Historicus' photostream

Saint Mark's Basilica is a monument made unique by both its wealth of history and the magnificence of its façade and interior. In essence, it is a splendid workshop, where, through the centuries, worked great Italian and European artists.
Its distinguishing Byzantine character appears particularly on the great mosaics illustrating St. Marco's tales, as well as the scenes of the Old and New Testament.
Venice's greatness has always been reflected in the Basilica's enrichment: during the centuries the Venetians embellished it with precious objects and works of art brought in from the most distant places, thus creating a grand, compact monument. The mellow light falling from above seems to divide the earthly world from the supernatural, which glitters on the vaults in the golden mosaics.
The extent of artistic, iconographic and religious contents and the variety of historical implications explaining the role the Basilica played during the centuries are here introduced according to an accurate division by subjects and by various levels of examination.
www.basilicasanmarco.it/eng/index.bsm

Garden Bench by Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer was born on July 29, 1950, in Gallipolis, Ohio. In 1972 she graduated in painting and printmaking from Ohio University and started an M.F.A. program at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence in 1975. During this period she started integrating written words and language into her work. She finished her degree in 1977 and moved to New York, where she enrolled in a study program organized by the Whitney Museum. It was there that she made her Truisms series, which were her first works solely comprising text. She had the words printed on sheets of paper and either distributed them as fliers or posted them anonymously around the city.

Holzer’s work tries to reformulate many assumptions made by traditional forms of art, especially in the context of public spaces. Writing is still the basis of her creative process, whether it is used singularly or combined with other modes of representation ranging from installations to xenon projections. Her texts are written on electronic signs; printed on posters and T-shirts; engraved on sandstone benches, marble floors, or granite sarcophagi; or cast onto bronze or silver plaques. Her words also appear on billboards, in newspapers, and over the Internet and have been projected onto the facades of buildings, hillsides, or liquid surfaces via laser or xenon projections.

Holzer’s projects have been presented at museums all over the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1989), the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1996), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1999), the Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art (2000), and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2001). In 1990 she was invited to show at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Leone d’Oro for the best national pavilion. She won the Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum in 1996 and the Berlin Prize Fellowship of the Berlin American Academy in 2000. Jenny Holzer lives and works in Hoosick, New York.

Barry Flanagan was born in Prestatyn, North Wales, on January 11, 1941. He first attended Birmingham College of Art and Crafts then went on to St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 1964, graduating in 1966 with a Vocational Diploma in Sculpture. During the same year he took part, along with Yoko Ono and Anthony Cox, in the Destruction in Art Symposium, held at Covent Garden’s Africa Centre, and had his first exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, London. In 1967 he began teaching at St. Martin’s School of Art and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, which he did until 1971. Flanagan traveled to New York for the first time in 1969 for a solo exhibition at the Fishbach Gallery, and the following year he exhibited in Japan.

During the 1970s, while primarly devoted to sculpture, Flanagan also experimented with etching and studied dance, taking courses with Carolyn Carlson. In 1977 the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, presented a retrospective of his work, which was later exhibited in a different fashion at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 1979 he started creating a series of dynamic and often monumental bronze hares, which frequently bore anthropomorphic traits. These were first exhibited in the early 1980s and soon became a distinctive icon of his work. In 1982 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and exhibited the sculptures he had made during the previous decade.

Meanwhile he was gaining mainstream attention and received many commissions, both public and private. In 1984 his sculptures were installed in Watlington Park in Oxfordshire, at the Equitable Life Tower West in New York, and at Victoria Plaza in London. He moved to Ibiza in 1987 and in the same year was elected a member of the the Royal Academy of Art, London. In 1993 Flanagan was the subject of a major retrsopsective at the Fundación “La Caixa,” Madrid. The show toured to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes the following year. His work belongs to several major public collections, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and the Tate Gallery, London. The artist died in Ibiza, Spain, on August 31, 2009.

www.barryflanagan.com/

Some colors

Mirko Basaldella is considered one of the most significant Italian sculptors of the twentieth century. He was born in Udine on September 28, 1910, and grew up in a family of artists, studying in Venice and Florence with brothers Dino, a sculptor, and Afro, a painter. He attended the Institute of Applied Arts in Monza, where he studied under Arturo Marini. When he was just eighteen, he had a group exhibition with his brothers in their native city, and in 1934, after moving to Rome with his brother Afro, he had his first solo exhibition at the Galleria della Cometa. In 1935 he was invited to represent the Roman School at the Venice Biennale.

In 1937 he went to Paris and visited the Exposition Universelle, where he was introduced to several turn-of-the-century, avant-garde masterpieces. While only somewhat taken by the work of the Surrealists, he was deeply affected by Cubism, and his work from 1939 to 1945 showed evidence of a growing synthesis between his own visual language and the modernist artistic threads of the early twentieth century. Among his various public commissions at this time was the project for the gates of the mausoleum of the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome.

At the beginning of the 1950s, he went to the U.S. with other Italian artists and had solo exhibitions at the Catherine Viviano gallery, New York. His artistic achievements were further recognized in 1955, when he was included in the exhibition A New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and again that year when he won the first prize at the São Paulo Bienal. In 1957 he was appointed director of the design workshop of Harvard University, Massachusetts, where he made monumental sculptures for private and public collections. In the meantime he spent his summers in Italy and took part in several group shows. In 1954 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and Peggy Guggenheim bought some of his work for her collection. He was won many awards, among them the prize for sculpture at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (1959), a nomination to the Academy of Arts and Sciences (1962), and first prize at the Quadriennale of Rome (1966). Mirko died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 24, 1969. Taken from Peggy Guggenheim Collection Website