The Louise Blouin Foundation, in collaboration with Peter Blum Gallery, is pleased to present Chris Marker: Selected Works 1957-2011, a survey exhibition that will feature over three hundred photographs and video installations by the late Chris Marker (1921-2012) from 9th October – 3rd November 2012 at the Louise Blouin Foundation in London. The exhibition will be celebrated with an opening reception on 8 October 2012.

The show will include seven bodies of work that span nearly six decades of the artist’s career, from KOREANS (1957), an unexpected documentation of a presently arcane country; to PASSENGERS (2008-2011), his last major body of work.

“From his groundbreaking work in film to his episodic photographic essays, Marker has turned a defiant curiosity toward images into poetic journeys about the human condition and the desire to create history,” expresses exhibition curator Matthew Drutt. “A self-described benevolent paprazzo, he has copiously captured his observations of everything from a newly established socialist utopia in North Korea to political marches on the streets of Washington and Paris and everyday life in the Paris Metro. His work is passionate, insightful, personal, and universally significant.”

PASSENGERS marked the artist’s first series of color photographs, and captures the many private and personal actions of commuters in transit on the Paris Métro. In his own words, Chris Marker writes:

The PASSENGERS are reflected in the artificial light, in the glass of the windows, in the metal of the poles and in the eyes of their fellow travellers. We catch them in their moments of beauty, innocence, humor, grief, their tired loneliness. Their image has been frozen. We are transfixed.

KOREANS, photographed in 1957, offers a rare, unrecognizable and obscure glimpse of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in the years immediately following the Korean War, when the communist country expressed idealist hopes prior to becoming an impenetrable totalitarian territory. Romantic, opulent, and elegant, the images open an often forgotten window into the nascent optimism that once captured the country’s citizens.

OWLS AT NOON PRELUDE: THE HOLLOW MEN, a silent eight-channel video installation, extends an unapologetic portrayal of the ravages of World War I. Borrowing influence from T.S. Eliot, verses of “The Hollow Men”, a poem written amidst the violence of the early 20th century, are interlaced between startling images that document the unfathomable acts and capabilities of human cruelty.

This survey of Chris Marker is the first of its kind for the artist, which continues the Louise Blouin Foundation’s commitment to promoting cultural dialogue and global exchange through the examination of art. Past exhibitions at the Louise Blouin Foundation include The October Issue (2011), Pure Views: New Painting from China (2010), Kandinsky Prize (2009), Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Ducks (2009), Wang Guangyi: Cold War Aesthetics (2009) and James Turrell: A Life I Light (2006).

The art magazine becomes art.
An exhibition bringing to life the pages of the October issue of Modern Painters.

EDITING AN ART MAGAZINE HAS MUCH IN common with curating a group show: each entails selecting artists and their work, weaving conceptual threads, collaborating with designers to produce an eye-catching visual flow, and establishing a rhythm to the display.

Having noted this congruence, we asked ourselves what an issue of Modern Painters might look like in the three-dimensional format of an exhibition. “The October Issue” is the realization of that thought experiment. While we weren’t able to include works by every artist in the magazine, we have, with these works, tried to reproduce each of its sections.

Designed by the award-winning architects Carmrody Groarke this exhibition will include areas curated by writers, artworks by artists featured and reviewed in the magazine and in an effort to faithfully reflect the publication, blowups of the advertisements, as well a series of talks and events to further expand on the content.

Highlights include John Bock’s new film Im Schatten der Made (In the Shadow of the Maggot), a twisted love story styled after 1920s German Expressionist films and recently premiered at Anton Kern Gallery, New York; a sculptural installation by Dutch artist Folkert de Jong; Matthew Collings’s Facebook Art School, featuring Jake and Dinos Chapman and a film of the making of Chris Burden’s Metropolis II, a massive kinetic sculpture that circulates a thousand-plus toy cars on an interminable loop.

The Louise Blouin Foundation (UK) and the Institutions of Chinart (CHINA) are pleased to present PURE VIEWS: NEW PAINTING FROM CHINA, a collaborative exhibition that will feature more than eighty works of art by twenty-six of the most renowned contemporary and emerging Chinese painters from 15th October – 4th December 2010 at the Louise Blouin Foundation in London. The exhibition will be marked with an opening reception on 14 October 2010.

PURE VIEWS takes its name from a work of art by Song Dynasty (960-1297) painter Xia Gui (1195-1224). Practices and techniques from this diverse group of living Chinese painters are exposed as the artists reflect and respond to their shared artistic heritage in the context of an ever-changing global environment. Curated by Lü Peng, the exhibition will feature some of the most renowned names in contemporary Chinese art, including Chen Danqing, Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun, Shang Yang, Mao Xuhui and Zhou Chunya.

Russia’s most prestigious Contemporary Art Award comes to London

Curated by Oleg Kulik, a group exhibition of contemporary Russian art by Alexey Beliayev- Guintovt, Boris Orlov, Dmitri Gutov, Dmitry Tsvetkov, Nikolay Nasedkin, Olga Kamennaya, Victor Alimpiev and Vitaly Pushnitsky.

Kandinsky Prize in London, supported by the Louise Blouin Foundation (London) and the Kandinsky Prize (Moscow), will introduce some of the most innovative young artists working in Russia today. Oleg Kulik has been invited to curate an exhibition that will take shape with a selection of artists represented in the Kandinsky Prize exhibition in Moscow, chosen by a panel of curators and art and media publishers and writers to represent the diversity of styles and forms that new art in Russia is producing. An opening reception will be held on Friday 16th October from 6.30 to 11.00pm.

Presented by Louise Blouin Foundation in collaboration with The Carpenters Workshop Gallery

A group exhibition of design art by ATELIER VAN LIESHOUT, SEBASTIAN BRAJKOVIC, INGRID DONAT, THIERRY DREYFUS, DRIFT, VINCENT DUBOURG, MARC QUINN, PABLO REINOSO, rANDOM INTERNATIONAL, LIONEL SCOCCIMARO AND ROBERT STADLER.

Design High will be on view at the Louise Blouin Foundation, 3 Olaf Street, Holland Park. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, 24 June from 6.30 to 11.00 pm.

The Louise Blouin Foundation is delighted to announce its partnership with Carpenters Workshop Gallery, one of the world’s leading design art dealers, in a collaborative exhibition that will feature several of the most important and innovative artists in the field of contemporary design art. Design High will specifically address the tensions that exist between craft and fine art among some of the most innovative established and emerging artists in the field, including Marc Quinn, Pablo Reinoso, Thierry Dreyfus, Vincent Dubourg and Sebastian Brajkovic. Working in an idiom that does not preclude a purpose beyond formalist or subjective aims, design art is both celebrated and dismissed for embracing some form of functionality or usefulness.

Presented by Louise Blouin Foundation in collaboration with PaceWildenstein

The Louise Blouin Foundation is delighted to announce its partnership with PaceWildenstein, to showcase the first major London exhibition of works by the sculptor LOUISE NEVELSON in nearly four decades. The exhibition, opening 30 April, will feature a collection of works highlighting the career of one of the most innovative and influential sculptors from the Post War period in America bringing together some of the most monumental and seminal examples of Louise Nevelson’s art from the 1950s to the 1980s. “Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks” will be on view at Louise Blouin Foundation, 3 Olaf Street Notting Hill, from 30 April through to 14 June 2009. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, 29 April from 6 to 9 pm.

Louise Nevelson continuously investigated the space between form and illusion, the space between painting and sculpture and between solid and void. “I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere,” Louise Nevelson insisted, “except it has to pass through a creative mind.” Nevelson pioneered installation art in America with her assemblage environments of the 1950s. She collected detritus from a variety of urban sources including street-discarded furniture, scraps of wood, refuse from factories, hat forms, patterns and moulds. She then gave the elements a new identity by ‘cleansing’ them with a solid colour: traditionally white, gold or black. These elements were then composed in boxes, sometimes constructed but more often found or reclaimed objects. She would spend weeks or even years rediscovering and rearranging the boxes, reinventing these collections of identifiable materials laden with meaning into formalist constructions that subverted the original associations of found objects. The final state of completion would be a compound structure in the form of a wall that existed between form and shadow, between painting and sculpture.

The Louise Blouin Foundation is delighted to announce the forthcoming exhibition of new works by the noted and rising Chinese contemporary artist, Wang Guangyi.

Wang Guangyi was born in 1956 and since graduating from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1984, he has become an internationally renowned artist, exhibiting around the world in both solo and group shows. His work has developed from political pop, heavily laden with ironic commercial references, to work concerned with sociological and political histories and the resulting psychological outcomes for society. Guangyi currently lives and works on Beijing.

Wang Guangyi has produced entirely new works for this solo show at the Louise Blouin Foundation. The exhibition will feature both sculpture and painting across two floors of the Foundation and will be accompanied by an extensive education programme, featuring a public lecture series, school workshops and related events.

The Louise Blouin Foundation hosted two concurrent shows by Gary Hill and Gerry Judah, which both opened in June 2007. Associated with these were an extensive programme of lectures, education work and public events to examine issues including conflict of interest, foreign policy and explore new solutions for the challenges of the 21st century.

For Gary Hill, the Ground Floor Gallery of the 35,000 sq ft gallery was transformed with two large scale works: the installation Guilt (2006) and the epic Frustrum (2006) depicting a gigantic virtual eagle. The Second Floor Gallery featured Gerry Judah with a series of white on white abstract sculptural paintings. Judah's work is inspired by images of war zones and takes as its subject the horror of war and the devastating impact on the buildings and cities of the Middle East and elsewhere.