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The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Via MOCA

Ending a week of speculation, Jeffrey Deitch has been named the new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA– becoming the only art dealer and commercial gallery owner to take on the leadership of a major American museum. The decision marks a kind of turning point from the more traditional approach whereby museums draw their directors from pools of established curators or academics. Deitch stated this afternoon that “(…) it’s my goal to position MOCA as the most innovative and influential contemporary art museum in the world.  I am excited by the opportunity to play a role in making MOCA and Los Angeles the leading contemporary art destination.” Founded in 1979, MOCA occupies two buildings in downtown LA and is renown for its collection which includes around 6,000 pieces of international artwork produced in the past 70 years. Jeffrey Deitch, 57, founded his own gallery, Deitch Projects LLC, in 1996 and operates from three different spaces–two in Soho and one in Long Island City. Known for having experimental projects and programs in his galleries–sometimes crossing over into music, theater and other disciplines– Dietch started his career as a Citi Group Vice President, where he developed an art advisory and art financing business. “He will cease to be involved with any commercial activity by June 1st,” MOCA’s Director of Communications, Lyn Winter, has stated (Bloomberg).

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Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of MOCA. Via LATimes

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With only two weeks left in the exhibition, all of Stockholm was out to see “Dalí Dalí featuring Francesco Vezzoli” at Moderna Museet. The exhibition presents a retrospective of Salvador Dali, as well as his influence on contemporary artist Francesco Vezzoli. According to the exhibition’ curator, John Peter Nilsson, the show “examines the role of the artist in today’s celebrity-obsessed society, and of these two artists’ disingenuous relationship with mass media and power.” At once, it puts Dali’s oeuvre in a contemporary context and creates a historical perspective through which Vezzoli’s work may be understood.

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Nikolaevsky Hall, via State Hermitage Museum

Currently on view at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is a collaborative project between the renowned London based Saatchi Gallery and the initiative “Hermitage 20/21” titled “Newspeak: British Art Now.”  The exhibition features works by British artists that recently gained recognition in the United Kingdom through their alliance with Charles Saatchi. The exhibition at the State Hermitage is their international debut.

Steven Claydon

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Cyprien Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009)

Currently on view  is the first exhibition of iconoclastic French artist Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980) to be shown at Sprueth Magers Berlin. Comprised of the 16mm film Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009) and the photographic works Geographical Analogies (2006-2009), the exhibition follows Gaillard’s concern with the controlled and shimmering demolition of natural and man-made monuments.

Film still of Cyprien Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009)

As an artist, “interested in things failing, in the beauty of failure, and the fall in general,” Gaillard has sought to map the human imprint on architecture and geography by vandalizing historical landmarks and receptacles of memory, then slowly retracting his hand from the course of the destruction. Describing his art as “post-entropic – in pursuit of the big moment after the chaos,” the artist has documented in sculpture, painting, etching, photography, video, performance and large scale, public interventions, cataclysmic shifts that engulf time and hasten modern ruins.

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Inside the Bruce High Quality Foundation University exhibition at Susan Inglett gallery. 2009, Via Susan Inglett.

Currently showing at Susan Inglett is an exhibition by members of the artist collective Bruce High Quality Foundation. The artist group, which  consists of five anonymous Bruces– all graduates of Cooper Union– launched their own free and unaccredited ‘University’ in September of 2009. Admission to the school is granted through peer-recommendation and lessons in areas such as ‘metaphor manipulation’ are offered. The current exhibition, entitled the ‘Bruce High Quality Foundation University,’ (B.H.Q.F.U.), marks the end of the group’s  ‘University’ semester and displays work that speaks on behalf of the school’s curriculum and studied themes. The show also explores project plans for the school’s future. Perhaps the most critical issues addressed are those pertaining to the ‘over commercialization’ and ‘market-driven’ nature of the contemporary art school system.

Part of the Bruce High Quality Foundation University exhibition at Susan Inglett gallery. 2009, Via Susan Inglett. It’s been said that the five anonymous Bruces “guard their anonymity fiercely.”

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Isa Genzken’s Wind II (Michael Jackson) (2009)
plastic foil, colour prints on paper, mirror foil, spray paint, perspex, tape, metal
174 x 230 cm

Currently on view at Galerie Daniel Buchholz through January 30, and running concurrently with an exhibition at Gallery Neugerriemschneider also in Berlin, is a collection of new works by the German artist Isa Genzken (b. 1948). Displaying provocative sculptures and collages blending paper, metal, paint, fabric and ceramics, the exhibition is the artist’s ninth solo show at the gallery since 1987.

Installation view of Isa Genzken’s Wind (2009)

Embodying the artist’s idiomatic style of arranging chintzy, ready-made materials, Wind constitutes a series of textured, totemic structures replete with fanciful juxtapositions. While the sculptures exude playful irony in their myriad associations, the artist’s saturated approach also levels a more serious critique at our contemporary society fueled by excessive consumerist urges.

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Related Links:

Official Website: [OHWOW]

Hell 63 Years B.C. (2009), by Jake and Dinos Chapman, via Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

Currently on view at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin is ‘Shitrospective’, the gallery’s first solo show by Jake and Dinos Chapman. In this exhibition the Chapman brothers recreate the most important sculptures and installations from their career together in miniature format made in cardboard and poster paint.

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Alex Katz’s Fashion 2 (2008)

Now on view at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve through February 21 is the exhibition, An American Way of Seeing, including over 40 works from 1957-2008 by the American painter Alex Katz (b. 1927) and encompassing the artist’s breadth of skill and influence in the genre of figurative painting.  Realized in cooperation with the Sara Hilden Art Museum, Tampere, Finland, and the Musee de Grenoble, France (and following a recent exhibition at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Paris showcasing the artist’s fashion studies), An American Way of Seeing will trace Katz’s contribution to the disciplines of portraiture and landscape through canvases of striking luminosity and spirit.

Alex Katz’s Coleman Pond (2008)

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Edgar Degas‘s Les Choristes (1876-77) via AFP

A valuable pastel by the 19th century Impressionist painter, Edgar Degas (b. Paris, 1834; d. 1917) was discovered missing from the Cantini Museum in Marseille, France, Thursday, December 31. The stolen piece, Les Choristes (also referred to as Les Figurants), measures 27cm by 32cm, and was on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris for an exhibition showcasing twenty Degas works portraying a common theatre theme. It depicts a line of male choir singers preparing for a stage performance. While a museum guard was arrested on Friday in connection with the overnight heist, further investigation is pending and the suspect has been subsequently released. Authorities are continuing to examine CCTV footage in order to ascertain whether or not museum insiders or intruders can be blamed for the theft. Jacques Dallest, a prosecutor leading the case, reports no apparent signs of a break-in and that the pastel appears to have been unscrewed from the wall. Rumors of the work’s value were circulating at upwards of $30 million. However, authorities have since corrected this lofty estimation to assert the pastel’s actual value at £800,000 or $1.14 million.

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Eberhard Schrammen, “Maskottchen (Mascot)” (c. 1924), in “Bauhaus 1919-1933” at MoMA. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Photo: Gunter Lepkowski © Estate Eberhard Schrammen

Complementing the Maholy-Nagy exhibition in Frankfurt showing at Shirn Kunsthalle through February 7, 2010, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is celebrating the early-20th century Bauhaus collective in a show which runs in the Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery through January 25, 2010. This presentation of the highly influential German school comprises 400 works, many of which have never before been exhibited publicly in the United States. Drawn from both private and public collections, including 80 works from MoMA’s holdings, the show also features 150 pieces from the three German Bauhaus collections, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassik Stiftung Weimar. The exhibition comes to MoMA after an earlier version at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius Bau, which showed from July 22 to October 4, 2009.

Vasily Kandinsky, “Schwarze Form (Black form)” (1923), via MoMA. Private collection. Courtesy Neue Galerie New York. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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