AO Art Observed™

Installation view, Eva Hesse “Spectres 1960″ at Brooklyn Museum. All images on site for Art Observed by Jen Lindblad unless otherwise noted.

Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum are nineteen small scale paintings by Eva Hesse. Completed at the age of twenty-four, the early figurative works are rendered in haunting golds and pale, muddled greens. The artist is best known for her fiberglass and polyester resin sculptures, but the paintings assembled for this exhibition shed new light on her work. Deeply personal, they offer a glimpse at the psychology of the tormented artist as she struggled to gain recognition in the New York City art scene of the 1960s before her untimely death at the age of thirty-four.

Eva Hesse, No Title, 1960, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in. Image via Brooklyn Museum.

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‬Anselm Kiefer tells German magazine der Spiegel of plans for ‘atomic art’ purchase of a defunct nuclear plant [AO Newslink]

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‪NEA study shows that the 2.1 million U.S. artists are, on average, incrementally more financially compensated than those who are otherwise employed [AO Newslink]

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Edgar Degas, Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, executed in wax c. 1879-1881 and cast later (est. $25-35 million), via Christies.com

The November sales will be inaugurated at Christie’s on Tuesday night with a 75-lot Impressionist & Modern auction at their Rockefeller Center location in New York. Seventy-one lots will be offered at Sotheby’s New York on Wednesday evening, and the two sales are expected to fetch close to $400 million. This round of auctions follows closely on the heels of the Frieze Art Fair and the concurrent and comparatively smaller sales of Contemporary art in mid-October. Little has changed between then and now to make buyer’s less anxious about the financial markets, but the auction houses managed to secure a handful of top-tier consignments that may bolster the results of their sales.

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On methods of auctioneering, with a profile of newcomer C.K. Swett [AO Newslink]

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Cory Arcangel, Research in Motion (Kinetic Sculpture 6) (2011).

Following up on his solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum, media artist Cory Arcangel is currently showing at the Lisson Gallery in London. Titled Speakers Going Hammer, the show features a number of pieces previously unseen in the UK, as well as several new works. The New York-based artist first rose to prominence in 2002, with his piece Super Mario Clouds, featuring a hacked Super Nintendo System that had removed all of the graphics from a Super Mario Cartridge save for the blocky, pixilated clouds. Continuing along these lines, Speakers Going Hammer features a hacked basketball game program, titled Self Playing N64 NBA Courtside 2, in which an outdated, video game version of Shaquille O’Neal continually takes and misses free-throws.

Installation view.

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‪New York Health Department limits ‬New Museum to one person per bath for Carsten Holler’s “Psycho Tank” installation [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Anish Kapoor’s Orbit sculpture has reached its full 114 meter height at London’s Olympic Park [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Alex Katz interviewed in the Financial Times: “Ambition creates drive. You want to be a famous painter? That was my ambition and I worked flat out.” [AO Newslink]

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Curtis Kulig, Love Me (Steel) (2011). All photos on site for Art Observed by Daniel Creahan.

Over and over again, the two words, “Love Me,” are repeatedly scrawled on the canvasses of Curtis Kulig, the street artist best known for emblazoning this simple cursive ‘throw-up’ all over New York City. Viewed next to the faux-LED crosses and blatant consumerist imagery of his long-time friend and supporter Skullphone, they begin to take on a hint of desperation, a plaintive plea in a world inundated with brand-names and electronic simulacra. While the two artists have supported each other for over 7 years, Scripture, now showing at the Mallick Williams and Co. Gallery in Chelsea, is the first documented collaboration between the two artists. Regardless of the precedent, however, the installation sees Kulig and Skullphone pursuing techniques that the artists have explored in past work.
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Tom Sachs interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, in advance of his takeover of the Park Avenue Armory this Spring and upcoming show at Sperone Westwater on the Bowery [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Tate Britain to explore “the impact of Picasso’s art on British art” this February, exhibition will include English National Ballet residency [AO Newslink]

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Frank Stella, Double Mitered Maze (1967). All images on site for Art Observed by Ana Marjanovic.

Paul Kasmin gallery hosts Geometric Variations, an exhibition assembling Frank Stella’s square-shaped canvases from the 1960s and ’70s, including Concentric Square, Mitered Mazes and the Benjamin Moore series. According to the press release, the exhibition explores the “historical importance” of Stella’s canvases. Contextualizing them within Western art history discourse, H.H. Arnason pointed out that Stella’s art represents a median between the “modernism advocated by Greenberg, and Minimalism.”

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Performa opens November 1 in New York with Elmgreen & Dragset work Happy Days in the Art World, featuring Joseph Fiennes [AO Newslink]

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Cologne sentences German art fraud ring to 15 years in prison for painting 14 works sold as masterpieces by such artists as Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and others [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Hewlett-Packard signs 10 year lease for Chelsea Art Museum building on Hudson River with ‘special’ plans [AO Newslink]

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Damien Hirst Legend (2011) and Myth (2010), via The Guardian

Damien Hirst has moved on to dissecting mythical creatures in his most recent public showing at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, UK, part of a Sotheby’s selling exhibition of monumental sculpture. From Legend, the winged horse with exposed bones and muscles, to Myth, a partially skinned unicorn, Hirst continues his exploration of anatomy, as well as “the relationship between science and religion,” (The Guardian). “It’s kind of like exploding a myth to make it real,” Hirst explains.

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‪‬Marni Kotak artfully births Baby X in Bushwick Microscope Gallery, awards herself and new son 10 foot trophies [AO Newslink]

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Sliding down with canvas mat in Carsten Höller’s Untitled (Slide), 2011. All photos on site for Art Observed by Nicholas Wirth.

Carsten Höller‘s 40-foot-high, 102-foot-long transparent metal slide—a “pneumatic mailing system”—awaits the daring visitor at the top floor of the New Museum. Surveying eighteen years of the artist’s work, The Experience exhibition is organized “experientially,” as opposed to chronologically, moving from a low-speed mirrored carousel down the slide to realistic albeit neon animal sculptures, disorienting architectural interventions, a sensory deprivation pool, and the artist’s simple yet highly effective upside-down goggles. The series of interactive environments function like science experiments, designed “to explore the limits of human sensorial perception and logic through carefully controlled participatory experiences,” as the exhibition’s press release explains.

Installation view, fourth floor.

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Installation view of George Segal’s Woman on a Park Bench (1998) and Roger Hiorns’ Untitled (2008) in September 11, MoMA PS1, 2011. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

For an exhibition dedicated to the memory of September 11, 2001, September 11 at MoMA PS1 is conspicuously void of images from the tragedy 10 years ago. There are no day-after headlines, no lists of missing persons, no photos of crumbling towers filled with smoke and terror. Instead, curator Peter Eleey approaches 9/11 with more than 70 works by 41 different artists, the works created for reasons wholly separate from, and many before, 9/11/01—only 1 piece was made as a direct response to the tragedy. “Horrific, yet familiar, images of the attacks and their aftermath are embedded in our memories,” says the press release. “This exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.”

Installation view of Jeremy Deller’s Unrealized Project for the Exterior of the Carnegie Museum (2004-2011) and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (The End) (1990) in September 11, MoMA PS1, 2011. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

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Nowness presents a city of moving images with Doug Aitken’s new video work, Altered Earth.  Says Aitken, “I felt like I was holding the earth in my hand.” [AO Newslink]

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Michelangelo Pistoletto, Lavatore – impalcatura (2008-2011). All images via Simon Lee Gallery.

His second exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, Michelangelo Pistoletto uses a process-as-product aesthetic to address themes of production, labor, and inevitably, deconstruction. The exhibition, titled Lavoro (Italian for to work or to operate), displays objects of construction as a means of revealing the art inherent to the tools that produce it, revisiting the artist’s fascination with ideas of assembly and process, and the socio-political implications thereof.

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‪‬Ai Weiwei to be named WSJ Innovator of the Year in Art, Marina Abramović to accept on his behalf at MoMA award ceremony this Thursday [AO Newslink]

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Mircea Cantor’s work in FIAC 2011, image by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed, all photos by Art Observed unless otherwise noted.

By the close of FIAC on Sunday evening, some 68,000+ visitors had come through the fair.  These attendance figures represent a 6% increase from the previous year, reports the New York Times.  Housed this year in the exuberant Grand Palais, the fair showed strong sales from the get go. Despite the global economic downtown of recent years, the atmosphere was effervescent. French, American, and German galleries dominated the space (55, 26, and 21, respectively), but participants from Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa showed a strong presence at the fair for the first time. New York newcomers Matthew Marks, Eleven Rivington, Andrew Kreps, Michele Maccarone and Friedrich Petzel did well, and Pace Gallery made a comeback after a long absence. Compared to Frieze the week before in London, many fair-goers felt that the Parisian fair was riskier in content, creating a more exciting and eclectic display of artworks.

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