2010 December
Dec 27
Expo Andre Kertész at the MuVim
icon1 valenciablogger | icon2 Valencia | icon4 12 27th, 2010| icon3No Comments »

Until January 30, 2011 the MuVim in Valencia will show a photo exhibition of works by André Kertész. This show will, presented parallel in two Spanish cities, will show nearly 100 of the artist’s most important works divided into the 3 most important places in his life: Budapest, Paris and New York.

andre kertesz

The MuVim will show the most important works of Kertész which dominated photography in between the two world wars.

This exposition will be the event that Spanish cultural initiatives are presenting during the Hungarian chairmanship in the European Union.

André Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1894 and died in New York in 1985. He is one of the most important photo journalists and his oeuvre represents an important turning point in regards to the value of photography because he developed a new, independent language through his image based on his special composition and perspective.

Since he found a manual for photography at home when he was a child he had an interest in photography and images. He bought his first camera when he worked in the stock market and started taking photos of everything that caught his eye. He emigrated to Paris in 1925 where he frequently went to the Café de Dome where the artistic avant-garde of Montparnasse met. There he met some of the most important figures in art like Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Constantin Brancussi and many more.

His first years weren’t easy because he had an unorthodox approach to photography and he wanted to develop his own style. He was misunderstood by many. His technique and aesthetic are flawless und show his attentive and sensible eye, that catches the magic of the moment. Cartier Bresson did something similar with his poetry shortly after.

His first exhibit took place at the Galerie Au Sacre de Printemps in 1927. During that time he developed his best and most known work, where he played with surrealism and nudity, but also street scenarios that capture the poerty of reality. His series Distortions is a result of this period which was published in the magazine Sourire in 1933. This series marked a turning point in photography.

He married Elizabeth Saly and moved to New York in 1936 where he worked for the Keystone agency and magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Look. But his work wasn’t recognized until 1964 thanks to an exhibition at MoMo in New York.

Nancy Guzman Only-apartments AuthorNancy Guzman

After this wonderful exhibit you can go and enjoy the night life the city has to offer and after you can rest in one of the apartments in Valencia

Contact Me 

salome antigone Only-apartments TranslatorTranslated by: salome antigone
Contact Me

Dec 21

“Compass in Hand: Selected Contemporary Drawing from the Collection of the Judith Rothschild Foundation” will be presented for the first time in Spain thanks to the collaboration between the IVAM and the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition will present 241 works on paper by 118 artists which were acquired by MoMA in 2005.

moma drawing IVAM

In addition to presenting the finished works of great artists, the exhibition also includes preparatory studies and sketches. In the various paintings you can enjoy art made with both traditional techniques such as graphite, pencil, brush, watercolor and gouache, acrylic and oil paintings and also in various printmaking techniques. There are also more experimental pieces featuring tracings and transfers of land, pigments, plant extracts, soot, food and body fluids, and a variety of collages and found objects.

Some of the artists to be enjoyed include Lee Bontecou, Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Hanne Darboven, John Currin, Amelia von Wulffen, Lucy McKenzie and Paulina Elizabeth Peyton Olowska

The collection of contemporary drawing from the Judith Rothschild Foundation is the most important of all donations the MoMA has received in its history and the idea is to introduce the viewer to different drawing techniques that existed from 1930 until 2005.

The last works that were added to the collection offer new ways of approaching the work on paper and using it not only as support but also using it to form part of the work.

For more information see: http://www.ivam.es/

Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Guillem de Castro 118, Valencia 46003

MiLK Only-apartments AuthorMiLK

Rent apartments in Valencia to enjoy this impressive exhibit, which will run until January 16 th 2011.

Contact Me 

salome antigone Only-apartments TranslatorTranslated by: salome antigone
Contact Me

Dec 13
Save the Cabanyal
icon1 valenciablogger | icon2 Valencia | icon4 12 13th, 2010| icon33 Comments »

If one were to identify a month with the city of Valencia, March would be a likely choice. That is when they celebrate the city’s most famous festival, culminating, after a year of preparations, in the great public burning, square by square, of sculptures on display from the start of the festivities.  This ceremony seeks purification through fire. Somehow, the pagan overtones of this ceremony bring to mind the potlatch phenomenon, practiced by some Indigenous Tribes of the Pacific Northwest Coast. These ritual demonstrations of abundance involved giving gifts, and people would take great pains to outdo each other, and some even burning the gifts as a display of wealth.

save the cabanyal
In April, as the air began to clear near the Malvarrosa and in Cabanyal, thoughts veered to more pressing matters namely, the future of this irreplaceable part of Valencia. Despite having been declared a protected historic and cultural heritage zone, it has spent years in danger of extinction, victim to the greed of speculators and irresponsible political leaders who have launched to the streets, bulldozers and eviction notices in hand. This voracious and unexamined will to destroy seems almost like the prideful sacrifice exhibited during fallas

For now, the demolitions have been stayed thanks to the Spanish Constitutional Court, but the municipal authorities are threatening to go ahead with their plan anyway. All the more reason to visit this old fishing village before it disappears. It is nestled between the beach and the center city, and you can visit the huge flea market on Thursdays, or just take a stroll before the great avenue planned to connect the center of Valencia with the sea splits this beautiful neighborhood in two and hopelessly rips out its heart and soul.

On streets like the Carrer de la Reina, you can see humble, charming and colorful art-nouveau and modernism, which makes Cabanyal a unique environment in Europe. Pottery shines as a decorative motif and lives in harmony with baroque buildings, palaces and colonial mansions and even a hint of art deco. The Salvem Cabanyal group organizes guided tours through the neighborhood regularly.

 

 


 

 

 

Paul Oilzum Only-apartments AuthorPaul Oilzum

When you rent apartments in Valencia you can see for yourself that the Cabanyal is a treasure worth preserving, not destroying.

Contact Me 

salome antigone Only-apartments TranslatorTranslated by: salome antigone
Contact Me

Dec 7
Find the Holy Grail in Valencia
icon1 valenciablogger | icon2 Valencia | icon4 12 7th, 2010| icon3No Comments »

In the last five years the novel by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, has enjoyed unprecedented sales success and reintroduced the idea of the Holy Grail.

holy grail valencia

In the case of Brown’s fiction, which builds its thriller based on the theories of Margaret Starbird, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh, the Grail is dematerialized, and interpreted as actually being the dynastic bloodline of Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, transmitted from generation to generation through his daughter Sarah, from his marriage to Mary Magdalene. Hence the concept of the Holy Blood, which strictly speaking would be the way we should read the words Holy Grail.

Perhaps the fact that a novel with as little literary merit and rather preposterous hypotheses as The Da Vinci Code haw turned into an international best seller has shocked some intellectual purists. However, perhaps the phenomenon is not so strange.

On one hand, the novel reflects not only the mess of syncretic reformulation and pseudo spiritual questioning peculiar to our time-probably not too different from other periods, such as the Hellenistic period, as well as returning women to the center of the religious and social concerns, as it did when the Mary and the figure of the Grail first made their appearance in Western literature, updated and double-tuned to the pulse of time.

On the other, it subverts one of the essential archetypes of the western collective unconscious that has been nurtured in Western literary history, a point of reflection in such diverse contexts as the romance Perceval ou Li Contes del Graal (circa 1180) of Chrétien de Troyes to movies like The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991) to composers like Wagner

The rich symbolism of the myth is inexhaustible. It is at once a Christian symbol, ancient pagan fertility rite, Celtic traditions … Whatever there is behind the myth, since the Vulgate Arthurian Grail presented the chalice that Christ used at the Last Supper, later used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of the Nazarene on the cross as a symbol, it has taken hold of our imagination.

One key text, Parzival (1200-1212), by Eschenbach, a Provencal chronicler reports that a Sephardic astronomer claimed to have read the name of the Grail written in Arabic, giving rise to a well-documented tradition that places it in the cathedral of Valencia.

Paul Oilzum Only-apartments AuthorPaul Oilzum

You can visit if you rent apartments in Valencia . Begin you own quest for the Holy Grail, you have watched too much Monty Python already.

Contact Me 

salome antigone Only-apartments TranslatorTranslated by: salome antigone
Contact Me