Gilbert and George, Guns (2011). All images via White Cube.

The collaborative duo Gilbert and George opened London Pictures to large crowds in Hong Kong last week, bringing the duo’s brash, oddball brand of British pop to the east for the inauguration of the London-based White Cube gallery’s new location. Based on 3719 source images drawn from newsstand posters stolen in East London over the last six years, the 292 works which comprise the London Pictures are the largest single body of work yet created by the duo, and the exhibition spans all four White Cube spaces—the new Hong Kong location, as well as Bermondsey, Hoxton Square, and Mason’s Yard. The gridded patterns of anywhere from four to forty tiles of found text and imagery—with the artists added in—explore themes of violence, sex, and death, through various methods of repetition. According to the press release, the survey draws “directly on the quotidian life of a vast city, [and] allow[s] contemporary society to recount itself in its own language.”

Installation view (more…)

‪‬Italian police recover 37 old masters paintings stolen from a Roman businessman’s collection in 1971. Paintings by Berlinghieri, El Greco, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, Van Dyck are among the works, worth £6 million in all.  Five works from the original theft still remain missing. [AO Newslink]

(more…)

Cindy Sherman, Murder Mysteries, at Metro Pictures. All photos on site for Art Observed by Ryann Donnelly.

Running through March 11 at the Park Avenue Armory on New York’s Upper East Side is the 24th annual Art Show organized by the Art Dealer’s Association of America (ADAA). Benefitting The Henry Street Settlement, the show features 35 solo-exhibit booths, and 37 thematic installations from a select array of galleries including Metro Pictures, Cheim & Read, Pace, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman, Anton Kern, and Gladstone Gallery, to name a few. With a steady, if not entirely bustling crowd Thursday afternoon, the gallerists reported positively about sales and client traffic at a show carrying a heavier contemporary selection than in years passed. (more…)

Installation shot. All images courtesy of Gallery Buchholz Berlin.

German artist Isa Genzken presents a new constellation of works Hallelujah at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, Germany. Genzken works primarily in sculpture but is known to also employ other media such as film, photography, works on paper, and collage in her works. Her practice, known for drawing on the legacy of Minimalism, often involves a critical dialogue with Modernist architecture as well as contemporary culture.

(more…)

‪‬Solid Objectives-Idenburg Liu (SO-IL) architects to create 1,500 ft long tent for Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island in May, with ‘neighborhoods,’ ‘wedges,’ and views of Manhattan along the curved structure, “It’s going to be very elegant,” says Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover [AO Newslink]

(more…)

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #466 (2008)

Cindy Sherman‘s retrospective is on view now at MoMA through June 11. Using herself as her only model, Sherman manipulates her appearance and environment, manifesting a dialogue about gender and social stereotypes through every carefully crafted and costumed persona. With eleven galleries dedicated to various series of her work—from the simplistic roles of femininity displayed in her pioneering Film Stills series, to her more complex transmutations of fashion centerfolds, or the aristocratic elite—her consistent process has yielded more emotionally, psychologically, and aesthetically nuanced characters since her earliest work in 1975.

(more…)

All photos courtesy David Zwirner.

Michael Riedel’s solo site-specific installation of silk-screened posters and wallpaper sold out within the first thirty minutes of the Armory Show preview at David Zwirner’s booth. Art Observed spoke with Riedel that very afternoon in the following interview.

Art Observed: I was really taken by your work and its interaction with systems. I felt that to be a foundational aspect of how you interact with art and what your art-making process is about. How did you get interested or involved with systems?

Michael Riedel: Well, there is a big German writer on systems, and it’s interesting because I found his writing after I produced a lot of works, and then I could say, ‘Wow, this is exactly what is in my work.’ So there is a strong relationship to his writing. I think he is a sociologist… anyway, I think this is something which makes total sense for me—as a product. It’s something that’s ongoing and changing, but also in the same time it is a fixed form somehow. Yet inside there are a lot of interests. You can also touch on the word reproduction; a lot of people like to talk about reproduction in reference to my work, yet there has been a shift in meaning of reproduction—it isn’t about a product anymore, but the process of production. Which means, in the process of producing works, they are only done to produce the next step, to recycle, to transform, to translate. So it’s an ongoing thing.

(more…)

‪‬Online art critic Hennessy Youngman invites “anyone—and I mean anyone—who can bring your art down to Family Business” to participate in upcoming exhibition, ‘ITSA SMALL SMALL WORLD,’ in association with curator Massimiliano Gioni, and artists Maurizio Cattelan, and Marilyn Minter [AO Newslink]

(more…)

‪‬Gerhard Richter’s auction sales reached $200 million last year, while the artist remains humble, says Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, “Richter doesn’t want to be the next king, but he has taken painting farther than just about anyone else” [AO Newslink]

(more…)

‪‬Model, actress, and Cambridge art history graduate Lily Cole will become the host of a six-part television series Art Matters, in which she will meet with contemporary artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Christo and Tacita Dean.
[AO Newslink]

(more…)

‪‬Chelsea-based David Zwirner gallery in New York seeks to open it first overseas space with a new location in London’s Mayfair. The London gallery will open November 2012, with an inaugural exhibition by Belgian painter Luc Tuymans. [AO Newslink]

(more…)

Alec Soth, 2008_02zl0173 (2008)

Alec Soth threads a narrative of retreat, decay, and reclamation through the photos on display in Broken Manual at Sean Kelly Gallery. The exhibition traces Soth’s life as Lester B. Morrison, a character of Soth’s invention whom he incarnated from 2006–2010 while infiltrating isolated communities living life on the rural American fringe. The photos tell the story of Morrison’s retreat from civilization, depicting his passage from the squatters’ dens of urban decay to life among the “hermits and hippies, monks and survivalists” that become the subject of Soth’s lens. As he presses on, photos of strident, decrepit infrastructure imposed on pastoral landscapes give way to portraits of men who unsettlingly resemble the unforgiving locales they inhabit.

(more…)

All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.

The Armory Show 2012 hosts 228 international exhibitors, “showing work that realizes the fair’s mission of innovation and discovery.” Split between Piers 92 and 94 on the west side of Midtown Manhattan, the show runs March 8–11, with several new programming initiatives and a re-designed floor plan added to the show’s fourteenth edition. Pier 94 is the larger exhibition hall, the Contemporary section featuring mainstay galleries Lisson Gallery, Sean Kelly, Victoria Miro, Kukje Gallery/Tina Kim Gallery, David Zwirner, Sprüth Magers, Gallery Hyundai, and Kaikai Kiki, among many others—including 19 invited Nordic galleries in the ‘Armory Focus’—while the Modern sector on Pier 92 is home to Marlborough Gallery, O’Hara Gallery, Inc., Pace Prints, Peter Findlay, and many more.

Ai Weiwei, Marble Cube at Lisson Gallery

(more…)

Gearing up for a performance piece on the fourth floor.  All images for Art Observed by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand.

The festive albeit politically charged atmosphere at the 2012 76th annual Whitney Biennial‘s pre-show event was practically interdependent, with the political climate not only informing the sentiments of viewers, but arguably the art itself. While protesters outside encouraged entering guests to “Occupy the Whitney,” antagonizing Sotheby’s and Deutsche Bank for withholding benefits from workers and developing financial strategies to benefit the ‘one percent,’ art indoors at the biennial also challenged artistic convention against the same political scale, with over 50 artists showing work.

Chuck Close touring the second floor

(more…)

‪‬Bushwick burgeons with artists and galleries paying low rent as the area may potentially become New York’s next gallery district, with Luhring Augustine’s new space possibly leading a migration from Chelsea [AO Newslink]

(more…)

‪‬Miami condo developer Martin Margulies collateralizes $80 million loan for 24-story tower from U.S. Trust with 59 pieces of modern art including works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Jasper Johns [AO Newslink]

(more…)

Terence Koh is now represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in New York [AO Newslink]

(more…)

Serkan Özkaya, David (Inspired by Michelangelo) (2005). All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Istanbul-born artist Serkan Özkaya’s 30-foot golden foam sculpture, David (Inspired by Michelangelo) is parked outside Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo today at Kenmare and Centre Street. The sculpture will tour New York tomorrow, passing by the Armory Show, before its final destination of 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. The work was shipped from Turkey, acquired by the American museum in 2011. Özkaya originally created it for the 9th International Istanbul Biennial in 2005, though it collapsed six days before the event began. After restoring the original, two additional copies were cast. The artist grew up producing small replicas of sculptures he was unable to actually see in person; the double-sized David also has no current plans to visit its original in Florence. At the Storefront for Art and Architecture tonight from 6:30 to 9:30 pm is a Manifesto Series presentation and discussion “on the topic of Double,”—doubling, replicating, copying—paneled by artists, architects, critics, historians and theorists, including MoMA PS1 and Art International Radio founder Alanna Heiss, among others.

(more…)

Adrian Villar Rojas, A Person Loved Me (2012)

The New Museum debuts its second Triennial exhibition ‘The Ungovernables,’ a show dedicated to representing international artists, many of which are under 40 and have never been represented in the United States before. There are over 50 participants in the exhibition including 34 individual artists, multiple-artist groups, and a few temporary collectives. The exhibition begins in the back of the lobby, the rest distributed between four full floors, a stairwell, and the basement. Nearly every type of artistic media is represented, from sculpture, to painting, to video, to installations. The range of styles and philosophies is vast as well, including figuration, abstraction, and conceptual art.

Curator Eungie Joo with ‘The Ungovernables’ artists

(more…)

‪‬Tate Modern purchases 8 million hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds by Ai Weiwei, the ten tons are nearly one-tenth of the total 100 million seeds from original Tate Turbine Hall Unilever installation, price undisclosed [AO Newslink]

(more…)

‪‬Charles Long to install ‘Pet Sounds,’ colorful railing-sculptures in Madison Square Park this summer, “As one pets the blobs, a wide range of sounds are triggered and are coming from within the bodies of the forms.” [AO Newslink]

(more…)

‪‬The Wall Street Journal discusses techniques to manage art investments and options to bequeath with minimal tax and inheritance issues [AO Newslink]

(more…)

‪ ‪The upcoming Christie’s Old Masters Sale in London in July has an overall value of $30 million, with A Bust of a Man in a Gorget and Cap (1626-27) at an estimate of $19 million alone. In a bid to attract new collectors, Christie’s will send the Old Masters on a promotional tour through Doha, Moscow, Hong Kong, Amsterdam and New York. [AO Newslink]

(more…)

Moto (1963). All photos on site for Art Observed by Elene Damenia.

John Chamberlain: Choices opened at the Guggenheim on February 24th, and will remain on view through May 13th, after which it will travel to Bilbao, Spain. Chamberlain was preparing for the current Guggenheim retrospective from his studio in Shelter Island when he passed away this December, aged 84. Although the exhibition officially began to coordinate in 2010, Senior Curator Susan Davidson told the press conference that the idea had been brewing for over a decade. The museum currently showcases almost 100 works from a lifetime of aesthetic development, garnered from private collections in America and Europe, as well as more recent works by the artist before his death.

(more…)