Prints by Ansel Adams were Top Lots at Swann Galleries' Auction

Prints by Ansel Adams were Top Lots at Swann Galleries' Auction

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 09:06 PM PST

NEW YORK, NY.- Two versions of Ansel Adams’s iconic image of "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico", 1941, sold to collectors at Swann Galleries' auction of Photographic Literature & Fine Photographs on December 8. A very rare vintage print created in 1948 that was signed and inscribed by Adams to Valentino Sarra, a photographer and W.P.A. poster designer and friend of Adams, sold for $360,000. It was one of only approximately 10 vintage prints Adams rendered with a delicate tonal quality. 

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art will present “Pure Pleasure”

Richard Avedon

Gagosian Gallery Announces Exclusive Representation of Photographer Richard Avedon Posted: 20 Nov 2011 06:02 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian Gallery announces the worldwide representation of Richard Avedon, in partnership with The Richard Avedon Foundation. Larry Gagosian comments, “Avedon is America’s consummate modern photographer and one of the iconic artists from a generation which produced many extraordinary painters, sculptures, and photographers. We consider it a great privilege to represent one of the true masters of twentieth century art.”

Difference and Desire in American Portraiture"

Brooklyn Museum Hosts "Hide/Seek ~ Difference and Desire in American Portraiture"

Posted: 19 Nov 2011 05:41 PM PST

BROOKLYN, N.Y.- HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first major museum exhibition to explore how gender and sexual identity have shaped the creation of American portraiture, organized by and presented at the National Portrait Gallery last fall, will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum, through February 12, 2012. With the cooperation of the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum has reconstituted the exhibition in concert with the Tacoma Art Museum, where it will be on view from March 17 through June 10, 2012. HIDE/SEEK includes approximately a hundred works in a wide range of media created over the course of one hundred years that reflect a variety of sexual identities and the stories of several generations

Highlighting the influence of gay and lesbian artists, many of whom developed new visual strategies to code and disguise their subjects’ sexual identities as well as their own, HIDE/SEEK considers such themes as the role of sexual difference in depicting modern Americans, how artists have explored the definition of sexuality and gender, how major themes in modern art—especially abstraction—have been influenced by marginalization, and how art has reflected society’s changing attitudes. 

Announcing the Brooklyn presentation, Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman states, “From the moment I first learned about this extraordinary exhibition in its planning stages, presenting it in Brooklyn has been a priority. It is an important chronicle of a neglected dimension of American art and a brilliant complement and counterpoint to Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, a touring exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum, also on view this fall. ”

In addition to its commentary on a marginalized cultural history, HIDE/SEEK offers an unprecedented survey of more than a century of American art. Beginning with late nineteenth-century portraits by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent, it includes works from the first half of the 1900s by such masters as Romaine Brooks, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe; the exhibition continues through the postwar period with works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Andy Warhol, and concludes with major works by late twentieth-century artists such as Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Catherine Opie. 

The Brooklyn presentation will feature nearly all of the works included in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition. Among them are rarely seen paintings by Charles Demuth, whose better-known industrialized landscapes are on view in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Youth and Beauty; a poignant portrait of New Yorker writer Janet Flanner wearing two masks, taken by photographer Bernice Abbott; Andrew Wyeth’s painting of a young neighbor standing nude in a wheat field, much like Botticelli’s Venus emerging from her shell; Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph riffing on the classic family portrait, in which a leather-clad Brian Ridley is seated on a wingback chair shackled to his whip-wielding partner, Lyle Heeter; and Cass Bird’s photographic portrait of a friend staring out from under a cap emblazoned with the words “I look Just Like My Daddy.” The exhibition will also include David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, an unfinished film the artist created between 1986 and 1987.

Newly developed metallic "micro-lattice" material is world's lightest

RESEARCH WATCH

Newly developed metallic "micro-lattice" material is world's lightest

By Darren Quick

21:44 November 17, 2011

The new micro-lattice material is so light that it can sit atop dandelion fluff without damaging it (Image: Dan Little, HRL Laboratories, LL

Earlier this year we looked at a "multiwalled carbon nanotube (MCNT) aerogel" -also dubbed "frozen smoke" - that, with a density of 4 mg/cm3, became the world's lightest solid material. Now frozen smoke has been knocked off its perch by a new metallic material with a density of just 0.9 mg/cm3, making it around 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. Despite being 99.99 percent open volume, the new material boasts impressive strength and energy absorption, making it potentially useful for a range of applications.

The 0.01 percent of the material that isn't air consists of a micro-lattice of interconnected hollow nickel-phosphorous tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanometers - or 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. These tubes are angled to connect at nodes to form repeating, three-dimensional asterisk-like cells.

The new material draws parallels with large structures, such as the Eiffel Tower, which is incredibly light and weight-efficient thanks to its hierarchical lattice design. As an illustration of just how efficient such a design is, if the 7,300 tonnes of metal used in the Eiffel Tower were melted down it would fill just six centimeters (2.4 in) of the structure's 125 m2 (1,345 square ft) base.

The ultralight micro-lattice material shows the same concept can also reap benefits on a much smaller scale. The wall thickness of the hollow tubes can be measured in nanometers, the diameter of each tube in microns, each tube length in millimeters, and the entire micro-lattice in centimeters - or even one day, meters, claim the researchers.

In addition to its ultra-low density, the researchers say the new material's micro-lattice architecture gives it extraordinarily high energy absorption with the ability to completely recover from compression exceeding 50 percent strain. This is due to the fact that the extremely small wall thickness-to-diameter ratio of the material makes the individual tubes flexible. Its impressive properties could see it used for battery electrodes, catalyst supports, and acoustic, vibration or shock energy damping.

The novel material was developed by a team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and California-based company, HRL Laboratories. for DARPA.

The research team's paper, "Ultralight Metallic Microlattices," appears in the November 18 issue of Science.

World's slowest roller coaster unveiled

Published: Thursday, 17 November 2011

Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth's 'Tiger & Turtle - Magic Mountain'

 

If the undulations, loops and dizzy heights of a roller coaster are a little too much for you, you can take them at your own speed, on foot, in Hamburg-based design duo Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth's new architectural sculpture, Tiger & Turtle - Magic Mountain overlooking the Rhine in Duisburg, Germany.

Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth's Tiger & Turtle - Magic Mountain

This 249-stepped, 45m high pedestrian roller-coaster sits on top of a man-made mountain of zinc from a nearby metal works, covered with a coating of grass. "There is so much heavy metal in the hill," says Ulrich Genth, "one used to joke that we could get all the power for our project out of the hill by just pouring acid on it."

Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth's Tiger & Turtle - Magic Mountain

The artists say the piece "subtly and ironically plays with the dialectic of promise and disappointment, mobility and standstill. The thing only looks fast from far away, but then it is a struggle to climb it with one's own feet and then even more frustrating when the impassable loop is encountered, confronting the walker with the absurd comicality of the limiting experience of the speed of walking." The title refers, so Genth explains, to the "paradox of Achilles and turtle, so, on one hand, to the turtle as a symbol of slowness and, on the other hand, to the tiger as symbol of capitalism. It reminds us a little of Olafur Eliasson'sUmschreibung (2004) in Munich - a staircase which literally leads back to where you started. 

Olafur Eliasson, Umschreibung (2004), Munich, Germany

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Bernd and Hilla Becher, Zeche Concordia, Oberhausen (1967), Germany
Gelatin-silver print, 50 x 60 cm

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How the Bechers made the boring beautiful

Published: Friday, 18 November 2011

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Photographers like to document, catalogue and analyse and there is no better example of this than the German collaborative artists Bernd and Hilla Becher. For over 40 years - until Bernd's death in 2007 - all kinds of industrial architecture from water towers, warehouses, blast furnaces, gas tanks and half-timbered houses came under their scrutinising eye. 

Meeting as painting students in Dusseldorf in 1957 they began collaborating on photographing the disappearing German industrial landscape concentrating, at first, on the Ruhr where Bernd's family had worked in the steel and mining industries. They were fascinated by the shapes and attracted to the high design ideals of the buildings they photographed, calling them "anonymous sculptures". With an 8x10inch view camera they photographed the buildings from a number of different angles but always with a straightforward objective point of view. They photographed only on overcast days and early in the morning to avoid shadows. 

At each site they would shoot overviews of the surrounding landscape to show the structures in their context and how each building related to another. Their first project, Framework Houses took close to two decades to complete. In drawing attention to such architecture they helped in many cases to preserve it. The Art Deco Zollern Coal Mine in the Ruhr was designated a protected landmark following publication of their photographs. 

They exhibited the photos in strict formation, grouped by subject, in a grid of six, nine or 15 images and used the word 'typology' to describe these ordered sets of photographs. Titles were brief to the point of being almost non-existent and captions noted only time and place.

Towards the end of his life Bernd began teaching at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf where his students included Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff and Elger Esser. As well as inspiring and influencing these and countless other photographers (Stephen Shore worked with Bernd on his first solo show at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and subsequently took to making an inventory of American life in his series' American Surfaces and Uncommon Places) - their work also had a big impact on Minimalism and Conceptual Art.