Frieze New York on Randall’s Island will once again host a variety of local food vendors at this year’s edition of the fair. The list of vendors, announced Friday, will include pizza from Roberta’s Pizza, coffee from Blue Bottle Coffee, and a full-service restaurant by Frankie’s Sputino. The fair runs from May 10th to the 13th. (more…)
Jackson Pollock’s No. 19, 1948 will be on the auction block at Christie’s next month, part of the auction house’s May 15th sale of Contemporary and Post-War Art in New York. A classic “drip-painting” by the artist, the work last sold at auction for $2.4 million in 1993, and is estimated to sell between $25 and $35 million. “You can see the circular movement of Pollock’s hand,” Said Worldwide Post-War and Contemporary Art Chairman Brett Gorvy said. “It’s one of those paintings you get lost in.” (more…)
After breaking auction records for the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat twice last year, Christie’s will look to set the bar even higher for the Brooklyn-born artist’s work. Basquiat’s Dustheads will be offered at the auction house’s May 15th Contemporary Sale in New York, with an asking price of $25 to $35 million. The artist’s current record is $26.4 million, and a buyer has reportedly already agreed to pay $25 million. “Collectors used to be snobbish about Basquiat since he started out painting on the streets,” Says Christie’s specialist Loic Gouzer. “But now his myth just seems to be getting fresher and more relevant with younger collectors.” (more…)
Members of the now-defunct hip-hop group Das Racist will perform at The Whitney Museum on Sunday, in conjunction with member Himanshu Suri’s Greedhead Music record label. The event, part of the programming for The Whitney’s current Blues for Smoke exhibition, will feature several musical performances, as well as several installations by Suri, including “hippie culture and spiritual tourism, the films and life of Guru Dutt, the skin lightening cosmetic industry in India, Air India, the Indian diaspora and immigration, South Asian visibility in Western pop culture, international working class labor politics, and much more.” (more…)
Virginia Overton, Untitled (Juniperus virginiana) (2013), via Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Mitchell-Innes & Nash is currently hosting an exhibition of new works by Virginia Overton, the Tennessee-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose sculptural installations play at conceptions of personal identity, spatial interaction and artistic process. (more…)
Beginning in June, artist Donald Judd’s Spring Street home and studio, which he purchased in 1968 and renovated himself, will reopen as a museum, offering visitors a look inside at the artist’s personal collection of works and living space. The building stands as the only intact, single-use cast-iron building left in the neighborhood, and was renovated under the supervision of The Judd Foundation. “This has all been toward the goal of having people experience this place as if none of these things we had to do were ever done. And from the beginning it’s been a battle between preserving the art and preserving the building.” Said Judd’s daughter, Rainer. (more…)
The Museum of Modern Art has announced a major survey of the contemporary practice of sound art, the first of its kind for the museum. Running from August 10th to November 3rd, Soundings: A Contemporary Score will examine intersections of space, sound, and theory. “Sound has come into the limelight. It’s getting recognized as a frontier. There are more tools that are easier and less expensive to use these days,” says associate curator Barbara London. “And because of these tools there is more artistic freedom.” (more…)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #138 (1984), via Skarstedt Gallery
Skarstedt Gallery is currently presenting the retrospective 1980’s Revisited, revisiting the works, theories and artists that helped to define the dynamic decade in contemporary art. Fetauring works by Carroll Dunham, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, David Salle and Cindy Sherman, the show highlights the varied and often conflicting artistic styles of the time, particularly in the newly developing approaches of Appropriation, Neo-Expressionism, and Graffiti. The 1980’s were a controversial decade for the art world, a period of active boundary breaking by artists looking to challenge contemporary society.
Jeff Koons, One Ball Total Equilibrium (1985), via Skarstedt Gallery
Artist David Hockney’s first multi-channel video work, The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (2012) will have its American debut next month at The Whitney Museum. Depicting a set of jugglers moving against a blue and white backdrop, the video employs 18 separate channels of video, using intense lighting to alter perceptions of depth and space. “In this new video installation David Hockney surprises us once again, exploring how multiple perspectives can transform our experience of the moving image. Hockney mines the histories of cinema and painting through the lens of technology, to create a new way of seeing.” said curator Chrissie Ilessaid. (more…)
The High Line in New York unveiled a new project for its ongoing public works series yesterday, welcoming photographer and filmmaker Ryan McGinley to exhibit his piece Blue Falling (2007) on the billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue. This will be the ninth installation of work at the site, and follows works by John Baldessari, David Shrigley, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, among others. The work will be on view until April 30th. (more…)
Russian billionaire Leonid Mikhelson has joined the board of trustees at The New Museum, mirroring the increasing number of international members on Museum boards across the U.S. “As art is thriving in so many centers, it is imperative to have an active group of supporters with diverse perspectives and deep connections to these communities.” Said New Museum director Lisa Phillips. (more…)
Arts critic Jerry Saltz comments on the diminishing role of the gallery show in the contemporary arts environment, noting the effects of increased focus on international fairs, auctions and biennials, and questioning the effects of this shift on the arts community of New York City. “Fewer ideas are being exchanged, fewer aesthetic arguments initiated. I can’t turn to the woman next to me and ask what she thinks, because there’s nobody there.” He says. (more…)
Artist Nick Cave was in New York on Monday, presenting his new performance piece, HEARD•NY, at Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall. Co-presented by Creative Time and MTA Arts for Transit, Cave’s ambitious project involves sixty dancers from The Ailey School suited in 30 life-size horse costumes. In choreographed gestures, the horses move around as a colorful herd, bobbing their heads and kicking their feet, intermittently grazing and foraging like real equines. (more…)
The Art Newspaper has published its annual survey of museum attendance for 2012, highlighting the best attended shows and museums of the past year. While the top names on the list stayed relatively unchanged from past years (The Louvre still remains the world’s best attended museum, with The Met close behind), the recently opened Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas surged onto the list, and MOCA in Los Angeles also noted a dip in the face of board defections and budgetary concerns. Also of note is the top exhibition of last year, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum’s Old Masters show, which drew more than 10,000 visitors a day to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. (more…)
Gert and Uwe Tobias, Untitled ’13 (Installation View), via Team Gallery
Continuing in their uniquely distinctive practice that weaves printmaking, installation, sculpture and typography, twin brothers Gert and Uwe Tobias are currently exhibiting a selection of new work at Team Gallery in New York City.
Gert and Uwe Tobias, Untitled (GUT 2055) (2012), via Team Gallery (more…)
Miroslaw Balka, The Order of Things (2013), via Gladstone Gallery
Polish sculptor and conceptual artist Miroslaw Balka is currently exhibiting a new sculptural work, titled The Order of Things, at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. Consisting of a towering set of containers and a length of hose, the work creates a continuous flow of water, pumping pitch-black water from one container through the piping, up over the rafters above the tanks, and out into the other tank. (more…)
Alexis Adler, a former girlfriend of Jean-Michel Basquiat, has released news of a massive collection of the late artist’s drawings, photographs, and paintings, some scrawled on the walls and appliances of the East Village apartment that the two shared in the late 1970’s. Given the artist’s current popularity, the collection is of particular note for its thorough documentation of much of Basquiat’s early development as an artist. Adler is currently planning a book documenting the collection, as well as an auction of the work. “The thing that’s most interesting is the material she has to support the actual artwork,” said former Gracie Mansion director Sur Rodney Sur. “A lot of the signage he used in his work over and over again, this was when he was developing it. The idea that it’s all together in one place makes it even more important.” (more…)
The Wooster Collective is currently celebrating its tenth anniversary, and has welcomed a number of artists the site showcased in its early years to offer advice and lessons learned over the past decade. The most recent contribution comes from the Los Angeles-based Skullphone, who offers: “If you are too pure you will never fly, drive, or physically go anywhere.” (more…)
Nick van Woert, Microscope (2013), (Nick van Woert in Ted Kaczynski’s clothes), courtesy of the artist and OHWOW
Since his first solo exhibition at Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam in 2010, Brooklyn-based artist Nick van Woert has quickly risen through the ranks of the contemporary arts scene, creating a prolific and experimental body of work informed by his unique interests in history, architecture, environment, and philosophy. From ancient Rome to the Unabomber, van Woert casts an eye on the past as a means of understanding the present and inquiring into the future. His work blends an emphasis on sculptural craft and process with the use of found objects and readymades, resting between aesthetic value and conceptual statement. While preparing for the opening of No Man’s Land, his first exhibition at OHWOW in Los Angeles, (open through April 6, 2013), the artist sat down to answer some questions for Art Observed.
Nick van Woert, No Man’s Land (2013), Courtesy of the artist and OHWOW
Visitors to The Museum of Modern Art in New York were treated to a special performance by actress Tilda Swinton yesterday, as the actress launched a month-long performance at the museum called The Maybe. The artist spent the day sleeping in a glass case in the museum’s lobby, and will return to the case several times during the duration of the performance. No one knows when Swinton will appear for her performances, emphasizing the unpredictability of the work. “There is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist’s statement released, no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued,” MoMA stated in a press release. “Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real-shared-time: now we see it, now we don’t.”
James Angus, John Deere Model D (2013), via Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
Pulling together three disparate artists in its three galleries on Greenwich Street in New York’s West Village, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is currently presenting a group of works that illuminate and reinterpret the construction of physical and structural realities. Combining sculptural, installation projects, assemblage and conceptual painting practices, the works on-view by James Angus, Rikrit Tiravanija and Jonathan Horowitz highlight their drastically different conceptual practices in exploring similar thematic territory.
Rikrit Tiravanija, Untitled (2013), via Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
Beginning July 1st, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be open to the public 7 days a week. The changes also apply to The Cloisters museum in northern Manhattan, and are the result of a decision to make the spaces “accessible whenever visitors have the urge to experience this great museum.” Says Museum Director Thomas Campbell. (more…)
The New York Times has published an in-depth look at Brooklyn’s newly founded Cultural Recovery Center. Comprised of a task force of 106 volunteers, this rapid response team works to salvage work in the wake of major disasters like last year’s Hurricane Sandy. “We’re not doing any big conservation,” says studio manager Anna Studebaker. “We are a kind of MASH unit.” (more…)
As part of its new “Artists Experiment” initiative, The Museum of Modern Art has announced Kenneth Goldsmith as the first “poet laureate” of the museum. Seeking to bring contemporary artists into dialogue with the institution,the initiative has welcomed Mr. Goldsmith, who also runs the online arts archive Ubuweb, to program a series of readings and events at the museum. “Poets have this idea that what they do is casual, but the minute you get up onstage anywhere, it’s performative. Poets tend to want to show some degree of “authenticity,” and the structural theatrics around the performative gesture are never questioned. That’s something I always do. I’m a bit of a dandy as a result.” Goldsmith says. (more…)
