Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Installation View), via Art Observed

Reflecting on the landmark career and tragically short life of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Zwirner has opened its first exhibition dedicated to his work.  Zwirner has partnered with Andrea Rosen to jointly represent the artist’s estate worldwide, a move that promises increasingly broad exposure and support for his vision and canon. (more…)

Lawrence Weiner, NAU EM I ART BILONG YUMI (The art of today belongs to us) (1988–2016), via Art Observed

Originally on view at the Monnaie de Paris, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Jens Hoffmann’s curatorial project Take Me I’m Yours has touched down at the Jewish Museum.  Bringing together a body of works centered around portability, consumption and distribution, everything on the show can be interacted with or taken by the viewer in some way, allowing the viewer to build up a collection of small-scale works and pieces from a single show.

Yoko Ono, Air Dispenser (1971), via Art Observed

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Michael Jenkins) (1991) Paint on wall Dimensions vary with installation

All photos courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation Photo: Pierre Le Hors

At Andrea Rosen Gallery, the first leg of a three-part exhibition commemorating the legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres concentrates on a single thread of the late artist’s expansive oeuvre.  Each one of his portraits—often times installed at their subjects’ residences—depicts a selected subject through a selection of important or trivial happenings loosely attached to the subject’s biography.  Placed on high ends of the gallery walls, right before ceilings begin, the portraits complicate hierarchies between climaxes and details in one’s lifespan, while challenging the methods of displaying art.  Curated by Julie Ault and Roni Horn, this current installment is set to continue with exhibitions at Massimo De Carlo in Milan and Hauser & Wirth in London this month, weaving an intercontinental dialogue through other prominent threads in the Cuban-born artist’s body of work. (more…)

A report by The Telegraph places Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas as the buyer of the record-setting $7.7 million Felix Gonzalez-Torres candy work at Christie’s this month, sold by Dallas Collector Howard Rachofsky.  (more…)

Mark Manders, Room with Reduced Chair and Camouflaged Factory (2003) , via Art Observed

Compiled from over 100 works in the Guggenheim Museum’s personal collection, the current exhibition at the uptown institution, Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, feels like something of a victory lap for the museum, following up on its excellent On Kawara exhibition with an extended show of contemporary works that spans the last thirty years, and which uncovers a broad curatorial focus at the core of its collection.  Emphasizing a nuanced interest in the narrative as a core unifying element for disparately realized works, objects and assemblages, Storylines pulls from diverse practices to portray the often challenging representative missions that contemporary artists set for themselves. (more…)

The Princeton University Art Museum has announced plans to install 12 billboards around the University, city and state, featuring the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.  The selected work, Untitled (1991), features an empty, but once occupied bed, evoking powerful emotions of intimacy and loss.  “Apart from its sheer beauty, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work invites us to consider issues of love and searing loss, and to become more aware of the meaning of private emotion and public space,” says Museum director James Steward. “In an age in which the scourge of AIDS remains with us globally, Felix’s immersive vision remains essential, and is a potent reminder of how this disease ravaged the art world twenty years ago.”  (more…)

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), 5 Türen II (5 Doors II) via Christie’s
Sold for: £2,169,250 ($3,466,462)
Estimate: £1,500,000 – £2,000,000 ($2,397,000 – $3,196,000)

Postwar & Contemporary Evening Sale
Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction on October 11th realized a sale total, including buyer’s premium, of  £23,177,900 ($37,158,809) with 47 of 64 lots sold. The Evening Auction featured three artists whose work has not previously been included in an evening sale: Idris Khan, Rebecca Warren and Jonathan Wateridge.  It also included a group of important self-portraits by Martin Kippenberger that include his seminal work on canvas Untitled (from the series Hand-Painted Pictures), twelve self-portraits on paper and his sculpture Immer an der Wand Beißen bei Susan.  Also notable was Gerhard Richter’s 5 Türen II (above), a masterwork from 1967 which has never been at auction or offered privately. 5 Türen II is related in theme to 5 Türen I (1967), which is at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.  The auction also highlighted figurative sculpture from the early 80s onward.

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Sturtevant. Photo by Loren Muzzey. All images courtesy the artist and Moderna Museet unless otherwise noted.

For half a century, Sturtevant has built her practice on the citation of other artists’ works. Challenging authorship through acts of appropriation long before it was made popular by the likes of Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Sturtevant made her artistic debut in 1965, when she presented a roomful of Warhol silkscreen flowers at a gallery mere months after the originals had been created. Although largely overlooked until recent years, Sturtevant won a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Biennale. Her latest exhibition, Image over Image, opened March 17th at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Showcasing 30 works, 4 of which are the artist’s “originals,” the exhibition fosters a sort of wall label guessing-game. As visitors travel from room to room they are confronted with familiar works from modernist art history—a Jasper Johns here, a Duchamp there. Among other artists cited in this exhibition are Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres, John Waters, and Paul McCarthy.

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Paul McCarthy, Cultural Gothic (1992). All photos on site for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

Art Observed was on site for the private Tuesday evening preview of the Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation show American Exuberance. Throughout 28 gallery spaces in a 45,000 sq ft museum, 190 works by 64 artists explore the American condition today through art, dissecting the paradoxical arenas of culture, economics, and politics. A 244-page catalog includes written commentaries by 13 of the artists from the notable roster, as follows: Thomas Houseago, Richard Jackson, Rashid Johnson, Nate Lowman, Richard Prince, Sterling Ruby, Haim Steinbach, Ryan Trecartin, and to name a few. About a quarter of the works were made in 2011 specifically for the show.  Also, Art Observed returned the next morning on Wednesday for Jennifer Rubell’s 11th annual breakfast, which is presented every morning throughout the week, treats visitors to a small jar of fresh yogurt, to be ‘anointed’ with honey dripping from the ceiling.

Collecting dripping honey at Jennifer Rubell’s Incubation yogurt and honey breakfast.

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Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled (Aparición), 1991 (est. $600,000-800,000, realized $1.65 million). All images via Sothebys.com.

Tuesday evening’s auction of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s New York brought in $128 million for forty-nine of fifty-eight lots sold. The sale’s estimate of $120.8-171.4 million included two lots that were withdrawn from the sale. Inclusive of the buyer’s premium, the night’s earnings barely passed the low presale estimate (prices realized include the buyer’s premium, estimates do not), and the results stood in stark contrast to Monday night’s sale at Sotheby’s of works from the collection of Allan Stone, which realized $54.8 million against a high estimate of $46.8 million. At the press conference auctioneer Tobias Meyer explained that estimates were “possibly aggressive” and that Sotheby’s had worked with sellers in reevaluating their expectations in response to the market, which in some cases meant lowering the reserve price. The sale’s top two lots – Sixteen Jackies by Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons‘ Pink Panther – both fetched respectable prices despite the fact that they fell short of presale estimates.

Andy Warhol, Sixteen Jackies, 1964 (est. $20-30 million, realized $20.2 million)

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Félix González-Torres, Untitled (Lover Boys), 1991. Courtesy of MMK Frankfurt.

The traveling retrospective of artist Félix González-Torres reached its last venue, the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt, on January 29th and will be closing April 25th. The exhibition, curated by Elena Filipovic and titled “Specific Objects without Specific Form”, provides an illustration of the elements of participation, dislocation, and transience that are prominent in González-Torres’s work. For each venue, an artist was invited to curate during the second-half of the show’s run. The three artists-curators–Danh Vo at WIELS, Brussels; Carol Bove at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Tino Sehgal at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt–refer to their own practice as directly influenced by the work of González-Torres. In this retrospective’s specific mode, they aspire to cast new light into the exhibited work, and construct new meanings and interpretations.

Félix González-Torres, Untitled, 1998 and Untitled (Blood), 1992. Courtesy of MMK Frankfurt.

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All Installation views via Andrea Rosen Gallery

Amnesia at the Andrea Rosen Gallery brings together three ambitious projects: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (It’s Just a Matter of Time) from his Billboard series, 12 On Kawara canvases from the artist’s Today project, with each work representing a month of one year, and a video program over nine monitors curated by Rebecca Cleman and Josh Kline of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). The show attempts to bridge the gap between seemingly incongruous works through the very theme of discontinuity. Amnesia references the gaps in memory that extend to the fibers of culture, and, ultimately, the historical archive.

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Andy Warhol, Men in Her Life, 1962 (est. $40 million), via Phillipsdepury.com

The second week of major New York auctions begins with two evening sales at Phillips de Pury on Monday, November 8th, followed by the Sotheby’s sale on Tuesday and the Christie’s sale on Wednesday. Phillips will hold two back to back sales on Monday evening that will inaugurate the house’s new headquarters at 450 Park Avenue in New York City. The evening sale is preceded by the first of a new series of auctions titled Carte Blanche, wherein a guest artist, collector, or curator organizes the auction. This week’s Carte Blanche auction is the bigger of the two sales and is curated by Philippe Ségalot. It is comprised of 33 works expected to fetch at least $80 million. The Sotheby’s sale is composed of 55 lots expected to bring upwards of $132 million, while the 76 lots at Christie’s are expected to fetch upwards of $240 million.

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Julie Mehretu, Untitled 1, 2001 (est. $600-800,000), via Sothebys.com

Almost two years to the day after Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the bank will auction off hundreds of artworks worth some $16 million in hopes of raising funds for its creditors. There will be an auction at Sotheby’s New York on September 25 followed by an auction at Christie’s London on September 29. The smallest of the three auctions will be held at Freeman’s in Philadelphia on November 7 and will focus on the Lehman’s Contemporary Art holdings.

Damien Hirst, We’ve Got Style (The Vessel Collection Blue/Green), 1993 (est. $800,000-1,200,000) via Sothebys.com

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Untitled (Throat) (1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, via Fondation Beyeler

Currently on view at the Fondation Beyeler is “Specific Objects without Specific Form,” part of a traveling retrospective featuring principal works by influential Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996). Among the principal works on display are the artist’s piles of candy and paper stacks. Viewers are allowed to enact with such works by taking away a small part. Also exhibited are a group of lesser known paintings, sculptures, photographic works and public sculptures.

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Field, Ai Weiwei.  Ming Dynasty-patterned Chinese ceramic structure in front Art 41 Basel’s entrance, with White Cube‘s Jay Jopling in the background, sitting at the fountain.

Art 41 Basel begins this week in Switzerland.  The international art show, featuring approximately 300 galleries and 2,500 artists, coming from 30 countries and every continent, will take place from June 16 to June 20.  Media include painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and editioned works.  Over 60,000 gallerists, art collectors, art dealers, artists, curators, and reporters will flock to the banks of the Rhine, at the border between Switzerland, France, and Germany, to view the works of established masters and up-and-coming talents alike.

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