A selection of works by Fanny Allie, via Art Observed
Bushwick Open Studios has come and gone in the North Brooklyn arts hub, with another year of exhibitions and projects spread across the sprawling industrial landscapes of the borough closing to strong attendance.
Outside Fuchs Project Space During a previous Bushwick Open Studios
With another summer comes another edition of Bushwick Open Studios, the vastly popular arts open that brings a flood of visitors, artists and events to one of North Brooklyn’s strongest arts communities. (more…)
Pasternak, via New York Times
Following 20 years serving as President and Artistic Director of New York City’s prolific non-profit arts org Creative Time, Anne Pasternak will take over as President of the Brooklyn Museum, taking the helm from the recently departed Arnold Lehman, who had worked almost as long in the position. (more…)
Kehinde Wiley, Arms of Hugo von Hohenlanderberg as Bishop of Constance with Angel Supporters (2014)
The Brooklyn Museum is hosting a mid-career retrospective of Kehinde Wiley, the L.A.-born and New York-based artist known for his juxtapositions of contemporary youth through the lens of a classical notion of aesthetic. Wiley’s mostly street-cast models, sporting untouched urban attires, replace the highly familiar figures of classic European paintings that generally exclude people of color. Wiley consequently redeems what is missing from the canon of Western art in his intricately detailed oils on canvas, yet pays homage to Old Masters such as Velásquez or Ingres. Maintaining some distinct elements such as outfits and posture, his models, mostly young males of African descent, do not simply recreate what was already done centuries ago, but also reclaim a collectively missing part of their history. (more…)
The Public Art Fund and Brooklyn Bridge Park will host an exhibition of public works by Danish artist Jeppe Hein this summer, the New York Times reports. “One of the brilliant things about Jeppe’s work is he can engage you no matter what your background or experience or age in a very direct way,” says chief curator Nicholas Baume. (more…)
Philip Taaffe, Choir (2014-2015), all photographs by Farzad Owrang, © Philip Taaffe; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
In his large-scale paintings on display at Luhring Augustine’s Bushwick Gallery, Philip Taaffe blends historical and cultural motifs in dizzying collages full of color and life. His exploration of shapes and designs spanning space and time draw on historical narratives to bring overlapping cultural archetypes into view.
Charles Atlas, Terri’s Option (2015), all images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
Luhring Augustine is currently presenting The Waning of Justice, the gallery’s second collaboration with the pioneer video and sound artist Charles Atlas, following 2012’s The Illusion of Democracy at the gallery’s Bushwick location. One of the foremost experimentalists in multimedia, Atlas has pushed the limits of time-based art arguably more than any other artist, challenging the ephemeral natures of both performance and dance incorporated alongside his video work. In doing so, Atlas, not a performer himself per se, has collaborated with legendary names such as Leigh Bowery, Douglas Dunn, Michael Clark and most famously Merce Cunningham, whose partnership with Atlas resulted in video documentations of the late artist’s illustrious performances at levels that adopt further conceptual and contextual levels through Atlas’s frame. (more…)
Kehinde Wiley is in New York Magazine this week, showcasing gowns from the spring fashion season worn by a number of female models the artist painted for his soon to open Brooklyn Museum exhibition. “What we wanted to do was to play up the real world within the language of glamour,” Wiley says. “I wanted to have a reprise of that moment, to go back to this idea of fashion and art having something in common, the idea that fashion could change the perception of an individual.” (more…)
Ryan Foerster, Green Day (2012-2014), via C L E A R I N G
For C L E A R I N G’s second exhibition in its new 5,000-square-foot Bushwick space, the Brooklyn and Brussels-based gallery presents a sprawling showcase of multimedia work by Canadian artist Ryan Foerster. Winding fluidly through the venue’s four airy rooms, strewn across the floors and walls in a seemingly impromptu array, the featured works exploit the possibilities of the photographic medium while charting the artist’s latest forays into installation, video, and sculpture. (more…)
Artist E.V. Day’s Brooklyn home is the subject of a recent profile in New York Magazine this week, an open design which she shares with her husband, food writer Ted Lee. “Everything we put in was very clean—new and crisply detailed, to contrast with the industrial materials,” says architect Elizabeth Roberts. “The best features of the existing space were the unpainted wood ceiling and columns.” (more…)
Robert Wilson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, via BAM
Shakespeare’s sonnets were never intended as a theatrical work, a set of poems that extend the Bard’s legendary repertoire beyond a cache of plays that already constitutes a sizable portion of the western theatrical canon. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped Robert Wilson, who has revived Shakespeare’s Iambic Pentameter for his production currently showing at Brooklyn Academy of Music. (more…)
Bradford Young, Bynum Cutler (2014), via Art Observed
Founded in 1838, the Brooklyn community of Weeksville was a landmark moment in the history of African-American self-determination. Just 11 years after the abolition of slavery in New York, Weeksville was founded by free Black landowners, a venture that grew to over 500 households and earned its citizens the right to vote. As a social project, Weeksville’s impact is vastly significant, allowing a supportive, radical structure for its citizens to define and build their own system of economic and cultural stability. Weeksville’s powerful history that sits at the center of Creative Time’s newest project, Funk, God, Jazz & Medicine, a series of collaborative on-site projects and initiatives incorporating the communal, radical mission of Weeksville and examining its presence in the contemporary landscape of Central Brooklyn. (more…)
Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold Lehman has announced that he will step down from his position at the museum next year, closing out 17 years at the helm of the borough’s chief art museum. “This has been something I have been thinking about for a while,” Mr. Lehman told the New York Times. “I turned three score and 10 this summer. It’s time.” (more…)
The colorful, shifting glasswork of Andrew Erdos
The annual festivities surrounding Bushwick Open Studios seem to get bigger each year, and 2014 was no exception, as the yearly summer art open wrapped its eighth year of open artist studios, new gallery shows, and a freshly inaugurated art fair in the heart of one of Brooklyn’s hotbeds for creative talent.
Seren Morey at 56 Bogart (more…)
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Le orecchie di Jasper Johns (The Ears of Jasper Johns), (1966) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
At the current Michelangelo Pistoletto exhibition The Minus Objects 1965-1966, on view at Luhring Augustine’s Bushwick location, what greets visitors is their own reflection, as a single piece from the artist’s signature Mirror Paintings series, sits at the entrance. But the exhibition looks deeper into Pistoletto’s work throughout his career, focusing on the artist’s sculptural objects created between 1965 and 1966.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sfera sotto il letto (Sphere Under the Bed), (1965-1966) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
Bringing together a wide range of industrial materials such as wood, metal, newspaper and plexiglass along with glass mirror, the work carries an individualistic structure and an independent content: Pistoletto, by placing them in an uncommon harmony, orchestrates a coherent body of work composed of, in many ways, unrelated works. Structures underlining a hybrid combination of contrasting materials create a bridge between different techniques. For example Scultura Lignea (Wood Sculpture) includes a classically styled wooden sculpture, erected inside an orange-colored plexiglass case. Letto (Bed) on the other hand, is an assembly of wide ranging materials including glass mirror, velvet, wood and iron that Pistoletto culls together to render the domestic symbol.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Scultura lignea (Wood Sculpture), (1965-1966) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
Another noteworthy element in the exhibition, as its title suggests, is absence. Pistoletto’s work here puts a strong emphasis on the invisibility or the disappearance of certain components of his work to create a flowing dynamic within the piece itself. Parts that were there but now gone, or parts that never existed encourage viewers to elaborate on these missing elements. Le orecchie di Jasper Johns (The Ears of Jasper Johns) for example, is a torn photograph of artist Jasper Johns, missing the whole middle section, and in turn showing only his ears, an interesting rumination on the interplay between fame and intellect in the contemporary artist. Bagno (Bath) is a fiberglass bathtub that has the scooped out silhouette of a human being inside. Giving an impression of a departed guest inside the bathtub, the silhouette carries an intangible mystery along with a sense of wicked humor. Pistoletto’s irony-inflected wit is also evident in works such as Rosa bruciata (Burnt Rose) which is a spray-painted, corrugated piece of cardboard curled to give the impression of a giant burnt rose.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Rosa Bruciata (Burnt Rose), (1965) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
The act of subtraction is always at play here, examining Pistoletto’s reductive impulses at the heigh of Arte Povera, and his ongoing interest with the potential for the artist’s hand in contemporary practice. The Minus Objects 1965-1966 is on view through May 11, 2014
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ciak Azzurro (1962-2007) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Bagno (Bath) (1965-1966) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
—O. C. Yerebakan
Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Luhring Augustine]
Photographer Nan Goldin is profiled in The Guardian this week, as the artist prepares for the release of her new book, Eden and After. Reviewing the impact of her early series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin discusses ties between her work and the ubiquitous nightlife photography present on Instagram today. “Most of that stuff is so easy and lacking in any kind of emotional depth or context,” she says. “Nowadays, people forget how radical my work was when it first appeared. Nobody else was doing what I did.” (more…)
Matthew Barney, River of Fundament (still) (2014), Courtesy BAM credit: Hugo Glendinning
Matthew Barney’s newest film, River of Fundament, is a spectacle, to say the least. Clocking in at just under 6-hours, the film is in turns a surreal voyage through the Egyptian afterlife, the American automotive industry, and the respective encounters of Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler’s with their various subjects, all turned inwards on the film’s own internal logic and unleashed in jarring blasts of viscera, atonal operatics and monumental, ritualistic performance happenings taking part in Detroit, Los Angeles and New York.
Matthew Barney, River of Fundament (still) (2014), Courtesy BAM credit: Hugo Glendinning (more…)
The Eyebeam Center has selected the designer for its new center in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, choosing a multi-tiered structure by WORK Architecture Company (WORKac). “It’s a great moment in Eyebeam’s trajectory to think about the relationship between art and technology,” said WORKac Principal Dan Wood. (more…)
David Salle, Ghost 1 (1992), © David Salle, VAGA, NY. Courtesy, Skarstedt New York
Currently on view at Skarstedt Gallery’s uptown space is a series of 13 works by David Salle, from his Ghost Paintings series. Executed in 1992, these busy, color-inflected works were created from a series of photographs, documenting improvised actions with an enormous white sheet. Taken as a whole, the works create a dialogue on the image as the result of a series of practices, processes and flows, rendering a final piece that belies its mode of creation in subtle ways. (more…)
Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Ona has received considerable attention since its installation earlier this fall at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Bloomberg spoke with the artist recently, discussing its construction, her views towards her work, and the inspiration behind the towering sculpture. “I knew, if I wanted to be in front of it, I needed to have some presence, some power. So I made a piece that was sand cast in bronze. I wanted the sand casting because it would be more matte. I hate shiny, glossy things.” The artist says. (more…)
Public art pioneer Suzanne Lacy has announced a major project coming to Brooklyn on October 19th. Created in collaboration with Creative Time, the project will install “300 women and a few men” on the stoops of apartments in Prospect Heights, and on the steps of the Brooklyn Museum to engage pedestrians and visitors in dialogues on contemporary gender politics. The project is informed by 5 months of research Lacy completed this year with an advisory board of 16 activists. (more…)
Alex Ito, Magic Mountain (2013), via Fireplace Project
On view at The Fireplace Project in East Hampton, New York is a collection of works created this year by The Still House Group, an artist-run organization based in Red Hook, Brooklyn made up of eight permanent artists and a different resident artist each summer.
Matthew Stone, Unconditional Commitment to Sacred Love (2011) via Ben Richards for Art Observed
Dustin Yellin’s Pioneer Works Center is open again in Red Hook, with a series of exhibitions, concerts and events that have trumpeted the space’s return after the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. At the forefront of the Center’s fall calendar is Amor Fati, a tightly curated group exhibition featuring works by Yoko Ono, Angel Otero, Nicolas Provost, Matthew Stone, Mickalene Thomas, Nick van Woert, Andy Warhol, and many more, which seeks to explore the wild emotions and impulses so often present in the artistic treatment of love.
John Miserendino, Funny Games Pavilion (2012), foreground, and Andy Warhol, Kiss (1963), background, via Ben Richards for Art Observed
In anticipation of her upcoming show at the Brooklyn Museum, New York Magazine sat down with artist Wangechi Mutu to discuss her elusive, layered collage techniques, her influences in science fiction and mythology, and her views on images of international black identity. “In National Geographic you always saw pictures of tribal Africa. And here I am sitting in Nairobi, in our suburban house, watching TV and thinking, ‘Why is it always going to be these tribal people that are the ambassadors of our image?’” She says. (more…)
