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ANGEL ORENSANZ DISPLAYS IN PALERMO THE JOYOUS INSTABILITY OF ART

February 9, 2008. The Government of Sicily and the City of Palermo, through Palazzo Inteligente Foundation (Palermo) and Orestiade Foundation (Gibellina) have readied for Angel Orensanz one of Sicily’s most emblematic monuments, the Castle of La Cuba for his exhibition “The Joyous Instability of Art”. 

The show is being curated  by contemporary most prestigious art critic and curator,  Achille Bonito Oliva, a professor at La Sapienza University in Rome.The show opened this Saturday, February 9, at 5:30 in the evening with the participation of the Secretary for Culture, Environment and Public Education of Sicily, professor Achille Bonito Oliva and sculptor Angel Orensanz.

....by Professor Achille Bonito Oliva: "Instability is the true essence of contemporary art. For this reason you need to start from a level of conceptual abstraction which matter cannot provide. By projecting through shape, art experiences a condition of wholesome intangibility made of references and intervals between idealization and realization. full text

The show will be open until next March. The show presents a collection of forty drawings of Orensanz as well as several of his installations of sculpture in fabrics in the exterior and interior of the Castle, in a nod  to the cultural role that the castle played during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Spanish/Aragonese period.After the exhibition at the Castle la Cuba, the work of Orensanz  will travel to Fondazione Orestiade in Gibellina, near Palermo, a center  of creativity and research open to European, Arabic and Jewish  creativity, historical and contemporary.


invite card and detail from the installation


THE ORENSANZ OF ORENSANZ.
CLOSE UP TO FORTY YEARS OF SCULPTURE PRACTICE.

November 13 to December 31, 2007

Zaragoza, November 13, 2007. Curator Jesus Pedro Lorente, professor of art at the University of Zaragoza and Eduardo Capape,  the  director of the art gallery Cajalon (Zaragoza) have been working  for almost a year in establishing the road map of close to forty years of the art work of Angel Orensanz; a carrier conducted in the US, Spain, Russia, Italy and another dozen countries.

Their curatorial strategy has resorted to a intelligent heuristic resource. By gaining  unprecedented access to Orensanz’s studio they have extracted significant samples of the four main periods of the body of Orensanz oeuvre from his ateliers, storages and studio spaces in Zaragoza itself, Paris and New York.

Then, by displaying  them extraordinarily documented in the five rooms of the Cajalon art gallery in the heart of  Downtown Zatagoza. Their  semi archeological methodology  and the enthusiasm of the gallery  have led them to produce a companion catalogue, to be followed by a full blown book that will be published in the course of this exhibition that opens tomorrow November 13 and ends December 31.  

The show runs from November 13 to December 31, 2007. It is open and free to the public daily, except Sundays.     
from 10 AM to 4 PM; and is located at Coso, 29 Zaragoza 10007. Zaragoza, Spain.  Tel. 34.976-703300.



 The four periods featured in this “The Orensanz of Orensanz” correspond roughly to almost forty years of art practice: “Barcelona y Paris (1960’s -1970s”) illustrated in a room that presents  six wood pieces and a bronze that breath the spirit of the late Rodin and Gauguin; “The groups and  environments of the mid 70 and 80”, typified mostly by his show in Holland Park, London, 1973. The third room follows with a survey of his postmodernist drawings of the 1900’s and the beginning of the present decade; to close this circuit with a fourth,  ample room in which the  color explodes with fabrics that correspond to his recent  installations in Venice (Biennales of 2005 and 2007), .Water museums of Lisboa  (2006) and Coimbra (Portugal), Kassel. (2007) and Moma Wales (2007).  The exhibition comes accompanied by a catalogue that carries the methodology that props  this exhibition. Later in December, there will be a book on the work of Angel Orensanz to be presented to the public before the end of the year.


Orensanz and Carmo moved by road in close parallel to the river Mondego, approaching  the boats installation of  Orensanz  in some points  of their drive, until reaching the Ocean open, and endless like a universe of water. The automobile was all the time decorated with the circles and tarpaulins of Orensanz, making it an imaginary dinosaur. Read Spanish version of press release
November 5, 2007 - To mark the end of his exhibition at the Coimbra Water Museum,Angel Orensanz and curator Manuel Carmo drove a 1930’s Ferrari from the front entrance to the museum  in the banks of the river Mondego.to the nearby seashore of the Atlantic Ocean, just a few miles away. “Water Dreams” has been seen by thousands of visitors from the city of Coimbra itself and from the entire country.

The Orensanz exhibition  opened with the conceptual  sculptural piece  “River of Fire” in which several boats participated  in a display and juxtaposition of water and fire. In  that first piece he developed the antinomy of water as a threat and a relief. In this last intervention he is bringing up the semantics of  water as the primal perspective of all motion and  its eventual  absorption into  the galloping  ocean. The Ferrari, an original from the 1930’s,  brings the utopian mind of the early 20th century when the automobile in the hands of the Italian engineers and artists became  an  icon of individual empowerment, speed  and energy.

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Watch the video : The Garden Before the Snake

Sculpture, Utopia and Mirage by Angel Orensanz

This is an art installation, offically inaugurated on October 16, in which Angel Orensanz raises the issue of the environment from a critical perspective. It portrays the utopia of the garden as a horizon of beauty and moral uplifting and its built-in danger of mirage and delusion. Three groups of vertical sculptures cover the South side of the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza,
just yards away from the entrance to the UN.


The Garden Before the Snake


This installation was scheduled to coincide with the recent debates on the world climate change. Now the Parks Department of the City of New York has extended its presentation to the end of March 2008, due to the enthusiasm of the people. The work is on view at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the corner of 47th St. and Second Avenue; and can be seen 24 hours, day and night.






Wales, film still (August 2007) at the closing of the MoMa exhibit

July 2, 2007. Sculptor Angel Orensanz is in Kassel (Germany) participating in the Dokumenta, but in reality he traveled to meet Joseph Beuys. The revolutionary German artist carried in Kassel (1982) an art experiment of  transcendental nature. He planted through the City of  Kassel 7000 oak trees accompanied by a stele in basalt next to each tree. Orensanz landed in Kassel with a cargo of his canvasses  in bright colors that he has dispersed throughout the city. The canvasses of Orensanz  in numerous points of the city contribute a semantic ambiguity, both festive and alarming. Are these canvasses an alarm code of some eminent situation or do they salute the Documenta itself? They are not a permanent fixture but a transitory gesture. That's precisely what Orensanz  is attempting in Kassel, to continue the challenge of Beuys to produce more than a work, a meaning not unidirectional but multiple and referential.

The oaks of Joseph Beuys and his steles go almost unnoticed in Kassel but they have reached the culture and art of the entire world.  The relevance of Orensanz's  Kassel interventions is not in the exchange value of the pieces but in their visual pull at a specific place and  time.



This year Kassel Dokumenta opened on June 16th and will close on September 23d. Angel Orensanz will carry his intervention in Kassel in three occasions, always early in the morning and without prior announcement. Orensanz's intervention does not come clothed as an object  "but as an event, soaked in intention, meaning and intrigue, in the words of the artist himself".
press release in Spanish language

A new book about Angel Orensanz's recent works
was just released in New York on April 12, 2007


NOMADIC SCULPTURE:
Orensanz in Tel Aviv

New York, April 5, 2007.   Invited officially by the City of Petah Tivah  (Tel Aviv), sculptor Angel Orensanz has accepted a commission to create an environmental piece that is already fluttering with the wind of the Mediterranean. He calls it “Nomadic Sculpture” and tries to capture the transient texture of a land and the peoples who over the millennia  have moved through it, East/West and West/East. The event is taking place on the Sportek plaza at the Sirkin interchange on Arba Artzot Street of the city of Petah Tikva, in the outskirts of  Tel Aviv.   Angel Orensanz commented on his installation as a  series of silk, parallel shapes in vibrant colors that speak about the diversity of languages, cultures, faiths and traditions always making a strong gesture of presence in the region  but never establishing a permanent city habitat. Thousands upon thousands of people circle daily the Orensanz piece and accompanying sculptural contributions of more than 200 artists who participate this year in this art festival. 

The event, a yearly artistic feature in Israel, is joined by the museums and art galleries of the region under the concept of “Passover of Hope”.  The organizer of this annual event is Doron Polak, an international art curator and ardent proponent of a new, world art culture, founder of the Artists Museum, established in Poland, and of the “Stones speak Peace”. This last project premiered at the Biennale of Venice of 2001 and has literally moved around the world. 


MEDUSA: BRONZES, GLASS AND FIBERGLASS

A Current Exhibition of Angel Orensanz in Madrid.

Madrid (Spain) March 30, 2007. A vast collection of 80 pieces in bronze, glass and fiberglass opened yesterday, March 29, at the Galeria Dolores de Sierra, in the heart of Madrid.

The exhibition will be opened to the public for a month, and reveals a most powerful strand of the art work of Angel Orensanz. It is a powerful body of sculpture in bronze, steel and glass. The bronzes were shown last time in Rome in an exhibition organized by the Ministry of Culture of Italy; similar steels pieces were shown in Dusseldorf and at the Water Museum in Lisbon (Portugal). The glass and fiber glass pieces presently shown at the Dolores de Sierra Gallery in Madrid belong to the family of his recent sculptures cast in Murano Venice (Italy), and belong to the same family of the ones that form part of the Saatchi and Saatchi London Collection.

This is an essentialist exhibition centered in three materials that are an integral part of the canon work of Orensanz. This exhibition does not deal with Orensanz's prolific fabrics sculpture, works on paper, painting, film and video that will profusely be shown in Cardiff, Tel Aviv, Palermo and Coimbra later on throughout this 2007. The language of bronze, steel and glass acquires in the hands of Angel Orensanz an animated, creational and other worldly condition seldom generated by any other contemporary artist. These pieces, irrespective of their date, material or texture, are endowed with vibrancy, ingenuity and unparalleled assertiveness.

The exhibition will be open to the public until the 21st of April 2007.

Galeria Dolores de Sierra
San Agustin, 15
28014 Madrid (Spain)
Tel. 34 91 429 0151
Galeria@doloresdesierra.com

Medusa