Category: Event

Christ Cathedral Campus. Garden Grove, CA. June 2019. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition recreates the awe and wonder of arguably one of mankind’s greatest artistic achievements while allowing its visitors to experience this art from a new perspective.

With special expertise and care, the ceiling paintings from the Sistine Chapel have been reproduced using state of the art technology. In order for the observer to fully engage and comprehend the artwork, the paintings have been reproduced in their original sizes. The overwhelming impression for the observer will be the dimensions of the art, the closeness to the picture, and the modern style of the exhibition. As a result, the visitor can explore the artwork up close at a distance impossible to achieve in the Sistine Chapel.

The introduction and information in the pre-show area of the exhibition will prepare visitors for a new staging of Michelangelo’s works and awaken their curiosity. The exhibition is an innovative and unique interpretation of Michelangelo’s timeless masterpiece.  Guests who have already visited the Sistine Chapel will find a new way of observing the art. Visitors who have never seen the originals will be intrigued and inspired to visit the Sistine Chapel at some time in the future.

PONTORMO: Miraculous Encounters

The Getty Center, Brentwood, CA. February 2019. Featuring one of Jacopo da Pontormo’s most renowned works, the Visitation, this exhibition presents this innovative altarpiece along with two exceptional portraits and preparatory drawings that reveal his creative process. Completed during Florence’s political upheaval at the end of the 1520s, the artist’s paintings from this period resonate with acute psychological intensity. Recent conservation of the Visitation reveals its stunning range of colors and exquisite details, which led to its first-time travel from Italy to the United States. Generously supported by Janine and J. Tomilson Hill. Additional support provided by the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture (FIAC). Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Morgan Library & Museum, New York; and the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. The exhibition has been organized to raise support for the conservation of the Parish Church and the former Franciscan convent of San Michele Arcangelo in Carmignano.

The Huntington Library. San Marino, CA. December 2018. “Project Blue Boy” allows visitors to watch and learn about high-tech analysis and treatment of Thomas Gainsborough’s 18th-century masterpiece in the historic Thornton Portrait Gallery.

One of the most iconic artworks in British and American history, The Blue Boy, made around 1770 by English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), undergoes its first major technical examination and conservation treatment in public view, in a special satellite conservation studio set up in the west end of the Thornton Portrait Gallery in the Huntington Art Gallery. “Project Blue Boy” offers visitors a glimpse into the technical processes of a senior conservator working on the famous painting as well as background on its history, mysteries, and artistic virtues.

The Getty Center. December 2018. Renaissance artists transformed the course of western art history by making nude central to their art. Drawing inspiration from classical sculpture and the study of the live model, these artists created lifelike, vibrant, and sensual representations of the human body. Featuring more than 100 works by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michaelangelo, and others, this exhibition traces the nude’s gradual emergence over 130 years in Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands. This exhibition has been organized by the Getty Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Bowers Museum. September 2018. Knights in Armorfeatures stunning masterpieces of European arms and armor, dating from the Medieval and Renaissance ages to the Romanticized Medieval revival of the 1800s.

“Knights in Armor is Shining at the Bowers Museum.” – LA TIMES

The provocative beauty and the exquisite craftsmanship of more than 90 pieces of armor, including full suits, helmets, corselets, shields, swords and paintings on loan from the Museo Stibbert of Florence, Italy bring to life the legendary figure of the knight, his code of chivalry and his battlefield role. Knights in Armoris brought to you by the generosity of Frank and Eileen DeSantis. The exhibition was organized by Contemporanea Progetti in collaboration with the Museo Stibbert, Florence, Italy.

The San Diego Museum of Art. Late June 2018. On the Second Floor, in Gallery 19, The Max and Muriel Gluck Collection–featuring modern masterpieces by Pierre Bonnard, Amedeo Modigliani, and Edouard Vuillard–forms the nucleus of a group of paintings from the school of Paris. Alongside highlights from this transformational bequest, a gift to the Museum in 1985, are other paintings from the museum’s collection, including works by Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and a number of significant loans from the Bloomberg Collection. Together, these present a portrait of Paris from the 1870s to the first decades of the 20th century, when the legacy of Impressionism remained a significant source of inspiration.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). November 19, 2017–March 18, 2018. Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici is a groundbreaking exhibition devoted to 18th-century Mexican painting, a vibrant period marked by major stylistic developments and the invention of new iconographies. The exhibition’s over 100 works (many unpublished and restored for the exhibition), will make a lasting contribution to our understanding of Mexican painting in particular and transatlantic artistic connections in the 18th century in general. Its seven main themes—Great Masters, Master Story Tellers, Noble Pursuits and the Academy, Paintings of the Land, The Power of Portraiture, The Allegorical World, and Imagining the Sacred—explore the painters’ great inventiveness and the varying contexts in which their works were created. The exhibition represents the first and most serious effort to date to reposition the history of 18th-century painting in Mexico; it will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication, complete with scholarly essays authored by the leading experts in the field. Co-organized with Fomento Cultural Banamex, Mexico City, the exhibition will subsequently travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This exhibition was co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Fomento Cultural Banamex, A.C.

Getty Museum (Brentwood), Los Angeles — Giovanni Bellini’s evocative landscapes are as much the protagonists of his paintings as are the religious subjects that dominated 15th-century Italian art. One of the most influential painters of the Renaissance, he worked in and around Venice, and while his landscapes are highly metaphorical, they also accurately reflect the region’s topography and natural light. Created for sophisticated patrons, Bellini’s works present characters and symbols from familiar sacred stories, set in a dimension of reality and lived experience to a degree unprecedented in the history of Italian painting. Generous support for this exhibition was provided by John J. Studzinski CBE, and Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Holmes Tuttle.

Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.  November 10, 2017 through April 9, 2018. The Norton Simon Museum presents Taking Shape: Degas as Sculptor, an illuminating exhibition that explores the compulsive nature of Edgar Degas’s artistic practice. Focusing on the Museum’s collection of modèles, the first and only set of bronzes cast from the artist’s original wax and clay statuettes, Taking Shape considers the affinities among sculpting, painting and drawing in Degas’ oeuvre. By presenting the modèle bronzes alongside related compositions from the Norton Simon’s renowned collection, this expansive body of Degas’ works celebrates the artist’s boundless enthusiasm for creation, and the act of making as an end in itself.

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) exhibited just one sculpture during his lifetime: the controversial Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen. This figure startled visitors to the 1881 Impressionist exhibition with its unidealized physiognomy and its radical use of real materials, such as silk slippers and a wig made from human hair. In the privacy of his studio, however, Degas modeled in wax and clay throughout his career, producing hundreds of small-scale, informal studies of horses, dancers and bathers that were seen only by close friends and visitors. It was not until the artist’s death—one hundred years ago this year—that the extent of his sculptural production was revealed. Of the nearly 150 models retrieved from Degas’s studio, 74 of the best-preserved examples were  cast in bronze and editioned, making public and permanent these transient exercises in form.

This exhibition explores the improvisational nature of Degas’s artistic practice through the Norton Simon’s collection of modèles, the first and only set of bronzes cast from the original wax and plaster statuettes. This unique set of sculptures served as the matrix for the serial bronzes that followed, and in some cases they preserve objects or evidence of Degas’s handwork that has been altered in the wax originals. Capturing the condition of the figurines when they were discovered in the artist’s studio, the modèles vividly convey the instinctive way in which Degas pressed and smeared pliable wax and plaster over handmade wire armatures, and bulked the core with cork and other easily accessible materials. Rather than serving solely as sources for paintings or pastels, these sculptures were independent objects, what the artist called essais—“trials” or “experiments.” For Degas, the act of sculpting was an end in itself.