Thursday, April 5th, 2012
‪‬Sotheby’s to auction ‘Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror’ by Francis Bacon, estimated at possible $40 million at the contemporary-art evening sale in New York on May 9 [AO Newslink]
‪‬Sotheby’s to auction ‘Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror’ by Francis Bacon, estimated at possible $40 million at the contemporary-art evening sale in New York on May 9 [AO Newslink]
‪‬Ai Weiwei ordered to shut down 24-hour live stream of his Beijing studio, though he told Radio 4’s World at One that he “won’t be shut down” [AO Newslink]
Hernan Bas, A Satanist on a Tuesday (or, The Key Master) (2012)
Detroit-based artist Hernan Bas’ new show Occult Contemporary is on now at Lehmann Maupin, the exhibition consisting of Bas’ most recent body of work: a group of paintings in various sizes depicting dark, fairytale-like scenes. The name of the show is a reference to “Adult Contemporary,†a term used to describe a category of popular music. The subject of the show itself, as reflected in the title, is inspired by the appearance of the occult in all forms of popular media, including those geared towards children and young adults. Bas displays a strong fascination with the supernatural, his paintings loaded with whimsical imagery.
Eva Hesse, No title (1960). All images © The Estate of Eva Hesse unless otherwise noted.
Eva Hesse: Spectres and Studiowork at Kukje Gallery in Seoul combines two recent critically acclaimed exhibitions exploring German-born, Yale-educated artist Eva Hesse’s early paintings and mature studio practice. Curated by Barry Rosen, Director of the Estate of Eva Hesse and Briony Fer and E. Luanne McKinnon, two acclaimed Hesse scholars, this unique pairing allows visitors an intimate view into the development of the influential artist’s career.
‪‬Google Art Project launches site expansion, now including 151 institutions from 40 countries, with over 32,000 works digitally archived online for global virtual viewing [AO Newslink]
‪‬New Museum-based Rhizome to hold third “Seven on Seven” conference, pairing artists with “technologists” in one-day one-on-one brainstorming sessions, the results of which to be unveiled at Saturday, April 14, at the New Museum [AO Newslink]
‪‬Sotheby’s auctions record-breaking $26.7 million 900-year-old calligraphy brush ceramic washing bowl, the high estimate more than doubled by eight bidders [AO Newslink]
‪‬Tracey Emin unveils British Airways A319 Air Bus Olympic-inspired ‘Dove’ plane artwork by Emin’s mentoree Pascal Anson [AO Newslink]
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Installation view of Heart to Hand. All photos on site for Art Observed by Douglas Cloninger.
Located in the former Deitch Projects building at 18 Wooster St., Swiss Institute‘s current set of exhibitions opened with a line out the door on March 7, running through April 15. Three shows are on view: Nicholas Party’s Still life, Stones and Elephants, Pati Hertling’s curatory project Heart to Hand, featuring work by Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Adam Pendleton and brothers and collaborators Oscar Tuazon and Elias Hansen, and downstairs Jimmie Durham’s Marquette for a Museum of Switzerland. Split between the several artists, the show begins with a colorful entrance, a large open main space split in two—half the floor raised, half reappropriated as sculpture—and a basement of semi-faux artifacts.
‪‬Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani, head of Qatar Museum Authority, profiled in the Economist, works to better Doha, Qatar, with Museum of Islamic Art and record-price acquisitions “Art—even controversial art—can unlock communication between diverse nations, peoples and histories.” [AO Newslink]
‪‬Sotheby’s contemporary Chinese art auction sold several works above estimated prices in Hong Kong on Monday, top sale was Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘Bloodline: Big Family No. 2’ for US$6.7 million, other sales including works by Liu Wei, Wang Guangyi, Jia Aili [AO Newslink]
‪‬Long Island dealer Glafira Rosales and companion Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz involved in FBI investigations regarding authenticity of several paintings by artists including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Jean-Michel Basquiat [AO Newslink]
‪‬British tourist Andy Fields may have bought a 1930s signed sketch of American actor Rudy Vallee by a juvenile bed-ridden Andy Warhol for $5 from an unidentified man in Las Vegas who claimed his aunt once babysat the artist, value estimated at £1.3 million if authenticated [AO Newslink]
‪‬Ai Weiwei voluntarily streams 4-camera home surveillance, with views of office overhead, computer, bedroom, and courtyard, with Twitter feed along bottom of site [AO Newslink]
Kembra Pfahler and Spencer Sweeney. All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.
E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler have collaborated on a series of photographs in the French gardens of Claude Monet‘s Giverny estate, displaying the project within a thorough installation simulacrum thereof at The Hole Gallery in New York City. A pebble walkway through tulips and trees, around a lilly-padded pond complete with Monet’s famous Japanese bridge, guided the likes of Jeffrey Deitch, Terence Koh, Spencer Sweeney, Aurel Schmidt, and gallerist Kathy Grayson, among a full house Friday night. A clothed Pfahler—of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black (see video)—had an unclothed red ‘Femlin’ in tow, the artist’s strong feminist creature originally inspired by a character of Playboy.com, which happened to fund the entire exhibition.
Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns (2011). Images courtesy of Haunch of Venison.
In July 2011, Katie Paterson blended science with art in the work 100 Billion Suns for the Venice Biennale—the photo documentation of which is now on view as the first exhibition in Haunch of Venison‘s new Fitzrovia gallery space in London. Paterson was the 2010–11 Artist in Residence at University College London’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, and at the Biennale, the artist placed confetti canons throughout the city and set them off at regular intervals in a gesture to reenact Gamma Ray Bursts—the brightest explosions in the universe. During the Haunch of Venison show, one confetti canon will explode at 1:00 pm each day, littering the floor with small fragments of paper color-matched to the Gamma Ray Bursts Paterson has documented. In addition to the canon and its Venetian archive, two other astronomy-related works are on view as well, The Dying Star Letters and Ancient Darkness TV.
‪‬Doug Aitken’s ‘Acid Modernism’ house in Venice, California is profiled on NY Times, featuring ‘sonic’ tables and stairs, secret rooms, and a ‘light house,’ built on the same footprint from 2010 ‘House’ video piece, “The goal was to create a warm, organic modernism that’s also perceptual and hallucinatory” [AO Newslink]
Thomas Ruff, 3D_ma.r.s.04 (2012). All images from ma.r.s : © 2012 Thomas Ruff/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
Thomas Ruff exhibits for the first time with Gagosian Gallery presenting two exhibitions, ma.r.s. and nudes, at the gallery’s two London spaces on Britannia Street and Davies Street, respectively. Ruff’s unique style involves various photographic experiments, often working in series and using sourced imagery combined with an assortment of photographic tools and techniques: composite picture-making apparatus, star light system for night-vision, hand-tinting, stereoscopy, digital retouching, and photomontage. “The difference between my predecessors and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture. We all lost, bit by bit, the belief in this so-called objective capturing of real reality,” says Ruff in the press release.