On March 11, 2011, the strongest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history struck just over 80 miles off the coast of the island of Honshu. An ensuing tsunami produced monstrous waves up to 40 meters high that pummeled the coastline and caused numerous deaths, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents homeless and crippling the country’s infrastructure. Artist Keita Miyazaki witnessed the devastation firsthand, and as access to everyday necessities and supplies was disrupted, he began to question Western society’s reliance on industry and material goods, as well as how the contemporary world measures its progress.

In his solo exhibition Excess of Desire at Gallery Rosenfeld, Miyazaki’s sculptures appear to grow from the floor or sprout from pedestals. Metal components meet intricate origami, exploring the dualities of robustness and fragility, the decorative and the utilitarian, and heaviness and lightness. The ends of pipes blossom with colorful fans and spindles of folded paper, juxtaposed with car parts in a reference to the 20th-century automotive boom and advancing technology.

Miyazaki articulates ideas around functionality and decay by welding together fragments of mufflers and engines that no longer operate for their intended purposes. He incorporates carefully selected parts, such as specialized mufflers that were produced illegally in the 1980s and 1990s, which rose to popularity because they could increase the car’s noise level and produce a specific sound. Challenging the frivolity of excess in wealthy society, the artist reframes the components as flourishing, botanical-like forms.

The Victoria and Albert Museum recently added one of the Miyazaki’s pieces to its Japanese collection, and one of his large-scale floor works will soon be on display at the Young V&A in Bethnal Green. Excess of Desire remains on view through September 30, and you can follow the artist on Instagram for updates.

“White Ore” (2023), car parts and paper, 72 x 60 x 48 centimeters

Left: “Stereo Order” (2022), car parts and paper, 70 x 50 x 38 centimeters. Right: “Tree of knowledge” (2020), car parts and paper, 250 x 90 x 100 centimeters

“Converted Reality” (2021), car parts and paper, 285 x 90 x 60 centimeters

“Core in Space” (2023), brass, car parts, enamel, and resin, 35 x 25 x 25 centimeters

“Plural Blue” (2023), car parts and paper, 220 x 55 x 55 centimeters

“The Bird” (2023), brass, car parts, enamel, and resin, 45 x 25 x 25 centimeters

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Keita Miyazaki Sprouts Delicate Origami from Welded Car Parts in ‘Excess of Desire’ appeared first on Colossal.

There is only one English-language biography of the French artist Suzanne Valadon — Renoir’s Dancer, a title that doubtless thrilled the marketing department of its publisher, Icon Books. Valadon was indeed a major model and muse, and sat endlessly for the already famous Renoir, but in her lifetime she also became a serious and feted artist in her own right.

Now, as a robust exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz deftly demonstrates, though she posed in a frothy white ballgown for Renoir’s “Danse à la ville”, as the hard-faced girl in Toulouse-Lautrec’s “The Hangover”, and as a sensual siren for Puvis de Chavannes, it is her vibrant paintings, as well as her drawings and etchings, that deserve our attention.

Valadon, who lived from 1865 to 1938, painted without inhibition or flattery, cleaving to a brilliantly hued realism. Her self-portraits are searing observations of womanhood — in the last of them she is a tough, bare-breasted 66-year-old. Those commissioned by society and friends, from which she made a good living in the 1920s and 1930s, are equally unforgiving. Lucie Valore, a wealthy collector, is shown as puffy and stern. By 1937, when it was painted, she had married Valadon’s son, the painter Maurice Utrillo, and was about to turn him against her.

Even close family members don’t escape Valadon’s forensic gaze. In a portrait of her niece Maria Coca and daughter Gilberte, made in 1913, the sitters face in opposite directions and a pall of misery infuses the picture.

At the Pompidou, director Chiara Parisi, who also curated the show, has taken an art-historical view of the artist’s career, and interspersed the assemblage of 130 works by Valadon with a further 40 by her peers. “I wanted to put her in context,” says Parisi. Among them are a gorgeous still life by Cézanne, with whom Valadon shares a palette of saturated colours, and a sensational portrait of Valadon by Toulouse-Lautrec, who was also her lover; it was buried in a store in Wuppertal, Germany, until Parisi dug it out.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s influence can be seen in works such as Valadon’s “Nude in Boots”, a quick study of a confident showgirl naked but for her stockings and boots. Lautrec also gave her the name Suzanne, although she was really called Marie-Clémentine: the new name was after the biblical parable of Susanna and the Elders, alluding to the amount of time she spent with older men.

Parisi didn’t want to hang Valadon’s appeal on her rollicking rags-to-riches-to-rags life story — such a sensational tale of its times that it reads like the plot of a Zola novel. Valadon came to Paris from the poor, rural Limousin region aged five with her unmarried mother Madeleine. They landed in Montmartre where Suzanne ran riot, played truant and really did join the circus.

By the age of 15, she had tumbled disastrously off her trapeze and, after recovering, started making a living as an artist’s model, most notably for Puvis de Chavannes. She had her son Maurice at 18 (fellow artist Miquel Utrillo claimed paternity, though society preferred Chavannes), who went on to be blighted by alcohol and mental illness but became a very successful artist.

By 19, she had started making her own drawings, then Edgar Degas taught her etching. An affair with the overly obsessive Erik Satie (who gets a tiny corner here) was followed by marriage to a stockbroker. But eventually André Utter, a 23-year-old friend of Maurice, swept her away (she was 44), managed her career and spent her money. As did Valadon herself, with a penchant for furs, chauffeur-driven cars and lavish dinners.

Utter also made appalling pornographic paintings, of which there is one on show here, doubtless a self-portrait of a particularly blunt doggy-style encounter, rather incorrectly named “Scène érotique”. Though their relationship faltered, they are buried together in the Saint-Ouen cemetery outside Paris.

“She did want a different kind of life than the one she was born to,” concedes Parisi, who chose the title A World of Her Own for the exhibition. “She was really daring for a woman of her time, a real adventuress.”

Elaborating the story through the art itself, Parisi opens the show with Valadon’s first major painting, made in 1909. A remarkable portrayal of herself and Utter as Adam and Eve, it is most likely the first male nude painted by a western woman. (A fancy garland of fig leaves had to be added when it was shown in the Salon des Indépendants 11 years later.) Next to it is “The Fortune Teller”, an unnerving symbolist scene, in which a lounging Olympia is being read her cards. The future could be bleak.

The strong line that Valadon developed in her early days of drawing, then engraving, often follows through to her paintings: everything from figures to flowers are at times circumscribed with a heavy black line. In “The Blue Room”, from 1923, one of her very best works, the line traces the body of a large woman lying on a couch, a truculent expression in her eyes, a cigarette in her lips. In her pink camisole and stripy pyjama pants, she is categorically modern; this is a face that will never be troubled by anything as submissive as a simper.

That Valadon needs reintroduction as an artist is not just a matter of misogyny, or class, though both have certainly played their part in the obscurity that has enveloped her reputation since her death. She was a realist painter, a figurative painter, and though touched by Fauvism, impression, symbolism and even classicism, she deliberately chose not subscribe to any school. (Berthe Morisot, upper class and a rare female member of the Impressionists, has been far more easily absorbed into the story of art.) Meanwhile, tastes were changing as she neared her death. From early in the 20th century, Cubists, Constructivists and Surrealists were changing the artistic landscape and Valadon’s style was going out of fashion. 

Now, though, it seems that Valadon’s skill and confidence as an artist have prevailed. She has a sense of volume that shows a unique understanding of the body in space that she may have learnt first as a sitter, then as a painter: less an autodidact than someone whose education was entirely experiential. Her pictures have a sculptural force and an unflinching presence that has not gone away.

In 1930, the French art critic René Barotte said: “I do not know what will last of the visual art of our era, but Valadon’s work, elaborated in solitude, will remain outside time, like something at once sensitive, pure and strong.” Nearly 100 years later, this exhibition proves him right.

At Centre Pompidou-Metz until September 11, then Musée d’arts de Nantes, October 27-February 11 2024. centrepompidou-metz.fr

How have some legendary gallerists contributed to the making of art history? An exhibition at the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin is honoring the discerning eye of Rudolf Zwirner, one of the most influential art dealers of all time, on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Born in Berlin on July 28, 1933, Zwirner and his then wife Ursula Reppin opened his eponymous gallery in Essen, Germany in 1959, quickly expanding to a second location in Cologne (formerly Kunstmarket Köln) in 1963. He is usually credited with having invented the art fair after co-founding Art Cologne with fellow dealer Hein Stünke and artnet’s founder Hans Neuendorf in 1967. Perhaps most impressive of all, Zwirner brought international attention to the German art scene at a time when it had been greatly diminished by the economic ruin of World War II, Nazi suppression of “degenerate” art, and the exodus of many well-established Jewish dealers.

“When we started what became Art Cologne, there were just six of us who sold contemporary art, so it was really a risk,” Zwirner told Artnet News in 2021. “There was very little interest in contemporary art at that time. Now, there are 3,000 galleries in Germany that focus on it.”

In 1992, he retired as an active gallerist but his son David Zwirner, who was born in 1964, has become an art market giant with galleries in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Paris.

Bringing together some 80 works from the Deutsche Bank Collection, other private collections and museums, the show tells Zwirner’s life story and demonstrates his celebrated ability to spot talented artists in the early stages of their careers and support them in becoming successes.

Over decades, he worked with many of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art whose works are in this survey, including Louise Bourgeois, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and David Hockney. A few standout examples from the more distant past include those by Tiepolo, Dürer, and Gaspare Diziani.

See a handful of works from the exhibition below.

Henri Rousseau, The sign as a painter (1903-10). Photo: Alistair Overbruck, © Courtesy Sammlung Zander.

Matija Skurjeni, Surprise Visit (1958–61). Photo: Alistair Overbruck, courtesy Sammlung Zander.

Astrid Klein, Untitled (I hermetically locked a man in the room) (1980). Photo: Timo Ohler, © Astrid Klein, courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Michael Müller, Epiclesis (2022) from the series “Hades.” Photo: Mathias Schormann, © Studio Michael Müller.

Gerhard Richter, Bomber (1963). Photo: © Gerhard Richter 2023.

Gaspare Diziani, Cane and Abel (early 18th century). Photo: Lea Gryze.

“A Life in Pictures: A Portrait of Seeing for Rudolf Zwirner” is on view at the PalaisPopulaire by Deutsche Bank, Unter den Linden 5, Berlin, through August 14.

More Trending Stories:  

A Sculptor’s Lawsuit Against Kevin Costner Over Artwork She Created for His Planned Luxury Resort Will Finally Go to Trial 

Creepily, the Woody Allen Romp ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ Channels the Book That Outed Picasso’s Treatment of Women 

JTT, the New York Gallery Known for Minting Star Artists, Is Closing After More Than a Decade 

The British Library Has Discovered Scandalous Details Censored From the Official Account of Elizabeth I’s Reign 

Whether Painting Indoors or Out, Canadian Artist Keiran Brennan Hinton Imbues His Serial Studies With Intimacy and Devotional Intensity 

This Bonkers ‘Whale House’ in California, Inspired by Antoni Gaudí’s Architectural Whimsy, Comes to the Surface for $3.3 Million 

How the Many Dilemmas of Hannah Gadsby’s Anti-Picasso Show Feed Our Contemporary Cultural Doom Loop 

Researchers Have Found Hidden Details in Ancient Egyptian Paintings Using Portable Chemical Imaging Technology 

Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.