With his “May Day” show opening at Deitch Projects this Saturday May 1st, and an OBEY Clothing pop-up shop at 151 Orchard Street, Shepard Fairey has been busy putting-up work all over the city. In addition to his Deitch mural on Houston Street in the spot made famous by Keith Haring in the early-‘80s, a collaboration with COPE2 in the Bronx and mural projects in Williamsburg and SOHO – another mural appeared this morning on an 80-foot piece of plywood wrapping the Ace Hotel at the corner of Broadway and 29th Street. Guests visiting the hotel on May 1 are able to book the “May Day” package: an OBEY May Day t-shirt, a signed off-set print, and two tickets to the MAY DAY after-party.

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In 2005, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, held a retrospective of the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat.  In conjunction with that exhibition was a short 20 minute film of an interview by Tamra Davis, a friend of the artist. The footage shows a young Basquiat speaking about his works and his life, and is one of the few instances we have of the artist on film. The rare footage also shows Basquiat at work on a number of paintings, providing insight into his artistic process and highly intuitive means of creation. Because of the rarity of the footage, and at the encouragement of Jeffrey Deitch, Tamra Davis decided to work with Arthouse Films to make a feature length documentary entitled Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, combining the original eighties footage with interviews by various artists, gallery owners, and friends of Basquiat. The film constructs a psychological portrait of the artist tracing his humble beginnings as a street artist to his extreme success.

Afterparty at the Boom Boom Room

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Les Chadoufs (1934) by Mahmoud Said, via Christie’s

This past Wednesday Dubai’s art connoisseurs gathered together for a sale of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern art.  A highlight of the sale were 25 masterpieces from the collection of Dr. Mohamed Said Farsi featuring Egyptian modern painters.  The auction concluded in a total of $15.2 Million outdoing its pre-sale total of $4.3 million.

Les Chadoufs (1934) by Egyptian painter Mahmoud Said was the great sale of the evening bringing in a record $2.42 million, reportedly the most expensive work made by an Arab artist ever to be auctioned at Christie’s Dubai.  The work is from the collection of Dr. Farsi and had a pre-sale estimate of $150,000-$200,000. It depicts a desert landscape with men workers wearing turbans and veiled women carrying jars above their heads envisioning Egypt’s Pharonic and Islamic past.

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No. 30 by Mark Rothko on display at The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. All images via The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture unless otherwise noted

On April 23, a first major retrospective of the American artist Mark Rothko (born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia,September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970) opened at The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia. Thirteen works of his later period on display at the Garage come from the collection of New York financier Erza Merkin. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with Pace Wildenstein Gallery, NY.

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Honoree Gabriel Orozco (with Matthew Barney behind) at BOMB magazine’s 29th Anniversary Gala & Silent Auction at the National Arts Club, New York   All photos by Oskar Proctor for ArtObserved

Last night, BOMB magazine kicked-off their 29th Anniversary Gala at the National Arts Club in New York with a Silent Auction. Since the magazines’ founding in 1981, its pages have featured over 900 interviews comprised of 1,800 artists’ voices. Many of the featured artists contributed works to last night’s auction which featured both renowned and emerging names such as Alex Hubbard, Joan Jonas, Nan Goldin, Alex Katz, Julie Mehretu, Roxy Paine, Guy Maddin, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Carrie Mae Weems, most of whom were in attendance. At 7.30pm, attendees were called to honor 4 individuals whose work and vision speak directly to BOMB’s mission of creative excellence. Rob Pruitt raised slices of toast to Honorees Cecily Brown and her husband, the New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff.  Brice Marden introduced the next Honoree artist Gabriel Orozco while Matthew Barney toasted honoree Nancy Spector, curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim.  Along with Rob Pruitt’s generous offerings of slices of golden toast, the honorees were presented with “Pink Bomb” awards created by sculptor Tom Otterness.

Brice Marden introducing Honoree Gabriel Orozco

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Installation view, Brucennial 2010: Miseducation (image courtesy of The New York Times)

Thought you missed your chance to see what the artist group known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation claims to be “the most important survey of contemporary art in the world. Ever.”? Fear not – the Brucennial 2010: Miseducation has been extended until May 22.

The exhibition’s opening in February was greeted with snow, but visitors were not deterred by the weather, and the entry line extended far beyond the block. Boasting to exhibit 420 artists from 911 countries working in 666 disciplines, the Brucennial 2010 is not to be missed. The BHQF, as they are called, were a highlight in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Their video installation piece entitled “We Like America and America Likes Us” featured a 22-minute video projected onto the hood of a white hearse.

We Like America and America Likes Us by Bruce High Quality Foundation

Along with celebrated artists the likes of David Salle, Francesco Clemente, Ron Gorchov, George Condo, Donald Baechler, James Nares, Rita Ackermann, and Julian Schnabel, hang works by younger artists without privileged connections. To make sense of the chaos, use, as your map, Hyperallergic’s piece-by-piece guide to the works in the exhibition.

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L: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (He entered shop after shop…), 2008 R: Eric Fischl, Rebirth I: (The Last View of Camiliano Cien Fuegos), 1986. All images courtesy of Haunch of Venison, New York.

On view at Haunch of Venison New York, until May 1, 2010, is “Your History Is Not Our History.” Organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips, this group show presents works produced in 1980s New York City.

Including works by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Carroll Dunham, Eric Fischl, Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger,Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Malcolm Morley, Richard Prince, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Jenny Holzer, Phillip Taaffe, Terry Winters and Christopher Wool, this exhibition seeks to convey “a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time,” says Phillips.

L: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1988   C: Jeff Koons, Buster Keaton, 1988 R: Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat & The Old Man’s Dog, 1981.

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Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portait) (1965) by Lucian Freud, via FT

“I want to paint to work as flesh. As far as I am concerned the paint is the person.” -Lucian Freud

Currently on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is a major retrospective of work by Lucian Freud. Now 88 years old, Freud is among one of the world’s greatest living artists. His work was last shown at the Pompidou Centre in 1987 during his last retrospective at the museum. The exhibition presents a great selection of Freud’s work including around fifty large format paintings mostly from private collections together with various prints and drawings as well as photographs from the artist’s studio. The theme of the exhibit is the artist’s studio, the place which is most important to Freud and the creation of his art.

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Cy Twombly, The Ceiling, 2010

Cy Twombly is the first contemporary American artist to create a permanent work for the Louvre: a 3,750-square-foot painting on the ceiling of the Salle des Bronzes. A council of international experts selected Twombly to paint the mural for one the oldest and largest wings of the museum, in keeping with the Louvre’s commitment to incorporating modern art within its galleries. Along with Anselm Kiefer of Germany and Francois Morellet of France, Twombly is the third artist to paint a decorative work for the Louvre since 2007.

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All images and text by Eric Forman for ArtObserved

Last Saturday at the New Museum, new media arts organization Rhizome presented Seven on Seven, a day-long conference showcasing seven collaborations between one artist and one “technologist.”  Each pair had only 24 hours to conceive an idea and whip up a prototype.  The event referenced “9 Evenings,” a famous 1966 collaboration between artists and engineers organized by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver.  That group had 10 months and came up with many influential technological “firsts.” Seven on Seven had more modest aims, and the results, though uneven, were varied and entertaining, most straddling the line between functional social experiment and pop-up work of art. Rhizome executive director Lauren Cornell curated the pairings and many of the participators gushed about the fun they had brainstorming together.  The audience, a packed house of well-heeled digerati who paid what some said were “exclusionary” amounts for tickets, seemed to enjoy the proceedings, not least the cocktail reception in the New Museum’s sleek Sky Room. Some grumblers asserted that networking was the true raison d’eÌ‚tre of the event, although there was widespread admiration for what the participators pulled off in such a short time.

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Installation view: The Globe Shrinks (2010) four-screen digital video installation, via Mary Boone Gallery

Currently on view at Mary Boone Gallery, through May 1st, is “The Globe Shrinks,“ a playful and seductive new video installation by Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger.  The artist is best known for her confrontational slogans paired with images, but her recent video work finds a new home in the gallery, where a 12-minute, 44-second looped video plays on four channels surrounding the room.

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Installation view: The Globe Shrinks [for those who own it], via Mary Boone Gallery

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SculptureCenter’s annual fundraising event, Lucky Draw 2010. All images via SculptureCenter.

AO was on site for Lucky Draw 2010, a spirited annual benefit thrown by SculptureCenter to raise money for its exhibition program.  This year’s event set a new record for the highest gross, bringing in over $120,000 to the non-for-profit arts institution located in Long Island City, New York.

Volunteers moving a work by Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder (DAS INSTITUT)

On April 13, 2010, as ticket holders surveyed the offerings and made lists of their top picks, no one seemed to worry that the event’s unlucky date would disturb anyone’s luck.  The room was abuzz with excitement: unlike most art auctions, in this event the order in which the artworks are selected is determined by a lively and suspenseful random drawing.  The ticket price, at $450 a head, draws both novice and experienced collectors.

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Rachel Whiteread, Stairs, 1995

Leading contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread is best known for her sculpture, which almost exclusively springs from the premise of capturing the negative space in and around architectural structures. Now for the first time a museum has ventured to shed some light on her relatively neglected drawings, in a retrospective display at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Perhaps previously overlooked as preliminaries to a final sculptural piece, or just obscured by the monumentality of her public works, it is an interesting choice, and a critical one, in order to assert the importance of this ignored portion of an artist’s oeuvre. Whiteread herself affirms the personal import of these works when she described them thus: “My drawings are a diary of my work.” [Press Release] In the press release this metaphor is aptly extended as they describe how “like the passages in a diary her drawings range from fleeting ideas to labored reflections.”

Rachel Whiteread, Vitrine Objects

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Jules de Balincourt, Out of the Darkness and Into the Light, 2009-2010

Premonitions, Jules de Balincourt’s current solo show at Deitch Projects, is an implausible explosion of color, imagery, and imagination.  Aptly named, the show teeters between storyboarded recollections of drug induced hysteria and the dreamscapes of an apocalyptic premonition, for lack of a better word. The viewer is expected to jump head first into a world where imagination and chance reign supreme.

Jules de Balincourt, “Premonitions”, installation view

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Copyright: Andreas Gursky Ocean I, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010, via Gagosian Gallery

Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills recently inaugurated its new double-size gallery with an exhibition of work by German artist Andreas Gursky. Known for his luscious color, elaborate and intricate photographs which reproduce modern life often in epic proportions,  here Gursky presents a new series of large-scale works as well as a variety of subjects from the last twenty years of his career. The works on display capture his fascination with the structure of labor, luxury and leisure.

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Eva Hesse, No Title, 1969

Currently on show at Hauser & Wirth, through April 24, is a series of small sculptures by Eva Hesse that are essentially fragments rescued from her studio. They are fragile and diaphanous in substance, almost anti-sculptures. A year before her death, in 1969, Hesse wrote of her desire “to get to non-art, non-connotive, non-anthropomorphic, non-geometric, non-nothing; everything…It’s not the new, it is what is yet not known, thought, seen, touched; but really what is not and that is.” Though not quite there, or not quite anything, the works, nonetheless, feel significant and demanding. As Leslie Camhi wrote for the New York Times blog, though the work in the exhibition seem closer to prototypes to autonomous works of art, they are compelling in revealing those familiarly Hesse-ian themes: “plasticity, an engagement with ephemeral materials, the elusive and incomplete nature of memory, and a redolent corporeality.”

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Hedge (2008) by Tony Cragg. All images via Lisson Gallery

Currently on view at the Lisson Gallery in London is a major exhibition of works by the British sculptor Tony Cragg. The artist’s first solo show with the gallery took place in 1979, here he presents five new larger works, a selection of smaller works and drawings. The works displayed reflect upon the consistency Cragg has used throughout his career even as he moved from his early assemblages to casting sculptures during the mid-1980s. The resulting works project the forever materialist who easily transforms a simple image into a monumental and powerful form.

Elbow (2010)

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Idexa, Catherine Opie (2008)

Currently on view at Gladstone Gallery’s 24th st location is “Girlfriends,” by Catherine Opie. The works exhibited are a play on Richard Prince’s biker girlfriends and seek to explore the nature of “butch-dyke” identity. “An ode” to her former life, before domesticity and motherhood, Opie’s new works refer back to the subject matter that propelled her into the limelight in the early 1990s: her friends and partners in the gay, lesbian, and trans leather community. This return to the artist’s roots is highlighted by the inclusion of a series of small black-and-white portraits of androgynous young women that Opie made as a freshman in the early ’90s and has since kept to herself.

Angela (head), Catherine Opie (1992)

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Antony Gormley, Breathing Room II, 2010. Installation view with lights off.

Currently on show at the Sean Kelly Gallery is an exhibition of new works by the preeminent British sculptor Antony Gormley.  This exhibition acts as a welcome compliment to Gormley’s current public art installation, Event Horizon, in Madison Square Park, continuing his career-long exploration of the human body in space. Conversely to Event Horizon, the Breathing Room exhibition investigates the human body confined within the boundaries of architecture. What is more, Gormley’s work is ostensibly the visual representation of how the body exists as a “bounding box of the mind” [Sean Kelly Gallery Press Release] and how architecture becomes fortification for the body.  Thus he draws parallels between the body and architecture, which are particularly well articulated in this exhibition.

Antony Gormley, Breathing Room II, 2010, Installation view with lights on.

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Marlene Dumas in front of self-portrait The Sleep of Reason, 2009, press preview for Against the Wall

Marlene Dumas’ practice is two-fold: on one hand conveying politically potent messages that are more often than not critical, and on the other being deeply concerned with the surface, aesthetic potential of paint.  One is forced to question whether these seemingly disparate objectives marry well at all or compliment each other? However the tension between the two are played out, and resolved in the artist’s exciting first solo exhibition at David Zwirner, through April 24.

Marlene Dumas, The Wall, 2009.

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At PMA, “Head of a Woman” (1937-38). Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

AO visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which are both showing survey exhibitions of the avant-garde in Paris in the early twentieth century. “Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris,” at PMA, is an exhaustive display of thirty years of Picasso, from 1905 to 1945, following him through the development of Cubism and artist communities in Paris. The Guggenheim’s show is smaller and less concentrated on Picasso; it includes thirty works by Picasso, Léger, Chagall, Braque, and more, where the PMA’s 200-strong exhibition includes works by Picasso collaborators and contemporaries as they interact with his own.

At the Guggenheim, Pablo Picasso, “Mandolin and Guitar (Mandoline et guitare)” (1924). Oil with sand on canvas Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York  Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Drawing from Stereoscope (1998-1999) by William Kentridge, via The Museum of Modern Art

I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing-the contingent way that images arrive in the work-lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world.

-William Kentridge

Currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is “Five Themes” by William Kentridge (b.1955).  The exhibition features a comprehensive survey of the artist’s career highlighting more than 120 works made in a variety of mediums such as visual art, film, and  theater. Known for exploring social conflict in his work particularly that of his South African homeland, he often  questions themes of personal and cultural memory, oppression and reconciliation.  This exhibition underlines the inter-relatedness of Kentridge’s various mediums while exploring five themes  present in his work since the 1980s.

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Faunes et chèvres by Pablo Picasso  1959   All images via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, 3 Merlin Street, Athens is an exhibition titled ” Pablo Picasso:Experiments in Linogravure”. This comprehensive  show explores the late Picasso’s experiments with linogravure, a particular kind of printing technique that he favored during the final years of his creative activity. The exhibition is on view until May 1, 2010.

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Ryan McGinley, Luz, 2010

It would be easy to quickly walk through Team Gallery right now and feel like you have seen some pretty satisfying photos. However, Ryan McGinley’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” is more complex than its enjoyable simplicity may first imply.

Sean, 2010

ArtObserved On Site at the Ryan McGinley, “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” at Team Gallery

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