Gearing up for a performance piece on the fourth floor.  All images for Art Observed by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand.

The festive albeit politically charged atmosphere at the 2012 76th annual Whitney Biennial‘s pre-show event was practically interdependent, with the political climate not only informing the sentiments of viewers, but arguably the art itself. While protesters outside encouraged entering guests to “Occupy the Whitney,” antagonizing Sotheby’s and Deutsche Bank for withholding benefits from workers and developing financial strategies to benefit the ‘one percent,’ art indoors at the biennial also challenged artistic convention against the same political scale, with over 50 artists showing work.

Chuck Close touring the second floor

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‪‬A tour of Tracey Emin’s studio and home in East London, “Things change, you change, your thoughts do, your life moves on and my work has changed because of that too. I’m asking questions that I wasn’t addressing before and doing things that I wasn’t doing before.”
[AO Newslink]

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‪ British Airways, with direction by Tracey Emin, plans to decorate at least eight airplanes with a dove motif for London’s 2012 Olympic Games, in keeping with the Olympic theme of setting doves free, with the designs to debut in April. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Tracey Emin appointed Professor of Drawing at Royal Academy Schools in London; Emin “excited to be teaching again” [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Tracey Emin to sell limited edition prints and works out of new east London shop, Tracey International [AO Newslink]

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Will Ryman’s Roses being installed on Miami Beach. Image via The Art Newspaper.

Art Observed is on site for this year’s 10th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach which officially runs December 1–4, with previews and parties throughout the entire week beginning on Tuesday, November 29th. More than 260 galleries from around the world will be representing over 2,000 artists, not including the several satellite shows taking place simultaneously across Miami, including NADA, SCOPE, Pulse, and the original Art Miami—twelve years Basel’s senior. Attracting 46,000 visitors in 2010, the fair is expanding every year, with various collaborations and special additions celebrating its 10th. The Swiss-based Basel art fair installment in Miami has evolved into something that may have lost some of its innocence from its earlier days but in the end has become the definitive closing party for the art market’s year. There have been many previews and summaries of the fair, the following is our view of the week to come.

Hennessy Youngman, still from ART THOUGHTZ: Relational Aesthetics. Via Youtube.
Youngman will be speaking at NADA Deauville Beach Resort on Thursday at 5 pm.

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Installation view of Tracey Emin, The Vanishing Lake (2011). All images by Stephen White courtesy of White Cube.

The Vanishing Lake, Tracey Emin’s White Cube-curated exhibition housed at 6 Fitzroy Square, is a meditation on personal metamorphosis. A new series of self portraits that were inspired by her novel of the same name provide the exhibition’s focal point while other works—including textual light installations and large-scale tapestries of her provocative paintings—help create an overwhelming sense of romantic melancholia.

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‪‪‬Tracey Emin traces family genealogy in BBC show ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ [AO Newslink]

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Tracey Emin surreptitiously installs a neon work at David Cameron’s headquarters at No. 10 Downing Street, London [AO Newslink]

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Jay Jopling’s White Cube, purveyor of art by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Chapman Bros., to open first overseas branch in Hong Kong, shortly after Larry Gagosian [AO Newslink]

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Turner Contemporary, via Turner Contemporary

David Chipperfield’s Turner Contemporary was opened today in Margate by artist Tracey Emin and muscian Jools Holland on the site where J.M.W. Turner (1775- 1881) often visited. Emin grew up in Margate and the grandmother of Holland lived in the Kent town.  It was here on the spot of the new museum that Turner was enraptured by the skies which he called “the loveliest in all of Europe.”  The stunning light and landscape of the coast of Kent stimulated his imagination and inspired his painting. The dynamic new visual arts venue thus takes heed from Turner’s artistic spirit of curiosity and discovery. The opening exhibit, Revealed displays the work of six contemporary artists, four of which have made new work specifically for the exhibition. Like Turner, they create their art while employing the same spirit of exploration and intrigue into the natural world around them.

Ellen Harvey, Turner Contemporary Revealed Opening, via Turner Contemporary

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Inside the Bermondsey Street warehouse, via NovaLoca

London art dealer Jay Jopling has just announced that the former Recall warehouse in Bermondsey Street will soon be converted to a gallery under his White Cube umbrella.  Jopling, through White Cube, represents such artists as Jake & Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Marc Quinn and his former wife Sam Taylor-Wood, among others.
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Jay Jopling, via The Rich Life

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Anselm Kiefer, Winter Ade Scheiden Tut Weh Aberdein Scheiden Macht, Dass Mein Herz Lacht (Goodbye, Winter, Parting Hurts But Your Departure Makes My Heart Cheer), 2010
Listed at $100,000

Last night at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery on Chrystie street in the Lower East Side of New York, West-Village-based Foundation for Contemporary Arts held a benefit auction selling nearly 200 paintings and sculptures.  All proceeds went to programs of the FCA, “hoping to assist and encourage innovation, experimentation and potential in the arts,” this year providing 14 grants to artists, of $25k each.

A view from the balcony

The benefit was extremely well attended, with some of the artists joining as well. The large number of works represented a variety of globally well-known artists, including Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Brice Marden, Francesco Clemente, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Julie Mehretu, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, David Salle, Frank Stella, Elizabeth Neel, Julian Opie, Cecily Brown, Vija Celmins, Robert Gober, Nate Lowman, Dan Colen, Dana Schutz, Kara Walker, and T.J. Wilcox, to name a few.

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Art dealer Jay Jopling at the White Cube booth

Art Observed was on-site December 1st for the VIP Preview of Art Basel Miami Beach 2010, which opened to the public this morning at 10 a.m. Like most international fairs of its scale and scope, the work presented broadly underscores the trends witnessed across commercial markets and throughout museum and gallery exhibitions over the past several months. It also affords individual institutions an important opportunity to distinguish themselves from their peers, and provide fresh and immediate insight into the nuances and complexities of contemporary taste.

Richard Jackson, Upside Down Duck at the Kordansky Gallery Booth

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Postcard from RCA Secret 2010 at the Royal College of Art, all photos via The Guardian

Twenty-eight hundred postcards are on view at the Royal College of Art in London through 6 pm this Friday, November 19. Until November 20th, the artists who created them will remain anonymous, their names (signed on the back of each card) revealed to buyers only after purchase during a one-day sale. The collection constitutes RCA Secret 2010: an annual exhibition and sale of postcard-sized art benefiting the Royal College of Art Fine Art Student Award Fund. To add to the allure of the unknown, a few household names are among the 1,000+ participating artists, including Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry, Yoko Ono, Jake Chapman, Olafur Eliasson, Yinka Shonibare, Sir Peter Blake, John Baldessari, fashion designers Manolo Blahnik, Mary Quant and Sir Paul Smith, animator Nick Park, photographer David Bailey, film maker Mike Leigh and designers Ron Arad and James Dyson. Students and graduates from the Royal College of Art comprise the majority of the participants.

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Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, Deep inside my heart, 2009-2010. All images courtesy of Carolina Nitsch Projects.

During the last two years of her life, feminist sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) collaborated with the self-revealing YBA artist Tracey Emin on a series of prints entitled DO NOT ABANDON ME, published in an edition of 18 by Carolina Nitsch. Emin spoke of her friendship with the 98 year old artist in an interview with Kisa Lala in early 2010, stating: “I asked if I could meet her, and she said yes. Now we’re doing a collaboration. Louise makes watercolor prints and I do drawings over the top.” The prints use a new technique that transfers the dye from Bourgeois’ original gouache drawings onto fabric, to which Emin added text and drawings in black ink.

Artists Bourgeois and Emin, 2010, by Brigitte Cornand.

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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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Louise Bourgeois in her Brooklyn studio in 1992. Photo courtesy The New York Times.

Louise Bourgeois, one of the world’s most celebrated sculptors, passed away today at the age of 98. The news was announced by an Italian foundation preparing an exhibition of the artist’s work in Venice, and was confirmed by Wendy Williams, the managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio. The cause of death was heart attack, and occurred at the Beth Israel Medical Center. Bourgeois was a leader of feminist art, and is known most recently for her large-scale metal spider sculptures, as well as psychologically-charged roughly-textured depictions of sex organs.

Bourgeois’s 30-ft spider sculpture outside the Tate Modern in 2007. Photo courtesy the BBC.

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Eight Elvises, which sold for $100 million in a private deal last year via TheEconomist

–  The Economist has a downloadable special report on the art market, in it Sarah Thornton reports in an article on Warhol, in the wake of the sale of his work in the recent New York  contemporary auctions for $43.8 million, that in August 2008 Andy Warhol’s singular “Eight Elvises” was sold privately to an unknown buyer for $100 million [Economist]

– Close to $100M of Russian art aims to be sold for Russian Art Week in London, where the vast growth of wealth in Russia allows for repatriation of that country’s works [Bloomberg] more on this here [WallStreetJournal]

A discerning look into some of the less disclosed but nevertheless driving forces and relationships behind various high profile exhibitions [Financial Times]

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Installation Still from “Only God Knows I’m Good” (via Lehmann Maupin)

Lehmann Maupin Gallery has opened a new solo show by British artist Tracey Emin at their Lower East Side location. Emin, most notorious for her 2005 work “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995” deals primarily with issues of lust, dreams, and the alienation of sex.

The media in “God Only Knows I’m Good” is varied: the artist employs embroideries, video, monoprints, sculptures, and neons. The embroideries encompass most of the show: sexed-out figures reminiscent of Egon Schiele’s awkward nudes writhe across large-scale canvases made from blankets. A plethora of small drawings also populate the gallery, inviting a more intimate viewer relationship. Tongue-in-cheek texts accompanying these figures offer either a shock of revulsion or a dark humor. “I can’t feel,” the women say, as they fondle themselves. “Every fucking time,” reads another. Both acutely personal and universal, Emin insists the women in her portraits are not directly autobiographical, but rather symbolic of prurience and loneliness. Her use of rudimentary spelling and a shaky line also imbue the work with a kind of disturbing naïveté, given the strong content of the imagery.

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The Royal College of Art Secret Postcard fundraiser via The Guardian

-The Royal College of Art’s Secret 2009 event has 2,500 postcards for sale for £40, made by artists including Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry and Yoko Ono.  Though buyers don’t know who the artist is until after they buy. [Times UK]

-Penelope Curtis has been appointed director of Tate Britain, the first woman to hold a directorship at Tate. [Guardian]

-Tracey Emin opens a new exhibition in New York, that, while popular, comes nowhere near the levels of sales or attendance she normal receives in Britain. [NY Times]

An artist’s rendering of Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Cirkelbroen’ bridge to be built in Copenhagen via Artinfo

-Olafur Eliasson has designed a bridge to be completed by 2012 in Copenhagen’s harbor. Called ‘Brikelbroen,’ the bridge is comprised of five circles that take pedestrians on a winding path rather than straight across. [Artinfo]

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Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Trophy Wife,’ depicting Stephanie Seymour, currently going through a messy divorce from Peter Brant, who owns the piece

-Recent court filings in the divorce of Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour reveal disputes over nearly 50 works by Andy Warhol, as well as works by Richard Prince, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, and a bust of Seymour made by Maurizio Cattelan [Vanity Fair]

-And in related, Udo Fritz-Hermann Brandhorst, an heir to Germany’s Henkel AG & Co. fortune, settled out of court a dispute with his former mistress over two works by Damien Hirst [Bloomberg]

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Allison Schulnik’s music video for Grizzly Bear’s ‘Ready, Able’

– Painter Allison Schulnik’s claymation music video for Grizzly Bear’s ‘Ready, Able’ via The Flog

-Tracey Emin reading her new book of poems “Those Who Suffer Love” and “Strangeland” at University Settlement as part of Performa 09 [Supreme Being]

-Also related, a round-up of Performa 09 includes a “Pasta Sauna” based on the Futurist Manifesto, Tacita Dean, William Kentridge, Merce Cunningham and more [Financial Times]

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Gavin Turk, Pop (1993), showing with Tate Modern’s “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” through January 17. Image via The London Paper.

Tate Modern is currently showing works by artists that embrace mass media and popular culture. Its motto is Andy Warhol’s proclamation that “good business is the best art,” and artists such as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin, and more present works that are, accordingly, a blend of popular and left of center culture. “Pop Life: Art in a Material World,” which also features a new piece by Takashi Murakami, closes on January 17.

Foreground, House of Martin Luther King (1990), by Rob Pruitt and Walter Early; background, Damien Hirst’s False Idol (2008). From “Pop Life,” images via The Guardian.

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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]

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