1 pce.

Iranian Satirist Ardeshir Mohassess

Decades before Marjane Satrapi drew the first frame of her celebrated comic book memoir “Persepolis,” the Iranian satirist Ardeshir Mohassess, now 69, was making black-and-white drawings whose blend of humor and reportage made him a cult figure for artists and intellectuals in his country. With rich allusions to Persian miniatures, Western artists like Goya and episodes in Iranian history, Mr. Mohassess has depicted life in Iran before, during and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The drawings have a fanciful yet descriptive line quality, comically exaggerating facial expressions while giving full weight to bullet holes and severed limbs. Some of the meanings may be lost on American viewers, but the artist’s deep suspicion of religious and political authority comes across clearly.

Now some 70 of Mr. Mohassess’s works are on view at the Asia Society and Museum in a show, “Ardeshir Mohassess: Art and Satire in Iran,” assembled by the artists Shirin Neshat and Nicky Nodjoumi. The timing could hardly be better, given Iran’s high profile in the American political debate during this presidential election year.

link: Life in Iran, Etched With Suspicion and Humor

By Karen Rosenberg

The New York Times

Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams

Director Federico Fellini, a former cartoonist whose visually striking masterpieces typically combine memory, dream and fantasy,once dismissed his sketches as "ugly strokes - hurried and ungrammatical notes".

The 400 drawings are brightly coloured, fully formed and often quite explicit. Many highlighted the erotic and playful side that ran through Fellini's screen work. Enthusiastic movie buffs hope the books will show, for the first time, the germs of a great film-maker's creations.

Fellini, the maker of classics like La Dolce Vita, Eight and a Half and Amarcord, started drawing his dreams after meeting a Junghian psychoanalyst in 1960. He kept up the habit until 1990, three years before his death.

link: The Italian Almanac

Now Rizzoli has published Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams in a beautiful oversize volume. A unique combination of memory, fantasy, and desire, this volume is a personal diary of Fellini’s private visions and nighttime fantasies. This dream diary exhibits Fellini’s deeply personal taste for the bizarre and the irrational. His sketches focus on the profound struggle of the soul and are tinged with humor, empathy, and insight. Fellini’s Book of Dreams is an intriguing source of never-before-published writings and drawings, which reveal the master filmmaker’s personal vision and his infinite imagination.

Drawing on Film

Drawing on Film will survey the practice of “direct film”—the process of drawing, scratching, or otherwise manipulating film stock to create images without a camera. The exhibition will present works spanning from the late 1930s to the present and will highlight an overlooked facet of experimental film. Many of the works to be exhibited are seminal films in the history of the genre—including Len Lye's A Colour Box and Norman McLaren's Blinkity Blank—while other, more contemporary works are being screened for the first time. By showcasing films from over seven decades, Drawing on Film will present an overview of the rich legacy of direct film.

The exhibition will transform the Drawing Room into a screening room with a program of films by eleven artists that will screen multiple times each day. In addition, individual installations, one by Jennifer Reeves and one by Jennifer West, will run for one week each. Two separate evening screenings will feature works by Stan Brakhage and by Dieter Roth and Amy Granat, respectively.

link: The Drawing Center

Holodomor: Genocide by Famine

The details of a little-known genocide that resulted in the deaths of as many as 10 million people will be presented in an exhibition opening on May 27 at The Ukrainian Museum in Manhattan's East Village.

The exhibition, Holodomor: Genocide by Famine, is one of a series of events taking place around the world to commemorate the 75th anniversary of what James Mace, the director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine (1988), referred to as "the crime of the century that nobody's ever heard of."

The horrific event, known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor (literally, murder by starvation), took place in 1932-1933, less than twenty years after Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. Determined to force all Ukrainian farmers onto collective farms, to crush the burgeoning national revival, and to forestall any calls for Ukraine's independence, the brutal Communist regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin embarked on a campaign to starve the Ukrainian people into submission.

The Soviet government confiscated all the grain produced by Ukrainian farmers, withheld other foodstuffs, executed anyone trying to obtain food, and punished those who attempted to flee. As a result, in the land called the Breadbasket of Europe, millions of men, women, and children were starved to death.

Stalin boasted privately that as many as 10 million people – 25% of Ukraine's population – had perished during the Holodomor. At least 3 million of the victims were children.

Despite the magnitude of the atrocity, the Soviet regime, behind its Iron Curtain, denied the existence of the Holodomor for decades, denouncing any reports as "anti-Soviet propaganda." It was not until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent establishment of an independent Ukraine that the contents of many sealed government archives were uncovered, exposing a wealth of gruesome information.

Much of that information is included in Holodomor: Genocide by Famine, which consists of 100 panels of photographs, documents, government reports, eyewitness accounts, and other archival material detailing virtually every aspect of the tragedy.

Holodomor: Genocide by Famine

May 27 through November 30, 2008

'The Oldest Living Things In The World'

As the Michael Steinberg Fine Art gallery press release has it, Rachel Sussman takes photographs of the “oldest continuously living organisms on the planet.” What we see are gorgeous, large-scale color pictures of trees, “predatory fungus,” and bacteria. These stately pictures quiet the soul: You enter a reverie wondering how these organisms managed to live so long and if there’s anything in them that might help us stave off the inevitable. You also start thinking about what it means that we destroy these “creatures.” Sussman brings you to the place where science, beauty, and eternity meet. — Jerry Saltz

Enzo Mari

Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles hosts a traveling exhibition by world famous designer Enzo Mari. It is a special collection of sixty objects carefully chosen by the artist in collaboration with some firms which manufactured them: Alessi, Artemide, Danese, Driade, Hida Sangyo, Kartell, Magis, Muji, Poltrona Frau, Robots, Zani & Zani, Zanotta.

One of the most thoughtful and intellectually provocative Italian designers of the late 20th century, Enzo Mari has always been preoccupied with the role of object design in everyday living and the function of the designer, whom he expects “to define his own model of an ideal world”.

Porn Posters from the 1960's

link: curate

Pyramids of Makkum

Commissioned by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, to repair their late 17th century Delft flower pyramid—an exuberant, monumental multiple layer flower vase created in response to Europe’s “tulip mania”—Royal Tichelaar Makkum, the renowned 16th century Dutch manufactory, spent years researching the long-lost techniques necessary to recreate such a massive and complex composition.

link: EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS AT MOSS

Peyton Place

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age. In one picture, of Matthew Barney, he’s sitting slightly hunched. He isn’t just some lambkin; there are circles under his eyes, he stares into the distance and into himself, posing in such a way to accept and reject our gaze. It’s a performance, a surrender, and a protective defense. We’re getting to see what life is doing to Peyton and what it’s doing to us.

link: ELIZABETH II By Jerry Saltz, artnet

Wayne Thiebaud: ‘The Figure’

WAYNE THIEBAUD: ‘THE FIGURE’ While best known for his Pop-realist paintings of food products, Mr. Thiebaud has also been a skillful and innovative figure painter, as this fine show of paintings and drawings dating from 1963 to 1992 demonstrates. Outstanding are six oil paintings from the ’60s, each depicting a man or a woman against a blank wall. The women are sexy and enigmatic, the men subtly comical. All the paintings have great visual snap and a slightly melancholy, Hopperesque distance.

link: NYT