Artist Cyprien Gaillard is featured in the New York Times’ T Magazine, talking about his practice, inspiration, and development as an artist, as well as his viewpoints on the cultural processes that inform his work. “For me, decay is a starting point. I don’t just record it or picture it. What I’m interested in is creating a form of equilibrium within the decay.” He says. (more…)
Cyprien Gaillard, Artefacts (2011), via MoMA PS1
Over the past several years, French artist Cyprien Gaillard has created a body of work that negotiates the complex spatio-political, geographical and cultural maps of contemporary culture. Continuously revisiting themes of decay, flux, erosion and conflict, his work picks through the saturated visual landscape of modernity, and exposes the interlocking mechanisms of destruction and creation at work, as well as the grey area between these polar states. (more…)
A fan clip of M.I.A. performing Paper Planes at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale – click to watch
12/12/12 at 12:00 opened the first-ever Indian Biennial, held in the South Indian city of Kochi, Kerala, 30 kilometers from the historic Muziris islands. Twenty-three of the eighty-two showcased artists in the Biennale are native to the state, with more than forty from India. The remaining artists come from all over the world, including Ai Weiwei (China), Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Cyprien Gaillard (France), and Wangechi Mutu (Kenya) among others. Musician M.I.A., whose family is originally Sri Lankan, inaugurated the showcase with her own Indian performing debut, additionally contributing her own hologram-based artworks to be viewed throughout the exhibitions. Modeled after the Venice Biennale, Kochi-Muziris runs for three months, through March 13th, 2013. (more…)
Terry Richardson and Pharrell Williams at OHWOW It Ain’t Fair 2012 photo by Aviva for Art Observed
On December 7th, 2012, at 743 Washington Avenue (on the Miami Beach side and not across the bay in the design district) OHWOW inaugurated the fifth and last edition of It Ain’t Fair (IAF), a venue for avant-garde art across all media. It began in 2008 in Miami, concurrent with the main fair, as another way to view work by emerging artists such as Tauba Auerbach, Ashley Bickerton, Cyprien Gaillard, Clayton Patterson and others.
Atmosphere at OHWOW It Aint Fair Miami 2012, all photos by E. Schwartzberg for ArtObserved unless otherwise noted
Street view of Cyprien Gaillard mural (2012). Via Sprueth Magers.
Situated at the top of Culver City’s gallery row where Venice and La Cienega meet is an automotive garage with a new mural of Caspar David Friedrich‘s tombstone epitaph, the work of Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard, commissioned by the Triple A public art project. Next door in a former muffler shop is François Ghebaly Gallery, one of many galleries along this stretch of Los Angeles road, which houses some of the most important gallery spaces in the city and is also one of the most heavily trafficked by commuters. The outside wall of this former muffler shop-turned-gallery is now the site of Gaillard’s mural, which is the second of eight projects meant to be realized over the next two years by Triple A, a public art project began by Fançois Ghebaly, Emma Gray, Al Moran (co-founder of OHWOW Gallery), Justin Beal, Flora Wiegmann, and Drew Heitzler (Wiegmann and Heitzler also being co-proprietors of Mandrake Bar, the hip Culver City art bar).
Move over vaporetti — there’s a new barge in town. Slated to gracing the banks of the Grand Canal in Venice over the past five days was a project by The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, entitled “Commercial Break.” The exhibition is organized by Neville Wakefield, a contemporary art writer prolific curator globally. Powered by POST Magazine, “Commercial Break” considers itself to be a provocative architectural intervention in a city where no advertising is traditionally displayed. Unfortunately, as Artinfo reported, the city pulled permits a few days before and the videos were instead screened at the project’s Bauer Hotel party. The woman behind the “GCCC” is Dasha Zukhova, girlfriend of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich; it is the institution’s second project in Venice. All videos are now viewable on the exhibition’s website.
Among videos featured is one by Richard Phillips, starring Lindsey Lohan.
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All photos by Caroline Claisse.
Currently on view at the Punta della Dogana, housed in the magnificent Palazzo Grassi, is “The World Belongs to You.” Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, the exhibition brings together artists from different generations, geographical locations, and practices to explore history and current realities.
The Punta della Dogana became the official exhibition space of Francois Pinault‘s private collection in 2006, when he purchased the building from the city of Venice. It now houses works from internationally renowned contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Urs Fischer, Maurizio Cattelan, and Takashi Murakami.
Urs Fischer’s violet piano at Punta della Dogana.
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Cyprien Gaillard The Recovery of Discovery (2011), via KW Berlin.
French artist Cyprien Gaillard’s “The Recovery of Discovery” is currently on view at KW Berlin. The work consists of cardboard boxes of beer that form the shape of a pyramid, which are available to the public to open and drink, after signing a waiver. The show opened on March 27th, and is in a continuing state of destruction until May 22nd.
Cyprien Gaillard’s beer pyramid opening night, via KW Berlin. More text and images after the jump…
Installation View All photographs are via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted
Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia street, London is the exhibition titled “Crash, Homage to J.G. Ballard” , a group show dedicated, as the name suggests, to the oeuvre of J.D. Ballard, a prominent British novelist and short-story writer, a representative of the New Wave movement in science fiction. The exhibition was put together to pay tribute to the enormous cultural influence of J.D. Ballard’s fiction on many visual artists. The impressive selection of works by such prominent artists as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, AndyWarhol and Helmut Newton illustrates profound engagement of the writer with the works of visual artists of his generation and their mutual influence.
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Cyprien Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009)
Currently on view is the first exhibition of iconoclastic French artist Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980) to be shown at Sprueth Magers Berlin. Comprised of the 16mm film Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009) and the photographic works Geographical Analogies (2006-2009), the exhibition follows Gaillard’s concern with the controlled and shimmering demolition of natural and man-made monuments.
Film still of Cyprien Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009)
As an artist, “interested in things failing, in the beauty of failure, and the fall in general,” Gaillard has sought to map the human imprint on architecture and geography by vandalizing historical landmarks and receptacles of memory, then slowly retracting his hand from the course of the destruction. Describing his art as “post-entropic – in pursuit of the big moment after the chaos,” the artist has documented in sculpture, painting, etching, photography, video, performance and large scale, public interventions, cataclysmic shifts that engulf time and hasten modern ruins.
More text, images and related links after the jump…
An excerpt of an earlier collaborative performance at The New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus show
On November 20th, ArtObserved attended a Performa event that was unlike many others. The evening started out engulfed in the crowd of stylish audiences, which noisily filled the small entrance lobby and occasionally poured out onto the sidewalk for a smoke or some air. As many languages resonated across miniature gallery, anticipation seemed to rise to a crecendo. Needless to say, The Kitchen filled to capacity.
The artist, a young French native who is now based in Berlin, shuffled in and out of the performance space beyond the large black doors. Hurried, yet composed, he let escape an occasional smile to the public.
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