Gallerist Charles Riva with Brancusi Tree (2007). All pictures by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed.

Art Observed was on site at the opening of Paul McCarthy “Selected Works” at the Charles Riva Collection Thursday, April 28th. The show’s opening fell on the inaugural night of Art Brussels 2011, which ArtInfo calls a “slow burn” – in an interview with Perry Rubenstein, the gallerist compared the show to Art Basel Miami Beach: “The collectors that attend [Art Brussels] are true connoisseurs — they look at work many times and engaged in informed dialogue before acquiring.” The same thoughtful collecting can be seen in Mr. Riva’s selection of 30 of McCarthy’s most seminal works.

Paul McCarthy is a multimedia artist, who is known for his sexually-tinged transgressive work. He fires satirical shots at beloved American icons and myths– of Hollywood, of Manifest Destiny, of Democracy itself.

Installation view, Paul McCarthy “Selected Works” at Charles Riva Collection.

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Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Turning the Seventh Corner (2011) via Ex Berliner

Friday night, April 29th, Tim Noble and Sue Webster opened their new site-specific installation, “Turning the Seventh Corner”, at Blain|Southern‘s Berlin space as part of the city’s Gallery Weekend.  The new installation has been made in conjunction with architect David Adjaye, with whom Noble and Webster have worked previously,  (“Toxic Schizophrenia (Hyper Version)”, (2007), MCA Denver) and also on the home in which the the artists live..  Noble and Webster co-opted the second floor space of the gallery, creating two doorways into a neighboring space, providing an entrance and an exit for their installation.  “Turning the Seventh Corner” is an experiential installation that draws inspiration from the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs and reflects Noble and Webster’s continued interest with shadow and light.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Two Shooters Portrait, (2011), via Blain|Southern.

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Pablo Picasso, Femmes Lisant (Deux Personnages), 1934 (est. $25-35 million), via Sothebys.com

The New York spring sales begin this week as Sotheby’s and Christie’s hold their Impressionist & Modern evening auctions on May 3rd and 4th, respectively. Sotheby’s 59-lot sale is estimated to fetch $158.9-227.9 million, while Christie’s 55-lot sale is expected to bring in at least $160 million. Five works to hit the auction block (one at Sotheby’s and four at Christie’s) carry estimates of $20 million or more. The headlining work at Sotheby’s is a 1932 portrait by Picasso of his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. The painting is similar to the portrait of Walter that led the February Impressionist and Modern sale at Sotheby’s London and sold for £25.4 million (about $42.4 million) against a high estimate of £18 million ($30 million). Femmes Lisant (Deux Personnages) last changed hands in 1981 and is expected to fetch between $25-35 million.

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Scott Campbell, Untitled (2011). All images Nicolas Linnert for Art Observed.

Friday evening marked the opening of Marc Jancou Contemporary’s exhibition Blankness is Not a Void, a group show of works by Steven Parrino, Raymond Pettibon and Scott Campbell. Encouraging a dialogue between three artists of disparate time and locale, the exhibition showcases the overlapping thematic and formal references each artist drew not only from their social milieu, but also from each other.

Artist Scott Campbell (left) and gallerist Marc Jancou (right) with friends.

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Mark Tansey, Invisible Hand (2011), via Gagosian

Painter Mark Tansey shows recent work at the Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills through May 27th. Known for his monochromatic composite figurative paintings, Tansey has chosen works done in ultramarine to display in the gallery. His work is well known for crossing the boundaries of illustration and perception- works seem to depict single narratives or settings, but when given a second look, the figures begin to separate from one another and an assortment of new narratives form on the canvas.

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The Brooklyn Artist’s Ball 2011 took place at The Brooklyn Museum on April 27th.  It was chaired by museum trustee Stephanie Ingrassia, and  co-hosted by actresses Sarah Jessica Parker and Liv Tyler.  The traditional annual gala of the museum was given a twist this year in order to celebrate the creative and influence of Brooklyn’s artists. This year’s honorees were the artists Fred Tomaselli, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson, as well as the retiring Brooklyn Museum Chair, Norman M. Feinberg. The Ball was followed by an after party in the Museum’s Great Hall, and featured live DJs.

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Berlin will host its ersatz spring art fair, Gallery Weekend Berlin (GWB), this weekend, Apr. 29 – May 1, with over 44 galleries participating. Now in its seventh installment, GWB has an air of excitement about it – perhaps due to the number of buyers, dealers, and other visitors flying in, which also coincides with the yoke of the winter season being thrown off.  In any event, GWB promises some interesting viewing experiences, and brings a concentrated selection of strong art and events to a city is a prime destination for the creatives of the world.

Albert Oehlen, Stars (2005), via Galerie Max Hetzler

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Publicity photo of “Sleep No More” at the McKittrick Hotel, courtesy Yaniv Shulman

Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More,” a Hitchcockian interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, officially opening to the public on April 13th, 2011 at New York City’s McKittrick Hotel and has been extended due to its clearly impactful launch in New York. Since 2000, the British theater company Punchdrunk has been devoted to developing sensory theater; at “Sleep No More” audience members explore the 100 or so rooms of the hotel, encountering snippets of the performance and a unique display of theater, performance and an interactive art installation. Punchdrunk blurs the division between performer and audience, inviting spectators to explore, touch, and invent within the many spaces.

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Wiliam Kentridge, Man With Trumpet (2010), via Galleria La Rumma

Currently at Galleria Lia Rumma is an extensive exhibition by famed activist, director, animator, printmaker, sculptor and illustrator William Kentridge.  The self-titled show is a personal exhibition of the artists work, being held in conjunction with his involvement in Teatro alla Scala (The Magic Flute), Palazzo Reale (WILLIAM KENTRIDGE & MILANO. Arte, musica, teatro), Palazzo della Triennale (What Will Come, has Already Come) and  Teatro Verdi (Woyzeck on the Highveld).  The show itself is chock-full of Kentridge hits, including monochromatic prints, drawings, Caulder-like sculplture, and an installation with eight video projections and a performance piece entitled “I am not me the horse is not mine.”

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All pictures by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed

Currently on view at Tate Modern is “Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape” featuring over 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints in the first London retrospective of the renowned Surrealist artist in over fifty years. Working in a rich variety of styles, Juan Miro (1893-1983) is considered a precursor to Abstract Expressionism. He effectively combined his surrealist style with strong political views to create work which is all at once playful and socially thought-provoking.

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Diane Arbus, A Castle in Disneyland (1962), via Gagosian

The Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles presents “People and Other Singularities,” an exhibition of the photographs of Diane Arbus between the years of 1956 to 1971. The gallery showcases  the most extensive collection of Arbus photographs within Los Angeles since “Diane Arbus: Revelations” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2004. “People and Other Singularities” contains several photographs that have never before been exhibited publicly, along with some older favorites that have become part of photography’s canon.

Diane Arbus, Identical Twins(1962) via Diane Arbus Photography

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Andrew Kuo, The Walk Home After Being Racially Slurred/I’m Not Tall, Dark or Handsome, 2011. Via Taxter & Spengemann.

New York City-based artist Andrew Kuo is presenting his second solo show, My List of Demands, at Taxter & Spengemann through April 30th. Kuo meticulously tracks events in his life on digitally-produced charts, including rational and emotional insights on his milieu or on the music he listens to. The richness of the color palette on these charts, as well as the highly stylized use of lines and shapes, and the ludic quality of the variables reflect the artist’s concern on creating beautiful and empathetic representations of messy and conflicted life experiences; enclosing either a gesture, an incident, or a temporal subject (e.g. a musical piece) in a tight, quantifiable, bi-dimensional object.

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All photos by Art Observed

Daniel Arsham‘s recent collaboration with Storefront for Art and Architecture, entitled “DIG,” is comprised of three stages: an exhibition, installation and performances, and is performed by the artist along with the group Snarkitecture, which is “is a collaborative practice operating in territories between the disciplines of art and architecture,” according to their website.

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Video still from Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. All images Nicolas Linnert for Art Observed.

Kara Walker is expanding her study of silhouette figures and video to Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side branch. The exhibition, Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale, presents a few video works in conjunction with Walker’s graphite drawings that are on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea.

Kara Walker, Miss Pipi Title (left) and Levee (right) (2011).

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The audience at SculptureCenter’s Lucky Draw 2011. All images courtesy of SculptureCenter.

Last Wednesday, Art Observed was on site at SculptureCenter’s Lucky Draw in Long Island City. Of the events in New York’s spring benefit circuit, Lucky Draw stands out for its rapid paced, chance-dependent operation that lends the event an element of excitement and guarantees that each ticket holder brings home a piece of art. Even though the auction format gala keeps it casual by omitting a formal dinner or seating order, anticipation leads up to a quick raffle draw that replaces the traditional art world bidding process. Every ticket purchased guarantees the lucky philanthropist a piece of art as decided by the raffle’s random draw and not the highest bidder. However, SculptureCenter knows the anxious collector’s soul and lets the event begin with a traditional search for the three highest bidders, who are then allowed to bypass fate and pick the first three works of art.

SculptureCenter volunteer carrying an Olaf Breuning piece 

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Stock, Ryder Ripps (2011).

The crowd on the New Museum’s 7th floor at Rhizome’s 15th anniversary benefit party.

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Ben Jones, Facemaker (2011), via The Hole

Currently showing at Royal/T is the show “Facemaker” curated by Kathy Grayson, of The Hole Gallery in New York City.  Located in Culver City, the Royal/T Gallery is a melange of café, shop, and compartmental art exhibition spaces. The 10,000-square-foot area holds a multitude of pieces from the show “Facemaker,” which explores the conceptualization of a face through the eyes of many different artists.  The show includes work from famous names as Shepard Fairey, Takashi Murakami, and Aurel Schmidt, as well as that of new and emerging artists.

Installation view of “Facemaker” featuring Shepard Fairey at Royal/T, photography by Rebecca Leib

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Robert Whitman, Passport (2011), via Dia Art Foundation

Following a canceled performance on Saturday, Dia:Beacon presented Robert Whitman‘s latest theatre performance, Passport on Sunday, April 17th despite the rain. Passport was performed simultaneously in both Beacon, NY and Montclair, NJ.  The project utilized live transmission feeds, internet broadcasting technology, and multiple video projections to give viewers a sense of displacement and the experience of being in two places at once.

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David Altmejd, The Vessel (2011), via Andrea Rosen Gallery

Currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery is an exhibition by Canadian artist David Altmejd, whose show includes sculptures that use a wide range of media and technique- terrines that house massive, undulating sculptures share the space with and site-specific pieces that draw their material from the wall of the gallery itself. Altmejd gained prominence in 2007 after his participation in the Whitney Biennial. His sculptures take many forms, but usually are centered around themes of life, death, decay and birth (not necessarily in that order.)

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Gary Hill’s The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment installation. All images Nicolas Linnert for Art Observed.

Gladstone Gallery is currently showing Gary Hill’s latest experiment in audiovisual installation until April 23rd. The exhibition, entitled of surf, death, tropes and tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment, considers the LSD trip as a psychoactive event worthy of artistic exploration. Comprising a series of individual installation chambers, The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment disorients image, text and sound by splitting, reversing, or rendering somehow unintelligible a typical sensory experience.

Gary Hill, Beauty is in the Eye (2011).

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Yayoi Kusama, Reach Up to the Universe, Dotted Pumpkin (2010). All images via Gagosian Gallery.

Following a solemn exhibition of black and white photographs by Gregory Crewdson at the Gagosian Gallery Rome is a psychedelic installation of recent works by Yayoi Kusama, on view now through May 7th. Five bold canvases, including two self portraits, are hung in the main gallery. Around the floor’s perimeter are dozens of highly polished and reflective chrome balls that are a later incarnation of a piece Kusama presented at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966 (though back then she was not invited to do so).

Yayoi Kusama, Installation View at Gagosian Gallery Rome

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Installation view at the Met Museum. All images Nicolas Linnert for Art Observed.

Notions of lightness, delicate strokes, and diminutive scale may come to mind when imagining the artistic tradition of drawing. However, not a single one of these tendencies is applicable to the Metropolitan’s Museum’s new exhibition Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, in which the strokes are bold, the images dense and the scale massive. One of the few contemporary shows that the Met has shown recently and a chronological anomaly amidst the 17^th-18^th French painting galleries, this retrospective of Richard Serra‘s drawing is comprised of about fifty works and traces the artist’s use of mainly paintstick on varying textures from the 1970’s to present day.

Richard Serra, Abstract Slavery (1974).

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All photos by D. Terna Art Observed.

Yesterday, a crowd congregated outside the Chinese Consulate in New York City, protesting for the detention of artist Ai Weiwei on April 3rd, 2011.  Ai has been missing since, and the international community has expressed concern for his personal safety, as he has not been formally arrested yet and the circumstances surrounding his detention. The protest started at 1 pm EST. It was named “1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei,” and was organized by Anne Pasternak–Creative Time’s President and Artistic Director–with the objective of promoting public awareness on this important issue of political and ideological censorship.

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Marina Abramović speaks. All photos by L. Streeter, Art Observed.

Bomb Magazine celebrated its thirtieth birthday last night on the Bowery- a fitting location for a publication that emerged out of the unruly downtown art scene in 1981. Guest speakers Marina Abramović , Richard Armstrong, Betsy Baker and Francine Prose spoke to the history of the magazine alongside dinner and a silent auction. Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong described eloquently the substance of art media: “As makers of words and images, we need to realize our power. For all of you who make images, who work with words, Bomb is dedicated to bringing those together.”

Michael Stipe and Klaus Biesenbach

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