“Imago Mundi: Map of the New Art” at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the Island of St. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice from September 1-November 1, 2015 is the largest exhibition to date of the Luciano Benetton Collection, a collection of works commissioned and collected by Luciano Benetton on his travels around the world. Sourced from more than 38 collections, the exhibition comprises 6,930 works by emerging and established artists whose only restriction is the 10x12cm (3.9x4.7inches) format.

Under the auspices of the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, the Imago Mundi project commissions 10 x 12 cm works by established and emerging artists from around the world which are then organized by geographical location with the aim of “mapping the situation of human cultures at the start of the third millennium.” By the end of 2015 the project will have engaged more than 20,000 artists from over 100 countries and indigenous people.

The Venice exhibition includes works by artists from Afghanistan, Algeria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Caribbean, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Latvia, Mexico, Nigeria, North Korea, Italy, United States of America, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Syria, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tibet, Tunisia, Uganda/Rwanda/Burundi, and Vienna, as well as works by Kalahari Bushmen, North American Indigenous Artists, and Australian Aboriginal Artists.

“Ideas, meanings and inspirations are not monopolized products, but fluid and evolving expressions born of interaction and communication between East and West, North and South, and through the convergence of cultural experience,” says Luciano Benetton. “We look to the new frontiers of art—personalities, countries, emerging languages and different cultures—to foster openness towards the world and the coexistence of expressive diversity.”

“Map of the New Art” is at at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Italy from September 1-November 1, 2015.

The Bendigo Art Gallery has announced Chinese-born Australian artist Guan Wei as the winner of the 2015 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Australia’s richest open painting prize. Guan Wei was awarded the $50,000 prize for his work “Beach 5,” which the judges praised for its “strong cultural message.”

“It is a painting about Australia and the idea of cultural transformation by a Chinese born Australian artist that speaks to us about the changing nature of Australian life,” said the judges, who selected Guan Wei’s entry from a shortlist of 30 works and an original pool of more than 250 entrants from across Australia.

Guan Wei is best known for his fabulous narrative paintings that connect the cultures of China and Australia. Drawing inspiration from themes such as immigration, secret histories, cross-cultural understanding, exploration, and the plight of refugees, he creates works imbued with wit, humour, and a sense of social conscience.

The biennial Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize was initiated in 2003 by Mr Allen Guy C.B.E in honour of his late brother Arthur Guy who was killed in 1945 aged 30 while serving with the Royal Australian Air Force in New Guinea.

The 2015 judging panel included Dr Vincent Alessi, (Senior Lecturer, Visual Arts and Design, La Trobe University), Jennifer Kalionis (Director, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum), John McDonald (Art Critic.Sydney Morning Herald), Peter Guy (representative of the Guy family) and Julie Millowick (Vice Chair, Bendigo Art Gallery Board).

Guan Wei’s “Beach 5” and works from the shortlisted artists are on display at Bendigo Art Gallery in the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize exhibition from August 29 to November 1, 2015.

“The way I think about constructing images is connected to things 
like watercolor painting,” says
 Sue de Beer. “Finding ways in video to make all the colors soften and bleed is exciting to me.” The artist is showing me a collection of prisms and glass objects that she has used — to the detriment of her cameraman’s back, she concedes — in conjunction with the camera lens to capture the indistinct, overlapping, or fragmented shots that splinter
 the wandering stories of her videos. Her most recent work, The Blue Lenses, a two-channel film projection on view at Marianne Boesky’s Lower East Side location from September 9 to October 25, features one such image. A sword dancer is nearing the climax of his performance, but for a second, the shot changes and the camera is looking down on a girl illuminated by a harsh, green light. A watery duplicate floats to her left, mirroring her movements. Her attention is caught and she stares into the camera for a moment. Twinned, on two screens, four sets of sultry eyes blink up at the viewer.

As with watercolor, that fickle medium, much of de Beer’s work teeters on chance — the perfect coming together of elements out of her control. “I stand behind my cameraman’s shoulder, usually with a monitor I’m holding, and pass him things to try
out. After working together for a while, you don’t even have to say anything. He just knows,” she explains. It’s this kind of relationship that’s key for de Beer, who relies on the collaboration with her writers, actors, and crew to determine the direction a work will take. It’s not only the visuals that come about organically, left up to whatever happens between 
the wineglasses, kaleidoscopes, or other unorthodox objects she proffers on the day of shooting. The entire outcome of a de Beer film relies on experimentation, risk, and a group of people willing to follow her down the circuitous path along which these elements lead.

The melodious chant of an Arabic prayer opens the film. With two university research grants and a four-month-long teaching position at NYU Abu Dhabi, de Beer set out to make what 
she describes as a “Daphne du Maurier–inspired noir set in
a fictional version of the Middle East.” Du Maurier’s stories, which were the basis for a number of Alfred Hitchcock films, are masterpieces of suspense and intrigue. For her film, de Beer has in fact lifted the title for The Blue Lenses from a du Maurier story, in which a woman, upon having the bandages removed after surgery to restore her sight, finds that through her
 new eyes, the people around her now alarmingly bear animal heads atop their human bodies. De Beer’s version also creates alternate modes of seeing, but here — in her fractured scenes, often bathed in blue, deep green, and bright red — the altered perception presents a multifaceted picture of the Middle 
East, one that includes but also defies the preordained set of images the region usually calls to mind.

The opening scene is set by the voice of a young woman, who tells a story that starts at the end, with a funeral for a man she knew for a while, albeit not very well. It seems that nobody did. Over the course of 20 minutes, we learn a little more about this mysterious character, Daniel: salesman, connoisseur of fabric, drug user, magician, and thief. Interspersed between these semi-narrative fragments, told to us by either the character himself on-screen or the woman’s voice, are snippets of disparate and unrelated scenes and snapshots. While the plot wanders, a plodding, clocklike drumbeat drives through the middle of the film, holding the viewer’s attention through a story that leads only to further ambiguity. Interruptions come in the form of a burlesque dance performance, or eerie stills of the indoor ski slope located in the opulent Mall of the Emirates, shown deserted after hours. As the scenes skip and jump, they circle back to the captivating, plotless fragments of the enigmatic man’s story. The character of Daniel came from a casting call de Beer put out, at a point when she and her writer on this piece, Nathaniel Axel, had only one scrap of text written, a monologue from 
the perspective of a shoplifting employee. With this in hand, de Beer sent out a call for all the characters in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol,
 purely to see what this
 odd combination would
 yield. “A guy came in who
thought he looked like
 the Ghost of Christmas
 Present,” she recalls. “He 
was all wet from the rain, he had on a Hawaiian
 shirt, and he was very big,
 and looked like he was
 going to murder us all,”
she laughs. Though she 
ended up casting another actor in the role, the character of Daniel was born. De Beer often starts by “asking for something that doesn’t work,” but pursuing it nonetheless, because “asking this of a place or set of people can give you a truth-event, or a new kind of image that you wouldn’t expect. You’re not asking for an image you know you want, you’re asking for the situation to tell you its own image.” The plan is: don’t make plans.

De Beer’s style of winging it may be unconventional, but 
it’s one that she has developed over time, with a band of 
fellow risk-takers willing to follow her lead — whether that’s casting actors who might not ever see a script (many times she just describes what should happen in a scene and lets them 
take it from there), filming without a sense of the finished structure, or the aforementioned tendering of objects over her filmmaker’s shoulder. Making herself (as well as others) nervous is a motivating force. She admits it’s not always easy to find those eager to take the leap. “You have a crew and actors and equipment that cost a lot of money, and everybody waiting around to be told what to do, while I’m wondering, is anything interesting going to happen today?” She laughingly admits that, to put it bluntly, this process “takes balls.”
 Much of this she learned during six years spent in Berlin in the early 2000s — needing a break from New York and its skyrocketing rents — where she developed her style of non-narrative stories through the videos Hans & Grete, 2003 (included in the Whitney’s 2004 Biennial), Black Sun, 2005, and The Quickening, 2006. She looked to the filmmakers of New German Cinema for inspiration, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, who, because of a loophole in German governmental funding for cinema and TV, were able to make their early films fast and loose but with what de Beer regards
 as incredible artistic integrity. Since returning to New York for a faculty position at NYU, finding money has become an even bigger pressure. “Your funders also have to believe in your balls,” she jokes. And The Blue Lenses, for which she transported this method of working to a country where she’d never worked before, took “the largest metaphorical balls.”

De Beer grew up around New England, moving to new York 
to study at Parsons for her undergraduate degree before receiving an MFA from Columbia. There, in her second year, after working primarily with photography, she made her first film, Making Out with Myself, 1997, which features the young artist, through visual trickery, performing the titular act. Not one to enjoy being in front of any camera, de Beer experimented with her own image early on because of an apprehension about asking other people 
to do things that could be potentially awkward or embarrassing. But that nervousness has proven to be a great stimulant for de Beer — anxiety becomes a type of challenge. “Now I feel very comfortable asking people to do that for me,” she says. “As I’ve grown older and made more work, the process has evolved into just pulling all my information out of the piece as it unfolds, rather than coming up with an idea and executing it.” Often her favorite parts of the final films are these unscripted moments. In The Quickening, she recalls telling German hard-core musician Gina D’Orio, who plays the lead in the film, to “go into the forest and dance with the animals.” once settling on some music, Gina choreographed the ensuing ballroom dance she performs with a wolflike creature, after accepting a pineapple from his outstretched paw. Similarly taking a gamble in how she screens her work, with The Blue Lenses de Beer has opted for Marianne Boesky’s Lower East Side gallery, a bright, storefront space dominated by a wall of windows. It’s an attempt to get away from the pitch-black, curtained rooms where film is usually at home and which the artist dislikes. She’s created sculptural installation elements to work with the environmental constraints. Patterned, lacelike screens — made of MDF to block the bright sunlight — mimic the architecture seen throughout The Blue Lenses, and the windows are tinted blue. Rather than trying to make the space around the film disappear, to have no interference between the viewer and the work at hand, de Beer wants the screening environment to provide another element that can play into the audience’s interpretation.

The attraction of de Beer’s work is that she’s not interested
in giving the viewer a clear, wrapped-up story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. She manages to make her films both suspenseful and captivating, yet awash with ambiguity and without conclusion. In so doing, she invites an abundance of readings. With still images, sections separated by vague titles, dual projections that sometimes sync, sometimes skip just a
beat, and occasionally go off on their own tangents, de Beer uses any means to bring together the most interesting accumulation of scenes and visual elements to make her multilayered pieces. But there is one thing she won’t do: “Postproduction effects. I hate them,” she says. “I feel that it just looks like after effects.” Everything happens on set. What she shoots is what she gets; she doesn’t retouch her work. “I always shoot with colored lights. I’ll maybe lighten something occasionally, but I have to believe the world to be able to make it a world, which includes being
in a room with the lights exactly the way they are,” she explains. Even if making that world, and getting that image with the lighting just perfect, requires a certain amount of trust, risk, and backache for those involved.

A version of this article appears in the September 2015 issue of Modern Painters magazine.

Elevator brawls, basketball trolls, and slow-motion showers: The subjects of Dana Schutz’s latest paintings are about as bizarre as one might expect from an artist who can turn a simple sneeze into a grotesque epic. Her latest exhibition at Petzel in New York, “Fight In An Elevator,” opening September 10, comes on the heels of a busy year, one that included the birth of her son, a pivotal experience 
that found its way into the work in interesting ways. Schutz has been finding inspiration in unlikely places — the in-progress canvas seen above in her Brooklyn studio is based on a Swiss family she encountered in an airport. Modern Painters executive editor Scott Indrisek met with the artist to discuss claustrophobic spaces, bodies, and why Schutz is sometimes relieved to leave color behind.

Scott Indrisek: So everything here in the studio is for your Petzel show this fall?
Dana Schutz: I’m halfway through, I think. There are a lot of interior situations—like this fight
in a mirrored elevator. I’d actually considered “Interior Situation” for the show’s title, but then I thought it would creep people out. “We have to talk... there’s something... this situation in your interior.” But yes, I was thinking about these interior spaces that could be permeable, or that are really structured. The compositions are tightly constructed and kind of claustrophobic. The bodies of the subjects map out the space in the paintings.

Why an elevator?
Well, there have been a lot of fights in elevators: Beyoncé’s sister; Ray Rice. That one was really horrible. But I liked that it’s a space in which there’s a feeling of the painting opening up. It’s not quite voyeuristic, but
the action is bracketed in the painting, and it’s being revealed. There’s a mirrored floor; I wanted everything to be refracted. There’s an action in the painting. I don’t know if I love George Bellows, but I really like his boxing paintings. I was interested in seeing how I could paint a high-action situation in a very compressed space. It’s tough painting a fight between a man and a woman. There’s the politics of how you depict it. I didn’t want it
to be about abuse, and I didn’t want it to be a catfight. I wanted them to be equal aggressors. I think the woman is winning.

Were you consciously aiming for a sense
of claustrophobia in these new works?
The pictorial compression came from drawing, over the past few years. I was consciously trying to make finished drawings. I’d have an idea, but the format of the paper would always stay the same, and it was a matter of trying to structure the subject into this space—a lot of erasure while figuring out how it could work. When I approached these paintings, I started drawing them out on the canvas before painting them, which was new for me. In the past, I’d have a general idea of where things would go. But this time I was painting wet onto wet; the paint is much thinner, and drawing is more a part of the process than before.


Will there be drawings at Petzel?
I hope so. I’ve been in group shows with the drawings, and a couple museum
shows, but I’ve never shown them in a solo gallery show in New York. I’ve always drawn, but it was more like thumbnails or preliminary sketches.

So what changed?
I felt there was a crisis. That sounds so dramatic! “Everything burnt down, and then I started to draw.” But I started wanting
the paintings to feel a lot lighter. I didn’t feel that they were quite working.

Was it strange to be working without color?
No, it’s great! It’s fantastic and really pleasurable. You just have one tool to make different marks.

Can you tell me about this painting of 
a man in the shower?
It’s actually a woman. It’s a slow-motion shower. You know how when you wash
 your face, your face sort of feels... deformed? I wanted the water and figuration in the painting to feel slow and lumpy.

What about this one, which is almost totally abstract?
It’s a breastfeeding painting. There’s the lap, and the body, and the baby’s head. To breastfeed you have to use all of these weird pillows — it’s really unstable. I wanted the painting to feel like a clock, spinning around.

Based on the schedule of breastfeeding?
There’s just so much sitting in a chair! This is the first painting I made once I was back in the studio after having my son. You sit in a chair forever. It’s crazy. For some people 
I guess it’s wonderful and relaxing. I got better at it, but initially it felt like wrestling badgers, like a calamity. And it was 
all the time, night and day. It’s funny because a lot of these paintings have compressed spaces, and
 I was thinking about that before having a baby, 
but doing so gave them 
a whole new meaning.


In 2007 you made a painting titled How We Would Give Birth. What were you thinking about childbirth before going through it in real life?
I didn’t know what that experience would be like, and the challenge was to see if I could make a painting with that subject, which seemed so heavy and difficult and intense. How do you paint that? And I was also interested in getting it wrong, too. Because painting can give you a lot of information but it can’t tell you exactly how to do something. I think of the work in that “How We Would...” series as being inaccurate instructions for people in the future. Now,
 I think painting childbirth would feel too serious to me. That makes a difference. It was like a miserable flu — not the normal flu, but one where you think you’re dying. And
 I don’t know if I’d want to paint that.

This small-scale portrait here — the woman’s expression is interesting.

I was in St. Louis, walking with my husband. We saw someone get pulled over by the cops; I think she was stoned. It did not seem like she got pulled over very often. She seemed a little freaked. The expression on her face while being interrogated by the police was one of trying both to conceal and engage at the same time — I wanted to make a painting that was like that, where the person is trying to hide and also really engage with the viewer, but also trying to look as normal as possible.

What about this painting, with the odd child in it with these huge testicles?
It’s a boy, and I wanted his body to become like a painter’s palette that looks like the features on it 
could be moved around. His body has a torque to it. And I added a basketball for scale and because it seemed boyish. The body’s pose felt like Roman sculpture, and the basketball is so everyday that it brought it back
 to the actual world. Also, my husband, Ryan, had had this crazy dream about shrinking after we had our 
baby. It was like a hallucination, that first week, when you don’t sleep at all. You spend so much time staring at this little body. And then, in the middle of the
night, Ryan was really worried; he kept asking: “Am I shrinking? Am I shrinking?” It was intense. And then he had this crazy dream about a little bald, mentally impaired troll, sort of like a leprechaun, but he was holding a basketball. The troll said, “I’ll be your friend.” In the beginning when you have a baby you are so
 tired and freaked out. But I should probably not talk about Ryan’s dreams, or any dreams, really!

What do you still have to do for the Petzel show?
I want to make a large painting of an intimate subject: something simple, like a couple in bed, from
an aerial view.

Figurative painting has seen a resurgence in the recent past (in no small part due to your influence). But at the same time there has been an upsurge in process-driven abstract painting, most of it fairly homogeneous. What excites you these days, reminding you that there’s still work to be done in a fairly conservative medium?
I don’t think painting is conservative, or any more conservative than any other medium. But I do think
it’s a good time: It feels very open. And there has been a lot of serious thinking and writing about painting in the past 10 years, which is exciting. About abstraction and figuration, I think there are bad and great artists in both camps and there really isn’t too much of a difference. It really only comes down to making interesting paintings.

In your work, the body occupies a fraught position — sometimes it’s dissolving, or exploding in violent gestures, or being dissected, or cannibalized. What
sorts of bodies inhabit these new paintings?
I think they are all different. Maybe they are containers of a sort? Some of them feel like they could be Trojan horses, sculptural, or active. I want them
 all to engage the viewer directly, to be very frontal. Even the figures that are in profile, I feel like they are totally set up for a viewer. I want them to be pushing 
up against their physical limitations, the space of
the painting — hemmed in by their interior space but able to step outside themselves.

A version of this article appears in the September 2015 issue of Modern Painters magazine.

— Gaudi’s First House Will Be a Museum: Barcelona’s Casa Vicens, designed by Antoni Gaudi in 1888, was the Spanish architect’s first house — and now it’s on its way to becoming a museum, with a projected opening date of fall 2016. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1984, the house remained primarily under the purview of the Herrero-Jover family, who acquired the property from Vicens’s widow and used it as a residence from 1899 to 2014, before selling to Andorran bank MoraBanc. Despite planned restorations, a number of irreparable changes were made to the structure over the years. Still, according to Mercedes Mora, of the MoraBanc family, who will serve as executive director of the museum, the house represents “an essential work for understanding his unique architectural language and the development of Modernism in Barcelona.” [TAN]

— Archaeologists Safeguard Against ISIS With 3D Cameras: Oxford and Harvard archaeologists with the Institute for Digital Archaeology will team up to give 5,000 3D cameras to residents in conflict zones across the Middle East, in hopes that they will capture around one million images of at-risk sites and artifacts by 2016. More than regular photographs, 3D images could allow the objects to be recreated in the future. “This is a race against time,” said executive director Roger Michel. “We’ve changed our timetable in recognition of the places being destroyed.” He added: “Digital archaeology, in my view, is the best hope that we have for preserving the architecture, the art history, of these sites. All around the Middle East, they feel so strongly about their local identity and history that they’re willing to help.” Actual distribution of all the cameras, however, is the next big hurdle. [BBC]

— Priced-Out Galleries Are Leaving Chelsea: Only two of the seven galleries that initially transformed Chelsea into an art district remain in the Manhattan neighborhood, after being priced out by escalating rent. Now, even the two stalwarts doubt they will renew their leases come November. “It’s time to move to a new area and be part of a new story,” said Michael Gillespie, owner of Foxy Production, one of the two galleries. “Chelsea feels more blue-chip and less an area where you come to discover new artists.” While Gagosian Gallery, Gladstone Gallery, David Zwirner remain, many art dealers have decamped to Chinatown or the Lower East Side, where the number of galleries has nearly doubled since 2010, leaping from 63 to 124. “Just like in Soho, galleries are the victims of their own success,” said Stuart Siegel, senior vice president at real-estate firm CBRE Group Inc.. “The galleries put Chelsea on the map. Then the world followed them.” [Bloomberg]

— Frank Lloyd Wright House Relocated to Crystal Bridges: The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is moving a Frank Lloyd Wright building, originally built in New Jersey, to Bentonville, Arkansas. The Bachman-Wilson House, built in 1954, is scheduled to open on November 11. [Observer, Artnet]

— Nazi Gold Train a Deathbed Revelation: Specialists believe that the location of a lost Nazi train containing a looted trove of gold and art has been found in Western Poland, after one of the men who helped hide the treasures disclosed its location on his deathbed. “The train is 100 metres long and is protected. The fact that it is armoured indicates it has a special cargo. We do not know what is inside the train. Probably military equipment but also possibly jewellery, works of art and archive documents,” said Piotr Zuchowski, head of conservation at Poland's culture ministry. [Telegraph, Independent, NYT]

— Black Portraits at Harvard: A show of rare portraits picturing black individuals in Victorian-era England is opening at Harvard University’s Cooper Gallery of African & African-American Art. “There’s a healing aspect to seeing these exquisite images,” said Vera Ingrid Grant, the gallery director. [WashPo]

— Russian police have found pieces of a 100-year-old bas relief believed to have been removed from its building by a conservative group claiming they acted out against a “cult of Satan.” [WP]

— RIP Noah Davis, 32-year-old painter and founder of the Underground Museum; Nelson Shanks, president and royal portrait painter; Gary Keys, filmmaker who documented jazz greats; and horror legend Wes Craven. [ARTnews, WP, NYT, LAT]

— Japan’s leading toilet company has opened a museum dedicated to “a century of lavatories.” [ArtDaily]