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Drawing Restraint 15 (2007) by Matthew Barney, Photo: Neville Wakefield, via Schaulager

Currently on view at Schaulager in Basel is “Drawing Restraint” presenting sixteen performances by American artist Matthew Barney. In each enactment the artist leaves traces in an atmosphere of self-inflicted psychological and physical restraints. The result of such performances are sculptures, vitrines, drawings and videos all of which are juxtaposed against North Renaissance art.

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Rivane Neuenschwander, I Wish Your Wish, 2003, installation view (detail) © New Museum, all installation photos by Jordana Swan

Earlier this week at the New Museum, Rivane Neuenschwander’s first American museum retrospective, “A Day Like Any Other”, opened, finally giving the States the opportunity to view the internationally acclaimed work of this Brazilian-born artist.  Art Observed was on site for the three-floor opening, which spans a decade of Neuenschwander’s refined and poetic presentations on how she understands the world.

Rivane Neuenschwander, Rain Rains, 2002, installation view

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Picasso’s Portrait d’Angel Fernandez de Soto sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £34,761,250 – the 2nd highest price for a work of art sold by Christie’s in London (est. £30-40million)

Last night Christie’s held London’s biggest ever art auction when 46 Impressionist and Modern works racked up £153 million ($227 million), but the total was off from the pre-sale estimate of £164-231 million. While nearly quadrupling the anemic $60.4 million brought in by Christie’s at the same sale last June, tonight’s results suggest that while the art market may have recovered, pricing points are still a moving target. The sale was dominated by UK and European bidding – that includes Russia and former Eastern Bloc countries – which bought 55 percent of the lots sold, the U.S. accounted for 40 percent, and Asia for the remaining five percent. The sale saw only 46 of the 62 lots on offer sell, for a buy-in rate of 25 percent by lot and just 26 percent by value. Eight lots sold for over five million pounds and 31 broke the million-pound mark (37 works sold over $ 1million).

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Untitled (Throat) (1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, via Fondation Beyeler

Currently on view at the Fondation Beyeler is “Specific Objects without Specific Form,” part of a traveling retrospective featuring principal works by influential Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996). Among the principal works on display are the artist’s piles of candy and paper stacks. Viewers are allowed to enact with such works by taking away a small part. Also exhibited are a group of lesser known paintings, sculptures, photographic works and public sculptures.

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Self-Portrait with a Palette, Edouard Manet sold for a record £22,441,250 (est. £20-30 million) Image via Sotheby’s

Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern sale last night marked a sluggish start to the summer auction season in London as sixteen of the 51 lots offered failed to find buyers. In percentage terms, 31 percent went unsold by lot and 16 percent by value. The sale totaled £112,101,350 ($165,282,230) – surpassing the low end of the pre-sale estimate of £101 million ($150 million), but far off the £148 million ($220 million) high estimate. The total is the third-highest ever achieved for an Impressionist and Modern evening sale at Sotheby’s in London and stands in stark contrast to the £33.5 million realized in June 2009. In another encouraging sign of a surging market, nineteen lots fetched over a million pounds, and of those, three made over ten million pounds. In all, four artist records were set. The sale was topped by the cover-lot Edouard Manet‘s Self-Portrait with a Palette, which reportedly sold to the New York based dealer Frank Giraud for a record £22,441,250 ($33,087,379). The previous Manet record was set at Christie’s when La Rue Mosnier Aux Drapeaux sold for $26.4 million in 1989. The work, consigned by hedge-fund billionaire Steven A Cohen, had been estimated to fetch between £20 million and £30 million.

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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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Ugo Rondinone with two of his works in lower Manhattan, 2007, photo by Charlie Samuels via artnet

Currently on view at Aargauer Kunsthaus, in conjunction with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, is “The Night of Lead”, the first comprehensive exhibition of Udo Rondinone’s oevre in his Swiss homeland in eleven years.  New and recent works of painting, small and environmental sculpture, video and sound installation cover two floors of the gallery with a surrealist sensibility that speaks more to a tone of poetic metaphor than to a grope toward the unconscious.

Ugo Rondinone, The twenty-third hour of the poem, 2010, wax cast, pigments, 55 x 32 x 32 inches, © Ugo Rondinone via Aargauer Kunsthaus

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Nymphéas, Claude Monet (est. £30 – 40million)

The June sales in London are packed with potentially record-breaking Impressionist and modern works that are expected to fetch a combined total of £300-450 million. If the pre-sale estimates are realized, these the most lucrative series of auctions ever held in London, easily surpassing the £298 million realized in June 2008 before the global economic meltdown during which the June sales achieved just £96 million. Giovanna Bertazzoni, Director and Head of Impressionist and Modern art at Christie’s, London has noted the recent confidence renewed in vendors in light of the the strong results witnessed at auction over the last year, “we are witnessing a great willingness from clients to consign works of art of the highest quality. There is a fierce international demand in the art market, particularly for the rarest and the best, and the market itself is now truly global as illustrated at our auction in New York in May where we saw bidding from Russia, China and the Middle East, as well as from Europe and the Americas.”

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Portrait of Ángel Fernández de Soto, Pablo Picasso (est. £30-40million)

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Quilt by Alexandre da Cunha, and Six Billboards by Angus Fairhust, Art Basel.  Image via Art Daily, AP Photo/Keystone/Georgios Kefalas.

Yesterday marked the end of the most highly-attended Art Basel to date. The 41st annual contemporary art fair boasted 306 galleries from 36 countries, and AO was on site to peruse the work of some 2,5000 artists.  62,500 dealers, collectors, curators, high-profile shoppers, artists, and art appreciators navigated installations, browsed gallery booths, mingled, and enjoyed the city of Basel.  Artists, established and newcomers both, showcased works ranging from Polaroids to performance pieces, paintings to videos, sculptures to large-scale installations.  A social and teeming affair with an obvious commercial edge, Basel’s sales were optimistic.  Picasso, Warhol, Prince, Hirst, de Kooning, Pollock, and other similarly established artists reigned supreme as the focus of this year’s event.  Franck Giraud, a New York dealer, spoke to the New York Times about the lack of prominently featured up-and-comers: “Is it because that’s what the market wants, or is it because dealers didn’t want to take risks? I think it was a bit of both.” Nonetheless, certain galleries used Basel as a platform to introduce new artists and show off their latest signings.

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Robert Morris, Untitled, 2010. Felt with steel brackets. All images courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery.

Currently on display at Sonnabend Gallery are works by Robert Morris.  These include for the most part reiterations of works he has explored at various points in his career, such as the Felt Pieces, which he began making in 1967, and the Blind Time drawings, which he executes blindfolded following certain self-imposed rules, and which he began making in 1973.  Two films, Neo-Classic and Slow Motion, made in 1971 and 1969 respectively, are also on display.  Morris played an important role in defining the principles of Minimalism, a practical field which he also endued with a new softness and sensuousness, most notably with these works in felt.

Robert Morris, Sonnabend Gallery installation view.

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Damien Hirst and Michael Joo, 2010 © Damien Hirst/Hirst Holdings Limited and Michael Joo 2010 via Other Criteria, photo by Johnny Shand Kydd.

On view at Haunch of Venison, Berlin, “Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun?” is the first joint exhibition of Damien Hirst and Michael Joo, two artists whose often-controversial mediums (animals, a diamond-encrusted, platinum skull, urine) have offered convenient comparisons since the late 1980s.  This exhibition displays both new and canonical works in a manner that allows the works’ conceptual interests to flourish, despite—and in conversation with—their formal similarities.

Michael Joo, Improved Rack (Elk #18), 2010, antler, stainless steel, 72 x 115 x 37 inches © Michael Joo, via Haunch of Venison

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Louise Bourgeois, Fragile Goddess, 2002, cloth, 31.7 x 12.7 x 15.2 cm, courtesy of The Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg Museum.

The Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Berlin’s museum of Surrealist art, is currently holding its first temporary exhibition co-curated by Udo Kittelmann and Kyllikki Zacharias. Kittelmann had the idea to create a curatorial dialogue between the work of Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer before the museum’s opening in June 2008. ‘Hans Bellmer-Louise Bourgeois Double Sexus’ consists of over seventy works by Bellmer and Bourgeois, including sculpture, graphic art, and photographs.

Hans Bellmer, Die Puppe, 1935-1965, cast aluminum on gold plated bronze, 50 x 27 x 25 cm, courtesy of The Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg Museum.

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Robert Rauschenberg, Reach Beach (Runts) (2007) All images via Galleri Faurschou.

Currently on view at the Galleri Faurschou in Copenhagen is ‘Robert Rauschenberg: Runts’. The exhibition features the last series of collages created by the artist before his death in 2008.  Unlike much his earlier collage works, which were comprised of prints from newspapers and magazines, many of the images in ‘Runts’ draw from Rauschenberg’s own photographs. Many of these photographs were taken in Florida, where Rauschenberg lived for several years. As a result, the series has a highly personal feel that both transcends and enhances the pictures of sunny blue skies and beach paraphernalia featured among the works.

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Team Gallery Booth at Art Basel 2010, Image via Art Basel.

AO is on site at Art Basel, Switzerland, where Wednesday marked the official, public opening of the international show.  On the roster was an inaugural Conversation Series speech by Paul McCarthy, an Art Film at Stadtkino Basel, and an Artist’s Talk with Rodney Graham at Kunstmuseum.  If the congenial and thronged atmosphere hadn’t tipped us off to the anticipation surrounding this year’s exhibitions, Tuesday’s sales would have been a clear indication.   A $15 million Picasso 1960 plaster maquette, Personnage, was snatched up immediately from Krugier Gallery by one of the VIP guests (an American collector) invited to Basel’s early opening, as was a line drawing by the same artist, one by Egon Schiele, and paintings by Max Ernst and Paul Klee. Sara Kay of the Geneva- and New York-based Kugier Gallery was unable to disclose the buyer of yesterday’s Picasso sale, but ten minutes after the purchase’s confirmation noted to Art Info that “[The] piece went to a very important collector with the best modern masters.  This is museum-quality, not trophy-level. It’s a very serious piece.” Skarstedt Gallery also enjoyed a  meritorious patronage yesterday, with sales including a Christopher Wool painting, Untitled, for $800,000, a Barbara Kruger photograph for $700,000, a Cindy Sherman piece for $500,000, and two works by George Condo: The Madman and The Colorful Banker, which fetched $375,000 and $225,000, respectively.  Hufkens Gallery sold a Louise Bourgeois etching, A Baudelaire (#7), which the late artist completed several months before her death in May, for $650,000 to a European collector.  Cheim & Read boasted a lucrative afternoon as well, with sales including a $2 million Joan Mitchell abstraction, a $125,000 Sam Francis drawing, a $100,000 Ghada Amer painting, Paradise, and a 28-strong Bourgeois watercolor series, Les Fleurs.  Lisson Gallery sold two Anish Kapoor‘s for $742,000.  Richard Prince‘s Student Nurse brought Gagosian $4.2 million, and Paul McCarthy’s bronze suites–Sneezy and Dopey–yielded Hauser & Wirth a combined total of $3 million. Blum & Poe sold a dyptich by Takashi Murakami for $1 million. White Cube reportedly sold six of Damien Hirst‘s new paintings, as well as Hirst’s “Memories of Love,” valued at $3.48 million. Lehmann Maupin sold two neon works by Tracey Emin, each for $74,000.

Damien Hirst, ““Memories of Love,” at White Cube’s booth, sold for $3.48 million. Image by Art Observed.

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Untitled, Christopher Wool (2009). All images via Gagosian Gallery.

On view through July 30th at Gagosian Gallery in Rome is an exhibition of eight new paintings by New York artist Christopher Wool. In these new works, Wool continues to experiment with the fundamentals of abstract painting, while furthering his use of new tactics for application and negation. Adhering to a mostly black-and-white palette and an array of techniques including over-painting, silkscreen, spray paint, stenciling, rolling, dripping, dragging, reproduction and deletion, the past decade has seen Wool increasingly focus on the gestural and painterly qualities of his work.

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Anna Gaskell, Untitled (turns Gravity) #1, 2010, archival pigment print on aluminum, 35 x 57 inches © Anna Gaskell, all images via Yvon Lambert.

Yvon Lambert, New York, is currently showing their second solo exhibition of the work of Anna Gaskell.  Known for her uneasy, often menacing photographs of young and pubescent girls in ambiguous narratives, this exhibition marks a slight imagistic departure.  Her earlier works referenced Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and allusions to the realms of fairy tale and cinema, but are replaced by scenes that are more grounded, casting them in an ominousness potentially intensified by their comparative realism.

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Man in the Mirror (2010) by Marc Quinn, via The Guardian.

Currently on view at White Cube Hoxton Square is “Allanah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela, and Thomas,” a new body of work by British artist Marc Quinn. The exhibit brings together new sculptures by the artist which depict individuals after having gone through extreme amounts of plastic surgery including hormone therapy, piercings, implants and transplants. The works emphasize Quinn’s continual interest in society’s obsession with the body and how it can be transformed.

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Anselm Kiefer, Unfruchtbare Landschaften, 1969, 60 x 45 x 7 cm, 12 pages, black and white photographs, surgical instrument, ink and paper on bound cardboard. All images courtesy the artist and Yvon Lambert Gallery.

Currently on view at Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris, through June 26 2010, is “Unfruchtbaren Landschaften” by Anselm Kiefer. The phrase, which translates to “Barren Landscape,” encapsulates the heavy and frangible works on view. Among the works, which take the form of cardboard books filled with photographs, watercolor, text, and ephemera, are many that were conceived in the late 1960s and early 70s. Enigmatic clues are scattered among cliches, both provocative and disturbing. The works serve as visions, heavily freighted with memories and symbols, inserted into and born of the sociopolitical context of World War II Germany. The exhibition’s eponymous phrase is scribbled in shaky script, conveying a feeling of school-boy-like nostalgia.

Installation view, Anselm Kiefer, Unfruchtbare Landschaften at Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris.

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Rodney Graham’s “Dance!!!!!” (2008) © 303 Gallery

Last week “Music and Dance,” a new series by Rodney Graham, opened at 303 Gallery. Art Observed was on site at the show, which presents a series of lightboxes depicting scenes of archetypes and activity.  Each work encapsulates a disconnection from the very object it is depicting, thereby questioning the status of the object.

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Art 41 Basel, entrance view. All images by Art Observed unless otherwise noted.

AO was on site yesterday at Art 41 Basel, Switzerland, to see the 56 installations exhibited by the eleventh Art Unlimited, a museum-like forum for sizable and high-priced pieces. Installations of established masters and up-and-comers alike are characteristically oversized this year, with six pieces taking up over 200 square meters.  Despite the diversity of work, galleries, and featured artists, a distinct tonal resonance pervades Art Unlimited.  The lustrous style favored by Art Unlimited’s formative years gives way to a bold, rustic minimalism.  Although an intellectual understatement saturates this year’s Art Basel, Art Unlimited is hardly a quaint affair.  Economists and art experts alike are predicting major acquisitions for the international art elite, with a Giacometti and a Bourgeois notably up for grabs.

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Untitled (Skull) (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, via Fondation Beyeler.

Currently on view at the Fondation Beyeler is a large retrospective devoted to the work of Jean Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)  in celebration of the museum’s fiftieth anniversary. The exhibition bring together over 100 paintings, works on paper, and pieces from renowned museums and collections throughout the world. Basquiat’s works are colorful, playful, incorporating a range of everyday objects, and poetic slogans commenting on contemporary society and social injustice.

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Field, Ai Weiwei.  Ming Dynasty-patterned Chinese ceramic structure in front Art 41 Basel’s entrance, with White Cube‘s Jay Jopling in the background, sitting at the fountain.

Art 41 Basel begins this week in Switzerland.  The international art show, featuring approximately 300 galleries and 2,500 artists, coming from 30 countries and every continent, will take place from June 16 to June 20.  Media include painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and editioned works.  Over 60,000 gallerists, art collectors, art dealers, artists, curators, and reporters will flock to the banks of the Rhine, at the border between Switzerland, France, and Germany, to view the works of established masters and up-and-coming talents alike.

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Video still from Episode 3, artwork by Renzo Martens

One of the highlights of the current Berlin Biennial is the work of a young Dutch artist – Renzo Martens. Titled Episode 3 (2008), Martens’s 90-minute video constitutes a challenging portrait of contemporary media and capitalist exploitative foundation that continues to run a deep division between North and South. Martens takes a candid, often tragically ironic, approach in exposing and criticizing First-World self-righteous image.

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Breathing Room III (2010) by Antony Gormley, via White Cube

Currently on view at the White Cube, Mason’s Yard in London is an exhibition of new works by Antony Gormley. The artist has created a new-site specific installation and a new series of cast-iron block work sculptures. The works aim to depict how time engages with objects and how in turn objects influence human beings.

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