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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Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1271 Scribbles 12 (2007), all photos via Quincy Childs for Art Observed

The Drawing Center in New York is currently presenting selections from the collection of Sol LeWitt, offering a glimpse into the creative inspirations of one of the Post-War era’s central figures.  Showcasing an array of memorabilia and art including Japanese woodblock prints, hand-colored tourist photographs, and letters from his contemporaries, the show traces a lifetime of intellectual exchange and exploration by the pioneer of minimalist and conceptual practice. (more…)

An article by the BBC profiles the increased number of projects by contemporary artists taking place in culturally historical locales like Versailles, noting in particular Lawrence Weiner’s new installation at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.  “There is no clash between historical and contemporary,” Weiner says. “It is all contemporary. This was my home and Blenheim Palace is still living.” (more…)

Sol LeWitt, Drawing Series I,II,III,IIII (Drawings for Xerox Book) 24 Drawings (1968), via Art Observed

In 1968, a group of artists interested in the material limits of art practice, and the interrelations between text, language and action launched The Xerox Book, a published art book culling contributions from Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Lawrence Weiner to be printed and copied as an easily distributed art work.  Presented at Paula Cooper’s 21st Street Location in New York, The Xerox Book is a return to this landmark publication, incorporating a series of works and objects drawn from or inspired by each artist’s contributions.

The Xerox Book (Installation View) © Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Photo: Steven Probert

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Summer Group Show (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

The group exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery revives an excitement for the accomplishments of formal, conceptual and technical art practices during the mid to late 20th century, presenting a lively exhibition that groups together an overlapping group of six prolific artists: Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Fred Sandback, Anne Truitt, John McCracken and Lawrence Weiner, one is privy to the continuing reverberations of works that defined both minimalist and conceptual techniques in contemporary art practice, often passing from one school to the other while redefining notions of structure, method, dimensionality, and form.  Stoic in its midtown location, the exhibition presents an impressive collection of conceptual and minimalist classics, offering continuing pivots and critically advanced methodological expectations of non-referential visual forms.

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Image: Sean Daly, Shaun Regen, Kathryn Bigelow, and John Loga via Vogue

Shaun Caley Regen opened her new location in Los Angeles last night at 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, in a newly developing section of Hollywood, just east of Highland Avenue. The new space was designed by architect Michael Maltzan, creating a museum-like exhibition venue.

Image: Regen Projects’ inaugural exhibition via Regen Projects

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Artforum’s current cover, with the work Cake as Pie Pending Resolve, was created by Lawrence Weiner in honor of Artforum’s 50th Anniversary Issue.

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Fridericianum in Kassel via dOCUMENTA

Every five years, the city of Kassel in Germany plays host to dOCUMENTA, a colossal, 100-day long exhibition of contemporary art from all over the world.  Participating artists are provided at least two years to complete their work and the results are thus consistently thorough and complex.  This year is dOCUMENTA’s thirteenth edition and is expected to attract more than 750,000 visitors, nearly twice that of last year’s Venice Biennale.

Yan Lei‘s  “Limited Art Project”, a room of works completed daily over the past year.  The room and the art hung on its walls will be sprayed over with car paint, retransforming every piece into a blank canvas.  This image is featured on BBC News’ Big Picture series.

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‪‬Documenta 13 artist list announced: beginning June 9, 2012, the 100 day, once-every-five-years event will feature over 150 artists from 55 countries

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‪‪‬Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Tony Oursler, Marilyn Minter, Carrie Mae Weems, and rapper Jay-Z to artistically modify 300 NYC rooftop water tanks to “raise awareness on the global water supply” [AO Newslink]

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Lawrence Weiner, At a Distance to the Foreground (1999). All images Nicolas Linnert for Art Observed.

Closing this week is Paula Cooper Gallery’s group exhibition Locations, a showcase of work by fifteen artists involving mapping and locality. At a moment when art and its surrounding socioeconomic structure have moved steadily to occupy a global, deterritorialized sphere, this arrangement of works is distinctive in its look back to a mid-century Modernist practice regarding spatial surroundings.

Installation view at Paula Cooper Gallery.

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Temporary Tattoo provided with exhibition statement As Long As It Lasts (2011), photo by A. Bogart for Art Observed

Arratia, Beer present “As Long As It Lasts…”, a group exhibition that is transitory in nature.  The gallery invited several artists and designers to design tattoos, which are inked on site by a professional tattoo artist, Sarah Bolen from AKA Berlin.  The tattoo artist was only on site for Gallery Weekend, April 29-May 1, so appointments need to be made for anyone wishing to be ‘signed by’ an artist.  Those who choose to have an artist’s design tattooed get a certificate of authenticity, thus certifying that a work of art is part of them.  Appointments can be made until the end of May.

Francesco Vezzoli Untitled (2011), via Arratia, Beer.

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North Gallery installation view. All photos via Marian Goodman Gallery

Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner has placed text and curves upon walls and floors in his exhibition Gyroscopically Speaking, showing now at the Marian Goodman Gallery. The gyroscope as an object is problematic and unpresentable as a whole; one thing while it is still, a fascinating phenomenon of physics once spinning. Filling the North and South Galleries and the North Gallery Viewing Room, Weiner explores relationships between language and materials, humans and objects; the artist questions simultaneous realities of society and economics, forcing the viewer to engage an entirely new mentality.

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Taken from the Wind and Bolted to the Ground, (2009)

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Barbara Kruger, Past / Present / Future (2010). Via The Citrus Report

Closed since 2003, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has partially reopened with an innovative program of exhibitions, lectures, performances and workshops titled The Temporary Stedelijk. Taking Place is a group show highlighting the museum’s permanent collection, showcasing exciting recent acquisitions and also featuring new site specific work, such as Barbara Kruger‘s Past / Present / Future (2010). Ann Goldstein, recently named director of the Stedelijk and former senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, organized the program after complications prevented the Stedelijk from re-opening as planned in Fall 2010.

Roman Ondak, Measuring the Universe (2007), Via Uapmarker

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Anselm Kiefer, Winter Ade Scheiden Tut Weh Aberdein Scheiden Macht, Dass Mein Herz Lacht (Goodbye, Winter, Parting Hurts But Your Departure Makes My Heart Cheer), 2010
Listed at $100,000

Last night at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery on Chrystie street in the Lower East Side of New York, West-Village-based Foundation for Contemporary Arts held a benefit auction selling nearly 200 paintings and sculptures.  All proceeds went to programs of the FCA, “hoping to assist and encourage innovation, experimentation and potential in the arts,” this year providing 14 grants to artists, of $25k each.

A view from the balcony

The benefit was extremely well attended, with some of the artists joining as well. The large number of works represented a variety of globally well-known artists, including Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Brice Marden, Francesco Clemente, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Julie Mehretu, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, David Salle, Frank Stella, Elizabeth Neel, Julian Opie, Cecily Brown, Vija Celmins, Robert Gober, Nate Lowman, Dan Colen, Dana Schutz, Kara Walker, and T.J. Wilcox, to name a few.

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The First Annual Art Awards via Guggenheim.org

Last night, October 29, marked the inauguration of a new annual art event: Rob Pruitt presented The First Annual Art Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Yorkin association with the city’s oldest alternative art space, White Columns.

The awards were conceived by artist, Rob Pruitt, as a performance-based artwork; for the occasion he recruited the characters of Index Magazine’s wry satirical web series, Delusional Downtown Divas. The New York Times have reported that “…the Divas schemed to infiltrate the art establishment by any means possible. In one segment they pitched a tent in the Guggenheim, doing their laundry in the lobby fountain.”

Jeffrey Deitch and Kembra Pfahler at The First Annual Art Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum via style.com

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Gilbert & George’s ‘Great Expectations,’ via MoMA

On view through October 5, 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is ‘In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976,’ an exhibition that examines the beginnings of conceptualism and the role that international travel – in this case, particularly between Amsterdam and Los Angeles – played in shaping the movement. The exhibition includes ten American and European artists, from heavy-hitters such as Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, to the mythologized, like Bas Jan Ader and Stanley Brouwn, to lesser-known and peripheral figures such as Charlotte Posenenske. The focal point is the now-defunct but highly influential Amsterdam gallery Art & Project. Founders Geert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn gifted the museum 230 works in 2007, which make up the majority of the 75 works that appear in the exhibition.

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Sol LeWitt’s ‘Area of Amsterdam Between Leidseple Jan Dibbets’s House and Kunstijsbaan Jaapeden,’ via MoMA

Related Links:
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In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–197 [MoMA]
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MoMA Trumpets Amsterdam’s Role as Hub of Conceptual Art [Art21]
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Amsterdam as Hub for Globetrotting Conceptualists [NY Times]
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Conceptual Motion [New Yorker]
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Whatsits and Thingamabobs [NYObserver]
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In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960 – 1976 [ScribeMedia Art Culture]
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In & Out of Amsterdam at the Museum of Modern Art [Art Critical]
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Conceptual artists from Amsterdam and Los Angeles go dutch at MoMA [TimeOut NY]
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Looking at MoMA’s “In & Out of Amsterdam” [Hrag Vartanian]
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On Text & Art [Jen Bekman]
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Stunning and Flat [After Art News]

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Bas Jan Ader’s ‘Art & Bulletin 89,’ via MoMA

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Installation view at MOCA LA of “Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions” exhibit via TRYHARDER

Currently on view at MOCA, Los Angeles is a show titled “Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions”  organized by Ann Goldstein- the Museum’s Senior Curator and Bennett Simpson- the Associate Curator of MOCA. The exhibit aims to showcase recent acquisitions to MOCA’s permanent collection – one that is renowned internationally for growing at a remarkable rate and presenting contemporary art from a variety of art movements. The exhibit “Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions” focuses mainly on the works taken into the possession of MOCA LA within the last 5 years.  The show closes October 19, 2009.

Related Links:
Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions [MOCA]
Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions @ MOCA (part II) [TRYHARDER]
Collecting History [Selectism]

Installation view of “Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions” via MOCA

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Andreas Gursky, Pyongyang V via Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Currently showing at the   Wolfsburg is an exhibition titled “15 Years of Collecting – Against the Grain.” The Museum was launched in 1994 along with the immediacy of its mission to build a permanent collection of highly distinguished works by contemporary artists. The year of starting point of the collection, acquired since the launch of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, is 1968. The museum’s international reputation boasts works of avant-garde, minimalist, late modernist and conceptual artists. In celebration of its 15 anniversary Kunstmuseum is showing key works from its collection curated in an unconventional manner. The exhibit includes works by Bruce Nauman, Elizabeth Peyton, Carl Andre and Damien Hirst among others and closes September 13, 2009.

Damien Hirst, A Hundred Years via Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Related Links:
15 Years of Collecting: Against the Grain [Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg]
Fifteen Years of Collecting at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg- Against the Grain [ArtDaily]
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg presents 15 Years of Collecting- Against the Grain [Artipedia]
Profile- Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg [Saatchi Gallery]

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Installation View “As Long As It Lasts” via Marian Goodman

Through August 28, the Marian Goodman Gallery will be showcasing works by 14 artists throughout different generations in “As Long As It Lasts.”  The show, curated by Tom Eccles, takes its title from a work by Lawrence Weiner, and features artists such as Oliver Babin, Johanna Billing, Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Struth.  When these pieces are “seen in the context of one another, ruminate on the transitory nature of life, the contemplation of morality, impermanence and immanence of death.” The pieces span various mediums from sculptures, paintings and drawings to photography and film installations.

As Long As It Lasts [Marian Goodman]

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