Martin Cid's Blog: Martin Cid Magazine, page 1077

Birthdays Today, April 12: Brendon Urie, Jennifer Morrison, Sehun, Saoirse Ronan

Our Top#1 Famous Birthdays Today is for the lead singer of the band Panic at the Disco, Brendon Urie. He was born in Summerlin in 1987 and, from Yareah, we wish him and his family all the best in this special day. Congrats and happy birthday, Brendon Urie!

Famous Birthdays Today, April 12: Brendon Urie at the Walmart Soundcheck in 2013. Source: flickr. Author: Lunchbox LP

The future should be exciting, you know? It shouldn’t be a nerve-wracking experience.

Brendon Urie

have no problem with people illegally downloading stuff. I’m not going to drive hard into ‘You should buy my stuff,’ because really, it’s inevitable. If you like a song, you’re going to download it for free. I have no problem with that.

Brendon Urie

More famous birthdays today, April 12: Jennifer Morrison, actress born in Chicago in 1979; the South Korean singer known as Sehun; and Saoirse Ronan.

Happy birthday to all of them. Have a very nice day, dear friends.

Famous Birthdays Today, April 12 Video: Panic! At The Disco: Emperor’s New Clothes [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

Daisy Ridley speaking about Star Wars

English actress Daisy Ridley began her career with minor roles on TV. But in April 2014, Ridley’s casting as Rey, one of the lead characters in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and she was chosen for the film! Now, she is one of the most famous actress around the world.

Daisy Ridley as Rey

“Goals are ever-changing. I didn’t set out to be in a ‘Star Wars’ film but now I’ve been in one.” Daisy Ridley.

What does she thing about Rey? Our quote of the day is by Ridley. Listen to her!

“Rey is so strong. She’s cool and smart and she can look after herself. Young girls can look at her and know that they can wear trousers if they want to. That they don’t have to show off their bodies.”

Ridley will also continue her role as Rey in Star Wars: Episode VIII, which is scheduled to be released in December 2017. What do you expect from the next film?

“So many people look up to Jennifer Lawrence playing Katniss in ‘The Hunger Games.’ For them to look up to Rey and what she represents would be fantastic. She’s a wonderful character… The reason I love her so much is she does all the fun stuff. She fights, runs and protects herself and has an incredible emotional story.”

** Star Wars: Episode VIII stars Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Andy Serkis, Benicio del Toro, Laura Dern, and Kelly Marie Tran. The film will be directed by Rian Johnson, produced by Lucasfilm and distributed worldwide by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Daisy Ridley in Abu Dhabi.

Enjoy your day, Yareah friends. Art is everywhere and up to you!

“The thing about ‘Star Wars’ is that every single person is important. Even though Rey is a big role, everyone influences everyone. If that wasn’t so, why would so many people remember Admiral Ackbar?”

New York exhibits. Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth

New York exhibits. Beginning 26 April 2016, Hauser & Wirth will present ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’, exploring a pivotal decade in the career of the preeminent 20th century American artist. Featuring 36 paintings and 53 drawings, many on loan from major museums and private collections, the exhibition draws together a compelling body of work that reveals the artist grappling to reconcile gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction.

Philip Guston. Accord I, 1962. Oil on canvas. 173 x 198.4 cm/ 68 1/8 x 78 1/8 in. Private Collection. Image @ The Estate of Philip Guston. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Calling attention to a series of works that have not yet been fully appreciated for their true significance in the artist’s development, ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ explores a decade in which Guston confronted aesthetic concerns of the New York School, questioning modes of image making and what it means to paint abstractly. In the number and quality of paintings on view from this period, the show parallels Guston’s important 1966 survey at the Jewish Museum in New York, a half century ago. As its title suggests, the exhibition offers an intimate look at Guston’s unique relationship to painting and the process by which his work evolved.

On view through 29 July 2016, ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ has been organized by Paul Schimmel, Partner and Vice President of Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue focusing specifically on the period beginning in the late 1950s and spanning a decade until the artist’s return to figuration in the late 1960s.

‘I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself. And I think the best painting that’s done here is when he paints himself, and by himself I mean himself in this environment, in this total situation.’ Philip Guston, 1960.

About the Exhibition:

By the mid-1950s, Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) and his contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, were among the leading figures of the New York School, standing at the forefront of American avant-garde painting. Guston, whose work was widely exhibited during this period, achieved critical success as an abstract painter, whose work was lauded its luminous, ethereal, and tactile fields of bold gesture and color. At this pinnacle moment, with the artist seemingly at the height of his career, an unexpected shift occurred in Guston’s approach. Dark, ominous forms began to crowd his paintings, coalescing into what would become a new language that consumed his practice over the next ten years.

The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth opens with ‘Fable II’ and ‘Rite’, two small paintings from 1957 that suggest evolution in both Guston’s mood and technique. Disturbing the pictorial field of these canvases, thick, densely clustered black strokes burst through heavily pigmented colorful patches ranging in tone from radiant azure and blazing orange, to fleshy pink and deep forest green. Similarly, a silvery wash of glimmering brushstrokes begins to encroach upon Guston’s lighter forms. Enveloping the background completely in ‘Last Piece’ (1958), the expanses of grey field suggest erasure – an obliteration of the artist’s previous association to pure abstraction.

In that same year of 1958, Guston exclaimed, ‘I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart’. In the face of abstraction, Guston’s search for corporeality intensified. He challenged himself to create and simultaneously dissolve the dialogues of the New York School in a field that evoked ‘something living’ on the surface of his canvas. The introduction of brooding forms can now be understood as harbingers of a new figuration, wherein titles such as ‘Painter’ (1959) go so far as to suggest the pictorial presence of Guston, the painter himself. Wrestling with the simultaneous existence of abstraction and representation, ‘Painter’ strikes a precarious note: ambiguous, but semi-recognizable forms recall the artist’s early figurative works of the 1940s. A red shape and the loose application of blue paint hint at the return of his signature hooded figure, here with a paintbrush in hand. At the same time, however, the artist’s gestures dissolve legible shapes into a swirling field of energies in flux.

The exhibition continues across four dedicated rooms, tracing the evolution of Guston’s forms through the 1960s until they are reduced to “the isolation of the single image”. With such works as ‘Path II’ (1960) and ‘Alchemist’ (1960), dense pictorial dramas are unleashed, with colors and forms competing against one another in a storm of darkened strokes. In ‘Path IV’ (1961), Guston’s blackened, weighted masses emerge victorious, swarming in an atmosphere of rusted reds and ashen greys. Meanwhile, ‘Accord I’ (1962) reconciles the grouping of Guston’s black forms while still offering richness and warmth, as faint hues of color peek through pewter grey grounds.

Such concessions disappear in the following year: In a significant group of works created between 1963 and 1965, Guston interacts directly with the raw surface of his canvas, marking gestural, smoky fields in greys and pinks. One of the largest paintings from this period, ‘The Year’ (1964) is dominated by the presence of two great black personages floating in a field of luscious wet-on-wet strokes. Using white pigment to erase his looming black strokes, Guston creates heaving washes of nuanced grey matter that seem to pulsate with energy and life. As forms become fewer and denser in other works, the artist’s titles imply vague narratives. In ‘Group II’ (1964) or ‘The Three’ (1964), head-like shapes and bodies emerge. In the latter, Guston represents a family: the artist, his daughter, and his wife. The culmination of this extraordinary series is ‘Position I’ (1965), in which a single black shape nestles in a barren landscape devoid of chromatic variation.

In the years following his 1966 Jewish Museum survey, Guston would abandon painting and turn to drawing during a time of internal conflict and personal turmoil. In the two-year span between 1966 and 1967, he produced hundreds of works on paper in charcoal and brush-and-ink that are known as his ‘pure’ drawings. Works from this period occupy the final room of the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. Presented together in a grid, they recall the manner in which Guston lived with these works, which were tacked to his studio walls.

Commenting upon the decade explored in ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ Paul Schimmel said, ‘If there was one way in which Guston was consistent as an artist, it was in his unwillingness to be pinned down or to rest on his own considerable accomplishments and influence. As one of the most significant proponents in the reconciliation of gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction, he was a solitary figure, ‘moving vertically’, unencumbered by the responsibilities and pressures that others often felt as they worked in his shadow’.

EXPLORING A PIVOTAL DECADE IN THE CAREER OF AN AMERICAN TITAN, PHILIP GUSTON: PAINTER, 1957-1967

WILL GO ON VIEW IN NEW YORK.

Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967. 26 April – 29 July 2016. Hauser & Wirth New York, 511 West 18th Street. Opening: Tuesday, 26 April 2016, 6 – 8 pm.

London. The National Portrait Gallery is to stage a major exhibition of portraits by Pablo Picasso

The National Portrait Gallery is to stage a major exhibition of portraits by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) this autumn, it was announced today, Monday 11 April 2016.

Portrait of Olga Picasso by Pablo Picasso, 1923; Private Collection © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2016

Picasso Portraits (6 October 2016-5 February 2017), sponsored by Goldman Sachs, and in association with the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, will include over 75 portraits by the artist in all media, ranging from well-known masterpieces to works that have never been shown in Britain before.

The latter include the extraordinary cubist portrait from 1910 of the German art dealer and early champion of Picasso’s work, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, loaned by the Art Institute of Chicago; and from a private collection the exquisite portrait executed in 1938 of Nusch Eluard, acrobat, artist and wife of the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard.

All phases of the artist’s career will be represented, from the realist portraits of his boyhood to the more gestural canvases of his old age. It is the first large-scale exhibition devoted to his portraiture since Picasso and Portraiture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Grand Palais, Paris in 1996.

Because Picasso did not work to commission and depicted people in his intimate circle, he enjoyed exceptional freedom as a portraitist and worked in different modes as well as many different styles. Formal posed portraits coexisted with witty caricatures, classic drawings from life with expressive paintings created from memory reflecting his understanding of the sitter’s identity and character.

Woman in a Hat (Olga) by Pablo Picasso, 1935; Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art moderne © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2016 Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Rights reserved

The exhibition includes a group of revealing self-portraits as well as portraits and caricatures of Picasso’s friends, lovers, wives and children. Guillaume Apollinaire, Carles Casagemas, Santiago Rusiñol, Jaume Sabartés, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, FernandeOlivier, Olga Picasso, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Picasso are among the people visitors will encounter. Complementing these images of Picasso’s intimates are portraits and caricatures inspired by artists of the past – Velázquez and Rembrandt among them – with whom he identified most closely.

The Museu Picasso, Barcelona is lending most generously to the National Portrait Gallery. Other lending institutions include: the British Museum; Tate; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Musée national Picasso, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée national d’artmoderne de la ville de Paris; Museum Berggruen, Berlin; Fondation Hubert Looser, Zurich; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Iceland. The exhibition also benefits from important loans from the artist’s heirs and other private collectors.

The copiously illustrated catalogue provides an original, broadly based account of Picasso’s portraiture and analysis of every work on display. Among the issues explored in detail are the artist’s sources of inspiration, differences between his approach to portraying men and women, and the complex motivation behind his switches of mode and style and defiance of representational norms.

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘We are delighted to stage Picasso Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, a collaboration with Museu Picasso, Barcelona, which focuses on the artist’s reinvention of time-honoured conventions of portraiture, and his genius for caricature. The exhibition gathers together major loans from public and private collections that demonstrate the breadth of Picasso’s oeuvre and the extraordinary range of styles he employed across all media and from all periods of his career.’

Bernardo Laniado-Romero, Director, Museu Picasso, Barcelona, says: ‘The two organising museums, one dedicated to portraiture and the other to Picasso, are the natural instruments to bring forth a reassessment on how Picasso, time and time again, redefined portraiture throughout the twentieth century. The exhibition will surprise and confront one’s preconceived ideas of what a portrait should be and how a portrait by Picasso ought to look like.’

The support of the exhibition’s sponsor Goldman Sachs is enabling the Gallery to introduce for the first time a special ticket offer, whereby every Friday morning throughout the run of Picasso Portraits, the first 100 tickets will be £5. In addition they are supporting a wide ranging Learning programme linked to the exhibition.

Michelle Pinggera, Partner, Goldman Sachs, says: ‘We are extremely proud to partner with the National Portrait Gallery to bring this fascinating exhibition to London. Goldman Sachs has a long history of supporting arts and culture in the UK and through our sponsorship, we are very pleased to be able to support the Gallery’s wider access and learning programme linked to this exhibition.’

Picasso Portraits is curated by Elizabeth Cowling, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Picasso: Style and Meaning (2002) and Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (2006). She has co-curated several exhibitions, including Picasso Sculptor/Painter (1994), Matisse Picasso (2002–3), and Picasso Looks at Degas (2010–11).

PICASSO PORTRAITS: 6 October 2016 -5 February 2017, at the National Portrait Gallery, London www.npg.org.uk.

Sponsored by Goldman Sachs.

Tickets with donation: Full price £19 / Concessions £17.50.

Tickets without donation Full price £17 / Concessions £15.50 (Free for Members and Patrons).

Birthdays Today, April 11: Jeremy Clarkson, Michelle Phan, Alessandra Ambrosio, Mark Thomas

He’s a televisión show host, his name is Jeremy Clarkson and he’s our Top#1 Famous Birthdays Today, April 11. Jeremy Clarkson has been born in Doncaster, England in 1960 and, from Yareah, we wish him and his family all the best in this special day. Congratulations and happy birthday, Jeremy Clarkson!

Famous Birthdays Today, April 11: Jeremy Clarkson (right) with his fellow Top Gear presenters, Richard Hammond and James May. Source: flickr. Author: Phil Guest

I have a pathological terror of falling through ice. I nearly drowned once. I fell off a boat and got a cramp, and was rescued by an oil-rig diver, a great bear of a man who simply leant into the water and scooped me out with one finger.

Jeremy Clarkson

Ambition is a very dangerous thing because either you achieve it and your life ends prematurely, or you don’t, in which case your life is a constant source of disappointment. You must never have ambition.

Jeremy Clarkson

More famous birthdays today, April 11: Michelle Phan, entrepreneur and YouTube star born in Boston in 1987; Alessandra Ambrosio, model; and Mark Thomas, comedin born in London, England in 1963.

Happy birthday to all of them. Have a very nice day, dear friends.

Famous birthdays today, April 11 Video: Jeremy Clarkson: War Stories: THE GREATEST RAID OF ALL

Francofonia by Sokurov at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

Francofonia by Sokurov at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. April 20 – May 7, 2016. New film from the director of Russian Ark explores the Louvre Museum.

Francofonia by Sokurov

A historical meditation on the Louvre Museum in Paris and the preservation of European culture during the destructive climate of World War Two.

Exploring the Louvre during the Nazi occupation of Paris, as well as its roots under the Monarchy in the Napoleonic era, famed Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov’s newest film Francofonia is a masterful discourse on the nature of museums. The film compels audiences to consider what museums tell us about our grasp of time, their historical function in empire-building, the way in which they foster the harvesting or hoarding of art, and how those very acts alter our understanding of power, both personal and political.

In Francofonia, Sokurov goes beyond the techniques used in his portrayal of the Hermitage Museum in Russian Ark, blending history and fiction, documentary and feature, fact and opinion. Trained as a historian before becoming a filmmaker, the director himself narrates, occasionally delving into European history more broadly and ruminating on the course of Europe today. Yet Francofonia “is not a historical film in the classic sense” according to Sokurov. “I did not want to take a scientific approach, even if I attach great importance to factual details” he says, “Behind any documentary image shot there is an artistic endeavor. This is inevitable. …All this has the same single space in reality.”

The film has at its heart the story of the real-life collaboration between Louvre director Jacques Jaujard and the German officer (a curator, historian and preservationist himself) Count Franziskus Wolf-Metternich, who worked together in tacit alliance to preserve the museum’s treasures. Francofonia encourages viewers to think about the links between appropriation and domination, a political vision of the world together with its aesthetic representation.

It also highlights the special position occupied by museums in the public and civic space of the West today. Using a poetic cinematic style that merges digital camera work, fictionalized recreations, archival footage, and image processing that adds, superimposes or modifies additional visual components and distorts perspective, Sokurov brings a complex subject and set of sources into a unified artistic fabric.

At this year’s Venice Film Festival, Francofonia was nominated for the Golden Lion, and won the Fedeora award for Best Euro-Mediterranean Film, as well as the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella Award. (Russia, 2015, 90 min.).

To compliment Francofonia, the MFA will also present three screenings of Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark on April 22, 23 and 24.

Co-presented with Boston-based Ballets Russes Arts Initiative.

TICKET & VENUE INFORMATION: Tickets may be purchased online at www.mfa.org/film, by calling the MFA Ticketing Line at 800.440.6975, or in person at any MFA ticket desk. Tickets are $9 for MFA members, $11 for nonmembers, $5 for students at local universities.

Peer to Pier is a collaborative artist-in-residence and cultural exchange project

Peer to Pier is a collaborative artist-in-residence and cultural exchange project. Artistic Director: Marloes van Houten.

Peer to Pier

Peer to Pier is a collaborative artist-in-residence and cultural exchange project. Part of the Hong Kong International Choreography Festival and Dutch Days in Hong Kong, this multi-disciplinary project involves a group of female artists from Hong Kong and the Netherlands.

Public programmes at Mur Nomade include the installation Ichi by sculptor May Yeung and site-specific dance performances The Voyage:

Sculpture installation: 15 – 23 April 2016.

Dance performances: 16 April at 4:30pm (meet the visual artist at 3pm); 17 April at 3pm (meet the dancers and musicians after the show); Limited seats: to register please email hkicaros.hkicf@gmail.com (ticketing at the door or on URBTIX).

Peer to Pier participating artists: Marloes van Houten – HK/NL (initiator, concept, co-choreographer, performer); Ilse Evers – NL (concept, co-choreographer, performer); Jeannine La Rose – NL (performer, singer); Ivy Tsui Yik Chit– HK (choreographer, performer); Rebecca Pik Kei Wong – HK (choreographer, performer); May Yeung – HK/US (sculptor, photographer); Constanze Lee – HK/NL- (art historician, critic, musician); Jin Heng – HK (photographer, cinematographer); Ka Yue (Trista) Ma – HK (video artist, stylist); Linda Tong – HK (musician, flutist).

Acknowledgements: Organizers of Dutch Days in Hong Kong: the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Asia Week Hong Kong

Presenter and Artistic Director of HKICAROS and Hong Kong International Choreography Festival: Vangelis Legakis.

Venue Sponsor: Mur Nomade.

** Established in Hong Kong in 2012, Mur Nomade is a place for creative encounters. Managed on a non-profit-making basis, we operate as both a curatorial office and an art gallery. The proceeds of the gallery help funding our curatorial programmes: collaborative art projects, cross-disciplinary and cultural exchanges, open calls for young curators, performances, workshops and residencies. Our name is the French for ‘nomadic wall’ as we present site-specific curatorial projects in alternative venues all around Hong Kong, in addition to the regular programme of our space in the South Island Cultural District. To imagine and conceive our projects, we invite local and international artists, curators, writers and teachers. We like bold ideas, and we are convinced that confronting viewpoints and going out of comfort zones support creativity, stimulate emulation and encourage experimentation.

Sunday Poetry with Gypsy Woman, Jenean C. Gilstrap. Today: The Baptism

Ken O’Neill. lost

THE BAPTISM

i been baptized in the sands of time

make me wanna lay down ‘n cry

need me some’a them holy waters

ain’t gonna never run dry

but i’m out here in the desert

with my bones laid out to dry

.

i been dipped in the river of no return

make me wanna lay down ‘n die

need me a good hearted woman

that’ll never say good-bye

but i’m out here in the dark

‘n i ain’t gonna lie

.

i been born once ‘n then twice

make me wanna git up ‘n live

can’t be put on no ice

so i washed away all them sins

but either way i went

it was all

just a

roll

of

the

dice

~

TV Shows Today, April 10: Dice, Madam Secretary, Quantico

It’s Sunday and it’s time for great television shows. Our Top#1 TV Shows Today is for a new series, Dice. Today’s episode: Elvis. Season 1. Episode 1. 6:30 pm. SHO. From Wikipedia: Dice is an upcoming American comedy television series created by Scot Armstrong. The series stars Andrew Dice Clay as himself. On March 20, 2015, Showtime ordered a six episode first season.

Our second choice is for Madam Secretary. Today: Desperate Remedies. Season 2. Episode 19. 5:00 pm. CBS.

And our last recommendation is for Quantico. Today’s episode: Care. Season 1. Episode 17. 7:00 pm. ABC.

We hope you enjoy the shows. Have a very nice day, dear friends.

TV Shows Today, April 10 Video: Dice (2016) | Official Trailer | Andrew Dice Clay SHOWTIME Series

Birthdays Today, April 10: Shay Mitchell, Sofia Carson, Alex Pettyfer, Daisy Ridley

She plays the role as Emily Fields on the ABC series Pretty Little Liars, she’s Shay Mitchell and she is our Top#1 Famous Birthdays Today, April 10. She was born in Mississauga, Canada in 1987 and, from Yareah, we wish her and her family zll the best in this special day. Congrats and happy birthday, Shay Mitchell!

Famous Birthdays Today, April 10: Shay Mitchell on the red carpet at the 38th People’s Choice Awards on January 11, 2012, at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, California. Source: flickr. Author: JJ Duncan

I’d define my everyday style as put together, but also comfortable. A great pair of jeans and a cute top can be so versatile.

Shay Mitchell

I’m reading a lot of different books, but I always think I have to switch it up a little bit. It’s like food – everything in moderation, same with my books, same with my reading. You read books that are good for you and you learn a lot of stuff, then you read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ which is like candy.

Shay Mitchell

More famous birthdays today, April 10: Sofia Carson, television actress born in Florida in 1993; Alex Pettyfer, English actor; and Daisy Ridley, actress.

Happy birthday to all of them. Have a very nice day, dear friends.

Famous Birthdays Today, April 10 Video: Shay Mitchell on Embracing Her Filipina Heritage | Pretty Unfiltered