Currently on exhibit in London is the Kinetica Art Fair, the UK’s only fair dedicated to kinetic art, which mixes science and engineering together in a modern mirage of moving and glowing artworks, some of which react to human movement and sound. The kinetic art exhibition, which includes wonders such as robots and holographic light beings, is designed to question the perceived boundaries between different disciplines through the use of light, robotics, sound and electronics. More than 150 artists are exhibiting at the event, which is organized by the Kinetica Museum. Over 30 galleries and other organizations are participating in the fair. Artists involved in the show include Paul Friedlander, Ivan Black, Paul Friedlander, Paul Beckett, Bálint Bolygó, Nik Ramage, Roseline de Thelin, Ben Parry, Rachel Garrard and many others.
Art Observed video coverage featuring artists, in order, Rachel Garrard, Vincent Leclerc, Interactive Agents, Rosaline de Thelin, Andras Mengyan, Vyacheslav Koleychuk, Lilyan Lin, Peter Logan, Paul Friedlander, Tom Wilkinson, Balint Bolygo and Squid Soup.
Auctioneer Henry Wyndam sells L’Homme qui marche I by Alberto Giacometti. Estimate: £8-12 million Price Realized: $104,327,006. Image via Associated Press
A bronze sculpture, entitled L’Homme qui marche I, by Alberto Giacometti became the most expensive work ever sold at auction this evening when it realized $104,327,006 at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale in London. In an interesting turn of events, Giacometti’s sculpture represents the recession from beginning to end – it was being auctioned as an asset of the failed bank Dresdner Bank and the remarkable price undoubtedly signals a resurgence in the art market. In total, the 39-lot sale realised $233,622,228.37 – the highest total ever reached for a sale in London. While 8 lots went unsold, an impressive 17 pieces sailed past the £1 million mark including three works that individually realized more than £10 million – in reflection of these enormous sales Melanie Clore, Co-Chairman, Impressionist & Modern Art, Sotheby’s Worldwide, stated: “We are thrilled to have sold these great works this evening and that they have been recognized for the masterpieces that they are. The competition which generated these exceptional results demonstrates the continued quest for quality that compels today’s collectors.”
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L’Homme qui marche I, Alberto Giacometti. Estimate: £8-12 million Price Realized: $104,327,006 via Sotheby’s
Tonight, Alberto Giacometti’s L’homme qui marche I fetched $104,327,006 at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale in London – making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. The bronze sculpture exceeded the previous record of $104.1 million that was set at Sotheby’s in May 2004 by Pablo Picasso’sGarçon à la Pipe. 10 bidders, mostly on telephone, fought a fast and furious battle over a period of eight minutes – the eventual winner was an anonymous client on the telephone with Philip Hook, Senior European Director of Impressionist & Modern Art at the auction house. Sotheby’s had expected the sculpture to bring-in between $19.2 million and $28.8 million. The work was being sold by Dresdner Bank in Germany, which acquired it in 1980.
The sale is still in progress – more details will follow shortly.
Tête de femme (Jacqueline), Pablo Picasso. Estimate $4,845,000 – $6,460,000 Price Realized:$12,887,348. Image via Christie’s
Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale and the auction of Art of the Surreal took place last night in London and fetched $122,167,093, over a pre-sale estimate of $87 – $124million. The sale illustrated a buoyant market in reflection of last year’s equivalent sale that raised $101 million as buyers and sellers held back in the financial crisis. Another observation is the continuing appetite for important works of art – most specifically large, colorful works fresh to the market from long-established private collections. Competitive bidding for 4 works by important artists Picasso, Kees van Dongen and Natalia Gontcharova pushed prices over £5 million – in total 21 lots realize over £1 million, compared to 26 at both last year’s major London sales combined. Despite recent musings on buyers in China’s ascendant economy who are displaying a new appetite for 20th Century Art, Thomas Seydoux, Christie’s international head of Impressionist and modern art, was most surprised by the amount of bidding from Russian and former Eastern Bloc buyers who dominated the action on the telephone – only 2% of lots were sold to Asian buyers in relation to 25% UK, 48% Europe and 25% Americas.
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Kirche in Cassone (Church in Cassone), Gustav Klimt via Sotheby’s
Masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt and Henri Matisse that have been unseen for decades will go under the hammer this week at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in London at the first major European auctions of 2010. The appearance of many top-quality, ‘lost’ works marks a distinct change in the attitude of sellers who have been encouraged to put their prized works on the market by the recent success of Impressionist and Modern Art sales – most notable is Sotheby’s November Impressionist and Modern sale in New York that exceeded all expectations when it realized $182m over a high-end estimate of $163m. The sales kick-off with Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale on February 2 that will offer 86 lots with a total pre-sale value of £56,505,000 to £80,805,000. The sale is led by works by Kees van Dongen, Natalia Goncharova, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Sotheby’s evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on Wednesday, February 3 is smaller with only 39 lots but the target of £102million is considerably higher. This high estimate is excelled by three works from Gustave Klimt, Alberto Giacometti and Paul Cézanne that are individually estimated to realize more than £10 million – the auction house sold three works for that price across all categories all last year.
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An exhibition of work by British-born artist Anthony McCall is currently being exhibited at both the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York through January 30th, 2010 and Gallery Thomas Zander in Koln, Germany through February 20th, 2010. Entitled ‘Leaving (with Two-minute Silence),’ McCall’s new work of ’solid light’ presentations are comprised of digital videos of carefully choreographed, intersecting lines and curves. The collections of intersecting shapes are projected in dark, haze-filled rooms and result in three-dimensional forms, constructed purely from light. The exhibition is interactive, and as the viewers move in and out of the projected light beams, they must reconcile their perceived sense of fixed, three dimensional objects with the actual mutable properties that light possesses.
McCall’s work emphasizes the sculptural qualities of beams of light.
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After the success of London’s ‘Old Master Week’ that took place in December 2009, expectations were high for the Old Master auctions that took place this week at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York. While perhaps not as rousing as the sales in London, the Old Master auctions in New York marked the first opportunity to verify suspicions that buyers were returning to the art market with confidence. Christie’s two days of sales included the two-part auction of Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings & Watercolors on Wednesday and a special private collection sale, A Cabinet of Curiosities: Selections from the Peter Tillou Collections on Thursday, achieved a combined total of $40,858,500. While these auctions were successful, the auction that led the week was Thursday’s sale of Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture at Sotheby’s, which brought $61,599,250 – twelve lots sold for more than $1 million, and almost 60% of the works sold brought prices above the high estimate.
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Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue are new sculptures and paintings by Damien Hirst. The exhibition takes its title, “End of an Era,” from the central sculpture of the exhibition: a severed bull’s head with golden horns and a solid gold circular disc cast in formaldehyde and encased in a gold vitrine on a marble pedestal. Hirst’s September 2008 monumental Sotheby’s London auction, where he famously circumvented his dealers, is widely recognized as marking the top of the recent art market rise. In this this auction the centerpiece was the “The Golden Calf” which sold for £10,345,250 with buyer’s premium and was cited as a reference to Hirst’s representation of cultural excess, worshipping false idols and likely Hirst’s own myth making. The current exhibition title, and the decapitated head of basically the same artistic work, certainly has Hirst again presenting self-referential messages in light of his work’s current cultural and economic context.
Painful Memories/ Forgotten Tears (2008) by Damien Hirst, via Gagosian Gallery
The first Art Los Angeles Contemporary annual international contemporary art fair kicked off last night at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, California. Open through January 31st, the fair presents 55+ galleries from around the world, with an emphasis on leading Los Angeles based galleries. The fair’s opening reception presented a playground for art patrons, designers, musicians, actors and architects alike in an appropriate closing to Los Angeles’ January Arts Month. While some Angelenos remain skeptical of another Art Fair, a critique set off in domino effect by the LA Times’announcement of the fair, Curator Helen Varola arranged a diverse series of speakers and panels, in addition to securing an eclectic group of galleries and artists from around the world. Highlights included Los Angeles galleries such as David Kordansky, Kim Light / Light Box, Blum & Poe and Honor Frasier, as well as spaces with international arms, such as Peres Projects, and Crisp, and New York favorite Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.
La Belle Ferronnière, Follower of Leonardo da Vinci – probably before 1750
Dubbed as “an historic event for the art market,” Christie’s Old Master & 19th Century Art sale in London in December realized £68,380,250 – the highest ever total for an Old Masters auction. Following this ground- breaking success, expectations are high as Christie’s kick-off ‘Old Master Week’ in New York today, January 27, with their two-part sale of Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings, and Watercolors. This sale will present over 320 works from Lucas Cranach the Elder, Jan Brueghel II, Thomas Gainsborough, Gaetano Gandolfi, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, and Samuel Palmer, among others. Total sales are expected to achieve in excess of $48 million. Sotheby’s “Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture” auction will take place on Thursday, January 28 and is dominated by a Rembrandt portrait of a young woman from 1632 estimated at $8m-$12m, along with the controversial painting linked to Leonardo da Vinci - ‘La Belle Ferronnière.’
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Installation of Sol Lewitt’s ”Wall Drawing #422” (November 1984) via Magasin 3
Currently on view at Magasin 3 Konsthall is “Seven Wall Drawings” by Sol Lewitt. The exhibition, spanning the artists’ prolific career, takes the line as its theme. It is a motif to which Lewitt constantly returned, working, according to the exhibition’s curator Elisabeth Melqvist, “with exceptional consequence.”
Installation View: Sol Lewitt, ”Wall Drawing #51” (June 1970)
Ten thousand lines, measuring a total of 22 meters, cover the gallery’s walls from floor to ceiling. These lines truly reflect the creativity that can exist within a simple restriction. ”The descriptions and instructions sound bone dry but the result is startling,” shares Mellqvist. “It is beautiful, chaotic and overwhelming.” In addition to his investigation of possible line combinations, Lewitt also expanded his formal language in later years to encompass geometric shapes and color.
A Pablo Picasso painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was damaged last Friday, Janauary 22, when a woman attending an adult education class lost her balance and fell into the piece. ”The Actor” (1904-5) incurred an irregular vertical tear 6 inches in length in the lower right-hand corner.
Untitled (Newspaper on Ground, Grass, California) (2000) by William Eggleston, via Cheim & Read Gallery
Currently on view at Cheim & Read Gallery in New York are two concurrent photography exhibitions featuring rarely shown photographs by Diane Arbus and William Eggleston. The works by Diane Arbus are grouped under the “In the Absence of Others” and feature empty rooms and artificial rooms taken during the 1960s. The exhibition of Eggleston’s works is entitled “21st Century” and highlights his most recent works.
An Empty Movie Theater (1971), by Diane Arbus, via T Magazine
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Currently on view at L & M Gallery in New York is Frank Stella’s “Exotic Birds.” The exhibition features work the artist executed in 1975 in the form of twenty-eight graph paper drawings which he then converted into Foamcore maquettes. In 1976, he transformed the maquettes into a series of large-scale aluminum reliefs known as “Exotic Birds.” According to renowned curator William Rubin, the series signaled a transition in Stella’s work, “that was radical on the levels of both method and pictorial language.”
Omer Fast’s Nostalgia III, 2009 – production still super 16mm film transferred to HD video running time: 32:48 minutes via Whitney Museum of American Art
Now on view at Postmasters Gallery and Whitney Museum of American Art are concurrent exhibitions by the iconoclastic video artist Omer Fast, known for his non-sequential cut ups of tragedy and humanity. Splicing disjunctive narratives of traumatized subjects – actual, staged or imitated – Fast’s dystopian imaginings shun aesthetic formality and evoke what truth lies in the ambiguity of storytelling. As highly interpretive mash ups collapsing space and time, his films recall the intimacy of reality and fantasy through mingling documentary and fictional styles.
Omer Fast’s Take a Deep Breath, 2008 – production still two channel HD video running time: 27:07 minutes
Chronicling the plight of the refugee, Omer Fast’s Nostalgia, showing at Whitney Museum of American Art, pinpoints feelings of longing and dislocation in a labyrinthian network of disparate ethnic voices. Tracing themes of displacement, war and loss through the recurrent motif of an animal trap, jumbled bits of dialogue and streams of overlaid images,Fast explores different permutations of cross-cultural encounters.
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Artur Zmijewski, “Powtorzenie” (Repetition), DVD, master DV, 2005 via Culture PL.
Currently on view at X Initiative as part of Phase 3 is a comprehensive solo exhibition of work by the controversial artist Artur Zmijewski. It is easy to misunderstand and disprove of Zmijewski’s intentions, and easier to feel uncomfortable and conflicted by his video propositions. This conclusive installation in a year-long experimental non-profit space marks a culmination of its mission to “inspire and challenge us to think about new possibilities for experiencing and producing contemporary art.“ Mr. Zmijewski reminds us that the experience of art can be as challenging as its production. The subject matter he explores is often heavy, the manner of delivery – raw, frank, often unedited – documentary. The videos resemble an archive of a continuous social experiment where social situations, belief systems, reality and memory are test-driven for their endurance.
Zmijewski’s work is politically oriented as much as it is emotionally moving and complex. He acts as an activating agent by creating scenarios and situations in which initially passive and apathetic participants are galvanized and stirred, their actions documented and on view.
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Emily Prince in front of her installation at the Saatchi Gallery, via the Guardian
An installation by Emily Prince, featuring graphite pencil miniature portraits of slain U.S. soldiers, is drawing additional attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to bolster the mission in Central Asia. The installation, titled American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis, nor the Afghans, features almost 5,300 sketched portraits and is on display at the Saatchi Gallery in London through May 7th.
The 28 year old artist, only a few years out of Stanford and UC Berkeley but who already has participated in a Venice Biennale, was motivated to draw the portraits by her frustration following George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004. “I was feeling hopeless and frustrated, and I think I somehow needed to channel that energy,” Ms Prince expressed via Bloomberg. She was also quoted by the Daily Telegraph, saying that “I am disturbed about how easy it is to be disassociated from the war if like me you don’t have a relative who is involved.” Based in San Francisco, she will continue to produce the drawings until the conflicts come to an end.
Andre D Tyson Riverside, CA Date of Death: April 22, 2007 by Emily Prince, via Saatchi Gallery, via Saatchi Gallery
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