ASIA WEEK 2014

Are you ready for a 9-day extravaganza of some of the finest, rarest, and awe-inspiring exhibitions from the East? Starting this Friday, March 14th until the 22nd, Asia Week, now on its sixth year, will take center stage in a city that has already seen its fair share of art during the last few weeks (The Armory Show, The Biennale at the Whitney Museum, Volta, to name a few). However, this mega star of Asian art plans to trump them all by offering its ardent followers with even more dazzling, museum-caliber exhibitions. Over 100 Asian art curators from the nation’s major American museums will make their annual pilgrimage there, for an unprecedented 9-day round of 47 international gallery shows, 19 auction sales and many museum exhibitions and special events.

Art dealers from Australia, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, and the United States have all joined the list this year. They’ve worked together towards a shared goal to weave Asian art into the cultural fabric of New York and to broadcast its unique appeal worldwide.

Asia Week New York exhibitions are open and free to the public, and each reveals the rarest and finest Asian examples of ceramics, jewelry, textiles, paintings, sculpture, bronzes, prints, photographs and jades, representing artistry, ingenuity and imagination from every corner and time period of Asia.

“We are delighted to welcome such a distinguished group of Asian art curators whose enthusiasm and scholarship underscores the importance of Asia Week New York as an important destination for museums,” says Carol Conover chairman of Asia Week New York.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Portland Museum, The Morgan Library, The American Museum of Natural History, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum, The Mingei International Museum, The Kruizenga Art Museum, The Crow Collection, The Newark Museum, The Samuel P. Harn Museum-University of Florida, Japan Society, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Worcester Art Museum, The Burke Foundation, The Cleveland Museum, The Spencer Museum-University of Kansas, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Smart Museum-University of Chicago, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Kimball Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum, The Cincinnati Art Museum. And from Europe comes The British Museum and The Musée Cernuschi in Paris.

Organized by group, you will find a roundup of exhibitions at the participating galleries right here. According to Ms. Conover, the museum curators attending are from all parts of the country and represent: The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, The Phoenix Art Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, China Institute, Asia Society, Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, The Smithsonian Institution, The Peabody Essex Museum.

To help visitors easily navigate the Asia Week New York’s activities, a comprehensive guide with maps is available at all participating galleries and auction houses, along with select museums and cultural institutions, and online. For the second year, to meet the demands of Chinese collectors, the website is available in Chinese. For more information, visit www.asiaweekny.com.

Jewels by JAR opened on November 20 and ends on March 9, 2014. All the hype surrounding JAR is true. I’ve seen my share of jewelry expositions all around the globe, but I don’t believe I’ve come across this type of jewelry exposition before. Joel A Rosenthal (JAR) The Harvard educated American moved to Paris in 1978 and opened his namesake business at the fashionable, and opulent Place Vendôme. What makes him so different from most of his contemporaries is his excellent eye, and his genius of being unique in the way that he uses his “pavé technique – the setting of small stones so close together that they seem as a continuous surface of jewels – and uses subtle gradations of color to create a painterly effect.” Throughout his collections, JAR uses his signature jewels in classical flower forms and organic shapes to witty objets d’art. His work set him apart from the others and this exhibit will leave you with some powerful emotions. As for me, I came out of that sensuous Great Hall feeling… breathless.

   

Blain|Di Donna had its first historical group exhibition, Dada & Surrealist Objects last Thursday night. This was the first show devoted to this important subject ever presented in any gallery or museum in America, and has been curated in association with the well-known specialist in Dada and Surrealist art, Timothy Baum. The exhibition presents a retrospective overview of all aspects of this subject, and encompasses a full choice of works by every serious creator of objects from both the Dada and Surrealist groups. Chronologically, this exploration begins with Marcel Duchamp, whose invention of the ready made in 1913 gave birth to the separation of found or handmade objects from the more limited world of sculpture, usually confined to plaster, bronze, marble and occasionally carved wood that had previously represented, exclusively, the realm of the third dimension in art.

The presentation is augmented by a group of vintage photographs by Raoul Ubac depicting various objects created by Surrealist artists for the International Surrealism Exhibition in Paris in 1938: mannequins decorated by Man Ray, Max Ernst and others, and two works by Dalí: The Aphrodisiac Table (with Lobster Telephone) and the environmental phenomenon, Rainy Taxi.

BLAIN|DI DONNA is located at 981 Madison Avenue, NYC (Inside the Carlyle Hotel). The show runs from October 25 – December 13, 2013. Opens Monday through Friday: 10am–6pm
Saturdays November 2, 9 & 16: 10am–6pm.