Frank Auerbach: To the Studio
This film offers an exclusive invitation to the secret world of Frank Auerbach. The painter rarely leaves his studio: he works 364 days a year, from sun-up to sun-down in a furious race against time. There is not a minute to waste. His main links with the outside world are the models who've sat for him for between ten and forty-two years. They are from diverse backgrounds: acting, academia, filmmaking and business. They talk with insight about being painted and about the man behind the canvas. Auerbach is filmed in his studio, sketching in the National Gallery and around Camden town, talking about his sitters, his routine, his compulsions, strange rituals, his ambitions and his heroes.
Attila Richard Lukacs: Drawing Out the Demons
Gifted artist, tormented soul, egomaniacal bad-boy hyped up on crystal-meth. This is the snapshot, circa summer 2001, as this raw and uncensored documentary begins tracking the dramatic career of Canadian-born painter Attila Richard Lukacs. A bold visionary whose life-size homoerotic renderings of skinheads fetch tens of thousands of dollars, Lukacs fails in his attempt to crack New York City and the world's toughest art scene. He spirals into depression and drug addiction, alienates friends and arts associates, and pushes away his saintly parents. But the wired West Coast artist manages to make it to the other side, retreating from his disastrous NYC exploits to find detox, redemption, and creative renaissance in Maui. A gritty and compulsive examination of the extremes of artistic temperament, the story is set against the backdrop of Lukacs' school days at Vancouver's Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design and his meteoric rise into the international art world. His paintings, once the toast of Berlin and Toronto, shift and change in tone and execution, revealing an artist of uncanny ability and endurance.
Antagonist Art Collective: This Is Berlin Not New York
A documentary on the Antagonist Art Movement, a group of underground New York artists who traveled to Berlin in 2007 for ten days of cross-cultural artistic exchanges. This includes collaborating with Berlin artists, putting on an exhibition at a local gallery, displaying works on the street, and transforming an abandoned building into a piece itself. Tracing the journey of these fifteen young artists, they meet and join forces with their German counterparts. Together, the American and German artists explore the artistic ideas and concepts while collaborating on original projects that push conventional boundaries.
Bacons Arena: An Art of Pain and Beauty
Despite the carnage and horror in his paintings, Francis Bacon insisted that beauty was his inspiration. This program explores Bacon's life and work, from his troubled Edwardian childhood to his death in Madrid in 1992. Using rarely seen archival films and images, as well as interviews with friends and relatives of the painter, the film depicts Bacons influences, far-flung travels, chaotic relationships, and most of all his torturous, spellbinding pictures. Viewers will encounter Bacons Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, other triptychs, Figure in a Landscape, several pope paintings, and more.
Bending Space: Georges Russe and the Durham Project
French sculptor, painter and photographer Georges Rousse transforms abandoned or condemned buildings into pictorial spaces, creating unique, ephemeral works that are preserved only as photos. In 2006, at the invitation of two art lovers, he spent a month in Durham, North Carolina, where he worked on four historical buildings, including the Liggett & Myers tobacco factory (which produced Chesterfield cigarettes), closed since 1984. The project won an enthusiastic response from the local community. Over 200 volunteers, in constant interaction with the city's residents, got together to revive the memory of the place and bear silent witness to a now-defunct local industry. The film is an opportunity to follow the artist's creative process, step by step. 56 minutes
Barnstormers Collective: Barnstormers 360
In 1999, New York-based artist David Ellis invited a group of artists from New York and Tokyo to paint murals on aging tobacco barns, farming equipment and tractor trailers in his hometown of Cameron, North Carolina, a tiny farming community. Dubbed "the Barnstormers" by the locals, the group of artists made the trip, and in the process of painting formed an unlikely and lasting friendship with the people of Cameron. Filmed in Cameron, NC and the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, this extraordinary 30-minute DVD captures the Barnstormers disassembly of a 1930s era 16 x 16 x 23 foot tobacco barn, its reassembly in the museum, the painting of over twenty murals on its side, and its eventual reconstruction in Cameron.
Christian Boltanksi: The Possible Lives
Christian Boltanski started exhibiting in Germany in the early 1970s and has today gained worldwide recognition for his art. The documentary plunges us into a sombre yet humorous universe, around the world in Paris, Berlin and Japan. It portrays works which are monumental yet little known, as often they are hidden in locked basements or far-away sites. The film also contains previously unaired archive footage, confronting the artist with his own past and future. Christian Boltanski talks of his true and possible lives, of humanism, religion and utopia, and explains his major project Archives of the Heart.
Eye of the Beholder: Artscape Nordland
Artscape Nordland is a unique project realized in the northernmost reaches of the world. Over ten years , 33 of the worlds leading contemporary artists from 18 different nations produced a sculpture for a designated municipality in the county of Nordland, Norway. The project has been characterized as creative "madness" and was met with head-shaking resistance and curiosity when it was initiated. The film ia a journey: geographical, mental and aesthetic. Nordland comprises a long stretch of coastline, and most of the cultural impulses that have come here have arrived via the coastal route. Many of the works of art are located in exactly this junction - between land and sea - and they consist of objects washed ashore from foreign points of origin.. Featuring work by Dan Graham, Dorothy Cross, Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and many others.
Georg Baselitz: a film by Heinz Peter Schwerfel
A documentary by filmmaker and art critic Heinz Peter Schwerfel on controversial German painter Georg Baselitz, who once referred to German painting traditions as "ugly," provoked censors with the sexual content of his postmodern works, and became famous for a series of upside-down paintings. This film looks at Baselitz at two points during his life. Once in 1987 on the occasion of his retrospective at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn at the age of 50, and 17 years later, when Schwerfel asked the artist to reexamine his previous statements and to discuss the themes of his current work. "Baselitz manages to stand outside 'isms' of art yet remain central to its history"
Georg Baselitz: Making Art after Auchwitz and Dresden
A documentary on controversial German painter Georg Baselitz, who once referred to German painting traditions as "ugly", provoked censors with the sexual content of his postmodern works, and became famous for a series of upside-down paintings.In the fall of 2007, a brilliant retrospective exhibition of the work of Georg Baselitz opened at Londons Royal Academy of Arts. It was curated by Norman Rosenthal, who had first exhibited paintings by Baselitz in the early 1970s. Baselitz traveled to London to lecture at the Academy and revisits his exhibition together with Rosenthal. They discuss the work, paintings and sculptures, and the artists beginnings and progress.
GENERAL IDEA: Art, AIDS, and the fine de siPcle
In Toronto in 1969, three young gay Canadian artists come together to form a collective called GENERAL IDEA. GENERAL IDEA achieved celebrity status in Europe in the 1970s. Treated like rock stars, they exhibited in major museums in Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris. The 1980s bring the first labeled cases of AIDS. GENERAL IDEA responds by making art that addresses the virus. GENERAL IDEA toured Europe and North America with massive political installation pieces that chronicled the devastating spread of the disease and its impact on their community, including an early end to the lives of two members of GENERAL IDEA. AA Bronson, the sole survivor of GENERAL IDEA, narrates this documentary lending personal relevancy to a poignant story of art and sexual politics.
Gerhard Richter's career as a painter began after his departure from East Germany in 1961. He is now considered "Europe's greatest modern painter". In 2002 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held the first major retrospective of his work in the U.S. Curator Robert Storr and the artist selected 188 paintings for the show. Before the opening they visit the exhibition and discuss this remarkable body of work. The ensuing dialogue reveals Richter's motivations, approach and personality
Ilya Kabakov: Flies and Angels
Ilya Kabakov is considered an important contemporary artists. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbachev, he left the country in the 80s. He lives and works in New York together with his wife Emilia. In his Installations and his numerous paintings, Kabakov digests the traumatic experiences of his life in poverty and under constraints of a degenerated political system which has not lost its dictatorial structures fully until now. Using his subtle jewish humour he creates in his work a world of its own, which leaves the heaviness of socialist and postsocialist life far behind. The film links Ilya Kabakovs artistic spaces with insights into russian everday life, which itself sometimes appears like an istallation by the artist. A narrative by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov interlinks biographical and political aspects of the film
Jeorg Immendorf: I, Immendorf
Jeorg Immendorff, who ranks among the most important of contemporary German artists, died in 2007 after a 9-year-long struggle with ALS, or Lou Gehrigs Desease. This documentaryrecords his final two years as he continues, despite being lamed by the disease, to create large-scale masterpieces through assistants. During this time he also remains professor at Dsseldorf Art Academy, where he had been a student of Joseph Beuys decades earlier. Interviews with the people who knew him best provide background and historical context to his artistic expression that spans personal and political topics through performance, paintings, and sculpture. Filmmaker Graef aims to both convey the man and the legend for which life and art were inseparable
John Virtue - London
John Virtue was invited by the National Gallery of London create paintings in response to the gallerys collection, but ended up created a series of London landscapes. He talks to Paul Moorhouse, Senior Curator at the Tate, about the works he's produced during this time, about his working process and routines, about the importance of accurate drawings of the landscape, about his favourite paintings in the National Gallery. John Virtue is a landscape artist who�s worked solely in black and white since 1978, creating paintings that are a mixture of realistic and abstraction.
Keep Adding Collective: Wrekage
Over five years in the making, this DVD documents "A History of Wrekage" by the artist group Keep Adding. Co-produced by videographer and artist Scott Pagano, the documentary gives viewers an up-close and behind the scenes view of Keep Adding's site-specific installation works. In 2006 Keep Adding displayed their most ambitious version of WREKAGE at the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Santa Fe. The CCA exhibition centers on an epic installation comprised of adobe structures, spray paint murals, pools of water, light boxes, and a haunting ambient soundtrack by contemporary composer Richard Devine.
Kiki Smith: Squatting the Palace
Smith works in her home not in a space specifically designed as a studio but on the 2nd floor of her East Village townhouse. There, amid her books, a pet bird, and small kitchen, Smith goes from drawing to collaging to modeling clay to painting plaster casts and back, again and again, moving from one discipline to another in a way that can seem aimless to a casual observer, but which is actually the modus operandi of a highly sophisticated visual artist. Over the course of the video, it becomes apparent that many of the pieces Smith is creating including sculptures, photographs, prints, and furniture fashioned from liquor boxes are intended for an eight-room installation at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, Italy, to open contemporaneously with the 2005 Venice Biennale.
Leon Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes
Art, politics, and the media intersect in contemporary artist Leon Golub's nightmarish images of war, torture, death squads and mercenaries. This film follows the creation of one of the artist's monumental canvases, "White Squad X," detailing his complex and unorthodox techniques. Scenes of Golub at work are interwoven with archival footage, interviews with museum-goers and TV news as the film challenges us to question our connection to violence in the modern world and to reassess the relationship between art and society.
Lucian Freud: Portraits
Unprecedented, intimate and revealing, this film weaves interviews with a large selection of work by one of the great artists of our century. Lucian Freud, now in his 80s, has always been at pains to preserve his privacy. In recent years, as his fame has increased and his eminence as a painter has matured into pre-eminence, the artist has become the object of endless and generally inaccurate press interest. Lucian Freud :Portraits is an analysis of the artist as seen through the eyes of those who have been best placed to study him - his sitters. Over a period of two years, film-maker Jake Auerbach and Freuds biographer William Feaver filmed many of Freuds subjects, ranging from the late Duke of Devonshire and the now Dowager Duchess of Devonshire to fellow painters David Hockney and Celia Paul; from friends such as Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles to ex-lovers, daughters and grand-daughters.
Marlene Dumas: Miss Interpreted
Born in Cape Town South Africa, Marlene Dumas is one of the best-known contemporary artists in the world. In her paintings,usually life-sized, she depicts human figures that wrestle with emotions. The documentary film Miss Interpreted, follows the artists activities for a period of six months while she prepares for an exhibition, thus giving us intimate insights into her work and ideas
Markus Raetz: The Artist as Magician
The word YES morphs into NO.A man with a hat becomes a rabbit. A human face doubles as the space between two other faces. These are some of the visual challenges at the core of Markus Raetzs art, tricks that call into question the viewers fundamental assumptions about reality, movement, and change. In this program, the Swiss artist allows cameras into his studio to record his creative process and working methods. From simple, whimsically curved wires to meticulously layered wood sculptures, the documented pieces, interwoven with commentary from members of Raetzs inner circle, reveal his conceptual and technical prowess. His fascinating sketchbooks and animated films are also featured.
Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz, Markus Lupertz. Narration by Donald Kuspit. Critic Donald Kuspit sees the possibilities of modern art revitalized in the powerful expressive painting of this international group of artists. From an immense reservoir of choices, they have recovered myth, history, symbols and eroticism to use as subject matter, and have recharged the painterly gestures of previous generations with new intensity
Olafur Elliason: Space is Process
From the immense golden sun of The Weather Project at the Tate Modern to his New York Waterfalls, Olafur Eliasson has created large-scale installations that situate viewers in the ambiguous zones between communal and individual awareness. This program follows the Danish-Icelandic artists work in locations around the world. English-language interviews with Eliasson are interwoven with scenes from his studio as well as the unique, wide-ranging locations in which he builds sculptures, shoots photographs, and constructs intriguing automatic drawing machines. A central focus of his work emerges: how the spaces of our world are shaped by social, ideological, natural, and artificial structures.
Our City Dreams: Swoon, Ghader Amer, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero
This documentary strings together the self-revealed narrative of five women artists of differing ages, each of whom has a passion for making art inseparable from her devotion to New York. Swoon, the youngest, exhibits cut-outs directly on city walls and subways, and exudes idealism and energy while carrying a two by four the way some women would a briefcase. Cairo-born Ghada Amer mixes media - embroidering with painting - to confront sexual taboos that cross cultural boundaries. After experiencing The New York Dolls in San Francisco, Kiki Smith realized she needed the energy of the city to create her paintings and sculptures. Marina Abramovic, originally of Belgrade, is a performance art pioneer who often uses her own body as a canvas. And Nancy Spero returned from Paris with artist-husband Leon Golub in 1964, to meld art and activism during the Vietnam War and become, in her own words, "a woman warrior."
Philip Guston: A Life Lived
Narrated by the artist. Late in life, the artist looks back over a career that originated in social realism during the '30s, moved to the center of Abstract Expressionism, and culminated in a return to figuration. Filmed at his retrospective in San Francisco in 1980 and at his Woodstock studio, where Guston is seen painting, the artist speaks candidly about his philosophy of painting and the psychological motivation for his work
Paula Rego: Telling Tales
Jake Auerbach's intimate documentary TELLING TALES offers an insight into the life and work of one of Britain's most distinguished artists, Paula Rego. From her retrospective in Madrid to the privacy of her London studio, the Portuguese-born artist shares her thoughts on the highly personal nature of her work and the psychology behind it.
Often using subjects which lie on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross�s structural and often mechanical sculptures, question empirical, ontological and philosophical systems ubiquitous within our lives
theEye - Julian Opie
Julian Opie�s highly distinctive depictions of the modern world are created in an extraordinary variety of media. His bold portraits, subtle landscapes, unconventional wallpaper, playful sculptures of animals, buildings and cars, computer films and much more present simplified and iconic versions of the contemporary environment
theEye - Antony Gormley
An internationally acclaimed artist, Antony Gormley is best known for his monumental sculpture Angel of the North. Many of Antony Gormley�s most significant works are illustrated in this film profile. Antony Gormley offers a reflective commentary on these and other works and on the central investigations and imperatives of his art.
In 2003 Chris Ofili created the spectacular installation Within Reach for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Combining a cycle of paintings depicting lovers in a Paradise-like garden with a shimmering glass dome, Ofili plunged visitors into disorienting spaces of dense colour and enveloping light. Shot in London, Germany and Venice, this film relates the creation of Within Reach.
theEye -Hamish Fulton
Hamish Fulton describes himself as a walking artist. For more than thirty years he has undertaken demanding walks in many parts of the world, and drawn on his experiences to create distinctive artworks using text, graphics and photographs.
theEye - Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson is an internationally-renowned sculptor and installation artist who often works on an architectural scale. In this profile, Wilson outlines the genesis and meanings of a selection of key works. Many of Wilson�s works are created for specific places, and he reflects here on the importance of collaboration and on his spectacular performances throughout the 1980s.
Gary Hume makes beautiful paintings. His materials are household paints on aluminium surfaces. The results are elegant, delicate, simple yet elusive and exquisite. Playing gloriously with colour and light, they are paintings of subtle tones, idiosyncratic clashes and insistent reflections
theEye -Yinka Shonibare
Shonibare is a painter, photographer and installation artist, whose art is influenced by both the cultures of Nigeria, where he grew up, and Britain, where he now lives. The complexities of nationality and identity, of history and ethnicity, post-colonialism and today�s global economy, form the intellectual and aesthetic arena in which Shonibare works
theEye - Sandra Blow
Three spectacular canvases by Sandra Blow were one of the highlights of the 2006 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Sadly, this was her last show, as she died in August that year. This film was made in her studio in St. Ives as she was preparing to submit her works, and it captures her remarkable character and her fascinating reflections on a lifetime creating beautiful, rigorous, distinctive and joyous paintings
William Kentridge: Anything is Possible
William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible gives viewers an intimate look into the mind and creative process of William Kentridge, the South African artist whose acclaimed charcoal drawings, animations, video installations, shadow plays, mechanical puppets, tapestries, sculptures, live performance pieces, and operas have made him one of the most dynamic and exciting contemporary artists working today. With its rich historical references and undertones of political and social commentary.
Documentaries on Contemporary Art
The Bowman Arts Centre has an exhaustive collection of documentary films about contemporary art and artists. This collection is a unique archive , and a valuable research tool for both artists and the interested public. The community is welcome and encouraged to arrange screenings on the following films here at the Centre.