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2007

Macchi, who created Argentina's pavilion at the 2005 Venice Bienale, produces work that is characterized by drawing poetic potential from everyday situations and materials. His artwork explores the intersection of presence and absence in structures such as music, maps, and language.

The New York–based, Honduran/American, artist Paul Ramirez Jonas investigates failed utopia and the brief moments in history when believed success alters the interpretation of the concept of progress. For this WorkSpace at the Blanton, Ramirez Jonas will draw on the words of famous Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges using the following sentence as a point of departure: "El acto de leer es más creativo que el de escribir," (The act of reading is more creative than that of writing). The installation will bridge a conceptual study of the taxonomic relation between the written language and what holds it (be it books, tablets, or pedestals), along with the performative qualities of texts that address notions of history as a fiction and reality. For Ramirez Jonas, the public takes on a pivotal roll in the construction of meaning of the ideas he presents through his work. For example, one of the components of the installation is a lectern with a microphone and speaker where an engraved clay tablet rests with the oath, "Do you solemnly swear that you will consider all the evidence in this case, follow the instructions given to you, deliberate fairly and impartially and reach a fair verdict? So help you God." Here the audience is invited to activate the project by reading out loud the presented text and thus setting in motion Borges' words, as the act of reading a single text will indeed invite different interpretations that can awaken our imagination and create new meaning.

WorkSpace Talk

Curated by Ursula Davila–Villa, assistant curator of Latin American art

The first major retrospective of internationally renowned performance/video/installation artist Michael Smith and his New York-based collaborator, director/artist Joshua White. This extraordinary exhibition features some 30 years of videos, installation environments, and other performance-related materials detailing the adventures of “Mike,” a sweet but hapless Everyman character created by Smith, and his hilariously awkward and ineffectual search for a piece of the American Dream.

Transactions focuses on artists who have adopted a radical approach to artistic production and distribution. In addition to showing at galleries and museums, these artists also operate within the public sphere, creating work for sites associated not with art, but with everyday life. Here viewers will see art originally made for newspapers and magazines, sculptures that are being sold over the Internet, hand-sewn articles of clothing that were surreptitiously dropped into retail stores, and zero-value currency created in unlimited editions and given away for free, among other provocative projects.

Albrecht Dürer: Prints from the Foundation of Lower Saxony and the Konrad Liebmann Foundation, Germany is a comprehensive survey of more than one hundred woodcuts and engravings by the German artist, providing extraordinary insight into his genius. Included in the exhibition are twenty impressions from the Blanton's notable holdings of European prints and drawings, as well as other local collections.

Josefina Guilisasti is one of the leading contemporary artists working in Chile. Her work typically consists of multi-part painting installations that reflect on the history of art and issues surrounding representation in realist painting. For this WorkSpace, Guilisasti presents a major installation of eight canvases called Marfa/Puerto Viejo. This series was provoked by a trip the artist took to Marfa, Texas, in 2005. Looking at Donald Judd's large-scale geometrical works in the landscape, she was struck by how similar they were formally to the precarious summer homes erected by low-income families who live in the northern Chilean desert. Marfa/Puerto Viejo presents four pairs of images rendered in a delicate realist manner on large canvases. Each pair shows an almost identical scene taken from photographs, but it is virtually impossible to tell which corresponds to Judd's heavily–subsidized west Texan desert dream or to the tenuous illegal summer camps of Chile. The formal equivalence shown by the images, aided by the physical similarities between west Texas and northern Chile raises important questions about the context of artmaking, and the relationship between art and landscape.

Exhibition Brochure (pdf – download adobe reader.)

Curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, curator of Latin American art

Continuing its Summer of Masterworks, the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to present Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery, on view through August 12, 2007. These important examples from Yale's distinguished drawings collection provide a compelling survey of European draftsmanship from the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The exhibition includes masterworks by such artists as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, François Boucher, Degas, Guercino, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, as well as a number of works never before seen by the public.

This exhibition is organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. The presentation of the exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art is made possible by the Inman Foundation.

Celebrating the first anniversary of its new building with a summer of masterworks, the Blanton will host its first major exhibition of nineteenth–century European masterpieces. Drawn from a renowned collection known for its classically inspired art, the exhibition features works that explore the human figure in all its beauty, strength, and grace. The show provides an exceptional chance to view well known artwork from some of the superstars of the salon scene—beloved masters such as Bouguereau, Gérôme, Rosa Bonheur, and Alma-Tadema. Organized by New York's Dahesh Museum in collaboration with the Blanton, this lush exhibition features some 50 paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

This exhibition was organized by the Dahesh Museum of Art in collaboration with the Blanton Museum of Art. Presentation at the Blanton is made possible through the generosity of Blanton Museum members. Additional support provided by Stacie and David McDavid and Kit and Charlie Moncrief.

For centuries, artists have used paper to make sketches, jot down ideas, record fleeting impressions, or prepare for large-scale paintings, sculptures, and installations. Works on paper are thus indelibly associated with the artist's hand as well as his or her imagination, and they are typically described as more instinctive or immediate than “finished” works of art. The prints and drawings in Sketches, Plans, and Proposals conform to but also challenge many of these assumptions. Some of the pieces are indeed sketches for works that were later rendered in other media, but others detail projects so impractical, so idealistic, that they were either never realized or never intended to be realized in the first place. Works by Christo, Alfred Jensen, Gyula Kosice, Lee Lozano, Nam June Paik, César Paternosto, and James Turrell will be featured, among others.

Curated by Kelly Baum, assistant curator of American and contemporary art

The mythology of marriage explored in art! A thematic approach to the material gives an historical perspective on a timely topic. Images of allegorical, religious, and royal weddings from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries will be presented as models for the ideal marriage with Abraham Bosse's wedding suites (Le mariage à la ville and Le mariage à la compagne) and William Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode serving as visual critiques on the subject.

Curated by Cheryl Snay, assistant curator of prints and drawings

The art of Francesco Parmigianino was the most stylized and elegant in sixteenth-century Italy. It was also tremendously influential, inspiring developments in Italy through the rest of the century, helping establish mannerism as an international style, and setting the standard of artistic refinement for the next two centuries.

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

Lithographs from two portfolios from the series New European Graphics published in 1921 and 1922 in Germany. Artists included in the portfolios are Wassily Kandinsky, George Grosz, Ernst Kirchner, Umberto Boccioni, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Kokoschka, and Max Beckman among others.

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

In 2006 the Blanton received an important gift: Anselm Kiefer's stunning Sternenfall [Falling Stars] from 1998. This monumental painting by one of the most highly regarded artists working today allows the Blanton to begin the process of creating a truly global collection of contemporary art. Kiefer currently lives in France and exhibits his work all over the world. However, he was deeply influenced by having grown up and studied in Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s. In an effort to provide insight into his origins and re-create something of the dynamic, fractured environment in which he was working at the time, Anselm Kiefer in Context assembles a group of prints by artists who were also active in Germany during this period. Associated with movements as diverse as Pop, Conceptualism, Fluxus, and Expressionism, these individuals form the cultural and historical context in which Kiefer came to maturity as an artist.

Curated by Kelly Baum, assistant curator of American and contemporary art, and Danielle Wells, curatorial intern

Caesar was born in Oakland in 1973 and received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001. His work has been featured in such group exhibitions as Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles (Hammer Museum, 2005) and Trace (Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, 2006). Caesar's project at the Blanton will be his first solo exhibition at a museum, and it will feature new work made specifically for this site.

Curated by Kelly Baum, assistant curator of American and contemporary art

Journey through the vibrant cities of South America during the mid-twentieth century and witness the birth of Modernism in the Americas. Drawn from one of the world's leading collections of Latin American art, this exhibition examines the dynamic visual vocabulary of Geometric Abstraction that developed in the cosmopolitan art capitals of Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other South American cities from the 1930s through the 1970s. Featuring more than 125 works by more than 40 artists, The Geometry of Hope examines the complex history and rich creative ferment of one of the most fascinating artistic movements of the last century. A version of the exhibition will be on view at New York University's Grey Art Gallery in the fall of 2007.

Raised on the West Coast and currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Matthew Day Jackson makes highly idiosyncratic objects and installations that combine natural, hand-crafted, and recycled materials with imagery and allusions that inspire wonder and surprise. Absorbed by legends of history and folklore, personal transformation through spiritual rites, the idealism of avant-garde aesthetics, and their possible conceptual intersections, Jackson mixes a heady and visceral blend that addresses the romanticization of America's past and environmental and political crises of the present moment. For the Blanton, he will create an installation featuring a suite of large and medium–scaled sculptures and photo-based works created in 2006 and 2007. Jackson has received critical acclaim for his works in the influential group exhibitions, Greater New York, 2005, PS1 Contemporary Art Center and the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Day for Night.

Curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, curator of American and contemporary art

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