Ed Ruscha, Baby Jet, 1998. Photo by Paul Ruscha, courtesy of Moderna Museet.
Currently on view at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, through September 5, is Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting. This exhibition, which is a collaboration with Hayward Gallery in London, shows more than 70 paintings, spanning the period from 1958, five years prior to his debut in 1963 at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, to the present day. Curated by Lars Nittve and Ann-Sofi Noring, the installation groups Ruscha’s works in chronological order so as to allow the viewer to see the development of the artist’s various motifs and styles over time.
The exhibition’s overarching theme, of course, is words and their constantly shifting relationships with context and message. As the curators explain, “In all his paintings there are tensions and frictions at play: between foreground and background, between text and image, and between how words look and what they mean.”
Installation shot, Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years Of Painting. Photo by Åsa Lundén, courtesy of Moderna Museet.
The forthcoming exhibition of works by acclaimed Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami at the Palace of Versailles has sparked protests by French traditionalists and conservative groups. Due to open on the 14th of September, the show will feature 22 works by the artist displayed throughout the Palace and the gardens including 11 pieces created specifically for the exhibition. As with the Jeff Koons’s exhibition, which showed at Versailles in 2008, a group of traditional supporters of the historic Versailles Palace protested against a commercial and at times sensationalist artist showing work in such a landmark of French history.
Dancers in MELT at The Salt Pile. All images by Art Observed.
Art Observed was on site for MELT: an experimental, site-specific dance installation performed at the Salt Pile in lower Manhattan through September 12, 2010. Choreographed by Noémie LaFrance, best known for staging similar conceptual pieces in unconventional urban spaces, MELT incorporates both the aesthetic and acoustic particulars of its location into a multi-media sensory experience. Watch the video below for AO’s exclusive MELT short clip.
The 30 minute performance features eight seated women, each harnessed to the wall beneath the Manhattan Bridge. The dancers are wrapped in a mixture of beeswax and lanolin, which gradually softens, drips, and liquefies, in order to create the illusion that they are melting.
Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, Dreammachine, 1962. Installation View, The New Museum. All images via Artnet
Currently on view at the New Museum is “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine,” the first comprehensive American exhibition to feature the interdisciplinary British artist, writer, and collaborator. Often overlooked, both popularly and commercially, Gysin (1916-1986) has frequently been characterized as a foil of failure within the historical narrative of Beat-Era success stories. He is generally credited as the inventor of the “cut-up” method, a medium which culminated in his co-authorship of the experimental collage-manifesto The Third Mind with William S. Burroughs.
Brion Gysin and William S. Burroghs, The Third Mind, 1965.
Martin Creed, Work No. 928, 2008, courtesy of The Guardian.
As part of the Edinburgh Arts Festival, Fruitmarket is honoring one of Britain’s most popular and esteemed artists, Martin Creed, in a major solo exhibition of recent and newly-commissioned work. Entitled “Down Over Up,” the show focuses on basic visual properties like the differentiation of size, proportion, and tone of everyday objects such as chairs, tables, boxes, and Lego pieces. Creed has often been criticized for the accessible quality of his materials and technique; while this aspect of his practice is visible in “Down Over Up,” the artist has also incorporated more conventional art forms such as paintings, drawings, and sculpture into the exhibition.
Creed initially won critical acclaim for his minimalistic sculptures, in which he rearranges everyday objects. He manipulates the common as a material representation of his primary preoccupation: modern culture. The artist often creates work in order to elicit particular responses from the viewer, by deploying a spectrum of motifs ranging from the absurd to the familiar.
Currently on view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art is “Pure Beauty,” a retrospective of work by John Baldessari. The exhibition features one hundred and fifty objects produced by one of the most influential living American artists, representing over five decades of his storied career. The show is curated by LACMA’s Leslie Jones, with Jessica Morgan, curator of Contemporary Art at the Tate Modern.
Art Observed was on site Tuesday, August 24th for the opening of Miles Mendenhall’s solo show at Half Gallery. The exhibition is the product of Mendenhall’s first off-screen collaboration with ‘Work of Art’ judge and Half Gallery co-owner Bill Powers.
On view are eight new works that echo the artist’s black-and-white screenprints from the Bravo show’s finale. His large-scale manipulations of digital imagery feature luminous geometric patterns, which reflect the artist’s enduring fascination with technology and, in particular, “the computer’s inability to compute certain visual information.” For more on Miles work in this exhibition and his artistic practice, watch the exclusive AO interview with the artist and Half Gallery owner Bill Powers.
‘The Geometry of Kandinsky and Malevich” is currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. The show, which includes only seven paintings, features the works of Russian artists Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) and Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944). The small scale of the exhibition permits an intensely focused look at two of the pioneers of abstract art. Although all the work is presented in one room, the representative paintings of each artist are hung in distinctly separate areas. This spatial orientation refers to the fact that, although Kandinsky and Malevich were contemporaries, and explored similar formal concepts, they did so independently of one another.
Vasily Kandinsky, In the Black Square (June 1923) Image via Guggenheim Museum
‘Newspeak: British Art Now,’ all images are via Charles Saatchi Gallery unless otherwise noted
Currently on view at the Saatchi Gallery is ‘Newspeak: British Art Now,’ an exhibition featuring more than 30 young British artists whose work is represented in the collection of Charles Saatchi. The European premiere of the show was held at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia in October 2009.
A Van Gogh painting valued at $55 million dollars was cut from its frame and taken from the Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo on Saturday. Despite reports that the painting, referred to as either ‘Poppy Flowers’ or ‘Vase and Flowers,’ had been recovered from an Italian couple at the Cairo airport yesterday, Egyptian officials now confirm that the painting remains missing.
Currently on view at Whitechapel Gallery is “Painted Truths,” the first major European exhibition of work by American artist Alice Neel (1900-1984). Featuring more than sixty paintings produced over the course of her artistic career, the show focuses upon the psychologically insightful and expressive portraits for which she is best known. Also included are a number of Neel’s cityscapes, in which the anonymity and exteriority of New York City are shown alongside the artist’s intimate depictions of its inhabitants.
Alice Neel, Ninth Avenue El, 1935. Image credited as above.
Julie Mehretu, Untitled 1, 2001 (est. $600-800,000), via Sothebys.com
Almost two years to the day after Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the bank will auction off hundreds of artworks worth some $16 million in hopes of raising funds for its creditors. There will be an auction at Sotheby’s New York on September 25 followed by an auction at Christie’s London on September 29. The smallest of the three auctions will be held at Freeman’s in Philadelphia on November 7 and will focus on the Lehman’s Contemporary Art holdings.
Damien Hirst, We’ve Got Style (The Vessel Collection Blue/Green), 1993 (est. $800,000-1,200,000) via Sothebys.com
Greater New York, the third quinquennial exhibition organized by MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art, features 68 artists and collectives from metropolitan New York. Recently completed and specially commissioned works alike showcase diverse talents and media, including sculpture, painting, photography, film, and large-scale installations. A purposefully provocative exhibition, Greater New York emphasizes themes of trauma, identity, and ecological, political, and psychological exploration. Curators of the colorful 2010 iteration selected artists of varying degrees of repute through online submissions, studio visits, and recommendations, assembling a brimming observation of contemporary New York City culture.
Images, text, and an interview with participating artist Conrad Ventur after the jump… Read More »
Installation View. Carol Bove, Sterling Ruby, Dana Schutz. Andrea Rosen Gallery, 2010. All images courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery.
Open until Friday, August 20 at Andrea Rosen Gallery is a group exhibition featuring artists Carol Bove, Sterling Ruby, and Dana Schutz. Each of the works on view in this summer show explore themes of confinement, disaster, and violence, uniting the disparate styles and material approaches of the three participating artists.
Tauba Auerbach, Quarry, ‘Whitney On-Site: New Commissions, 2010.’ Photograph by Danielle Canter, via The Whitney.
Currently on view at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington streets is Tauba Auerbach‘s Quarry; an installation at the South-end of the High Line, where the Whitney Museum expects to open their downtown branch in 2015. The exhibit, which runs from July 18 though August 29, 2010, is the second installment of the three-part series ‘Whitney On-Site: New Commissions,’ a project anticipating the start of construction on the museum’s new building, currently scheduled for next Spring.
Otto Dix, Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Hugo Simons (1925) All images via Neue Galerie
Currently on view at the Neue Galerie is an exhibition featuring the work of German artist, Otto Dix (1891-1969). The show was organized by Olaf Peters, Professor of Art History at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Following its run at Neue Galerie, the show will travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is the first solo museum show of Dix’s work in North America. Although widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century in Europe, Dix has been slower to attain widespread appreciation among American audiences. The 100 plus works featured in this exhibition, which include drawings and paintings, emphasize Dix’s ability to portray the often brutal realities of his time, with the cynicism and satire which characterized the “New Objectivity” movement.
Billboard paintings after Dennis Hopper photographs, courtesy of LA Observed.
Dennis Hopper’s photograph series, 1961 to 2010, courtesy of When You Awake.
‘Dennis Hopper Double Standard,’ a comprehensive survey of artwork by the late cultural icon, is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition explores an interdisciplinary body of creative work produced by actor, director, photographer, painter, sculptor, and conceptual artist Dennis Hopper, over the course of his prolific sixty-year career. More than two hundred objects crafted in a variety of media are on view, including a rare early painting completed in 1955, before to the loss of the artist’s studio and much of his work in the 1961 Bel Air fire. Curated by artist Julian Schnabel, ‘Dennis Hopper Double Standard’ is the inaugural exhibition of the museum’s new director, former New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. Prior to his death in May of this year, from complications related to prostate cancer, Hopper also played a significant role in the organization of the exhibit.
MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, actress Diane Keaton and Jean Stein at the Opening of ‘Dennis Hopper Double Standard’ on July 10th, 2010, courtesy of the Huffington Post.
Horizon Field (2010) by Antony Gormley, via The Guardian
Currently on view is a unique project in the mountains of Vorarlberg, Austria produced by British artist Antony Gormley (b.1950) in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Entitled Horizon Field, the project consists of 100 life-size solid cast-iron figures of the human body, dispersed over an area of 150 square kilometers in the Austrian Alps. The positioning of the figures in such a special location addresses the relationship between human beings and life on earth.
Also in Wall Street Journal weekend: Barry McGee is new mural on nyc's Houston/Bowery wall that has featured Haring, Fairey, Os Gemeos 3 days ago
Work by Steve Powers (Espo) featured in Wall Street Journal weekend edition's article on Urban Art Foundation's attempt to landmark graffiti 3 days ago
NYTimes: feature on Mary Boone Gallery's Barbara Kruger: show in East Hampton,NY; new Rizzoli book; and a permanent piece at the new Whitney 4 days ago
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