VoCA - a huge fan of German art galleries - went to the Hamburger Bahnhof today, a contemporary art museum housed in a former train station.

The spaces are large and white, perfect for all the enormous Anselm Kiefer works, including the lead fighter plane in the middle of the space and the large scale library of lead books, which seemed to be embedded with seeds of some kind. In the middle of this semi-enclosed library was a glass polyhedron with what looked like analogue film strips inside.

Anselm Kiefer, Volkszählung, 1991. Image: ncf.ca

Nearby, the curators had hung an engraving of Melancholia, by Albrecht Durer. Turns out that Kiefer has been inspired by the figure of Melancholia, and the polyhedron sculpture was taken from one in Durer’s image.

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Coming up on VoCA:

Paul Thek, Uncle Tom´s Cabine with Tower of Babel, 1976. The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper.
Image: zkm.de

-The Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
-Paul Thek at the Facklenberg collection, Hamburg
-Art criticism debate in London

…and more!

While VoCA is in Europe, we asked contributor Bill Clarke to report back from this year’s Power Plant Gallery fundraiser, the Power Ball to see how it compared to the AGO’s fundraiser, Massive Party (see VoCA’s report HERE.)

To start, we must say that the PB ad campaign was fantastic:

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Cross dressing artists are nothing new, of course. (See post below on Grayson Perry)

Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, c.1920-1921. Image: happynews.com

VoCA saw the Tate Modern exhibition that brings together work by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. It’s subtitled “The Moment Art Changed Forever”. Indeed.

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The five finalists are:

-Tim Lee, West Coast and Yukon region

-Daniel Barrow, Prairies and the North region;

-Terence Koh, Ontario region

-Raphaëlle de Groot, Québec region

-Mario Doucette, Atlantic region

In a recent article in London’s Financial Times, the cross-dressing potter (and Turner Prize winner) Grayson Perry bemoans the rise of the ‘conceptual’ in art at the expense of craftsmanship, something that VoCA has been bothered by for quite some time.

Artist Grayson Perry among his pots. Image: smh.com.au

“Perry launches into an impassioned discourse on our responsibility to hand down skills to future generations and the importance of taking pride in the execution of a work of art. “There is too much slap-dashery in contemporary art,” he says. “It’s as if it is enough to knock up some sort of stage set that basically illustrates ‘the idea’.”

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We will be posting intermittently until June 2, from London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Hamburg….

Stay tuned…

Who will win this year’s Sobey Art Award? The list is full of strong contenders including the hot photographer Scott McFarland, the excellent Paul Butler and Theo Sims, Luis Jacob, Raphaelle de Groot and the fun, funny art collective BGL.

While choosing among the contenders is tough, VoCA has chosen one artist from each region who we feel are deserving of the Sobey, regardless of whether they win this year or not.

For more on the Sobey Art Award, please click HERE.

WEST COAST AND YUKON: Althea Thauberger; Tim Lee; Scott McFarland; Mark Soo; Kevin Schmidt.
VoCA PICK: TIM LEE

Tim Lee, My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) / Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), Neil Young, 1979. Image: hustlerofculture.com

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Our 2nd annual Most Influential People in the Canadian Art World:

Click HERE for last year’s list.

1. Phoebe Greenberg, Founder, DHC Art Foundation, Montreal.

Phoebe Greenberg. Image: ledevoir.com

For bringing internationally relevant shows to Canada. Next is Sophie Calle’s installation from the last Venice Biennale.

More HERE.

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The late Haida artist Bill Reid received the Order of British Columbia. Image: protocol.gov.bc.ca

In Canada, the first time the work of contemporary indigenous artists made it into an art context was in 1965-67 when Doris Shadbolt, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, organized the groundbreaking exhibition, Arts of the Raven: Master Works of the Northwest.

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