Tag: contemporary art

Postcard from Bilbao, Spain: Vitoria-Gasteiz showcases contemporary art

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Above: Videostills from Soneto de Alimanas, Naomi Rincon Gallardo, 2022, at Artium

Soneto de Alimanas depicts a group of underground, marginal characters who conspire to celebrate ‘delirious entangled re-existences’ amidst a world subjected to the logics of exploitation. It generates a solidarity of rejected beings who communicate across airwaves and defend their existence and the potential driven by their otherness to resist violence and dispossession.”

Curator’s Notes at Artium

It’s hard not to get shoved into the backseat of the artworld when your city lies in the shadow of Bilbao’s Guggenheim. Vitoria-Gasteiz is forty miles away, yet the ambitious leadership of Alava province saw an empty hole – the opportunity to promote the flourishing contemporary art scene of Basque Country.

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Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Richness of contemporary art scene evident at MUPO

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Above: Detail of “Aborregados 6” by Soledad Velasco

The works with acrylic and India ink are a mixture that balances the safe and the unsure, the spontaneity and the calculated. While acrylic is more stable and gives solidity to the work, the pen and water give that feeling of chance, of an accident that must be controlled…. The immediacy and freshness, the lack of control when one decides to drain the water and the necessary control that ends up being exercised, all of this is a metaphor for what each day has in store for us. And in my case, a reminder that nothing is entirely predictable or certain.”

Soledad Velasco

Originally hailing from Oaxaca, artist Soledad Velasco spent 25 years working in Spain before returning home in 2019. Earlier this year, we saw the fruit of her time spent since then in a one-person show, “A Eva,” at Museo de los Pintores Oaxaquenos, or MUPO.

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Postcard from Palermo, Sicily: Phillips’ passion for collecting left me entranced

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Above: Detail from “Curriculum Vitae XI,” Tom Phillips

The muses visit children in disguise with shrouded gifts ~ Terpsichore gives her a skipping rope ~ From Clio he receives old stamps of far forgotten colonies ~ Darkly to me Apollo and his team present the pnuema ~ the creative spark ~ all strife of art inside a filing clerk.”

Excerpt of text on Tom Phillips’ “Curriculum Vitae XI”

Last spring, we almost missed what emerged as our favorite museum in Palermo. Palazzo Butera was newly opened. Although we passed by it often, we didn’t see it in any guidebook or even resources online.

Word art by British artist Tom Phillips (1937-2022) so captivating it demands you stop in your tracks to slowly digest every morsel of poetry within each piece. But how could I absorb them all when we had a whole museum ahead of us?

The amazing part of this is his process. Most of his “Curriculum Vitae” series is composed in iambic pentameter, a form of traditional English poetry with ten syllables per line (Yes, I learned this through labels.). Yet, they are written, or carved as it were, somewhat on the fly.

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