Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, Bright White Underground, 2010. Installation view. All images via Country Club Projects.

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s Bright White Underground weaves myth, history and experience into a compelling and memorable site-specific installation at an iconic Los Angeles residence.  The Buck House itself, an achievement of American Modernism, participates in the installation’s nod to sixties psychedelia in what might be more appropriately labeled an experiential and temporal collage.  Traveling through Bright White Underground, the “real” history of the house and the fabricated history of a fictitious Dr. Arthur Cook and his psychedelic vision become obscured and intertwined, questioning social norms, truth, and the erosive process of memory.

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, Bright White Underground, 2010. Installation view.

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Less than a week after the Frieze Art Fair ended in London, the Foire d’art contemporain, or FIAC, prepares to open to the public later this week in Paris. In its 37th year, the fair will feature nearly 200 dealers with work from over 3,500 artists, and expects to see an estimated 80,000 visitors to its two locations, the Cour Carrée and the Grand Palais–opening Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.

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Grand Palais during FIAC 2007, photo via Grand Palais

Running through Sunday the 24th, FIAC annually provides an arena for a wide variety of contemporary art, from blue chip galleries–the likes of Barbara Gladstone, Gagosian Gallery, David Zwirner, Blum and Poe, Cheim and Reid, Contemporary Fine Arts, Yvonne Lambert, Emmanuel Perrotin, Thaddaeus Ropac, Sprüth Magers, and Hauser and Wirth to name a few – peddling million dollar pieces to the lesser known emerging talents in the field. In a tandem move with the week’s events, industry powerhouse Larry Gagosian opened the latest installment in his global network of galleries off of Champs Elysees, noting the resurgence of modern art in France.

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An early picture from the FIAC preview: Victor Man, Untitled, 2008, photo via Art Observed

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NYAA’s “Take Home a Nude” benefit, hosted by Sotheby’s, October 18, 2010. All photos by Deborah Heuberger for Art Observed.

For the 19th installment of the New York Academy of Art‘s annual Take Home a Nude benefit, the organization honored Eric Fischl for his outstanding contribution to contemporary art, scholarship, and the mission of the Academy. The representational style and enduring interest in the human form which characterize Fischl’s body of work are consistent with the Academy’s reputation as “The first and most significant graduate school in the United States to focus on the human body.”

What began in 1991 as a modest fundraiser held at the Academy’s Tribeca headquarters has evolved into one the most prestigious arts events of the season. This year’s venue was generously provided by Sotheby’s, where works were installed throughout five gallery spaces, hosting cocktail hour, silent and live auctions, and a post-auction dinner.

Andres Serrano, Taylor Mead, 2010.

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WK Interact, Reform School, 2010, photo via Samuel Lee

Friday, October 8th marked the opening of RE:FORM SCHOOL, a comprehensive pop up art group exhibition held to raise public awareness for the need to reform American public education. The show, which ran through the Columbus Day Holiday, utilized virtually all of the available space at 322 Mott Street, in Little Italy. Formerly St. Patrick Old Cathedral School, which closed at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year, the site included three floors of indoor and outdoor space. Desks, chalkboards, pencil sharpeners, and other educational artifacts remained alongside the work of the over 150 artists who participated, reinforcing the five main themes of the installations: Knowledge is Power, Community, Teachers Inspire, Creativity, and Innovation.

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Two Tahitian Women (1889) by Paul Gauguin, via The Guardian

Currently on view at the Tate Modern is Gauguin: Maker of Myth, the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the work of Paul Gauguin in over half a century. Featuring more than 100 works from private and public collections worldwide, the exhibition examines the artist’s unique approach to storytelling in his compositional practice. The works displayed offer greater insight into the narrative process of one of the most prominent figures of the Post-Impressionist era.

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The Ham (1889) by Paul Gauguin, via The Guardian

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Andy Warhol, Diamond Dust Shoes, 1980 (est. 1.3 -1.6 million GBP, realized 1,553,250 GBP), via Sothebys.com

Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction in London today brought in 13.3 million GBP against a low presale estimate of just under 10 million GBP.  Of the 39 lots offered for sale, 4 were bought in, 15 lots sold above their high presale estimates, and 2 works sold for under their low presale estimates. Andy Warhol‘s Diamond Dust Shoes, never before seen at auction, realized 1,553,250 GBP against a high estimate of 1.6 million GBP and was the highest earning lot of the night.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1965 (est. 1.5-2 million GBP, realized 2,281,250 GBP), via Sothebys.com

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Damien Hirst, I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, 2006 (est. 2.5-3.5 million GBP, realized 2.2 million GBP), via Christies.com

Thursday’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening auction brought in a total of 19,585,400 GBP, within the presale estimate of 15.9-22.7 million GBP. The auction had a sell through rate of 86% by lot and 92% by value, with 7 of the 51 lots bought in. While 40% of the lots exceeded their high presale estimates, the featured lot did not reach its low presale estimate. Damien Hirst‘s I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds carried a presale estimate of 2.5-3.5 million GBP and sold for 2.2 million GBP.  All sale totals stated in this article include buyer’s premiums and come directly from Christie’s official website or courtesy of The Baer Faxt.

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Hans Peter Feldman, Untitled, Installation outside Regent’s Park for 303 Gallery, Frieze Art Fair, 2010. Photo by Art Observed.

Art Observed is on site in London for Frieze 2010, which opened yesterday to a crowded VIP preview and featured 173 galleries (up from 164 last year) with reportedly over 2,000 works of art from 1,500 artists and likely between 50-75,000 people expected (there were 60,000 visitors at last year’s fair).  Since its inception in 2003, the Frieze Art Fair, founded by Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, has become the center point for the most important week for contemporary art in London.  The fair is distinctive in that it is devoted entirely to living artists.

Spotted inside the fair were many collectors, art world figures and the occasional bold-faced name including collector Marty Margulies, hedge fund manager Steve Cohen with his art adviser Sandy Heller, Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, Klaus Biesenbach of MoMA, Charles Saatchi, young dealer Vito Schnabel, mega-collector Dakis Joannou, jeweler Laurence Graff, Dasha Zhukova art curator and companion of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, and Claudia Schiffer.  Artists Ai Weiwei, Yinka Shonibare, Gabriel Orozco, Antony Gormley, Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin were also in attendance.

Sales at the fair:

A detail of Damien Hirst’s cabinet piece The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, photo via Tate Etc. Magazine

The sales were robust for the VIP opening, but not at the frenzy of years before the recession.  Perhaps the most talked about sale was at White Cube’s booth, where a large Damien Hirst installation The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (2006) sold for £3.5 million or $5.6 million.  The work, which takes its title from a quote by artist Bruce Nauman, is a shelf work filled with fish and may have been the the most expensive work ever sold at the fair.  Very nearby at Gagosian, another Damien Hirst sculpture, a Viagra-tablet-filled pill cabinet was reportedly on sale for $6 million.

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David H0ckney, Autumn Pool, 1978 (est 700,000 – 1 million GBP, realized 1,329,250 GBP), via Phillipsdepury.com

Wednesday’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale at Phillips de Pury in London, which carried a presale estimate of 5.6 – 8 million GBP, brought in 6,562,900 GBP, with 21 of 56 lots unsold (86% by value, 69% by lot). The featured lot, David Hockney‘s Autumn Pool, sold for 1.3 million GBP against a high presale estimate of 1 million GBP. This also broke the record for a work on paper by the artist at auction.

Andy Warhol, The Scream (after Edvard Munch), 1984 (est. 500,000-700,000 GBP), via Phillipsdepury.com

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Damien Hirst, I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, 2006 (est. 2.5-3.5 million GBP), via Christies.com

The Frieze Art Fair begins this week in London and is accompanied by Contemporary Art sales at the three major auction houses. This year, Phillips de Pury will kick things off with a 56 lot evening sale on October 13th, followed by a 51 lot sale at Christie’s on the 14th and a 40 lot sale at Sotheby’s on the 15th. After the dismal results of last year’s equivalent sales and the lackluster results of the summer sales, the art world is hoping that these auctions will give a stronger indication that the market for contemporary Western art is in fact recovering.

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Installation View of “Al Qaeda is the CIA” at 303 Gallery, 2010. Image courtesy of 303 Gallery.

Currently on view at 303 Gallery is a retrospective of work by Sue Williams, spanning the last twenty years of the artist’s career, curated by Nate Lowman. Lowman’s curatorial objective was not to chronologically organize the objects on view, but to contextualize her experimentation with different mediums and socio-political themes within the trajectory of her stylistic development. Together, the two artists revisited Williams’ work and selected a small representative body of pieces produced between 1989 and the present, which comment and reflect upon her current practice and conceptual goals.

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Jeff Koons, Violet Ice (Kama Sutra), 1991. Photo by Patrick Meagher.

The most recent museum-grade show at Luxembourg & Dayan gathers 9 pieces of Jeff Koons‘ seminal sex-infused series “Made in Heaven” in a multi-story love and sexuality tour-de-force of human(istic) nature. Eight life-sized silkscreen and early-inkjet paintings, based on photographs, and a cast-glass sculptural tableau were conceived and produced in a life-meets-art process spanning approximately ten years from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties.

It is worth mentioning that it has now been nearly twenty years since these hardcore and soft-core-looking works were first presented by the late, great Ileana Sonnabend, and yet they still manage to really irritate, shock or bother some people for one reason or another. The re-presentation of this formerly scandalous, yet newly exciting and loaded work comes at an interesting time, with regard to the unabashed state of popular reality-media today, as well as the neo-sex-drugs-and-rock n’ rollish art of late in lower Manhattan.

La Ciccolina, Taschen Poster Book, 1992.

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Sky Mirror, Red (2009) by Anish Kapoor, via The Guardian

On view in London’s Kensington Gardens is a major exhibition of outdoor sculpture by London-based artist Anish Kapoor. Presented jointly by the Serpentine Gallery and the Royal Parks, the exhibition displays works not previously shown together in London. Dispersed throughout the gardens, Kapoor’s sculptures are made from highly-reflective stainless steel, which create large mirrored surfaces to distort the image the surrounding environment.

C-Curve (2007) by Anish Kapoor, via The Guardian

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Angela de la Cruz, Super Clutter XXL, 2008. All images via Tate Britain.

On October 5, Tate Britain unveiled its Finalist Exhibition for the 2010 Turner Prize. Painter Dexter Dalwood, installation artist and painter Angela de la Cruz, sound artist Susan Philipsz, and film collaborative Otolith (comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) represent the shortlist for the coveted annual award. The winner selected from among this group will be announced at the museum on December 6, 2010.

Dexter Dalwood, Death of David Kelly, 2008.

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Zhang Xiaogang, Chapter of a New Century – Birth of the People’s Republic of China II, 1992 (est. 21—23 million HKD, realized 52,180,000 HKD), via Sothebys.com

This week’s auctions at Sotheby’s Hong Kong indicated that the Chinese art market continues to show signs of growth, as both Contemporary Art sales easily passed the earnings of the equivalent sales in 2008 and 2009. Monday featured back to back auctions. First, the 20th Century Chinese Art sale realized 137,313,750HKD (est. 130 million HKD) with 29 of 38 lots sold. The afternoon Contemporary Asian sale realized 205,896,250  HKD, well above the presale estimate of 150 million HKD.

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Roy Lichtenstein, Ivan Karp, 1961. Image copyright Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

As Roberta Smith recently described in the New York Times, “Autumn in New York is the perfect time for an accidental festival of the work of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.” Leo Castelli Gallery‘s contribution to this apparently serendipitous trilogy of current exhibitions is “Mostly Men;” an exploration of the artist’s representations of both males and maleness. Paintings, drawings, and sculpture spanning Lichtenstein’s entire working career are brought together in a show which both underscores and confronts the iconic status of women and girls in his body of work.

Roy Lichtenstein, Alan Kaprow, 1961. Image copyright Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

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Joan Miró, Dutch Interior I, 1928. Image via The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is “Miró: The Dutch Interiors,” an exhibition featuring three surrealist works and the two seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings that inspired them. Joan Miró first encountered the domestic scenes of Jan Steen and Hendrick Sorgh when he visited the Rijksmuseum during a 1928 trip to Amsterdam. The impact of these works on the Catalan artist resulted in The Dutch Interiors: a series of three paintings in which Miró re-envisions the Old Master works as abstract compositions, nearly four-hundred years after their original production. The exhibition, which debuted at the Rijksmuseum earlier this year, is the first occasion on which Miró’s reinterpretations of these scenes have been displayed with the works upon which they are based.

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Hendrick Sorgh, The Lute Player, 1660. Image via the Rijksmuseum.

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Flower Matango, Takashi Murakami (2010) via Chateau de Versailles–>

Despite reports that the palace would not feature contemporary art in the royal apartments in future years, directors at Versailles have denied this and other rumors that the decision was a response to controversy over the current Takashi Murakami exhibition in that space. Initially, an article in The Art Newspaper indicated that Jean-Jacques Aillagon, President of Château de Versailles, had elected to use other venues on the palace grounds in the future. Spokesmen from Versailles shortly after responded to correct the story, noting that while contemporary works will be shown in the palace gardens in 2011, nothing else has been decided beyond that time. The source added that there is not reason to believe that shows by living artists will not return to the indoor space again.

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Exterior View of Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, NYC, image courtesy of Dezeen.

Sperone Westwater opened the doors of its new gallery space on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010. A retrospective of Guillermo Kuitca’s work was chosen as the Bowery location’s inaugural show. The gallery has a longstanding relationship with the Argentinean artist, whose work is inspired by the study of architecture, theater, and cartography. This is his eighth solo show at Sperone Westwater. “Guillermo Kuitca: Paintings 2008-2010 & Le Sacre 1992” consists of recent paintings, which developed from his famous 2007 series with which he represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale, and the important 1992 installation Le Sacre.

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Paul McCarthy, Ship of Fools, Ship Adrift, 2010. All images via L & M Arts.

L & M Arts is currently celebrating the inauguration of their Los Angeles branch with ‘Three Sculptures;’ an exhibition of new work by transgressive sculptor, filmmaker, and performance artist Paul McCarthy. Three large-scale pieces in differing mediums are installed throughout the gallery’s well-received new space, which consists of two adjacent buildings and an outdoor garden. The property was transformed from a disused power station and (literally) a pile of bricks, by local architect Kulapat Yantrasast, with gallery co-founder Robert Mnuchin personally designing the garden landscape. The works on view in this important exhibition reflect the artist’s continued exploration of certain themes and motifs which have pervaded his work for nearly twenty years.

Paul McCarthy, Ship of Fools, Ship Adrift, 2010.

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John McCracken, New Works in Bronze and Steel, image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner is currently presenting a new body of work by Californian artist John McCracken. McCracken first gained international recognition with his monochromatic geometries placed between flat surfaces and three-dimensional objects. In the present exhibition, he addresses the gallery space as a whole, allowing its architecture and light to participate fully in the installation. In the first room, three bronze planks lean against the wall, in an apparent departure from the materiality of his previous works in fiberglass and resin, while continuing to work in his signature format – the narrow, rectangular, monochromatic panel. Their shiny, reflective surfaces introduce the exhibition’s key motifs, inserting them into a dialogue, both formally and conceptually, with the four free-standing stainless-steel sculptures in the adjacent room: Star, Infinite, Dimension and Electron.

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Yoshitomo Nara, No Hopeless, 2007

The current retrospective of Japanese Neo-Pop artist Yoshitomo Nara at the Asia Society is his first in New York, showcasing over one hundred works in a variety of mediums–including paintings, sculptures, ceramics, installations, poems, and drawings–all with the artist’s signature kowa kawaii, or “creepy-cute” aesthetic. Before the visitor enters the exhibition, there is an outdoor installation of Nara’s sculpture White Ghost, on view at Park Avenue and 67th and 70th streets. The sculptures are identical, and face each other across three blocks, acting as komainu, or protective guardians of entrances. The sculptures display a combination of slightly-sinister features with the aesthetic of friendly cartoons, a strategy repeated throughout the many works in the exhibition. Watch the AO Onsite video of White Ghost below:

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Collective Show opening reception at Participant, Inc., September 19, 2010.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, New York witnessed a group of particularly daring and passionate artists, institutions, and commercial galleries emerge as sites of discourse about the production and exhibition of art, film, music, performance, and theater. Exit Art, the Filmmaker’s Cinématèque and Jonas Mekas, Paula Cooper Gallery, P.S.1 and Alana Heiss, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, George Maciunas and the Fluxus group, the Wooster Group, and many others, devised brilliant strategies for funding, producing, and displaying art in a difficult moment in New York’s history, when the real estate climate was arguably even more hostile than it is today. The contributions of these innovators were profound and historic, and deserve to be acknowledged in the context of our current cultural predicament.

Over the subsequent forty years, a divide has developed between the heirs of these original non-profit spaces, those organizations who are able to exist and exhibit work based solely on donations, and the commercial gallery sector; corporate entities which, in theory, fund their operations through sales of the artworks they show. Any group that hopes to be successfully established within this economic system must adhere by its basic tenant: that one chooses to be either an institution or a gallery.

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