Last night, October 29, marked the inauguration of a new annual art event: Rob Pruitt presented The First Annual Art Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Yorkin association with the city’s oldest alternative art space, White Columns.
The awards were conceived by artist, Rob Pruitt, as a performance-based artwork; for the occasion he recruited the characters of IndexMagazine’s wry satirical web series, Delusional Downtown Divas. The New York Times have reported that “…the Divas schemed to infiltrate the art establishment by any means possible. In one segment they pitched a tent in the Guggenheim, doing their laundry in the lobby fountain.”
Glenn Brown, “Christina of Denmark” (2008). Via Gagosian Gallery.
On view now until November 26, 2009, the Gagosian Gallery in London features several paintings and sculptures by Glenn Brown. This exhibition focuses on the evolution of the images that Brown borrows from other works as well as the titles he uses for his paintings, which deliberately reference pop culture. The museum describes Brown’s borrowing of images as “a slow and intuitive process over many months, by which the subject of and medium of each painting slowly morph and accumulate into ‘replicant’ versions of their former selves.”
Glenn Brown, “If you know how to get here, please come” (2009). Via Gagosian Gallery.
–> Portrait of Geoff Dyer Talking, Francis Bacon (1966) at FIAC, Paris
If Frieze opened willing to court the unavoidable media speculation about sales or the lack of them: FIAC, and the exhibitors it houses this year, have in the early stages proved characteristically reticent. Not to mention laconic. At least on the surface. This morning there was little sign that much of Paris and beyond would descend on the Grand Palais and the Cour Carrée du Louvre at noon.
A Picture Of The Blessed Lion Who Stares At Death, Takashi Murakami
Currently on display in a side room at Gagosian Gallery’s w24th Street warehouse complex, NYC is Picture of Fate: I am but a Fisherman Who Angles in the Darkness of his Mind. This is a one-painting exhibition showcasing a major new work by Takashi Murakami: A Picture Of The Blessed Lion Who Stares At Death. This small show appears at the same time as the large exhibition of his work currently on show at the Emannuel Perrotin Gallery, Paris.
A Picture Of The Blessed Lion Who Stares At Death, Takashi Murakami
On view now at Gagosian Gallery’s Davies Street location in London is an exhibition of the work of Richard Wright, one of four artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize. The highlight of the show is a site-specific painting on the ceiling made with silver leaf. Many of Wright’s works are created in situ, responding to the architectural layout, often working with overlooked places, with the overall design of the work evolving until its completion. The exhibition also includes a number of works on paper.
Julien Fronsacq (Palais de Tokyo, Paris), Olivier Sailliard (Musée de la Mode et du Textile, Paris),and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery, London) model for Yohji Yamamoto’s Y, via ArtJetSet
At 20ft high, The Ego and the Id is the newest and largest aluminum sculpture ever created by internationally acclaimed Austrian Artist Franz West. The Public Art Fund, New York’s leading presenter of artists’ projects, new commissions, and exhibitions in public spaces, have brought West’s enormous, brightly coloured loops to the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park located at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street.
This seems to be a very fitting project for West as he once famously stated in an interview with Robert Fleck, “Best of all I like art in the streets; it doesn’t demand that you make a special journey to see it, it’s simply there. You don’t even have to look at it – that is probably the ideal art.”
Posted in Go See | Comments Off on Go see – New York: Franz West “The Ego and The Id” at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, through March 2010
Philip Taaffe, “Unit of Direction No. 2” (2008). Via Gagosian Gallery.
Until August 21st Gagosian Gallery is displaying a small group exhibition of exuberant abstract paintings which celebrate circles, dots and spots at their West 24th Street location. The collection of nine paintings covers work from their most prestigous artists; included are works by Damien Hirst, Yayoi Kusama, Mike Kelley and Roy Lichenstein.
Piotr UklaÅ„ski’s “Untitled (Pink Placenta)” 2009 via Gagosian
The Gagosian Gallery will be presents Piotr UklaÅ„ski’s first solo exhibition in London since 1998 entitled “Brut.” The title of the exhibition refers to the term art brut, conceived by artist Jean Dubuffet in 1945 and roughly translates as “rough” or “crude” art. The show, which opened June 11th, debuts contemporary mediums of work envisioned by UklaÅ„ski’s interest in a certain set of European aesthetics and politics from the post-war era. The exhibition runs through July 31, 2009.
An assortment of works, all centered on depictions of the human figure, is currently on display at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery until July 31, 2009. Gagosian has selected pieces from an all-male cast of seminal artists, each tackling the issue of bodily representation in a variety of media. This relatively small exhibit constitutes an appealing means of considering how male artists have approached the portrayal of both men and women over the course of the twentieth century.
To celebrate Yayoi Kusama’s eightieth year, Gagosian’s Gallery is exhibiting some of her recent works at their West 24th Street location until June 27, 2009. Although the show features only Kusama’s latest works, it can be considered as a retrospective: Kusama has been exploring the same themes and forms in her artistic production since the late 1950s, with her paintings, collages, sculptures and environmental works all sharing an obsession with repetition, pattern and accumulation. Gagosian’s exhibit of Kusama’s work reveals how the production of this eccentric and elusive artist is not exactly Abstract-Expressionist, Minimalist, psychedelic or Pop, yet shares characteristics with all of these movements.
ASSEMBLYMAN LENTOL WARNS HIS COMMUNITY ABOUT ASIAN LONGHORNED BEETLE
US Fed News Service, Including US State News November 8, 2006 Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, D-Brooklyn (50th District), issued the following press release:
Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol (D-North Brooklyn) alerted his community that the Asian Longhorned Beetle, a non-indigenous insect that preys on healthy trees, has returned to Brooklyn. Once a tree is infested it must be removed and destroyed to prevent the beetle from spreading to other trees.
“The Asian Longhorned Beetle is a threat to our community,” said Lentol. “We thought we eradicated it from the district seven years ago. Now we have evidence that it has returned.” A massive infestation in Greenpoint was literally rooted out in 1999 when over 1,000 trees had to be destroyed because of the Asian Longhorned Beetle. Last spring, the New York State Asian Longhorned Beetle Cooperative Eradication Program found 18 trees in Williamsburg infested with the bug. The majority were on Lynch St. Thirteen of the 18 trees were on Lynch St, the rest on nearby Lee Avenue and Heyward St. website asian longhorned beetle
“Just because we’re talking about a little bug doesn’t mean this isn’t a big concern for our district,” warned Lentol. “We’re lucky that this appears to be a small infestation, but the key to keeping the Asian Longhorned Beetle from destroying our trees is through awareness.” The Asian Longhorned Beetle is known to nest in all varieties of maple, as well as birch, horse chestnut, elm, willow, poplar, ash, hackberry, sycamore, London Plane and mimosa. Lentol encourages homeowners to look for exit holes on their trees, they will be about the size of a dime, and to grant environmental inspectors access to their property for the purpose of finding infested trees. go to website asian longhorned beetle
Lentol also encourages residents who spot the beetle to call 311 and ask for the Asian Longhorned Beetle Hotline. The United States Forest Service offers replanting of new trees to those who lose trees to the beetle. The insecticide imidacloprid is the only effective preventative measure against the beetle, though experts warn that it cannot help a tree once it is infested. ALB Eradication Program contractors use it during the spring to treat at-risk trees. Residents will be notified by the ALB Eradication Program when tree treatments take place in this area, and Assemblyman Lentol urges residents to work with program officials and provide them access to yard trees for these critical applications and for survey.
Currently on view at Gagosian’s Chelsea Gallery in New York is “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” one of the first exhibitions in the United States to focus on the late paintings of the artist. The selection of works aims to shed new light on the context and subjects that influenced the artist’s later work. Featuring a large group of important paintings and prints from the collection of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso as well as works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museo Picasso, Malaga, and various other private collections spanning the years of 1962-1972, the exhibit is the first to display works from Picasso’s later period since the exhibition “Picasso: The Last Years: 1963-1973” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1984. Such unique images of matadors, musketeers, twisted couples and disturbed women provide a glance into the world of Picasso’s later life.
RALEIGH WOMAN PLEADS GUILTY IN MORTGAGE FRAUD CONSPIRACY.
States News Service January 11, 2010 GREENVILLE — The following information was released by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina: in our site employment verification letter
The United States Attorney’s Office announced that in federal court January 8, 2010, MARY ROSE WRIGHT, 43, of Raleigh, North Carolina, pled guilty before United States Magistrate Judge David W. Daniel to wire fraud and conspiring to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and bank fraud.
A Criminal Information was filed on November 23, 2009. According to the Information, from August, 2006, to November, 2006, WRIGHT, working as a mortgage broker for Fairway Mortgage, worked with others to defraud various financial institutions through the submission of false and fictitious mortgage loan applications. Using a falsified Power of Attorney giving authority on behalf of a co-conspirator to execute all documents in connection with the property purchase, WRIGHT then prepared false United States Individual Income Tax Returns for years 2004 and 2005 and a self-employment verification letter and caused to have prepared a fabricated financial statement to use in obtaining the property. She then submitted an offer to purchase a property. go to site employment verification letter
On November 27, 2006, WRIGHT submitted a loan application, which included false representations regarding borrower’s address, employment, bank account information, and rental real estate schedule, in connection with the purchase of the residential Raleigh property. That same day Equity Services, Inc., loaned a co-conspirator $1,537.500 for the property purchase.
In November, 2006, WRIGHT’s co-conspirator gave her $120,000 from a previously fraudulently obtained mortgage loan from Washington Mutual in the amount of $2,996,969 to be used as a down payment for the purchase of the Raleigh property. On November 27, 2006, WRIGHT took possession of the property after executing a HUD-1 statement containing false and fraudulent information. To date, no mortgage payments have been made.
“In recent years we have seen how pervasive bank fraud has become and how devastating it has been to our banking institutions and our economy. This guilty plea is another step in the Justice Department’s effort to deal with this problem and to ensure integrity in our financial systems,” stated John Stuart Bruce, Acting United States Attorney.
Investigation of this case was conducted by the Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation Division, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the North Carolina Real Estate Commission. This case is being handled by the Office’s Economic Crimes Section, with Assistant United States Attorney Banumathi Rangarajan assigned as prosecutor .
Posted in Newslinks | Comments Off on Newslinks for Friday, March 27, 2009
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Piero Manzoni behind one of his ‘Achromes’ via Gagosian
Currently at Gagosian Gallery is the first major US retrospective of Italian Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni. Manzoni, who died of a heart attack at the age of 29 in 1963, is most notorious for his ‘Merda d’artista,’ 90 sealed cans purportedly containing his feces and sold for the market-value of gold at the time of purchase. The exhibition is curated by Germano Celant, who named the movement Manzoni belonged to, Arte Povera.
Currently on display at Gagosian’s Britannia Street Gallery in London are five new monumental paintings by American artist Cy Twombly. Each painting depicts four wood panels with three vibrantly colored roses in full bloom. The colors of the roses range from deep burgundy to bright orange, violet, crimson, and gold against a turquoise background. Stanzas from “Les Roses” by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke are inscribed on the last panel of each painting. The poems inspired this series of works and tell of the artist’s characteristic coupling of painting and poetry.
Currently displayed at the Gagosian’s Davies Street gallery in London are new paintings by Takashi Murakami. The compact exhibition features three larger scale paintings including new work in the Time Bokan series and from his trademark Kakai and Kiki characters. The Kaikai and Kiki (2009) painting is accompanied by new paintings in the Time Bokan series that Murakami began in 1933. A central image in Murakami’s work is the skull-shaped mushroom cloud borrowed from the Japanese anime TV series from the 1970s. Found in both Time- Camouflage Moss Green and Bokan-Camouflage Pink, the cloud symbolizes the fall of the villain at the end of each episode but can be likened as well to the atomic bombing of Japan.
The opening night of Francesco Vezzoli’s ‘GREED’ at Gagosian Gallery in Rome on February 6th was a timely spectacle marking the end of an era of excess and decadence. Vezzoli is well known (and well criticized at times) for his use of celebrities in his work, and ‘Greed’ is no exception. The exhibition centers around a faux perfume, called Greed, and features a 60-second commercial directed by Roman Polanski and starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, and a serious of needlework ‘endorsements’ by several female artists (and art world hangers-on) such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Leonor Fini. At the opening, appearances were made by the elite of the art and fashion worlds, including Miuccia Prada and Dasha Zhukova.
Soma Series (2) (detail) by Carsten Höller, via Gagosian Gallery
Reindeers and Spheres by Carsten Höller, now on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, presents an intriguing mix of photographic collages, sculpture, and installation that provoke the structure of learned behavior in order to question what is considered rational. “The real material I am working with is people’s experiences”, the artist said of his work. There is no cohesive underlying meaning; everything is left to the interpretation of the viewer. The exhibition is Höller’s first show in Los Angeles.
–> Boden Sea, Uttwill by Hiroshi Sugimoto on display now at the Gagosian Gallery via Artnet.
Fourteen photographs from the Seascapes series by Hiroshi Sugimoto are on display at the Gagosian Gallery through March 7, 2009. The exhibition entitled 7 Days / 7 Nights is comprised of photographs of the sea and its horizon taken at various locations around the globe. The photos, like all of Sugimoto’s work, were taken using a late 19th century large-format camera with extremely long exposures. The results are works that display the unchanging nature of the sea while still revealing its subtle idiosyncrasies. The artist is also the subject of a traveling retrospective now on display at the Lucerne Museum of Art. Included are several of the artist’s famed works including several photos from the 1976 Dioramas series. The series Dioramas consists of photographs taken of natural history museum displays, the subjects appear as real animals until examined further. Like much of Sugimoto’s work Dioramas is an attempt to intrigue the viewer into taking a more methodical approach at viewing the photo and its subjects. These works along with several others will be on display at the Lucerne Museum of Art through January 25, 2009.
“Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Renee Vivian and Roman Brooks take over the Guahnahani” with permission from Gagosian Gallery
Canal Zone, a new series of collages by artist Richard Prince, opened November 8, 2008 at the Gagosian Gallery. Prince inspired by his birthplace, The Panama Canal, draws a narrative that carries contentious topics of race, colonialism, and separatism. In the artwork, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Renee Vivian and Roman Brooks take over the Guahnahani, nude women stretch and bend into erotic poses. Many of the names of the paintings feature hotels in the island of St. Barth which the artist relates to the work in the following quote:
“The story was basically about a guy who lands in St Barth, gets off the plane, is immediately told that there’s been a nuclear holocaust in the rest of the world, and he looks at his family and says ‘We can’t go back.'”
Their figures cut from magazines, then pasted against a jungle backdrop are missing eyes, mouths, and noses that dehumanize and objectify the sensuous subjects. Using stereotypical images consisting of nude women, Rastafarian men, guitars, cars, and jungle landscapes Prince’s new works lay heavy within a perpetual bed of interpretation. Pending on size, these large-scale collage pieces range from $1 to $3 million dollars and will exhibit through December 20, 2008.
Sam Orlofsky and Tom Sachs at Richard Prince - Photo by ArtObserved
Cory Arcangel’s “Golden Ticket” to the 2008 Frieze Art Fair via Artnet
With over 150 galleries, The Frieze Art Fair, set in London’s Regent’s Park, began selling works by over 1,000 artists on October 15. Since its first year in 2003, the Frieze fair has grown to be regarded as the youngest and perhaps the most cosmopolitan and cutting edge of the global fairs, which include Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach and the Venice Biennial. The fair, which runs until the 19th of October, and the London auctions that will occur this evening and this coming weekend, mark the first major opportunity for transparency into the the status of the global art market since the widespread financial turmoil began. Following Damien Hirst’s groundbreaking, clearing house, £111.5 million, direct-to-market auction of his own work at Sotheby’s last month (as covered by ArtObserved here) the market has had some clouds brewing over it, with beginning indications of weakness manifesting in events such as Sotheby’s lackluster first evening sale of contemporary Asian art in Hong Kong earlier this month (as covered by ArtObserved here), which sold £7 million against expectations of £30 million to another auction that same weekend in which Sotheby’s sale of modern 20th-century Chinese art left over a third of the lots unsold. More recently, the Singapore Art Auctions were also a dissapointment.
