‪‬In the New York Times, Maxwell Snow, younger brother of the late Dash Snow, discusses current exhibition at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, ‘100 Headless Women’ in context of family and life [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sotheby’s CEO William F. Ruprecht, “responsible for securing a number of the company’s most high-value and successful auction and private sales consignments,” earned $7 million in 2011, up 18% from 2010, as Sotheby’s in total profited $171.4 million [AO Newslink]

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled (1975). All images via Art Phalanx (© Cindy Sherman).

Vienna’s Sammlung Verbund is currently showing nearly fifty early Cindy Sherman photographs at their Vertical Gallery. The exhibition, That’s me – That’s not me, concentrates on works that Sherman produced before moving to New York City in 1977. They thus offer a rare glimpse into the artist’s formative years, and predate her more well-known Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), which critics and art historians have traditionally taken to be Sherman’s foundational works.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (ABCDE) (1975/1985)

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‪‬The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation aims to grow endowment from $18 million to $350m over the next fifteen years through the sale of art and real estate, possibly surpassing the Andy Warhol Foundation while hoping to contribute to an artist-generated grant landscape with “a dedication to exploration and more risk-taking commissions” [AO Newslink]

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Curators Jason Alexander, “That’s not actually part of the show, we just liked the way it looked.” All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

The duo Jason Alexander—Jason Lee and Alexander Shulan—have set up a two-floor pop-up show in a former Chinatown sewing machine repair shop, Ten Ten, from which the show draws its name. The DIY exhibition of 17 young New York based artists includes Peter Demos, Debo Eilers, Ryan Foerster, and Ben Schumacher, as well a curator himself, Jason Lee—the self-inclusion an admitted faux pas. According to co-curator Shulan, the collection is unrestrained, loud, politically incorrect, non-AbEx (Abstract Expressionist), messy, with parts of it that “just don’t even work.” The diverse sculptures and images, a Porsche seat and chained pineapples, are set in dialogue amid wooden crates, broken sewing machines, and other remnants of the shop. The press release is a brief history of the sewing machine, providing something of a context of the space, while the curators otherwise chose to let the work speak for itself. Shulan said each of the young artists are either currently showing at galleries “or should be.” A few of the artists were also current or former assistants to more established artists; Jared Madere to Jenny Holzer, and Valerie Keane to Olaf Breuning and Ryan Sullivan.

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‪‬Museum of Contemporary Art Australia reopens after $55 million renovation with ‘Marking Time’ exhibition to include both well-known and lesser-known artists, with Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ 24 hour screenings each weekend, and after-hours entirely nude group tours of the museum led by Stuart Ringholt [AO Newslink]

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‪‬The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation donates ‘Early Bloomer [Anagram (a Pun)]’ to the White House be placed in the family dining room, the fourth contemporary work within the White House Collection amongst two works by Joseph Albers and one by Georgia O’Keeffe [AO Newslink]

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Kehinde Wiley at the opening of The World Stage: Israel at The Jewish Museum. All photos on site for Art Observed by Perrin Lathrop unless otherwise noted.

In the most recent iteration of his World Stage series, American artist Kehinde Wiley turns his eye on Israel. Wiley broadly considers The World Stage a project geared toward taking the “cultural temperature.” More specifically, the series represents a mission to picture young black men globally and has already brought the artist to India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Lagos (Nigeria), Dakar (Senegal), and China. With The World Stage: Israel, now on view at The Jewish Museum in New York, Wiley brings the African and Jewish Diasporas into convergence.

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‪‬Cézanne preparatory watercolor study for Card Players series surfaces in estate of late Texas doctor, to be auctioned at Christie’s in New York May 1 for an estimated $20 million ceiling [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Hilton Kramer, longtime art critic at New York Times and The New Criterion, dies today at age 84 [AO Newslink]

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Hans-Peter Feldmann, Golden Shoes with Pins (2012). Photos for Art Observed by Ryann Donnelly unless otherwise noted.

Hans-Peter Feldmann‘s sixth solo exhibition of new work is on view now at 303 Gallery in Chelsea, featuring pieces from several recent series in sculpture, collage, painting, and photography. Across the various mediums, the work is united by Feldmann’s keen appropriative sense, and traceable aesthetic manipulations. Often wavering between the vaguely comedic and the latently subversive, Feldmann’s work re-engages the seemingly familiar or ubiquitous to propose an alternative dialogue. (more…)

‪‬Jeff Koons in talks with Robert Hammond and Joshua David of Friends of the Highline regarding possible ‘Train’ sculpture installation above the Highline park in New York, to feature a “full-size replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive” suspended via crane, the project estimated at at least $25 million by The Los Angeles County Museum of Art which is also interested in the work [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Ronald S. Lauder, co-founder and president of the Neue Galerie in New York, speaks on his vast collection, “Art is meant to be shared” [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Shepard Fairey to potentially collaborate with Ron Howard and Brian Glazer to produce the latest film adaptation of George Orwell’s classic book ‘1984’ [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Internal email communications from Gagosian Gallery come forth during lawsuit involving the sale of a Lichtenstein by the Cowles family [AO Newslink]

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Thomas Zipp, Schwarze Ballons (2005). All pictures on site for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

The Saatchi Gallery in London is currently showing the work of twenty-four artists who work in, or are from, Germany. The exhibition, titled Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art From Germany, gives the audience a chance to see artists who come from the currently lively German art scene. Charles Saatchi has been collecting for over thirty years, and has had had numerous influential shows, often focusing on younger artists. The current exhibition continues a focus on younger artists, although there are some older as well, including Isa Genzken (born 1948). All three floors of Saatchi’s London gallery have been put to use, providing the larger pieces with plenty of room, and offering a rather impressive overview of contemporary art being made in Germany today.

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Six-year running Art Dubai attracted a record-breaking amount of visitors this year, albeit with some degree of censorship of artwork depicting politically charged Egyptian and ‘Arabian’ gulf conflicts. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬The Art Newspaper releases figures on 2011 museum and exhibition attendance, The Louvre remains number one with 8,880,000 visitors [AO Newslink]

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Jenny Holzer, Top Secret 21 (2012)

Section 2340 is pain that is difficult for the individual to endure and is of an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury. See Section 2340A Memorandum at 6.

Manhattan’s Skarstedt Gallery currently plays host to American artist Jenny Holzer’s first series of paintings in over thirty years. Renouncing the medium in the 1970s in favor of electronic LED lighting, projections, bronze castings, silkscreen, and varied other media for her subversive textual declarations, Holzer returned to painting for this 2010–2012 series, titled Endgame. Made famous by language-based works that provoke arresting responses to serious social and political issues, here Holzer occupies the veneered Upper East Side with Color Field-like swathes of oil on linen that manage to maintain her political bent .

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David Altmejd, The University 1 (2004). Images courtesy The Brant Foundation Art Study Center / Farzad Owrang.

For sculptor and installation artist David Altmejd, structure continues to play an integral role to the exhibition layout as well as the conceptual art itself. Currently on view at The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut, the chronological and aesthetic diversity of the showcase lends itself to many labels, potentially defined as a small-scale retrospective or a massive installation. Altmejd explained on a tour of the exhibition that he intensively sought the corporeal as cognitive—the use of the human body as an artistic commentary.

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Jonathan Beer.

In his most recent show at Half Gallery, Investigations of a Dog, New York based artist Dustin Yellin collides Max Ernst and MC Escher to create a series of 3D photo collages laminated between multiple sheets of glass. These pieces highlight a new direction in Yellin’s work with his use of photography and prints to create illusionary spaces that seem to move in two different directions at once. Art Observed’s Jonathan Beer was able to catch up with the artist before the show’s well attended opening on March 20.

Art Observed: The name of the show, Investigations of a Dog, comes from the Kafka short story. Is that something you just recently read or a piece you’ve returned to as a source? Has Kafka inspired other works?

Dustin Yellin: It was something I’d read in my younger days, and Kafka is someone, amongst a lot of different people, that I’ve been moved by. And it made sense for this show, because, if perhaps I had the consciousness of a dog maybe these black and white hallucinations might be one of the ways I might see.
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‪‬Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled #96,’ valued at $2.8–3.8 million, could break $4.3 million record for any photograph at Christie’s auction in New York on May 8, the piece a consignment by the Akron Art Museum in Ohio [AO Newslink]

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‪‬The Netherlands’ 10 day Maastricht Art Fair successful so far, dealing mainly old masters and antiques to seemingly recession-proof wealth [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Skarstedt Gallery to open space in Mayfair district of London this June, joining several other New York galleries expanding to London, including David Zwirner and Marlborough [AO Newslink]

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