Family Matters and Pontormo & Rosso Fiorentino

Family Matters: Portraits and Experiences of Family Today ― Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (14 March-20 July 2014).

Portraits and experiences of family today presents the works of eleven international artists (Guy Ben- Ner, Sophie Calle, Jim Campbell, John Clang, Nan Goldin, Courtney Kessel, Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini, Trish Morrissey, Hans Op de Beeck, Chrischa Oswald, Thomas Struth) that encourage an investigation into the images, dynamics and structures that define the concept of family in the contemporary world. Each individual has his or her own personal experience of family, but when we seek out a shared definition, what do we mean by this term? Read more…

Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism ― Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (8 March-20 July 2014) ― devoted to the work of Pontormo and of Rosso Fiorentino, the two painters who were without question the most original and unconventional adepts of the new way of interpreting art in that season of the Italian Cinquecento which Giorgio Vasari called the ‘modern manner’….

Visitazione, Pontormo

Pontormo, always a favourite with the Medici, was a painter open to stylistic variety and to a renewal of the traditional approach to composition. Rosso Fiorentino, on the other hand, was more tightly bound to tradition, yet at the same time he was fully capable of flights of originality and innovation, influenced also by Cabalistic literature and esoteric works. Read more… 
You can watch Bill Viola’s The Greeting. Viola—one of most celebrated exponent of video art—relies little on computer editing and uses slow motion in an intensive way.