‪‬Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” to be auctioned at Sotheby’s New York on May 2nd by Norwegian businessman, estimated at over $80 million, the only one of four versions still held privately, with scheduled public viewings in London and NYC [AO Newslink]
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Joyce Pensato, 2012 Batman (2012). All images via Friedrich Petzel Gallery
The Friedrich Petzel Gallery presents Batman Returns by New York-based artist Joyce Pensato, a blend of old and new work based around the Batman motif that Pensato has been working with since the mid 1970s. Drawing, painting, and photography are her chosen mediums in this exploration of pop culture past, with clowns, Homer Simpson, Groucho Marx, Mickey Mouse, and her own creation, “The Juicer,†on display in dripping hues of black, white, and gray to create a transmutation of this distinct cartoon culture. The trajectory of Pensato’s use of color is also evident; she has only recently began to incorporate color into her otherwise black-and-white world and this will be the first time this addition is on display.
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Joyce Pensato, Installation View (2012)
Gary Hume, The Indifferent Owl (2011). All images courtesy of White Cube.
Gary Hume returns to London for his first exhibition in the city in four years with The Indifferent Owl at White Cube Gallery. Occupying both the Mason’s Yard and Hoxton Square locations, Hume presents a collection of paintings and sculpture that shows off his streamlined aesthetic. With a muted palette and naturalistic subject matter—representations of birds and flora are dominant—The Indifferent Owl is a study in subtlety.
Marilyn Minter and Massimiliano Gioni at the opening. All photos on site for Art Observed by Rachel Willis and Samuel Sveen.
Maurizio Cattelan, who recently swore off his career as an artist, has taken a large step into the business side of the art world. The famed artist has teamed up with longtime friend and project partner—and notable curator—Massimiliano Gioni for a new exhibition space, Family Business. Located in the front of the Anna Kustera Gallery in Chelsea, at 520 West 21st Street, Family Business is a small non-profit venue geared towards both the making and showing of conceptually and aesthetically experimental art. The inaugural show, appropriately titled “The Virgin Show,†consists of a group of artists whose work has never been exhibited in New York before. There are a few exceptions to the rule however, with established artists like Laurel Nakadate and Mika Rottenberg showing some of their earliest works. The show was curated by Marilyn Minter who, in line with the theme of the show, has referred to herself as a “Virgin Curator.†To top off the theme, the band The Virgins played a short acoustic set, with visitors shuffled out to make room in the small space.
‪‬Former director of Deitch Projects Nicola Vassell, leaves director position at Pace Gallery after year and a half, Andrea Glimcher quoted as saying “It’s best for all that she is pursuing her own projects.†[AO Newslink]
Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1960)
Phillips de Pury & Company held the last of the Contemporary Art Evening Sales for this week in London on Thursday, bringing in a total of £5,695,550, just under their low estimate of £5,985,000. It is quite possible that they would have hit well above their high estimate had Robert Indiana‘s infamous LOVE sculpture not been pulled from the auction before it started, as it was estimated to bring in between £800,000–£1,200,000. The top seller from the auction was Lucio Fontana‘s Concetto Spaziale, Attese, which sold for the hammer price of £900,000—at the low end of the £1–£1.5 million estimate. The work was once owned by Andy Warhol, and is a quintessential example of the Spazialismo movement that Fontana founded, a movement that was among the first to emphasize the importance of performance as art.
‪ Photographer Douglas Friedman’s ‘Ungovernables’ series captures the New Museum Triennial art and artists, including Canadian Julia Dault and her performative sheets of Plexiglas, Cambodian Gabriel Sierr and geometric frames, and Vietnam-based Propeller Group with “Television Commercial for Communism.”[AO Newslink]
Rashid Johnson, The Sweet Science (2011). All images for Art Observed by E. Damenia.
Chicago-born multi-media artist Rashid Johnson brings Rumble, an exhibition of new works, to the Hauser & Wirth uptown gallery in New York City as a precursor to his upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, opening this spring. Rumble is inspired by prizefight promoter Don King and takes its name from the legendary 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle. Hauser & Wirth’s Upper East Side townhouse is a fitting home for Johnson’s exhibition—the space was previously owned by King himself.
Installation view
Abramović speaking at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011 about the MoMA-related documentary, Marina: The Artist is Present. (Photo by Caroline Claisse via Art Observed)
This week, Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramović signed on with Rotterdam-based architect Rem Koolhaus to redesign a historic community tennis club to house her Center for the Preservation of Performance Art (CPoPA) in Hudson, New York. As the name indicates, Abramović conceptualizes the creative space to exhibit long-term performance pieces, which may range from six hours to days on end. Visitors to the Hudson space will be seated in uniquely designed wheelchairs with desks, which can be wheeled to a set sleeping area if the performance piece goes on too long. In addition to the performance art center itself, Abramović is in discussions with Hudson’s local mayor to potentially build a new hotel for the art set. She told art patrons at The Core Club that she will need $8 million to fund the project.
The designated performance art center, via L Magazine
‪Gregory Crewdson’s “Brief Encounters” Trailer released, in anticipation of South by Southwest (SXSW) 2012, which runs from March 9th-18th. The documentary follows Crewdson’s photography-related journeys and conceptualizations. [AO Newslink]
‪Devon resident Damien Hirst is building 500 eco-friendly homes at Winsham Farm outside Ilfracombe, Devon, which rely on hidden wind turbines and photovoltaic solar panels. He owns 40 percent of the development’s land, as well his art studio and a local restaurant, and hopes to attract “young, creative people†to the new property. [AO Newslink]
‪Street artists Shepard Fairey, Ron English, Robbie Conal and Kenny Scharf will lend their voices and likenesses to Fox’s ‘The Simpsons’ characters in, “Exit Though the Kwik-E-Mart,” a play on the Banksy’s street-art documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” In the episode airing March 4th, Bart Simpson plasters posters of Homer’s face around Springfield, and Shepard Fairey offers Bart a solo gallery show. [AO Newslink]
Street view of Cyprien Gaillard mural (2012). Via Sprueth Magers.
Situated at the top of Culver City’s gallery row where Venice and La Cienega meet is an automotive garage with a new mural of Caspar David Friedrich‘s tombstone epitaph, the work of Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard, commissioned by the Triple A public art project. Next door in a former muffler shop is François Ghebaly Gallery, one of many galleries along this stretch of Los Angeles road, which houses some of the most important gallery spaces in the city and is also one of the most heavily trafficked by commuters.  The outside wall of this former muffler shop-turned-gallery is now the site of Gaillard’s mural, which is the second of eight projects meant to be realized over the next two years by Triple A, a public art project began by Fançois Ghebaly, Emma Gray, Al Moran (co-founder of OHWOW Gallery), Justin Beal, Flora Wiegmann, and Drew Heitzler (Wiegmann and Heitzler also being co-proprietors of Mandrake Bar, the hip Culver City art bar).
‪Australian Timothy Potts has been appointed curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Fellow director Michael Brand, onetime director at the Getty, has taken a position at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. [AO Newslink]
‪ James Franco’s “Rabbit Bandini Productions” releases the trailer for the Kalup Linzy series “Melody Set Me Free” [AO Newslink]
‪ British Airways, with direction by Tracey Emin, plans to decorate at least eight airplanes with a dove motif for London’s 2012 Olympic Games, in keeping with the Olympic theme of setting doves free, with the designs to debut in April. [AO Newslink]
‪Late painter Cy Twombly and his American advisers allegedly evaded $38.8 million in Italian tax on approximately 40 paintings sold from 2005 to 2009. Although Twombly’s eldest son Alessandro was due to receive $150 million in cash via the Cy Twombly Foundation in New York, funds were seized and cannot be released until the legal battles clear [AO Newslink]
‪Gerhard Richter Painting trailer is released: “To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too, because you can only express in words what words are capable of expressing.” [AO Newslink]
‪‬Jerry Saltz exalts upcoming Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA, offering “four pointers to the unconvinced” [AO Newslink]
‪President Obama awarded the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal today, with painter Will Barnet and sculptor Martin Puryear among the recipients. [AO Newslink]
Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012). All images via David Zwirner.
At age 72, Doug Wheeler opens his first solo show in New York City at David Zwirner. A single site-specific installation, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 challenges the finite perceptions of interior space, creating what some have called a visual “vacuum tube†in the gallery’s massive exhibition space.  Long regarded for his contributions to the “Light and Space†movement of the 1970s, the American artist works to remove the visual cues of a space, focusing instead on the materiality of light and the human perception thereof. Longing back to the days of his childhood, flying over the western desert with his father, Wheeler said in a recent interview with the New York Times, “When I was growing up, the sky was everything to me.”
Installation view. All images courtesy of Haunch of Venison, London.
Haunch of Venison’s newly renovated four-gallery space in London currently holds an exhibition showing ten of Britain’s more important painters of the post-war era: Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Patrick Caulfield, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow. Exploring both personal and artistic relationships amongst the artists, over 40 paintings and drawings are on display, unveiling some works that have not been seen in public for years.
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