Nature has a rival (Angel Orensanz)

Angel Orensanz‘s new exhibition is here in New York City, right at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. Three weeks from now, the gallery will be open for you to see his bronze sculptures, drawings, and paintings in our gallery’s new exhibition, Burning Bronzes.

Until then, how about getting more acquainted with Angel‘s work? The internationally known French art critic Pierre Restany wrote a beautiful article about the Spanish artist that exposes the ways Angel Orensanz explores the ideas of movement, presence and absence. The article is available here.

Last Chances – Galleries on the L.E.S

Monday is time for the Angel Orensanz Foundation blog to show you a little more about the Lower East Side and all its galleries and art spaces. Today, we will focus on one of the most blossoming streets of the L.E.S.  Once a place where many low-rise tenement buildings stood, Orchard street has become the art and fashion center of the Lower East Side.

But before we talk about the galleries in Orchard St, a quick reminder:  The Angel Orensanz Foundation gallery is opening soon (on September 12, to be specific) with an exhibition of works from the Spanish sculptor/painter/conceptual artist Angel Orensanz. Get to know more here.

But, for the time being, focus on Orchard St, where you can see the Paolo Pellizzari exhibition in the Anastasiaphoto gallery. The Italian photographer focuses on the human landscape , with abundant details and bright colors. The photos in the exhibition are part of his series “The Broad Way”. Pellizzari photographs entirely with film, which is his aestethic choice and makes a big difference in the result. So, make sure to check out the art exhibition before it ends on August 31^st.

 

Also on Orchard St, you can see Slipstream in the Bridge Gallery. A study about fluidity, undulation, and instability by FreelandBuck, who puts together form, structure and graphic into a simple, yet complex painted wooden piece. Also in the gallery, you can see Masked Plagiarism by Mentor Noci, his drawings have a deep conection with constructivism, a form of art that believes the only type of art with meaning is the one that challenges limits, definitions and boundaries.

Further down on the same street you can see Jacob Williams: Ugly Sticks in the Windows Gallery.  The exhibition features the re-imagining of the world by the New York artist. For him, it is as if the tribal culture was left somehow intact. Jacob Williams said about his exhibition and his inspiration taken from the Museum of Natural History in New York City “The exhibit on Japanese civilization was somehow so intriguing in that it mentions how Japanese culture managed to maintain many aspects of their earlier culture despite being among the most industrialized countries on earth. This made me imagine, what would American culture look like today if Native Americans had not been stripped of their cultural legacy, what if they had managed to repel the foreign European invaders?”

sources:

http://www.anastasia-photo.com/artist.php

http://bridgegalleryny.com/home.html

http://www.artcat.com/exhibits/17922?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Gallery Opening!

We are presenting "Burning Bronzes", an exhibition of Angel Orensanz's drawings, paintings and bronze sculptures. Join us for the opening on September 12 at 06:00 p.m. in the Angel Orensanz Foundation, on the Lower East Side. 

L.E.S. art galleries (part 3)

On Monday we decided to talk about Angel Orensanz, after all, he is the star of our next exhibition here in the Angel Orensanz Foundation. “Burning Bronzes” will debut on September 12th and you can read all about it here.

Now, onto the galleries of Lower East Side. Last week we featured the group exhibition going on inside DODGEgallery, this time we go a little west onto Bowery St, where the Charles Bank Gallery is located. They are presenting Inglorious Materials, a group exhibit featuring collage works by Scott Zieher, Ryan Dusso, Dan Mort, Cassandra C. Jones and Halsey Burgund. The name comes from  the fact that each artist uses collages supported by different mediums, like digital media, or paper.

Another exhibit from the Lower East Side gallery is Ryan James Macfarland – Tide Study, a collection of photographs that explore nature and its relation to us, how it affects us. The Florida photographer  shows stunning landscapes reducing all the complexities of nature into frames.

South onto Canal St, go inside 3A Gallery to appreciate another solo exhibition, this time the Paintings of Kurt Finsten, the Denmark-based artist uses color in a naked and unadulterated way, or as the poem used as a description for the exhibit in the gallery’s website says: “He loves their colours fresh and fine“.

Finally, on Forsyth St inside myplasticheart gallery , you can enjoy another group exhibition on the L.E.S. Signs of Apocalypse features 30 artists curated by Lou Pimentel, and is about, as he explains it: “The Mayans believe that the world will end in 2012, and with so many things going wrong in the world; tsunamis, earthquakes, global warming, flocks of birds/schools of fish mysteriously buying the farm; one can’t help but think about it. What do you consider to be a sign of the Apocalypse? I invited  some of my favorite artists to translate, and give life to the fears living in their heads.”

Sources:

http://www.charlesbankgallery.com

http://www.myplasticheartnyc.com

http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2012/08/gallery-goer-what-to-see-this-week-13.html

http://3agallery.com/

Angel Orensanz on the eyes of Calvin Reid

ANGEL ORENSANZ, by Calvin Reid

A respected artist for more than 40 years, Orensanz has produced a body of work ranging from large abstract sculptures with humanist overtones to a series of conceptual installations and performances that whimsically address social and geopolitical conflict.

The latter works invoke his own brand of pacifism idiosyncratic vision of a multicultural, interdependent world community. Angel Orensanz has done a series of quirky public performances. Beginning in 2001, the performances were conducted in Venice, Florence, Tokyo, New York City, Berlin, Madrid, Paris and elsewhere.

They offer a personal response to the specter of war and suffering. These acts most vividly embody the artist’s engaging sense of transnational fellowship and spiritual introspection. Orensanz constructed a large, man-sized transparent plastic sphere that he rolled through the streets of these legendary cities — sometimes pushing it along from behind, sometimes walking inside the giant globe and moving it forward. He loaded it on a gondola and traveled the canals of Venice; at other times the sphere was parked in historic locales such as Piazza San Marco or at the Brandenburg Gate. While the sphere is on view Orensanz and the people he encounters paint and mark up its surface.

The portable globe is like a giant existential snowball that grows metaphorically larger as it picks up layers of historic and symbolic grit and grime. In his catalogue essay, Thomas McEvilley provides a brisk and lucid examination of Orensanz‘s work and the history of the Norfolk Street center and points to the significance of the sphere in classical Greek philosophy.

Orensanz is out to metaphorically link his personal and ancestral wanderings to the great international venues of human civilization. Hanging in the venerable Norfolk Street building, his work evoked yet another revolution — it reconnected the historic transit between the old world and the new embodied in New York‘s Lower East Side. Orensanz offers himself as a kind of shambling figure, a delightful modern Sisyphus relentlessly pushing a scarred and sagging globe through the miseries and triumphs of human history.

— Calvin Reid. February 2003

Calvin Reed is an art critic for “Art in America“, where this piece appeared in February of 2003.

September 12, you will be able to enjoy Angel Orensanz works in the Angel Orensanz Foundation!

Newsletter #19

It has been a while since our last edition, in which we talked about the past of Ludlow Street and how this landmark of the Lower East Side transformed itself to became one of the hippest areas in town. We also revealed the past of Aragon, the city where Angel Orensanz and his brother Al Orensanz (who will be publishing a book soon, so keep your eyes open!) were born. Finally, in that issue we told you about the contemporary artists Marilyn Minter and Walter Urbach. Want to remember? Just click here!

This time, we will tell you the story of how objects became artifacts through time, how they change and represent who we are and the time we live in. Also, we will talk about the Black Panther party and their relationship with the Angel Orensanz Foundation, in fact, did you know that Spike Lee, who directed the “Huey P. Newton Story” has a new movie? Yes, Red Hook Summer! Finally, we will tell you where Angel Orensanz has been and what he thinks about the English artist Sir Roland Penrose. One more thing, we interplay the connection between absence and presence. Curious, excited? No worries! Just click here and have fun!