All photographs by Oskar Proctor for ArtObserved

Currently on view at Hauser & Wirth New York is “Else,” the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to the drawings of Roni Horn.  The show, composed of six new large-scale works up to eight by ten feet in size, will remain on view through June 19, 2010 at 32 East 69th Street.

The new works lend themselves to multiple viewing angles: from far away they appear as densely-packed thumbprints and dissipating hearts. A closer look reveals involved diagrams reminiscent of tesselations and multiplying cells. The heavily textured images are composed of cut paper, red painted lines, and the artist’s fractured pencil notes. Ever aware of the material, the stamp of the paper manufacturer feature prominently on the outer edges of several works. The intricacy and density of the compositions are contrasted with the artist’s simple, large scrawled signature, which floats, relaxed, detached from the rest in a sea of oaktag.

Björk at Friday night’s opening

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Uri Aran, All This Is Yours, (Detail), Mixed Media, 2010.

Over 900 people were in attendance at the opening last Sunday, May 2 for “Knight’s Move,” the new show at SculptureCenter, running through July 26, 2010. The exhibition brings together artists prominent to the dialog of New York’s recent past as well as those at the very beginning of their careers.  Curated by Fionn Meade, this survey of new sculpture in New York embodies an informed yet playful and questioning view of the contemporary.  Working within this theme, the exhibition’s title refers to the chess piece whose move is tactical, stealthy, and surprising.

The exhibited artists include Uri Aran, David Brooks, Nikolas Gambaroff, Tamar Halpern, Alex Hubbard, Esther Kläs, Daniel Lefcourt, Joanna Malinowska, Ohad Meromi, Virginia Poundstone, Cassie Raihl, Erin Shirreff, Alexandre Singh, Matt Sheridan Smith, Mika Tajima, Tom Thayer, Sara VanDerBeek, and Allyson Vieira.

No Neck Blues Band performs on David Brook’s installation in SculptureCenter courtyard. All opening images by Su Beyazit, courtesy of SculptureCenter.

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Tobias Meyer, International Head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department. leads the Impressionist and Modern evening sale last night.

As with Christie’s historic sale of Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust for a record $106.5 million on Tuesday evening, Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern evening sale last night struck another strong note for the recovering art market.  The sale achieved $195,697,000, nearly reaching the high end of the pre-sale estimate ($141 – 204 million).  Fifty of the 57 lots offered sold.  Forty-three works achieved prices over $1 million, ten works exceeded $5 million, four works brought prices over $10 million, and two works sold for over $15 million; two artist records were broken. That compares very favorably to the 36-lot sale that generated $61,370,500 at Sotheby’s last May. Despite a packed salesroom, absent bidders on telephones dominated the evening’s sales – while a constant feature of this secretive market where anonymity is key, the many languages spoken by Sotheby’s representatives on the telephones last night acted as a strong indicator of the global demand for these top-quality works. Most notably, Asian buyers dominated the phones – pushing-up the prices of many of the night’s big sales and eventually winning four of the top ten lots.

Bouquet de fleurs pour le Quatorze Juillet, Henri Matisse Estimate: $18 – 25 million. Price Realized: $28,642,500.

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Les buveurs d’absinthe (Les Déclassés) by Jean-Francois Raffaelli quadruples its pre-sale estimate of $400-600,000 and sells for $2,994,500 at Christie’s Impressionist/Modern sale.  Photo by Art Observed.

The art market received another, enormous boost of confidence last night at Christie’s Impressionist and Modern evening sale, as Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932) sold to anonymous telephone bidder for a record-breaking $106,482,500. The staggering price comes hot on the heels of Sotheby’s historic sale of Alberto Giacometti’s iconic bronze, L’Homme Qui Marche I (1961), for $104,327,00 in February this year. The Picasso helped drive the sale’s overall total to $335,548,000, making it the third biggest sale ever witnessed at Christie’s in New York.  Of the 69 lots offered, 56 sold with over 30 lots exceeding $1 million, and of those, 9 exceeded the $10 million mark. Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was part of a 27-lot single-owner sale from the collection of Mrs. Sidney F. Brody, a noted Los Angeles collector.  The Brody group was 100% sold by lot and value and realized $224,177,500 making it the biggest single-owner sale offered at Christie’s New York, surpassing the landmark sale of the Collection of Victor and Sally Ganz sale in 1997, and coming second only to the mammoth Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Berge sale that made $443 million at Christie’s, Paris in February 2009.

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Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

The spring auctions in New York, which form the bellwether of the art market, get under way tonight with the Impressionist and modern art sale at Christie’s.  Over the next two weeks, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury & Co are offering up to $1.2 billion of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art – twice as much as they sold last May. During the Impressionist and modern evening sales in May 2009 only three works carried price tags of $10 million or more – this month 10 works by Edvard Munch, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and others are priced as high. Another six works are expected to fetch at least $5 million, up from four a year ago.  Judging by these optimistic pre-sale estimates, the auction houses clearly hope that things will play out as they did three months ago in London when Sotheby’s set the record for any work of art ever sold at auction with the $104 million sale of Alberto Giacometti’s L’Homme qui marche I to Lily Safra, wife of the late Lebanese banker Edmond Safra.  Now a Pablo Picasso nude bears the largest pre-sale estimate in history ($70m to $90m) and an anonymous third-guarantor who has agreed to bid at least $70 million (that’s more than the auction house got last fall for its entire evening sale of Impressionist and modern art). Christie’s are set to dominate the fortnight because of two art-stocked estates. Tonight, paintings and sculptures owned by the late Los Angeles collector Frances Brody are expected to fetch as much as $194 million.  98 lots from the estate of the bestselling author and filmmaker, Michael Crichton, are estimated to sell for as much as $75 million and form the backbone of their Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on Tuesday, May 11.

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‘May Day’, the final exhibition before Deitch Projects closes it’s doors, exhibits significant new works by Shepard Fairey executed in his familiar palette of reds, black, and white. The show opens in conjunction with four other mural works by Fairey; a mural covering an 80 foot wall surrounding the Ace Hotel, one on Houston and Bowery, one for the Cooper Square Hotel, and a mural for the Music Hall of Williamsburg.  Both public and private murals, highlight Fairey’s play on constructed binaries–primarily between fine art and design, street art and galleries–as a means of stimulating curiosity about the surrounding visual culture.

Opening Night for May Day, Saturday May 1st at Deitch Projects

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Scott Campbell Skull Cube, 2010 via OHWOW

Thursday’s opening for Scott Campbell’s current show, If You Don’t Belong, Don’t Be Long, with OHWOW at 109 Crosby was inspired by the dreams of art students everywhere. There were celebrities, models, art superstars, and just plain crowds lining up at the door to see the work. Those in attendance, to name just a few, were Dan Colen, Aurel Schmidt, Nate Lowman, and countless others.  In addition to the block seeming to be the place to be at that moment in New York, the art set new standards for the artist and also helped to further establish Miami’s OHWOW gallery in New York.

Crowd at Scott Campbell’s opening April 29th, 2010. Photo By Oskar Proctor

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With his “May Day” show opening at Deitch Projects this Saturday May 1st, and an OBEY Clothing pop-up shop at 151 Orchard Street, Shepard Fairey has been busy putting-up work all over the city. In addition to his Deitch mural on Houston Street in the spot made famous by Keith Haring in the early-‘80s, a collaboration with COPE2 in the Bronx and mural projects in Williamsburg and SOHO – another mural appeared this morning on an 80-foot piece of plywood wrapping the Ace Hotel at the corner of Broadway and 29th Street. Guests visiting the hotel on May 1 are able to book the “May Day” package: an OBEY May Day t-shirt, a signed off-set print, and two tickets to the MAY DAY after-party.

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In 2005, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, held a retrospective of the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat.  In conjunction with that exhibition was a short 20 minute film of an interview by Tamra Davis, a friend of the artist. The footage shows a young Basquiat speaking about his works and his life, and is one of the few instances we have of the artist on film. The rare footage also shows Basquiat at work on a number of paintings, providing insight into his artistic process and highly intuitive means of creation. Because of the rarity of the footage, and at the encouragement of Jeffrey Deitch, Tamra Davis decided to work with Arthouse Films to make a feature length documentary entitled Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, combining the original eighties footage with interviews by various artists, gallery owners, and friends of Basquiat. The film constructs a psychological portrait of the artist tracing his humble beginnings as a street artist to his extreme success.

Afterparty at the Boom Boom Room

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Les Chadoufs (1934) by Mahmoud Said, via Christie’s

This past Wednesday Dubai’s art connoisseurs gathered together for a sale of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern art.  A highlight of the sale were 25 masterpieces from the collection of Dr. Mohamed Said Farsi featuring Egyptian modern painters.  The auction concluded in a total of $15.2 Million outdoing its pre-sale total of $4.3 million.

Les Chadoufs (1934) by Egyptian painter Mahmoud Said was the great sale of the evening bringing in a record $2.42 million, reportedly the most expensive work made by an Arab artist ever to be auctioned at Christie’s Dubai.  The work is from the collection of Dr. Farsi and had a pre-sale estimate of $150,000-$200,000. It depicts a desert landscape with men workers wearing turbans and veiled women carrying jars above their heads envisioning Egypt’s Pharonic and Islamic past.

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All images and text by Eric Forman for ArtObserved

Last Saturday at the New Museum, new media arts organization Rhizome presented Seven on Seven, a day-long conference showcasing seven collaborations between one artist and one “technologist.”  Each pair had only 24 hours to conceive an idea and whip up a prototype.  The event referenced “9 Evenings,” a famous 1966 collaboration between artists and engineers organized by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver.  That group had 10 months and came up with many influential technological “firsts.” Seven on Seven had more modest aims, and the results, though uneven, were varied and entertaining, most straddling the line between functional social experiment and pop-up work of art. Rhizome executive director Lauren Cornell curated the pairings and many of the participators gushed about the fun they had brainstorming together.  The audience, a packed house of well-heeled digerati who paid what some said were “exclusionary” amounts for tickets, seemed to enjoy the proceedings, not least the cocktail reception in the New Museum’s sleek Sky Room. Some grumblers asserted that networking was the true raison d’eÌ‚tre of the event, although there was widespread admiration for what the participators pulled off in such a short time.

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SculptureCenter’s annual fundraising event, Lucky Draw 2010. All images via SculptureCenter.

AO was on site for Lucky Draw 2010, a spirited annual benefit thrown by SculptureCenter to raise money for its exhibition program.  This year’s event set a new record for the highest gross, bringing in over $120,000 to the non-for-profit arts institution located in Long Island City, New York.

Volunteers moving a work by Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder (DAS INSTITUT)

On April 13, 2010, as ticket holders surveyed the offerings and made lists of their top picks, no one seemed to worry that the event’s unlucky date would disturb anyone’s luck.  The room was abuzz with excitement: unlike most art auctions, in this event the order in which the artworks are selected is determined by a lively and suspenseful random drawing.  The ticket price, at $450 a head, draws both novice and experienced collectors.

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Marlene Dumas in front of self-portrait The Sleep of Reason, 2009, press preview for Against the Wall

Marlene Dumas’ practice is two-fold: on one hand conveying politically potent messages that are more often than not critical, and on the other being deeply concerned with the surface, aesthetic potential of paint.  One is forced to question whether these seemingly disparate objectives marry well at all or compliment each other? However the tension between the two are played out, and resolved in the artist’s exciting first solo exhibition at David Zwirner, through April 24.

Marlene Dumas, The Wall, 2009.

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“The Clipper” – The Marianne Vitale Experience presented by Kunstverein NY at White Slab Palace. Photograph by Christopher Marcus.

On Saturday, March 28, Biennialist Marianne Vitale brought together a group of writers, performers, poets, and thinkers to realize a collaborative artist cabaret – THE CLIPPER. The performance was presented by Kunstverein NY as part of YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE AN HOUR AGO – a monthly series that is guest-curated by performance artists, filmmakers, and writers that will be presented at White Slab Palace on the last Sunday of each month, from 6-8pm. The evening staged gallery-grade performance art angst, supported by a full, live jazz/rock ensemble.  Taking us back to the Seventies (1970, 1870 and 1770) on a mock ship stage, replete with ol’factory mood-setting dead fish decoration, the experience meshed nightclub glamarama with Musikverein-ish social opera via a Royal-Court-like contemporary art jestering.  Characters got interactive with seaweed tossing, singing sailors and a happy sea-woman, amidst a revolutionary who cleans up the conceptual act after a human clam unloaded salty water onto the crowd.  Screaming drunkards, lovers, a dancing drag, and a silent naked golden muse masthead paint a tableau of today – lambasting fraudulent eco-capitalism, problematizing political pirates, and debating and delighting in dead-end debauchery.  The troupe delivered the evening’s themes, both simple and complex, to an audience who each shared a moment of their own stardom for some part of the rough half hour. The occasional reading from the script on stage reminded viewers that this was a coordination of mostly performance artists deft in-the-moment energy.

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“The Clipper” – The Marianne Vitale Experience presented by Kunstverein NY at White Slab Palace.

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Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, MoMA. Installation view with Portrait with Flowers, 2009. All photos by Ipek Irgit for Art Observed unless otherwise noted.

Marina Abramović is notorious for the centrality of her own body within her artwork. True, Abramović’s career can be read as a sort of bewildering physical endurance test, yet this would seemingly belie, a more important relationship than the artist to her own body, but the relationship between the artist, artwork and audience. In the case of her newest performance, The Artist is Present, part of the retrospective of the same name at MoMA, the artist is very much present, but most significantly the audience is present also.  In an interview on the MoMA website Abramović discusses her belief in the essential role the audience plays in performance art, if not all art work, “The work is done for the audience, without the audience the work doesn’t exist, it doesn’t make any meaning.”

Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, 2010

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View of Art Dubai in the Medinat Jumeirah – All photos by Art Observed unless otherwise noted

On March 17^th his Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE, Ruler of Dubai officially opened Art Dubai for its fourth edition.  The Middle East’s best attended contemporary art fair, this year record number of international and regional collectors attended the Jumeirah Patron’s Preview.  This year’s fair exhibited 1500 works from 72 leading International and regional galleries presented 1500 made by around 500 artists.

Visitors at Art Dubai, via Capital D Studio

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Sarah Morris, “Beijing Intersecting” (2009), one of the proposals for filling the Guggenheim’s void as part of its 50th anniversary show. Photo by Art Observed.

AO was at the press preview for “Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim” as the museum celebrates the 50th anniversary of its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home on the East Side. For this new exhibition, organizer Nancy Spector commissioned two hundred proposals from artists, designers, and architects to fill the void.  Through April 28, proposals are on the walls of the Guggenheim, a set of dreams and interventions.

Detail from “Remember Beuys” (2009), by Bolles+Wilson, at the Guggenheim. Photo by Art Observed.

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Sterling Ruby, “Pig Pen” (2009-2010), on view at PaceWildenstein.

Through March 10, Sterling Ruby has two new pieces at PaceWildenstein’s downtown gallery.  On view are “Pig Pen” and “Bus,” two industrialized traps that confine, says a gallerist, humanity’s basic primitivism. This is an artist’s apocalyptic endgame.

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Sterling Ruby, “Bus” (2010) at PaceWildenstein.

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Every March for the past 12 years, artists, galleries, collectors, critics and curators from all over the world have made New York their destination during Armory week. Launching the week of cultural activities, Mayor Bloomberg predicted that 60,000 visitors are expected bring in around $44 million. The week’s main event, The Armory Show, opened its doors to a record number of VIP ticket holders yesterday morning reflecting a renewed optimism in the art market. This year, the show has expanded to include 285 dealers, up from 239 in 2009. Pier 94, at 12th Avenue and 55th Street, showcases 211 cutting-edge contemporary galleries, institutions and non-profit art organizations, a further 78 dealers specializing in Modern and Secondary market works at the adjacent Pier 92.

Jay Jopling shows a client around the White Cube booth, all photographs by Oskar Proctor for Art Observed

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Marina Abramovic and Klaus Biesenbach at Moma

Marina Abramovic gave a lecture Monday evening at the MOMA as a precursor to her major retrospective which will open there on March 14th. Abramovic has had a prolific career as a performance artist, much of her work pushes the boundaries of the physical body in endurance based pieces that posit her body as the art object.  The lecture was introduced by Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA’s PS1, as a way for Abramovic to speak before entering into a lengthy period of silence, a requirement for the main performance piece to the show, her longest solo piece ever performed.  She will spend over 600 hours in the museum over a period of three months without speaking or moving.

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“Eierstapel” (2009), part of the new Wolfgang Tillmans show at Andrea Rosen. ©Wolfgang Tillmans

Through March 13, Andrea Rosen is hosting 85 new works by the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, in an exhibition that diverges from much of his typical series. A picture of a baby opens the show, which includes pictures of the Gaza security fence, a triathlon, egg cartons, cities, nature… “Previous shows,” Tillmans tells Dominic Eichler, “…often included absurd moments and odd subject matter that had nothing to do with the core narrative of the ‘real’ utopias portrayed in my pictures. But this show reverses the balance – a few pictures from ‘my world’ are met with a majority of ‘outside’ world.”

Installation view of the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at Andrea Rosen. ©Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo by Jeremy Lawson

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Strange Attractors, Aki Sasmoto – all photographs by Oskar Proctor for Art Observed.

This week the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York opened its doors for the 75th edition if its defining exhibition: The Biennial. Simply titled, 2010, the show rejects an organizational theme and instead uses time as its marker in a matter-of-fact cross-section of American art today. The show is one of the smallest in the Biennial’s history – works by only 55 artists and collaborative teams are displayed on four floors of the museum’s ‘Breur Building’ in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This year the entire third floor of the building has been taken dedicated video installation – first exhibited at the Biennial in 1975 – a sure sign that video work has now reached maturity, worthy of recognition as an independent art form. In addition, the museum’s fifth floor is devoted to artists in the Whitney’s permanent collection who have shown in past Biennials.

Francesco Bonami, Curator of Whitney Biennial 2010

Whitney Biennial 2010 – Interview with curator Francesco Bonami via VernissageTV

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“zycles 3075” (2009), part of the new show of Thomas Ruff’s works at David Zwirner Gallery.

The David Zwirner Gallery is currently showing Thomas Ruff’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. On view are two new series by the artist, whose photography has explored landscape, the nude, portraiture and even architecture through appropriated, computer-generated, and traditional images. “zycles” and “cassini,” at David Zwirner through March 13, draw in patrons as they notice the details that yield a snowballing structural complexity.

Thomas Ruff, “cassini 26” (2009), at David Zwirner.

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Kiki Smith, Walking Puppet, 2008. Papier-mâché with muslin overall © Kiki Smith, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York. Image Courtesy the Brooklyn Museum

On February 11th ArtObserved was on-site at the media preview of Kiki Smith’s latest lofty installation based on her thoughts on the passage of one’s life and artistic development. ‘Kiki Smith: Sojourn’ is on view at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, The Brooklyn Museum, through September 12, 2010, marking the fourth site-specific installation as part of a grand, long-term project. Other venues included Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany (March 16–August 24, 2008) and traveled to Kunsthalle Nürnberg (September 18–November 16, 2008) and Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (February 19–May 24, 2009).

ArtObserved in conversation with Kiki Smith at the opening of “Kiki Smith: Sojourn”, The Brooklyn Museum

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