Theaster Gates made a statement on supporting young artists in remarks last night at a party in Basel, asking collectors to support young artists making and selling their work. “You guys, I know that I’m the byproduct of people saying yes when they didn’t know me, saying yes at my potential and the possibility of the thing,” he said. “Throwing small dinners with me with five people that has turned into dinners for 200. I’m just grateful.” (more…)

A piece in Art Newspaper this week asks if arts awards really carry many of the benefits for winners that they claim, looking at a range of examples including a recent protest by a group of artists nominated for Germany’s Berlin Nationalgalerie Prize. “There is an unspoken assumption that the participants are likely to be remunerated by the market as a result of being nominated for or winning the prize,” the artists nominated for this prize said in an open statement. “We know that this is not always the case. The logic of artists working for exposure feeds directly into the normalization of the unregulated pay structures ubiquitous in the art field.” (more…)

(more…)

Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme de profil (Femme écrivant) (1932), via Sotheby’s

With the bustling week of sales and exhibitions in Basel now capped, the final major auctions of the spring are set to take place in London, as two weeks of auctions will look to test the waters of a market seemingly on the rebound after a strong outing earlier this season in New York.  Beginning this week with a pair of Impressionist and Modern Sales, the week’s proceedings should make for an intriguing wrap up of the first half of 2018.   (more…)

Wendy White, American Bleach Effect (Budweiser) (2018), via Marlborough Contemporary

It’s hard to estimate Leo Fitzpatrick’s impact on the course of Marlborough Contemporary’s programming.  The director, who joined the gallery in 2015, has dipped his toes into any number of puddles over the course of his time with the gallery, yet always bringing an equally studied and adventurous approach to curation across the gallery’s two story exhibition space. The shows have twisted in and out of the gallery’s broader curatorial vision, pulling both from the deeper reaches of contemporary art history and from the gallery’s list of frequent collaborators.  For his most recent exhibition project, BURNT, Fitzpatrick continues this trend, inviting a broad swath of artists to a show that manages to both unite diverse voices and focus them towards the modern American cultural landscape.  (more…)

Liu Wei, 180 Faces (detail) (2017-2018)All images © Liu Wei Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York and AYE Gallery, Beijing

Sean Kelly’s exhibition of 180 small scale portraits by Chinese artist Liu Wei offers an intimate and thought-provoking survey into the psychological layers of portraiture, a genre almost as archaic as art history itself.  Entitled 180 Faces, the exhibition of modest scale portraits of anonymous individuals are hung akin to the style of the salon, with a twist on the traditional display fashion as the frames’ sleek surfaces blend into the gallery’s contemporary white-cube interior. (more…)

The Freelands Foundation in London has issued a report on gender disparity in British Art, noting continued challenges to gender disparity and representation in the field. “Female artists are still under-represented in the art world in 2017 despite outnumbering men studying in art school,” the foundation reports.   (more…)

The Baltimore Museum of Art and SFMOMA art organizing a show dedicated to the works of Joan Mitchell, Art News reports. “The time is right for a thoughtful reconsideration of Mitchell’s work and her impact on postwar painting on both sides of the Atlantic,” says Neal Benezra, the director of SFMOMA. (more…)

Megan Marrin at David Lewis, via Art Observed

Offering a fitting counterpoint to the expanses of the Messe Basel, Liste Art Fair has returned to Warteck, a former schoolhouse on the banks of the Rhine now serving as an exhibition and performance space, for another year of exhibitions showcasing adventurous and exploratory proects from a range of galleries around the globe.  Liste continues to build on its position as one of the central hubs for the week of Art Basel, priding 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.

Edouard Montassut, via Edouard Montassut

(more…)

Robert Longo, Death Star, all photos via Ben Krieglstein for Art Observed

Art Basel has opened its doors, kicking off a marathon week of sales and shows in the Swiss city that marks another year for the landmark giant of contemporary and modern art selling.  Marking the terminus for the first half of the year’s major primary market activity, the fair once again showed why its impressive scale and appointments makes it such a draw for collectors, artists and dealers.

Carol Bove at Unlimited (more…)

Paula Cooper is temporarily relocating to 524 West 26th Street.  “I’m looking forward to it,” Cooper says. “We’ll be able to exhibit works in a completely different way. It will be exciting for the artists.” (more…)

Nan Goldin is profiled in the New York Times this month, as she reflects on her recovery from opioid addiction, and her newfounded protest pieces against the Sackler family, which has benefitted from the widespread prescription of OxyContin.  “I had heard it was a really evil drug, but I didn’t think it would do me,” she says. “I thought I had a lot of control.”  (more…)

Mitchell-Innes & Nash now represents the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, Art News reports. “Kogelnik’s work bridges American Pop art and European figurative painting and sculpture of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and her interest in Pop imagery, media, and feminism makes her a natural fit for our program,” the gallery says. (more…)

Tanya Bonakdar is opening a gallery space in Los Angeles, Art News reports.  “It’s a natural evolution,” Bonakdar says. “We really are artist-driven at the gallery. So many of our artists have expressed interest in having a presence on the West Coast. This is not a decision I have taken lightly. I have been looking and mulling the idea for four or five years. I found the perfect space, and the perfect team, and it all came together.” (more…)

David Zwirner now represents the estate of photographer Roy DeCarava worldwide, the gallery announced today. “He’s a giant to those who know the work, and I think he’ll be a real discovery for those, like myself, who didn’t know,” Zwirner says of the photographer, who documented the life and culture of black American throughout the 20th century.  (more…)

Nick Cave, The Let Go (2018), all images via Greem Jellyfish for Art Observed

“Back in the day the club was my safe place-and losing myself on the dance floor has always kept me centered.”

The Let Go is artist Nick Cave’s new work at Park Avenue Armory, a multi-sensory performance using visual works, sounds, and movement to transform the Armory into a dance-based town hall aimed at bringing together visitors, performers, DJs, dancers and community members to participate in a collective act of catharsis. The audience is asked to let go of frustration and negativity, and to uplift one another as they participate in this powerful socially-engaged piece.  Stringing together a series of interrelated works, The Let Go is bounded by the installation Chase, and where a performance titled The Up Right, featuring one of Cave’s signature Sound Suits, is activated by a jazz keyboardist, choir and opera singer. Concluding the performance,  the “town hall” becomes a dance hall, complete with DJ. (more…)

Charles Ray, Reclining Woman (2018), via Matthew Marks

The work of artist Charles Ray draws particular strength from its deliberateness and commitment to concept.  The artist’s figurative sculptures are direct in their depiction, yet draw particular strength from the nuance of their subject matter, and the mastery of the artist’s hand.  Returning to New York for a show of new work at Matthew Marks this month, Ray has once again cemented this reputation, bringing a small but powerful selection of works to bear on the gallery space, and once again underscoring why he is a living legend in the world of contemporary sculpture.  (more…)

An exhibition of new work by Kelley Walker closed yesterday at Capitain Petzel in Berlin.  This was the New York artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. For this exhibition, Walker took his exploration of 1970s and 1980s advertising culture as a starting point. The works on view were invested in exploring the ways in which popular iconography is “filtered by time, reinvented, and continually recycled through private and public contexts,” a process described as a “tireless auto-cannibalization” of images in the press release. The effect is a fascinating practice that both mimics and refracts the process by which we consume, reproduce, and experience the images of popular media.

Kelley Walker, “Stacked Pioneer PL-518_3”, 2018.

Kelley Walker, “Untitled (Screen to Screen)”, 2017.

This exhibition features several large-scale works based on an advertisement for the legendary Pioneer PL-518 turntable. This advertisement, from 1973, features Andy Warhol and is essentially linked to the New York disco scene of the 1970s. This scene is echoed in another work, “Circle in Circle” from 2006, which is a disco ball covered in chocolate, thus rendering it unable to reflect and scatter light as a functional disco ball would.

Another body of work centers on the advertising campaign for Calvin Klein jeans from the early 1980’s, shot by Richard Avedon and featuring a fifteen year-old Brooke Shields. At the time of its release, in the infancy of the conservative Reagan administration, the advertisement caused a scandal that marked a turn in the ways in which visual media circulated and reflected certain social and political realities. Walker’s return to this advertisement and the scandal it caused can be seen as a commentary on the current conservative political climate today, and the way that visual culture interacts with this contemporary moment.

Kelley Walker, “Untitled 1980 Brooke Shields with Bio”, 2017. All images courtesy Capitain Petzel.

Kelley Walker, “Untitled”, 2018.

A third body of work consists of seven large-scale collaged screen prints from Walker’s series of “brick works.” The structure of this work is composed of scanned individual bricks arranged and printed onto canvas. The mortar for these bricks is a collage sourcing Vogue magazines from the 1980s. The work hovers between illusion and flatness, representing both a brick wall and a variation on an abstract screen.

Installation View.

This exhibition reflects Walker’s incisive approach to visual media and how the circulation of images affects individuals on a collective, as well as private level. By revisiting certain iconic images from the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Walker effectively reveals how the language and impressions of print media can continue to speak long after their cultural expiration.

-A. Corrigan

Related Links:

Exhibition Page [Capitain Petzel]

Pace Gallery has named Andria Hickey senior director and curator, with a curatorial focus that marks a new direction for the gallery. “It’s not necessarily a traditional gallery role,” Hickey says. “It’s about working closely with artists and having somebody in-house who can really focus on exhibitions, research, publications, and working with artists in their studios as they develop projects. That’s the way I like to work in any institution, and it’s exciting that I can do it in a new platform.” (more…)

The Dia Art Foundation has announced plans to improve its spaces in New York and Beacon, developing an operations endowment through a recently announced capital campaign. “I spent a lot of time talking to artists about what they wanted and what we could provide, and there was resounding enthusiasm for leaving the spaces as they are as much as possible” says director Jessica Morgan. “Artists are excited to use them because they’re not overwhelming or dominating and speak to the type of spaces we’ve always worked with.” (more…)

Danh Vo is now represented by White Cube, Art News reports, adding the gallery to an already impressive string of galleries including Marian Goodman Goodman, and Kurimanzutto. (more…)

As the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation prepares to wind itself down, the organization is a making a string of major donations to museums, including a donation of about 400 artworks to the Whitney Museum of American Art. “We decided we wanted to get out of the art-holding business,” foundation director Jack Cowart says. (more…)

Iran will open its first art fair, Teer, at the end of the month, Art Newspaper reports, even as the ongoing conflict with the U.S. makes securing work and sales a challenge in the country. “The transfer or receipt of money to or from abroad is a major issue as Iran is not connected to the international banking system. It’s an ongoing issue made worse due to current political decisions,” Salman Matinfar, the director of Tehran’s Ab-Anbar gallery, says. (more…)

John Giorno and Robert Watts, Fun with Fluxus (1984-1988), via Supportico Lopez

As the days of summer tick by, and the weather grows ever warmer in Europe, the art world once again returns to the namesake home of the Art Basel fair, which takes over the Swiss city for its annual run of sales and project exhibitions, held in conjunction with a number of various exhibitions and shows across the city.  Marking the final run of market activity before a well-deserved summer recess, the fair should offer a last glimpse at the European art market’s health before the fall season. (more…)