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Quilt by Alexandre da Cunha, and Six Billboards by Angus Fairhust, Art Basel.  Image via Art Daily, AP Photo/Keystone/Georgios Kefalas.

Yesterday marked the end of the most highly-attended Art Basel to date. The 41st annual contemporary art fair boasted 306 galleries from 36 countries, and AO was on site to peruse the work of some 2,5000 artists.  62,500 dealers, collectors, curators, high-profile shoppers, artists, and art appreciators navigated installations, browsed gallery booths, mingled, and enjoyed the city of Basel.  Artists, established and newcomers both, showcased works ranging from Polaroids to performance pieces, paintings to videos, sculptures to large-scale installations.  A social and teeming affair with an obvious commercial edge, Basel’s sales were optimistic.  Picasso, Warhol, Prince, Hirst, de Kooning, Pollock, and other similarly established artists reigned supreme as the focus of this year’s event.  Franck Giraud, a New York dealer, spoke to the New York Times about the lack of prominently featured up-and-comers: “Is it because that’s what the market wants, or is it because dealers didn’t want to take risks? I think it was a bit of both.” Nonetheless, certain galleries used Basel as a platform to introduce new artists and show off their latest signings.

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Team Gallery Booth at Art Basel 2010, Image via Art Basel.

AO is on site at Art Basel, Switzerland, where Wednesday marked the official, public opening of the international show.  On the roster was an inaugural Conversation Series speech by Paul McCarthy, an Art Film at Stadtkino Basel, and an Artist’s Talk with Rodney Graham at Kunstmuseum.  If the congenial and thronged atmosphere hadn’t tipped us off to the anticipation surrounding this year’s exhibitions, Tuesday’s sales would have been a clear indication.   A $15 million Picasso 1960 plaster maquette, Personnage, was snatched up immediately from Krugier Gallery by one of the VIP guests (an American collector) invited to Basel’s early opening, as was a line drawing by the same artist, one by Egon Schiele, and paintings by Max Ernst and Paul Klee. Sara Kay of the Geneva- and New York-based Kugier Gallery was unable to disclose the buyer of yesterday’s Picasso sale, but ten minutes after the purchase’s confirmation noted to Art Info that “[The] piece went to a very important collector with the best modern masters.  This is museum-quality, not trophy-level. It’s a very serious piece.” Skarstedt Gallery also enjoyed a  meritorious patronage yesterday, with sales including a Christopher Wool painting, Untitled, for $800,000, a Barbara Kruger photograph for $700,000, a Cindy Sherman piece for $500,000, and two works by George Condo: The Madman and The Colorful Banker, which fetched $375,000 and $225,000, respectively.  Hufkens Gallery sold a Louise Bourgeois etching, A Baudelaire (#7), which the late artist completed several months before her death in May, for $650,000 to a European collector.  Cheim & Read boasted a lucrative afternoon as well, with sales including a $2 million Joan Mitchell abstraction, a $125,000 Sam Francis drawing, a $100,000 Ghada Amer painting, Paradise, and a 28-strong Bourgeois watercolor series, Les Fleurs.  Lisson Gallery sold two Anish Kapoor‘s for $742,000.  Richard Prince‘s Student Nurse brought Gagosian $4.2 million, and Paul McCarthy’s bronze suites–Sneezy and Dopey–yielded Hauser & Wirth a combined total of $3 million. Blum & Poe sold a dyptich by Takashi Murakami for $1 million. White Cube reportedly sold six of Damien Hirst‘s new paintings, as well as Hirst’s “Memories of Love,” valued at $3.48 million. Lehmann Maupin sold two neon works by Tracey Emin, each for $74,000.

Damien Hirst, ““Memories of Love,” at White Cube’s booth, sold for $3.48 million. Image by Art Observed.

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L: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (He entered shop after shop…), 2008 R: Eric Fischl, Rebirth I: (The Last View of Camiliano Cien Fuegos), 1986. All images courtesy of Haunch of Venison, New York.

On view at Haunch of Venison New York, until May 1, 2010, is “Your History Is Not Our History.” Organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips, this group show presents works produced in 1980s New York City.

Including works by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Carroll Dunham, Eric Fischl, Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger,Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Malcolm Morley, Richard Prince, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Jenny Holzer, Phillip Taaffe, Terry Winters and Christopher Wool, this exhibition seeks to convey “a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time,” says Phillips.

L: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1988   C: Jeff Koons, Buster Keaton, 1988 R: Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat & The Old Man’s Dog, 1981.

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Installation view: The Globe Shrinks (2010) four-screen digital video installation, via Mary Boone Gallery

Currently on view at Mary Boone Gallery, through May 1st, is “The Globe Shrinks,“ a playful and seductive new video installation by Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger.  The artist is best known for her confrontational slogans paired with images, but her recent video work finds a new home in the gallery, where a 12-minute, 44-second looped video plays on four channels surrounding the room.

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Installation view: The Globe Shrinks [for those who own it], via Mary Boone Gallery

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Untitled (We Decorate Your Life) by Barbara Kruger

Sprüeth Magers Gallery in London presents a retrospective of Barbara Kruger’s early works, now on display through January 23rd.  In this rare opportunity to see this portion of her collection, one will note the raw and less yielded approach in these pieces than in her later more refined works.

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Barbara Kruger’s installation at the Lever House on Park Avenue in New York via Lever House Collection
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Whether we realize it or not, our daily lives are filled with multitudes of graphic and visual information. While reading a newspaper, watching television, walking on the street past countless advertisement, we constantly absorb information. It is this aspect of social and public sphere that Barbara Kruger exploits in her current installation at the Lever House in New York. A project commissioned by the real estate  mogul Aby Rosen, whose collection features such names as Jeff Koons, George Condo, John Chamberlain, Keith Harring, and Barnaby Furnas, holds tight to its message of “an image is worth a thousand words.” The text as art exhibition, titled “Between Being Born and Dying” runs through November 21st, 2009.

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Barbara Kruger “Between Being Born and Dying” installation [Lever House]
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Barbara Kruger Bio [PBS]
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Barbara Kruger at Lever House [Lindsay Pollock]
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Helvetica at 50 [BBC News]
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50 Years of Helvetica exhibition [MoMa]

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Ron, Will Cotton via Artnet

-Eric Fischl, Chie Fueki, Hilary Harkness, Will Cotton, Francesco Clemente, Peter Halley and Barbara Kruger  are all a part of the long list of artists who have created, dedicated and portrayed Ron Warren in their works; Mary Boone’s assistant he has always played an understated yet influential role leading to a Mary Boone Gallery exhibition in his honor [The New York Times]

-The 2009 edition of the Power 100 by ArtReview is released with Hans Ulrich Obrist taking the first place and the list showcasing some changes in the influences and forces of the art world; the top ten include dealers and artists as Larry Gagosian, Francois Pinault, Eli Broad and Bruce Nauman [ArtReview]
-In related, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the director of Serpentine Gallery, just voted to be the art world’s most powerful figure by the Power 100, gives an idea of how busy his week gets [The Independent]

-A $310 million collection of Mark Rothko paintings to be shown next spring in artist’s first Moscow solo exhibition at Dasha Zkukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture [Bloomberg]

To stay apprised of most of the relevant art news for this past week… (more…)

Untitled (Four Single Men with Interchangeable Backgrounds Looking to the Right) (1977) by Richard Prince, via The Met

Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984.” It is the first major museum exhibition devoted entirely to the “Pictures Generation,” a close-knit group of artists concentrating on the self-reflexive and critical principles of Minimal and Conceptual Art.  The exhibition explores how images shape perceptions of ourselves and the world and features 160 works made in all media by thirty artists including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Louise Lawler, Laurie Simmons and David Salle.

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 [Exhibition Page]
The Original Artistic Recyclers [Wall Street Journal]
The Pictures Generation [The New Yorker]
At the Met, Baby Boomers Leap Onstage [NewYorkTimes]
Framing the Message of a Generation [NewYorkTimes]
The Pictures Generation: A Conversation with Douglas Eckund [Art in America]
Preview the Met’s Fab New Show, “The Pictures Generation” [The Washington Post ]

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