the art life

Examining the legacy of Charles Darwin on the 150th anniversary of the publication of his famed work, On the Origin of Species Opening 6-8pm, Thursday 19 November No RSVP required

The exhibition will be opened by Roger McDonald, author of Mr Darwin’s Shooter, recipient of numerous literary awards including the 2006 Miles Franklin Award and alumnus of the University of Sydney.

Guest speaker Chris Darwin, the great, great grandson of Charles Darwin will speak about his famous ancestor and his work as an Ambassador of Bush Heritage Australia.

Labels: art museums, exhibitions, press releases

"The young women were unusual for stopping. Most of the museum’s visitors passed through the gallery oblivious.

"A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four might help them see what was, plain as day, just before them.

"Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride..."

At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus, New York Times

Labels: art museums, public galleries, tourism

Ensor's Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring (1891), at MoMA

"The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor. This avant-garde painter’s decisive moment came in a salon show in Brussels in 1887 (the same year the gods had Van Gogh meet Gauguin). Ensor was a co-founder of a group called “the Twenty,” living with his mother at 27, and doing all right in his native Belgium. That year, he exhibited a breakthrough series of large, smoky drawings of Christ in modern-day settings. As fate had it, they were installed near Georges Seurat’s epic, world-changing A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Reactions to Ensor’s work were mixed at best. Many critics and viewers, including his artist friends, enamored of Seurat’s ideas and methods, found Ensor’s religious subject matter and murky drawings “fatally retrograde.” (The criticism set him off; he referred to “bizarre Pointillists operating behind the scenes,” of being “surrounded by hostility” and “mean vile attacks.” He condemned Impressionists as “superficial daubers suffused with traditional recipes.”)

"Today, Ensor is still squaring off against the master of speckles. The L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight calls him “the anti-Seurat.” Ensor’s swirling surfaces, kaleidoscopic color, corkscrewing space, fluttery fevered touch, and fiendish feel for facial features and fanfare make him, with El Greco, one of the great weird painters of all time. At the Museum of Modern Art’s diligent, disciplined Ensor retrospective, you can see that he was better than just about anyone at painting crowds, clowns, contempt, and cacophony. Despite the flushed grandstanding in many of his paintings, his perfect storm of inflated self-esteem, angry viewpoint, and perverse inner landscape combine to make him one of art history’s visionaries..."

Jerry Saltz, Teeing Up the Twentieth Century, New York Magazine.

Labels: art museums, painting, public galleries

From John Kelly...

Having arrived in Australia from Europe we book our accommodation online. Wotif.com finds us in a hotel in Kent Street Sydney. As with many of Sydney’s boutique hotels the foyer is dominated by a large decorative Australian artwork, Cadence #3, a tapestry by Robert Owen.

During our week in the harbourside city the news informs us that the global economy has fallen off a cliff, caused by what has become known as the international credit crunch. In a dramatic move the Australian Prime Minister announces an economic stimulus package that will use the billions of dollars of budget surplus to pump prime the local economy. It is an attempt to avoid the international financial tsunami engulfing the local economy. This destructive wave is the signal that a global recession is on the way. However what good might come out of such an event? For recessions are obviously painful for many, including artists, but also opportunities for fundamental structural evolution in society.


Yinka Shonibare MBE, Dorian Gray.
As the world’s stock markets go into meltdown we head down the road to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Two exhibitions are on show. The first is Primavera, a survey of young Australian artists. When quizzed, a well-informed attendant tells us that the name is from the Italian meaning spring and is an annual exhibition. I ask how many Australian’s speak Italian and she informs me that Primavera is also the title of a Botticelli painting.

Upstairs is Yinka Shonibare M.B.E. Shonibare is a British born artist with a Nigerian background. He is probably just about as British establishment as any artist can be. He has the Medal of the British Empire (M.B.E.) to prove it. According to the catalogue. “He accepted the award with relish…” although it is noted elsewhere that the use of the title by the artist is “…an ironic dig at the British Honours system.”

Emphasizing his established reputation the Tate has collected his work. Originally the Tate was set up to collect and promote British Art and has now evolved to contextualize British art alongside international Art through the Tate Modern. It does it extremely successfully. Interestingly, the Tate is named after a benefactor whose sugar coated fortune was made using slave labour in the most brutal of fashion so its history with black artists is complex. Shonibare shares some of this history having descended from a nineteenth-century Yoruba King who was also a slave owner.

As I struggle to understand how irony can be coated with relish we read of Shonibare’s importance. This is based on his use of wax fabrics that are strongly identified with Africa. Shonibare realized that they are actually designed and made in Europe and were sent to Africa because the Dutch exporters could not sell the fabric into Indonesia, their intended market. Instead they sold the material into western Africa where it became popular, particularly during the fifties and sixties, when many African states were gaining independence. Apparently people decided to wear this material instead of obvious western clothes as a sign of African liberation, which is how the material paradoxically came to be identified as African. It is an odd piece of history and the exhibition to my eye is the visual merchandising of it, utilizing repetitive window display techniques, including headless mannequins. The exception to this are the paintings, which are painted on the material in an awkward and clumsy manner and do not share the slickness of the ‘video’ piece or the photography where ,unlike the mannequins, everybody keeps their head.

The catalogue twice repeats that Shonibare’s work is a link “to the tangled interrelationships between Africa and Europe.” This may well be true - but what makes this exhibition truly intriguing is not the work but that the exhibition has originated from within an Australian art institution and afterwards will travel to the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum of African Art in the US. As I understand it, an Australian art institution has imported a British establishment artist, value adding further international credibility and scholarship to his work and is then exporting his exhibition to America where he has already exhibited and been written about extensively. Robert Hobbs states in Yinka Shonibare, [p.25] that Shonibare has had 108 group shows and 33 solo museum and gallery exhibitions. He has featured on the covers of Art and America, Artforum, Art News, Sculpture, as well as “an elaborate New York Times Style magazine spread.” It raises this question. Is the MCA mimicking the role of a colonial Dutch company in importing European art into a local market only to then export it to a third country?


Sticking it in...
Installing Giuseppe Penone's bronze tree for the Biennale of Sydney.
After the MCA we head off to the Art Gallery of New South Wales where we find two enormously large Kiefer paintings dominating the galleries. They are powerful works, however, having been placed in a Eurocentric mood, I ask what is the relevance of post-war German angst to this collection and Sydney in general? Is the AGNSW, like Tate Modern, attempting to contextualize Australian art by juxtaposing it against the international? Or is it grandiose European trophy art that is being used to negate the complexity of the regional?

We move on to admire more European war angst in Otto Dix’s etchings and then for some Asian regional respite the Lost Buddha’s. However we avoid the Monet exhibition and the obligatory shop and instead go down to the basement where contemporary Aboriginal art is symbolically segregated. This seems to answer my earlier question - the AGNSW is no Tate Modern although its relationship with black artists is obviously just as complex and unresolved.

On the way back up we stop for lunch at the gallery’s splendid restaurant, which we regard as a great deal better than Tate Modern’s. I decide on the snapper and Christina has the pork chop. When the meals arrive our conversation is animated and the waitress wrongly presumes I am getting the chop and Christina the fish. Our conversation centres on a rock up a tree in the gardens opposite the gallery, which we encountered on our arrival. It is curiously placed and I am unsure whether it is part of the gallery collection. We approached the information desk where I asked the receptionist the name of the artist who had created the rock in the tree and the date of when it was made. “It is by an Italian artist who was involved in Arte Povera” she replied. “It was part of the Sydney Biennale and we are trying to raise the money to buy it.” I put on a straight face and ask; “Do you think the Italian artist might have been influenced by the Australian artist John Kelly and his ‘Cow up a tree’?” She laughs dismissively and informs me that; “Oh no I don’t think they look this way!” “Oh”, I reply, “John Kelly exhibited that work in Europe on the Champs Elysee back in 1999 - maybe he saw it over there?” “Oh no it is from the 40’s or 50’s” she continues. “Are you sure?” I enquire. Helpfully she rings the curator for the artist’s name and - upon being informed that the artist is Giuseppe Penone - we look up the catalogue and find the work was completed in 2007. Penone’s work often deals with the image of the tree and has done so for a considerable time. However there are some obvious similarities with Cow up a tree. Both quote previous artists work heavily influenced by events in WWII, both use bronze, are 8 metres in height and both are realistic looking trees with an object stuck in the fork of the branches. At the very least a visual dialogue seems to exist. In 1999 ‘Cow up a tree’ received widespread coverage in the European press during Champs de la Sculpture.


John Kelly, Cow Up A Tree. 1999.
Penone’s piece is obviously quoting Joseph Beuys work in Kassell, Germany (during Documenta 7) where Beuys wanted to plant thousands of Oak trees and place a basalt rock next to each one. It forms an obvious connection with Kiefer who was also heavily influenced by Joseph Beuys. Beuys and Kiefer “share a concern with German trauma in the wake of the Second World War.” As I look out the restaurant window, over the gardens to where the Japanese attacked the USS Chicago in Sydney Harbour I again ponder why German angst dominates the AGNSW and can only think it is a transference from our own colonial past that resides in the basement of our minds.

Well before WWII, Cezanne also painted trees and during our short stay in Sydney we learn that the AGNSW is currently on another fund raising adventure tapping up generous donors to buy a ‘new’ Cezanne. I would have though all the best Cezanne’s were now in museums but apparently not. The price, over sixteen million Australian dollars!

Recessions are interesting times and it is when the unthinkable can be thought and structural evolution is possible. So it might be time for Australia to take its cultural cringe to a new level and think about post-war Europe as a model in the way our art institutions are organised? For ‘wotif’ we created a type of ‘European Union’ of State and regional galleries with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) acting as the cultural equivalent of ‘our’ Brussels. The state and Territorial galleries would then form the member states of this Union. This institution could even have a rotating Presidency to further mimic the EU!

Our Brussels, the NGA, would take care of foreign policy when it comes to collecting internationally lifting the burden from the State and Territorial galleries. This would allow them to promote and exhibit their state and territorial interests within the context of a broader Australian art history whilst the NGA would be charged with contextualizing the national against the international across Australia.

Why should we do this? Well, think how ludicrous it is that at the start of a deep global recession the AGNSW is spending over sixteen million dollars on a Cezanne when the NGA and the NGV already have two paintings by this artist and the NGV’s is currently in storage! It is appropriately titled An uphill road. If you are anti continental Europe and prefer a British model, think of this new institution as being like the Tate Modern with the other seven-state and territorial galleries playing the role of satellite institutions just as Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives do.

This unified institution would become a powerful and important player internationally. Australia’s combined resources would truly become a first class collection of international Art that each gallery struggles to achieve individually. The singular union of cultural institutions would then be in a position to place Australian art within a broader international context just as the Tate Modern does with British art.

Using this ‘European’ model, the AGNSW can exhibit a Cezanne without spending a penny - sorry a cent and that is not a euro cent! For the Art, just like Europeans would be able to freely travel between the members of the union. Then wotif the sixteen million Cezanne dollars was spent on Australian art in NSW? It might even be recession busting and then it wouldn’t matter whether the MCA mimicked Dutch colonial practice or not.

John Kelly is an Australian, English and Irish artist. See – www.johnkelly.eu

Labels: art museums, John Kelly, public galleries, sculpture

From Ian Houston

Robert Henke, also known as Monolake, is a musician, but only just. He explores that area of music on the very edge of becoming sound or perhaps he explores that area of noise, just on the edge of becoming music. His particular interest is the amorphous - clouds of detail, atoms of sound, grit, dirt and patina or as he puts it, "fragile structures, morphing timbres constructed of millions of microscopic sonic particles, cathedrals of filtered noises". His works are long meditations in which he explores in exhaustive detail a single aspect of tone.



Last Wednesday in the grand court of the AGNSW he performed Buddha Layers. No need to worry, he's no hippy, or at least not the bad sort. This hour-long performance consisted of the manipulation of samples taken from a $2 FM3 Buddha Machine a device he acquired in China, that is used to aid meditation. In essence it is a machine that plays very low quality four bit loops to accompany chanting. There are six loops ranging from ten seconds to a minute long. Henke recorded these loops at the highest possible resolution using a state of the art audio digital converter. He was then able to transpose the loops, slowing them and exposing extraordinary levels of detail in the sound. He then layered different elements of the sound building up enormous reservoirs of information. Some "pads" of sound would involve as many as one hundred layers of samples. Phasing, delay and other manipulative techniques would add further depths creating transparent "oceans" in which interlacing sounds would accrete in standing waves of harmony and dissonance. These recordings formed the basis of his performance.

Henke sat at a simple white table upon which was his lap top, digital audio converter, pre amps and an eight band equalisation device. The audience was arranged around him throughout the soundfield, roughly in a circle but all facing in the same direction as the composer, as if they were on seats in the magical mystery bus.. The music was reproduced on a high quality Meyer sound system using a dolby 5.2 system. To the left and right were two fridge sized sub woofers and then in a circle around the audience were another five large twin fifteen speakers. Once the audience was seated, Henke pressed play on his laptop.



The sound emerged as clouds of granulated, digitised, rust. Something just beyond white noise. Cycles of fuzz would move through the sound field, acquiring structure and form then spin away into the distance. Gradually the volume increased as larger waves of harmony developed. Intricate plays of resonance grew and diminished both adding to and subtracting from other sound structures that would evolve, morph and then disintegrate leaving only an after image. Most members of the audience chose to close their eyes as the music searched for form in a space closer to the imagination than the visual field. Henke achieved control of the soundfield through manual sweeps of the equalisation band and manipulation of the software running on his laptop. At times intense peaks of volume were realised, with mighty surges of bass rumble so deliciously thick that its effect was genuinely visceral.

Once the audience had surrendered to the apparent formlessness detail became highly apparent. The satisfaction was to be attained in a kind of timelessness, a trance state of pure timbre and tone beyond any notion of rhythm or melody. Toward the end of the performance needles of sound danced in stacatto lines, trailing figure eights in lines of tracer light through the sound field. Loops of bass wound into knots of belly rumbling thunder until we were left with nothing but the after burn of white noise and reverberation. He pressed the space bar and stood up. The performance was over.

Labels: art museums, music, performance art

Flags fluttered along Macquarie Street down to the Opera House, the brightly coloured banners read like a who’s who of contemporary art, Warhol, Freud, Sherman etc. They were also the names of artists whose works belong to the UBS collection and were part of the exhibition An Incomplete World at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.



UBS acquired the financial organization PaineWebber in 2000 and along with it their art collection. The PaineWebber collection was no ordinary collection but "one of the greatest contemporary collections in America". Arguably, the UBS art collection now rivals the contemporary collection of nearly any public museum around the globe. An Incomplete World is was a small, tightly curated selection of works from the larger UBS collection. The works in the exhibition were more impressive examples of the works of the same artists held by the AGNSW.

It's interesting to examine the scope of big business, which now has both the financial clout and more importantly, the ‘passion’ to acquire major artworks . The UBS collection is typical of the evolution of corporate collections: from a policy of private ownership and private viewing to showcasing collections in the public domain. The UBS corporate sponsorship program is both international in scope and has extensive public support. UBS - a major supporter of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, the Tate Modern in London and MOMA in New York - support an array of other public projects including the Australian artists exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. This of course sits well with their tag line ’You & Us’ - a promise to deliver individual person-to-person service while at the same time providing enough global scope to manage and create your wealth.

The inevitable impact of such major financial commitment to contemporary art by corporations means that pivotal and exemplary works of contemporary ar belong to global corporations rather than national museums. The Saatchi Gallery is another good example of this shift. The question which then needs to be asked is : will it matter, or how will it matter? . Increasingly, it would seem that the art works are still being shown in public museums and galleries but now they belong or are donated by corporations rather than having been acquired through the collection policies of a public institutions. Whether this makes any difference to the viewing public or to the kind of works that are acquired is yet to be fully understood.

Art is big business – Australian art sales are always reaching record highs each financial year. The benefits to the arts of purchases, patronage, sponsorship and philanthropy from business are well known and the pay–off to business is just as beneficial as they become associated with ‘art and culture’ by buying into it. Today, most major Australian business own or rent contemporary art.

In this current climate of a growing number of sophisticated and challenging corporate collections, it is interesting to reflect on the continuing popularity of The Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales which still rates as the most popular Australian art event . The Archibald is one of the top 100 exhibitions in the world. This extraordinary fact seems only possible because the public have embraced the Archibald as their show, an annual event on the nation’s calendar like the Melbourne Cup and just like the Cup we await the (live radio) announcement of the winner each year. We expect the annual a beat-up of some controversy or other over what constitutes a "portrait" to find its way to the its tabloid headlines each year. However it is the ‘idea’ that the show is ‘owned’ by the general public that has fuelled its popularity.

Everyone has an opinion, this is of course because portraiture provides a comfortable platform for debate, and we all think we know what a person looks and is like and what we expect to see/experience in the painted representation.

Ownership is a key factor in the process of expanding art audiences. It is not always necessary to actually buy, or possess the physical object/work but it is none the less essential to feel a sense of identification with it that in a much broader sense is called ownership.

Public galleries and museums do this as a matter of course – after all it’s the business they’re in and their success is reflected in the ever-increasing visitors numbers. Thirty years ago it was a few enlightened high schools that took their students to the galleries – now the snaking crocodiles or melee of school students outside these public institutions are just as likely to be kindergarten kids as senior students.

Commercial galleries have an inherently different agenda – one that balances two seemingly opposed positions- on one hand they want to increase their audiences and their buying public yet on the other they need to appear to be part of an elite. The ownership you buy into here is not just the physical artwork but the participation in ‘high’ culture.

Business has long recognised value of art as a means of reflecting these complex ideals. You just put it on your walls and it speaks all these complexities to anyone who steps into your offices. As the popularity and accessibility of contemporary art increases, the means of differentiating art works becomes increasing difficult. Value adding, art for investment, the role of public museums, government funding, critical reviews and international exhibitions all are keys to determining the future success and longevity of an artist’s career and resale value.

To avoid the pitfalls art consultants, and in-house curators are often employed by larger businesses to manage their art collections. These experts, who usually hold degrees and often have had commercial or large public gallery experience, aim to keep the collections ‘on track’. It is easier to follow their recommendations and safer too than blindly plunging into the art world. Through its art collection a business has not only the benefits of an enhanced public profile but also allows its employees to ‘buy’ into the ownership of the works within the collection as well as developing the vocabulary to engage in the broader art world.

The prediction is that art and business are just beginning to recognise just how much they can benefit each other without compromise. Art is everywhere - all we need to do is claim it. Whether it’s in our public galleries and museums or on our office walls it’s ours to ‘own’. Banking on Art might be the name of UBS’ investment service but it seems like a sound policy to me. Contemporary art mirrors the world and “expresses the ‘Zeitgeist’ of society”. It is a reflection that is not always the comfortable image we wish to see, but no matter who pays for it art of value continues to exert its ownership on us.

From Isobel Johnston.

Labels: art museums, corporate collections, exhibitions

Marcus Trimble, editor of top architecture blog Gravestmor completes his three part guest blog for The Art Life with this installment on new art galleries around the world. Please join us in thanking Mr. Trimble for his fine efforts and please enjoy...



Kunsthaus Bregenz, Peter Zumthor, Bregenz, Austria.

Sitting on the Austrian edge of Lake Bodensee, this gallery is a perfectly crafted little glass and concrete box by swiss uber dude, Peter Zumthor.



The exterior is clad in overlapping glass shingles sitting in stainless steel clips, giving the building an ephemeral, transparent quality. This forms a loosefit screen that allows daylight and into the gallery spaces within. This being a Swiss building built by Austrians, not one bit of glass or steel or anything is out of place. At night the building glows.



Within the glass facade are a series of concrete boxes forming the gallery spaces. Each floor is separated from the one below and above to allowing daylight to penetrate into the gallery spaces. The daylight is diffused through the space by a suspended glass ceiling. The galleries themselves are massive rooms without columns, the walls left in their raw concrete, providing a neutral backdrop - not unlike photoshop grey - to the art. Seen here during a Cindy Sherman show:



The Storefront for Art and Architecture, by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci, New York City

You art people may know Vito Acconci as that guy that used to masturbate under the ramp in the gallery, but here, in collaboration with architect Steven Holl he was responsible for creating a most interesting gallery space. The gallery is situated in the undercroft of a building, and is a wedge of space that is about 4m wide at its widest and narrows down to half a metre at its end.

Acconci and Holl, put up a long fibro-clad wall to the street enclosing the space. This wall has a series of variously shaped cutouts that spin along their horizontal and vertical axis. In the closed position, they form a wall to the street, and completely enclose the gallery space, and in the open position they open out onto the street, effectively doubling the gallery space by inhabiting the street.



The effect is rather nice.




Incidentally, May 29th sees the beginning of a week long event, Postopolis, will be taking place at the Storefront where a bunch of architecture bloggers get crazy in the rotating planes.

The Museum of 21st Century Art, by SANAA in Kanazawa.

This is the awesome. Bearing in mind that it is a pretty fluid list; this is probably on my top five buildings of all time list. The literature tells us that it is a gallery devoted to art of the 21st Century, however when we visited, there was a retrospective of Gerhard Richters work so go figure.



The Kanazawa Museum sits in a park over the road from the Kenrokuen gardens - noted as being one of Japans Top 3 Gardens. It is a large cylinder with a bunch of blocks thrown in and a couple of courtyards punched out for good measure. Like much of SANAA's work, this building is a built diagram. The boxes are the gallery spaces, the glass cylinder that surrounds them forms the circulation space.



As each of the boxes is a separate entity, the curators of the shows may devise how the galleries are filled and how people move between them according to each show, thereby making each visit to the gallery a new experience.



Like, the Kunsthaus in Bregenz and unlike the Storefront, this is a meticulously crafted building. In order to maintain the clarity of the diagram, of the idea, it has to be. The slightly curved glass and ultrafine steel structure give the building the sense of being a model, something made of paper.

Labels: architecture, art museums, guest blog

Marcus Trimble returns with the latest installment in his magnum opus style guest blog - this week a short tour through art galleries of the world...

Now that I have all the plugs for gravestmor out of the way, and with all the I thought I would run through a couple of buildings that are made to put art in them that may be considered by some as pretty good.

Today, some of the classics. Later, some newer ones.


The Kimbell set the standard for naturally lit galleries and displays a structural athleticism with concrete beams spanning 40m. The building is made up a series of linear barrel vaults comprising an entry portico and the gallery spaces. Light enters the building at the top of the vault and is bounced off a series of perforated aluminium reflectors onto the underside of the concrete vaults. The reflected, evenly distributed lights allows the gallery to be daylit without glare or any visible light sources.


Photo by flickr user farr gallery

This is something of an archi-fetishists dreamscape. It is the meticulous and highly particular conversion of 12th Century castle on the edge of Verona's old city and houses a collection of 11-17th Century artworks.

Each room of the museum has been carefully restored and re with a vigour that ought to make the Heritage boffins in Australia gallantly protecting their 80 year old 'heritage' with such "don't touch that! Its old!" nonsense ashamed. Here, holes have been cut in walls, sections of roofing have been removed, floors have been re-laid in concrete pavers and so on. However each move that Scarpa made serves to highlight a characteristic of the building or to show off an artwork in a particular way.







The artwork - in particular the sculptures - are each carefully displayed to strengthen the place of the artwork in the museum. Sculptures are set on ornate pedestals, a crucifixion is placed against a brass cross with an inverted top, and paintings hang suspended from brass rods or sit on intricate, mechanical easels. The most notable example of the building being modelled to accommodate the galleries collection is the equestrian stature of Cangrande which sits out on a cantilevered beam looking over the castle's courtyard, the strictly controlled movement through the gallery dictating that the sculpture is viewed from every possible angle. This is not a gallery with a rotating collection and I have no idea what the museum does if it acquires a new piece. Convert a new room?


This is the possibly the most evil gallery in, like, forever. Mies van der Rohe's was an architect whose career saw many innovations in unrelenting modernism (mother fucka exploded the wall), a great number of cigars consumed and this was his final work. It is essentially an enormous steel pavilion on a stone podium. Much of the gallery space is located in the stone podium, the pavilion over generally dedicated to ticket sales and the occasional special exhibition.

This is perhaps the ultimate architect's art gallery, where the pesky pictures and figurines are kept in the basement and the gallery is free to sing the praises of the architect. But then, it is an extraordinary building. The whole roof curves upwards slightly, like classical temples do, to correct the optical impression of a sagging roof. The monumental black steel structure sits perched on only eight elegant cruciform columns and spans 65m. So who cares if the art is in the basement?


Photo by Flickr user Manuela Siener.

Labels: architecture, art museums, guest blog