Landscapes real and imagined

Posted at 4:13 PM on February 2, 2011 by Marianne Combs (2 Comments)
Filed under: Galleries, Museums, Painting, Photography

Margaret Wall-Romana
Memento Lucem (Remember the Light) [detail], 2010
Oil on panel
58 x 133 x 2 in.

Walk into the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and you will find two very different bodies of work hanging on the walls. But spend a little time with them both and you may find yourself pondering similar questions.

Margaret Wall-Romana's work is lush and breathtaking to behold. Her giant canvases are rich with imagery - primarily plantlife - in various states of growth and decay. MAEP coordinator Christopher Atkins says Wall-Romana's work combines everything from naturalism to abstract expressionism, surrealism and color fields:

Margaret's work is really formal - she sustains a sense of history and technique that I don't see very often in painters in this town. She's very much a large scale studio artist, playing with scale, and creating these intricate structures from bones, wood and plants around her.

Margaret Wall-Romana
Towards & Away, 2010
Oil on panel
46 x 116 x 2 in.

Wall-Romana's work draws you in to explore her compositions that are both gorgeous and other-worldly. If you pay close attention you can even see the strokes of her palette knife across the canvas.

Peter Happel Christian, by contrast is a photographer who's work, while beautiful, is more conceptual and minimalist. In a series of photographs called "Blackholes and Blindspots" Happel Christian purposefully blacks out the very center of each image. By obscuring the focal point, he's actually making us look harder at an image of an urban landscape that we might otherwise take for granted.

Peter Happel Christian
Blackholes and Blindspots (No. 8), 2010
Chromogenic print
8 x 11 in.

For Happel Christian, the artwork is as much an embodiment of the artistic process and his own questions than it is a final product. For his work "Witness Tree" he went back to his childhood home and took a myriad of photographs of the redbud tree his parents planted around the same time Happel Christian was born. In essence the tree is a marker of his own life. But, according to Atkins, when it came to really capturing the tree and what it represented, Happel Christian felt any one photograph was lacking, so instead took a picture of all of the photographs bound together. He's basically saying "this is not the definitive image."

Christopher Atkins says it's that artistic inquiry that drives Happel Christian's work throughout:

He really takes an idea and explores it in depth in a variety of ways, whether it's through photography or installation pieces. You can look at his work and see beautiful photographs, but what's important for him is that the idea underneath is clear as well.

Peter Happel Christian
Witness Tree, 2010
Chromogenic print
15 x 13 in

So while Margaret Wall-Romana's paintings are sensual and expansive, Happel Christian's work is more of an intellectual pursuit, bringing our attention down to a single point.

Upon further contemplation, however, these two artists are similarly preoccupied with the natural landscape, and how we manipulate it. They both seek to capture the eye of their viewers - one by creating lush landscapes, the other by thwarting our initial attempts and making us look harder. Each are passionate about their pursuits - one through technique and form, the other in concept and method.

"Painting Before and After Words: Maragaret Wall-Romana" and "Ground Truth: Works by Peter Happel Christian" are both on view in the MAEP galleries of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through April 3.

Museums of the world, up close

Posted at 11:05 AM on February 2, 2011 by Marianne Combs
Filed under: Media, Museums, Technology

If you've done a Google search this morning, you may have noticed the home page is promoting something called "Art Project." Well that's too tempting a title for me to resist, so I did a little exploring, and am pretty thrilled with what I found.

"Art Project" is basically a collaboration between museums around the world to upload their artworks online in extraordinary detail, as well as offer virtual tours of their galleries. Users can create their own collections of favorite artworks from the participating museums.

In short, it's an art lover's dream come true.

Currently there are 17 museums participating in the project, including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Tate Britain in London, the Uffizi gallery in Florence and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The website promises more information soon on how other museums can join the project (the Walker and MIA, perhaps?).

According to the Art Project website, Google approached the museum partners with the idea, and each museum was able to chose the number of galleries, artwork and information they wanted to include.

As you might imagine, the images on the site are copyright protected, and Google owns the "Stree View" imagery used for creating the virtual museum tours.

Here's the current list of museum partners:

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC - USA
The Frick Collection, NYC - USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin - Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC - USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC - USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid - Spain
Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza, Madrid - Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague - Czech Republic
National Gallery, London - UK
Palace of Versailles - France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg - Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow - Russia
Tate Britain, London - UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence - Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands