Art News and Updates from Gallereo
All the latest news from the art world, as well as what's happening here at Gallereo. If you've built a gallery at Gallereo, let us know about your experience and you and your site could feature in our blog in the coming weeks.
Wednesday 24th November 2010Auction will Raise Money for Centre Dedicated to Illustration
Quentin Blake's Illustrations for
Roald Dahl's character, the BFG
World famous illustrator, Quentin Blake, who is perhaps best known for his illustrations in books written by Roald Dahl, is leading the rally to raise money for a new centre that will be dedicated to the art of illustration.
Blake has been encouraging fellow artists and illustrators to submit their original works of art for an auction which is to be held at
Sotheby's in London, this December. Amongst the illustrators set to participate in the auction are Raymond Briggs (
The Snowman), Eric Carle (
The Very Hungry Caterpillar), Ronald Searle (creator of
St Trinians) and Gerald Scarfe (cartoonist for
The Sunday Times and
The New Yorker).
A particular work of note from those going on sale is an original illustration of the butterfly from his famous book,
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
. Pre-sale estimates suggest that the work could sell for around £3,000 - £5,000.
Blakes work doesn't just stop at getting artists and illustrators to join in with the auction; the 77-year old has been integral to the House of Illustration project as a whole, which will be housed in the King's Cross area of London.
Blake himself has donated a watercolour of the BFG character for the auction, which is perhaps one of the better known characters from the stories of Roald Dahl.
All of the illustrations that have been donated will be on view at Sotheby's from the 12th December.
Posted on November 24th 2010 on 06:03pm
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Tuesday 23rd November 2010Build an Artist Website or Art Website - What Do You Want to See?
Gallereo has been going through a lot of development over the past year. A large amount of that development has come straight from suggestions and recommendations made by Gallereo users who got involved at an early stage and have worked with us to create a system that is great for hosting art gallery website templates, building an artist website or for allowing people to create photo web templates.
We have been endlessly impressed with the dedication of some of the people who have offered us feedback and we hope to continue a pattern of being able to build on Gallereo through the comments of our dedicated user base.
So, in that spirit, we are asking you what you would like to see in terms of us building and developing art gallery website templates? What would your perfect artist website template feature? What sort of design aspects do you think would make your paintings, prints, sculpture or photographs look good?
If you have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment below, or contact us at
info@gallereo.com.
We look forward to hearing from you!
All the best,
The Gallereo Team
Posted on November 23rd 2010 on 02:35pm
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Monday 22nd November 2010Annie Leibovitz to Take Sydney by Storm
Annie Leibovitz, My Brother Philip and My Father, Silver Spring, Maryland, 1988
Photograph © Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz is undoubtedly one of the worlds most sought after photographers, with a truly remarkable photographic oeuvre. Having toured through Europe and the US,
Annie Leibovtiz: A Photographers Life 1990 - 2005 now makes its presence felt at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.
Having opened on the 19th November, it is estimated that the Museum in Sydney will see large crowds, as the exhibition will attract everyone from critics and hardcore collectors through to photography fans and art-lovers.
Around 200 images form the core of the show, pulling together Leibovitz's portraits of famous people as well as very personal photographs of her family and friends. The exhibition is arranged chronologically so that the audience can gather a sense of narrative from the photographers life and work. On one hand you may see images of Leibovtiz's children on vacation or pictures of her parents, next to photographs of people like Al Pacino, Brad Pitt or Cindy Sherman.
Leibovitz has made a very successful career from photography; from the early 70's when her work appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, right through to working for Vanity Fair, Vogue and advertisting campaigns such as Gap and American Express.
All in all, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographers Life should make a great addition to the exhibition schedule at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, offering the Australian audience the chance to view some truly world class photographic works.
Posted on November 22nd 2010 on 11:30pm
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Friday 19th November 2010iPad App from MoMA to Coincide with Abstract Expressionism Exhibition
First the Museum of Modern Art iPhone App let us get closer to their collection and exhibition schedule, now the latest app from
MoMA lets you get up close and personal on your iPad with one of the great New York movements; Abstract Expressionism (AbEx).
Abstract Expressionist New York is on at MoMA until 25th April 2011 and the exhibition comprises of a range of key AbEx works drawn entirely from their collection. MoMA is showing paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture from the movement that can boast such names as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, David Smith and Mark Rothko. The exbhibition is noteworthy for being the first occasion upon which MoMA have devoted an entire floor of the museums space to a single theme.
To go alongside the exhibition you can now pick up the Ab Ex NY app for your iPad which acts to encourage interaction with and understanding of the works on show. With imagery, audio and video, you can indulge in around 60 works from the exhibition, along with related art-historical texts to keep the works in context.
The app also has some short videos by MoMA's Marie-Josée, Henry Kravis, and Ann Temkin who offer their insights on the movement and it's artists. Another nice feature is also an interactive map of New York City and Long Island that lets you take a look at where the AbEx artists lived and worked.
Visit the MoMa website to find out more about the app, and how you can
download it.
Posted on November 19th 2010 on 04:36pm
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Wednesday 17th November 2010In Giacometti's Studio
In Giacometti's Studio
is a new book by the leading authority on the artist, Michael Peppiatt. The book has been published to coincide with an exhibtion at the Eykyn Maclean gallery in New York.
Eykyn Maclean was set up in 2006 by Christopher Eykyn and Nicholas Maclean, to exhibit musem quality 19th and 20th century art. The pair had previously been co-heads of the Impressionist and Modern art department at Christie's and so we well placed to take on such a venture.
In Giacometti's Studio: An Intimate Portrait will run until 18th December, and is the first public exhibition to be held at the gallery and the works on show are not for sale. Around 100 sculptures, paintings and drawings are on show thanks to a generous loan from the Giacometti family.
The exhibition, and the book, take a look at the tiny studio that Alberto Giacometti inhabited behind Montparnasse, in the last four decades of his life, churning our creations based on his views of mankind. The book charts the life of the studio from the time that Giacometti and his brother arrived in 1927, with their possessions in a wheelbarrow, until Giacometti's death in 1966.
The book both gives an in-depth look at Giacometti's life in those years within his hub of creativity, but also sheds light on the influences and experiences that shaped his artwork. Peppiatt came close to meeting Giacometti, through his relationship with Francis Bacon, but that meeting was never to be, with Giacometti dying not long before.
Regardless, Peppiatt got to know the people in Giacometti's world, and through those relationships he has managed to create a key book on the life of Alberto Giacometti.
Posted on November 17th 2010 on 05:50pm
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Monday 15th November 2010LACMA To Hold Exhibition For American Sculptor David SmithDavid Smith (1906 - 65) is arguably one of the greatest American sculptors of the 20th century, and now he will get recognition for that at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy is the first major thematic exhibition to be devoted to the sculptor.
The exhibition will be in view from 3rd April until 24th July 2011 in the new part of the museum; the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion. The exhibition will show around 100 of Smiths works, that span his entire career as a sculptor, including drawings, paintings and photographs alongside his more known sculptural works.
Famed for his hard-edged geometric style and deeply linked with working class motivations which has seen his work placed under the banner of international constructivism, Smith owed a lot to his early experiences in life when it came to building a career as a sculptor. Smith worked as a welder at the Studebaker automobile factory in Indiana whilst he was a student, and to this he owed the education of manufacturing and building things from raw materials.
With Mondrian, Kandinsky and Picasso noted amongst his influences, Smith was well positioned to produce some fantastically solid, geometrical formations that sit well in the canon of art history, speaking to movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.
The show at LACMA looks set to be an excellent comment on Smiths life and career. To find out more about the show, visit the
LACMA website.
Posted on November 15th 2010 on 06:11pm
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Saturday 13th November 2010If Banksy Could Knit...If Banksy could knit, he'd probably be a fan of Yarn Bombing. Yarn Bombing is the new term that I learned today. I'm not sure where I was when Yarn Bombing hit the scene, but a post on
It's Nice That earlier this week alerted me to it. The post was about Olek, a Polish-born artist who uses crochet as her medium. Currently showing at the Christopher Henry Gallery in NYC, Olek's bizarre artwork prompted me to take a closer look at Yarn Bombing.
Olek at Christopher Henry Gallery, 127 Elizabeth Street, NYC
At
YarnBombing.com (a blog written by knitters Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain) the tag line says it all, "Yarn Bombing: Improving the urban landscape one stitch at a time", or as it is referred to on their blog page, "knit graffiti". Much like Banksy or the Guerrilla Girls, Yarn Bombers go around making 'hits', but instead of spray paint or posters, they use wool, and lots of it.
Yarn Bombing, which started in Vancouver, is now a worldwide phenomenon, and here are just a few examples of Yarn Bombing hits from the Yarn Bombing blog.
>
This first is the creation of a Yarn Bomber known as Brifrischu, whose knitting playgrounds are in Aachen Germany and Nottingham, England. Here bollard creatures are known as 'FadenMonsters'.
The above sign post creation comes all the way from Western Australia and could possibly be the work of local Yarn Bomber Captain Plaknit (
check out the blog here). Apparently Captain Plaknit's skills have been called upon to Yarn Bomb an entire street for a festival in Perth, later this year.
Our final peek into the world of Yarn Bombing comes in the shape of a wooly car parking meter. This hit was found in Chinatown in Vancouver although the creator of the work remains unknown.
For more information on Yarn Bombing, and to see more crazy creations, visit the
Yarn Bombing blog.
Posted on November 13th 2010 on 06:56pm
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Friday 12th November 2010Masters of Photography on Show at the Metropolitan
Paul Strand, Wall Street, 1915
To continue the run of exhibitions dealing with world class photographers, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is now showing the works of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Paul Strand as an example of truly spectacular 20th-century American photography.
Running through until the 10th April 2011, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, explores the groundbreaking work that these photographers did in their field through a showing of about 115 photographs taken from the Mets own collection.
Each of the characters covered in the exhibition have a wealth of work and historical importance to qualify their inclusion in this exhibition. Stieglitz was born in 1864 and came to be a huge advocate for photography as a medium of modern art, through the work at his gallery, 291. As well as holding photography exhibitions at his gallery, he also produced a journal called Camera Work, which still stands as one of the most interesting resources on 20th-century photography. The museum first acquired Stieglitz's work in 1928 though a personal donation from the gallerist and photographer. Amongst the works that will go on show are some of Stieglitz portraits of Georgia O'Keefe, with whom Stieglitz had a complex and involved relationship.
Steichen was a protégé and collaborator with Stieglitz, showing remarkable talent as a photographer. Steichen was a member of the Photo-Secession, which was a group of artists founded by Stieglitz in 1902 with the aim of creating and showing photographs that would be judged on their artist merit by photographers, not artists - as had typically been the case. Steichen became well versed in multiple printing techniques that allowed him to create photographs on a scale, and with a quality, with which he challenged the individuality of painting.
Strand was a younger contemporary of Stieglitz and Steichen and he is renowned for taking the soft painterly efforts of the Photo-Secession photographers and shifting to the hard-edged and graphically powerful style of emerging modernism. Strand looked at geometric abstraction and involved himself in street life and machine culture in order to produce highly striking photographs of the modern world.
The exhibition at the Met offers a great opportunity to see these photographers works together and get a unique view of the development of photography at such a key time in modern history.
Posted on November 12th 2010 on 11:37am
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Thursday 11th November 2010Gallereo Tip of the Week - Getting Your Images in the Right OrderEvery week we will bring you our tip of the week - a small chunk of information that might just make the difference to your Gallereo website. You may learn things that you didn't know about the system and find out new ways to manipulate the parts you do already know about.
This week, we look at how you can order the images in your galleries, something we all like to play around with every now and again. As they say, context is everything so you want to get your images looking good and sitting next to complimentary works in your portfolio.
So here's how you do it; click on Categories in your Manage Art menu. You will then see a list of your categories as demonstrated below. Click on the number which tells you how many artworks you have in that category.
Once you have clicked on that number, you will be taken to a screen listing all of the artworks in that category. Below is just a snippet of that page to show you want it looks like. Use the up and down arrows on the right hand side to adjust the order in which your images appear in your gallery.
There's no need to press save, as soon as you start pressing the arrows to change the order, that change is reflected at the front end of your website when you refresh the page.
Check back next week for more top tips from Gallereo, and if you have any questions in the meantime, drop us a line at
support@gallereo.com.
Posted on November 11th 2010 on 05:15pm
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Wednesday 10th November 2010Secret Postcard Art at the Royal College of ArtRCA Secret is a great annual exhibition, at the Royal College of Art in London, that sees postcard-sized art go on show and up for sale by a range of professional artists, designers, illustrators and current postgraduate students at the Royal College of Art.
This is a fun and quirky show that sees the postcards displayed anonymously, but are signed on the reverse so that the creator is only revealed once a postcard has been purchased. The exhibition opens on Friday 12th November and runs through until Friday 19th, although please refer to the
website for closures and times!
There are a whole host of great surprises amongst the postcards that some lucky people are going to end up with. Amongst the thousand or so artists that have submitted a postcard are Yinka Shonibare, John Baldessari, Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry. Fashion designer Sir Paul Smith and animator Nick Park are also amongst the contributers to be found at this years show.
The cards go on sale on a single day (Saturday 20th) and they cost £45 each. You have to have a collector number before you can purchase, which you can get off the RCA's website, but purchases do have to be made in person.
Posted on November 10th 2010 on 05:01pm
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