The Works of Javier Callejo and Richard Serra on Exhibit in New York

Until a few years ago, Spanish artist Javier Calleja (b.1971) was teaching art to earn a living and worked in a very small studio, with barely enough room for a table and some art supplies. 

 

He comes from a very artistic family: his great-grandfather,  Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840-1924), was a masterful painter and Pablo Picasso’s first teacher.

 

 

Calleja began his own formal training as an artist when he was 25. He received his BA in Fine Arts from Granada University in 2000 when he was 29.

 

His initial gallery exhibits, consisting of small works portraying his funny and naive children, were not very successful, but his popularity began to grow in the art markets in China and Japan and he is now an international success…with a large studio and assistants.

Javier Calleja: One true tree for… is currently on view at Alpine Rech Gallery in Tribeca through December 14, 2024. 

 

Calleja’s works can be found in the permanent collections of Granada University,  the Banco Sabadell Collection in France, the Long Museum in China, the X Museum in China, the Chen Art Foundation in Taiwan and many other museums and galleries.

 

Javier Calleja lives and works in Malaga, Spain.

 

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 A monumental work by Richard Serra is currently on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York.

 

Every Which Way is comprised of sixteen vertical steel panels, each measuring six feet wide and twelve inches thick. These stand at varying heights of either seven, nine, or eleven feet tall and are arranged in a staggered grid formation that spans the exhibition space. The sculpture, which is vertical, leads the viewer to choose twists and turns through the piece.

 

Serra was born in San Francisco and and moved to New York in 1966. He died at his home in Orient, New York, on March 26, 2024, at the age of 85.

 

 

Many museum and gallery exhibits focused on Serra’s drawings. Serra always carried a sketchbook with him, in which he created drawings, like Oteiza, available at VFA, that often became the basis for his monumental works. 

 

Richard Serra’s works are in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht in The Netherlands, the Centre Cultural Fundació La Caixa in Barcelona, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum Bilboa, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, the Smithsonian and many more.

 

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 Julia Warhola (1891-1972) was an American immigrant, born in a small village in Austria-Hungary in 1891, who worked and sacrificed so that her children could follow their dreams.

 

A talented artist herself, she encouraged creativity in Andy, lived with him in New York for twenty years and used her calligraphy skills to illustrate many of Warhol’s books.  

 

The University of Pittsburgh Press has just released Andy Warhol’s Mother: The Woman Behind the Artist, a biography of Julia Warhola. Written by Elaine Rusinko, a professor emerita of Russian language and literature at the University of Maryland, who searched through letters and archival materials to paint a portrait of a woman who was more than just Andy Warhol’s Mother.

 

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November 19, 2024