The Art Newspaper profiles the work of Zlot Buell, the art consulting firm that has earned a reputation for discretely advising tech entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley wealth in the contemporary art market, and notes the commonly assumed myth that tech collectors are interested in digital art. “They look at a screen all day long; they don’t need to look at another,” Ms Zlot says. (more…)
Lucas Samaras, XYZ 1700 (2015), via Pace Gallery
On view at its 25th Street galleries, Pace is currently presenting Lucas Samaras’s exhibition Albums 2, featuring over 700 digitally enhanced photographs and a mirrored room installation. Samaras’s exhibition showcases his continued exploration of manipulated imagery as a way of plumbing his own existence, this time playing through his autobiographical accounts with digital technologies. (more…)
The Financial Times profiles Iranian artist Shirin Neshat as she prepares to open a career retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and Baku, Azerbaijan. “As an Iranian in exile, she has always been very articulate about the idea of a condition of diaspora and, with that, the complexity of feeling connected to a culture, but living outside it,” says Director Melissa Chiu. “It’s a very personal approach to history, through Shirin’s own eyes.” (more…)
An article in The Economist this week revisits the frequently noted boom in the art market, taking an extended perspective on the practices of private sales, institutional investment and consulting over the past thirty years. “People buy art when they’re confident about their future wealth,” says economist Clare McAndrew. (more…)
Rudolf Stingel, (Installation View), all images courtesy Gagosian Hong Kong
On view at Gagosian Hong Kong is an exhibition of recent paintings by Rudolf Stingel, representing the Italian artist’s first major exhibition of work in Asia. Exploring the nature of memory and the relationship between artwork and artist, Stingel continues expanding the vocabulary of painting with this series of work.
Alicja Kwade, Something absent, whose presence was expected (2015), via Johann König
A narrative surrealism infuses the work of Alicja Kwade. Works depict objects in the midst of transformation, moments of fusion, transposition and alteration of forms or materials that give the viewer the impression that time may in fact be standing still, if only for a moment. This sense of momentary pause is on view at the artist’s most recent solo exhibition at Johann König in Berlin, where the artist is presenting a body of new work under the title Something absent, whose presence was expected. (more…)
Klaus Albrecht Schröder, the director of Vienna’s Albertina Museum, has publicly called for a time limit Nazi-loot restitution claims for work held in public collections “The international community should decide on a sensible time frame of 20 or 30 years from now,” Schröder argues. “If we don’t set a time limit of around 100 years after the end of the Second World War, then we should ask ourselves why claims regarding crimes committed during the First World War should not still be valid; why we don’t argue anymore about the consequences of the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war, and why we don’t claim restitution of works of art that have been stolen during previous wars?” (more…)
Pierre Huyghe, Zoodram 5 (2011)
Following a year of strong solo exhibitions and special projects in the United States and abroad, Pierre Huyghe has opened a the first major retrospective devoted to his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, pulling together a combination of his most ambitious videos, sculptures and installation environments, allowing a broad few of the artist’s continued interests in fluctuations of time, space and matter as expressed within the gallery environment. Huyghe’s retrospective, which first opened in Paris, early last year, finally makes it to U.S. soil, bringing with it a group of 50 projects culled from the artist’s 20 year career. (more…)
Gillian Wearing, Me As an Artist in 1984 (2014), all Photos Courtesy of Regen Projects Los Angeles.
One of the most prominent members of the Young British Artists, Gillian Wearing, who in the past few decades has established a unique and enduring voice in the contemporary discourse, is presenting her new body of work at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects. The artist’s fourth collaboration with the gallery, everyone, features two new video pieces as well as various multimedia works that juxtapose Wearing’s investigations on personal memory, confrontation with past and unfolding of angst as a direct result. (more…)
Ryan Foerster, Green Day (2012-2014), via C L E A R I N G
For C L E A R I N G’s second exhibition in its new 5,000-square-foot Bushwick space, the Brooklyn and Brussels-based gallery presents a sprawling showcase of multimedia work by Canadian artist Ryan Foerster. Winding fluidly through the venue’s four airy rooms, strewn across the floors and walls in a seemingly impromptu array, the featured works exploit the possibilities of the photographic medium while charting the artist’s latest forays into installation, video, and sculpture. (more…)
Kader Attia, Asesinos! Asesinos! (2014), All images are the courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photography by Elisabeth Bernstein
Currently on view at both Lehmann Maupin spaces in New York, on the Lower East Side and in Chelsea, Kader Attia’s Show Your Injuries presents a striking first show for the artist with the gallery. Born in the suburbs of Paris, and raised both in France and Algeria, Attia appoints his multicultural background as his source of inspiration, studying the consequences of his dual cultural identity, both as an advantage and as a challenge. (more…)
Tracey Emin, Good Body (2014), all images courtesy White Cube Bermondsey
On view at White Cube Bermondsey, London is a new exhibition by English artist (and YBA member) Tracey Emin. Entitled The Last Great Adventure is You, the show will be her first at White Cube in five years, and will remain on view through November 16th.
Gillian Wearing, We Are Here (2014), all images courtesy Maureen Paley
On view at Maureen Paley is a solo exhibition of single-screen video work by Turner Prize-winner Gillian Wearing. Entitled We Are Here, the artist’s 6th at the London gallery. The exhibition is conceptually inspired by American poet Edgar Lee Master’s book Spoon River Anthology (1915), in which the people who lived by the titular waterway rise up from the grave and talk about their lives and memories. Wearing, who grew up in the town of Sandwell, bases her video on people from the West Midlands speaking as if they have returned from the grave.
Gillian Wearing (Installation View)
We Are Here premiered in the UK at The New Art Gallery Walsall and in the US at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and the work here centers around the production and conceptual planning of the piece, including a series of photographs taken around Sandwell, and other pieces of research. While the show is rather sparse, the exhibition is a welcome investigation into Wearing’s personal history, giving the area around her home town a certain agency to represent itself while also addressing the conditions and histories that help to define her own life and work.
Gillian Wearing (Installation View)
In her series of photographs, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, she allows her subjects the ability to express themselves on a series of white placards, with the results running from tender moments of self-honesty to hackneyed expressions about world peace. Taken as a whole, Wearing’s brand of cultural realism uncovers the the anxiety of her environment and the occasionally fraught contract between the artist and her subjects, occasionally breaking down or leaning into pop culture formats.
Gillian Wearing (Installation View)
Wearing won the Turner Prize in 1997 and was awarded an OBE in 2011. We Are Here was made possible by the Outset Contemporary Art Fund and the Art Fund with support from Maureen Paley, Shaun Regen and Tanya Bonakdar. The exhibition will remain on view at Maureen Paley through November 16, 2014.
Gillian Wearing, We Are Here (2014)
— E. Baker
Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Maureen Paley]
Pierre Huyghe, IN. BORDER. DEEP. (2014), video still © Pierre Huyghe Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, London and Anna Lena Films
Boldly distorting otherwise rigid phenomena, Pierre Huyghe has ambitiously orchestrated and staged alternative recreations of the daily and the mundane. For his current show at Hauser & Wirth’s London location, the Paris-born artist is covering the gallery space with his unfamiliar narratives, which emerge from more familiar territory. IN. BORDER. DEEP. invites the viewers into a hub of various experiments and observations, merging various mediums with science and art history itself.
Pierre Huyghe, IN. BORDER. DEEP. (Installation View) Hauser & Wirth London, 2014, © Pierre Huyghe Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, London Photo: Hugo Glendinning (more…)
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Nancy Rubins, Our Friend Fluid Metal (2014)
Nancy Rubins has not been hesitant about creating mammoth works of art, as seen in her first public installation at a shopping center in Illinois in 1981 or her 1995 installation of salvaged airplanes at MoMA. Exhibiting objects collected from thrift stores and and secondhand shops, the artist’s sculptural assemblages are charged with an eclectic energy. Televisions, planes, surfboards, heaters and mattresses are just a few source materials transformed into complex structures, charged with tangible energy and an inexplicable resistance to gravity. (more…)
“Born in the Bronx”, Installation View. All photos Anna Corrigan for Art Observed.
Now through August 1, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is presenting a trio of diverse works by Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, a video piece by the gallerist himself, and an exhibit of Afrika Bambaataa’s record collection surveying of the roots of hip-hop in the Bronx. The exhibits speak to the process of emptying shelves and opening closets, placing the material details that one collects over a lifetime on view. In equal measure, the works illustrate a history, at once intimately personal and indicative of the larger movement of time and material legacy.
Artist On Kawara, whose ongoing artistic project involved the painting of each day of his life, has passed away at the age of 81.
Born in 1933 in Japan, Kawara worked in Tokyo until 1965, when he moved to New York City. Shortly after arriving, Kawara began his famous “date paintings” series, painting the calendar date for each day of his life, meticulously recording the passage of his life on canvas through a simple, tracing of dates and time. His absurdist, heavily conceptual bent opened a new engagement with the processes of time and context in art, making him an unlikely air to the work of early Dadaists like Duchamp and Magritte. (more…)
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Ludwig II (M.2062) (2013), via Art Observed
Currently on view at 303 Gallery is French born artist Dominique Gonzales-Foerster’s exhibition, euqinimod & costumes. Being the artist’s first collaboration with the Chelsea gallery, the exhibition stands out as Gonzales-Foerster’s autobiographical investigation using clothes from her own wardrobe.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Euqinimod & Costumes (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)
Ann S. Moore, former CEO and Chairwoman for Time Magazine, has announced plans to open a gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. The Curator Gallery, located on 23rd, close to the High Line, will open on March 7th. “At my age,” Moore says “you can either put your money away, or you can spend it and have fun and that’s what I’m doing. Maybe I’m crazy, but I’ve decided to see what I can do.” (more…)
Roni Horn, Untitled (“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the…)(detail) (2013), via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed
The glass globules dotting the floor of Roni Horn’s current exhibition at Hauser and Wirth give off a remarkable sense of tension: frosted exteriors play off against the the crystal-clear center of the pieces, giving off an illusion of liquid depth, ready to overflow its container. Rather than staring at a solid object, one struggles to remember that these are not, in fact, vessels in the traditional sense, but enormous glass molds, poured and cooled over the course of several years. If they are vessels, the fluid material of it holds is that of light, flowing with the passage of the sun, and the gradual progression of time that it implies.
Roni Horn, Untitled (“A dream dreamt in a dreaming world is not really a dream…but a dream not dreamt is.”) (2013), via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed (more…)
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted its last weekend event series this weekend, featuring a free 24-hour screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock.The event marked the last days of the museum’s current space, as it closed its doors yesterday for a planned 225,000-square-foot expansion, which will make it the largest new American art museum of the decade.
Artist Ed Ruscha is on this Times’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people this year, recognizing the artist’s highly influential conceptual practice and ongoing contributions to contemporary American art. “Even if Ruscha never met a word he couldn’t unsettle, let’s hang on to the one we need sometimes to describe him: genius.” Writes Time art critic Richard Lacayo. (more…)
Ernesto Neto, for ever (2013), Courtesy Max Hetzler
A series of new drawings and sculptures by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto (1964) are currently on view at Galerie Max Hetzler in a solo exhibition entitled notes, stones and dots. The exhibition sees Neto exploring the forms and movements generated from the act of dancing: “If we could feel our body in a state of dance,” he says, “we might gain a better balance.”
Ernesto Neto, animal nature (2013), Courtesy Max Hetzler
Christian Marclay’s film The Clock, recently closed its one month run at the Museum of Modern Art this week, drawing a record 40,000 visitors to the museum. The number of visitors exceeds the combined counts for The Clock’s two prior New York screenings. The winner of the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Marclay’s film literally tells time, using shots of various clocks from the full range of film history to compile a full 24-hour viewing experience. (more…)
