More Meetings with Remarkable Men:  Roy Lichtenstein, Leo Castelli and Nils-Udo

Text and photographs by John Grande

   

Art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer, John Grande's reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photo-graphy, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum. He is also the author of Balance: Art and Nature (a newly expanded edition by Black Rose Books in, 2004), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998), Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engagé (Lanctot, 2001), and his most recent book, Dialogues in Diversity: Marginal to Mainstream published in Italy in 2007 by Pari Publishing.

www.paripublishing.com.

Recent collaborations include Le Mouvement Intuitif: Patrick Dougherty & Adrian Maryniak (Atelier 340 Muzeum, Brussels, Belgium 2004) and Nature the End of Art: Alan Sonfist Landscapes with Robert Rosenblum et al, 2004

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New Interview:

shock and awe

in the art world

 

 

Ignorance is bliss and the road to hell is paved with good intention, so as an intrepid art lover, and ocassional traveller I went to New York to see Hanne Darboven's work at Leo Castelli's gallery. Years later Leo came up to Montreal with Roy Lichtenstein for his solo at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and we met again. This time he was with his beautiful translator, which is when I caught him in a bemused state talking photography. during the same visit I captured Leo with Roy Lichtenstein as they stared with great curiosity in front of a caption "One thing's sure... He's still got those emeralds!" My thoughts at the time were not so different from those of the man thinking those private thoughts in Roy Lichtenstein' painting...

     
  Nils-Udo loves nature, dreams nature and lives nature through his art. I walked three kilometres through the woods at Domaine St. Bernard near Mont Tremblant in the Laurentian Mountains to see his Pre-Cambrian Sanctuary. Within a series of horizontal caves Nils-Udo had created, were large boulders. he stones looked like offerings back to nature of nature. While Nils-Udo's early works have a ritualistic flavour, he has gone on to nests (on for Peter Gabriel), an illusionistic fanstastic construction at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, beautiful colouristic assemblages in nature at the fundacion César Manrique on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, a cranberry and bush planting near the University of Moncton in New Brunswick, and for the Ludwig Museum in Aachen among others. Below is his famed "Water house."