AO Art Observed™

Cai Guo-Qiang in front of Desire for Zero Gravity (2012) at MOCA’s Cai Gu0-Qiang: Sky Ladder. Images via MOCA unless otherwise noted.

In the first West Coast solo exhibition of world-renowned New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) presents four commissioned projects, including the most recent work in the artist’s Projects for Extraterrestrials series, which began in 1989. Trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Cai Guo-Qiang’s projects are spectacular and theatrical gestures, embodying the ethos of action painting and a long history of creation/destruction strategies in terms of today’s complex (pyro)technical mechanisms. Using gunpowder as his medium, Cai creates large-scale drawings in a matter of seconds with the dramatic transformative potentials of this volatile material.

Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Photo on site for Art Observed by Megan Hoetger.

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation held an Easter celebration at MoMA PS1 this past Sunday in typical DIY Bruce fashion. From 3–6 PM, a gamut of bands played in the Performance Dome while a lamb roasted outside, and an Easter egg hunt included cigarettes. While the group’s Brucennial 2012 exhibition continues through April 20, the one-day event in the courtyard of PS1 was titled Bruceforma 2012: The Resurrection.

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David Shrigley, How are you feeling (2012). Photos on site for Art Observed by Douglas Cloninger and Samuel Sveen.

Installed April 5th, 2012, the Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley‘s dry, absurdist sense of tragi-comedy is now on display as the third “Friends of the Highline” billboard. The 25 by 75 ft billboard is located at 18th Street and 10th Avenue in the Chelsea area of Manhattan and had previously featured work by Anne Collier and John Baldessari. Known for emploring a childish aesthetic and comic wit to navigate the tense world we create for ourselves, Shrigley’s new billboard poses the question, “How are you feeling?” and provides us with an uncommon but honest response. The work speaks largely to contemporary culture and the internal pressures that attempting to “keep up with the Jones” can create. The bubbles read, “HOW ARE YOU FEELING?” “I’M FEELING VERY UNSTABLE AND INSECURE. I ALSO FEEL VERY WORRIED AND ANXIOUS ABOUT EVERYTHING.” “I ALSO FEEL TRAPPED AND I FEEL THAT I AM MUCH TOO FAT AND THAT PEOPLE ARE LAUGHING AT ME. I FEEL VERY FRUSTRATED AND DEPRESSED. I FEEL THAT I AM UNABLE TO MEET THE DEMANDS THAT HAVE BEEN MADE OF ME. I AM IN A BIT OF A RUT CREATIVELY AS WELL.”

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Sketch Restaurant, London. All photos on site for Art Observed by Ryann Donnelly.

In celebration of their 10th anniversary, London’s Sketch restaurant in Mayfair unveiled a new installation from Turner prize winning British multi-media artist Martin Creed on March 1st, 2012. Creed’s installation is comprised of three main components: opulent marble tiling, large-scale murals, and an assemblage of mix-matched furnishings and tableware, each piece as functional as it is aesthetically compelling and intricate.

Martin Creed, Sketch Installation View (2012)

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Hernan Bas, A Satanist on a Tuesday (or, The Key Master) (2012)

Detroit-based artist Hernan Bas’ new show Occult Contemporary is on now at Lehmann Maupin, the exhibition consisting of Bas’ most recent body of work: a group of paintings in various sizes depicting dark, fairytale-like scenes. The name of the show is a reference to “Adult Contemporary,” a term used to describe a category of popular music. The subject of the show itself, as reflected in the title, is inspired by the appearance of the occult in all forms of popular media, including those geared towards children and young adults. Bas displays a strong fascination with the supernatural, his paintings loaded with whimsical imagery.

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Installation view of Heart to Hand. All photos on site for Art Observed by Douglas Cloninger.

Located in the former Deitch Projects building at 18 Wooster St., Swiss Institute‘s current set of exhibitions opened with a line out the door on March 7, running through April 15. Three shows are on view: Nicholas Party’s Still life, Stones and Elephants, Pati Hertling’s curatory project Heart to Hand, featuring work by Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Adam Pendleton and brothers and collaborators Oscar Tuazon and Elias Hansen, and downstairs Jimmie Durham’s Marquette for a Museum of Switzerland. Split between the several artists, the show begins with a colorful entrance, a large open main space split in two—half the floor raised, half reappropriated as sculpture—and a basement of semi-faux artifacts.

Artist Elias Hansen at the opening

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Curators Jason Alexander, “That’s not actually part of the show, we just liked the way it looked.” All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

The duo Jason Alexander—Jason Lee and Alexander Shulan—have set up a two-floor pop-up show in a former Chinatown sewing machine repair shop, Ten Ten, from which the show draws its name. The DIY exhibition of 17 young New York based artists includes Peter Demos, Debo Eilers, Ryan Foerster, and Ben Schumacher, as well a curator himself, Jason Lee—the self-inclusion an admitted faux pas. According to co-curator Shulan, the collection is unrestrained, loud, politically incorrect, non-AbEx (Abstract Expressionist), messy, with parts of it that “just don’t even work.” The diverse sculptures and images, a Porsche seat and chained pineapples, are set in dialogue amid wooden crates, broken sewing machines, and other remnants of the shop. The press release is a brief history of the sewing machine, providing something of a context of the space, while the curators otherwise chose to let the work speak for itself. Shulan said each of the young artists are either currently showing at galleries “or should be.” A few of the artists were also current or former assistants to more established artists; Jared Madere to Jenny Holzer, and Valerie Keane to Olaf Breuning and Ryan Sullivan.

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Kehinde Wiley at the opening of The World Stage: Israel at The Jewish Museum. All photos on site for Art Observed by Perrin Lathrop unless otherwise noted.

In the most recent iteration of his World Stage series, American artist Kehinde Wiley turns his eye on Israel. Wiley broadly considers The World Stage a project geared toward taking the “cultural temperature.” More specifically, the series represents a mission to picture young black men globally and has already brought the artist to India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Lagos (Nigeria), Dakar (Senegal), and China. With The World Stage: Israel, now on view at The Jewish Museum in New York, Wiley brings the African and Jewish Diasporas into convergence.

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Hans-Peter Feldmann, Golden Shoes with Pins (2012). Photos for Art Observed by Ryann Donnelly unless otherwise noted.

Hans-Peter Feldmann‘s sixth solo exhibition of new work is on view now at 303 Gallery in Chelsea, featuring pieces from several recent series in sculpture, collage, painting, and photography. Across the various mediums, the work is united by Feldmann’s keen appropriative sense, and traceable aesthetic manipulations. Often wavering between the vaguely comedic and the latently subversive, Feldmann’s work re-engages the seemingly familiar or ubiquitous to propose an alternative dialogue. (more…)

Jenny Holzer, Top Secret 21 (2012)

Section 2340 is pain that is difficult for the individual to endure and is of an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury. See Section 2340A Memorandum at 6.

Manhattan’s Skarstedt Gallery currently plays host to American artist Jenny Holzer’s first series of paintings in over thirty years. Renouncing the medium in the 1970s in favor of electronic LED lighting, projections, bronze castings, silkscreen, and varied other media for her subversive textual declarations, Holzer returned to painting for this 2010–2012 series, titled Endgame. Made famous by language-based works that provoke arresting responses to serious social and political issues, here Holzer occupies the veneered Upper East Side with Color Field-like swathes of oil on linen that manage to maintain her political bent .

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The artist Bharti Kher in front of A View of The Forest (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.

Bharti Kher‘s The hot winds that blow from the West showcases five variant pieces and is on view now at the East 69th Street location of Hauser & Wirth. On site for the show’s opening, the artist was born and educated in Britain, but moved to New Delhi, India in the early 1990s. The exhibition’s titular work is a large sculpture of stacked radiators, imported to Kher’s Indian studio from the United States over a period of six years. Stripped of their initial purpose as heaters, the ribbed design is dually linear and unnerving; repetitive carcasses pack the political implication of now-cold American heaters and suggest a recalibrating globalization with decreasing need for Western influence. More literally, ‘the hot wind that blows from the west’ is a reference to a summer wind called The Loo in Punjab. The region of Punjab is home to the northern border of India and Pakistan, a region fraught with conflict following post-colonial divisions.

Bharti Kher, The hot winds that blow from the West (2011)

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Rachel Willis.

Gagosian Gallery recently debuted a new body of work by German born artist Georg Baselitz. The show is comprised of ten pieces—nine oil paintings and one bronze sculpture—all standing at least nine feet in height and displaying images of abstracted human figures. Baselitz’s work has long been known for its aesthetic expression and the paintings in this show are no exception with their vibrant colors and painterly brushstrokes.

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Lisa Cooley‘s new Lower East Side space opened Friday night, March 16, 2012 at 107 Suffolk St after four years on Orchard Street. The inaugural show is titled Today—after the Frank O’Hara poem at the top of the press release—and promotes a participatory and communal feeling as Cooley’s full roster of artists is on display in the 4,800 sq ft, one story space. Guests were invited to sign a white canvas ‘guestbook,’ adding an additional dimension to the exchange between artist and participant. The exhibition features works from Michael Bauer, Alice Channer, Andy Coolquitt, Cynthia Daignault, Josh Faught, Frank Haines, Alex Olson, John Pestoni, Alan Reid, Erin Shirreff and J. Parker Valentine, and runs through March 25th.

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James Shaeffer at Reference Art from Richmond, Virginia.  All photos on site for Art Observed by Elene Damenia.

The second iteration of the Dependent Art Fair took place on the Saturday afternoon of Armory week, alongside several satellite fairs—including the Independent Art Fair. Dependent organizer Rose Marcus gathered 20 galleries in the Lower East Side Comfort Inn hotel, offering the two night stay for a fair fee of $400. The DIY, tongue-in-cheek fair is geared toward community and dialogue amongst its participating galleries and artists, seeking a sort of humorous—yet rigorous—elegance, leaving the intense marketing focus of other fairs to the back seat. Up and down the six occupied floors (floors 3–8, with a smoking deck on 6), visitors squeezed through the hallways and into the individual hotel rooms to see a variety of contemporary painting, sculpture, video, and installations, including a bed-ridden mini Kawasaki motorcycle at Reference Art, or made-to-order rum-fruit smoothies at Roberto Paradise.

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View of frame to have picture taken with boulder in Bixby Knolls on March 7, 2012. Images on site for Art Observed by Megan Hoetger.

On Saturday, March 10 at approximately 3:00 am the 340-ton granite megalith that will be part of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass reached its final destination at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Traveling for eleven days in the dead of night through Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, and Los Angeles Counties, the rock arrived at LACMA to a crowd of a thousand onlookers. The megalith’s final resting place is atop a 465-foot long slot carved into the earth. Viewers will be able to walk down into the slot and underneath the rock, experiencing scale in a way that harkens back to ancient times when massive structures such as Stonehenge, Easter Island, or the Great Pyramids were constructed.

View of boulder in Exposition Park area on March 9, 2012

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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 22^nd 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.

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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…)

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

Ai Weiwei, Marble Cube at Lisson Gallery

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Gearing up for a performance piece on the fourth floor.  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.

Chuck Close touring the second floor

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Serkan Özkaya, David (Inspired by Michelangelo) (2005). All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Istanbul-born artist Serkan Özkaya’s 30-foot golden foam sculpture, David (Inspired by Michelangelo) is parked outside Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo today at Kenmare and Centre Street. The sculpture will tour New York tomorrow, passing by the Armory Show, before its final destination of 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. The work was shipped from Turkey, acquired by the American museum in 2011. Özkaya originally created it for the 9th International Istanbul Biennial in 2005, though it collapsed six days before the event began. After restoring the original, two additional copies were cast. The artist grew up producing small replicas of sculptures he was unable to actually see in person; the double-sized David also has no current plans to visit its original in Florence. At the Storefront for Art and Architecture tonight from 6:30 to 9:30 pm is a Manifesto Series presentation and discussion “on the topic of Double,”—doubling, replicating, copying—paneled by artists, architects, critics, historians and theorists, including MoMA PS1 and Art International Radio founder Alanna Heiss, among others.

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