The Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland has taken control of the first works from the Cornelius Gurlitt art horde, spurring new research into the work’s provenance in the Swiss city. “It is impossible to separate the Gurlitt collection from […] the debate about Nazi-looted art,” says Nina Zimmer, the director of the Kunstmuseum Bern. “I am glad the museum’s board took on this responsibility.” (more…)
Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
“No one writes lyric on a battlefield. On a map stuck with arrows,” begins Quarto, a 2009 poem by the feminist author and essayist Adrienne Rich. Adopting its name from the metaphorical expression Rich uses in her poem’s first line, Gladstone Gallery’s summer group exhibition, Lyric on a Battlefield, seeks impressions of beauty inherent in the struggles and joys of everyday experience through the poetic and personal narrative of life. Organized by Miciah Hussey, the exhibition pairs established names such as Suzanne McClelland, Anne Collier, and Ellen Berkenblit with a younger generation of artists like Monique Mouton and Louisa Clement.
Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
The introspective and meditative nature of the lyric, in terms of offering a highly subjective interpretation of time and space, infuses each juxtaposition of collective human experiences, like loss, intimacy, and memory, with a sense of vivid and often urgent vitality. Presented here, the show’s works turn this sense of humanity into a powerful rumination on modern society, and the varied experiences that undergird our negotiation with everyday existence.
The biggest discovery of the exhibition is f.marquespenteado, the gender-nonconforming pseudonym of the Brazilian artist Fernando Marques Penteado, who combines traditional embroidery methods with found objects and text to orchestrate installations brimming with complex narratives. Although the artist is an established name in his native country and in Europe, his presence in New York has remained somewhat limited, with the exception of his inclusion in the Jewish Museum’s 2015 group exhibition Orthodox, which had aptly focused on artists outside mainstream dynamics of the art world.
The artist’s ability to infuse emotion, sensuality and soul to everyday objects allows him to marry domesticity with sexuality, while his texts add a sense of vivacity and character to his often mundane materials. The embroidery he accentuates and defamiliarizes his arbitrary objects which stems from a dedication to a practice that has been traditionally associated with feminine labor. In one of the installations, two pairs of clogs are placed in front of a wooden rake and dried flowers, standing in for a pair of absent bodies of two male lovers whose relationship is recounted through an imaginary interview conducted with one of them.
Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
By contrast, Suzanne McClelland’s large scale double-sided painting Reg Park and the Hard Gainers exemplifies the Brooklyn-based painter’s decades-long investigation of text, data, and image culture through the lens of American ideals such as success, fame, and class. What appear on the surface as tempestuous and fervent abstract paintings, emanating from loose hand gestures, encapsulate her research and analysis-heavy process regarding facts prevalent in our society, such as male privilege and unjust distribution of opportunity. Adorned with slightly abstracted letters and names, McClelland’s abstract paintings further the artist’s interpretation of information as a fluctuating entity through their double-sided natures that offer alternative paths to same ends.
This sense of text and movement, experience and action, running throughout the show makes for an intriguing engagement with intersections of text and the life it describes. Lyric on a Battlefield is on view at Gladstone Gallery through July 28, 2017.
— O.C. Yerebakan
Read more:
Gladstone Gallery [Exhibition Page]
A recent report on the year’s auction health sees auction sales slightly improving, while private sales are drastically down at Christie’s, the Financial Times reports. Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti has attributed this to the “counter-cyclical relationship” between auctions and private sales. (more…)
The most recent financial disclosure by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump has valued the couple’s art collection at over $25 million, CNN reports. This comes after months of reported foot-dragging by White House officials in the release of information on the family’s holdings. “We’re not getting the level of responsiveness from the White House counsel’s office that we’re used to, or that we need to do the job really effectively,” says Walter Shaub of the Office of Government Ethics. (more…)
Harumi Yamaguchi, Fight Mode (1976) via Art Observed
Tucked in the back room of Bridget Donahue‘s Bowery exhibition space lies Project Native Informant’s contribution to the itinerant exhibition project CONDO: Harumi Yamaguchi’s first US solo exhibition. Yamaguchi, a commercial artist active from the 1970’s onwards, is an expert air-brusher. Not unlike fellow artist and commercial illustrator Hajime Sorayama, her illustrations portray human figures in an idealized setting: perfect lighting, unblemished skin, and gleaming white teeth, a sense of almost unnerving beauty amplified by their provocative poses and minimalist backdrops.
Harumi Yamaguchi at Project Native Informant Hosted by Bridget Donahue, via Bridget Donahue
Alex Israel, Pelican (2017), via Almine Rech
Marking a new stage in his engagement with the cultural landscape and natural phenomena of the California coastline, Alex Israel returns to Almine Rech’s Paris location this month, presenting his aptly titled solo exhibition, Summer 2. Drawn from the artist’s work on his forthcoming feature-length film, SPF-18, Israel has created a series of aluminum and acrylic wetsuit sculptures, text-based pieces, and an extremely detailed pelican sculpture, each presenting its own twist on the familiar iconography of the beach environments he has so often used as source material. (more…)
A group of vandals attacked a sculpture in Nicole Eisenman’s site-specific installation, Sketch for a Fountain, at Skulptur Projekte Münster, Artforum reports. A large figure in the sculpture has been beheaded, and will remain without its head for the remainder of the show. (more…)
The Getty Museum has made a major purchase of 16 drawings and one painting including works by Michelangelo, Parmigianino and Watteau, among others, one of the most expensive single acquisitions in the museum’s history. “This acquisition is absolutely transformative in terms of the quality of our drawings collection,” says director Timothy Potts. “There hasn’t been an opportunity like this in 30 years of the Getty’s existence and there won’t be again.” (more…)
Lisa Yuskavage, Déjà Vu (2017) via Art Observed
On view at David Zwirner Gallery‘s London exhibition space, now through July 28th, is a new series of new paintings by Lisa Yuskavage. Often associated with the re-emergence of figuration in contemporary painting, Yuskavage’s work is noted for its psychedelic, colorfully vibrant style, and its often sexually-charged subject matter. Her paintings embody a unique genre of portraiture—a blending of imagined and contemporary subjects set against classical tropes and icons of human sexuality. In this series, Yuskavage draws upon the world of American hippies, where slinky, bodacious women lounge about and cavort with semi-nude men. It is worth noting that while the hyper-sexualized women remain the dominant characters, the inclusion of men in her work is a fairly new departure for Yuskavage. (more…)
Despite attempts by Donald Trump to defund the NEA, a bill guaranteeing future funding for the organization has won approval this week from the House appropriations committee, the New York Times reports. “It is a very solid rejection of the administration’s proposals to terminate the two agencies,” says Narric Rome, who heads up government affairs at advocacy group Americans for the Arts. “We consider the House number to be a very good starting point for the appropriations process.” (more…)
A young Israeli art student, Rotem Bides, is facing major criticism and potential criminal from the Polish government, after she reportedly stole artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum for a show at Beit Berl College in Kfar Saba. “The college believes that this move points to a lack of public sensitivity and a misunderstanding of its criminal significance,” Bides’s college said in a statement, after deciding to cancel her exhibition. (more…)
New York City embarked on an ambitious plan to refocus its orientation towards the arts in modern urban life. “We are clear: there are no cultural deserts in New York City,” Tom Finkelpearl, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, says. “There are arts organizations and artists in every part of the city, but there are not necessarily well-resourced artists and arts organizations in every part of the city. There are parts of the city and communities that remain underserved.” (more…)
Three of five Francis Bacon pieces stolen from the Madrid home of the artist’s friend José Capelo have been recovered by Spanish police, the BBC reports. The works were recovered after a string of arrests in the past months led to the work’s discovery. (more…)
The Centre Pompidou has confirmed an expansion to Shanghai, with plans to stage a series of exhibitions at a new pop-up space called Le Centre Pompidou Shanghai (West Bund). “This cultural partnership [with the West Bund Group] will also allow the Centre Pompidou to present Chinese contemporary art in Paris,” says a gallery statement. (more…)
The daughter of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape is suing electronics giant LG for is reportedly unlicensed use of the artist’s sculpture Tteia 1, C in packaging materials, advertising and promotions for one of its phones. “That LG and others stole her work for their crass commercial purposes is not only against the law, it is an affront, an ugly reminder that enormous corporations such as LG believe themselves beyond the law,” Paula Pape says. “They can steal now and pay later from their profits,” she said. (more…)
Louise Lawler, Life After (Faces), (2006/2007), via Art Observed
The Museum of Modern Art has opened the first New York museum survey of the work of Louise Lawler, moving throughout a broad range of the American artist’s conceptual exercises and investigations into the power dynamics and aesthetic underpinnings of the art world at large. Running from the artist’s early photographic investigations and her explorations into the presentation, representation, and, as she titles it “re-presentation,” of various works and images from the expanse of modern art history, the exhibition is a bold reflection on the artist’s work throughout the past 40 years, as well as a rumination on the continued role of the museum as a site for the understanding of the field’s history more broadly. (more…)
A Manhattan Federal Court judge has dismissed a request for dismissal by Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery regarding a lawsuit over one of the artist’s Instagram pieces, which features the work of photographer Donald Graham. “The judge applied the wrong standard,” Prince’s lawyer, Joshua Schiller, of Boies, Schiller & Flexner says. “We will be able to show fair use.” (more…)
The New York Times spotlights the friendship between painter Andrew Wyeth’s son Jamie, and Andy Warhol, and the time the two shared at Wyeth’s home in rural Pennsylvania. “Andy would spend most of his time down here watching soaps on TV, because he said the TV reception was better than in New York,” Mr. Wyeth says.
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The Brooklyn Army Terminal will become home to around 50 artist studios, with non-profit ArtBuilt launching construction work on-site. The project came to fruition following an extensive research process. “This research quickly led us to realize that the affordable workspace market was entering a period of unprecedented crisis,” says Esther Robinson, co-executive director of ArtBuilt. (more…)
Following on a string of closures for New York art galleries, Chelsea space Off Vendome will close at the end of July, Artforum reports. The gallery was originally founded in Düsseldorf in 2013. (more…)
CalArts in Valencia has added artists Martine Syms and Cauleen Smith to its staff, Art News reports. The pair have shown widely in past years, and both were included in landmark exhibitions this year at MoMA and The Whitney, respectively. (more…)
The Fondation Louis Vuitton has landed the collection of Russian philanthropists Mikhail and Ivan Morozov for an exhibition in 2020. The collection, which includes landmark works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso, will be culled from the holdings of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. (more…)
Matthew Wong, Last Summer in Santa Monica (2017), via Sarah Cohen for Art Observed
Drawing on a continuous engagement with the poetics of the horizon and its recurring presence across the history of contemporary painting, Cheim & Read has opened its summer group exhibition, The Horizontal. Culling together a diverse group of artists from the past eighty years of artistic practice, the show is an investigation and reflection on the horizon as a motif weaving its way throughout varied investigations of modern art-making. Photography, painting, drawing and print-making each make their presence felt throughout the exhibition, inviting a deep perspective on how the skyline, and its attendant impact on the viewer’s perception, has continued to inspire artist’s work into the modern day.
Louise Fishman, Bitter Herb (1988), via Sarah Cohen for Art Observed
Edward Quinn, Picasso wearing a bull’s head intended for bullfighter’s training, La Californie, Cannes (1959), courtesy of Gagosian
A true Spaniard at heart, Pablo Picasso had a great affinity for bullfighting. With a keen appreciation for the sport, it proved to be a continuous theme throughout his work. Picasso’s oeuvre is riddled with symbolism as well as direct pictorial representations of bulls, matadors and the mythological minotaur— the half-man, half-beast that so piqued Picasso’s interest. Minotaurs and Matadors, on view at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery space through August 25th, a show expertly curated by Sir John Patrick Richardson, celebrates Picasso’s passion and link to both his traditional Spanish roots and the mythological landscapes that so inspired him in turn. (more…)