Angel Orensanz Foundation
Angel Orensanz
Orensanz Events
Artscape
July 28 - October 30, 2011
The Ministry of Culture presents an innovative exhibition in the Museo del Traje’s gardens with artworks by Angel Orensanz (Larués, Huesca, 1951) a conceptual artist that has become a figure of international prestige. Acclaimed by the critic and the public as one the most outstanding sculptors, the Contemporary Art Biennial of Florence paid homage to his career in 2001. He has also been awarded the Gold Medal from the Russian Fine Arts Academy.
The exhibition will be presented in the museum’s extensive gardens, with site-specific sculptural installations. The bright and colorful fabrics hang from the trees, are intertwined in the entrance’s rotunda and enmeshed in the fountains. The show, curated by the artist himself, invites the viewer to observe the constant dialogue that takes place between the artist and nature through his flying sculptures. In addition, his latest audio-visual works will be on view on the first floor of the museum.
With this new project the Museo del Traje’s historic textile collection gains a new light, under the revealing perspective of contemporary creativity. This innovative approach is part of the Ministry of Culture’s strategy to foster the production of contemporary art. Its main goal is to promote diverse dialogues between the artists and the state museums, and to enhance artistic innovation through the use of a wide range of multidisciplinary mediums.
The opening will take place on Thursday, July 28 at 8:00 pm and will remain open to the public through October 30, 2011. The following personalities will attend the opening: the general Director of the Fine Arts Section of the Ministry of Culture, Ángeles Albert de León; the Museo del Traje’s director, Rafael García Serrano; and artists Ángel Orensanz.
Organizers: Ministry of Culture (General Section of Fine Arts Promotion and Museo del Traje. CIPE).
Curator: Angel Orensanz
Venue: Museo del Traje’s gardens. CIPE. Avda Juan de Herrera, 2. Madrid
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Berlin, July 3, 2011. The splendid urban background of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district in Berlin, is being the set for a major display and art-action of sculptor Angel Orensanz. His intervention consists of aerial displays of assemblages of dense formations of fabrics and painted vinyl sheets. They convey the feeling of an aerial descent of hermetic messages. Sculptor Orensanz has been requested to present this intervention as part of the current "Open Air Gallery Fest" that takes place from the 3rd to the 11th of the current month of July.
The thrust of Angel Orensanz’s participation establishes a rupture in
the relationship between the viewer and the at art piece, a trademark
element present in most of his displays in public spaces. The
aesthetics strategy of Angel Orensanz is to immerse the visitor and
the public in general in a playful atmosphere where the conventions
are broken and unexpected connections and feelings are brought to the
surface. Art becomes participation and game simultaneously to all. Art
is not a commodity for acquisition but a experience of spontaneity and
playfulness. The performance will take place again next weekend when the show opens
to the public again.
For further information or press photographs contact Angel Orensanz at
212.529-7194 (New York).
For interviews please call him in Berlin on
his cell phone 033-607-186702.
The full set of photo documentation is available for viewing by clicking on this link.
At the present moment, Venice is in the spotlight of the entire art world. With the prestigious Biennale di Venezia gearing up to open with a preview on June 1, curated by Bice Curiger and hosting a record of 89 countries this year, numerous are the contemporary art exhibitions and events taking place in the Italian city coinciding with the Biennale dates. Among them, the cultural association Artlife for the World has put up the group show Mapping, the eighth and last exhibition in the Markersproject series in honor of the Venice Biennale 2011, which is opening on June 1 as well.
An itinerant art project curated by Doron Polak and Amir Cohen, Mapping brings together 66 artists from around the world, and deals with a topic usually associated with cartography; namely, a map is a compilation of agreed upon symbols that describe ideas. The artists participating in this exhibition have mapped their personal or social experiences, linked to the culture to which they belong. Featured in the collective show is the work of Angel Orensanz The Abyss of the Gulf (2010), a photo of one of his seminal public art installations.
Having performed and exhibited previously in Italy with highly acclaimed installations, Angel Orensanz has an special attachment with the richly cultural city of Venice, where in 2001 he initiated a key performance intervention that involved the rolling transportation of an enormous semi-transparent plastic sphere throughout emblematic Venetian spots. While this and other series of works from the last two decades were more committed to multiculturalism and pacifism, with The Abbys of the Gulf and its related photo piece presented at Mapping,Orensanz tackled and reacted to a specific human and environmental catastrophic event occurred at the Gulf of Mexico, a tragic contamination and infection of the seacoasts. Last August, in a large tract of urban space in New York, close to his studio Foundation in the Lower East Side, the artist enacted a vision and dramatization of the apocalypse in the Gulf of Mexico through a sculptural, textile and video construction. Miles and miles of wreckage and debris filled the expansive yard where he unfolded his take on a continental catastrophe that is not explained but metaphorically reenacted.
The Angel Orensanz Foundation proudly presents and invites the public to visit the group exhibition Mapping at Artlife for the World gallery, curated by Donor Polak and Amir Cohen and initiated by the International Artists’ Museum and 972ARTT. It is part of the project Markers, which has organized a wide range of successful exhibitions that have traveled to New York, Berlin, Lodz, Edinburgh, and more.
Mapping (Mappe) – Markers (Segni)
1 June – 28 July 2011
Artlife for the World - eventi d’arte contemporanea
Art Director: Simonetta Gorreri
Cannaregio 6021
Venezia 30121 Italy
+39 041 5209723
artlifefortheworld@libero.it
This year Cannes has been fueled at the level of La Croisette and its nerve centers of command and speculation of the Festival by the disparaging comments of Lars Von Trier (Melancholia) and Pedro Almodovar (La piel que habito). But parallel to those high profile commotions, there has been a significant film ingredient with an influence well beyond the press highlights. One of them, and possibly one of the most significant contributions to the festival, is Le Dispositif, the work of two young French cinematographers who are already part of the European cinematic universe. These directors are Pacôme Thiellement and Thomas Bertay. Their work "Le Dispositif" consists of 52 films of different length, titles and individual aesthetic consistency. The episodes presented have been Le Mât, La Tempête, Les Feuilles mortes, La Seconde Mort and Le Peuple des Hommes Reconstitués.
The Art Video Film Festival of Cannes is produced by Christian Pouligo. He has established this award in cooperation with the Cannes Film Festival and the City of Cannes. The Angel Orensanz Award is a satellite of the Cannes Film Festival in which artists from all disciplines and practices elevate their artistic experience to a level of visual totality. Angel Orensanz is an artist with a vast practice in sculpture, painting, photography, film and space interventions. His film work has been acknowledged with awards in Monaco, London, Tokyo, Sundance, Moscow and other prestigious festivals. He has used video and film since the early nineties. He has consistently mixed sculptural constructions with painting, photography and movie making. Prominent within them are "The final score" (Wales), "Burning Universe", (Venice Art Biennial) and "The Shattered Tent" (Sundance), among many others.
Angel Orensanz, a New York resident artist, mostly known for his sculpture and open nature installations has developed, as well, a consistent body of work both of documentary and philosophical content that goes from the environmental to the metaphysical. Over the last fifteen years he has developed a body of work embracing no less than eighty titles. A good selection of them is accessible through the lending film library of the Museum of Modern Art that holds a collection of twelve of his signature titles.
This year, the fourth edition of the Art Show and the Art Video Film Festival of Cannes was carried as a celebration of Angel Orensanz work in the fields of video and film. The artist himself presented the award in the presence of Mr Eric Harson, cultural Deputy Commissioner of the city of Cannes.
The Angel Orensanz Foundation in New York presented a two weeks exhibition, with an opening as part of the Armory Show, in which an anthology of Luis Bunuel movies was interlaced with Orensanz's films and sculptures.
The soaring spaces of the Orensanz Foundation in New York were bathed in a dense, hypnotizing red. Both artists are natives of Aragon; they became friends and though working in different medium they closely followed each other's activities.
For more than 10 years "Razor in the Eye", the sculpture by Angel Orensanz commissioned by the city of Bunuel's birth place for his centennial stands as a prominent public art piece in Calanda, Spain.
The exhibition "Angel Orensanz/Luis Bunuel: reProjections" was on view at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, 172 Norfolk St. New York, NY 10002 between March 6 and March 18th, 2011.
RePROJECTIONS – Angel Orensanz and Luis Bunuel
The clue lies in the title: rePROJECTIONS. Indeed, it is not the first time Bunuel or Orensanz’s films are shown and it could look as another projection. It is not.
As visitors enter the Angel Orensanz foundation space, they are not welcome into a movie theater where they could sit wherever they want to, trying to find the right spot. Instead, they have to face random chairs, four side screens at different heights featuring different films, John Cage’s experimental music, Orensanz’s portly sculptures and an instantaneous feeling of confusion occupying their minds. Wavering between vacuity and overloaded information, the spectators’ reaction is to establish a distance between what they see – the actual installation –, and themselves – their bodies as part of the installation -. Because of this very distance, they become active spectators, "spectactors" projecting themselves – their feelings, interpretations, experiences – into the filmic installation, becoming thus a REprojection. By making the visitors uncomfortable and ordering them to lose their landmarks, rePROJECTIONS builds a camera obscura where one has to print his own projection.
Bunuel and Orensanz are both surrealist artists who influenced each other, dialogued and fostered surrealist concepts. By projecting them together and inhabiting the space with their films, the installation also creates a surrealist echo that the spectators are encouraged to take away and reProject in the real world.
Lara Sebdon, Intern
Curator/Exhibitions Assistant
Angel Orensanz Foundation, NYC
Angel Orensanz: 20 Years in Russia
MARCH 3 – APRIL 3, 2011
State Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, Saint Petersburg
PRESS CONFERENCE: March 3, 2011 at 2 PM
OPENING RECEPTION: March 3, 2011 at 3 PM
Catherine The Great Exhibit Hall
State Museum of Russian Academy of Arts
Saint Petersburg, Universitetskaya embankment, 17.
Phone: (812) 323-3578, (812) 323-6496
In the presentation of Galeria Bat Alberto Cornejo for Art Madrid '11
Angel Orensanz participates with a large size installation.
Art Madrid will open its door for the press and collectors on February 15 and remains open for general public between February 16 and 20.
Feria de Arte Contemporáneo Art Madrid 2011, Stand B-9 at Pabellón de Cristal de la Casa de Campo de Madrid.