Nine go mad in Holland

JANE Walker has had two excellent exhibitions in Cyprus but is now in Amsterdam, where she met Nicholas Panayi’s art history group the other week.

Here is her description of an incident.

"If you were an elevator in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, would you want to be stuck between two floors with ten Cypriot artists on board? Not if you were meant to hold a maximum of five persons,that is for sure.

"But Nicholas Panayi’s art history group, having chosen Holland for their annual trip, didn’t have enough Dutch to work that one out.

"After an anxious 15 minutes discovering what a sardine feels like, they were finally released to go to see the masterpieces in the Rembrandt Caravaggio exhibition.

"The engineer gave a sympathetic shrug, ‘don’t worry, you were not the worst. The record is held by a party of 13 Chinese’.

"The Rembrandt Caravaggio Exhibition was the highpoint of the trip.

"Carravagio was the "Rembrandt of the South," whose dramatically lit canvases were mainly all painted before Rembrandt was born but influenced him through a group of Dutch followers.

"Rembrandt would have turned 400 this year had he lived that long.

"Fortunately, most of his paintings have, and in the Mauritzhaus in the Hague, The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in the nearby Van Gogh Museum together with the enchanting Rembrandthaus, where the artist lived and worked, many of them are on show.

"But the trip was not just for Rembrandt…. It was the time of year when the Dutch bulb fields were at their most dramatically, colorfully stripy and the flower park at Keukenhof was at its best.

"The extraordinary highly-coloured blooms in the park, coupled with the many sculptures that were on display added up to a rich feast for the eye.

"A high point was the visit to the Royal Talens, where the Rembrandt and Van Gogh Oil Paints are made. The whole range is available at the Kazinos art materials store in Nicosia. We saw from the bags of pigment in the store, through the mixing process with potato starch binder, through the fine-grinding process to the filling of the tubes for distribution.

"A richly visual experience in itself and the factory gave us a typically Dutch lunch, with raw herring, meatball soup, Gouda cheese and other specialities all washed down with the local beverage karnemelk - a kind of buttermilk.

"On the last day, energy levels still high, in the morning, we managed the Escher museum in the Hague where the breathtaking illusory, precision drawing of Escher left us reeling whereas the kitsch chandeliers in the forms of umbrellas and fish etc

had us laughing and in the afternoon we went to Haarlem where the huge canvasses by Van Hals, in the Museum that bears his name, enabled us to see what sensitive human qualities had stolen into Dutch portraiture even before Rembrandt appeared on the scene … the hands and faces painted by Frans Hals were unforgettable."

Jane Walker

Richard Wentworth at the Pharos Center

RICHARD Wentworth has played a leading role in New British Sculpture since the end of the 70’s.

His work centers on the idea of transformation, of subtly altering and juxtaposing everyday objects which has both altered the traditional definition of sculpture and, in turn, fundamentally changes the way we perceive the world around us.

By transforming and manipulating industrial and/or found objects into works of art, Wentworth subverts their original function and extends our understanding of them by breaking the conventional system of classification. His palette is one of ladders and lightbulbs, buckets and tins, tables and chairs, sometimes with legs partly sawn off and counterbalanced by a weight as if to defy gravity.

"I live in a ready-made landscape," he remarked early in his career, "and I want to put it to use."

Richard Wentworth was born in 1974 in Samoa. He attended Hornsey College of Art from 1965 and worked with Henry Moore as an assistant in 1967. He was awarded an MA in 1970 from the Royal College of Art and went on to become one of the most influential teachers in British art over the past two decades at Goldsmith’s college, University of London, where he taught from 1971 to 1987.

He was appointed by the prestigious German Academic Exchange Programme (DAAD) to work in Berlin from 1993 to 1994, and in 2002 was made Master of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University.

He was one of the selected artists in the London section of the 2002 Sao Paolo Biennial and in 1999 curated ‘Thinking Aloud’, one of the most creative contemporary exhibition projects staged in the past five years and which was seen in Cambridge, London and Manchester.

He now lives in London.

Dance in the Spotlight

THE Cultural Society of the Poles in Cyprus (MALWA) had an exceptionally wonderful evening at Castelliotissa last week.

Organised by Urszula Savvopoulou, it reminded one of those ‘vernisages’ of past times.

There was even a grand piano on call.

There were two major photographers exhibiting work.

Christos Avraamides was born in Nicosia in 1956. He studied photography at a film school. Currently he works in the Press & Information Office of the Republic of Cyprus.

In 1998 he received the title Artiste FIAP (AFIAP) from the International Organisation of Artistic Photographers. He has won many artistic photography competitions in Cyprus and abroad.

Christos has held five individual exhibitions (four in Cyprus, one in Greece) and has participated in four group exhibitions: Thessaloniki (2000), Belgrade (2001, 2003) and Paris (2003)

Stanislaw Ekier was born in 1955 in Warsaw. In 1977, he finished in first place in the course on portraiture and action under the direction of the esteemed Witold Dederka.

In 1978, he underwent Study at the Union of Polish Photographic Artists, following with work as a photographer in the Polish Ballet School of Warsaw.

He has had many exhibitions in Poland and elsewhere in Europe and has been a full member of the Union of Polish Photographic Artists since 1993.

Each of the two artists presented dance "painted in light"; each however, has applied his own original technique and the individual approach.

Modern dance, expressed through modern means by one and classical ballet, presented in old, forgotten techniques of the 19^{th century, by the other, created an unforgettable atmosphere allowing the public to appreciate the variety and freedom of choice.}

The photographs of the two artists invited us to an unforgettable meeting with Terpsychora in a unique and original way.

The evening was opened by Arianna Economou, who was hidden in a mound of paper before the music started. It was like a cross between Debby Reynolds popping out of the birthday cake in Dancing in the Rain and Patricia Phillips entangled in a sculpture by Andreas Savvides in Synergy One. Great.

More please Urszula Savvopoulou.

Textile Landscapes

THIS is an exhibition by Malgorzata Swiatlowska.

Within the framework of the German-Polish Year 2005/06 the German Cultural Centre, Goethe-Zentrum Nicosia, and the Cultural Association of the Poles in Cyprus, Malwa, followed their governments suggestion to reconnect the cultures of the two neighbouring countries who had been estranged by a difficult past, to cross the divide and to share their respective cultural wealth.

The Goethe-Zentrum and Malwa co-organized a cycle of events that started with an exhibition by German painter and poet Alexander Fleischer and will end with the exhibition ‘Textile Landscapes’ by the young Polish artist Malgorzata Swiatlowska who obtained her Master’s Degree from the renowned Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland.

Malgorzata Swiatlowska started her studies in painting and subsequently specialised in textile art, which has long since broken with techniques of traditional tapestry.

Swiatlowska selects light, delicate, transparent or more solid fabric to compose long flag-like units in which most different elements are kept in balance.

She creates objects at times of subdued hues, at times of intense brightness, but always in controlled harmony where each element preserves its own value.

Smooth surfaces are opposed to wrinkled ones, lines interfere with squares, transparent elements become solid and dissolve again.

There is no searching for spectacular effects, Swiatlowska’s art distinguishes itself by the sensitive interweaving of varied structures, surfaces and colours.

Textile landscapes are one of the artist’s favourite themes.

She comments on her own work in the following way: "I have been fascinated by textile art for a long period. Above all, I am interested in the three dimensions of my objects and their interference with space. When I realize my projects, I apply old weaving techniques, applications and batik as well as textile printing. While creating the surface of Gobelins, I prefer the low relief, whereby the textile fabric receives a new structure. The main characteristic of my works presumably lies in my own particular way of creating landscapes."

The exhibition will be opened on May 23, at 8pm, at Famagusta Gate, Nicosia, by Pavlos Paraskevas, Senior Cultural Officer at the Ministry of Culture and Education. It closes on May 30.

Opening hours: Daily 10am-1pm and 4pm-7pm. Saturday/Sunday4pm-8pm.