Art Basel via The Telegraph

In it’s 43rd conception, Art Basel is continuing its legacy as the leader among the contemporary art world’s fairs.  Last year, 65,000 people flocked to the cultural capital, situated at the border of Switzerland, France, and Germany.  For this year, Basel will no doubt draw a similar, if not greater audience throughout its four-day duration.  Art Observed will be on site to cover and photograph throughout this fair.

Founded in 1970, Art Basel quickly surpassed Germany’s Art Cologne and similar fairs in scale and remains today as the world’s largest.  Almost 300 galleries from around the globe participate, spanning five continents.  This international representation results in a large and diverse assortment of exhibitions, video works, performances, and public installations.  This year specifically there will be more than 2,500 artists exhibiting $2 billion worth of art, nearly 300 gallery booths, and many more single stands present.

Perhaps the star feature of this year’s Basel will be Marlborough Fine Art’s Mark Rothko canvas, dated 1954.  The painting, for which there is already buyer interest, is priced from $78 to $84 million.

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Installation view. All images via Carlson Gallery.

Nate Lowman and Hanna Liden collaborate once again at Carlson Gallery in London. Lowman demonstrates his process-as-art aesthetic, exhibiting a number of paintings originally used as drop-cloths on his studio floor, alongside Liden’s peculiar umbrella sculptures, creating an otherworldly installation pockmarked by subtle intrusions of the everyday.

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All images courtesy Maccarone Gallery.

Currently on view at Maccarone New York is Hanna Liden‘s “Out of My Mind, Back in 5 Minutes.” The installation includes three photographs and several sculptures made from plastic shopping bags, t-shirts, and garbage bags. These items are stacked and filled with poured plaster or covered with latex, rendering them heavy and useless.

Loaded with references to memento mori and tribal customs, this process-based work transforms markers of the ephemerality and mundaneness of city life. It offers what the exhibition’s press release calls “a meditation on urbanity […] The result is a gallery space turned reliquary, containing the ghosts of an urban tribe now obsolete.”

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Rob Pruitt, Exquisite Self-Portrait: Father Martian, 2010. Images via the New York Times unless otherwise noted.

Rob Pruitt, the artist behind “Artworks for Teenage Boys” and “Artworks for Teenage Girls,” both paeans to and explorations of perceptions of adolescence, springboards off a particular microcosm of teenagerhood, the Amish rumspringa, in his current exhibition, “Pattern and Degradation.” This show, which opened September 11th at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and Maccarone, represents an ongoing rumspringa for the artist himself. In the Amish tradition, teens are given the chance to take temporary leave of their traditional, restrictive culture in order to indulge in the excesses of mainstream American youth, and then are allowed to decide if they wish to return to the community or stay in the outside world.

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Title to be Determined, Nate Lowman, 2010, bulletproof glass and bullets (detail view). Images by J. Swan for Art Observed.

On view at Andrea Rosen Gallery is the unusual pairing of artists Karla Black and Nate Lowman, two artists whose works address a general groundlessness, or rather, whose works evinces an almost petulant objection to groundlessness.  In partnership with Mary Mary and Maccarone, this exhibition, closing June 19th, displays recent works of painting and sculpture, executed in materials ranging from traditional alkyd paint on canvas to its self-conscious coupling with retired gas pumps, to guileful manipulations of paper that serve to threaten the material’s core integrity.

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Installation view of “A Dog From Every County” at Maccarone Gallery.  Photo by Tom Powel, courtesy of the Artist and Maccarone.

Greenwich Village contemporary gallery Maccarone is hosting a new Nate Lowman exhibition through the end of March.  The work, a series of works on paper depicting smiley faces, is a departure for the bad boy artist, more typically known for putting bullet holes in gallery walls.  According to Lowman, he’s challenging the idea of a reflexive happy emotion, and the smiley face imagery is lifted from a letter written by celebrity/criminal O.J. Simpson: “It’s this insane compulsion, like “I’m happy! I swear!” I’m not buying it. I don’t believe them.”

Maccarone Gallery
Nate Lowman “A Dog from Every County”
630 Greenwich Street, New York
February 28 – March 28, 2009

RELATED LINKS

Current Shows: Nate Lowman [Frieze Magazine]
Blasblog: The A-crowd comes out for Nate Lowman [Style File Blog]
Leo Fitzpatrick interview with Nate Lowman [Interview magazine]
Art Basel Miami Beach: Under Construction [T: The Moment]

More images, information, and video footage after the jump… (more…)

Andy Warhol’s Muhammed Ali Print via Artinfo

Warhol’s $28m “Athletes” series in Beijing for the Olympics [Macau Art]
Armed thieves steal 15 Antonio Berni works worth $2.2m in Buenos Aires [Art Daily]
New niche for ‘functional sculpture’ or art-as-furniture, among the big art buyers [Independent]
An increase in collectors wanting liquidity in their art by borrowing against it [NYSun]
Western art galleries in Beijing work quickly to cater to new wealthy Asian buyers [Telegraph]
Pretty Ugly at Gavin Brown and Maccarone reviewed the Times, previously covered by AO here [NYTimes]

“Pretty Ugly” at Gavin Brown Enterprise via Art Observed

Art Observed was on site at the opening of “Pretty Ugly” on Thursday, July 10th. The show took place at two neighboring galleries on Greenwich St. in New York: Gavin Brown’s Enterpise and Maccarone.
The show was curated by Alison Gingeras, of the Pinault collection, and featured work from more than 75 artists, including John Currin, Louise Bourgeois, the Chapman Brothers, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Alice Neel, Hermann Nitsch, Andy Warhol, Francis Picabia, and Rob Pruitt, just to name a few.

Pretty Ugly: Press Release [Gavin Brown’s Enterprise]
Pretty Ugly, Maccarone [Maccarone Gallery]
A Pretty Ugly New York Art Eclipse [Flash Art]
This Week in Art Openings: Totally Rad, Pretty Ugly, and The Shallow Curator [Papermag]
Pretty Ugly [Artlog]

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via Maccarone

Much like its title, Corey McCorkle’s current show initially strikes one as cryptic. Sparingly, he scatters a series of remnants across Maccarone’s cavernous West Village space: one room contains architectural photographs of an abandoned zoo, in the adjacent one, a looping video projects images of wild dogs roaming the overgrowth, and around the corner, down a narrow hallway, we come to a mirrored passageway that funnels to a point and creates endless, dizzying reflections. The overall effect is oblique but somehow uncanny, as abandonment haunts these commonplace sites, transforming them into pseudo-romantic ruins: the empty cages, the barren fields, the howling of dogs. And as the sense of desolation grows, so does the show’s subtle but insightful effect. (more…)