Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
‪‬Los Angeles philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn fund $100,000 Mohn Prize through The Hammer Museum and its “Made in LA 2012” biennial, the fund committed to at least five biennials [AO Newslink]
‪‬Los Angeles philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn fund $100,000 Mohn Prize through The Hammer Museum and its “Made in LA 2012” biennial, the fund committed to at least five biennials [AO Newslink]
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LA MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch and Mike D of The Beastie Boys collaborate for magazine Avant/Garde Diaries’ upcoming Los Angeles cultural festival “Transmission L.A.: AV Club” [AO Newslink]
Cy Twombly, To Vivaldi (1960). All photos courtesy Eykyn Maclean and the Sonnabend Collection, New York © Cy Twombly Foundation.
Nineteenth and twentieth century artworks gallery Eykyn Maclean is exhibiting Cy Twombly works from the Sonnabend Collection in its London space, and the works will move to New York City in April. The exhibition consists of eleven pieces from the collection of Ileana Sonnabend, who ran the Sonnabend Gallery for over thirty years, until her death in 2007. Ileana Sonnabend was an early supporter of Twombly, and shortly before his death in 2011, he said of her that “she had the eye.” Many of the works have not been seen in public before, and are part of Sonnabend’s son’s personal collection. The works span several phases of Twombly’s career, beginning with various Twombly-scribbles on large, light canvases from the fifties. Each of the works, from the fifties through the sixties, presses the boundary between writing and painting, revealing the physicality in both.
‪‬Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Battle of Anghiari’ may possibly be beneath Giorgio Vasari’s ‘The Battle of Marciano,’ as drilled probes detect similar pigments used in Mona Lisa, though Florence researchers maintain evidence is “not conclusive” at this stage [AO Newslink]
‪Damien Hirst will open his own gallery on Newport Street in South London to showcase his collection of 2,000 works, which includes his own paintings, work by street artist Banksy, and Jeff Koons. The gallery plans to open in 2014, following his retrospective at the Tate Modern in London this coming April. [AO Newslink]
Gavin Brown Enterprise. All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.
March 8–11 marked the third edition of INDEPENDENT, the alternative exhibition forum held in the former DIA Center for the Arts on West 22nd Street in Chelsea. Founded by gallerists Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook in conjunction with White Columns’ Matthew Higgs, Independent has established itself as a thoughtful and ambitious counterpoint to the annual Armory Art Show. This year marked the fair’s largest audience with attendance figures surpassing fifteen thousand. The forty-three participating organizations range from established blue chip galleries to emerging galleries as well as respected non-profits.
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild at Galerie Sho Booth, Pier 92
On the third and final day of the Armory Show 2012 both spirits and sales were high amongst the 228 exhibitors. Besides the notable success of David Zwirner’s solo booth by Michael Riedel, which sold out entirely in the first 30 minutes of the fair, many of the other galleries also benefited from the sales of their high-ticket items throughout the three-day exhibition. Art Observed spoke with representatives from various exhibitors including the Susan Sheehan Gallery, Spanierman Modern, Meredith Ward Fine Art, Art in General, Sprüth Magers, and the Gary Snyder Gallery. (more…)
Gilbert and George, Guns (2011). All images via White Cube.
The collaborative duo Gilbert and George opened London Pictures to large crowds in Hong Kong last week, bringing the duo’s brash, oddball brand of British pop to the east for the inauguration of the London-based White Cube gallery’s new location. Based on 3719 source images drawn from newsstand posters stolen in East London over the last six years, the 292 works which comprise the London Pictures are the largest single body of work yet created by the duo, and the exhibition spans all four White Cube spaces—the new Hong Kong location, as well as Bermondsey, Hoxton Square, and Mason’s Yard. The gridded patterns of anywhere from four to forty tiles of found text and imagery—with the artists added in—explore themes of violence, sex, and death, through various methods of repetition. According to the press release, the survey draws “directly on the quotidian life of a vast city, [and] allow[s] contemporary society to recount itself in its own language.”
Installation view (more…)
‪‬Italian police recover 37 old masters paintings stolen from a Roman businessman’s collection in 1971. Paintings by Berlinghieri, El Greco, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, Van Dyck are among the works, worth £6 million in all.  Five works from the original theft still remain missing. [AO Newslink]
Cindy Sherman, Murder Mysteries, at Metro Pictures. All photos on site for Art Observed by Ryann Donnelly.
Running through March 11 at the Park Avenue Armory on New York’s Upper East Side is the 24th annual Art Show organized by the Art Dealer’s Association of America (ADAA). Benefitting The Henry Street Settlement, the show features 35 solo-exhibit booths, and 37 thematic installations from a select array of galleries including Metro Pictures, Cheim & Read, Pace, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman, Anton Kern, and Gladstone Gallery, to name a few. With a steady, if not entirely bustling crowd Thursday afternoon, the gallerists reported positively about sales and client traffic at a show carrying a heavier contemporary selection than in years passed. (more…)
Situated within the western reaches of Times Square, between an advertisement for Jesus Christ Superstar, a multistory parking lot, and the Playwright Pub, stands New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper’s Manhattan Oil Project. The work, supported by the Art Production Fund and Sotheby’s, is the second installation in The Last Lot project space, an initiative sponsored by The Shubert Organization for the Times Square Alliance’s public art program. Occupying one of the few remaining vacant lots in this seat of American commercial culture since Monday, the two hulking red and black structures rhythmically swing up and down, reaching 25 feet at their highest points. Meckseper explains, “The critical placement of the pumps is a conceptual gesture that raises questions about business and capital; land use and resources; wealth and decay; decadence and dependence.â€
Installation shot. All images courtesy of Gallery Buchholz Berlin.
German artist Isa Genzken presents a new constellation of works Hallelujah at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, Germany. Genzken works primarily in sculpture but is known to also employ other media such as film, photography, works on paper, and collage in her works. Her practice, known for drawing on the legacy of Minimalism, often involves a critical dialogue with Modernist architecture as well as contemporary culture.
‪‬Solid Objectives-Idenburg Liu (SO-IL) architects to create 1,500 ft long tent for Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island in May, with ‘neighborhoods,’ ‘wedges,’ and views of Manhattan along the curved structure, “It’s going to be very elegant,” says Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover [AO Newslink]
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #466 (2008)
Cindy Sherman‘s retrospective is on view now at MoMA through June 11. Using herself as her only model, Sherman manipulates her appearance and environment, manifesting a dialogue about gender and social stereotypes through every carefully crafted and costumed persona. With eleven galleries dedicated to various series of her work—from the simplistic roles of femininity displayed in her pioneering Film Stills series, to her more complex transmutations of fashion centerfolds, or the aristocratic elite—her consistent process has yielded more emotionally, psychologically, and aesthetically nuanced characters since her earliest work in 1975.
All photos courtesy David Zwirner.
Michael Riedel’s solo site-specific installation of silk-screened posters and wallpaper sold out within the first thirty minutes of the Armory Show preview at David Zwirner’s booth. Art Observed spoke with Riedel that very afternoon in the following interview.
Art Observed: I was really taken by your work and its interaction with systems. I felt that to be a foundational aspect of how you interact with art and what your art-making process is about. How did you get interested or involved with systems?
Michael Riedel: Well, there is a big German writer on systems, and it’s interesting because I found his writing after I produced a lot of works, and then I could say, ‘Wow, this is exactly what is in my work.’ So there is a strong relationship to his writing. I think he is a sociologist… anyway, I think this is something which makes total sense for me—as a product. It’s something that’s ongoing and changing, but also in the same time it is a fixed form somehow. Yet inside there are a lot of interests. You can also touch on the word reproduction; a lot of people like to talk about reproduction in reference to my work, yet there has been a shift in meaning of reproduction—it isn’t about a product anymore, but the process of production. Which means, in the process of producing works, they are only done to produce the next step, to recycle, to transform, to translate. So it’s an ongoing thing.
‪‬Online art critic Hennessy Youngman invites “anyone—and I mean anyone—who can bring your art down to Family Business” to participate in upcoming exhibition, ‘ITSA SMALL SMALL WORLD,’ in association with curator Massimiliano Gioni, and artists Maurizio Cattelan, and Marilyn Minter [AO Newslink]
‪‬Gerhard Richter’s auction sales reached $200 million last year, while the artist remains humble, says Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, “Richter doesn’t want to be the next king, but he has taken painting farther than just about anyone else” [AO Newslink]
‪‬Model, actress, and Cambridge art history graduate Lily Cole will become the host of a six-part television series Art Matters, in which she will meet with contemporary artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Christo and Tacita Dean.
[AO Newslink]
‪‬Chelsea-based David Zwirner gallery in New York seeks to open it first overseas space with a new location in London’s Mayfair. The London gallery will open November 2012, with an inaugural exhibition by Belgian painter Luc Tuymans. [AO Newslink]
Alec Soth, 2008_02zl0173 (2008)
Alec Soth threads a narrative of retreat, decay, and reclamation through the photos on display in Broken Manual at Sean Kelly Gallery. The exhibition traces Soth’s life as Lester B. Morrison, a character of Soth’s invention whom he incarnated from 2006–2010 while infiltrating isolated communities living life on the rural American fringe. The photos tell the story of Morrison’s retreat from civilization, depicting his passage from the squatters’ dens of urban decay to life among the “hermits and hippies, monks and survivalists†that become the subject of Soth’s lens. As he presses on, photos of strident, decrepit infrastructure imposed on pastoral landscapes give way to portraits of men who unsettlingly resemble the unforgiving locales they inhabit.
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Installation view. All images via Metro Pictures Gallery.
John Miller’s exhibition Suburban Past Time at Metro Pictures Gallery combines several mediums in “a continuation of the artist’s ongoing sociological investigation into so-called middlebrow culture, which focus on artifice in Western consumer societies,” according to the press release. Art Observed was fortunate enough to visit with Miller in the following interview.
Art Observed: After looking over the photos of the work and seeing it in person, there’s this sense of the everyday that comes out but there is also this pervasive strangeness that you seem to capture. It’s akin to the experience one has in a public space, when you walk through and notice a glimmer of strangeness that you see or feel for just a second—the absurdity of the everyday. Are you concerned with capturing that strangeness?
John Miller: A little bit, yes. A couple things on that note: One inspiration or source for the show was a show by Michelangelo Pistoletto at Luhring Augustine 2 or 3 years ago. Like many of his works he created silkscreens on mirrors, but I had never seen him do anything like this where he had a bunch of images and things that connoted public space like traffic cones and construction webbing, all coupled with images of ordinary looking women, but then they were made slightly uncomfortable because they were with traffic cones in public spaces—and you had to ask, was this an ordinary woman or a street walker? I got into this idea of public space, when a woman waited too long she looked suspect, and it showed a kind of genderedness of space. When a man stands on a corner you think he’s just waiting around, he’s less suspicious. I also liked the idea of overlaying two spaces—the gallery space, which is commercial space, like a store, and this staging of public space.
All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.
The Armory Show 2012 hosts 228 international exhibitors, “showing work that realizes the fair’s mission of innovation and discovery.” Split between Piers 92 and 94 on the west side of Midtown Manhattan, the show runs March 8–11, with several new programming initiatives and a re-designed floor plan added to the show’s fourteenth edition. Pier 94 is the larger exhibition hall, the Contemporary section featuring mainstay galleries Lisson Gallery, Sean Kelly, Victoria Miro, Kukje Gallery/Tina Kim Gallery, David Zwirner, Sprüth Magers, Gallery Hyundai, and Kaikai Kiki, among many others—including 19 invited Nordic galleries in the ‘Armory Focus’—while the Modern sector on Pier 92 is home to Marlborough Gallery, O’Hara Gallery, Inc., Pace Prints, Peter Findlay, and many more.
Gearing up for a performance piece on the fourth floor. Â All images for Art Observed by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand.
The festive albeit politically charged atmosphere at the 2012 76th annual Whitney Biennial‘s pre-show event was practically interdependent, with the political climate not only informing the sentiments of viewers, but arguably the art itself. While protesters outside encouraged entering guests to “Occupy the Whitney,” antagonizing Sotheby’s and Deutsche Bank for withholding benefits from workers and developing financial strategies to benefit the ‘one percent,’ art indoors at the biennial also challenged artistic convention against the same political scale, with over 50 artists showing work.