Returning to Milan in 1928, Fontana enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. His first solo show was held at Galleria Il Milione in Milan in 1931. In 1935 he traveled to Paris and joined the Abstraction-Création group. The same year, he developed his skills in ceramics in Albisola, Italy and Sevres, France. In 1939, he joined Corrente, a Milan-based group of expressionist artists, while intensifying his collaborations with architects. In 1940, he moved back to Buenos Aires, where he founded the Academia de Altamira with some of his students in 1946, from which the Manifiesto Blanco group emerged. He returned to Milan in 1947 and, together with a group of writers and philosophers, signed the Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo. His first major international retrospective was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1977. Subsequent museum exhibitions include Musée national d’art moderne de la ville de Paris and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987 (traveled to La Fundación ‘la Caixa’ Barcelona; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1988); Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1996 (traveled to Museum Moderner Kunst Stifung Ludwig, Vienna, 1997); Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan (1999); “Lucio Fontana. Entre Materia y Espacio,” La Fundación ‘la Caixa’ and Museo National Cantro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1998); Hayward Gallery, London(1999); and “Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York” Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006–07).

The first major UK exhibition of Mika Rottenberg’s arresting and comically disturbing video works will be shown in three of our four galleries. Visitors will view them in specially created installations which create conditions as claustrophobic and absurd as those endured by the women workers she portrays.

Her videos explore labour – particularly repetitive women’s work. Her glamorous and oddly erotic workers are squeezed into sweatshops – often literally. Bodily fluids are sometimes part of the production process, where lo-fi machinery and Heath Robinson-like contraptions produce uncertain goods.

Rottenberg’s work plays with the manufactured aesthetic of the beauty salon – hair, nails, bellies, bums and breasts become autonomous objects. Her models are often out of the ordinary, such as the formidable Queen Raqui and the statuesque erotic model Bunny Glamazon. Rottenberg is interested in the dynamic between the exhibitionist and the voyeur. Her art works hint at power relations and reversals. A self-avowed feminist, she has said her work started with Marx.

Mika Rottenberg was born in 1976 in Buenos Aires and now lives in New York.

The exhibition is a collaboration with de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam.

More info:  The Guardian, review by Laura Cumming

Source; Nottingham Contemporary. Posted; May 5, 20011.

In addition to being able to see and buy art by over 1,000 of the world’s leading artists, visitors can experience Frieze Projects, the fair’s program of artists’ specially commissioned projects, and Frieze Talks, a program of debates, panel discussions and keynote lectures.

The Sculpture Park, located beside the East River’s waterfront, exhibits new selected works by established and emerging artists and is free to the public.

Frieze New York is housed in a bespoke temporary structure designed by New York-based SO-IL architects. Located in the unique setting of Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan, and overlooking the East River, the fair is easily accessible by public transport. Dedicated Frieze ferry and bus services are included in the admission price.

Source: Frieze press  Published: March3, 2012

Sometimes artists do it better than curators. Oftentimes, in fact, they get right to the heart of the matter without our didactic curatorial worries. The project at Casa de los Contrafuertes, convened by Charles Juhász-Alvarado (with Néstor Barreto), shows rather than tells. It is a must-see event. Inspired by the theme set forth for this year’s Trienal Poli/gráfica de San Juan, “El Panal/The Hive,” these busy bees have enacted a hive of their own, thus affirming the curatorial premise that artists working with other artists remains a powerful and productive creative force.

Ente (think “gente”), the group occupying the former home of the Museo de Nuestra Raíz Africana, was initiated by a commission offered to Charles Juhász-Alvarado to create a special project for this year’s Trienal. The artist has long been the Trojan horse of the Puerto Rican art world. From Transvestoys and Tú-Tran of the 1990s, toGo-ga and Escala of the more recent decade, Juhász-Alvarado’s work often has drawers, way stations, and platforms—spots designed for other artists’ participation, in which he can smuggle them into his exhibitions. His modus operandi has always been inclusive and generous, and he is a tireless promoter of Puerto Rican talents of all groups. Charles is an ambassador without ego, and never wastes an opportunity to share the stage. Although the commission was offered with the expectation that Juhász-Alvarado would create a new, collaborative work, we could not have foreseen the inspired project that is emerging.

After selecting the magnificent, historic, 2-story edifice (in need of restoration) offered by the Instituto, Juhász Alvarado set about bringing his own personal hive together under his moral and esthetic embrace. As he activated this group, he designed and built hive-inspired furniture, window elements, and doorways that organize, clarify and energize the space. Honey-colored wooden component tables reflect the bee motif and serve as plexi-topped trays containing small projects by 13 invitees: the loaded number at the Last Supper, the number of completion in the Aztec Trecena, the amount of circles in the angel Megatron’s cube, formed from his own soul to ward off evil, the age at which boys become men. The 13 tables in this case are composed by Allora & Calzadilla, Néstor Barreto, Marielys Castro, Elizam Escobar, Teo Freytes, Adelino González, Ivelisse Jiménez, Julio Suárez, Vargas Suarez Universal, Marga Vicenti, and Fabian Wilkins. The little worlds they are creating spread throughout the building.

In an organic evolution, he began inviting the artists around him to participate. These include his ever broadening circles: starting first and foremost with his wife, the artist Ana Rosa Rivera Marrero, who is installing a project created collaboratively while she was in residence at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. A sculptural fabric piece, it also is a set for her simultaneously historic and futuristic performances. Juhász-Alvarado has long served as a professor at Escuela de Artes Plásticas, and there are individual artist projects by former students ranging from Arnaldo Morales to Frances Rivera to Bik.  While the interactive metal wizard Morales (my husband) was one of his earliest students alongside Rivera Marrero, Frances is of a newer generation. She has been producing dreamlike tactile sea creature sculptures that zip up or unfold like a cloud. Charles’ fellow professor, Dhara Rivera, is working with a team on a project that considers the challenged river ecosystem of the island. Teo Freytes, Juhász’s longtime neighbor, is setting up a room for MSA, his legendary alternative space that, like an original hive, embraced a multiplicity of forms and factions. Between Freytes mini-show, the adjacent fantastical skirt-stages of Rivera Marrero, and a niche under the stairs being occupied by Ruben Solla, performative interventions promise to be ongoing. Área, another notable artist’s space, will also be in residence. Néstor Otero and Annex Burgos, also long in collaboration, are also mounting a project.

Juhász-Alvarado has a deep respect for literature, and decided to split his commission with Barreto, a respected poet and founder of Colección Maravilla (an independent publishing house) so that Barreto could create an independent press reading room on the first floor, as well as organize a series of readings. Juhász loves audio projects, and brought in frequent collaborator, musician Fabian Wilkins, to set up his sound studio. He will be working with and among several of the other artists. Cinema is another important form, and Juhász invited Guillermo Vázquez to program evenings of independent Puerto Rican avant-garde film. Andrea Bauza, the genie behind the official Trienal’s exhibition design, is organizing cutting-edge architectural presentations. Finally, as theatre aficionado, Juhász-Alvarado brought in renowned actor, Teofilo Torres (who also happens to be an agricultural guru) to carry out monologues, organize performances, and tend to an actual colony of bees taking up residence in the space, in a hive designed by Charles. They will feed off a patio garden created by Juhász with his student, Lynette Ruíz Martinez.

This ecosystem cuts across groups and styles. Juhász-Alvarado denies a curatorial role, and stresses rather the idea of a workspace. He assumes that projects will change and get added on, and he wants it to be a living, breathing production space. He has not discriminated to select only coherent and seamlessly-flowing works, but rather has taken an inclusive stance to represent as much of today’s culture as he has connection to. He has done an admirable job, particularly, of including a number of the oft-overlooked strong female artists on the island. However, to understand this beehive, you have to think through his relationships, his give and take over the years with these figures, and the invisible but now very tactile and deeply etched web that one person traces in the world. His personal connection is the motivating factor that draws all these voices into a marvelously-twinkling orbit.

My colleague, the curator Rebeca Noriega-Costas, riffs in her Trienal catalogue essay about how the title “El Panal” also contains the phrase, “mi pana”—and that friendship, camaraderie and shared experience is why collaboration is such a powerful force. In the official Trienal, we can trace this clearly in the historical sections with works from legendary studios in which Caribbean and Latin American artists played key roles such as Atelier 17, Taller de Gráfica Popular, and Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop. As we moved to the postmodern, politicized world, the New York Graphic Workshop, Tucuman Arde, C.A.D.A., Asco, or the Border Arts Workshop (to name a few) were continued forms of this type of satisfying group enterprise. In the Arsenal, contemporary workshops and collaborations, to name a few, include Beta Local, Conboca, Atarraya Cartonera, or the Dominican York Proyecto Grafica. We can see that this type of workshop continues and thrives.

However, nothing could better affirm the idea that sharing continues as an important force than Ente’s Casa de los Contrafuertes. This living hive, this seething panal, enacts rather than reviews the many and deep meanings of collaboration. It is a messy, inspired, moving and thrilling thing to see, and I urge that if you see nothing else of the Trienal, go see this. Go with an open mind and talk to folks. Prepare to spend some time. See what the power of artists joined together can do.

Source:  Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan  Posted: April 27,2012

In the main gallery, Porter casts a performance of eclectic figurines, knickknacks, toys, and souvenirs acting in unexpected combinations and circumstances. Porter’s ensemble of inanimate figurines performs mundane tasks, such as weaving, sweeping, and chopping wood. The peculiar situations she invents, where disparate events occur simultaneously, or dissimilar characters interact, wittily invite political, philosophical and existential interpretation.

In the second gallery, other members of this cast of souvenirs engage in quiet contemplation or confront one another in staged interactions. By creating dialogues between dissimilar characters that come together from different times and places,Porter demonstrates the non-linear nature of time. Porter’s space of representation fashions a new reality where everything can come together. The enigmatic figurines, then, act as objects of reflection – mirrors the viewer employs to discern or even produce meaning.

Pictures of works at: http://www.secristgallery.com/exhibitions/2012-04-28_liliana-porter/

Liliana Porter (Argentine, b. 1941) lives and works in New York and exhibits extensively nationally and abroad. Recent exhibitions include a two-person exhibition with Marcel Broodthaers at The New Museum, New York, a web project with Dia Art Foundation, and solo exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires; Palacio Aguirre de Cartagena, Spain; and the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona. Her work is in numerous public and private collections in Latin America, Europe and the United States, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; and Tate Modern, London.

Source: Gallery | Posted April 27,2012

For the second performance in the BMW Tate Live Performance Room, Argentinean born artist Pablo Bronstein will premiere, Constantinople Kaleidoscope, an entirely new work made especially for the BMW Tate Live Performance Room. Involving a group of dancers, Bronstein will create a baroque trompe l’oeil stage set that exaggerates the perspective of the room with mirrored columns. Bronstein uses architectural design and drawing to engage with the grandiose and imperial past of the built environment and this preoccupation with form frequently extends into his live work.

Audiences, who will only be able to view the performances on the internet, are invited to enter the online Performance Room via www.youtube.com/tate at 20.00 hrs in the UK and exactly the same moment across time zones on the specified dates—16.00 hrs on the East Coast of America, 21.00 hrs in mainline Europe and 23.00 hrs in Russia.

The global audience are encouraged to chat with other viewers via social media channels and to put questions to the artists or curator following it using Tate’s social media channels—twitter.com/tate using #BMWTateLiveQ and facebook.com/tategallery.

The BMW Tate Live Performance Room was inaugurated by French choreographer and dancer Jérôme Bel with the work Shirtology@Tate on 22 March. Artists Emily Roysdon, Harrell Fletcher and Joan Jonaswill also present works for the BMW Tate Live Performance Room in the coming months.

Source: Laura Bardier.  Published: April 15, 2012

In parallel with “The Structural Canvas Paintants”, the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld showcases “Some USA Stories” – a series of about 15 works, specially created for the venue, which particularly address subjects that belong to the dark side of recent US history: Topics such as the Mexican Drug War, the massacre in Waco, Texas, the mass suicide in Guyana directed by Jim Jones, the massacre at Fallujah or the school shootings at Columbine High School.

Picture:  work by Fabián Marcaccio: “Child Soldier Structural Canvas”, 2011, pigmentierte Tinte auf Leinwand, Aluminium, Alkydharz-Farbe, Silikon, Foto: © LehmbruckMuseum, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

Source:  LehmbruckMuseum  Posted March 16,2012

U-TURN presents works by 24 artists representing 12 galleries from Argentina, Brasil, España, México, Dinamarca, Suiza, Colombia y Alemania.   Below, a list of all projects, galleries and artists.