A TALE OF TWO CITIES: LONDON VS. PARIS, THE ART WORLD’S ONGOING RIVALRY

A man is waiting. In elegant clothes, the figure is placed in the center of what looks like a hotel bar. He plays the lead role on a sort of stage, an interior that is something of a cage, something of a scenic locus, as if a possible flirtation or a desired encounter would provide some catalysis of emergence, a quick enjoyment, an intense release, however short and finite, perhaps dismantling a routine of limits. Man in Blue (1954) works as a synthesis of the not so extensive but very significant gathering of the celebrated Francis Bacon (1909-1992) in A Beleza da Carne (The Beauty of Meat), at Masp (São Paulo Museum of Art). The exhibition is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the institution and curator of the current edition of the Venice Biennale, the 60th, on show until November in the Italian city, and co-curated by Laura Cosendey.

After six years of his collaboration as a teacher in the Master's Degree in Curatorial Studies offered by the Museo Universidad de Navarra (MUN), Gabriel Pérez-Barreriro has been appointed as the institution's new artistic director. With extensive experience in university museums and other centers in Europe, the United States and Latin America, he is now the new head of the MUN's artistic strategy together with Teresa Lasheras, artistic director of performing arts and music.

“I imagine the museum as an archipelago. It is not a continent, but an archipelago (...) The idea today is to put the world in contact with the world, to put some parts of the world in contact with other parts of the world... We must multiply the number of worlds inside museums”. Édouard Glissant (Sainte-Marie, Martinique, 1929-Paris, France, 2011) expressed his vision of museum functionality in this metaphorical way in his work Poetics of Relationship (1990).

Jesús Rafael Soto (Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, 1923-Paris, France, 2005) carried out several investigations during the 1960s on possible solutions to face the fragmentation that his language needed. From those explorations emerged the T, a fine, metallic element of simple purity that allowed him to access, with satisfaction, to that disintegration he pursued and to reach a certain sensation of vibration and sublime volatility thanks to the linear disposition of these elements and their uniform arrangement that ended up giving the work a certain mediation between the spectator and the space and movement.

Last Thursday, September 26, a ceremony was held at the French Embassy in Paraguay, where Ambassador Pierre-Christian Soccoja awarded art critic Adriana Almada and visual artist Félix Toranzos with the Order of Arts and Letters. Both were part of the third edition of Pinta Sud | ASU.

The Museo Moderno announced that La Menesunda, the legendary work by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín –a work originally created in 1965, reconstructed by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and inaugurated in 2015 and later in 2019 at the New Museum in New York– is on view for the first time in Europe as part of a tour that will show it in four countries.

The Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca was commissioned to create a site-specific work in the chapel of the Hôtel Salé, home of the Musée national Picasso-Paris. The final commission, whose canvas is the walls of the chapel, can now be visited.

¿Inversión o pasión? Una guía para navegar por el mercado del arte (Investment or passion? A guide to navigating the art market) is the new book by María Sancho-Arroyo, where the author delves into the world of art collecting.

Santa Barbara Museum of Art presents the exhibition Accretion: Works by Latin American Women, with works from artists from the United States but with roots in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.

Shifting Landscapes is a group exhibition at the Whitney Museum that explores how constantly evolving political, ecological, and social landscapes inspire artists and their interpretations of the world around them.

The Studiotopia international program is open for the submission of proposals to the residency program for young scientists or emerging artists. LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial -in collaboration with other institutions- announces an international call for non-Spanish artists. Deadline to apply: November 7, 2024.

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is presenting the first major retrospective in Europe of Olga de Amaral, a key figure of the Colombian art scene and of Fiber Art. The exhibition brings together nearly eighty works made between the 1960s and now, many of which have never been shown before outside of Colombia.

The Copenhagen Planetarium opens a permanent installation by Tomás Saraceno, Cosmic Threads, where the public is invited to reflect on the enigmas of the universe and human responsibility for the future of the planet.