Irandaily | No. 4375 | Art & Culture

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Finest Paintings to Go on Display

Sotheby’s London will offer Jan Havicksz. Steen’s remarkable ‘The Prayer Before the Meal’, from Sudeley Castle, estimated at £5-7 million, in its forthcoming Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale in December.
Other highlights include Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s ‘A Wedding Procession’, estimated at £2-3 million and two important Italian view paintings by Gaspar van Wittel, called ‘Vanvitelli’ and ‘Bernardo Bellotto’.
The sale will conclude with a supremely rare and important drawing by Raffaello Sanzio, called ‘Raphael’; and by two 15th century illuminated manuscripts--among the most important of their kind ever to be auctioned, ArtDaily reported.
All three come to sale from the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth House. Comprising 51 lots, the auction is estimated to achieve a total in excess of £35.6 million.
Alex Bell, Sotheby’s Head of Old Master Paintings commented, “December’s sale will offer collectors an unprecedented selection of masterpieces from private collections. In addition to the three masterworks from Chatsworth, Jan Steen’s remarkable and intimate The Prayer before the Meal leads a field of quite outstanding Dutch cabinet paintings, and from the early Italian Renaissance we are offering four exceptionally rare Scenes from the Passion of Christ by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini.
Not only are many of the works making their first appearance on the auction market for generations, but their treasured status has ensured they are in a wonderful state of preservation.”
Jan Havicksz. Steen’s ‘The Prayer Before the Meal’, (est. £5,000,000-7,000,000), depicts an unusual subject within the artist’s oeuvre. In a mood of quiet, unadorned piety, a simple family says grace before the humble meal laid before them. In few other works did Steen achieve such understanding of texture and detail. The treatment of the interior--and the subtle understanding of light and its effects-- point suggestively to the influence of Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch.

7 Artists Depict Film & Video

Tate Modern’s Project Space continues its series of international collaborations with ‘Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear’, an exhibition devoted to film and video, organized with Contemporary Image Collective Cairo, AP said.
This exhibition explores the moving image’s complex and multilayered relationship with narrative and perception. It brings together the work of seven international artists--Herman Asselberghs, Manon de Boer, Sherif El Azma and Ján Mančuška.
The exhibition will explore the difference between the moving images we are shown and what they represent to us as viewers. This tension has preoccupied many contemporary artists in a generation immersed in the flow of images from cinema screens, televisions sets, computers and smartphones.
Their work recognizes the multiple interpretations and doubt inherent in film, blurring the border between depiction and deception and investigating the limitations of the medium as it struggles to embody reality.
The works on display will include Manon de Boer’s film Dissonant 2010, which depicts a woman listening to a melody and performing an accompanying dance once the music has finished. The work explores the materiality of film, playing on audience memory and how senses--in this case sound and vision--supplement each other.
It will also present Herman Asselbergh’s recent film Speech Act 2011, which charts the offences he believes mainstream cinema and homogenized pop culture have committed in relation to the avant-garde film tradition.
Works by Ján Mančuška include the short video Double 2009 in which the border between act and its re-enactment becomes confusingly blurred, whilst Patricia Esquivias’ enquiry into the process of mythologizing and storytelling, Folklore II 2008, juxtaposes biographical facts from the lives of two Spanish ‘icons’, King Philippe II and celebrity pop singer Julio Iglesias.