{art} – Page 595 – { feuilleton }

Coulthart Calendar 2008

Mid-September is when new calendars are unveiled so here’s my addition to the calendrical onslaught. This year’s edition is an improved version (with tinted page art and a unique cover design) of the Lovecraft-themed calendar I produced last year, and of the three 2007 designs was easily the most popular. The pictures are those from The Great Old Ones sequence in The Haunter of the Dark. You can see larger versions of the page art here and the CafePress shop is here.

Olafur Eliasson’s BMW

Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project (2007).

A busy time for the artist this month with his design for BMW’s Art Car series (above) going on display for the first time in San Francisco. All the previous artists involved in this series have been content with merely painting on the body of the car. Eliasson’s creation is a considerable departure in that respect.

The new artwork was created on the hydrogen-powered H2R race car, after the artist replaced the body with a combination of steel mesh and reflective panels. The car was then sprayed with 530 gallons of water over the course of several days to create layers of ice.

It was constructed in situ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will remain in a display case with a special cooling unit from 8 September until 13 January next year, as part of the exhibition, Your Tempo: Olafur Eliasson.

According to BMW, the aim of this latest project was to transform an object of advanced industrial design into a work of art that reflects on the relationship between global warming and the car industry.

Continues here.

• Gallery of photos

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• The London Oasis
• New Olafur Eliasson
• The art of Cai Guo-Qiang

Giorgio Ghisi’s Allegory of Life

Allegory of Life or The Dream of Raphael (detail, 1561).

The British Museum’s description:

This famous print is often called The Dream of Raphael, because the lettering at the bottom states that the design is by Raphael. However, the accumulation of incidental detail is wholly uncharacteristic of Raphael’s style and no one believes that it is by him. Nor has anyone completely explained the esoteric subject.

A boat has been wrecked by turbulent and rocky river, in the foreground. It points to the bearded man, who leans on the trunk of a dead tree, with a bat, two owls and a crow above him. In the lettered state of the plate (signed and dated 1561), the blank panel at the base of the tree is filled with an inscription from Virgil’s Aeneid VI, 617: SEDET AETERNVM / QVI SEDEBIT INFOELIX (“He will sit forever who sits unfortunate”). The man is surrounded by monstrous creatures who eye him venomously. His only hope appears to come from the goddess-like woman with a long spear who appears on the right. She might be Reason, come to rescue a philosopher, but with no explanation to help us, her significance remains obscure.

Ghisi (1520–82) was trained in the Italian engraving style pioneered by Marcantonio Raimondi. He left Rome in 1550 to join the Antwerp publishing enterprise of Hieronymous Cock, where he introduced Roman High Renaissance art to northern Europe through his reproductive engravings. He was in Paris from 1556 to 1567, where he probably engraved this allegory, his most famous print.

See the complete print at large size here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Les lieux imaginaires d’Erik Desmazières

Labyrinthe II (2003).

This is very late notice but I only just discovered that there’s been a major exhibition of etchings by Erik Desmazières running at the Jenisch Gallery in Vevey, Switzerland. The exhibition, which ends on September 9th, includes these more recent works among over 100 other pieces covering the extent of the artist’s career. Sounds like the catalogue for this would certainly be worth ordering. There’s also a 40-minute documentary film being shown there, Le Paris d’Erik by Bertrand Renaudineau and Gérard Emmanuel da Silva.