CAMALOT October - News from The Chelsea Art Museum

Mimmo Rotella. Marilyn Folle, 1963. 138x100cm

Rotella is the first of the three artists qualified as "affichistes". He used/re-used existing materials for his creations long before "recycling" was becoming a prominent discussion. New Yorkers know him from the shows in the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art.

The collection of the Chelsea Art Museum consists of very early works of Mimmo Rotella (burned paper stuck on canvas), e.g. from his Marilyn series and advertising posters, as well as "soprapintura" on torn posters, still on their zinc support. Other works in the collection are more recent; his Berlin series and his ready mades, i.e. his oil cans ("Shell" in Japanese is "Rotella"). One of the highlights of our collection was highlighted in a joint exhibition of the graffitti artist Jos� Parla with works of Rotella whom he admired and classified as his godfather.
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Marlene Tseng Yu: Forces of Nature
October 3 to November 14, 2009

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Emerald Forest, 2000. Rainforest Series. Acrylic on canvas, 10' x 20'.

Marlene Tseng Yu has had a long and illustrious career exhibiting in museums across the world. This exhibition features large scale paintings which evoke many facets of the natural work and highlight the green movement in art.

Born in Taiwan in 1937, the artist received her BFA and MFA degrees in fine arts from National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. The artist has shown extensively since the 1960s throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. The National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, are among the venues of her most recent exhibitions. A new solo exhibition will open concurrently in October at Today Art Museum, Beijing. The artist's work has been widely reviewed in nine languages in more than 140 publications, including Artforum, Art in America, and Art News, by leading art critics Lawrence Campbell, Ronny Cohen, Jonathan Goodman, Gerrit Henry, April Kingsley, Donald Kuspit, Robert Morgan, Cynthia Nadelman, Carter Ratcliff, Lily Wei, and Jeffrey Wright. From 1969 to 2007, the artist lived and worked in Soho, New York, and in 2008 opened a studio in Long Island City, New York. Since 1995, the artist has curated Forces of Nature group exhibitions and poetry readings in praise of rain forests highlighting the green movement in art.

A catalog from the National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, will be made
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Shirley West: Discovery : A Retrospective
October 3 to November 14, 2009

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Prairie Woman, 1968/69. Welded rods, mesh, cement. 3'h, 39'l,10'd.

West's accomplishments span a wide variety of media, including design, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Of all the arts, sculpture is closest to West's sensibility; she is responsible for several remarkable, epic size outdoor sculptures, as well as many smaller pieces. West's long experience in New York demonstrates a close familiarity with the work of the New York School, a familiarity most evident in her expressive, gestural paintings.

An ambitious woman artist, West nonetheless belongs to a generation that was more than fairly macho in its sentiments and posturings. To an extent, then, the artist was pushed to the side, even when she was in her abstract-expressionist period in the 1940s, 50s and again, later on in her career. Her passionate, rough-edged abstract paintings remain compelling; their thick swathes of paint roll across the canvas, as if they had been driven by the winds of a storm. The language of these works of art transcends gender, in a way that emphasizes not only the achievements of the expressionist movement, but also the accomplishments of West herself.

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Jean Miotte: It's a Beautiful World
October 3 to December 31, 2009

Jean Miotte: Black Paintings
November 20 - January 2, 2010

miotte nowhere

Nowhere, 1995. Oil on canvas.195x520cm

"Abstraction is the figuration of the soul," says Jean Miotte. He points to a momento, a snapshot or mirror of an intense emotion. Paralleling his biography with the phases in his work, he creates monochromatic black paintings while he suffers with his Hungarian friends who were confronted with Russian tanks in 1956. He opened his studio for his Hungarian friends, who found refuge there. It is not astonishing that Jean Miotte was the subject of the important one-man exhibition in Hungary organized for the 40-year memorial of 1956.

And how can one explain that he painted black-and-white paintings when he was invited for the inauguration of the re-opening of the Museum Sursock in Beirut, after many years of civil war? He had decided to paint - acknowledging that he was invited as a strong colorist - especially colorful paintings which would convey the idea of a possible future. But each time he stood in front of an empty canvas and set out to prepare an exhibition, a black-and-white painting emerged.

As a young man he started to paint with the intense wish to be able to capture the energetic beauty of choreographers and dancers in the Russian ballets in London in the 40s. "These are three examples which deny the general idea about abstraction. Abstract painting can express in three words what others describe in a complete novel." - Jean Miotte

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BREAKTHROUGH
The Project Room for New Media
November 6 - December 5, 2009

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Edwina Sandys. Photo credit: Rich Sugg

The Project Room for New Media, where monthly exhibitions are presented in CAM's dramatic two-story black box space, features Edwina Sandys "Breakthrough" commemorating the Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

A 32 x 12 ft image of Breakthrough (1990), a monumental historic work by Edwina Sandys created from 8 Berlin Wall panels, sets the stage for excerpts from her grandfather Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech. The exhibition will also be presented throughout the Streaming Museum global network in cyberspace and public spaces on 7 continents, with special exhibitions taking place in Piazza Duomo, Milan as part of that city's celebration of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and other public spaces.

"Breakthrough" is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
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Sobin Park
November 20 to January 2, 2010
Curator: Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos

so bin park

Sobin Park's imagery offsets the beautiful against the beastly into a symphony or perhaps a dissonance upon the two extremes. She juxtaposes the scaly darkness of a dragon against the delicate translucent skin of the female beauty embraced by his roughness. The resulting differences in color, texture, content, density, sparseness and the nuanced shades in-between them makes for a very sensuous yet complex oeuvre. Park plays with and engages in a dialogue about beauty and its beholder, or beauty and its perceived opposite; ugliness. Nevertheless, cultural notions of beauty may be relevant in the case of Park who earned her BA and MFA from South Korean universities and has been working there most of her life although exhibiting globally. Beauty is after all in the eyes of the beholder and may have been a matter of taste for Kant but in Hegel's theories of aesthetics taste is not an issue. Perhaps in enumerating the criteria of standard discussions on beauty we need take note that our cultural notion of beauty is a cluster concept including the elements of order and flawlessness.

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Robert Chen
November 20 to January 2, 2010

Chen

Born in 1935 in Taipei, Chen Cheng-Hsiung is a living legend in his native Taiwan, where his work was recently honored with a 50 year retrospective in the National Museum of History Taipei and the National Museum of China. The painter Chen is famous as the youngest of the three Chinese moderns who contributed to the history of abstract expressionism. Working independently, the triumvirate of Zao Wou-ki, Chu Teh-Chun and Chen became abstract painters during the heroic decade of the 1950s, consistently represented at the Salon de Mai in Paris. Chen is the only one of the three, however, who never migrated to the West. He remained in Taipei and traveled, and wrote, and painted, exhibiting at home, in China, Paris and, in recent years, Italy. After so many years, this first major New York show represents the completion of a journey - for no one in these galleries knows New York painting as well as he - and an historic event.

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