Following two major centenary exhibitions at the Met and the Tate, Francis Bacon is now being treated to a singularly forensic homage in his native Dublin. The artist was already the subject of a rather bizarre homecoming in 1998 when the entire contents of his London studio, down to the very dust on the floor, were shipped permanently to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. To mark his 100th birthday, a huge selection of objects, including paint materials, unfinished and destroyed works, rarely seen paintings, photographs, magazines, books, notes, and vinyl records are now on display until March 7, 2010.
     In 1998 Bacon’s sole heir, John Edwards, bequeathed the studio. After a quasi-archaeological removal process and some initial cataloguing, it was opened to the public in 2001, becoming a major cultural attraction on the Dublin circuit. However, eight more years of painstaking research have come to show precisely what the studio contents can tell us about Bacon’s processes and preoccupations. This is the international significance of the event. In essence, Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty provides new insight into the source materials, techniques, and themes of one of the greatest modern figurative painters, debunking a few of his own myths to boot.
     Over almost twenty rooms and two floors, visitors are able to grasp the magnitude of the archives. For Bacon enthusiasts they are replete with biographical and technical gems.
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After Fountaine Bleu, Paul Wunderlich

For decades, Paul Wunderlich has been one of the most iconic and influential artists you’ve never heard of. Utter his name outside of art circles and chances are you’d get nothing more than a lifted eyebrow and shrug of the shoulders. But one look at his visionary, surrealistic motifs and discomfitted color palettes and off go the flares of visual recognition.
     Long deemed the Father of Fantastic, or Magic, Realism, Wunderlich is sort of like the Gabriel García Márquez of modern art, lending no less than sixty-two years of his life to the study and experimentation of various art media. After perfecting his lithograph technique in Paris between 1960 and 1963, Wunderlich moved on to tackle sculpture, drawing, and painting with airbrush and gouache. Regardless of the tools, Wunderlich brought an innate curiosity and intellect to each creative mode he dallied in, paying no mind to the critical recognition the outcome did or didn’t receive. Nevertheless, Wunderlich has enjoyed long and fruitful acclaim over the course of his career, selling out solo shows across Europe, Asia, and North America. In 1994-95, a retrospective of his work was featured in a scattering of major museums all over Japan.
     But even more telling than the art itself is the vast influence his work has had on pop-culture, high fashion, photography and music.
     Long-time friend and gallery owner, Christian Hohmann sits down with PLANET to reminisce about Wunderlich, the artist and the man, shedding some much-desired light on an unsung hero of surrealism.
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Photography by Enrico Sacchetti
Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment — General purpose detector capable of studying many aspects of proton collisions.

Last year, photographer Enrico Sacchetti gained exclusive access to the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. It was a two-day shoot with unlimited access to the entire facility. Sacchetti says his fascination to do the shoot came about not only because of his personal interest in science but also because the experiments (the four main ones: Alice, CMS, Atlas, and LHCb) are being done in some of the biggest and most complex machineries that humans have ever built in an attempt to discover one of the smallest particles in the entire universe — the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle”. Deep below the gorgeous Swiss countryside and hidden from all of humanity, Sacchetti captures the unusual beauty of the LHC.
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Images courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne, New York

Egon Schiele, an Austrian figurative painter, was a highly controversial figure. During his brief life and career at the beginning of the 20th Century he was praised for his portraits and denounced for his lascivious lifestyle. He thought highly of himself, but also suffered from persecution mania. Mixing self-aggrandizement and self-hatred, he poured his heightened sense of anxiety into his art. Much of it was made up of self-portraits, often nude and without a penis, reflecting his narcissism and dejection. Much of his other work consisted of female nudes.
     Schiele was recognized as a promising artist during his lifetime. A less known fact about Schiele is that he was an expert printmaker. In order to bring this aspect of his work to light, Galerie St. Etienne in New York has put together an exhibition of nearly fifty of Schiele’s prints, woodcuts, and etchings. Most of the work engages his already familiar themes. Schiele’s portraits, with their sad faces and contorted bodies reflect the torture of human condition, of the desire to be completely free to follow one’s instincts and the inability to do so because of social taboos. The female nudes are always overtly sexual, the stark red of their nipples emphasized against the dull colors of their twisted figures. His self-portraits reflect deeply rooted angst, half-hidden by a mask of cockiness. Angst is also the subject of Sorrow, the most powerful image of the exhibition. The listless female figure sitting on top of a rock could be a fitting illustration for Albert Camus’ seminal existentialist essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”.
     Egon Schiele As Printmaker is on view at Galerie St. Etienne until January 23, 2010.
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Black hoodie poncho Oak

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Photography courtesy of the Underground Library

The Underground Library thrives on many contradictory dualities: openness and mystery, transience and immortality, democratization and personalization. But its hairy outgrowths and connotations are bound by an essentially simple desire: to recreate the unique visceral experience that a work of art offers.
     After a successful test-run in May and a first grant from the public-dinner-as-arts-foundation FEAST, the Library has become a kind of asynchronous alternative to the easy and aloof mass-media saturation fostered by The Information Age. It provides this alternative by distributing original hand-bound books, all made in-house by its founders and composed of new multimedia work by its participating artists, to its members. In the cheekily faux-antiquarian parlance adopted for the project, these members, who may gain membership through donations of anywhere between $5 and $1,500 to the Library’s Membership webpage, are called heralds. Each herald is then responsible for passing the book on to others whom the herald believes may take interest in it. After the book has passed between the hands of eleven recipients (due dates are provided by the Library’s founders in the books’ library cards, with recipients’ names to be filled in as it makes its rounds) it is returned to the herald, thence a librarian in her own right. The first book in the first edition is called Forever, Michael. A memoir by Halloween’s Michael Myers, it is available in an edition of seventy-five copies.
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Chapter 1, The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb 2009. Ink and correction fluid on paper. Courtesy of R. Crumb, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner, New York.

In the beginning, there was Crumb. One of the founding fathers of the underground comic movement in the U.S., he first came to our attention back in the 1960s chronicling the colorful adventures of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural. His latest project, The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, might come as a surprise to some but actually it’s not really such a big leap. There’s enough salacious material in the Bible to make even his Devil Girl blush.
     Crumb, who’s been living in France with his wife and daughter since the late 1980s, spent five years on this project, working with a magnifying glass and a pot of black ink on all 207 illustrations. Despite his inclination for controversy over the years, Crumb stayed true to the text and approached the work as a straight illustration job, incorporating every word from all fifty chapters of Genesis. Avoiding any temptation to poke fun at the material, the result is an incredibly detailed and fresh look at some of the oldest stories known to the human race. Crumb did extensive research for this project to make sure he got everything just right. Words that all alone on the page might have seemed dry and didactic have now been transformed by Crumb’s pen into a story with all the drama of a telenovela. In the book’s introduction, Crumb calls Genesis “a powerful text with layers of meaning that reach deep into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness.” In this unique edition, he has done justice both to that cultural context and to his own inimitable style. The wrath of God has never been this much fun.
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Images courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Clement Greenberg, the infamous art critic who made and unmade Jackson Pollock, once wrote in his essay on the avant-garde that the goal of abstract painting is to imitate the process of art itself and not any discernable reality. Thus, painting becomes about paint, color, texture and line. If such criteria are valid, then Gerhard Richter’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman gallery, first in New York since 2005, is a definite success.
     The show displays a comprehensive collection of Richter’s work from this decade. In the first room his biggest paintings provide a study in tone gradation. Through the glossy paint one can see the emotional intensity of the horizontal brush strokes, which makes the viewer feel the act of painting. The next room contains a new series of works titled Sindbad, painted in 2008. These are 30 cm x 50 cm paintings done in lacquer behind glass. Here, the prime colors collide in an almost phantasmagoric way, cutting and crashing into each other. The Grey series is a monochromatic study of texture; the oil paint is dabbed on the canvas, achieving a three-dimensional effect that is reminiscent of cracked desert surface. A standalone painting titled September is one of those rare abstract works whose visceral impact, achieved solely through its color and texture, so accurately reflects its name. Its colors convey the dreary mood of autumn, and its effect becomes even more solemn if you think of the events of 9/11.
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Images courtesy of Aperture

Some images stay with us, just as fresh and potent in the mind’s eye years later as they were the first time we saw them. Photographer William Klein’s homage to Rome — a celebration of the city’s beauty, its character, and its vitality — is one such case, spellbinding even 50 years later. In honor of the book’s golden anniversary, Aperture has re-released the Rome collection. Along with Klein’s classic pictorial diary, the new, two-volume, slip-cased version includes Klein’s never-before-seen fashion work (shot in the city), along with new and updated text by Klein himself.
     In 1956, a 28-year-old Klein arrived in Rome to begin his first cinematic project, assisting famed Italian director Federico Fellini on his new film, Le Notti di Cabiria. Shooting was delayed, however, and Klein — though wildly disappointed — knew he had a choice to make: return home, or take advantage of his situation and shoot the city around him. The  resulting collection is an unparalleled photographic diary of Klein’s travel through the eternal city, guided by an eclectic cast of artists and writers. As Fellini himself once said, “Rome is a movie, and Klein did it.”
     Over the years, Klein has proved himself a jack-of-all-trades, exploring fine art and fashion photography, film, painting, and even graphic design. And he’s pushed the limits of his chosen fields, questioning the status quo. His fine art photography was a far cry from the reigning documentary style of the fifties. His fashion photography placed models out in the streets. And throughout the Rome collection, Klein’s signature style rings true.
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