The illustrations of this year's advertising campaign for the theater spektakel in zurich have been created by the South African performer and artist Peet Pienaar. The 37-year-old former rugby player and son of an Afrikaans-speaking white farmer is one of South Africa's most daring and innovative artists. In his seemingly playful graphic works as well as in his provocative performances he takes a bitingly ironic look at today's South Africa. He is the artistic head of «Daddy buy me a pony» (renamed «The President»), a studio for art, advertising and graphic design, which exhibited its award-winning creations during the 2005 festival «Afrique noire III» in Berne. Peet Pienaar is the publisher and co-creator of the Afro Magazine, a magazine featuring outstanding African graphic designs, which won the renowned Grand Clio Award for innovative design in 2006.

Peet Pienaar, New York Times

Mathematics is everywhere: In combination with a lot of art, you only find it at the museum of modern art (Mumok) in Vienna. The exhibition Exact and Different considers the connections between the ways art and mathematics conceive reality. 120 positions demonstrate how questions of mathematics have influenced art in the 20th century. The exhibition will show more than 300 works from 120 artists including: Josef Albers, Jost Amman, Carl Andre, Max Bill, Hanne Darboven, Theo van Doesburg, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Max Ernst, Herbert W. Franke, Naum Gabo, Heinz Gappmayr, Raoul Hausmann, Johannes Itten, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Paul Klee, Brigitte Kowanz, Fernand Léger, Sol LeWitt, Mario Merz, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Bruce Nauman, Roman Opalka, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Arnulf Rainer, Ad Reinhardt, Kurt Schwitters, Georges Vantongerloo, Ruth Vollmer, Peter Weibel

Curator
Wolfgang Drechsler in cooperation with Gabriele Werner and Dieter Bogner

http://www.mumok.at

The german dada artist Thomas Baumgärtel sprayed his banana, for interesting art places, on the kunsthaus in zurich, switzerland. The artist has further developed his Dadaistic action into a worldview and artistic concept. In his work, the world forms itself from bananas and the banana is a worldview and a view of art at the same time.

bananensprayer.de

At the mumok (museum for modern art in vienna) Omer Fast presents two looped stories which show the crossing between memories and the present moment. How do experiences become memories and how do stories result from that? What form does their media dissemination take and how are they collected, selected, recorded and transmitted? Omer Fast’s artistic work is concerned with the status of experience and history in a society permeated through and through by media.


mumok.at

In my opinion the wanna be design fair is a fake. Sure nice furnitures, sure nice designs - but never the less to little innovative state-of-the-art pieces. And over all it smells more like a merchandisers fair. For me the most impressive piece of the fair was the mini in a le corbusier outfit.

“neue räume 07”: visitor record More than 24’000 design devotees visited the nine-day international furniture and interior design exhibition “neue räume 07”, held at the ABB Halls, Zurich-Oerlikon. The event is set to return in 2009. This is the fourth outing for “neue räume 07” at the ABB Halls, Zurich Oerlikon, with its 8000 m2 of latest trends, concepts and wares presented by 90-plus national and international furniture, lighting, kitchen, bathroom and textile manufacturers. This exhibition, which affords the public a bird’s-eye view of trends in the market, features special events and has become Switzerland’s most popular design destination.

The great thing about a city is, that you can always discover something new. Ok, zurich isn`t really a big city and you could say also that you can discover new things in the smallest village of the world - but this exibithion was really something new in a well known surrounding. Anyway, fact no. 1: The museum riedberg is situated in a wonderful old villa, in the middle of the beautiful ried-parc. Please read the tubulent and amusing history of the museum. And now - the official version:

For the first time in Germany and Switzerland, a major exhibition is dedicated to the art of the Khmer, the ancient kingdoms of Cambodia. The Khmer culture is world-famous for its magnificent temples (Angkor Wat being the most renowned) and for the monumentality and artistic sensitivity of its sculptural art. The exhibition comprises 140 masterpieces of Khmer art. Of central importance are the large stone sculptures from the Hindu and Buddhist temples of the ancient kingdoms of Cambodia.

An exhibition of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, in cooperation with the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Museum Rietberg Under the patronage of UNESCO Supported by Swiss Re

I really approve the following exhibition: Olaf Breuning, August 25, 2007 until October 21, 2007 at the migros museum in zurich. Since the late 1990s, this Swiss artist (born 1970 in Schaffhausen, lives and works in New York) has produced quotation-rich works, which refer back to the imaginary visual memory of the West and its pictorial worlds. He has gained recognition through his films, staged photography, and colourful, huge-eyed, infantile sculptures and drawings, which comment on reality in a laconic manner. A primary element in his work is an artificiality, which each presentation and figure composition makes visible and in so doing opens up a large range of reception forms. In this substituting of each original and challenging significance, the image and subject combine to form a motionless, waiting coexistence in a theatrical adult playground of stage effects, upon which the works are arranged, shrugging their shoulders in the absence of a narrative superstructure.