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2006

Unlike earlier techniques of printmaking, lithography allows any artist to make and reproduce practically any size, shape, and character of mark. This versatility and faithfulness to the touch of the artist have often encouraged lithographs in which technique and graphic display tend to overshadow other meanings. Such works form a sub–tradition of what could be called “virtuoso lithography.” This exhibition brings together some two dozen spectacular examples from Delacroix and Whistler to Picasso and Jasper Johns.

Curated by Jonathan Bober, curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings and Kate Dempsey, curatorial intern

Presenting some 45 works from throughout Europe, this exhibition reveals a variety of inventive approaches to established ornamental motifs including geometric design, vegetal foliage, and grotesques, as well as fantastic objects and creatures.

Curated by Josh McConnell, graduate student, Art History, The University of Texas at Austin

Sensitive to human expression and capable of rendering it convincingly, Ribera, known as a painter, is notable for extending seventeenth-century realism to printmaking. While he only created 18 prints in his life, this exhibition of his etchings and those of his followers, Filippo Liagno, Salvator Rosa, and Luca Giordano sheds light on this little-known aspect of his artistic production and the impact it had on later artists.

Curated by Jonathan Bober, curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings

The phrase “Avec privilege du roy” refers to the permission granted by the French government to a publisher to produce an edition. In this exhibition, it refers equally to the privileges of luxury, leisure, and elaborate rituals afforded to the king and his court in the eighteenth century that came to typify rococo excess and frivolity.

Curated by Cheryl Snay, assistant curator of prints and drawings

Trained in the field of printmaking in the late 1980s and part of the first generation of artists from Chile's post-dictatorship era, Cristián Silva has become a renowned artist on the Latin American contemporary art scene. Inspired by a wide range of subjects that are on one level deeply personal as well as part of the general culture, Silva creates wall paintings, sculptures, installations, videos and drawings that build together an allegorical environment richly embedded with sociopolitical quotes. Golf balls, plastic bottles, peach pits, chocolate bars, an oversized machete, discarded tartan clothes, potatoes or an old window blind, become part of Silva's symbolic alphabet, one that ambiguously negotiates with the never ending issues of post-colonial identity and class struggle in Latin America.

For the Blanton, Silva is creating Black Sun—Green Flamingo, a new, large-scale installation. Deeply concerned by the dramatic dynamics of frontier politics along the Rio Grande area, Silva looks to a legendary Texan local album cover of the early 1980s to comment on the dreams of the Promised Land held by people from both sides of the border. Based on this slightly kitschy and surreal image source, Silva elaborates on the poetics of migration.

Download the Black Sun — Green Flamingo brochure
(pdf – download adobe reader.)

The first major U.S. exhibition of paintings by one of the principal figures of late-16th-century painting, Luca Cambiaso, is the first major international traveling exhibition hosted by the Blanton since the museum's opening in April. The Blanton is the exclusive U.S. venue for Luca Cambiaso, 1527–1585, providing a rare opportunity for the public to see first–hand over 120 works by a fascinating artist whose work has largely remained in his native Genoa. The range of works featured spans his entire development, showing the influence of Raphael and Michelangelo in his early years, the highly sophisticated and stylized Mannerism of his mature work, and the hints of early Baroque style that penetrate his later period.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (July 15, 1606–October 4, 1669) is considered one of the greatest painters of all time. He has also been called “the greatest master of etching,” and it is his experimentation and technical superiority with this medium that has given him this name. Although the number continues to be refined by art historians, the artist produced some 400 paintings, 300 etchings, and 2,000 drawings. The exhibition features 23 etchings by Rembrandt and 22 by his contemporaries or later artists whom he inspired.

New York-based artist Carol Bove (pronounced Boh-VAY) creates elegant sculptural installations that explore the cultural, spiritual, social, and political preoccupations of the 1960s and 1970s. For her exhibition at the Blanton, Bove has merged her interests in history and sculpture by making two miniature “sculpture gardens.” In the larger of the two installations, a sculpture (c. 1963) by the Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro serves as the anchor for a history of 20th-century art narrated by an array of disparate objects: pieces of driftwood and steel, peacock feathers, railroad ties, and concrete cubes. These objects represent forms that are associated with the Surrealists and Constructivists of the early to mid-20th century but that influenced artistic movements of the 1960s and 1970s as well. The smaller installation likewise serves as a “museum within a museum,” but it also recreates a specific celestial event. On March 2, 2006, at 9 PM, the canopy of bronze rods suspended over the “sculpture garden” aligned perfectly with the stars congregating over the ceiling of the Berlin gallery in which the work was then being exhibited. The installation is, literally, a horoscope: a view (“scope”) onto an hour (“hora”). The term also applies to Bove's work as a whole, which similarly provides a view onto time—in the case of the pieces displayed at the Blanton, a glimpse onto a slightly uncanny history of the 20th century.

Download Exhibition Brochure (pdf – download adobe reader.)

This exhibition presents new works by Paul Chan, one of the country's most provocative new media artists. Urgent, thoughtful, and compassionate, his works—which have been cited for their visual intensity and graphic flair—pose deeply philosophical questions in order to provoke awareness and debate.

Daniel Joglar is one of the leading young artists working in Argentina today. He creates magical and evocative formal compositions out of everyday objects—post-it notes, rulers, and reams of paper. A typical work by Joglar consists of various objects spread across a tabletop; what at first glance appears to be a haphazard arrangement slowly reveals a complex and intentional web of formal connections. Joglar will create a site-specific work for the Blanton. This will be the artist's first major presentation outside Latin America.

New works by established and emerging artists working in the United States and Latin America are featured in this grand opening exhibition. Over the last five years the museum's contemporary collection has grown dramatically. See for yourself what is new, now, and next in the art world through these paintings, drawings, video projections, animations, sculptures, and multi-media works.

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