Caravaggio’s “Conversion on the road to Damascus” (1601) Via FT.

Currently showing at Rome’s Galleria Borghese is an exhibition of paintings by Italian master Caravaggio and the 20th century Irish painter, Francis Bacon. The exhibition, which has already drawn over 70,000 visitors, displays 14 paintings by Caravaggio along with 17 paintings by Bacon and functions as a kind of commemoration– marking 400 years since Caravaggio’s death and 100 years since Bacon’s birth. Mixing the past and present masters together gives rise to inevitable comparison, and although it is widely acknowledged that Caravaggio had no direct influence upon Bacon, their work shares a broad range of thematic and stylistic properties– among them, a fascination with anatomy, a fixation on depicting an anguished and tormented human condition and revolutionary approaches towards depicting the human form and the expressive portrait in pursuit of realism.

Francis Bacon’s “Study of George Dyer.” (1969) Via FT. (George Dyer, Bacon’s most significant and constant companion and model, committed suicide in 1971, two days before Bacon’s major exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris.)

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A photograph of Joseph Beuys’s Action Piece presented as part of seven exhibitions held at the Tate Gallery from 24 February- 23 March 1972, via The Telegraph

I’m interested in the distribution of physical vehicles in the form of editions because I’m interested in spreading ideas. – Joseph Beuys (1970)

Currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Joseph Beuys: The Multiples, the first west coast presentation of The Broad Art Foundation’s nearly 600 Beuys works produced between 1968 and 1986. The works are displayed on the third floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) part of the ongoing loan program the foundation established with LACMA in 2008.

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Jeanne-Claude and Christo via smh

Jeanne-Claude, the radical artist best known for the joint projects undertaken with her husband Christo – most notably the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris and the installation of 7,503 vinyl gates with bright orange panels in Central Park in 2005 – dies at the age of 74 in New York City [Guardian] a review of some of the couple’s monumental art here [Guardian]

Jeff Koons’ train installation via artculture

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) reconsiders plans for a Jeff Koons sculpture involving a replica of a 70-ft 1944 Baldwin locomotive to hang from a crane and estimated to cost $25 million [LATimes]

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Urs Fischer’s ‘Noisette’ via New Museum

Swiss artist Urs Fischer is the first artist to take over all three galleries of the New Museum, with an exhibition entitled “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty,” Fischer’s first major American museum show. The announcement of Fischer’s show caused a good deal of excitement and speculation. Fischer, who famously dug out the floor of Gavin Brown‘s gallery in 2007, is well known for spectacular punk gestures, and observers were curious to see what he would do. Curator Massimiliano Gioni calls the exhibition not a retrospective or a survey, but an “introspective,” an in-depth look at Fischer’s practice combining previous works with new works and site-specific installations. In the post-boom era where museums are abandoning blockbuster shows and retreating to their collections, the New Museum gave Fischer a considerable amount of freedom, allowing him to significantly alter one of the galleries structurally, and flying last minute a gigantic sculpture from China.

Installation view of Urs Fischer’s ‘Marguerite de Ponty’ via New Museum

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stazione (Rialto Mercato), Emily Jacir (2008) via Alexander and Bonin

Emily Jacir: Dispatch is the artist’s second solo exhibition shown at Alexander and Bonin Gallery in New York City. The exhibition runs through November 28 and features works from two of Jacir’s most recent projects, Lydda Airport – a short film that takes place at the eponymous location sometime in the mid to late 1930’s. Also to be featured at photographs and the brochure of Jacir’s stazione, which was conceived for the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009 but never realized due to its unexpected cancellation by Venetian municipal authorities without explanation.

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Abstract Painting (894-1) (2005) by Gerhard Richter, via Marian Goodman Gallery

Currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York is “Abstract Paintings” by Gerhard Richter. The most recent presentation of the artist’s work in New York since his solo exhibition at Marian Goodman in 2005, the exhibition features major works by the artist from 2005 to the present including a new cycle of paintings entitled “Sindbad” (2008) and also individual paintings with medium to large format abstractions. In addition, Richter has displayed a new group of large scale near-monochrome paintings with underlying chromatic structures layered in veils of translucent white paint.

Abstract Painting (894-2) (2005) by Gerhard Richter, via Marian Goodman Gallery

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Bringing attention to the theme of repetition– a detail of view of the caged parrot, part of Broodthaers’s minimal and highly conceptual installation.(2009) Via Peter Freeman.

Currently showing at Peter Freeman, Inc. in New York is an exhibition of Marcel Broodthaers’s installation entitled “Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit – Le Perroquet” (Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So – The Parrot”.) The show marks the first time that Broodthaer’s installation has been exhibited in the United States. The show, in its entirety, consists of two palm trees, an African gray Parrot, a glass case displaying Broodthaers’ catalogue from his 1966 exhibition at the Wide White Space gallery in Antwerp (along with a reprint from 1974), and a recording of the artist himself, reciting one of his poems: “Moi Je dis Je Moi Je dis Je…”. Broodthaers formed the concept for the 1974 installation as a kind of symbolic setting in which the booklet for his solo exhibit at Antwerp’s Wide White Space Gallery could later be presented.

An installation view of Broodthaers’s exhibit at Peter Freeman, Inc. (2009) Via Peter Freeman.

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Walter De Maria: The Broken Kilometer via Dia Art Foundation

On long term display in Soho since 1979 under the Dia Foundation, The Broken Kilometer (1979) consists of “500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter.” The rods are placed in five parallel rows, with 100 rods making up each column. This monumental sculpture weighs 18 3/4 tons and would measure 3,280 feet, if all 500 rods were laid end-to-end. The rods’ placement increases by 5mm, with the first two rods placed a mere 80mm apart and the final two rods positioned 580 mm apart. The work is placed in a spacious room illuminated by metal halide stadium lights. Altogether, the piece is approximately 45 feet wide and 125 feet long. De Maria completed The Broken Kilometer in 1979, and it has been on long-term view to the public ever since.

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Preview of Yeondoo Jung’s piece - Cinemagician, commissioned by Performa 09 and presented at Asia Society. Video courtesy of Asia Society

On November 19th and 20th, Asia Society hosted one of 9 individual artists commissioned to conceive a piece of interactive art specifically for the 3nd Performa Biennial that has been remastering the landscape of New York art scene for the last two weeks. Yeondoo Jung’s Cinemagician is a project of one of the most prominent Korean artists working today. Combining theater, cinema, and performance, Jung create a trompe d’oeil effect that is both highly innovative and amusing. He tackles the often overlooked process behind creating a video work, art form that increasingly pervades modern practice. By allowing the audiences to witness first hand the making of Jung’s video work, he activates the space between the artist and the public. Jung recognizes the importance of the creative process to the final product and thus implicates the audience in actively participating in creating the work. (more…)

Terence Koh captured mid-lecture during his performance “Art History: 1642-2009” at the National Arts Club, New York via Zimbio

Last night ArtObserved was on site at New York City’s National Arts Club to witness a performance,”Art History: 1642 – 2009,” from Terence Koh.  The performance was curated by Stacey Engman, the National Arts Club‘s Contemporary Art Chair and Chief Curator and was in conjunction with Performa 09. Indeed, the theme of the night – a tour through the great canon of Art History – was set from the beginning of the night as guests, who included Aurel Schmidt, Vito Schnabel, Klaus Biesenbach, Marina Abramovic and Mary Boone, mingled in a salon-style reception in the beautiful front parlours of the club house. The performance was to take the form of an Art History lecture, accompanied by images of artworks – this was about all guests knew before the show started and so guessing and anticipating became the game of choice for all in attendance.

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Slow-motion shadow in color (2009) by Olafur Eliasson, via Kanazwa Museum

Now on view at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan is “Your Chance Encounter” featuring new works by the Danish/ Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.  Often employing the use of light, wind, waves, and other elements from nature as material in order to explore the workings of human perception, in these new works the artist once again investigates the nature of human perception by creating works which make use of the design of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art.

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A detail view of literary texts within a dessert terrain diorama, from Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition at the Hispanic Society of America.  Via Dia Art Foundation.

Currently showing at the Hispanic Society of America is an exhibition by Paris and Rio de Janeiro based artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.  The show, which  functions as a kind of expansion of the society’s renowned research library,  consists of a range of twentieth-century literature installed in a series of three dioramas, by reference to their place of origin. The various texts, written by some 40 authors, hail from three distinct geographical regions: the dessert, the tropics and the North Atlantic. Entitled “chronotopes and dioramas,” the site-specific project is the third in a series of contemporary art exhibitions commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation for the Hispanic Society of America, which rests in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Organized by the Dia Art Foundation’s curator at large, Lynne Cooke, the exhibition marks Gonzalez-Foerster’s first major solo show in the United States.

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An installation view of one of Gonzalez-Foerster’s modeled oceanic terrains, (2009) Via Dia Foundation. “I always wanted to be a writer, but writing is very difficult for me,” the artist has said. “Slowly I accepted the idea of a kind of expanded literature, you might say.”

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Installation Still from “Only God Knows I’m Good” (via Lehmann Maupin)

Lehmann Maupin Gallery has opened a new solo show by British artist Tracey Emin at their Lower East Side location. Emin, most notorious for her 2005 work “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995” deals primarily with issues of lust, dreams, and the alienation of sex.

The media in “God Only Knows I’m Good” is varied: the artist employs embroideries, video, monoprints, sculptures, and neons. The embroideries encompass most of the show: sexed-out figures reminiscent of Egon Schiele’s awkward nudes writhe across large-scale canvases made from blankets. A plethora of small drawings also populate the gallery, inviting a more intimate viewer relationship. Tongue-in-cheek texts accompanying these figures offer either a shock of revulsion or a dark humor. “I can’t feel,” the women say, as they fondle themselves. “Every fucking time,” reads another. Both acutely personal and universal, Emin insists the women in her portraits are not directly autobiographical, but rather symbolic of prurience and loneliness. Her use of rudimentary spelling and a shaky line also imbue the work with a kind of disturbing naïveté, given the strong content of the imagery.

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Bill Viola: Bodies of Light installation view via James Cohan Gallery

Bill Viola: Bodies of Light, an exhibition of the internationally renowned American artist Bill Viola, opened at James Cohan Gallery on October 23, 2009. This retrospective of two decades of Bill Viola’s work features Pneuma, a full-room video/sound installation and several pieces from the artist’s newest series Transfigurations. The exhibition is on view until December 5, 2009.

The Innocents, Bill Viola (2007) via James Cohan Gallery

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William Kentridge’s ‘I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine,’ Photo by Paula Court, Courtesy of Performa

On November 9th, as part of Performa 09, William Kentridge presented ‘I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine,’ a lecture and animated performance that is related to his upcoming production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1928 opera ‘The Nose,’ at the Metropolitan Opera. The opera is based on the short story by Gogol of the same name about a man whose nose runs away from him and takes on a life of its own. Central to the story and Kentridge’s performance are the ideas of divided selves and authorial doubt. As Kentridge relays the story, an animated version of himself comes onstage, leading him to pause repeatedly and look over his shoulder, to walk over and quizzically inspect his doppelgänger.

William Kentridge’s ‘I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine,’ Photo by Paula Court, Courtesy of Performa

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Paul McCarthy “[Shit Pie (White Snow)]” (2009), at Hauser & Wirth.

Hauser & Wirth’s New York gallery is showing an entirely new collection of works by Paul McCarthy. “White Snow” presents two sets of drawings, created through and commenting on the classic fairy tale “Snow White.”  It brings together one of the original versions of the story, the 19th century German “Schneewittchen [Snow White],” and Disney’s 1937 re-imagining of the beloved folk tale.  The show closes on December 24.

Paul McCarthy, “[White Snow] Inside the Dwarfs House” (2009), at Hauser & Wirth.

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Memory (2008) by Anish Kapoor, via The New York Times

Anish Kapoor‘s Memory (2008), a site-specific work now on view at the Guggenheim in New York, is the fourteenth commission project launched by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Deutsche Bank. Conceived to engage two different exhibition locations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin and New York, the work is made of a skin of Cor-Ten steel only eight millimeters thick.

Press Release [The Guggenheim]
Inside, Outside, All Around the Thing [NY Times]
Guggenheim Turns 50, Lays Anish Kapoor an Egg [The L Magazine]
Anish Kapoor [Frieze]
Anish Kapoor Installation Opens as Part of Museum’s 50th [Artdaily]

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Still Life Bread (2009) by Ugo Rondinone, via Sadie Coles

Now on view at Sadie Coles in London is Ugo Rondinone’s ‘Nude.’ The Swiss artist displays new sculptures from his ongoing ‘still.life.’ series. Objects such as tree trunks, walnuts, potatoes and other objects normally found in still-life paintings are cast in lead-filled bronze and displayed throughout the gallery.

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The Royal College of Art Secret Postcard fundraiser via The Guardian

-The Royal College of Art’s Secret 2009 event has 2,500 postcards for sale for £40, made by artists including Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry and Yoko Ono.  Though buyers don’t know who the artist is until after they buy. [Times UK]

-Penelope Curtis has been appointed director of Tate Britain, the first woman to hold a directorship at Tate. [Guardian]

-Tracey Emin opens a new exhibition in New York, that, while popular, comes nowhere near the levels of sales or attendance she normal receives in Britain. [NY Times]

An artist’s rendering of Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Cirkelbroen’ bridge to be built in Copenhagen via Artinfo

-Olafur Eliasson has designed a bridge to be completed by 2012 in Copenhagen’s harbor. Called ‘Brikelbroen,’ the bridge is comprised of five circles that take pedestrians on a winding path rather than straight across. [Artinfo]

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The New Museum

In September, the New Museum announced a series of exhibition entitled “The Imaginary Museum,” the first of which will be curated by Jeff Koons from the collection of Dakis Joannou, who in addition to heavy collecting the work of Koons, is a trustee of the museum. The museum’s decision to show works from the collection of one of its trustees raised some ethical red flags by several bloggers, and last week gained momentum with a front page article on the NY Times followed by considerable coverage elsewhere, including an editorial in The Art Newspaper by Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green, who had previously blogged about the situation, and responses by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine. The cover of the November issue of the Brooklyn Rail featured a satirical cartoon by artist William Powhida with the title, “How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality,” taken by a post by James Wagner, skewering the incestuousness and insiderness of the New Museum, and Artinfo called the controversy the “New Museum scandal.”  The New Museum responded in defense, and a number of other museum directors also defended the museum’s decision.

Dakis Joannou and Jeff Koons at the New Museum’s 30th Anniversary Gala in 2007 via The Art Newspaper (more…)

Girl Woods (2008) by Jeff Koons, via Gagosian Gallery

Currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills is “New Paintings” by Jeff Koons.  This new body of work suggests a departure from the artist’s usual rendering of familiar yet banal objects within glossy surface textures. These works appear to be more literal, abstract and gestural yet also follow the tradition of figurative painting.  They also engage in a dialogue that is cultural and intellectual by referencing major figures in modern art such as Gustave Coubet and Salvador Dali.

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Mike Kelley, “Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms,” (2009) Via Gagosian.

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On the back side of “Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms,” are TV color bars, interspersed with videos depicting family life found on YouTube. (2009) Via Gagosian.

Currently showing at Gagosian Gallery in New York is an exhibition of paintings by Mike Kelley entitled “Horizontal Tracking Shots.” The show is Kelley’s first exhibit in New York which is devoted solely to paintings. In the past, his collaborative and solo shows have involved elaborate multimedia sets, symbolic performance art, theatrical spectacles, drawings and installation works. This body of work grew out of one of Kelley’s previous exhibitions entitled “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions,” a kind of auto-biographical, multi-faceted project that began in 1995, involving sculpture, video narrative and themes of trauma and repressed memory.

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Women and Blackboard from Take Care of Yourself (2007) by Sophie Calle, via The Whitechapel

Now on view at the Whitechapel in London is Sophie Calle’s  exhibition Talking to Strangers. Hailed for her photographic and film installations, Calle is known as one of France’s foremost female conceptual artist.  Her often obsessive and voyeuristic projects examine the many notions by which human identity is constructed. She has been known to ask a stranger to sleep in her bed and invite an author to command her destiny. Such social interactions involve a complete act of trust for circumstances where trust is normally termed taboo.

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Polaroid Wall, Dash Snow (2005) all images via Phillips de Pury

This week we have been reporting on the Post-War and Contemporary evening sales in New York and last night Art Observed was on site at the final auction of the week – a smaller, more boutique event at Phillips de Pury in the meatpacking district of the city overlooking the celebrated Highline railway and Hudson River that was overseen by Simon de Pury himself.  Unlike the multi-million totals achieved at Sotheby’s and Christie’s Contemporary evening sales, Phillip’s modest sale brought in a grand total of $7,099,250, within the pre-sale estimate of $5.8 – $8.4million.

Ice Bucket, Jeff Koons (1986) sold under estimate $230,500

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