‪‬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]

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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.

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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.

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‪‬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]

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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.

Installation view. Photo: Mike Bruce

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‪‬Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) could sell for $45 million at Sotheby’s in May, perhaps the most important Rothko brought to auction since 2007. Additional lots in the sale include work by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬60 Minutes’ Morley Safer revisits his 1993 conceptualism question, “Is it Art?” tomorrow night, this time examining the role of art fairs in terms of Art Basel Miami Beach. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬MTV’s “Art Breaks” series from 1985 is set to air again this year. Once featuring Jean-Michel Basqiuat, Keith Haring, Richard Prince, and Kenny Scharf, it will now debut 30 up-and-coming artists, as curated in part by MoMA PS1. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Four stolen paintings by Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Fernand Leger, and Jean DuBuffet have been recovered in Cologne, Germany, now at an estimated value of $1 million. The six works were originally stolen in 1988 from Solomon Gallery in New York. When one by Karl Apfel and another by Motherwell were recovered previously in 2003 and 2012 respectively by art collectors, they prompted the now conclusive police investigation. [AO Newslink]

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All installation images via Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photos: Matteo Monti

Marcel Broodthaers. L’espace de l’écriture is the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s works to be exhibited in Italy. The Museo de Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo) has, with this exhibition, created an homage to Broodthaers highlighting the developments and achievements of his short artistic career. The works on view—all on loan from prestigious international collectors—provide an exceptional opportunity for the MAMbo to introduce a wider Italian public to nearly fifty works by the artist. The broad selection of work on display demonstrates the artist’s main themes, influenced by his years spent as a poet, such as the relationship between art and language, the status and cult of the artwork, and criticism of the museum. According to the press release, “The curatorial project of the exhibition is intended to verify how the relationship between image, object and word constitutes the central and constant theme of Marcel Broodthaers’ research and has strongly conditioned his entire creative process.”

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‪‬Vincent Van Gogh would celebrate 159 years today, born March 30, 1853 in Zundert, the Netherlands, later committing suicide at age 37 when he “walked into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest” and died two days later [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Knoedler Gallery in second recent lawsuit regarding artwork authenticity as a South Carolina family filed a $25 million lawsuit on Wednesday after paying $8.3 million for Rothko’s ‘Untitled 1956,’ which they claim to be “a canvas that is unsalable and worthless” [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Channel 4 in Britain to air TV program ‘Damien Hirst: Thoughts, Work, Life,’ the evening of April 3rd, “an intimate and revealing portrait” [AO Newslink]

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Urs Fischer, Problem Painting (2011). All images via Gagosian Gallery.

In his first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery Swiss-born, New York-based artist Urs Fischer presents a group of large-scale paintings and sculptures in the exhibition Beds and Problem Paintings. The installation at Gagosian is comprised of three parts: a series of paintings, a duo of fabricated beds, and a grouping of boxes reminiscent of the artist’s 2009 Service à la Française.

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‪‬Yayoi Kusama and Phyllida Barlow to create new works for first Kiev International Biennale, titled ‘The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art,’ to run May 24 through July 31, 2012, and also include works by Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Chapman Bros, and Paul McCarthy [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Financier and Dartmouth alum Leon Black donates $48 million to Dartmouth College to build new visual arts center featuring a commission by Ellsworth Kelly, “We hope this building fosters creativity among Dartmouth’s students and faculty — that it inspires them to dream big, be courageous, take artistic risks — and infuses them with the life-changing power of the visual arts,” [AO Newslink]

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Nir Hod and literary figure Salman Rushdie. All photos on site for Art Observed, at the opening by Samuel Sveen, studio by Jonathan Beer.

Nir Hod’s most recent body of work, titled Mother, opened last night at Paul Kasmin Gallery. The Israeli-born artist is known for creating work that is both strange and beautiful, sharing the sumptuousness found in glamour and fashion advertisements. This new series of paintings takes its inspiration from the widely discussed Holocaust photo “Boy from the Warsaw Ghetto.” History has mainly focused on unmasking the identity of the young boy, centered in the photo with his arms raised in surrender, leaving the matriarchal female figure to his immediate right largely unnoticed. In tribute Nir Hod has singled out the woman, depicting her repeatedly—ten times—in a variety of hues, in an effort to give her story new life. In a recent visit to the artist’s studio in Chelsea, Art Observed had the chance to discuss this new series with the artist.

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‪‬Socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor’s estate has been settled after five years, distributing approximately $100 million to education, culture, and parks, with $20 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Leonardo da Vinci’s original ‘Mona Lisa’ painting has been redated from 1503-6 to 1503-19, with the Prado’s version and ‘Virgin Child with St Anne’ also possibly redated, the Louvre verifying such based on recent scientific work and additional drawings [AO Newslink]

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‪‬In the New York Times, Maxwell Snow, younger brother of the late Dash Snow, discusses current exhibition at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, ‘100 Headless Women’ in context of family and life [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sotheby’s CEO William F. Ruprecht, “responsible for securing a number of the company’s most high-value and successful auction and private sales consignments,” earned $7 million in 2011, up 18% from 2010, as Sotheby’s in total profited $171.4 million [AO Newslink]

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled (1975). All images via Art Phalanx (© Cindy Sherman).

Vienna’s Sammlung Verbund is currently showing nearly fifty early Cindy Sherman photographs at their Vertical Gallery. The exhibition, That’s me – That’s not me, concentrates on works that Sherman produced before moving to New York City in 1977. They thus offer a rare glimpse into the artist’s formative years, and predate her more well-known Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), which critics and art historians have traditionally taken to be Sherman’s foundational works.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (ABCDE) (1975/1985)

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‪‬The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation aims to grow endowment from $18 million to $350m over the next fifteen years through the sale of art and real estate, possibly surpassing the Andy Warhol Foundation while hoping to contribute to an artist-generated grant landscape with “a dedication to exploration and more risk-taking commissions” [AO Newslink]

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Curators Jason Alexander, “That’s not actually part of the show, we just liked the way it looked.” All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

The duo Jason Alexander—Jason Lee and Alexander Shulan—have set up a two-floor pop-up show in a former Chinatown sewing machine repair shop, Ten Ten, from which the show draws its name. The DIY exhibition of 17 young New York based artists includes Peter Demos, Debo Eilers, Ryan Foerster, and Ben Schumacher, as well a curator himself, Jason Lee—the self-inclusion an admitted faux pas. According to co-curator Shulan, the collection is unrestrained, loud, politically incorrect, non-AbEx (Abstract Expressionist), messy, with parts of it that “just don’t even work.” The diverse sculptures and images, a Porsche seat and chained pineapples, are set in dialogue amid wooden crates, broken sewing machines, and other remnants of the shop. The press release is a brief history of the sewing machine, providing something of a context of the space, while the curators otherwise chose to let the work speak for itself. Shulan said each of the young artists are either currently showing at galleries “or should be.” A few of the artists were also current or former assistants to more established artists; Jared Madere to Jenny Holzer, and Valerie Keane to Olaf Breuning and Ryan Sullivan.

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