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Alfredo Barsuglia’s installation Oderfla Beauty Resort is located in the desert of Yucca Valley, California and consists of the remains of a ghost house covered in sand and dust. Oderfla Beauty Resort concerns beauty, transience, illusion and society. By presenting Barsuglia’s piece of art in the context of the desert he deals with and emphasizes the transience of human beauty. The quest for everlasting youth and beauty becomes an illusion. Oderfla Beauty Resort reflects current society, with its strong desire for beauty and glamour.
For the last five years Alfredo Barsuglia has been working on the theme of oral hygiene, an aspect of beauty. Since last year his focus has shifted to beauty in general. In his work he reflects and analyzes the complex theme of the current ideal of beauty and the ideal body, giving particular consideration to the economical, medical, social and mass media backgrounds and mechanisms of distribution.
Barsuglia, an Austrian artist, is in currently an artist in residence program in the high desert.
Permanent Installation is located at:
1188 Tahoe Ave.
Yucca Valley, CA 92284
(Flamingo Heights)
The Palm Springs Art Museum announced today that it will be the exclusive venue for the major exhibition Against All Odds: Keith Haring in the Rubell Family Collection. Organized in collaboration with the Palm Springs Art Museum by Mark Coetzee, Director of the Rubell Family Collection and adjunct curator for the exhibition, it will run from November 8, 2008 to January 18, 2009. This marks the first of other future partnerships between the two museums involving a range of initiatives.
The exhibition presents work Haring produced after the period of his early mural and graffiti art. Included in the exhibition are 70 paintings, drawings and one sculpture spanning from works he created for his first gallery exhibition in 1982 to others made closer to his death in 1990 at the age of 31. The exhibition also includes 33 works by other artists who were important friends and artistic peers in Haring’s life, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, George Condo, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Andy Warhol. Contextualized by the art of his associates, Haring’s colorful and playful, yet equally powerful, acidic work records the lively engagement of art and culture that represented a key aspect of the New York art scene of the 1980s.
“Keith Haring began a very close relationship with the Rubell family early in his career and the Rubell Family Collection was able to acquire one of the most significant collections of Haring’s work in the world,” said Mark Coetzee. “Drawn exclusively from our collection, the exhibition celebrates a new and exciting relationship between the Palm Springs Art Museum and the Rubell Family Collection.”
“We are honored to be the exclusive venue for this exhibition from the great Rubell Family Collection,” said Steven Nash, Executive Director of the Palm Springs Art Museum. “The Rubell family has an amazing collection of work by Haring and his friends. Their staff in consultation with ours have put together an excellent exhibition that we are privileged to make available to west coast audiences.”
Education programs scheduled with the exhibition include a series of films about the artists, including The Universe of Keith Haring [November 9] and Conversations with Jean-Michel Basquiat [November 23]. The museum’s Teen Art Group will also work with members of Gay Associated Youth to create an in-gallery collaborative experience centered on viewing the works in the exhibition and responding through writing and personal interaction as a means of empowerment.
Additionally, the art museum will offer a series of lectures and private tours of the exhibition to art students of Palm Desert’s College of the Desert. A panel discussion at the opening night reception will be held with the Rubell Family and members of museum staff, centering on the Rubells’ history of collecting and especially their involvement with Keith Haring. An audio tour of the exhibition will be available on an iPod platform. And on January 6, Mark Coetzee will present a formal lecture elaborating upon themes established in the exhibition.
A fully illustrated catalogue for the exhibition will be available, with introductory essay by Mark Coetzee. Co-published by the RFC and Palm Springs Art Museum, it will be the first publication to examine in depth the full range of works by Haring in the Rubell collection.
WORKS BY ARTIST DAVID TOUSTER
On View September 13th 2008 A one-night only art event at JANSSENARTSPACE
Gallery artist David Touster opens the season at JANSSENARTSPACE with a series of multi-media works entitled, “Private Pictures”. Ponder the mystery, the moment and the meaning of Touster’s intimate collection of works. Exhibit runs one-night only, Saturday, September 13th from 7-10pm.
Janssenartspace is located at 333 S. Indian Canyon Drive in Palm Springs, Ca. 760.864.9922
David Touster imagines that at the time the original photos for these works were taken, somebody probably said to somebody, “Nobody else is going to see these, right?” So who is to blame, the one for showing skin or the other for asking them to?
Art is storytelling. In “Private Pictures,” Touster looks at how intimate behavior can often be infused with an element of blame. He attempts to highlight that there are different sides to every story, all of them subjective and incomplete, and that it is the judgment, not the act, which should be condemned.
Touster works from both original and vintage vernacular photographs, reducing the images’ visual information to it’s barest through computer pixilation and manipulation. He then prints these new images on canvas and paints them with acrylics, using a variety of techniques. By leaving us to fill in the details, we become aware of ourselves looking at the work, and it’s when we participate putting ourselves in another’s shoes, that perhaps we can grow more compassionate.
