Flower Matango, Takashi Murakami (2010) via Chateau de Versailles–>

Despite reports that the palace would not feature contemporary art in the royal apartments in future years, directors at Versailles have denied this and other rumors that the decision was a response to controversy over the current Takashi Murakami exhibition in that space. Initially, an article in The Art Newspaper indicated that Jean-Jacques Aillagon, President of Château de Versailles, had elected to use other venues on the palace grounds in the future. Spokesmen from Versailles shortly after responded to correct the story, noting that while contemporary works will be shown in the palace gardens in 2011, nothing else has been decided beyond that time. The source added that there is not reason to believe that shows by living artists will not return to the indoor space again.

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Exterior View of Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, NYC, image courtesy of Dezeen.

Sperone Westwater opened the doors of its new gallery space on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010. A retrospective of Guillermo Kuitca’s work was chosen as the Bowery location’s inaugural show. The gallery has a longstanding relationship with the Argentinean artist, whose work is inspired by the study of architecture, theater, and cartography. This is his eighth solo show at Sperone Westwater. “Guillermo Kuitca: Paintings 2008-2010 & Le Sacre 1992” consists of recent paintings, which developed from his famous 2007 series with which he represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale, and the important 1992 installation Le Sacre.

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John McCracken, New Works in Bronze and Steel, image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner is currently presenting a new body of work by Californian artist John McCracken. McCracken first gained international recognition with his monochromatic geometries placed between flat surfaces and three-dimensional objects. In the present exhibition, he addresses the gallery space as a whole, allowing its architecture and light to participate fully in the installation. In the first room, three bronze planks lean against the wall, in an apparent departure from the materiality of his previous works in fiberglass and resin, while continuing to work in his signature format – the narrow, rectangular, monochromatic panel. Their shiny, reflective surfaces introduce the exhibition’s key motifs, inserting them into a dialogue, both formally and conceptually, with the four free-standing stainless-steel sculptures in the adjacent room: Star, Infinite, Dimension and Electron.

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Collective Show opening reception at Participant, Inc., September 19, 2010.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, New York witnessed a group of particularly daring and passionate artists, institutions, and commercial galleries emerge as sites of discourse about the production and exhibition of art, film, music, performance, and theater. Exit Art, the Filmmaker’s Cinématèque and Jonas Mekas, Paula Cooper Gallery, P.S.1 and Alana Heiss, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, George Maciunas and the Fluxus group, the Wooster Group, and many others, devised brilliant strategies for funding, producing, and displaying art in a difficult moment in New York’s history, when the real estate climate was arguably even more hostile than it is today. The contributions of these innovators were profound and historic, and deserve to be acknowledged in the context of our current cultural predicament.

Over the subsequent forty years, a divide has developed between the heirs of these original non-profit spaces, those organizations who are able to exist and exhibit work based solely on donations, and the commercial gallery sector; corporate entities which, in theory, fund their operations through sales of the artworks they show. Any group that hopes to be successfully established within this economic system must adhere by its basic tenant: that one chooses to be either an institution or a gallery.

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Jean Nouvel’s 2010 Serpentine Pavilion. Image via Serpentine Gallery.–>

Earlier this week, Bloomberg News reported that an agreement has been reached in favor of Serpentine Gallery regarding its ongoing competition with Damien Hirst for the space formerly occupied by a munitions store, The Magazine, in Hyde Park, London. According to an “anonymous inside source,” award winning architect Zaha Hadid will oversee the transformation of the Kensington Gardens venue, which is currently being used as a kennel for stray dogs. Under the direction of Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery will feature modern and contemporary artwork, and will be open to the public free of charge. An official public announcement of the decision is expected in the coming weeks.

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The Lehman Brothers corporate sign enters Christie’s, London. Image via the NY Times.

Two years after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the art that once decorated its offices is continuing to be sold off as part of their effort to repay creditors. Today, “artwork and ephemera” which once hung in the defunct bank’s European headquarters fetched £1,631,238 ($2,573,685) in a mammoth 6-hour sale at Christie’s in London. Today’s auction follows the September 25th sale at Sotheby’s in New York that raised $12.3 million.

The auction attracted over 1,100 registered bidders from around the world, including a record 330 clients who registered to bid via the internet using Christie’s LIVE. Many former Lehman employees were present for the bidding, one former staffer told AFP before the sale “It’s a memory I want. It was a sad end to it all but I had a lot of good times there, it was where I started off my career.”

Atomists – Jump over, Gabriel Orozco. Estimate: £60,000 to £80,000. Price Realized: £99,560 ($157,305)

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The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, a Bruegel painting recently discovered by the Prado Museum. Image courtesy of the New York Times.–>

The Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain has discovered a painting by sixteenth-century Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The painting, The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, is dated between 1565 and 1568. Belonging to private collectors, the painting was brought to the Prado to have it studied and cleaned before the owners planned its sale. During the restoration, scholars of Flemish painting were invited to share their expertise. After an x-ray on the 4.8 x 8.9 foot canvas revealed the artist’s signature, its authorship was confirmed. The painting had previously been attributed to Bruegel’s less illustrious son.

Bruegel’s signature on the back of the canvas. Image courtesy of the AFP.

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Exposure (2010) by Antony Gormley, via Artdaily–>

One of Antony Gormley‘s most intricate sculptures to date, a massive, squatting human figure, now stands 25 meters high near the Dutch city of Lelystad. The work, entitled Exposure, is five meters higher than Gormley’s most famous sculpture, Angel of the North, and weighs approximately 60 tons. The figure is composed of 5,000 hand-cut metal rods, each of a different length, and fastened with 14,000 bolts. The artist spent more than five years planning and creating the gargantuan structure, which would stand 100 meters tall if fully-erect.

Exposure (2010) by Antony Gormley, via TheGuardian

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Dash Snow, Untitled (Metallic Trees) – God Spoiled, 2007. All images via galerie du jour unless otherwise noted.

Currently on view at galerie du jour is an exhibition entitled “3 + 1.” The 3 in this case refers to the New York trio of Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley and Harmony Korine, while 1 refers to the Parisian fashion designer agnès b. (née Angès Andrée Marguerite Toublé, 1941).  The show will remain at agnès b.’s galerie du jour, which specializes in contemporary photography, through November 6, 2010.  In the exhibit’s press release, agnès b. explains that her goal was not to pay homage to the late Snow, but rather to commemorate his life through a presentation of his work, a year after his death, in the company of his friends and peers.

Ryan McGinley, Chelsea, 2010

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Rob Pruitt, Exquisite Self-Portrait: Father Martian, 2010. Images via the New York Times unless otherwise noted.

Rob Pruitt, the artist behind “Artworks for Teenage Boys” and “Artworks for Teenage Girls,” both paeans to and explorations of perceptions of adolescence, springboards off a particular microcosm of teenagerhood, the Amish rumspringa, in his current exhibition, “Pattern and Degradation.” This show, which opened September 11th at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and Maccarone, represents an ongoing rumspringa for the artist himself. In the Amish tradition, teens are given the chance to take temporary leave of their traditional, restrictive culture in order to indulge in the excesses of mainstream American youth, and then are allowed to decide if they wish to return to the community or stay in the outside world.

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Edward Dolman, Chairman, Christie’s International, PLC. All images via Christie’s.–>

Christie’s International announced yesterday that Edward Dolman has been promoted to Chairman at the U.K.-based auction house. Since 1999, Dolman has served as the firm’s CEO, where he “Shaped new operations, technology, and business strategy to seize trends in the market which include a shift to modernism and a rapidly expanding global client base.” He has been with the company for 26 years, joining as a specialist in the European Furniture Department in 1984. Since that time he has ascended through the ranks first as a department head, then as Managing Director of Christie’s Europe, Americas, and Amsterdam headquarters.

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Jean-Baptise-Camille Corot, Portrait of a Girl, 1857-8, which went missing on June 29, 2010 and was recovered weeks later. Image courtesy of the New York Times.–>

What began as a summer comedy of errors – an Upper East Side doorman finds a Corot painting missing on a courier’s drunken bender – took a strange turn earlier this month when the painting’s owner realized its co-owner may have been involved in its disappearance.  The following is a summary of the news and events that have unfolded over the past few weeks in the case.

The story begins like this: on July 29th a doorman at 995 Fifth Avenue, near 81st Street, discovered a painting in the bushes in front of the building. The nineteenth-century painting, “Portrait of a Girl” by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, whose estimated value is $1.4 million, was apparently lost hours earlier by an intoxicated courier, James Carl Haggerty. Thinking the artwork belonged to one of the building’s residents, doorman Franklin Puentes stored it inside his locker after unsuccessful attempts to locate its owner. Puentes then went on a three-week vacation. When he returned, he heard the buzz about the missing painting and promptly turned it over to the police.

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UNTITLED Gallery opening, 30 Orchard Street, September 12th, 2010. All images by David Al-Ibrahim for Art Observed unless otherwise noted.

On the evening of September 12th, New York’s Lower East Side was bustling with gallery openings celebrating the onset of fall exhibition season. One of the most exciting events that night was at 30 Orchard Street, where Rental Gallery reopened its doors in a new location under the new name UNTITLED. Formerly located on the sixth floor of a building on East Broadway, UNTITLED’s sleek, recently-renovated pencil tower, designed by Andrew Ong, offers a fresh and more accessible ambiance.

Joel Mesler, gallery owner, with Rashid Johnson, exhibiting artist.

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James Turrell, Cherry, 1998. Image via Almine Rech Gallery.

Currently on view in Brussels at Almine Rech is the gallery’s first solo exhibition by American artist James Turrell (b. 1943). Since the 1960s, Turrell has created innovative and unconventional installations in which he attempts to sculpt optical perception and “the concrete nature of light,” generating meditative, often-sublime experiences for the viewer.  The works on display represent more than three decades of Turrell’s experimentation with light as a physical material, including examples of his early Projection series, his Apertures, and his more recent engagement with holography.

James Turrell, Acro Red, 1968. Image via Almine Rech.

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Pipilotti Rist, Video Instillation, 2010, Langmatt Museum, Baden image courtesy of Museum Publicity.

To celebrate the Langmatt Museum’s 20^th anniversary, “Close My Dress, Thank You,” by Pipilotti Rist, the prominent Swiss filmmaker and video artist, is currently on view. This exhibition is the fifth in the series “Summer Guest,” begun by the museum’s director Rudolf Velhagen in 2006. (Stay tuned for the On Site video of Rist’s opening at New York City’s Luhring Augustine Gallery, appearing on Art Observed later this week!)

Upon Karl Moser’s original construction, between 1900 and 1901, Villa Langmatt became the home of the Brown-Sulzer family, known in Germany for their impressive art collection. Villa Langmatt was first opened to the public as a museum in 1990 and today is Baden’s museum of Impressionism and Lifestyle, housing a notable French Impressionist painting collection of Renoir, Cezanne, and Monet. It also holds a large decorative arts collection, including East Asian and European ceramics and carpets in the museum’s former living quarters.

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Gert & Uwe Tobias, Exhibition Poster, Woodcut, CFA Berlin, 2010. All images via Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin.

Currently on view at Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin is “Neue Arbeiten,” an exhibition of recent work by fraternal collaborative Gert & Uwe Tobias (b. 1973). The show features over fifty pieces by the Romanian-born twins, including ceramic sculpture, drawings, collages, and the colorful, large-scale woodcuts for which they are best known. Their interdisciplinary practice incorporates folkloric imagery, regional iconography, and popular culture, creating a self-referrential, multimedia visual narrative. Like all of their previous exhibitions, they designed a site-specific woodcut poster for the CFA show, which comments upon and participates in the body of work on view.

Gert and Uwe Tobias, Ohne Titel (Untitled), Woodcut, CFA Berlin, 2010.

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Lucian Freud, Eight Months Gone, 199700–>

Jerry Hall, the American model and ex-wife of legendary rocker Mick Jagger, will send 14 works from her collection to auction next month at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Sale in London. Hall’s lots are estimated to fetch at least £1.5 million, and include works by Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, Damian Hirst, Robert Graham, Ed Ruscha, Francesco Clemente, R.B. Kitaj, and Frank Auerbach.

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Aurel Schmidt, Crap Butterflies, 2010. All images via The Fireplace Project.

Concluding its three-week run at The Fireplace Project in East Hampton this Monday is Aurel Schmidt‘s ‘Summer Bummer:’ an exhibition featuring over a dozen new works on paper by the critically-acclaimed 27 year-old artist. It is the first solo show in almost two years for the 2010 Whitney Biennial selectee, who produced the series on view during a visit to her rural hometown in western Canada earlier this summer.

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A work by Takashi Murakami at the Palace of Versailles, via Chateau de Versailles00>

The forthcoming exhibition of works by acclaimed Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami at the Palace of Versailles has sparked protests by French traditionalists and conservative groups.  Due to open on the 14th of September, the show will feature 22 works by the artist displayed throughout the Palace and the gardens including 11 pieces created specifically for the exhibition. As with the Jeff Koons’s exhibition, which showed at Versailles in 2008, a group of traditional supporters of the historic Versailles Palace protested against a commercial and at times sensationalist artist showing work in such a landmark of French history.

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Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, Dreammachine, 1962. Installation View, The New Museum. All images via Artnet

Currently on view at the New Museum is “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine,” the first comprehensive American exhibition to feature the interdisciplinary British artist, writer, and collaborator. Often overlooked, both popularly and commercially, Gysin (1916-1986) has frequently been characterized as a foil of failure within the historical narrative of Beat-Era success stories. He is generally credited as the inventor of the “cut-up” method, a medium which culminated in his co-authorship of the experimental collage-manifesto The Third Mind with William S. Burroughs.

Brion Gysin and William S. Burroghs, The Third Mind, 1965.

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Vincent Van Gogh, Poppy Flowers (Vase and Flowers), c. 1887. Image via BBC News.–>

A Van Gogh painting valued at $55 million dollars was cut from its frame and taken from the Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo on Saturday. Despite reports that the painting, referred to as either ‘Poppy Flowers’ or ‘Vase and Flowers,’  had been recovered from an Italian couple at the Cairo airport yesterday, Egyptian officials now confirm that the painting remains missing.

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Julie Mehretu, Untitled 1, 2001 (est. $600-800,000), via Sothebys.com

Almost two years to the day after Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the bank will auction off hundreds of artworks worth some $16 million in hopes of raising funds for its creditors. There will be an auction at Sotheby’s New York on September 25 followed by an auction at Christie’s London on September 29. The smallest of the three auctions will be held at Freeman’s in Philadelphia on November 7 and will focus on the Lehman’s Contemporary Art holdings.

Damien Hirst, We’ve Got Style (The Vessel Collection Blue/Green), 1993 (est. $800,000-1,200,000) via Sothebys.com

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MoMA PS1. All images by Lucy Kissel for AO.

Greater New York, the third quinquennial exhibition organized by MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art, features 68 artists and collectives from metropolitan New York.  Recently completed and specially commissioned works alike showcase diverse talents and media, including sculpture, painting, photography, film, and large-scale installations.  A purposefully provocative exhibition, Greater New York emphasizes themes of trauma, identity, and ecological, political, and psychological exploration.  Curators of the colorful 2010 iteration selected artists of varying degrees of repute through online submissions, studio visits, and recommendations, assembling a brimming observation of contemporary New York City culture.

Images, text, and an interview with participating artist Conrad Ventur after the jump…
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