Subodh Gupta, Cooking the World (2017), via Art Observed

As Sunday drew to a close in Basel, the flagship Art Basel fair brought its program to its finale at the Messe Basel, capping an unexpectedly vigorous few days of sales and other programs that once again underscored the fair’s exceptional attraction for collectors across Europe, North America, and the rest of the globe.  Capping its five day run on Sunday evening, the week concluded on a high note, with ample sales that focused primarily around the blue-chip highlights of the fair’s lower floor, while sending a strong message on the market’s health more broadly.

Albert Oehlen, Geigenbau (2003), via Art Observed

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Artist Hermann Nitsch is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as he concludes a controversial performance in Australia.  “I want only to show what is,” he says. “I never was interested to make provocation. I want to show intensity. And let’s say, maybe in intensity is a kind of provocation, but for me [it] always is important to show life and to celebrate life.” (more…)

The New York Times reports on recent controversies in the study of the work of Andrew Wyeth, after researcher Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw published research documenting a series of the artist’s works changing the race of his subjects, or using their bodies as models while often denying them a fully formed sense of identity in his final paintings.  “I think we can find artists to be complicated and frustrating and disappointing in some ways and still love the work,” says Shaw. (more…)

Bicho (maquette) 1960. All images copyright O Mundo de Lygia Clark-Associação
Cultural, Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Now through June 17 work by pioneering Brazilian artist Lygia Clark will be on view at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea, in partnership with Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Clark’s early drawings, collages, paintings, as well as her iconic Bicho series will be on view.

Estudo para Plans em superficie Modulada (Study for Planes on a Modulated Surface) 1957.

Lygia Clark, whose work reimagines the relationship between the art object and the audience, is one of the most significant artists of the 20^th century. She is associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movement and the Tropicalia movement. She is a founding member of the neo-Concrete movement, which proposes that art should be subjective and organic. Throughout her career, Clark investigated ways for museumgoers to interact with the art object. Clark’s work suggested a radical approach to painting, in which the pictorial surface was treated as if it were a three-dimensional surface. Clark remained a seminal figure of the international avant-garde throughout her lifetime and impacted future generations of artists with her revolutionary ideas surrounding the body, its presence, and agency.

Estudo para Plans em superficie Modulada (Study for Planes on a Modulated Surface) 1957.

Clark’s early abstract works experiment with modulations of form, color, and plane. They challenge the two dimensional space of the canvas and extend the visual field into the physical realm of the viewer. Her monochromatic works feature interlocking and reflecting geometric shapes, exploring visual relationships and perspectival shifts. Adjacent planes overlap and interrupt each other, demonstrating that contours can express spatial fields as well the void between them. Clark’s work reveals an intensive consideration of line and its properties.

Estudo para Plans em superficie Modulada (Study for Planes on a Modulated Surface) 1952.

In her Estudo para Plans em superficie Modulada (Study for Planes on a Modulated Surface), contours, shading, and line are the strategies the artist employs to investigate the line’s range of expressive possibilities. Challenging the frame of the canvas, these forms portray the surface’s capacity to intervene in physical space. These works stand alone and as a series, elegantly illustrating a kind of choreographed engagement with abstraction. This choreography reappears in Bichos, or critters, in which the viewer must exercise control over her experience of the artwork. The work calls upon the viewer to participate by steering the sculptures through many possible configurations, transforming the static installation into a time-based performance.

Study for Bicho 1960.

Modulated Space by Lygia Clark presents an ample overview of the seminal artist’s illustrations, installations, and experiments with space and line. The exhibition is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

-A. Corrigan

Related Links

Exhibition Page [Luhring Augustine]

Jordan Wolfson, (Installation View), all images courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ

On view through June 17th, Jordan Wolfson’s first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ spans both of the dealer’s London gallery spaces, with his new video work Riverboat song featured at the Kingly Street space, and a group of new sculptural and virtual reality works presented at the nearby Davies Street gallery.  Creating nightmarish scenes which often contain symbols that suggest a perversion or deconstruction of the American Dream, the artist’s work blends fantasy and reality into a chilling combination.

Jordan Wolfson, Still from Riverboat Song (2017)

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Frank Stella, Alu Tuss Star (2016), via Art Observed

Marianne Boesky Gallery is currently exhibiting new work by artist Frank Stella, debuting seven large-scale sculptures created this year and underscoring the artist’s ongoing engagement with color, shape, and composition. Taking the shape of stars, ribbons, and bowties, these colorful sculptures activate and engage the surrounding space, and draw on an expanded history of Stella’s own formal language to give the works a sense of both vivid engagement with the sculptural language, and with his own creative evolution.

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An article in Art Newspaper this week traces the remarkable market rise for the Gutai group of Japanese post-war artists in the past years, and its subsequent decline in popularity.  “A big price will always drive the market,” says Grégoire Billault, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s New York. “When people can buy for $200,000 and sell for $2m, it’s irresistible for some of them.  I think it just needs a bit of time. It’s a question of needing a bit of maturity.” (more…)

Tracey Emin is featured in The Guardian this week, as she reviews works by Egon Schiele, one of her principal inspirations.  “You could see the anguish he was going through: ‘I am in pain. I am drawing this, but I am drawing this in a different way, because I see it differently from other people. I see it through the eyes of pain.’” (more…)

Rodrigo Hernandez at Galeria Madragoa, via Art Observed

Returning to its home at Warteck, a former schoolhouse on the banks of the Rhine, the Liste Art Fair continues to build on its position as one of the central hubs for the week of Art Basel.  The fair, which prides itself on a careful curation of young galleries, dynamic, forward-thinking works, and a roster of performances that remains one of the week’s main draws, Liste’s program marks it as one of the essential stops for both collectors and art lovers during a bustling week in the Swiss city. (more…)

Creative Time is embarking on a new project that sees a series of artist-commissioned flags flying over the organization’s headquarters in downtown Manhattan, including work by Tania Bruguera, Alex Da Corte, Jeremy Deller, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Yoko Ono.  “We live in a very dark political time, bombarded by bad news every morning, so it’s important for people not to feel outnumbered by bad ideas,” Nato Thompson, Creative Time’s artistic director, says. “We can produce a community and we can resist, collectively.” (more…)

The Met has announced a shake-up in its administration structure, placing president Daniel H. Weiss at the head of the museum, and putting the directorship of the museum under his supervision.  “He has worked hard, he’s gained the confidence of the board, of the curators, of the executive staff — he is the natural person to lead and run the museum at this time,” says Daniel Brodsky, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees. “There is really no one else to consider other than Dan.” (more…)

London’s Institute of Contemporary Art is growing its supervisory council, adding Wolfgang Tillmans, Russian collector Delya Allakhverdova and Lebanese patron Maria Sukkar.  “These new appointments align with my ambition to make the ICA a truly progressive and radical contemporary arts organization ready of the 21st century. Seventy years on, this need is felt more acutely than ever,” says director Stefan Kalmár. (more…)

The Financial Times focuses on sales at this week’s Art Basel fair, noting the ever-increasing popularity of blue-chip works in an uncertain financial market.  “Ten years ago, everyone raced upstairs for the exciting new artists, now they rush downstairs for the opportunities in the blue-chip, postwar market,” says art adviser Hugo Nathan. (more…)

Khadija Saye, a 24-year-old London artist currently showing at the Venice Biennale, is currently missing following the massive tower block fire in the British capital.  “We’ve been calling the hospitals, but I know from my own experience after the London riots people will be in hospital with no belongings, many of them will be unconscious,” says Labour MP David Lammy, whose wife mentored and employed Saye for some time. “So of course we hope and pray that she is amongst them and not perished in that building as I suspect hundreds will have done at the end of this count.” (more…)

Houston’s Menil Collection will close its doors for eight months for a major renovation project, including a full restoration of the building’s floors, the Houston Chronicle reports.  The piece notes the damage to the museum’s stained-black pine flooring, which has resulted from years of foot traffic.  “Everything I do in the building has to consider his architecture,” facilities manager Steve McConathy says of Renzo Piano’s original design for the building. (more…)

Andy Warhol’s first self-portrait will go on sale in London in the coming weeks, estimated to sell for £7 million at Sotheby’s June 28th.  “The artist’s first self-portraits – created using a strip of photographs taken in a New York dime store photo booth – have never felt more relevant to contemporary culture,” says Sotheby’s senior specialist in contemporary art, James Sevier. (more…)

Art Market Monitor looks at Marcato Capital’s gradual sell off of its holdings in Sotheby’s, even as the auction house’s value continues to increase.  The publication’s analysis indicates that, despite its activist push on the auction house’s business structure and goals, Marcato was unable to see major gains. (more…)

Mitchell-Innes & Nash has taken on the estate of General Idea, a three-artist collaborative that worked for over 30 years through a mixture of politically and socially-engaged art.  “They reinvented the idea of artist activism,” says Lucy Mitchell-Innes. “They took on ideas—those often demonized or ignored—with a boldness that was unheard of at the time. [General Idea] came of age in a period that saw pivotal changes in queer conceptualism and postmodernism. They led the charge in decentralization and intervention within the institutional framework.” (more…)

Following the failure of UK authorities to find a buyer for Parmigianino’s £24.5m The Virgin and Child with Saint Mary Magdalen and the Infant St John the Baptist, the work’s export bar has been lifted, sending it to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  Getty director Timothy Potts calls the acquisition “a rare opportunity to enrich our collection with a masterpiece from one of the most accomplished Italian artists of the 16th century.” (more…)

Art Basel, via Art Observed

The 48th edition of Art Basel opened its doors today for the first official day of its week-long run in the Swiss city, and capped its VIP preview with an impressive array of sales that underscored the fair’s lynchpin position in the summer market calendar.  Attendees poured into the halls of Messe Basel early this morning, jockeying for position and a first crack at the exhibition’s premier works, and bringing down a rain of early sales that indicated a return to form for a Western market that had struggled in the past year.  The hallways were packed for the opening day, with collectors Peter Brant, Don and Mera Rubell, and Uli Sigg rubbing elbows with Beatrix Ruff, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Phyllida Barlow and Wolfgang Tillmans. (more…)

A group of animal rights activists have attacked the Athens studio of artist Aboubakar Fofana, who is currently participating in Documenta 14.  Fofana’s work, which features a group of 54 dyed sheep, each representing a nation in Africa, has earned fierce protest over the animals’ confinement.  “I’m not treating [the sheep] badly,” Fofana says of the issues over the sheep’s presence in the work. “I’m not putting chemicals on them; it’s more like dyeing hair. In my culture, we use indigo and henna to dye hair black.”  (more…)

Los Angeles’s Broad Museum has signed on to host a sweeping Jasper Johns retrospective which will also show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  “The Broad Art Foundation has been lending art for over three decades, so the logistical, practical side of taking on a show of this magnitude is something we are ready to handle,” director Joanne Heyler said. (more…)

In one of the more unique angles on Art Basel reporting, Bloomberg has a piece on the influx of collectors, advisors, and bankers to Basel this week, as over $3 billion in art hits the market, spotlighting the wealth management services various banks are looking to sell alongside those works.  “Our clients are here, so we are,” says Deepak Soni, chief executive officer at Vontobel Swiss Wealth Advisors. (more…)

The New Yorker joins James Turrell on a visit to the new wing of Mass MOCA, where the artist is installing a series of works.  “Generally, we don’t see light this way, because we see light illuminating things,” he says. “But my interest is in the thingness, the physicality, of light itself.” (more…)