Works by Adam Pendleton, via Eva Presenhuber

Exploring two distinct voices in the evolution of art practice over the past 20 years, Eva Presenhuber has brought a strikingly confrontational, challenging exhibition to New York City, showing a body of works by Adam Pendleton and Liam Gillick that works between each artist’s strengths, and mines an ever-shifting understanding of the world around them to motivate and elaborate their respective iconographies.  
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Liam Gillick, A Broadcast from 1887 on the Subject of our Time (1996)

On view at Maureen Paley through November 22nd is a solo exhibition by prominent British conceptualist Liam Gillick, continuing the artist’s vastly interdisciplinary practice mining fluid and interconnected social norms, and scrutinizing the overt or arcane methods that agents of society pursue in response to such dynamics. (more…)

Liam Gillick, Installation View – Rest area racks 1-3, (2011), courtesy Air de Paris

Currently held within Air de Paris are two simultaneous complimentary exhibitions. Liam Gillick is responsible for a series of works entitled Sit in the Machine, which features two contradictory films detailing a glamorized yet banal setting regarding the mechanics of car manufacture. Intertwined with the exhibition is a relaxation area that mimics the workers’ rest areas at the factory. Gillick thus constructs a social act, relying on the spectators’ interactions, creating a nonobjectual relational experience.

Liam Gillick, Installation View, (2012), courtesy Air de Paris

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Liam Gillick, Untitled (2012). All images © The artist and courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

Galerie Eva Presenhuber hosts a new group of work by Liam Gillick in the exhibition Scorpion or Felix. Taking its name from a text by Karl Marx—of which only fragments have survived—the show features three central figures, Scorpio, Felix, and Merten, with smaller works in ink, writing on the wall, and colorful sliding doors. Gillick has been creating text-based works and objects dealing with the built environment since the late 1980s, challenging the interpretation of constructed spaces, “establishing relationships based sometimes on attraction, sometimes on repulsion.”

Installation view

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Another view of the main lobby, A Scott Campbell “tropical fantasy” (represented by the Miami based OHWOW Gallery) is the top center work

Art Observed was on site at the Soho Beach House Miami during the week of Art Basel Miami Beach for a tour of the 150 work art collection assembled for the private club and hotel.    Keeping a close connection with the artistic community has been an important part of the strategy for the Soho house brand, which has multiple locations in England as well as in New York and newly in Los Angeles, Berlin and Miami Beach.   This week marked the first Art Basel Miami Beach for the location and it hit the ground running,  hosting some important events such as dinners for White Cube and Victoria Miro galleries and a W Magazine event.

A John Baldessari on the left and a Friends With You on the right, in a hallway on the main floor

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Tiermetabolismus V (Katzchen) by Jonathan Meese at Bortolami Gallery, Art Basel Main Fair, Hall B, Booth I-09.

Art Observed will be on site as of today for the ninth edition of the America’s biggest contemporary art fair: Art Basel Miami Beach which will open to the public on Thursday December 2 and will run through Sunday, December 5.

The main section of the fair will house over 180 galleries and over 40,000 are expected following the December 2nd opening.  Annette Schönholzer and Marc Spiegler are the main fair organizers alongside its main sponsor UBS with Cartier, NetJets and AXA Art as the associate sponsors.  While Art Basel is still the main draw, the NADA Fair (the New Art Dealers Alliance) up the road at the Dauville Beach Resort will open to the public Thursday December 2. It will run through Sunday December 5 and also should not be missed.

Untitled (Art Fair Floor) by Ryan Reggiani.  Kate Werble Gallery at Nada Art Fair, booth 312.

The fair week is notable for its bridging of the Latin American buyers with American and British art centers as well as its uniquely intense amalgamation of social, media, fashion and other spheres of influence into the business of selling art.

The global art market seems to have stabilized this year and the main fair, along with its very significant satellites, should be met with lively buying this round.  Beyond this, all around Miami, the social calendar will be infused with events to the point where there is little chance to avoid regretfully missing something.

A view of an installation by Terrence Koh at The Island, an event during the week (see bel0w).

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Liam Gillick, Bundeskunsthalle installation view, 2010. All images via Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn.

Currently on view at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany, are works by British artist Liam Gillick, in a show enigmatically entitled “One Long Walk… Two Short Piers.”  The exhibit includes works produced by Gillick over the last two decades, and presents itself as a comprehensive survey exhibition of Gillick’s work.  Gillick’s work has often been the subject of such retrospectives: this exhibit is very much in the same vein (albeit on a smaller scale) as Gillick’s mid-career retrospective entitled, “Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario,” which traveled internationally to the Kunsthalle Zurich, the Witt de Withe Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Kunstverein Munchen, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, from spring 2008 to fall 2009.  The amount of attention paid to the entirety of Gillick’s oeuvre points to his status as one of the leading conceptual artist working today.

Liam Gillick, Bundeskunsthalle installation view, 2010

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Liam Gillick, Discussion Bench Platform, 2010. Exhibition View

Currently on show at Casey Kaplan Gallery is an exhibition of new works by Liam Gillick. This is an exhibition of three parts; however, each eloquently converse and all display Gillick’s familiar brand of socially motivated neo-Minimalism and neo-Conceptualism. The Discussion Bench Platforms in particular demonstrates Gillick’s concern for public/audience participation and integration into the work. Furthermore, it is another manifestation of Gillick’s attempts to level the balance of functionality and aesthetic quality. Powder-coated aluminum benches are set up in the gallery space to compliment new discussion platforms converting the gallery into a designated space for thought.

Liam Gillick, Discussion Bench Platform, 2010. Exhibition View

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Installation view of Liam Gillick: Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Currently on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, through January 10, is an extensive exhibition of a size and significance previously unprecedented in an American museum, featuring British artist Liam Gillick. “Liam Gillick: Three perspectives and a short Scenario,” interestingly marks the final installment of an elaborate multi-part, multi-national project, in association with Witte de With in Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich, and the Kunstverein in Munich, that represents this celebrated artist. Each location offered a unique, yet complementary, investigation into Gillick’s practice resulting in a rigorously comprehensive mid-career survey.

Liam Gillick, Rescinded Production, 2008. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Image courtesy of Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.

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Frieze Art Fair entrance in Regent’s Park, London

Art Observed is currently on site at the seventh edition of Europe’s largest contemporary art fair: Frieze which is on show in London’s Regent’s Park through October 18th.  The 164 exhibiting galleries represent the most exciting contemporary artists working today and for the past two years Frieze Art Fair has attracted over 60,000 visitors over the three day period for which it is active.  In addition to this, the fair not only attracts curators and collectors but encourages participation by all: over the three days the fair presents a curated program of talks, artists’ commissions and film projects, many of which are interactive or performative and encourage visitors to engage with art and artists directly.

A view of the booth of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin with work from Xavier Veilhan in the foreground and Duane Hanson in the background at Frieze Art Fair via abcnews.go.com

Related Links:
Art out of the ordinary [TimesOnline]
Frieze gets off to fizz-popping start [The Guardian]
A chair you can actually sit on [WSJ]
Autumn Fairs Are a Barometer of the Art Market [NYTimes]
Abramovic, Paltrow browse at Freize as buyers haggle [Bloomberg]
Chill of recession hits London Frieze art bonanza [Reuters.com]
Introducing the Frieze Art Fair [Telegraph.co.uk]
Party of the Weel: No sign of the Crunch at Frieze Art Fair [The Independent]
Recession chill hits Frieze Art Fair [Channel4.com]
Roll up for moody modern masterpieces:it’s the Frieze art fair [The Guardian]
Frieze Art Fair Opens to Steady Sales, Gray Art [WSJ]
Frieze Art fair: test your knowledge. A quiz to find out if you’re an art aficionado or Frieze faker [The Guardian]
London Calling a Spate of Artists to their Openings [NYTimes]
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Liam Gillick’s installation in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, photo by ArtObserved

Whereas the lines outside the Danish, American or British Pavilion were growing longer, the German Pavilion seemed rather calm on the opening day on June 4th.  For his room filling installation, British artist Liam Gillick in dialogue with the Pavilion’s curator Nicolas Schafhausen, decided to hide as little of the famous facist architecture of the Pavilion as possible. Inside, the artist built a kitchen-like structure in clear pine wood formally reminescent of Donald Judd’s wood sculptures. The facist background of the Pavilion’s architecture has been made the topic of their submissions by many artists. Gillick, in a spontaneous talk in front of the Pavilion this morning, explained that his intention was not to make a comment on why this architecture was built in the first place, but why it was maintained instead of being reconstructed as proposed in 1957 by Arnold Bode, founder of documenta.  Gillick mentioned the post-war rethinking of Germany and its identity in contemporary art and architecture in the 50s and 60s as one of the topics of his Biennial submission.  Though British, Liam Gillick is not the first non-German to exhibit at the German pavillion. Korean born Nam Jun Paik exhibited in this space in 1993, and was awarded the Golden Lion for his work.

German Pavillion 2009
Liam Gillick, the British artist representing Germany, outlines the challenges of working in a “problematic Fascist building” [The Art Newspaper]

Liam Gillick speaking in front of his installation in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, photo by ArtObserved

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