ARTNEWS

At an event in Venice this morning, the organizers of the 57th Biennale Arte announced that Anne Imhof has won the Golden Lion for best national participation, for her chilling show in the German pavilion, which involves a dark, fractured five-hour performance piece accompanied by abrasive music. That exhibition, which is titled “Faust,” has been one of the most talked about of the preview week, and lines to see it have been long. It is an incredible piece of art.

Germany last took home Golden Lion honors just six years ago, with a posthumous presentation of the work of Christoph Schlingensief, who died the year before it opened.

The Golden Lion for the best artist in the central show, “Viva Arte Viva,” curated by Christine Macel, went to Franz Erhard Walther, the veteran German artist of pioneering wearable, participatory fabric sculptures. Large pieces by Walther hold walls in the Arsenale.

In addition, a Silver Lion for the most promising young artist went to Hassan Khan, who presented an intricate, multilayered sound piece on a series of speakers in the gardens at the north end of the Arsenale.

The jury for the prizes was made up of Francesca Alfano Miglietti, a Milan-based curator; Manuel J. Borja-Villel, the director of the Reina Sofia in Madrid; Amy Cheng, a Taipei-based curator; Ntone Edjabe, a journalist and DJ from Cameroon; and Mark Godfrey, the senior curator of international art at Tate Modern in London.

The jurors made a special mention of Cinthia Marcelle’s Brazilian pavilion show, which transformed the space in the Giardini with sloping metal floors. They also offered special mentions for two artists in the central show, Charles Atlas and Petrit Halilaj.

At the ceremony today, a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement was also officially awarded to Carolee Schneemann–that prize had been announced in the run-up to the show.</s>VENICE — The top prize of the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and grandest international exhibition of contemporary art, was awarded on Saturday to Anne Imhof, an artist and choreographer whose grim and threatening occupation of the German pavilion, complete with anti-riot wire fences and barking Doberman pinschers, was the talk of the art world last week.

Ms. Imhof was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation, which is given to the strongest of the 85 exhibitions mounted in pavilions in the Giardini della Biennale and across Venice.

For her exhibition, entitled “Faust,” Ms. Imhof blocked the front door of the German pavilion, built during the Nazi era, and installed a raised glass floor through which a leather collar and bottles of hand sanitizer were visible. A dozen performers in black athletic wear posed and preened among spectators or on raised platforms. They crawled under the glass floor at times and walked slowly, like wraiths, against a harsh metallic musical score. The performances are to run throughout the Venice Biennale’s six-month duration, though “Faust” is just as unsettling when seen empty.

“First off, I felt aggressively affronted,” said Catherine Wood, a senior curator at the Tate Modern in London and a specialist in performance. “The dogs were barking behind a tall wire fence, and I was being shunted around to the side of the building with a massive crowd. Yet the movement, mood and sound inside — the dronelike group poses, and a tall, thin woman slow-motion headbanging, tossing her long black hair — were exquisitely calibrated and seducing.</s>MILAN (AP) - Germany has swept the 57th Venice Biennale, winning top Golden Lion prizes for the best national pavilion and best artist in the main curated show.

The jury called Anne Imhof's show at the German Pavilion "a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions of our time and pushes the spectator into an aware state of anxiety." Titled "Faust," the show includes painting, sculpture, installation and performance.

An installation by Anne Imhof is seen at the Pavilion of Germany, during a preview of the 57th International Art Exhibition, in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, May 9, 2017. The Exhibition will be open to the public from Saturday May 13th to Sunday November 26th 2017, at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues. (Andrea Merola/ANSA via AP)

Franz Erhard Walter, who exhibited works that combine textile, culture and performance in the main "Viva Arte Viva" show, was recognized for "the radical and complex nature of his work that transcends our time and suggests the contemporary mutation of a transitory life."

An installation by Anne Imhof is seen at the Pavilion of Germany, during a preview of the 57th International Art Exhibition, in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, May 9, 2017. The Exhibition will be open to the public from Saturday May 13th to Sunday November 26th 2017, at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues. (Andrea Merola/ANSA via AP)</s>Germany has swept the 57th Venice Biennale, winning top Golden Lion prizes for the best national pavilion and best artist in the main curated show. The jury called Anne Imhof's show at the German Pavilion "a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions of our time and pushes the spectator into an aware state of anxiety."

Start the conversation, or Read more at The Chronicle-Journal.</s>MILAN (AP) — Germany has swept the 57th Venice Biennale, winning top Golden Lion prizes for the best national pavilion and best artist in the main curated show on opening day of the six-month contemporary art fair, the world’s oldest.

Anne Imhof’s bold “Faust” exhibit mixing performance, sculpture and installation with touches of goth and S&M was cited by the jury as a “a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions of our time and pushes the spectator into an aware state of anxiety.”

In Imhof’s exhibition, black-clad contemporaries of the 39-year-old artist move above and below a raised glass floor, under which are placed scattered objects, including a black mattress with a strewn sheet, handcuffs and spoons. Dobermans pace threateningly in a fenced in area in front of the pavilion.

“My work stands for the grace of thoughts, for liberty, for the right to be different, for gender nonconformity, and the pride of being a woman in this world,” Imhof said at a ceremony in the Venice Giardini, where many of the national pavilions are located.

“The piece we developed for the German pavilion makes transparent the past but it speaks to the future,” she said.

The pavilion’s curator, Susanne Pfeffer, said that the work “is really about inclusion and exclusion. It is a crucial and existential question for a lot of human beings,” not only migrants but also the working poor struggling to get by.

Winning the Golden Lion in the main “Viva Arte Viva” exhibition was Franz Erhard Walter, a 77-year-old artist based in Fulda, Germany who is recognized as one of the most radical artists of the second half of 20th century whose work has influenced many young contemporary artists.

Walter exhibited works that combine textile, culture and performance, including a wall installation that invites the viewer to enter the work. The jury cited Walter for “the radical and complex nature of his work, which transcends our time and suggests the contemporary mutation of a transitory life.”

The 57th Venice Biennale is comprised of 86 national pavilions and the curated main show, titled “Arte Viva Arte” with works by 120 artists from 51 countries. It runs through Nov. 26 in the Giardini, the Arsenale and other scattered locations throughout the historic center of Venice.</s>MILAN—Germany has swept the 57th Venice Biennale, winning top Golden Lion prizes for the best national pavilion and best artist in the main curated show.

The jury called Anne Imhof’s show at the German Pavilion “a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions of our time and pushes the spectator into an aware state of anxiety.” Titled “Faust,” the show includes painting, sculpture, installation and performance.</s>The Exhibition will be open to the public from Saturday Ma... . An installation by Anne Imhof is seen at the Pavilion of Germany, during a preview of the 57th International Art Exhibition, in Venice, Italy, Tuesday, May 9, 2017.

Start the conversation, or Read more at KXXV-TV Waco.</s>Germany has swept the 57th Venice Biennale, winning top Golden Lion prizes for the best national pavilion and best artist in the main curated show.

The jury called Anne Imhof's show at the German Pavilion "a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions of our time and pushes the spectator into an aware state of anxiety." Titled "Faust," the show includes painting, sculpture, installation and performance.

Franz Erhard Walter, who exhibited works that combine textile, culture and performance in the main "Viva Arte Viva" show, was recognized for "the radical and complex nature of his work that transcends our time and suggests the contemporary mutation of a transitory life."</s>Venice, May 12 - Visitors to the 57th international art Biennale which opens to the public in Venice on Saturday can enjoy a number of corollary events in the lagoon city. The official programme includes 23 in total, not including the many exhibitions organised independently by private galleries and other venues. A possible itinerary might begin on the island of Murano, where experimental glasswork by architect, sculptor and designer Gaetano Pesce is on display at the local museum. Work by Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto can be admired on another island, San Giorgio Maggiore, along with a homage to fellow 'group' member, the late Alighiero Boetti. Back in the city centre, Palazzo Fortuny presents an orgy of old and new in the exhibition 'Intuition', born of the collaboration between the foundations Civic Museums and Axel&May Vervoordt. Here, Neolithic stones stand alongside work by Paul Klee and Anish Kapoor. Fondazione Prada presents a cross-media project born of a collaboration between writer and director Alexander Kluge, artist Thomas Demand, set and costume designer Anna Viebrock and curator Udo Kittelmann. French multimedia artist Pierre Huyghe presents his work in the Espace Louis Vuitton, while former 'bad boy' of the art world Damien Hirst occupies the two spaces belonging to the Francois Pinault Foundation. Other shows not to be missed include the retrospective dedicated to Jan Fabre, Mark Tobey at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the exhibition devoted to luxury craftsmanship curated by Stefano Zecchi at the Venice Pavilion in the Arsenale gardens. And then, of course, there is Viva Arte Viva, the central exhibition curated by Christine Macel and featuring work by 120 artists from across the globe. The collection is inspired by a new form of humanism in which the artistic act is seen as "an act of resistance, of liberation and of generosity". Most of the artists on show are exhibiting in the Venice Biennale for the first time.</s>Halfway through her second eight-hour day of looking at art in the Venice Biennale, took a break outside the Punta Della Dogana, an exhibition space on the Grand Canal.

 

 “It’s been interesting to understand what the art world thinks is relevant,” said Maramotti, the senior director of North American retail for Max Mara Ltd, which was founded by her grandfather. “I’ll go home knowing about some artists who I wouldn’t have necessarily thought about collecting, but who now I think could be interesting as a part of the Collezione Maramotti,” the family art collection based in Reggio Emilia,

Over the course of one week in May, hundreds of the world’s wealthiest people converge on Venice for a bacchanal of openings, parties, and receptions that revolve around the commencement of the 57th Art Exhibition, an ostensibly not-for-profit art show that’s known colloquially as theThe Biennale comprises 85 national pavilions, 29 of which are in a leafy park called the Giardini, where countries that include the US and Russia host contemporary art exhibits. The rest of the official show is in the Arsenale, a massive warehouse complex in which one curator (this iteration was organised by Christine Mace, the chief curator of the Pompidou Centre in Paris) assembles hundreds of artworks around a theme. This year’s is Viva Arte Viva, a show “inspired by humanism”. The Biennale will run from May 13 through November 26.Satellite exhibitions will also be sponsored by philanthropies and museums, and in the case of the Punta Della Dogana, by billionaire François Pinault. (As Maramotti spoke outside, Pinault exited the building, which is currently hosting an exhibition of controversial and potentially vastly lucrative set of new works by artist Damien Hirst.)Because of the large number of global rich, not to mention the cadre of art dealers who cater to them, the Biennale has become an unofficial forum where consensus is formed about art market standouts. (On the first few days of opening festivities, people as varied as pharmaceutical heiress Maja Hoffmann, San Francisco-based philanthropist Pamela Joyner, Farah Pahlavi, the exiled empress of Iran, and UK-based magnate Poju Zabludowicz were spotted at various events throughout the city.) New artists are anointed as stars, and the status of existing art celebrities is reinforced.“It doesn’t always make careers, but it definitely can make careers,” said Heather Harmon, a director of the New York-based art advisory KCM Fine Arts, which is helping to build billionaire Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté's collection, Lune Rouge. “Take the Anne Imhof [performance installation] at the German Pavilion. That’s going to be one of the great takeaways from this Biennial, namely that she’s one of the people who need to be paid attention to on a global level.”© Bloomberg
The Venice Biennale awards its top prize, the Golden Lion for best national participation, to German artist and choreographer Anne Imhoff for her total totalitarianism exhibition "Faust."