Blog
I would like to start the 2016 by presenting couple of very interesting shows at Chelsea, NY.
Christian Voigt exhibition will be on view at UNIX Gallery until Feb.27th, 2016. I would like to quote the art critic Simone Simon: "Christian's photographs of exotic nature and cosmopolitan cities look like surreal stage sets. As if they had been painted with a camera"
Don't miss Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, on view at Guggenheim, NY, on view until January 6th 2016.
This major retrospective exhibition—the first in the United States in more than 35 years and the most comprehensive ever mounted—showcases the pioneering work of Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915–1995).
The Easter Island heads have bodies! It's not known exactly why the bodies were buried or if they are buried on purpose. The figures were carved between years 1250 and 1500 by the Rapa Nui people. Archaeologists have documented 887 of the massive sculptures, known as moai, carved on the Chilean Polynesian island of Easter Island. The Easter Island bodies were news to us, but apparently archaeological research on the island located 2,000 miles west of Chile began over century ago, in 1914.
Photo: courtesy the Easter Island Statue Project.
Don't miss this great exhibition at MoMA, New York. Only two weeks left - on view until July 19, 2015.
“Latin America in Construction” recalls a not-so-distant time when architects and governments together dreamed big about changing the world for the better. From Cuba to Chile, Mexico to Argentina, cities in the region boomed. The task of providing everybody with homes ultimately proved unmanageable: proliferating slums outpaced new construction; poverty rose. By the 1980s, a pitiless neoliberalism swept aside much of the abiding faith in public largess and its social agenda.
Even so, what got built through the 1970s in places like Havana and Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Lima included some of the most inspired architecture of the modern age. The show is an eye-opener, rectifying a long-skewed, Eurocentric worldview, shedding light on a period neglected for generations outside the region. It’s the sort of exhibition MoMA still does best." NYTimes Review
The Reason Cervantes Asked To Be Buried Under A Convent
" It was Miguel de Cervantes' dying wish to be buried inside the walls of Madrid'sConvento de las Trinitarias Descalzas, where a dozen cloistered nuns still live today, nearly 400 years later. Cervantes, born in 1547, is the most famous writer in the Spanish language. But the world would never have read his literature if it weren't for the Trinitarian nuns. Cervantes believed he owed his life to them. That's because before Cervantes wrote his two-volume masterpiece, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, the author had some chivalrous adventures of his own.
As a young man in his early 20s, he fled Spain for Rome, after wounding a nobleman in a duel. By 1570, he returned home and enlisted in the Spanish navy. He went to war to defend the pope — and got shot in twice in the ribs, and once in the shoulder — an injury that left his left arm paralyzed. And it was only then that he got kidnapped by Algerian pirates.
"He was taken prisoner. He spent five years — five terrible years — as a slave, as a captive," says historian Fernando del Prado, With Cervantes enslaved in Africa, his family appealed to the Trinitarian nuns. They managed to raise a ransom and deliver it to the pirates — which won Cervantes his freedom."
Time is brief,
anxieties grow,
hopes diminish,
and yet my desire to live
keeps me alive. The Trials of Persiles and Segismunda, Miguel de Cervantes
Lina Bo Bardi at 100: Brazil’s alternative path to modernism
Lina Bo Bardi's buildings are shaped by love, people are at the center of her projects. At Sesc Pompeia, her masterpiece, old men play chess and children play with building blocks. People sunbathe on a boardwalk called “the beach”.
Viva Lina! An Italian in Brazil
So much passion, love, life! Lina was on constant pursuit of the essential and the functional, the ability to innovate and the place people the center of every project.
Brazil is on my radar! Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980, will be on view at MoMA March 29–July 19, 2015. Looking forward the exhibition.
