Nicholas Serota has reportedly won an additional £6 million in government funding for the Tate Modern expansion set to open next year. The move is particularly noteworthy, as it comes in the midst of widespread cuts to arts funding around the nation. (more…)
Olafur Eliasson is interviewed in Fast Company this week, discussing his design projects and views on urban infrastructure, including the capacities for city planning and art to change how people interact and use limited urban space. “Reflexivity is about connectivity, and connectivity is sometimes more about looking into yourself than looking at the ‘other.’ It can be hard work, and it can be uncomfortable, but sometimes public space has to make that demand of you,” he says. “And sometimes art—and good art always—makes that demand of you. It makes you work. It makes you give. It makes you into a producer of space, of situations, of life, instead of being a consumer.” (more…)
The Snarkitecture Studio has unveiled a massive ball pit installed inside of Washington D.C.’s National Building Museum, part of a 10,000 square foot work titled The Beach. The work will remain open to the public through September 7th. (more…)
The Hong Kong Museum of Arts closes its doors next month for a three-year, $120 million renovation that will expand exhibition space, as well as raise the museum ceilings in exhibition spaces, a much-needed change that had caused problems for the institution. “There were some exhibits from overseas which could not be shown at the museum because of the height problem,” says Chan Shing-wai, assistant director of leisure and cultural services. (more…)
Harlem’s Studio Museum has announced plans for a new, $122 million building, designed by David Adjaye, on West 125th Street. “We have outgrown the space,” says Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden. “Our program and our audience require us to answer those demands.” (more…)
Serpentine Pavilion, via Serpentine Galleries
The Serpentine Pavilion, the annual summer architecture project hosted by Serpentine Galleries, has opened in London, a swirling series of multicolored chambers and hallways by Spanish architecture firm SelgasCano (the first commission from a Spanish firm) resting on the lawn outside of the museum galleries. (more…)
The Serpentine has announced a Build Your Own Pavilion contest for young and aspiring architects, aged 8 to 14, inviting them to try their hand at executing their own unique architectural design. “The platform and workshops give an insight to the basic principles of architectural design and workshop students will be given the Pavilion brief and a toolkit that begins with sketching by hand, working with simple modeling materials and progressing to 3D design and print technologies,” the Serpentine says. (more…)
The Guggenheim has selected the design for its proposed Helsinki location, a series of interlocking pavilions unified by a single tower, designed by Moreau Kusunoki Architectes. “Our approach was to try to make a building that is closely linked with the city, with the way people use it,” says architect Nicolas Moreau, who runs the firm with his wife Hiroko Kusunoki. (more…)
Katharina Grosse, The Smoking Kid (Installation View), all photos via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed.
Now through June 21, Johan König in Berlin presents The Smoking Kid, a collection of new paintings by Katharina Grosse. Grosse is known for her work employing bold colors and ambitious movement in order to transcend, open, and test the limits and boundaries defining space. Color and gesture are central concerns of this artist, whose works are at once challenging and whimsical, and her current exhibition departs from Grosse’s typical method of large-scale sculptural installation, turning her abstract style instead towards work in which movement and color is tidily contained to the canvas instead of imposed onto walls and other three dimensional forms.
This week, The Guardian looks at the fates of past years’ Serpentine Pavilion commissions, and their destinations after the work is taken down. With most pavilions sold before they are installed, the article offers a look at the shifts in use and context as works appear in the gardens of Indian steel magnates, or used as a beachside restaurant in the Côte d’Azur in France. (more…)
Dasha Zhukova’s long-awaited Garage Center for Contemporary Art has opened in Moscow’s Gorky Park, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas from a repurposed Soviet-era dining canteen. “We are very happy to work on turning the almost-ruin of vremena goda into the new house for garage,’ says Koolhaas. “We were able, with our client and her team, to explore the qualities of generosity, dimension, openness, and transparency of the soviet wreckage and find new uses and interpretations for them.” (more…)
The Guardian notes the recent completion of two new European contemporary art spaces (The Garage Center in Moscow and the Fondazione Prada in Milan) designed by Rem Koolhaas, heralding what some consider a new era in the shape and strategy for cultural centers. “If you want to change the world you also have to decide what you want to keep,” Koolhaas states.
Following widespread protests, the Frick is expected to cancel a planned expansion that would have eliminated a rare piece of landscape architecture. “It just became clear to us that it wasn’t going to work,” says an anonymous museum official. “It won’t be the best plan, but we will go back and prioritize. There was just a number of voices out there and we heard them.” (more…)
The Guardian takes another look at Grayson Perry’s recently completed home design in Essex, the fittingly-titled A House for Essex, which he calls a monument to “thwarted female intelligence,” and executed as a sacred communion with an imagined Essex woman named Julie May Cope. (more…)
With Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Art set to open on June 12th in Moscow, the museum has released a video offering a preview of both its impressive architecture and its world-class collection, including a colorful mural unearthed during renovations of the site, previously a Soviet-era restaurant. (more…)
London’s Royal Academy of Art has unveiled a £50 million expansion plan that will link the institution’s two buildings in the British capital’s Mayfair district. “You will be able to go from an exhibition in Burlington House to a lecture in Burlington Gardens through the vaults of the building,” says Sir David Chipperfield, who designed the project. “You will see the cast corridors, you will see where the schools have been all this time. It’s a small amount of architecture for a profound result.” (more…)
A number of artists are voicing their concern over the Frick’s proposed expansion plan, which would eliminate a garden by the British designer Russell Page. “As professionals working in the art world,” says an open letter signed by Chuck Close, Rachel Feinstein, Lisa Yuskavage, and Frank Stella, among others, “we strongly believe that the Frick’s effectiveness as a display space lies in its intimacy. Replacing the hall and garden with an institutional 106-foot tower will indeed destroy the famed Frick experience for artists and art lovers around the world.” (more…)
Outside the New Whitney Museum, via Art Observed
When the Whitney’s migration downtown was first announced, the anxiety and anticipation over its move away from the Breuer building on 75th and Madison was palpable, to say the least. But as the initial reviews of the space begin to trickle in, the move downtown seems to have made all of the difference for one of the bastions of American fine arts. Sure enough, the museum, which opens its Renzo Piano-designed doors to the public on May 1st, has created the conditions for something truly incredible in the Meatpacking District, an effortless, flowing viewing experience that manages to tie the museum’s impressive holdings together with the skylines and scenic views of its iconic hometown.
John Storr, via Art Observed (more…)
Printed Matter is leaving its current space at 195 Tenth Avenue, which is has occupied for the last 10 years, and moving to a new, two-level space at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and 26th Street this September, the organization announced this week. The new building will double its current space, and will allow a more diverse series of events to be held on-site. “Printed Matter’s new location will provide us with the much-needed space to facilitate our many different programs and services,” says Printed Matter Board Chair Philip Aarons. “In the past 10 years we’ve more than doubled in size as an organization, and it has become clear that we have simply out-grown our current space. We are thrilled by the prospects and opportunities our new home will provide in the fulfillment and furthering of our mission.” (more…)
The fully realized design proposals for the Guggenheim Helsinki are set to be unveiled at the Kunsthalle Helsinki today, marking the next step in the museum’s proposed expansion to Finland. “We hope this exhibition and its programs will inspire the Finnish public to engage with the possibilities of a Guggenheim museum in Helsinki, and to think about the potential of a prominent site on their waterfront,” says Guggenheim Director Richard Armstrong. (more…)
The completed Whitney Museum is set to open in a matter of days, and articles in both New York Magazine and the New Yorker are already praising the space for its massive exhibition spaces and intriguing design by architect Renzo Piano. “The audacity of the building shows that, yes, the Whitney will survive the new era,” writes Jerry Saltz. “But the better question is whether it has found a way to thrive in it. And, believe it or not, I am in love with what this building represents.” (more…)
The Guardian reviews the ongoing rebuilding efforts at the Glasgow School of Art, after the school’s Mackintosh library was destroyed in last year’s massive blaze. A fundraising campaign has already launched to help finance a new building, but a debate over rebuilding the space or starting over is currently drawing considerable attention. “[Mackintosh] was driven by a lifelong search for new forms in architecture and technology and was never a copyist,” architecture professor Alan Dunlop says. “I have no doubt that he would reject the approach of building a replica.” (more…)
Taryn Simon, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), all images courtesy Jeu de Paume
On view at Jeu de Paume in Paris is a body of conceptual artwork by artist Taryn Simon, combining photography, text, and graphic design to address issues related to the production and circulation of knowledge, as well as the politics of representation. The works on view, all produced after 2000, include The Innocents, a piece documenting cases of wrongful convictions in the United States, and underlining photography’s role and function as a both a credible witness and an oppositional agent that blurs truth and fiction.
The Art Newspaper reviews the Whitney’s soon to open, Renzo Piano-designed space in the Meatpacking District, reviewing its tripled floor space and focus on every aspect of the museum’s presentation. “We conceptualized [the building] as a total work of art,” says Donna de Salvo, the museum’s chief curator. (more…)