On Saturday the 22nd and Sunday 23rd at 16 hs, Ludovico Pratesi will accompany the public on a guided tour through the exhibition Urban Spaces.
On Saturday the 22nd at 17.30 hs, the artist Thomas Struth and curator Ludovico Pratesi will be present at the Fundación Proa to dialogue with regards to the works being shown in Urban Spaces.

Photograph by Ayako Miyazaki 2004
In an interview done by Ludovico Pratesi, Thomas Struth comments with regards to the city “Ah! Cities! Once founded as commercial post son the shore of a river, as ports and fortresses.

Cities continue being stimulating melting pots of information and possibilities. Not withstanding, city-life has become increasingly difficult. The dependency on the automobile as a means of transportation dominates the quality of space in a destructive and unbearable way. It is surprising how the idea of Utopian urbanism – which emerged in the beginning of the 20th Century and promised leisure and happiness in an environment of apartment buildings and highways – has not been recycled or revised in our ecologically conscious era.

Cities from all around the world have ignored the imminent collapse of their structures due to greed, brutality, and incompetence of certain real estate developers that, with an alarming frequency, destroy important historic sites in urban environments. The politicians and urban planners almost always fail at the hour of controlling the interests of the private sector, and having a vision of the future of their cities.

The old, centric, neighborhoods of many cities in U.S have already been destroyed; China and Russia have copied this model, disregarding their urban history. But people want to be in Paris, London, and New York: three metropolis’ that represent the dream of the old city at a human scale”.

Some facts on his life
Thomas Struth was born in 1954 in Gelden, Germany; he lives and works in Dusseldorf. He began studying painting at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and later listed himself in the photography course of Bernd Becher. In 1978 he obtained a scholarship from the Academy to travel to New York, where he did his first black and white photos without any human presence.

He later takes on color and adopts a larger format. Towards the mid-eighties he takes on the relationship between man and environment in a series of portraits that, above all, show families in domestic environments. He later captures crowds and anonymous characters in the interior of museum exhibition rooms, exploring the intense dialogue between the public and the works of art. In recent years, he has extended his idiom to include in his work tropical landscapes.

He has shown work at the Kunsthalle in Bern and the Yamaguchi Museum in 1987, at the Portikus in Fráncfort, at the Renaissance Society in Chicago in 1990, at the Hirschhron Museum in Washington in 1992, at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg in 1993, at the ICA in Boston and at the ICA in London in 1994, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 1995, at the International Art Palace in Pekín in 1997, at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes and at the Stedelijk Museum in Ámsterdam in 1988, at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in 2000, at the Museum of Dallas and the MOCA in Los Angeles in 2002, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2000, at the Prado in Madrid in 2007 and at the Museo Madre in Naples in 2008.

Ludovico Pratesi returns to Proa with two guided visits on Saturday the 22nd at 16:00 hs. and on Sunday the 23rd at 17:30 hs.
Ludovico Pratesi was born in Rome, city which he lives in, on April 15th 1961. He graduated in Law and Modern Art History at the University of Rome. He is an art critic for the newspaper La Repubblica. Between 1994 and 2000 he wrote for the French newspaper Le Monde. He was the Artistic Advisor for the city of Bari from 2002 to 2005. Since December of the year 2000 he has been the Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Pesaro. In 2009 he was named curator of the Palazzo Fabroni, a contemporary museum situated in Pistoia, Toscana. Since 2004 he has been the Artistic Director of the Fondazione Guastalla, whose headquarters are in Rome.

Between 1998 and 2008 he was taught Contemporary Art History at the University of Reggio Calabria. He has curated numerous exhibitions of international and Italian artists, among them: Candida Höfer, Giuseppe Penone, Enzo Cucchi, Tony Cragg, Marina Abramovic, Joseph Kosuth, John Cage, Domenico Bianchi, Mimmo Paladino, Cristiano Pintaldi, Francesco Gennari, Stefano Arienti y Vedovamazzei. He is president of the Italian branch of the IAAC (International Asociation of Art Critics).

Reservations: info@proa.org

“The significance of the School of Düsseldorf in the contemporary art panorama”, is the dicussion and investigation theme proposed by Valeria Gonzalez for the organization of this round table. Together with Ana María Battistozzi and Daniel Molina, she proposes an approach to the the exhibition’s photographers’ reach with contemporary art.

Daniel Molina has commented on the exhibition: “ Urban Spaces is an exceptional exhibition. No so much for what these works can say regarding the theme of the city, but for everything that goes beyond speech, that whispering of the meaning that rests between the limits of the image. Gursky, Höfer, Hütte, Ruff and Struth are five intense visual poets. Beneath the mask of objectivism give free reign ti the exultant cold sentimentalism. That sentimentalism that bursts a few seconds before the tragic is made visible.” (Nota completa http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1145190)

Ana María Battistozzi wrote an extensive article titled “Empty Spaces, absent subjects”, from which we take the following fragment: “In the exhibition Urban Spaces, showing five photographers of the Dusseldorf School at Fundación Proa, a new way of transmitting the world in the global era can be seen, with a scenic emptiness and a way of looking guided by the supposed absence of the author.” (Nota completa http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/notas/2009/07/04/_-01951187.htm)

This meeting of specialists in contemporary art and photography opens the cycle Meetings and Debates that will be held throughout the month of August. The cycle aims to explore the theme of the city through art. Films, rounds tables, and interviews offer a panorama of the incidence of the city in contemporary life.

Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and the Becher matrimony Interview and documentaries Series.

From July 14th and August 28th

Tuesdays and Fridays 16hs
Admissions with Exhibition tickets

Program:

-      Conversation with  Andreas Gursky – Museo Haus Lange, Krefeld. 68’

-      Bernd y Hilla Becher – Dir. Jean-Pierre Krief. 13’

-      Thomas Ruff – Dir. Jean-Pierre Krief. 13’

-      Thomas Struth – Dir. Jean-Pierre Krief. 13’

Conversations with Andreas Gursky – A Museo Haus Lange, Krefeld. 68’ production.

Interview conducted in November 2008 as part of the exhibition Andreas Gursky: Werke / Works 80 – 08 at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, by its Director Martin Hentschel, and Education Coordinator Thomas Janzen. The artist comments of his formative years with Otto Steiner  and the Becher matrimony, on how he merged the opposing tendencies of their teachings -subjective and objective – in his work.
During the interview he addresses topics such as his method of working in series, the passage of the large format and digital media, and the relationship between photography and painting. He also reflects on how globalization and contemporary life have affected his artwork.

Contact Series – A KSVISIONS, ART and Jeu de Paume production

Contacts is a series documentaries on contemporary photography, in which the  invited artists guide the spectator to the heart of their creative photographic process by selecting images and commenting on their contact sheets, tests and impression. Thorough this process they show the evolution of the character and meaning of their work throughout the years. In this opportunity are presenting the episodes devoted to Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth.