Eliana Willis

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    in Street Art

    “Melody of the Soul” by Natalia Rak in Rome, Italy

    Natalia Rak has created large-scale paintings since 2011, in the form of beautiful murals, commissioned from around the world. She has been focusing on female-centric imagery while using a rich and glowing palette, giving a breath of fresh air to the street art scene she is part of.In 2012 she received a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts of Łódz, where she further explored Art through its history, as well as discovering the work of classic and modern illustrators. In studying Natalia’s work you can recognize the influences from folklore tradition and fairy tales. The colours highlight the spiritual strength of these tales, giving them a surreal touch.Her art has been exhibited throughout Europe in cities such as Dusseldorf (Germany), Barcelona (Spain), and Strasbourg (France). Also, she has been featured in many group shows from all over the world and has participated in some of the most prestigious street art events, such as POW! WOW! (USA), Art Scape (Sweden), Mural Festival in Montreal (Canada), Blink(USA), Memorie Urbane (Italy). Her standout work for the Folk on the Street festival in Bialystok “Legend of the Giants” was included in the series “Sztuka Ulicy – Street Art” issued by the Polish Post.Natalia excels in a variety of media, from paper and canvas to brick and concrete, building a vast body of work filled with complex symbolism, different sort of allegories and profound love for Nature, that helps the observer to evade reality.A mural was made between the alleys of Rome, for the Street Art For Rights festival. The inspiration came from Agenda 2030-collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet. Rak’s artwork was inspired by the 15th one- “Life of land”. Focusing on managing forests sustainably, successfully fighting desertification and stopping biodiversity loss and driven by the extreme necessity for human beings to re-establish a deep connection with Nature.Take a look at more images below and check back with us soon for more updates. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Beyond the Streets Will Launch a London Edition of Its Blockbuster Street Art Exhibition in a Takeover of Saatchi Gallery

    Street art will take center stage in the U.K. with the February opening of “Beyond the Streets London”, a major survey at the Saatchi Gallery. The exhibition will explore the impact of over 150 artists and the movements with which they were associated, including Hip-Hop and Punk Rock.
    The sprawling show will fill the entirety of the gallery’s 70,000 square-foot space for the first time in eight years, with presentations of original art and site-specific installations alongside new special commissions. Archival documents such as photography, fashion objects, and rare ephemera, will also be shown to explain the history of the works. 
    The exhibition’s curator is Roger Gastman, a leading specialist in graffiti who has staged several museum-scale shows across the U.S. in the years since he co-curated the much-acclaimed “Art in the Streets” show at L.A. MoCA in 2011. 
    Co-curated with the L.A. museum’s then-director Jeffrey Deitch, the groundbreaking exhibition elevated an art form that had been mostly marginalized by the mainstream art world and examined its complex history. With over 200,000 visitors, it broke the California institution’s attendance records and subsequent blockbusters followed, including one housed in an office building in New York in 2019. 
    A permanent dedicated gallery called Beyond the Streets opened in L.A. just this past September. “Our collector base, our audience just kept asking for more,” Gastman told Artnet News at the time. 
    Making an effort to honor the present as well as the past, its inaugural show linked the work of established legends like Eric HAZE and Lady Pink with a newer generation of artists such as Othelo Gervacio and POSE. 
    “I don’t want to say I’m the grumpy old man who only cares about historical things, but I want to continue to dig up the stories of the culture of graffiti and street art before they disappear,” said Gastman.
    “The story of graffiti and street art can’t be told without highlighting the significant role London, and the U.K. in general, played,” Gastman has said about his latest project at the Saatchi Gallery.
    The London exhibition will show street art’s far-reaching influence, from underground social movements to many aspects of mainstream contemporary culture, including what we wear and what we listen to.
    “Beyond the Streets London” is on view at the Saatchi Gallery, London, February 17–May 9, 2023. Tickets can be purchased in advance here. 
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    in Exhibitions

    For ‘Crafting Pinocchio,’ MoMA Gives the Museum Treatment to Guillermo Del Toro’s Just-Released Netflix Fairytale

    While the miniature sets and puppetry pieces soon to be unveiled at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) may look like a nod to December’s booming toy sales, they were actually assembled for the New York institution’s latest motion picture-focused exhibition, “Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio.” Opening on December 11, the show takes a behind-the-scenes look at “Pinocchio”—the award-winning filmmaker’s new, undeniably dark, stop-motion take on Carlo Collodi’s classic 1883 children’s story. 
    Featuring new plot developments courtesy of Del Toro, “Pinocchio” is the Mexican filmmaker’s first stop-motion animation film. He co-directed the film with stop motion animator Mark Gustafson, who is making his feature directorial debut. The film is already in select theaters and will be available on Netflix on December 9. 
    Netflix first pitched the show to MoMA last year, while “Pinocchio” was still in production in Portland and Guadalajara, the museum’s film curator, Ron Magliozzi, told Artnet News. He and the exhibition’s co-curator Brittany Shaw traveled to Oregon for their preliminary meeting with Del Toro in October 2021. “Collaborative effort was important,” Magliozzi recalled of their initial conversation. “We went into the first day of visiting the studio with that in mind.”
    “Crafting Pinocchio” unfolds across four floors: it begins with several retellings of the story, including a 2002 edition illustrated by Gris Grimly (which inspired Del Toro), to help contextualize Del Toro’s film, before delving into the film’s pre-production and production stages. It culminates with a program of film features, including several screenings of Del Toro’s “Pinocchio”, from December 22 to December 29, as well as a larger retrospective of all 12 of the filmmaker’s feature films, from December 2022 until January 2023.
    Magliozzi has curated previous shows at MoMA around Pixar (2005–06) and Tim Burton (2009), but those focused heavily on concept art—a stage in the animation process that is falling away due to digital tools. “Crafting Pinocchio” shows the shift to research-based studies to create scenery and costumes. 
    Mackinnon & Saunders. Puppet making at the Shadow Machine workshop. Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” (2022). Image courtesy Netflix
    Del Toro’s version is set in Fascist Italy and his team went to great lengths to accurately depict a typical 1930s Italian town by diligently scouring historical studies and even topographical maps to fine-tune details such as the color of the sky and even the shape of acorns.
    They even used vegetables like cauliflower and mushrooms to imagine the textures of fantastical characters. Those concepts grew into maquettes, paper standards, and then full puppets, cast from the very acrylic molds on view in illuminated cases throughout “Crafting Pinocchio.” Interestingly, Del Toro spent his early career in special effects, even making molds himself.
    Full-sized puppets were only made for main characters that required close-up shots, like Pinocchio, whereas a background puppet is six inches tall at most, and pretty much flat at just half an inch thick. The life-sized Pinocchio from the film will be on view, but he doesn’t look like the Disney version’s real boy. Del Toro sifted through over 232 Italian adaptations of Pinocchio to understand the character’s nuance and tie it back to his own vision.
    This vision is honored in the exhibition with three new video works in a lower gallery that connect themes throughout Del Toro’s film practice.
    To give audiences a sense of what production was like, the curators shipped lighting rigs, dragon screens, five working sets, and four large set pieces, including the largest—a church—from Portland. They’re all puppet sized, disassembling easily so puppeteers can bring scenes to life and be captured up close by cameras so everything appears scaled to real life.
    Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” joins projects like Henry Selick and Jordan Peele’s Netflix film “Wendell & Wild” in updating stop motion’s clunky Christmas special ubiquity. Puppets are more sophisticated now and so is digital film, which allows for faster shots and quicker review. And while Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” still used CGI during post production, Magliozzi said limitations were imposed to retain the film’s “handcrafted” feeling.
    Guillermo del Toro on the set of “Pinocchio” (2022). Image courtesy Jason Schmidt/Netflix
    Ephemera such as alternative movie posters and time-lapse videos of the animators in action will also feature at MoMA, alongside an animation schedule board from the Portland studio, complete with pushpins and rubber bands. “They’re like 10 feet tall,” Magliozzi said. “You think that would be done on a computer, but it’s apparently too complicated and easier to deal with this way.”
    While the props, puppets, and sets selected by the curators share the film’s story, people power has proved to be the most important element in the film’s creation. The puppets were made both on- and off-site by companies such as the U.K.-based studio, Mackinnon & Saunders, with some craftspeople making them in their apartments during the pandemic. Meanwhile, at the studios, teams of animators would often work on the same scenes at the same time as it can take dozens of animators a full week just to get several minutes of footage.
    It is fitting, therefore, that the last thing visitors see before leaving “Crafting Pinocchio” is a wall of Polaroid portraits featuring every craftsperson who worked on Del Toro’s film.
    “All the artists working in the studio had to have a Polaroid taken when they started their first day of work,” Magliozzi recalled. Even as people left the crew, their photos remained and new ones were added as people joined the team.
    If you pick up an audio guide, you’ll even hear some of the voices behind those faces narrating “Crafting Pinocchio.” 
    “Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio,” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 11, 2022–April 15, 2023.
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    in Exhibitions

    For Theater Pioneer Robert Wilson, Chairs Are Characters. See Decades’ Worth of His Stage Furniture at a Brooklyn Gallery

    For the dissident theater director and visual artist Robert Wilson, a chair exists in space, not simply in its relationship to function or its beauty as an object—but also in how it’s experienced throughout memory and time.
    While visiting his uncle in the New Mexican desert, eight-year-old Wilson took notice of the only chair in the house amid the spare surroundings and proclaimed, “That’s a beautiful chair.” His uncle later sent him the chair as a Christmas present. This simple wooden chair held great significance for the young Wilson, who was otherwise besieged by the ordinary presents of his Texas childhood: shotguns and cowboy boots. When he was 17 his uncle’s son wrote to him, “My father sent you this chair, and it’s mine, and I’d like it back.” He sent it back, yet there began a lifetime fascination with collecting chairs.
    By the time Wilson was making plays at 27, the collector, playwright, choreographer, painter and sculptor took the opportunity to create his own chairs for his productions. He saw these chairs as having their own personalities—becoming characters on the stage along with the performers.
    “Robert Wilson: Chairs, 1969–2011,” opening November 17 and running through January 14 at MDFG in Brooklyn, collects many of these characters in a career-spanning exhibit, showcasing the breadth of the 81-year-old’s poetic imagination and use of materials.
    Some of Wilson’s characters as chairs embody real figures interpreted and transformed through his personal lens, like his Einstein Chairs (1976) of elongated metal pipes created for his 1976 collaboration with Philip Glass, “Einstein on the Beach,” or his heavy Queen Victoria Chairs (1974), made of wood, metal, odd angles, and adorned with car headlights for his opera in four acts, “A Letter to Queen Victoria.”
    These works are beyond mere props, not only as characters within the performance, but also as sculptural objects that invite interpretation and contemplation—especially outside of their original context, presented on their own as they are here, now.
    Robert Wilson. Hanging Chair (Freud), 1969/1991. Metal wire mesh.
    Robert Wilson. Gilgamesh Chair (Pair), 1988. Wood, painted bandages.
    Robert Wilson. The Meek Girl Chair, 1994. Wood, veneers, fur.

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    in Exhibitions

    ‘Past. Present. OId Tools. New Tools’: Watch Video Artist Beryl Korot Rewrite Ancient Text With Digital Technology

    What does a 19th-century weaving loom have to do with computer programming? In the eyes—and practice—of artist Beryl Korot, the answer is: a lot. In fact, the pioneering video artist makes the case for the Jacquard loom, invented in 1804, as the earliest computer because of its ability to program patterns using punch cards. A show on view now at Manhattan’s Bitforms Gallery titled “Rethinking Threads” charts the artist’s artistic journey in making the connections between art and technology.
    The exhibition also references Korot’s earlier works, including her 2007 piece Babel: The Seven Minute Scroll. In an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed back in 2010, the artist discussed the work, which references the ancient text using contemporary technology.
    “I guess I always had the attitude towards technology that the more intimate you are with the tools that you get, the more you can tell your story,” Korot explained. “And so I decided to make a scroll, in a sense, on the computer based on the Tower of Babel story.” Using letters of the alphabet, pictograms, and her own visual language, the artist creates her own narrative while probing the history of communication.
    “For me as an artist, I’m interested, in a sense, in going beyond my personal expression to things that I’m personally drawn towards, that also tell my story,” the artist told Art21. “Which is my connectedness to other points in time. Past. Present. Old tools. New tools.”

    Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. “Beryl Korot: Rethinking Threads” is on view at Bitforms Gallery through November 26, 2022.

    [embedded content]

    This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of news-making artists. A new season of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series, like New York Close Up and Extended Play, and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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    in Exhibitions

    Nearly 100 Artist-Designed Globes Will Land in London’s Trafalgar Square This Weekend to Teach the Public About the History of Slavery in the U.K.

    This weekend, 96 artist-designed globes will be installed at the heart of London in Trafalgar Square, to raise awareness about the history of the transatlantic slave trade in the U.K., as part of the nationwide project, The World Reimagined.
    The public will be able to view the globes—designed by creatives including the project’s founding artist, Yinka Shonibare—from November 19–20, and then bid on them in an online auction held by Bonhams online only now from November 17 through November 25. Proceeds are going to The World Reimagined’s learning program, the artists, and the establishment of a grant-making program for racial justice projects and organization.
    “The core mission of The World Reimagined is to engage the public to learn about the impact of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans,” Ashley Shaw Scott Adjaye, artistic director of The World Reimagined, told Artnet News. “To have a public exhibition in Trafalgar Square, in the heart of the capital where so many people can interact with these glorious works, is incredibly exciting.”
    More than 100 globes were commissioned via an open call judged by Shaw Scott Adjaye, who is also head of global research at her husband’s architecture firm Adjaye Associates; artist Chris Ofili; Zoé Whitley, director of the Chisenhale Gallery; Matthew Smith, director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL; and Renée Mussai, senior curator and head of curatorial and collections at Autograph, a London-based arts charity.
    A selection of globes which are going on view in Trafalgar Square. Photo: courtesy the World Reimagined.
    The sculptures were decorated by African diaspora artists from across the U.K., as well as a number from the Caribbean. Among those who contributed designs include Julianknxx, who has an exhibition at the Barbican Curve in 2023, Godfried Donkor, Phoebe Boswell, and Alison Turner. All of them have drawn on their personal experience with Britain’s history with slavery, and how it has impacted people of all backgrounds and races living in the U.K. today.
    “The World Reimagined is an important opportunity to reflect on the importance of our diversity and to shine a light on our collective stories that too often remain untold,” said the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. “We must remember the millions who suffered due to the Transatlantic slave trade and the impact this has had on generations of Black communities.”
    Godfried Donkor, Race. Photo: courtesy the World Reimagined.
    Many of the globes have already been shown in cities around the U.K. since August. Each has a QR code on its base that takes visitors to a website, where they can learn more about the issues and histories raised in the artwork.
    “This is a deeply powerful moment. We believe in an idea of patriotism that says we are strong and courageous enough to look at our shared past and present honestly, so we can create a better future—together,” said the project’s co-founder Michelle Gayle. “It’s not Black history—it’s all of our history.”
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    in Exhibitions

    In Pictures: The Late Polish Artist Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Monumental Soft Sculptures Stun at Tate Modern

    Visitors to “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” at the Tate Modern in London will find themselves dwarfed as they move between vast, free-hanging structures that challenge our traditional notions of sculpture and textile art. 
    Their warmly colored, ragged surfaces have been achieved by weaving together organic materials like sisal plant, horsehair, and hemp rope into complex and ambiguous 3D fiber installations known as “Abakans.”
    “It is from fiber that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves,” Abakanowicz once said. “Our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles. We are fibrous structures.” 
    Audiences will learn how Abakanowicz started out making painted textiles in the 1950s and watch as her practice evolved over the 1960s and ’70s, when she transitioned to building suspended forms on a monumental scale.
    Their radical nature is all the more striking for the artist’s distance from many of the major hubs of the art world. Born in 1930, she grew up in the rural Polish countryside and later, during the war, her family became part of the resistance while she worked as a nurse’s aid at the remarkably young age of 14. Afterward, Abakanowicz became an artist under an oppressive Communist regime and struggled against the odds to build an internationally recognized career. 
    Abakanowicz is also known today for Agora, a crowded group of headless figures permanently installed in Chicago’s Grant Park, and War Games, large structures made from trees in the style of military equipment. One of the works from this latter series, Anasta (1989), is displayed in the exhibition alongside the Abakans.
    “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” is on show at Tate Modern until May 21, 2023. See works in the show below.
    Installation view of “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” is on show at Tate Modern until May 21, 2023. Photo courtesy of Tate Modern.
    Installation view of “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” is on show at Tate Modern until May 21, 2023. Photo courtesy of Tate Modern.
    Installation view of “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” is on show at Tate Modern until May 21, 2023. Photo courtesy of Tate Modern.
    Installation view of “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” is on show at Tate Modern until May 21, 2023. Photo courtesy of Tate Modern.
    Installation view of “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” is on show at Tate Modern until May 21, 2023. Photo courtesy of Tate Modern.
    Installation view of “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” is on show at Tate Modern until May 21, 2023. Photo courtesy of Tate Modern.
    Magdalena Abakanowicz, Brown Textile 21 (1963). Photo courtesy of Tate Modern; © Fundacja Marty Magdaleny Abakanowicz Kosmowskiej iJana Kosmowskiego, Warsaw.
    Photograph of Magdalena Abakanowicz at work in 1966. Photo: © Estate of Marek Holzman.

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    in Exhibitions

    French Designer and Provocateur Michèle Lamy Is Unveiling a High-Art Skate Park in West Hollywood

    Carpenters Workshop Gallery is opening a high-art skatepark in West Hollywood tonight with “Turning Tricks” (November 17, 2022–January 14, 2023). The group show was organized by Michèle Lamy, the designer and provocateur (and wife of Rick Owns) behind the creative collectives LamyLand and OwensCorp.
    Five undisclosed pro skateboarders will be at tonight’s opening event to shred their boards on the show’s twelve skateable sculptures, created by pro skater Danny Minnick (the exhibition’s co-curator) alongside artists and designers Skyler DeYoung, Chris Benfield, and Lamy’s daughter Scarlett Rouge.
    Typically, these skaters would charge appearance fees, but they’re friends of Lamy, who maintains a rich cadre of collaborators, and always brings a posse to art openings. Rapper A$AP Rocky credits her with shaping his career.
    Lamy and Carpenters Workshop Gallery partner Loïc Le Gaillard are also friends. As the two talked recently, Lamy expressed a desire to push art’s existing limits, transcending mere objects to encapsulate an ephemeral but palpable vibe. Skating, and its community, came to mind.
    “I’m fighting for a new way of being,” she said in a statement. “I’m ready to imagine a new world.”
    Rouge at work, on site at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Courtesy of the gallery.
    “I have always been about creating spaces for people and inviting artists to create, and this project is an extension of my world,” Lamy continued. “We are all on this ride together.”
    Even though skateboarding only gained mainstream appeal in the early 1990s, Los Angeles has been a hub for it since the 1950s. “No sport is more connected to Southern California than skateboarding,” the Los Angeles Times wrote late last year.
    L.A. residents emptied their pools during droughts. Some turned them into DIY skateparks. Last summer, the sport made its Olympic debut at the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
    Still, lingering associations between skateboarding and pesky kids—or worse, crime—persist.
    Between the gallery and artists, everyone hopes that the communal energy of tonight’s “Turning Tricks” opening carries on well throughout the show’s run over the next two months, leaving a social memory as much a design one.
    To that end, they’ve filled out the gallery by fabricating full-on ramps, while reimagining trash cans and fire hydrants as objets d’art and replicating L.A.’s most iconic skating sites.
    An installation view of Danny Minnick, Skater shredding H-Street Office Ramp (2022). Courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
    In Sandpit, for instance, Rouge reanimated a legendary skating site off the Venice Beach boardwalk, once “a notorious intersection between graffiti and skating, with worldwide influence,” the work’s description explained. Legends like Henry Sanchez, Guy Mariano, and Eric Koston practiced there, until the city razed the site in 2000.
    Atelier OwensCorp built their own iteration of the Lockwood Elementary School, whose concrete playground remain a popular skating spot, using cinder blocks, asphalt, a chain-link fence, paint, and concrete. Minnick, meanwhile, honors skate and apparel company H-Street, founded in 1986 by pro skaters Tony Magnusson and Mike Ternasky, by recreating their notorious in-house quarterpipe from plywood, masonite, and steel.
    The artists also all painted, carved, and re-shaped a total of 65 skate decks from maplewood for collectors at the occasion. Every single one comes with its own print of relief oil-based ink on archival Arches cover paper.
    “The essence of skateboarding will be seen and heard for the first time through objects as they should be, without being considered a nuisance, an outlaw, or outsider activity,” Minnick mused in the release. “The exhibition brings the artist energy that has been such a big part of my life to a format for all to consider and enjoy.”
    “Turning Tricks” is on view at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles through January 14, 2023.
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