Georges Braque, Woman at an Easel (Yellow Screen), (1936). All Georges Braque images courtesy of Acquavella Galleries

Acquavella Galleries‘ exhibition “Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism” is an homage to the other father of Cubism, most often associated with Picasso. Curated by Dieter Buchhart, the exhibition features more than forty paintings and papiers collés culled from various international collections. “Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism” is the first major retrospective of the artist’s work since the late 1980s, and is open through November 30^th.

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Photo on site for Art Observed by Tara Sheena.

In a production for the Performa 11 Biennial, co-commissioned by the Royal Danish Theater and the Bergen International Festival, the artist duo of Elmgreen & Dragset presented their satirical theatre work, Happy Days in the Art World. A
referential collage of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and Waiting for Godot, as well as Elmgreen & Dragset’s own play, Drama Queens, the work effectively combines a stream-of-consciousness humor with a bare bones set to reveal a contemporary commentary on the sociopolitical implications of the art world.

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Turner Prize winning British Artist Martin Creed announces ‘Work No. 1197: All the bells in a country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes’ to herald the start of the 2012 Olympic Games [AO Newslink]

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

In 2007, Urs Fischer used a jackhammer to tear up the floor of Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Chelsea, leaving the room an enormous pit of dirt. With his return to the gallery for a joint show with Cassandra MacLeod, Fischer has sought to “build” on the past show both literally and theoretically. The press release refers to the “inverted pyramid of excavated earth,” the natural next step of invention being a flat surface above the earth—the table, with which Fischer has filled the three gallery spaces. Paintings by MacLeod cover the walls of the gallery, making for an intriguing dialogue between the two artists’ work. Stacks of tables, some three or four high, perhaps even offer a better view to the paintings mounted high above.

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Overzealous cleaning lady scrubs away part of $1.1 million Martin Kippenberger sculpture in Dortmund, Germany [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Ai Weiwei to show his multiple tons of porcelain sunflower seeds at Mary Boone gallery in January while prohibited to leave China [AO Newslink]

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‪‬London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic posters unveiled featuring 12 UK artists including Tracy Emin and Martin Creed, to be displayed at Tate Britain next year [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Christie’s unveils Louise Bourgeois 11-foot-tall Spider sculpture for November 8th auction with the theatrics of Spiderman [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Ai Weiwei has been offered the opportunity to rebuild his demolished Chinese studio on Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s manor [AO Newslink]

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Mark Rothko, Light Red Over Black (1957). Artwork courtesy of the Tate.

Rothko in Britain commemorates the 50th anniversary of Rothko’s inaugural British exhibition. 41 years after his passing, the Whitechapel Gallery has meticulously compiled a retrospection of images, letters, and reviews, all paired with a single work—Light Red Over Black (1957), on loan from the Tate. Light Red Over Black towers over the viewer, a single, saturated painting. The large form and accompanying material, sparsely arranged, were placed in a manner in which to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko’s words, to encourage the feeling of being “enveloped within.” Walls were constructed specifically to show the work in such isolation, in hopes to evoke such intensity. The ‘less is more’ approach is discussed in Whitechapel’s video about the show, explaining the concept of an exhibition about a long closed exhibition.

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The Guardian calls Eva and Adele (as it did Gilbert & George) “living artwork;” art pair tells the newspaper, “We invented our own sex.” [AO Newslink]

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Gustav Klimt, Litzlberg am Attersee, 1914-15 (est. in excess of $25 million, realized $40.4 million) via Sothebys.com

The Impressionist and Modern art evening auction at Sotheby’s New York on Wednesday night realized $200 million for 57 of 70 lots sold. Business proceeded as usual within the auction house despite the deafening cacophony from protesters stationed outside the building’s main entrance (Sotheby’s has been feuding with their art handlers for months). Earlier today the auction house announced that one of the evening’s top lots – one of Matisse‘s bronze Nu De Dos sculptures estimated to bring $20-30 million- had been withdrawn from the sale after having been sold privately yesterday afternoon (along with the other three in the series, which also belonged to the Burnett Foundation, and which were slated to sell at auction over the next year). Excluding the Matisse, the sale carried estimates of $168-230 million. The $200 million total fell comfortably within expectations and bested Christie’s comparable sale on Tuesday evening. At the press conference Sotheby’s noted that last night’s results at Christie’s were “sobering” and that they did take the opportunity today to talk to consignors and in some cases lower reserves.

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Antony Gormley, Still Standing (2011-12). Installation view. Via AntonyGormley.com.

British sculptor Antony Gormley has been given the opportunity to place seventeen new works in the Dionysius Hall of the classical Greek and Roman galleries of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.  The exhibition is titled Still Standing: A Contemporary Intervention in the Classical Collection; the unique juxtaposition of contemporary sculpture in a classical setting sheds new light on the Hermitage Museum.

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Ai Weiwei is fined $2.4 million for tax evasion by the Chinese government [AO Newslink]

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Max Ernst, The Stolen Mirror, 1941 (est. $4-6 million, realized $16.3 million), via Christies.com

Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and Modern art on Tuesday night brought in $140 million against presale estimates of $210-300 million. Four of the top 5 most valuable lots failed to sell, including the auction’s cover lot – a Degas ballerina sculpture with a presale estimate of $25-35 million. The Degas had been shopped around privately with no luck and carried what many believed to be a very aggressive estimate. The auction house cited those two facts to explain that lot’s failure, as well as the overall performance of the sale. In general, fresh to market material faired best, and hefty presale estimates deterred bidding on the priciest works. What turned out to be the evening’s top lot – Max Ernest‘s The Stolen Mirror – was both fresh to market and carried an estimate in line with the artist’s records and with heightened interest in Surrealist material over the past few auction cycles. The canvas set the record for the artist at auction when it sold for $16.3 million against a high estimate of $6 million. The previous record was set this past June at Christie’s London with a 1923 work that brought $4.4 million.

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‪‬W Magazine posits Detroit as Berlin.  Struggling economy allows cheap spaces for creatives [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Cooper Union President Bharucha discusses possibility of charging tuition again after over a century, “We have to do the hard thinking now,” while alumni claim it to be a contradiction to the “DNA of the school” [AO Newslink]

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Aleksandra Mir, The Seduction of Galileo Galilei, video still (2011). All images courtesy the artist and Mercer Union, Toronto.

The second showing of The Seduction of Galileo Galilei, a video documenting Aleksandra Mir’s experiment with gravity and car tires stacked unnervingly high, is coupled with The Dream and The Promise, another previous series that combines religious iconography with elemental, scientific scenes. In her interview with AO, she explains how her inspiration largely lies between the crossover of the two—science and faith—so much so that each loses opposition, and within time are indistinguishable from one another.

Aleksandra Mir, The Dream and the Promise (2009)

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Installation view, Eva Hesse “Spectres 1960” at Brooklyn Museum. All images on site for Art Observed by Jen Lindblad unless otherwise noted.

Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum are nineteen small scale paintings by Eva Hesse. Completed at the age of twenty-four, the early figurative works are rendered in haunting golds and pale, muddled greens. The artist is best known for her fiberglass and polyester resin sculptures, but the paintings assembled for this exhibition shed new light on her work. Deeply personal, they offer a glimpse at the psychology of the tormented artist as she struggled to gain recognition in the New York City art scene of the 1960s before her untimely death at the age of thirty-four.

Eva Hesse, No Title, 1960, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in. Image via Brooklyn Museum.

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‬Anselm Kiefer tells German magazine der Spiegel of plans for ‘atomic art’ purchase of a defunct nuclear plant [AO Newslink]

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‪NEA study shows that the 2.1 million U.S. artists are, on average, incrementally more financially compensated than those who are otherwise employed [AO Newslink]

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Edgar Degas, Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, executed in wax c. 1879-1881 and cast later (est. $25-35 million), via Christies.com

The November sales will be inaugurated at Christie’s on Tuesday night with a 75-lot Impressionist & Modern auction at their Rockefeller Center location in New York. Seventy-one lots will be offered at Sotheby’s New York on Wednesday evening, and the two sales are expected to fetch close to $400 million. This round of auctions follows closely on the heels of the Frieze Art Fair and the concurrent and comparatively smaller sales of Contemporary art in mid-October. Little has changed between then and now to make buyer’s less anxious about the financial markets, but the auction houses managed to secure a handful of top-tier consignments that may bolster the results of their sales.

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On methods of auctioneering, with a profile of newcomer C.K. Swett [AO Newslink]

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Cory Arcangel, Research in Motion (Kinetic Sculpture 6) (2011).
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Following up on his solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum, media artist Cory Arcangel is currently showing at the Lisson Gallery in London. Titled Speakers Going Hammer, the show features a number of pieces previously unseen in the UK, as well as several new works. The New York-based artist first rose to prominence in 2002, with his piece Super Mario Clouds, featuring a hacked Super Nintendo System that had removed all of the graphics from a Super Mario Cartridge save for the blocky, pixilated clouds. Continuing along these lines, Speakers Going Hammer features a hacked basketball game program, titled Self Playing N64 NBA Courtside 2, in which an outdated, video game version of Shaquille O’Neal continually takes and misses free-throws.

Installation view.

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