ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: April 2008

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Augustin Ioan (Bucharest) ·

Bucharest’s National Museum of Contemporary Art in the Big House

The House of the Republic, now the Palace of Parliament, was built in the 1980s and remains a work in progress today. During the last years of the Communist regime, it was meant to host all the administrative apparatus in one enormous building, allegedly the second largest in the world, at least at the time, after the Pentagon. But the Ultimate Edifice of Romania was part of a much larger process of reshaping the capital city of Bucharest. Due to the enormous size of the building, the upper floors are still unfinished and will remain empty until the Ultimate Edifice … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Éva Forgács (Pasadena) ·

New Art and New Questions from the “New Europe” (Book Review)

ARRIVALS > ART FROM THE NEW EUROPE. Suzanne Cotter, Andrew Nairne and Victoria Pomery (eds.) Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, Turner Contemporary, 2007.

This beautifully designed book contains the records of ten exhibitions organized over a period of two years by Modern Art Oxford, an established public gallery, and Turner Contemporary, a new cultural institution at Margate. Works by artists from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, as well as Malta and Cyprus, have been selected for exhibition as part of the exploration of the post-Wall “New Europe” segment of the European Union. With the appearance … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Susan Snodgrass ·

Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945

Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945, Milwaukee Art Museum, February 9-May 4, 2008.

The importance of Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 extends beyond mere historical documentation. Fundamental to the exhibition’s premise is the essential role of photography in defining modernism within this region, both in art and in the culture as a whole.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue—wonderfully curated and thoughtfully written by Matthew Witkovsky, assistant curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (the show’s organizer)—impart key, if not unprecedented, scholarship to an art historical narrative that often overlooks the contributions of Central European artists and … Read more