Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Dr. Ute Eggeling and Michael Beck first established their gallery in Leipzig in 1994 and at the same time opened a branch in New York City. Fours years later, in 1998, the gallery moved to Düsseldorf, a traditional centre for the Arts since the 1960s, re-establishing themselves in a new area.
For more than 20 years now Beck & Eggeling has been featuring a sophisticated and ambitious art programme, with an emphasis on German Expressionism, Post-war art, especially the ZERO-period, as well as different movements of international contemporary art.
An important impulse is to act as an agent to convey art visibly to the public, to interpret art and to use it in order to shape the social discourse of our time.
Ernst Ludwig KirchnerLiegender weiblicher Akt mit Katze (verso: Weisse Katze)/(Reclining Female Nude with Cat (verso: White Cat)), 1908 Watercolour and charcoal on paper
Ocula Photolog TEFAF New York Spring 2018 8 May 2018 'TEFAF New York Spring provides an unrivalled draw for a community of collectors, museum curators, and art lovers from around the world. In addition to showcasing the best of today's modern and contemporary art market, the art fair also features exhibitors focusing on jewellery, African and Oceanic art, and antiquities to provide a more...
Ocula Report On The Autobahn: A Report From North Rhine-Westphalia 21 Jan 2015 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula Project 25/25/25 is a quintessentially “NRW” affair. Celebrating 25 Years of the Arts Foundation North Rhine-Westphalia (Kunstiftung NRW), this expansive exhibition—which started in 2014 and will continue into 2015—pairs 25 artists with a constellation of 25 municipal museums spread out over a vast territory that makes up...
Ocula Conversation Heinz Mack Artist, Germany A pioneer of land art in Europe through his iconic 'Sahara-Project', Heinz Mack is one of the founders of ZERO, which he started along with Otto Piene, whom he met in 1950 when both were students at the legendary Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Mack and Piene became collaborators, co-founding the ZERO movement in 1957, by establishing a...
Related Press A chameleon who never lost his feeling for clay – Lucio Fontana at the Met Apollo : 15 March 2019 Was Lucio Fontana, at heart, just an easily distracted ceramicist? So one might conclude from the current exhibition at the Met. The show reveals a chameleon figure, highly responsive to the prevailing winds of art and politics. He worked across many artistic disciplines, in contexts that should have been antithetical to one another, leaving an...
Related Press In Murakami’s Moscow, It’s All “Cuteness and Catastrophe” Vogue : 3 October 2017 In a 2000 interview with the Japanese photographer Mako Wakasa for the Journal of Contemporary Art, the artist Takashi Murakami presented the following rules for survival and success in the contemporary art market (best exemplified, he said, by Damien Hirst and the continued relevance of Picasso and Warhol): "First of all, distinctively...
Related Press Surprises and Innovations Abound at Art Basel The New York Times : 15 June 2017 Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel, said Hong Kong has its galleries, while Miami is known for its private collections and Basel for its museums.For all the obvious differences among these cities, when the Art Basel fair visits them each year, it anchors its shows in the same way, with a large showcase of presentations by...
Related Press Examining the scars of history with Günther Uecker Apollo Magazine : 14 February 2017 On my way to Günther Uecker's (b. 1930) studio in Düsseldorf, I manage to lose my way, and when I ask for directions a helpful passerby points past a twisting trio of Frank Gehry buildings and says, 'Take a right at Uecker Platz.' Günther Uecker may have the honour of having a whole square christened after him, but he's not a grand figure. When I...
