AO Art Observed™

Blackboard Tableau #1, Vija Celmins, 2007-2010. 3 found tablets, 7 made tablets, wood, paper, string, acrylic, alkyd oil, and pastel. Image via McKee Gallery.

Vija Celmins’ first gallery show in nine years features paintings, prints, and sculptures.  At the core of the exhibition are Celmins’ assemblages of neatly arranged objects that recall an outmoded and cerebral academic youth: globes, maps, tablets, and books, are bronze-cast or painted. Celmins presents 16 such objects, in addition to 4 paintings and 9 new prints.  Her exhibition at the McKee Gallery characteristically combines the personal and terrestrial with the cosmic.

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Shooting into the Corner, Anish Kapoor, 2009. Image via Scai the Bathhouse.

Anish Kapoor has installed five new sculptures at Scai the Bathhouse, Tokyo.  This is the third time Kapoor has exhibited his sculptures at the Japanese contemporary art gallery.  Although from Mumbai, India, Scai’s location prompted Kapoor to draw inspiration from Japanese craft, and to collaborate with an urushi lacquerware artist.

Untitled, Anish Kapoor, 2009. Image via Scai the Bathhouse.

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Installation views, Martin Creed & Jonathan Horowitz at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.
All images via Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

On view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise are concurrent solo shows by artists Martin Creed and Jonathan Horowitz. Creed has fashioned a site-specific installation by remaking the gallery floor into a collage of more than 100 different slabs of marble. The exhibit also includes paintings, performance works, and the premier of a new film. The multi-room installation “Go Vegan” by Horowitz offers a unique perspective on vegetarianism and sustainability, and addresses the ever growing consumption of commoditized pop culture in contemporary society. This marks the inaugural exhibition of the newly expanded space at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, which now extends into the 10,000 square foot space formerly occupied by the butchery and meat purveyor Pat LaFrieda Meats.

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Omer Fast Talk Show, 2010. With actress Lili Taylor. All images: A Performa Commission co-produced by Artis Contemporary Israeli Art Fund, Edith Russ House for Media Arts, Oldenburg and Goethe Institute. Photo by Olimpia Dior. Courtesy of the Artist and Arratia, Beer, Berlin.

Currently on view at Arratia Beer is a new video piece entitled Talk Show by Omer Fast. The work was originally recorded in front of a live audience as part of Performa in 2009, and continues Fast’s interest in the liminal space between fact and fiction as mediated by film. Set in a theatrical, talk show like setting, the film records Lisa Ramaci relating her personal story about the Iraq war to actress Rosie Perez, who was hearing the account for the first time. When Ramaci finishes her story, Perez re-tells the story to another performer. This process of re-telling is repeated for a total of six renditions, and, much like the childhood game of Telephone that the work is inspired by, results in many factual errors and even becomes comedic.

Omer Fast Talk Show, 2010. Courtesy of the Artist and Arratia, Beer, Berlin.

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Untitled by Richard Diebenkorn, 1950. All images via Artnet unless otherwise noted.

Currently on view at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, is an exhibition titled “Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Works on Paper 1949-1955″. Organized in cooperation with the Estate of Richard Diebenkorn, this exhibition features thirty-six works on paper  of this well-known American artist, whose early work is associated with Abstract Expressionism.

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Justify My Love, Cecily Brown, 2004, oil on linen. Image via CFA, Berlin.

Cecily Brown‘s exhibition at the Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, features large-scale oil paintings on canvas and linen.  Brown camouflages her subjects, often females in torrid positions, within alternately muted and frenzied colors and animated brush strokes.  Her use of blurred lines and monochromatic colors forces the observer to look carefully to discern the action of the painting.  Brown employs figuration and expressionism in this exhibition, which combines lush landscape paintings with motifs of sexuality and attraction.

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Kiki Smith, Pilgrim, 2007-2010, leaded stained glass in steel frames, installation dimensions variable. All installation images courtesy G.R. Christmas courtesy The Pace Gallery.

Currently on view at The Pace Gallery‘s location on 545 W 22nd Street is Kiki Smith: “Lodestar.” A parallel narrative to this exhibition can be found in “Sojourn,” Smith’s concurrent solo show now on view at the Brooklyn Museum (through Sept 12). “Sojourn” marks the artist’s first major museum show in New York since a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 2006. “You have to hit the ground running,” Smith recently told the New York Times, in reference to her process. Ever busy, the artist has also recently been commissioned to design a 16-foot-high window for the Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York’s Lower East Side. The historic landmark is scheduled for completion later this year.

The west coast also welcomes the artist’s presence this year: through August 15, 2010, Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery is showing “Kiki Smith: I Myself Have Seen It,” which explores the role of photography in the development of Smith’s aesthetic. The exhibition will travel to the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in the fall and to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University in the spring of 2011.

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On May 6, a multidisciplinary art festival dedicated to Marchel Duchamp and the creation of his latest and most mysterious masterpiece Etant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage opened in Chexbres, Switzerland.  The festival is presented by the Association Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and ECAL/University of Art and Design, Lausanne.  The floor will be given to the internationally most renowned Duchamp experts who will speak about the Forestay, the Lavaux-Region, Etant donnés and the reception of Marcel Duchamp by contemporary artists.

Etant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage by Marcel Duchamp via Artdaily

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Claude Monet “Le pont japonais”, 1918-24. Oil on canvas, 35 x 39 1/2 inches, (89 x 100 cm). W.1924, MM 5091. Musee Marmatton Monet, Paris. Photo courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Erase from your mind what you knew about waterlilies. Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery’s location on 522 West 21st Street is Claude Monet: Late Works. Straying from the artist’s better-known pastel-infused palette, the exhibition brings together 27 late canvasses with bold hues and scintillating color combinations. Many of these paintings were never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime, and some remained hidden as recently as the 1950s. Beautifully curated by Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker, this exhibition follows in the line of museum-quality shows the Gagosian has mounted in recent years. The gallery’s walls, transformed into elegant lavenders and greys, serve as the perfect backdrop for these exquisitely raw landscapes.

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Craneway Event Still (2010) by Tacita Dean, via Frith Street Gallery

Currently on view at London’s Frith Street Gallery is “Craneway Event” by Tacita Dean, a one hour and forty-eight minute film featuring legendary modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) and his dancers rehearsing for an event in a former Ford Assembly plant in Richmond, California. It became Cunningham’s last performance captured on film. He died just a few months later after premiering his last work “Nearly Ninety” on his 90th birthday.

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