Gerhard Richter, Wald (Forest), (2005), all images courtesy Fondation Beyeler
On view at Fondation Beyeler is the largest exhibition ever devoted to German painter Gerhard Richter, with an express focus on the artist’s reoccurring interests in series, cycles, and interior spaces, while also offering some of his most singularly iconic works. (more…)
The Living, Hy-Fi (2014), all photos by Kelly Lee for Art Observed
The 15th annual The Young Architects Program (YAP) has taken rise at MoMA and MoMA PS1, continuing the program’s reputation for innovative ideas that challenge the presentation and purpose of architectural structures for future environments, while embracing and promoting sustainable construction practices. The 2014 YAP winner is Hy-Fi, a unique, 100% organically biodegradable structure created by New York firm The Living. The structure emerged as the final winner among five finalists in The Young Architects Program competition, starting from 25 candidates. (more…)
Protestors with Signs at the Free Cooper Union rally, via Art Observed
Earlier this afternoon, students, professors, politicians and more gathered to protest Cooper Union‘s decision to institute tuition for the upcoming school year. The alma mater of artists such as George Segal, Alex Katz, and Eva Hesse, Cooper Union has traditionally been a tuition-free school, offering opportunities to study art, architecture, and engineering to those who might not be able to afford other programs of equal quality. When Cooper Union announced in 2013 that it would begin to charge tuition in the fall of 2014, the backlash was immediate as students organized sit-ins, occupations, and, earlier this year, a lawsuit filed against the school’s Board of Trustees by the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCU). The Bruce High Quality Foundation, an arts collective founded with members primarily drawn from Cooper Union graduates, has also been active in their support of CSCU. (more…)
Antony Gormley has created a special architectural installation for The Beaumont Hotel in London, using his trademark figuration to create an illusive luxury hotel suite. Titled Room, the suite is modeled after one of Gormley’s squatting figures, and contains a full luxury apartment inside, which has also been meticulously shaped by the artist. “Shutters over the window provide total blackout and very subliminal levels of light allow me to sculpt darkness itself,” Gormley says. “My ambition for this work is that it should confront the monumental with the most personal, intimate experience.” (more…)
Architect Peter Zumthor has altered his plans for the expansion of the LACMA campus, taking into account its close proximity to the La Brea Tar Pits, and instead has shifted the design to snake around the museum campus, avoiding the pits altogether. “The original design would have severely impacted six of the nine active tar pits,” said Jane Pisano, director of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, which oversees the tar pits. “We are so pleased, I do believe this design direction preserves and protects the tar pits.” (more…)
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Manatee (1994), All images courtesy Pace Gallery
On view from May 9th until June 28th at Pace New York is an exhibition of seventeen large-format photographs by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto from his most recent body of work. Entitled Still Life, the display gives a prime example of Sugimoto’s mastery of formally composed and exacting photography and printing processes. Sugimoto has worked in a variety of approaches to still-life and architectural photography over the past years including old American movie palaces, drive-ins, and other structured works. He also formed an architectural practice himself in Tokyo, after receiving many requests to design structures such as restaurants and art museums.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Still Life (Installation View)
Sugimoto compares the medium of photography as a record-making process to the fossilization process in nature – a moment suspended in time. His Polar Bear (1976) was the first photograph from his Diorama series, and many of the earlier silver gelatin prints also depict animals. The works are surreal, black and white images of dioramas he photographed in natural history museums, playing on the distorted perspective of “nature” that humans believe to be true. Although the photographs appear to be realistic nature landscapes, they are actually artifically constructed, staged recreations of natural environments on display in museums. Many of the works are representations of animals, but no humans appear in any of the images – in a way, depicting a divide between humans and the natural environment.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Still Life (Installation View)
The result of Sugimoto’s pieces is at times quite jarring, particularly in works where the separation between recreated environment and museum space suddenly comes into focus. In several scenes, a notable line can be detected where a museum diorama gives way to painted display, and animals suspended in mid-action are placed in close proximity to a painted counterpart. The result is a sudden realization of the meticulous placement of each object in the image, not by Sugimoto, but rather the institution which is striving to frame the diorama as a moment of authentic animal behavior. The diorama, in turn, becomes as much an aesthetic project as it is an archival one, turning the intersection of scientific research and creative impulses into a definitive focal point.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Still Life (Installation View)
The exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto: Still Life is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue,Hiroshi Sugimoto: Dioramas, and the display will remain on view at Pace New York through June 28, 2014.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Polar Bear (1976)
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Still Life (Installation View)
—E. Baker
Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Pace]
This year’s temporary summer pavilion by the Serpentine Gallery has opened in Hyde Park, an enormous rounded structure likened to a doughnut, and designed by Chilean architect Smilijan Radic. The rounded fiberglass space is designed to act as a public social space, and will remain open through October.
Guillermo Kuitca, Untitled (2013), all images courtesy Sperone Westwater
On view at Sperone Westwater in New York, NY is an exhibition of new works by Argentinean painter Guillermo Kuitca, featuring large scale works with a concept of fragmentation and fractured forms, including a painted, room-like structure visitors can pass freely in and out of. The exhibition will continue through June 21st, 2014.
Guillermo Kuitca, This Way (Installation View) (more…)
The Swiss Art Awards have kicked off the proceedings around Art Basel this week, as eight artists, one architectural collective, and one curator have received the prize’s $27,765 award. Winners include: BITNIK (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoji Smolji), Vancessa Billy, Kim Seob Boninsegni, Claudia Comte, Emilie Ding, Andreas Hochuli, Emanuel Rossetti, Jules Spinatsch, CKÖ (Daniel Lütolf and Sarah Widmer), and Emilie Bujès. (more…)
The Guggenheim officially opened its call for design entries for its Helsinki Museum outpost yesterday, judged by a staff of architects, museum employees and and politicians, including jury chair Mark Wigley, the Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University; Ritva Viljanen, the Deputy Mayor, City of Helsinki; and Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Guggenheim Foundation. “This competition promises to be extremely exciting,” says jury member Erkki Leppävuori, President and CEO of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. “The site, which is rich and varied as a cultural and environmental setting, poses potentially productive technical challenges to architects and structural engineers, who also must address the high expectations and lively opinions of our citizens.” (more…)
A group of professors, admitted students and alumni from the Cooper Union have filed a lawsuit against the school’s Board of Trustees, in an attempt to halt the charging of tuition against students next fall, and to force an investigation into how the board has handled the school’s finances over the past several years. “The Board of Trustees has permitted the school to engage in numerous financial transactions that bear no reasonable relationship to the educational purposes of The Cooper Union,” the lawsuit alleges. (more…)
Fifty years after Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled the groundbreaking design for the Guggenheim Museum, museums around the world are embracing dramatic designs for housing their collections, such as the subtle flow of The Curve at the Barbican in London. “When we first embarked on this, people thought of this space as very awkward and difficult,” said visual arts head Jane Alison. “You don’t see everything at once. Now artists are very keen to be in the Curve and recognize the potential of it.” (more…)
Richard Serra has been awarded the President’s Medal from the Architectural League of New York, the first time a non-architect has been given the award. “In presenting this award, the League honors Richard Serra for contributions his work makes to the way we think about space, viewer and object, site, and materiality, concerns relevant to both architects and the artist,” the organization said in a statement. (more…)
The plans seem to be moving forward for the Helsinki branch of the Guggenheim Museum, as the institution is reportedly launching an open competition to design the new space, co-organized with the Finnish Association of Architects. (more…)
Jorge Pardo at Petzel Gallery, via Art Observed
Through April 4th, the work of artist Jorge Pardo will be on view at the Petzel Gallery, stretching the space into a bizarrely disorienting collection of objects and installations. This is the Los Angeles-based artist’s eighth exhibition at this gallery, and continues Pardo’s investigation of architectural and non-specific spaces that interrogate the limits of the gallery-space, as well as the way the viewer is conditioned into looking at art.
Jorge Pardo, Spare Bedroom (2014), All images courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery (more…)
Toyko-born architect Shigeru Ban has been awarded with the 2014 Pritzker Prize, recognizing his work with low-cost emergency shelters and temporary structures at natural and man-made disaster sites around the world. “Receiving this prize is a great honor,” Ban says, “and with it, I must be careful. I must continue to listen to the people I work for, in my private residential commissions and in my disaster relief work. I see this prize as encouragement for me to keep doing what I am doing — not to change what I am doing, but to grow.” (more…)
Doug Wheeler at David Zwirner, via Art Observed
The new installation by Doug Wheeler, currently on view at David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery, cites itself as an exploration of the horizon, a delicately shifting light installation inside an enormous ellipsoidal room. Painted a harsh white, the floor and ceiling reflect the subtly changing neons running just out of site underneath the floorboards of the work. Comparable to the work of James Turrell, Wheeler’s pieces make much of the illusory capabilities of light acting on space. His 2012 installation at Zwirner, a massively lit wall giving the impression of an infinite color scape in front of the viewer, bears resemblance to a number of Turrell’s infinite lightscapes, allowing the viewer to slowly gain an awareness of their own act of seeing, and the behavior of their eyes in space.
Doug Wheeler, LC 71 NY DZ 13 DW (2013), Photo by Tim Nighswander, Imaging4Art © 2014 Doug Wheeler; courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London (more…)
Chilean architect Smiljan Radic has won the competition to design the 2014 Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Hyde Park, set to open June 26th. Radic’s design, resembling a series of large stones and pillars, will be semi-translucent, and will host a number of events and site-specific projects. “Radic is a key protagonist of an amazing architectural explosion in Chile,” the Serpentine said in the statement. “While enigmatically archaic, in the tradition of romantic follies, Radic’s designs for the Pavilion also look excitingly futuristic, appearing like an alien space pod that has come to rest on a Neolithic site.” (more…)
G.T. Pellizzi, Diagram, Figure 3 (2013), All images courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery.
Giandomenico Tonatiuh Pellizzi, better known as G.T. Pelizzi, is currently showing a selection of new works at Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Pellizi was born in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1978, and attended St. Johns College, Santa Fe, New Mexico, studying literature and philosophy before going on to the Channin School of Architecture at Cooper Union, NYC, where he received some training in visual arts by attending courses at the School of Art with Walid Raad and Joan Waltemath, among others. He currently lives and works between New York City and Mexico. (more…)
The Eyebeam Center has selected the designer for its new center in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, choosing a multi-tiered structure by WORK Architecture Company (WORKac). “It’s a great moment in Eyebeam’s trajectory to think about the relationship between art and technology,” said WORKac Principal Dan Wood. (more…)
The LA Times takes a look at the Menil Drawing Institute, set to open in 2017. The new museum, designed by Johnston Marklee & Associates, will sit at the southern edge of the Menil Campus, and boasts a number of striking features, including a thin, plate-steel roof and a special public space shaped by illusory curves in the shape of the building. (more…)
The winner of the 2014 young architects program at MoMA PS1 has been announced, a striking cylindrical design made of corn stalk and living root structures, designed by New York-based practice The Living. The structure will be installed this summer as part of PS1’s annual “Warm-Up Series.” “This year’s yap winning project bears no small feat. it is the first sizable structure to claim near-zero carbon emissions in its construction process and, beyond recycling, it presents itself as being 100% compostable,’ said Pedro Gadanho, curator of MoMA‘s department of architecture and design. (more…)
The construction of an enormous tower next door to the Art Students League has raised fierce debate among members and supporters of the institution. The soon to be built Extell Building will stand as one of the tallest buildings in the world, with several cantilevered segments hanging over the school, for which developers will pay the organization $31 million. While many at the Art Students League are eager to accept the money, others worry about rushing into a deal that may ultimately endanger the school’s future. “The League is too beautiful and too venerable to be messed with like this,” says member Beth Karts. “Some things in this world, like the League, are worth a lot more than money.” (more…)
Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto’s budding practice as an architect is profiled in a recent article by The Wall Street Journal, noting the artist’s published guide to museum architecture, his work renovating and constructing spaces, and his newly conceived Odawara Art Foundation museum, part of which juts out from a cliff to view the Pacific Ocean, and tactfully incorporates its surroundings into its design. “This is related to memories of ancient culture of the human civilization,” says Sugimoto. (more…)
