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gagosiangallery · 4 years ago

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Sterling Ruby at Gagosian Athens

April 8, 2021

STERLING RUBY THAT MY NAILS CAN REACH UNTO THINE EYES

May 13–July 31, 2021 22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens _________ And are you grown so high in his esteem Because I am so dwarfish and so low? How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak! How low am I? I am not yet so low But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes. —William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (act 3, scene 2) Gagosian is pleased to present THAT MY NAILS CAN REACH UNTO THINE EYES, an exhibition of new paintings and ceramics by Sterling Ruby. In an oeuvre encompassing sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, video, and textiles, Ruby engages art history, his own autobiography, and balances of social power. Creating disruption by contrasting clean lines and recognizable objects with rough and uncanny forms, his works interrogate the canon of art while seeking to critique the institutions and shortcomings of modern society. Ruby composes his WIDW paintings (2016–)—the series is titled after an abbreviated form of “window”—with thick, vibrant coats of acrylic and oil paint, also adhering squares of cardboard and patterned fabric onto canvas. These collaged elements demarcate the canvas into halves and smaller rectangles, transforming the compositions into gridded windowpanes that offer a glimpse into the physical and cerebral strata of Ruby’s working process.

In this new body of work inspired by William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ruby makes allusions to theater, likening the vantage of a window frame to the proscenium. Taking a cue from the play’s contrasting settings of judicial ancient Athens and the mystical forest beyond, Ruby bisects each canvas vertically with a strip of painted cardboard, introducing a pillar-like barrier that bright pigments rebound against or cower behind. Featuring dynamic bursts of pink, teal, white, and gold, Ruby’s paintings evoke the fertile yet impermanent aura of springtime. Opposing realms—order and chaos, love and violence, civilization and wilderness—are key to his works, which dwell in moments of transformation. Exploring the liminal space between these dichotomies, Ruby taps into the loss of self that occurs when the identities and innermost desires of the play’s protagonists become enmeshed within a collective subconscious. The exhibition is divided in half between both floors of the Athens gallery: visitors enter a suite of black-grounded “night” paintings before ascending the stairs to reach a set of ethereal “daylight” paintings. Passing through physical space and metaphorical time of day, the viewer follows a path akin to Shakespeare’s characters in their passage from luminous dreamscapes to bright-hued works that impart a vivid psychological clarity. Also on view is ACHERON (2021), part of Ruby’s Basin Theology series (2009–). The sculpture’s title refers to a line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—“The starry welkin cover thou anon / With drooping fog as black as Acheron”—that invokes the name of the river in Greek mythology that carried the souls of the dead through the underworld to Hades. To make ACHERON, Ruby gathered broken pieces from previous ceramics projects in a flat-bottomed vessel, fusing everything through the firing process. Glazed in volcanic black and lustrous turquoise, the fragments emerge from the kiln in a reincarnated form reminiscent of entombed remains. Employing a similar technique for MORTAR. KISSING WALL’S HOLE (2021), Ruby references text from the play in which a “wall’s hole” creates an access point for forbidden lovers, rendering the ceramic work as a symbolic opening between spaces and people. Sterling Ruby was born in Bitburg, Germany, in 1972, holds American and Dutch citizenship, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Collections include the Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibitions include DROPPA BLOCKA, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2013); STOVES, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (2015); Belvedere, Vienna (2016); Ceramics, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2018, traveled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019–20, traveled to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston). In June 2019, Ruby launched his clothing label, S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA., after debuting at Pitti Uomo Immagine in Florence, Italy. At the invitation of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, Ruby presented a collection during Paris Couture Week in January 2021. Concurrently, a selection of ceramic sculptures by Ruby will be exhibited within the permanent collections of the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. The installation, Sterling Ruby at Cycladic: Ceramics, will also extend to the museum’s temporary exhibition wing and will be on view from May 12 to June 14, 2021, with dates subject to national public health guidelines. _____ Sterling Ruby, WIDW. KNACKS. TRIFLES. NOSEGAYS. SWEETMEATS., 2020, acrylic, oil, elastic, and cardboard on canvas, framed: 73 7/8 × 53 7/8 × 3 1/4 inches (187.6 × 136.8 × 8.3 cm) © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

#Sterling Ruby #Gagosian

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sosuitglitter · 5 years ago

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PRICING OF ARTWORKS: AUCTION VERSUS EXHIBITION

Author: Dr. Stephen Achugwo, Ph.D. Painting, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria,

Artistic Splendor, Abuja Nigeria. Email: [email protected]

Abstract

When an artist is trying to sell his work through an exhibition or an auction, the selling price may end up being different from his intended price. In 2013, one of the four versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a pastel on board painting, according to Vogel (2012), fetched $119.9 million at Sotheby’s auction in New York. In 2014, Ben Enwonwu's Princes of Mali, sold for $138,870 at Bonhams in Lagos, and El Anatsui’s Mask, sold for $78,375 at Arthouse (Castellote & Fagbule, 2015). El Anatsui’s works sell for millions of naira, yet works of another artist struggles to sell for thousands of naira. Auction and Exhibition play major roles in the pricing of works. Why does one work sell for ₦70,000, another for ₦500 million, and yet another for ₦17 billion? In establishing selling price for a work, is exhibition more beneficial to the artist than auction? Does the price of a work go higher in auction than exhibition? These inquiries would build and buttress the concentration of this paper. This paper uses a review of reports on marketing structures and operations of art auction and exhibition to discuss their impact on pricing of artworks. It also examines the certain benefits accruing to artists on either channel of distribution and sale of their artworks.

Keywords: Price, Artwork, Exhibition, Auction, Argument

Introduction

This review discusses the advantages and disadvantages of auction over exhibition, in relation to pricing of artworks. According to Wikipedia (2017), “An art auction or fine art auction is the sale of artworks, in most cases in an auction house”. In England this dates back to the latter part of the 17th century. At that moment the names of the auctioneers were mostly repressed. Prior to the date of an art auction, an auction catalogue, that lists the art works to be sold, is written and made available. An art auction is one of the most glamorous way of collecting art for many people. Some of the most famous auction houses are Christie's and Sotheby's, based in London and New York. The oldest auction house, according to Wikipedia (2017) is Stockholm Auction House (Stockholms Auktionsverk), which was established in Sweden in 1674. In Nigeria, the most prominent auction houses include Arthouse Contemporary, Bonhams, Sogol and TK.MG, all based in Lagos. Art auction is a new development in the sale of artworks in Nigeria. Castellote & Fagbule (2015) observes that Nigerian art auction is still at the ‘embryonic stage’. The history of art auction in Nigeria is barely two decades old. Onwuzulike (2015) opines that “The young history of art auction in Nigeria reveals its steady growth and appreciable impact in the visual art sector, locally and internationally.” He discovers that the first art auction in Nigeria, entitled Before the Hammer Falls, held in 1999 was organised by The Nimbus Art Gallery Lagos, run by Chike Nwagbogu. Onwuzulike (2015) narrates that “The auction was historically timed and the result was revolutionary in the history of art and art market in Nigeria. With the record sale of Bruce Onobrakpeya's Palm Wine Women for ₦2 million, the auction brought art to the front pages of the newspapers”. The first auction yielded a total of ₦22 million in sale of artworks.

Another prominent way that artists can market their artworks is through an Art Exhibition, show or fair. Wikipedia (2007) states that “An art exhibition is traditionally the space in which art objects (in the most general sense) meet an audience”. The exhibit of artworks lasts for some temporary period unless, if it is a permanent exhibition, as in the case of Art Museums. Art exhibition may present pictures, drawings, video, sound, installation, performance, interactive art, new media art or sculptures by individual artists, groups of artists or collections of a specific form of art. The works of art might be exhibited in historical centres, museums, art halls, art clubs or private art galleries, or at some place, the chief business of which is not the show or offer of artwork, for example, a cafe. An art exhibition can likewise be organized out on a particular event, including a birthday, commemoration, remembrance, festival, celebration or jubilee. Any of these occasions offers the artists great chance to deal their artworks.

Whether a work of art is going to be exhibited or auctioned, the artists and dealers make so much efforts in establishing a price for a particular work. The efficiency of these basic marketing structures is a key determinant of the cost of creating and distributing works of art. There are artists who are creating works for academic purposes, yet some are producing works as hobby or for emotional, religious or spiritual purposes. But the artist who must earn a living for their creative endeavours, must be vast in their marketing strategies. They should acquaint themselves with exhibiting skills as well as regularly exhibiting their works.

This writing dwells on the benefits accruing to professional artists in selling their artworks through exhibition at galleries, trade fair and show booths, or auction at auction houses. Some of the major art galleries and museums across the world include Christy’s and Sotheby’s auction houses of London, Tate Gallery Britain, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of New York and the Louvre of Paris. In Africa, there are the Johannesburg Gallery, University of Johannesburg Commercial Gallery, the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa. ArtHouse and Signature Galleries in Lagos, the National Galleries of Art in Nigeria, among others. The auction system and major exhibitions are central in the determination of the incentives for artistic work.

Price of Artworks

The price of an artwork is the monetary or economic value of the work. For a coherent discourse about the advantages and disadvantages of auction over exhibition, it is very necessary to find out the factors that determine the price of artworks. Sometimes the artist, in collaboration with a gallery, decides on the price of his artwork. Kathleen (2014) observes that “There's no easy method of determining a value for a painting except perhaps going by market value, and still that's not an easy way to calculate”. Various possible reasons that can affect the price of artworks are enumerated as follows:

1. Authentication

The price of an artwork can be affected by authenticity. If the potential buyer is worried about the authenticity, he may place a low asking-price or decide not to buy the work. The process of authentication varies, depending on an art period. Contemporary art is the easiest to authenticate, especially if the artist is alive and working, and if the production of the work is documented. If this is not the case, documentation must be verified, as well as the artistic traits of the work itself. The most challenging cases of authentication involve a laboratory. This entails analysis, investigative research and material dating. The experts face the challenge of meeting a deadline to decide the authenticity of an artwork. Laboratory authentication can take several weeks to be completed. According to Art Expert (n.d.), “Our normal turnaround time for a full authentication report is two to four weeks”. Nowadays, many contemporary artists issue certificates of authenticity for their works, so obtaining it at the beginning is crucial, since forgeries are common.

2. Artist’s Name

Price of artworks of artists with big names may be exorbitant. A Jeff Koons’ work cannot sell for a small amount of money after the auctioning of the legendary Orange Balloon Dog for $58.4 Million at Christy’s in New York (Waxman, 2013). But the work of emerging artist cannot be valued exceptionally high. However, there are new rising artists in art market, who tend to contradict this notion. Oscar Murillo and David Ostrowski are good examples. Prices of their works have risen relatively quickly in the past few years, from widely affordable to exclusive (Kostov, 2017), but completely unexpected surprises don’t come around often in the market.

3. Fashionability of the Artist

Changes in fashion can affect price of artworks. Artists go in and out of fashion, but there are broader shifts in taste that affect the market. Forty years ago the highest prices were achieved by Old Masters. Today a lot of glamour and demand is focused on Modern and Contemporary art. Even ten years ago the highest auction price for Francis Bacon stood at $8.5m, but in November another Bacon’s work sold for $143 million (Vogel, 2014).

4. Importance of the Artist in History of Art

Artworks of ancient artists are highly priced. Some artists are legendary. Hook (2014) observes that “It is hard to imagine art history ever downgrading the importance of Rembrandt or Rubens, Leonardo or Raphael, Picasso or Matisse. They will always be valuable”. However, over the past few years, artists such as the Surrealists and the German Expressionists have become more expensive as their art historical importance has been re-affirmed. Art lovers are now appreciating the beauty of the works of art. Likewise, if an artist has just featured in a major exhibition, like the Tate, then that kind of high-profile exposure can also raise the price of his works.

5. Positive Romantic Baggage

The price of an artwork can be influenced by a back-story to an artist’s life. Such a story affects the appreciation of him and the works he produced. It is a romance made up of the glamour and myth of his artistic creation. Other positives in an artist’s life story include unhappy love-affairs, rebellious behaviour and even spells in jail. Reminiscing such remarkable difficult moments can also add value to the works of the artist.

6. A Desirable Phase in the Artist’s Development

The price of an artwork can be affected by periods of an artist’s career, which was more desirable. Hook (2014) finds that “Late Van Gogh is more expensive than his early work. A Renoir from the 1870s will be worth more than a late one. Any Picasso is desirable, but one from the early 1930s particularly so”.

7. Signature Artwork

The price of an artwork may be affected by unique characteristics of works of a particular artist that market prices highly recognize. For instance, after purchasing a Monet, one would obviously want his visitors to see the painting as Monet’s work. “Thus a painting showing water lilies or Rouen Cathedral will be more expensive than a less typical portrait or still life by the artist.” (Hook, 2014).

8. Condition of a work

The price of an artwork can be determined by the condition of the work. Having a Damien Hirst’s work does not mean that the work can be priced like another Damien Hirst’s work. The condition is important whether it is a painting or a drawing, an original, or an edition. Irrespective of the medium, condition is the first thing that is assessed. The assessment takes cognisance of the effects of retouch, restoration or any damage or change of the physical integrity. Works of art suffer and age over time, some more than others. Like human beings, some are subjected to cosmetic surgery, through restoration. Where this has been too extensive, the price of the painting will be affected.

9. Wall-power

The price of an artwork can be influenced by wall-power. Wall-power include such factors as composition, colour, and emotional power. Thus, blue and red, tend to be good news for most people. Hook (2014) posits that "Surpassing artistic quality (difficult to define, but you know it when you see it) is always reflected positively in the price a work of art realizes, sometimes by an astonishing margin.” A good example of an artist’s work may fetch 400,000; but with such effects as Wall-power, it could make 1,000.000.

10. Subject of the Artwork

The price of an artwork can be determined by the subject. Some subjects are more desirable than others: portraits of pretty women will always sell better than those of gloomy old men. Sunny landscapes are more attractive than dark ones, and calm seas are preferable to rough ones. Animals and birds are generally preferably being depicted alive, because most people regard death in a painting as a bad news. The theme depicted can affect market. Nudes, sell well if the models are beautiful. On the other hand, nudes are not favourably received by most Islamic buyers.

11. Provenance

The price of an artwork can be affected by provenance. The history of the painting itself can make a difference to its value. Provenance refers to whose collection it has been in, where it has been exhibited and which dealers have handled it. (Hook, 2014). A Cezanne from the great Paul Mellon collection is worth more than the same painting with an unspecified provenance. Similarly, an El Anatsui’s work owned by a celebrity will worth more than another Anatsui’s work, which its provenance is unknown.

Advantages of Auction over Exhibition

The auction system and exhibition are essential in determining the incentives for works of art. Their effectiveness is a major determinant of the cost of creating and distributing artworks. However, Ashenfelter and Graddy (2003) finds that “The value of most important works of art is established by public auction, either directly, by an actual sale, or indirectly, by reference to other sales. How the auction system works is thus a critical determinant of how the public’s preferences are translated into the evaluation of artistic work”. The following are among the conditions that can affect the pricing of artworks in auction, which could be of significant benefit to the artists.

1. Seller request estimate

Price of an artwork can be established through seller request estimate. Agarwal, et al (2014) finds that “Estimates are given for all lots and can be based on prices recently paid at auction for comparable property”. Thus the auction house can estimate a price for a particular artwork going for auction based on the price reached on related works sold.

2. Subjective private value

Price of artworks in auction depends more on the subjective private value to the bidders than an objective common value. Sooke (2011) notes that the competition among bidders to acquire a particular artwork leads to increase in the price of the work.

3. Uniqueness, scarcity and genre differences

Price of artworks can be influenced by the uniqueness of each work, the scarcity of the work along with genre differences among the artists. Onuzulike (2015) finds that works of art that are unique and rare are valued higher at auction than those that are easily available.

4. Past value of an artist's work

Price level can be affected at the beginning of the auction by past value of an artist’s work. Ebay (2016) finds that “Artists who have been featured or discussed in various catalogues or books are likely to be well established. Pieces that are high priced usually come from a respected and well-established artist”. Castellote and Fagbule (2016) discovers that price level of works of some notable artists in Nigeria (El Anatsui, Ben Enwonwu, Yusuf Grillo, Kolade Oshinowo and Bruce Onobrakpeya) remain higher in Nigerian auction than similar works of other artists practicing in Nigerian.

5. Established artists

Price of artworks can be influenced by the reputation of the artist. Agarwal, et al (2014) find that “Established artist show a positive relationship with price at the beginning of an auction.” They observe that the rate of price change, when buyers are bidding for a work of an established artist, rises towards the end of the auctions. EBay (2016) stresses that “The price of artwork largely correlates to the reputation of the artist”.

Advantages of Exhibition over Auction

Exhibition is essential to an artist due to the following advantages: promotion, meeting other artists and industrial colleagues, inspiration and selling of works.

1. Promotion

It is necessary for artists to promote their works at exhibition as it provides opportunity for them to meet people and share with them what they do. Exhibition enables the artist and his work to become more popular and attract more clients. For upcoming artists, who are trying to establish themselves, exhibition is better and more cost effective way than auction. If an artist or his work is not known, he will not succeed (Fleskes, 2014). There is no better way to make an impact with another person than a face to face encounter. Shows will help make him better known. Promotion at events builds a growing awareness of him.

2. Meeting other artists and industrial colleagues in person

Having a booth at a show makes an artist accessible. It is a location where fans and industry people can find him and solicit commissions and artworks. He can pick up jobs at shows. An artist can receive calls a few months later from someone that met him at the show, who is following up a request. If the artist did not make money at a show, he might make it down the line. (Fleskes, 2014). This goes to show the advantages an artist enjoys from exhibiting.

3. Inspiration

Walking around a show and seeing what others are doing is an inspiration that can last for a long time in the memory of the artist. Most shows are networks of booth after booth of artists who paint, draw, sculpt, hand-craft and use technology to create several imageries. Variety of styles, materials and techniques broaden the artist’s creative mind. (Fleskes, 2014). The analysis of artworks displayed by other artists at show could help the artist resolve many technical issues concerning his work.

4. Selling of works

A show enables an artist to attract buyers who are looking to purchase artworks directly from him instead of buying from a dealer. It helps the artist to sell his artworks at the price he wants. A show aids an artist to know the kind of artworks that are in vogue. It acquaints him with the business of art with fresh ideas and sells strategies that are necessary in marketing his artworks.

Conclusion

In comparing auction and exhibition regarding price of artworks, the reputation or popularity of the artist plays a vital role. For emerging artists that are not well established, exhibition is a better way of getting better prices for their artworks than auction. For well established artists, auction is a better way of getting better prices for their artworks than exhibition. With public auction most valuable artworks are sold at the highest possible price. Sometimes the eventual price is more than the expected selling price. In a documentary of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on art, Alastair Sooke found that price of artworks is very subjective. A renowned art dealer, Arne Glimcher in Sooke (2011) observes that: "The whole thing of art and money is ridiculous. The value of a painting at auction is not necessarily the value of a painting. It is the value of two people bidding against each other, because they really want the painting". They want the artwork desperately, not because of its beauty, but to enhance their social status. On the other hand, auction is a big disadvantage for emerging artists, as the rich people who come to bid are oftentimes seeking for works that were produced by legendary artists, most of whom are dead. Auction can destroy the business of the emerging artist, if his work did not get a bid. Auction houses prefer to avoid such artists than to reduce price. This sort of transaction can destroy the price of the artist’s work or even his career. Most emerging artists want to be successful in their art business. To attract bids and good price for their artworks, emerging artists need to do several exhibitions, some of which has to be mounted at high profile galleries or art fairs. Works of a Nigerian artist, Chris Ofili went from affordable to exclusive, immediately after his exhibition at the Tate Gallery London. Now his works can sell for high price in most auction houses.

References

Agarwal, B., Ali, F., P Kolli, P., & X Yang, X. (2014). Predicting the Price of Art at Auction. Retrieved May 10, 2017, from

https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~skiena/591/final_projects/art_acution/Team4_Final_Report.pdf

Ashenfelter, O., & Graddy, K. (2003). Auctions and the Price of Art. Journal of Economic Literature, 41(3), 763-786. doi:10.1257/jel.41.3.763

Aspire art auctions, historic modern and contemporary. (2016). Retrieved May 16, 2017, from http://aspireart.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Aspire-Catalogue.pdf

Castellote, J., & Fagbule, T. (2015). Nigeria art market report 2014. Retrieved from Foundation for Contemporary and Modern Visual Arts (FCMVA) website: http://networks.h-net.org/system/files/contributedfiles/namr14.pdf

Castellote, J., & Fagbule, T. (2016). Nigeria art market report 2015 (2). Retrieved from Foundation for Contemporary and Modern Visual Arts (FCMVA) website: http://content/uploads/2016/03/Nigerian-Art-Market-Report-2016.pdf

Ebay. (2016, March 3). Understanding prices for paintings and artwork. Retrieved May 16, 2017, from http://www.ebay.com/gds/Understanding-Prices-for-Paintings-and-Artwork-/10000000177628199/g.html

Fedderke, J. W., & Li, K. (2014). Art in Africa: market structure and pricing Behavior in the South African Fine Art Auction Market, 2009 - 2013 (466). Retrieved March 1, 2017, from https://econrsa.org/system/files/publications/working_papers/working_paper_466.pdf

Fleskes, J. (2014, January 4). The importance of exhibiting at shows & why exhibit at Spectrum Fantastic art live? Retrieved May 16, 2017, from

https://fleskpublications.com/blog/2014/01/04/the-importance-of-exhibiting-at-shows-why-exhibit-at-spectrum-fantastic-art-live/

Hook, P. (2014, September 30). What makes art sell? 10 questions that establish the value of a painting. Retrieved May 16, 2017, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-hook-/ten-questions-that-establ_b_5884762.html

Kathleen, G. (2014, April 23). What determines a painting's cost? Retrieved May 17, 2017, from https://www.quora.com/What-determines-a-paintings-cost

Kostov, A. B. (2017). How to value an artwork. Retrieved May 16, 2017, from http://www.widewalls.ch/how-to-value-an-artwork/

Onwuzulike, O. (2015). Art auctions in Nigeria: A contemporary Critical Interventions, 9(1),3-2, doi: 10.1080/19301944.2015.1012901

Sooke, A. (2011). What Makes Art Valuable? - Top Documentary Films. Retrieved from http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/what-makes-art-valuable/

Vogel, C. (2012, May 2). 'The Scream' is auctioned for a record $119.9 million. Retrieved May 16, 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/arts/design/the-scream-sells-for-nearly-120-million-at-sothebys-auction.html

Vogel, C. (2014, January 15). Buyer of $142.4 Million Bacon triptych identified as Elaine Wynn. Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/arts/design/buyer-of-142-4-million-bacon-painting-identified-as-elaine-wynn.html?_r=0

Waxman, O. B. (2013, November 14). Jeff Koons’ $58.4M Ornge Balloon Dog and 10 Other Cool Balloon Pieces | Time.com. Retrieved June 20, 2017 from http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/11/14/an-orange-balloon-dog-sold-for-58-4-million-here-are-10-cool-jeff-koons-balloon-pieces/

Wikipedia (2017). Art auction. Retrieved June 15, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_auction

Wikipedia (2017). Art exhibition. Retrieved June 15, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_ exhibition

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micaramel · 4 years ago

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Artists: Urban Zellweger, Amelie von Wulffen, David Weiss, Emily Sundblad, Daniele Milvio, Ella Mathys

Venue: Weiss Falk, Basel

Exhibition Title: Watercolour, Chapter I

Date: June 27 – August 8, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Weiss Falk, Basel

Press Release:

Everyday Washout

David Weiss’ art is as good as The Velvet Underground’s first record. It is funny and heartbreaking; sexy, alive, understated, fearless, pedestrian–everything I miss right now. – Emily Sundblad

Daniele Milvio’s Watercolours, Chapter I exhibition poster takes after the poster for Paul Thomas Anderson’s feature film Magnolia (1999). In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, frogs rain down on the San Fernando Valley. The downpour is torrential: careening cars into strip malls, splatting on sidewalks, interrupting a suicide attempt. Like the second Plague of Egypt in the Book of Exodus, the flood of frogs connects a cast from separate storylines, reminding us that their individual experiences share a geographical setting. The current pandemic—and the climate crisis—invite easy analogy to biblical plagues. Simultaneously triggering end time anxieties and compulsions, the ongoing moment of uncertainty underscores how distinctively collective events are experienced. But yet: marketing campaigns insist we are in it #AloneTogether, the willful naïveté that such shared experience might soften the separations of subjectivity or of market-shaped, strident individuality, are also present. It feels like the perfect moment to start a series of exhibitions featuring watercolors. The medium that is unambiguously ambivalent: watercolors are neither drawing nor painting—and somehow they’re always both. The medium’s liquidity begets speed, touch and mistakes, but it also encourages wistful strokes. Motifs in watercolor invite comparison to children’s designs—but they more often than not insinuate mannerism and gravity. Simply put, aquarelle washes the everyday into an absurd daydream, rendering fantasies mundane in turn. That’s what constitutes a fantasy: it feels unique, but everyone’s got them.

But does everyone have graphic fantasies? Or maybe it’s just some do some don’t. A fantasy like making up a little story. Or replaying a scenario, embellished with what ifs. Remember sexual fantasies without sex, like in elementary school, elaborate scenarios that climax in kissing by the water fountain, things like that. Watercolor is ideal for daydreaming: it lets fantasy slip in easy. Can you catch yourself dreaming? Commit it to paper? Is that what’s happening, like that’s what watercolors are for? What if you waited for a taxi so long that you started to grow roots? Or skeleton arms salted your feet? Or you gave a blowjob with your pandemic mouth? Watercolours, Chapter 1 brings together artists that suffuse the everyday with the fantastic, make space to move fast and play things out. To slip from limitless dreamscapes to the comfort of your own bedroom—and back.

Daniele Milvio made watercolors of the view from his bed—closet ajar, feet tented under the sheets—just before the lockdown. So this series takes on an eerily prophetic quality and continued unimpeded in happy isolation from the outside world. But the closet—something that can shut, caught up with shame—has had a recurring presence in his practice. A selection of works from 2007-8 take a look inside, a stack of folded shirts, printed wallpaper. In line with his evolving examination of domestic and architectural fixtures, he has also used the closet as a framing device, mounting a work in collage on wool inside of closet doors so that they could close and obscure the work entirely. He scrutinizes the domestic as a private space: structured to shroud secrets, skeletons in the closet. And then slices the house open like a delicate chicken breast, looking at interiors from the outside, the tempta- tion of a dollhouse view. He pictures two skeleton arms reaching out of the closet to sprinkle salt on feet, setting the scene for the age-old torture technique in which a prisoner’s feet were doused with salty water for a tethered, greedy goat to lick until the flesh wore away.

For Emily Sundblad, watercolors are for window gazing and longing for a tangle of sweaty limbs in a dark room somewhere. To picture Dolly Parton’s beehive, to get carried away by the jungle and the creatures that prowl there. She started working in watercolor because it fit into a life lived on the go, though the medium has accompanied her in recent months of stasis, rendering studied views of Stockholm’s rooftops from her window. Sundblad taps into the medium’s propensity to move between reality and fantasy, hovering somewhere between memory, imagination, postcard and portrait. These imagined club scenes continue a series of erotic drawings, which the artist has returned to since illustrating Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency with auto-erotica drawn with eyeliner on Colony Club stationary when she moved into the hotel during Hurricane Sandy. The stationary design becomes a part of the works themselves, a nod to Kippenberger and Salvo’s hotel drawings. What was a very real life of endless travel, close contact and sexy shared spaces assumed a dream-like quality in a world abruptly grinded to a halt. The watercolors manifest desire for a lifestyle that distance rendered increasingly radical and essential to the artist. She’d risk a lot for it.

What if you stayed still so long you turned into a tree? Like you’re waiting for a taxi, you want to catch a last-minute flight, but no car comes and planes aren’t flying and you can’t go anywhere so you start to sprout, grow roots. Life takes over. More water, less control. Urban Zellweger uses a lot of liquid in his watercolors on paper and to thin the paint in his works on canvas. His works carry their washedoutness with grace. Taking water as a subject matter as well, he imagines it as the source of transformations. Zellweger started working with tree imagery about a year ago. His trunks are usually in some stage of germination from humanness, still wearing jeans or a sweater like a vestige of a former state. For a while now, he has been interested in metamorphosis, through the classic transformative figure of the butterfly, for instance. A monsterish amphibian—possibly a rain frog—emerges from a slosh of blue-green like some sort of shapeshifting sea monster. In a collaboration in textile with artist and architect Ella Mathys, initiated with a curtain installation created last month, butterflies staccato paint washed fabrics.

Amelie von Wulffen’s watercolors cast foods and objects in petty human narratives. A melon lies on the sofa, knees knobby and lips thin, staring into space, while its partner chops charcuterie. A pair of sausages are couch shopping with a little one in toe, one leans over to stroke a ribbed green velvet couch as the other rolls its eyes. When New York painter Amy Sillman saw von Wulffen’s watercolors in 2011, she thought of them as “a lampoon of our failings.” Von Wulffen rakes up those everyday experiences of boredom, pride, irritation, staging them as scenes between lipsticks and a lighter or a pair of mushrooms. She proffers these interactions as the inevitable core of the bourgeois human experience. The shameful banality of bickering, the humiliation of being a body among bodies. Von Wulffen started working in comic-like pencil drawings around 2008, which inform this ongoing watercolor series, often confessing art world anxieties or acting out childhood memories.

David Weiss’ watercolors from 1978-79 offer a glimpse into his practice before his ongoing Fischli/Weiss collaboration. There was something about the medium that didn’t make sense to him in collaboration, like sculpture or video did. The Quiet Nights series, like the Blaue Stunde in light washed violet, orange, red, are like a love letter to the city at night. A series following the wanderings of a cartoonish flower figure enact his chafing at the conservatism of postwar Swiss society, as the flower-flâneur sprouts up in a variety of everyday scenes. In Die Funktion der falschen Gefühle (1), a flower with a maniacal grin leans over a picket fence typical of a suburban Swiss single-family home. It seems to personify the purpose of wrong feelings, as the title suggests, popping up out of painterly shrubs with crazy eyes, lusting for what lies beyond. Weiss was a part of a burgeoning bohemian movement within Switzerland’s rigid contours, living in a commune in Meret Oppenheim’s house in Ticino for much of the Seventies. Indeed the influence of Oppenheim’s surrealist compositions is also palpable in his works, as Weiss also draws upon the cartoonishness he admired in Philip Guston. Emily Sundblad calls his watercolors as good as The Velvet Underground’s first album, something that always makes her feel better. His watercolors have something of the feeling of a musical score, the energy of a quick and light notation. The melody chimes both somber and sunny.

Tenzing Barshee & Camila McHugh

Link: “Watercolour, Chapter I” at Weiss Falk

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/30h9XQ8

#micaramel

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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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Conceptual Art Wasn’t Meant to Be Collected, Now It Sells for Six-Figures

What does it mean to “own” a work of Conceptual art?

In 1970, the collecting couple Herb and Dorothy Vogel spent $250—roughly $1,667 in today’s dollars—on a work of art that can never be displayed, and, in some sense, never existed in the first place. Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery (1969) was a performance in which galleries in Amsterdam, Turin, and Los Angeles followed the artist’s instructions to close the gallery space for the duration of their respective Robert Barry shows. The only physical representations of the work were its certificate of authenticity and three copies of the invitation sent out to promote a show that never happened, which the Vogels received in turn for their money. The invitation simply says: “During the exhibition the gallery will be closed.”

Despite the fact that the work is not tangible, it was the cornerstone of the Vogels’ entire collection. In 1975, Herb Vogel told New York magazine of Closed Gallery, “We have without a doubt the greatest piece of conceptual art in the world.”

Wall Drawings #766 and #415 D , 1994. Sol LeWitt MASS MoCA

Conceptual art has thrilled and vexed collectors since it emerged in the 1960s, when a group of iconoclastic artists insisted that their work tackle the very questions of what art is, and what its relationship to the market should be. Since then, adventurous patrons have explored the commercial contours and philosophical questions around purchasing, often for large sums of money, the cerebral art these artists create.

“Conceptualists made few concessions to the practicalities of galleries, collectors or sales,” Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times, wrote in an essay on the topic in 1999. “They had almost ‘no stuff,’ in the words of an artist I know; that is, stuff to sell.”

And even if Conceptual artists profess a passionate desire to make anti-commercial work, they have found (and still typically need) some forward-thinking patrons to purchase it. How do these collectors address the practicalities of purchasing and living with a work of art—assembling a contract that ratifies the deal; holding onto the certificate that proves it is authentic; going through the process of storing the work and then installing it again; getting insurance that will protect in the event of an accident—when, oftentimes, the work in question is not visible to the naked eye?

Art in the service of the mind

Fountain, 1917/1964. Marcel Duchamp San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

The groundwork for Conceptual art was laid by Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, particularly Fountain (1917), the sculpture that he created by turning a urinal on its side, signing it with the pseudonym “R. Mutt,” and submitting it to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Though no work can be declined by the committee, the work caused such an uproar that the overseers decided to hide the work from view, saying in a statement: “Its place is not an art exhibition, and it is by no definition a work of art.” It was discussed in Dada publications in New York and Paris, but had little lasting effect until the 1950s, when Duchamp’s career roared back as Neo-Dada artists claimed him and the readymades as pivotal influences, and the impact of Fountain was cemented. (In 2004, a poll of 500 art experts commissioned by a sponsor of the Turner Prize named it the the most influential work of modern art ever made.)

The term “Conceptual art” was coined in the early 1950s by Edward Kienholz, a California-based pioneer of large-scale installations and a key figure in the Los Angeles art scene, according to Roberta Smith’s 1999 essay. He was also one of the so-called Neo-Dada artists who took up the baton from Duchamp in the 1950s. Throughout the 1960s, Kienholz developed a series of works he called “concept tableaux,” deemed as such because until they were purchased, they were not realized works. The ownership of the idea would be transferred to the buyer once the first transaction occurred, and then two more stages of payment would facilitate the creation of an actual object.

For instance, in 1965, Kienholz offered for sale a proposed work called The World (1964), a 15-by-40-foot tableau of 5-foot-thick concrete, to be placed in Hope, Idaho. There, visitors could write whatever phrase they would like—“The Fuck You’s will have to stand with the Jesus Saves,” Kienholz wrote in the description of the work—and when the top gets completely covered in writing, another slab would be placed on top. The price is $10,000 for the idea ($80,771 in today’s currency), which can be sold on the secondary market as the new owners sees fit. The price for a full sketch of the project beyond the text description would be $1,000, and then the actual construction would be simply the cost of materials and wages for the artists.

One and three Rakes, 1965. Joseph Kosuth Lia Rumma

The bottom of the description contains the note that “The State o’ Idaho is vaguely interested in this tableau and may eventually maintain and expand it to a state project,” but it never sold to Idaho, or anyone—in fact, one of the few “concept tableaux” to sell as an idea, and the only one to be fully planned and constructed during the 1960s, is The State Hospital (1966), which was purchased as an idea by Pontus Hultén, the pioneering director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and later the founding director of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Once finished, The State Hospital consisted of two figures on stained bunk beds, their bodies pus-yellow, topped with heads made from goldfish bowls, black fish swimming in their skulls.

These few sales of mostly unrealized ideas were more than many of the early Conceptualists could pull off—buyers were not quite ready to pay serious money for work that so flagrantly questioned whether it could be considered art. Joseph Kosuth did more that most artists to establish Conceptual art as a legitimate enterprise, especially through his groundbreaking One and Three Chairs (1965), which consisted of a picture of a chair, the chair itself, and text on the wall with the definition of the word “chair.” Though it is now in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, Kosuth struggled to find buyers in the early days—and that was exactly the point. In his book Art of the Deal, Noah Horowitz argues that because Conceptual art is commenting on the nature of production—he calls it “art about the system of art making”—it is “deprivileging” art, aligning itself with a Marxist critique of consumer culture. But its success as an anti-capitalist gesture depends on it being genuinely unsellable.

This attitude comes across in a catalogue essay for a show at Castelli Gallery in 2015, when Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, the gallery’s director who took over when her late husband Leo Castelli died in 1999, asked Kosuth about the desired market for his early Conceptual works.

“It never even entered my mind that somebody would buy these works,” Kosuth said.

They present no storage problems

But by the mid-1970s, collectors were already trying to buy the works, and artists were finding ways to sell them, anti-capitalist gestures be damned. Horowitz cites the art critic Lucy Lippard’s landmark book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, which contains a postscript written at the time of its publication in 1973 that examines how much has changed since she started chronicling the Conceptualists in the mid-1960s.

“Hopes that ‘conceptual art’ would be able to avoid the general commercialization…were for the most part unfounded,” Lippard wrote. “The major conceptualists are selling major work here and in Europe; they are represented by (and still more unexpected—showing in) the world’s most prestigious galleries.”

By the 1980s, the market for these works had grown enough for Christie’s to hold an auction of 48 items from the collection of the Gilman Paper Company in 1987, which included a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, Ten Thousand Lines About 10 Inches (25 cm.) Long, Covering a Wall Evenly (1971). It was the first time a work of Conceptual art had ever been sold at auction, and the highest bidder would win the right to reproduce the work in the location of their choosing. Beyond that concept, it would not claim much else.

Installation view of work by Darren Bader in “E/either e/Either n/Neither N/neither” at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, 2018. Photo by EPW Studio/ Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

“This is the first time we will auction a work of art that cannot be taken away in a truck or under the buyer’s arm,” Martha Baer, who was then the head of the contemporary art department at Christie’s, told the New York Times.

As Lippard documented, there was a growing market for Conceptual work. The dealer John Weber had managed to successfully make careers for artists such as LeWitt by selling them out of his SoHo gallery at 420 West Broadway. He told the Times that institutions had been buying them up, and perhaps not just because of their historical import.

“Museums love them—when they are not on view, they present no storage problems,” Weber said. “The artwork consists in terms of instructions in a drawer.”

Weber mentioned that wall drawings sold for around $2,800 in the late 1960s. By May 1987, the first one at auction sold to dealer David McKee for $26,400—prompting People magazine to write snarkily about the intangible nature of what McKee had bought: “Just what it was he had, to Philistines in such matters, was less than clear.…He doesn’t seem concerned about the possibility that it might get stolen.”

Back Seat Dodge '38, 1964. Edward Kienholz "Los Angeles to New York: The Dwan Gallery, 1959-1971" at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Fast forward to 2012, when Puerto Rican collector Roderic Steinkamp alleged that, in fact, a LeWitt wall painting was lost. Steinkamp sued the Chicago dealer Rhona Hoffman for a total of $1.4 million in the New York State Supreme Court, alleging that she had lost a certificate of authenticity for a LeWitt wall painting that he consigned to her in 2008. Such certificates can’t simply be reissued, as Susanna Singer, an advisor to the LeWitt estate, told Hyperallergic. “We don’t give duplicates,” she said. “We don’t want two certificates out there, raising the question of which is the real one.” And because Rhona Hoffman’s insurance company refused to cover the disappearance, Steinkamp had no option but to sue to recover the amount the work—the certificate—could have been sold for elsewhere. “Since the wall drawings do not constitute freestanding, portable works of art like a framed canvas or a sculpture on a podium, documentation of the work is key to transmitting it or selling it to a collector or institution,” Steinkamp said in the complaint. The two parties arrived at an settlement for an undisclosed amount weeks after the suit was filed.

In 2015, the insurance company Crystal & Co. teamed up with AIG Private Client Group to create a division that would specialize in protecting works of Conceptual art, further encouraging clients to treat Conceptual art as a valuable, tangible asset, and not the radical, anti-commercial worth its creators intended it to have.

“Since a piece of paper is often the only document essentially giving value to a work of conceptual art, we wanted to find a way to protect our clients’ investments even if something happens to their certificate,” Jonathan Crystal, executive vice president of Crystal & Co, told Insurance Journal.

Auctioning $16,000 for $19,000

Original Drawing: Lines in Four Different Directions, 1983. Sol LeWitt Alpha 137 Gallery

Since the mid-2000s, a new batch of Conceptual artists are going further than their predecessors, investigating the existential nature of buying and selling an object that may or may not be a work of art. One example is New York-based artist Darren Bader, who—through sculptures, installations, performances, net art, social experiments, and text works—has created a ongoing narrative that explores and critiques what it means to sell Conceptual art in a gallery.

One taste of his gleeful but trenchant commentary can be found in his 2015 book77 and/or 58 and/with 19, which is described as certificates for work. Some include works—which are, as is customary for Bader, undated—that are exactly what they sound like: pizza with earring(s), person sitting in passenger seat of car, and chicken burrito, beef burrito, which was shown in an exhibition of Bader’s work at MoMA PS1. One work, lasagna on heroin, is also purportedly what it says it is—a brick of lasagna with heroin injected into it—and caused quite the stir when it was unveiled as part of Bader’s solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, his London gallery, in 2012. With such works, collectors are buying the instructions on how to install the work, and not the physical manifestation that was encountered in an art fair or a gallery or Bader’s imagination—for instance, the lucky owner of chicken burrito, beef burrito does not own the actual two burritos that were cuddling next to each other on a windowsill at PS1. The owner just has the right to install the work as they so please.

Darren Bader, lasagna on heroin, 2012. © Darren Bader. Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London.

There is a thread through his practice when Bader is selling a physical object—when he is selling monetary currency as a readymade. Two examples of such works are 11.62 Euros—“The work is 11.62 Euros. The work can be kept/taken/destroyed/used/ found/forgotten anywhere,” the description reads—and ___GBP, the performative work where Bader set up an Indiegogo account and asked people to donate what they wanted, and the day after the donation period ended, he would auction off the amount raised at the post-war and contemporary art day auction at Christie’s in February 2015, with the proceeds going to a number of charities.

Just under £10,322 ($15,857) was raised during the donation period, which was subsequently offered as a lot in the sale, the money now a work by Darren Bader. At auction, a bidder paid £12,500 ($19,203) for it—again, for £10,322.

Video works such as 3.95,3.985(,5),7 and Sculpture #4 deal directly with the absurdity of the market by discussing scenarios in which hollow sculptures filled with trash could increase in value on the secondary market. In a recent profile of Bader in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, the writer Nikil Saval described the generational roots of Bader’s multifaceted practice: “Bader came of age as the art world was reaching its commercial peak, and his contribution to this history is to commodify conceptual art itself—some of his work is only complete once it is bought.”

Tino Sehgal is also of this new generation of Conceptual artists, but instead of creating vast amounts of work across media like Bader does, his work only exists in dance performances or a series of gestures, and can never be photographed or shot on video—the only person who has the right to perform it is the artist, and it can never be documented anywhere but in memories. No ephemera exists—there are no certificates of authenticity and no contracts, and once someone does decide to buy a work, a notary finds the new owner to hash out the details in person to avoid a paper trail. But despite making work that is is anti-commercial to its core, Sehgal has become a celebrated artist who is represented by the mega-gallery Marian Goodman, and has sold works for as much as $70,000 to MoMA.

Sehgal admits that buying intangible art about the intangibility of art is not everyone’s cup of tea. Asked about the patrons and collectors who support his work, Sehgal told W magazine: “I don’t have that many of them.”

“The people who are interested in my work,” he said, “they’re quite far-out.”

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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sentrava · 7 years ago

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What’s On in Stockholm: March 2018

Although we always aspire to celebrate the women in our lives, March is Women’s History Month, and Stockholm is definitely making the most of it, including specific International Women’s Day celebrations on March 8th. Of course, there are plenty of other events to choose from, from festivals to markets.

Here’s what’s happening in Stockholm, Sweden, during March 2018, including all the best exhibitions, concerts and films:

Friday 2nd March

Afrofutures at CinemAfrica

CinemAfrica’s film festival events began in February, and now they’re (thankfully) rolling into March. This particular event will show three short films: Afro Punk Girl, They Charge for the Sun, and See You Yesterday. All three films are in English.

Friday 2nd – Sunday 4th March

DecentBangla Pop-up

Enjoy a glass of cava while appreciating the organic and fair trade fashion of DecentBangla, a collaboration between Sweden and Bangladesh.

Saturday 3rd – Thursday 8th March

Who Likes Me? at Galleri T

Nora Farah is displaying her work in Sweden for the first time. The theme of her exhibit falls perfectly in line with International Women’s Day: women’s perception of themselves.

Saturday 3rd March

Kendrick Lamar at Ericsson Globe

Kendrick Lamar is on tour in Stockholm. Need we say more? James Blake (who is also credited as a writer and producer on Kendrick’s song “ELEMENT”) will open. Double yes!

Stockholm Carnival Party at Münchenbryggeriet

Join the 25th annual Carnival party – 4 dance floors, 100 artists, 10 DJs – it’s going to be a wild night! Don’t miss the Brazilian style food available. Tickets are 330 SEK, or 350 SEK at the door.

Sunday 4th March

Feminist Market at Nalen

Nalen kicks off International Women’s Week Sunday with a market and entrance is free. Over 50 female designers will be selling their artwork, and Ida Östensson, founder of FATTA!, will speak. Check out @feministiskmarknad on instagram for a sneak peak of items for sale.

Wednesday 7th – Thursday 8th March

Female Legends Women’s Day Celebration

During this 24-hour event, women will discuss issues within gaming and tech, and will take part in competitive gaming. The event will be live-streamed, and benefits will go to Save the Children.

Thursday 8th March

Bangs March 8 Party at Nalen

Nalen and Bang magazine are hosting a Women’s Day celebration for the 15th year in a row. Award winning poetry will be presented, JUCK dance group will perform, as well as Beatrice Eli! Dancing will follow the performances. Tickets range from 195 to 349 SEK – check out the website to decide which ticket is right for you.

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Friday 9th – Sunday 11th March

Photo Exhibition at Fotomassan

For those interested in photography, this is a place to find inspiration! There will be seminars, image shows, and product information at this fair. An entrance ticket to the Photo Exhibition will also give you entrance to the Lake and the Explore Exhibitions.

Friday 9th March

‘Strophe, a Turning’ at Moderna Museet

Enjoy a screening of Ellie Ga’s film, Strophe, a Turning, with Ellie Ga herself. This film was inspired by her interest in how drifting objects have helped to chart sea movement. After the film (which is in English), Ga will speak. Tickets are 65 SEK for non-members, and 45 SEK for members of the Modern Museum.

The Chainsmokers at Tele2 Arena

These two continuously make fun bouncy beats, so this concert may end up being equal part club (fine by us!).

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Wednesday 14th March

8 Hours for Syria

War Child presents 8 Hours for Syria to highlight children’s situations during the 8 years of war in Syria. The events of the day will be live-streamed through their Facebook page, where you can also donate to War Child to help Syrian children. The day will conclude with a concert at Under Bron with Omar Souleyman. Ticket proceeds for the concert will go to War Child’s projects.

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Wednesday 14th, Wednesday 21st, and Wednesday 28th March

Dance Life Drawing at Dansmuseet

This isn’t your ordinary drawing class: these models are dancers! Different types of dance will be performed each week, and you are encouraged to draw the models in motion. Beginners and experienced drawers alike are welcome. Price of admission is 120 SEK. Be sure to bring your own materials.

Thursday 15th – Sunday 18th March

Portuguese Film Festival at Kulturhuset

Frames on Women, the 5th edition of the Frames Portuguese film festival, focuses on the representation and visibility of women in cinema. The festival kicks off with an opening concert by Luísa Sobral on Thursday, and Friday begins a weekend of films (either in or subtitled in English). You can purchase individual screening tickets beginning 1st March, or purchase a festival pass for 400 SEK.

Friday 16th – Saturday 17th March

Stockholm’s New Beer and Whiskey Fair

Wine tastings are great but sometimes you’ve got to switch it up! At this fair, you can enjoy samples of beer and whiskey. You’ll also find food, cigars, chocolates and more for sale. Tickets for this fair are between 250 and 295 SEK; entrance fee does not include coupons for drink samples.

Saturday 17th March

St. Patrick’s Day Parade

Gather in Kungsträdgården for face-painting, competitions and more to get into the festive spirit for St. Patrick’s Day. Then follow St. Patrick, Irish wolfhounds and the Stockholm Pipe Band as they parade to Kornhamnstorg for music and dancing. The planned route this year will be shorter than in years past, so be sure to check out the website even if you’ve attended previously.

Tuesday 20th March

Bahamas at Obaren

Bahamas is a Canadian musician; he has previously worked with musicians such as The Lumineers, Feist, and Jack Johnson. He will be performing for free at one of our favorite hip spots: Obaren.

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Wednesday 21st – Thursday 22nd March

Again at Dansenhus

Ina Christel Johannessen, one of Norway’s most renowned choreographers, and composer Marcus Fjellström, bring the performance “Again” to Stockholm. The dance uses repetition to investigate our thoughts of the world and existence. Tickets range from about 150 SEK to 300 SEK.

Thursday 22nd – Sunday 25th March

Sweden’s Short Film Festival at Bio Rio

The theme of this year’s short film festival is Identity. The festival includes screenings, talks, and a party. The program will be available in early March, after the best non-commercial short films are nominated, so stay tuned to their website for further information!

Friday 23rd March

English Comedy Night at Stockholm Comedy Club

Snatch up the English comedy when you can! Comedian Ben Richards is the headliner on this show; several others will also perform. Tickets are 200 SEK, plus additional cost if you choose to eat dinner or have snacks there.

Saturday 24th March

Feminist Spring Market in Södra Latin

The Leopard Förlag Feminist Autumn Market drew in over 4,000 visitors last year, and this spring will be even bigger. Entrance to the market is free; inside, you will find vendors selling everything from clothes to jewelry to furnishing. You’ll also be able to get a tattoo or haircut; very full service!

Popaganda Spring Party at Färgfabriken

It’s the first Popaganda event of the season and you don’t want to miss it! There will be two different scenes, multiple artists, including Hurula and Pale Honey, and DJs. The entrance fee is 325 SEK.

WALK THE MOON at Fryshuset

We are glad to see that the members of WALK THE MOON found their way back to each other to produce their fourth album, What If Nothing. From “Shut Up and Dance” to “Kamikaze,” this band certainly put “One Foot” in front of the other to reunite after a forced break back in 2016.

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Friday 30th March

Arton.STHLM Spring Clean Swap Shop at Sickla Kanalgata 77

We LOVE this idea. Gather up all of the things you don’t wear anymore (clothes, shoes, jewelry) and bring them here so someone else can appreciate them. Then, bring home some new-to-you items! Fashion sustainability is always in style.

Ongoing in March

The Nutcracker Reloaded at Dansens Hus

The holiday classic is great. Now add breakdancing and hip-hop? Even better. Tickets for this dance show are selling out quickly so we clearly aren’t the only one excited for it! The show premiers 2nd March and concludes 18th March.

Spring Salon 2018 at Liljevalchs

A collection of 131 pieces, from young and old, from professionals to amateurs! This art exhibit contains paintings, drawings, sculptures, graphics, and textiles, all of which are for sale. It will be open until 25th March; entrance fee is 40 SEK, and free on Mondays!

Under the Surface at Spiritmuseum

This exhibit showcases a darker side of glass artist Bertil Vallien’s work. The exhibit is leaving Spiritmuseum 1st of April. Tickets to the museum are 120 SEK for adults.

If you’re a business or organisation that would like us to add your event to next month’s calendar, please contact us at hello [@] scandinaviastandard [dot] com. Thank you!

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finalcreativeprojectdigitalmedia · 7 years ago

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Yayoi Kusama – Artist

Yayoi Kusama (Kusama Yayoi, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.

Raised in Matsumoto, Kusama trained at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. Kusama was inspired, however, by American Abstract Impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. Since the 1970s, Kusama has continued to create art, most notably installations in various museums around the world.

Yayoi Kusama’s wide ranging practice reflects a lifelong preoccupation with the infinite and sublime, as well as the twin themes of cosmic infinity and she has developed a practice, which, though it shares affiliations with Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop art, Eccentric Abstraction, the Zero and Nul movements, distilled within the important, ongoing My Eternal Soulseries are the themes and obsessions that characterise Kusama’s art, encapsulating a surreal and humorous, each new work of the My Eternal Soul series abounds with imagery. Some appear psychedelically primordial, other examples bring to mind ancient. The fundamental tenets of Kusama’s art – the ultimate, immersive expression of her lifelong exploration of infinity, illusion, self-obliteration and repetition – are unmistakable in the “all-over” quality of her Infinity Nets. Forging a path between abstract expressionism and minimalism, Kusama first showed her white Infinity Nets in the late 1950s to critical acclaim. She continues to develop their possibilities in restlessly beautiful works. The pumpkin occupies a special place in her iconography and is a motif she has returned to repeatedly throughout her career. Kusama has described her images of them as a form of self-portraiture. Created for her 2016 Victoria Miro exhibition, All the Love I Have for the Pumpkins is a centrepiece of the major exhibition focusing on Kusama's immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms, touring North America in 2017 and 2018. Originating in 1966, when Kusama first participated, albeit unofficially, in the Venice Biennale, Narcissus Garden comprises mirrored spheres displayed en masse

Kusama’s extraordinary artistic endeavours have spanned painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and immeasurable yet intimate, Kusama’s art may possess a kind of universal language but it speaks to us one by one. Pictured: Infinity Mirror Room – Filled with the over the past five years there have been museum exhibitions of Kusama’s work touring the world in Japan, Korea, China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, England, France, North America and Scandinavia. In 2016, Kusama received the Order of Culture, one of the highest honours in Japan. She was also selected as one of TIME Magazine’s World’s 100 Most Influential People and named Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, the first major survey of Kusama’s work in Southeast Asia, opened at National Gallery Singapore in June 2017. In 2017, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the most significant North American touring exhibition of Kusama’s work in two decades, opened at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. On 1 October 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo with the exhibition Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art. Opening displays at the Yayoi Kusama Museum include works from the My Eternal Soul and Love Forever series and the mirror installation Pumpkins.

For almost seventy years Yayoi Kusama has developed a practice, which, though it shares affiliations with Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop art, Eccentric Abstraction, the Zero and Nul movements, resists any singular classification. Born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929, she studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in the late 1950s, and by the mid-1960s had become well known in the avant-garde world for her provocative happenings and exhibitions. Since this time, Kusama's extraordinary artistic endeavours have spanned painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and environmental art as well as literature, fashion (most notably in her 2012 collaboration with Louis Vuitton) and product design.

An enduring feature of Kusama's unique art is the intricate lattice of paint that covers the surface of her Infinity Net canvases, the negative spaces between the individual loops of these all-over patterns emerging as delicate polka dots. These motifs have their roots in hallucinations from which she has suffered since childhood, in which the world appears to her to be covered with proliferating forms. Forging a path between abstract expressionism and minimalism, Kusama first showed her white Infinity Nets in New York in the late 1950s to critical acclaim. She continues to develop their possibilities in monochromatic works which are covered with undulating meshes that seem to fluctuate and dissolve as the viewer moves around them.

Another key motif is the pumpkin form, which has achieved an almost mythical status in Kusama’s art since the late 1940s. Coming from a family that made its living cultivating plant seeds, Kusama was familiar with the kabocha squash in the fields that surrounded her childhood home and the pumpkin continues to occupy a special place in her iconography. She has described her images of them as a form of self-portraiture.

From these to Accumulation sculptures, where everyday objects are made uncanny with a covering of soft-sculpture phallic forms or dried macaroni, to monumental outdoor sculptures and installations, such as Narcissus Garden, originating in 1966 when Kusama first participated in the Venice Biennale, and to the entrancing illusions of recent experiential mirrored room installations, Kusama's work is far-reaching, expansive and immersive. Simultaneously infinitesimal and unlimited in scale, immeasurable yet intimate, it allows the viewer to enter into a fully realised world.

It is with characteristic dynamism that Kusama’s My Eternal Soul series, first began in 2009, has grown far in excess of the hundred works originally conceived by the artist. Distilled within the My Eternal Soul paintings are the themes and obsessions that characterise Kusama’s art, encapsulating a surreal and humorous, as well as instinctual approach to art making. Each new work of the ongoing series abounds with imagery including eyes, faces in profile and other more indeterminate forms recalling cell structures, often in pulsating combinations of colour. Some appear psychedelically primordial, other examples bring to mind ancient landscapes and grand geological patterns. This is Kusama, a pioneer in her command of a variety of media, at her most personal and direct, relying on brush, paint and canvas alone. They reveal an artist overflowing with ideas and undiminished in her desire to depict the apparently contradictory, unpredictable and undepictable, well into her ninth decade.

Over the past five years there have been museum exhibitions of Kusama’s work touring the world in Japan, Korea, China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, England, France, North America, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. In 2016 Kusama was selected as one of TIME Magazine’s World’s 100 Most Influential People. She was also recently named the world’s most popular artist by various news outlets, based on figures reported by The Art Newspaper for global museum attendance. In 2016, Kusama received the Order of Culture, one of the highest honours bestowed by the Imperial Family. Kusama is the first woman to be honored with the prestigious medal for drawings and sculptures.

Kusama represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, and currently lives and works in Tokyo, where the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened October 2017 with the inaugural exhibition Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art.

A major exhibition focusing on the evolution of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms tours the US throughout 2017 to 2019. The most significant North American tour of Kusama’s work in nearly two decades began at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (23 February - 14 May 2017), travelling to Seattle Art Museum (30 June - 10 September 2017), The Broad, Los Angeles (October 2017 - January 2018), Art Gallery of Ontario (March - May 2018), Cleveland Museum of Art (July - October 2018) and The High Museum of Art, Atlanta (November 2018 - February 2019).

Further current and recent major international touring exhibitions include Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, National Gallery of Singapore (2017); travelling to Queensland Art Gallery - Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2017 - 2018), and Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity, which travelled from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, (2015 - 2016) to Henie Onstad Kunstcenter, Oslo (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016) and Helsinki Art Museum (2016 - 2017). Kusama Yayoi: A Dream I Dreamed was first presented at the Daegu Art Musuem, Korea (2013) and travelled subsequently to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2013 - 2014); Seoul Arts Centre, Korea (2014); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2015); and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2015). The widely acclaimed Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession toured from 2013 to 2015 at the South American institutional venues Malba - Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires (2013); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília (2013 - 2014); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2014); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2014 - 2015) and Fundación CorpArtes, Santiago (2015). Previously, from 2012 to 2014 the large-scale exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Eternity of Eternal Eternity was staged in museums in Japan including The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museum of Modern Art, Saitama; Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Matsumoto; Niigata City Art Museum, Niigata; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka; Oita Art Museum, Oita; The Museum of Art, Kochi; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto; Akita Senshu Museum of Art & A Akita Museum of Modern Art and Matsuzakaya Museum, Nagoya. A touring retrospective of the artist's work was presented from 2011 - 2012 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Previous significant surveys include Mirrored Years, which travelled from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand from 2008 - 2009. Yayoi Kusama: Eternity-Modernity was presented at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2004), and The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (2005).

Yayoi Kusama had her exhibtion in Tate Modern. The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama's life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as 'Accumulations', to her 'Infinity Net' paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

At the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her identity as an 'outsider' in many contexts – as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan's most prominent contemporary artist.

This is a varied, spectacular exhibition of a truly unique artist. There has never been an exhibition of this size of her work in the UK and this is an unmissable opportunity for both Kusama fans and those new to her work.

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gr-und-blog · 7 years ago

Photo

Dark_Side of the Tour

Opening Sat Oct 28th 7-10pm (live performance 8pm)

Closing Fri Nov 17th 7-10pm (with live set)

Exhibition from Oct 29th - Nov 17th

Opening hours Thursday-Saturday 4-7pm

With

Installations

Jia-Jen Lin

Scott Sinclair

Live performances

curated by Agnieszka Szablikowska of Raczej Gallery

Mikołaj Tkacz

Łukasz Trusewicz

CHCE (eng. WANT / WISH / FANCY) - Olga Dziubak & Barbara Gryka

Bad signals. Disconnected memories. Pixelated images form into nightmares and lead us to explore the dark side of our unconscious. An invitation to bifurcations inside the unknown.

Why not take an alternative sightseeing tour to find the border of the end of Knowingness and transform that path into an irreplaceable sensory experience?

Rays of light illuminate distinct complementary perspectives along a spatial Bokeh. Transparency brings lives together like seasonal souvenirs, waiting to be brought to intimacy.

Jia-Jen Lin

http://jiajenlin.info/

Jia-Jen Lin creates images of the human body and its surroundings as a reflection of our psyche. Drawing from personal experience and observations, Lin uses sculpture integrated with photography, video, and performance to portray the ongoing negotiation between our latent desires and the manipulated realities in which we find ourselves. Hybrid cultures, shifting identities, and the relationships between our physicality and psychology are subjects Lin has investigated since 2004. Her recent projects explore humanity’s experience of displacement, self-consciousness and loss and how memories change with modified experience and new events.

Jia-Jen Lin is a Taiwanese artist based in New York. Lin attended National Taiwan Normal University for a BFA in Western Painting and received her MFA in sculpture, installation, and multimedia from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has participated in artist residencies at International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; L’Estruch, Spain; Water Mill Center, New York; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Nebraska; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Exhibitions include Queens International 4, Queens Museum; Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale, South Korea; Young Artist Discovery, Art Taipei; and Manufractura, Hangar Art, Barcelona. She has received grants from Brooklyn Arts Council, Sculpture Space, Franconia Sculpture Park, National Culture and Arts Foundation of Taiwan, and Ministry of Culture of Taiwan.

Scott Sinclair

http://www.halftheory.com/

Scott Sinclair is an audiovisual artist working in sound, video, performance, and installation. Using a highly interdisciplinary approach, Scott creates brutalist and humorous collages of audiovisual media incorporating elements such as computer music, cracked video art, found objects, custom-made costumes, and improvised performance. His work is often concerned with the over-stimulation of these elements to bring about states of intensified noise delirium.

As a performer, Scott is known for his highly energetic and unpredictable performances which are often equal parts brutal avant-garde and equal parts low-brow trash. His concerts have found audiences on many tours in Europe, Australia, Japan, Russia, and North America. Scott currently performs in the audiovisual groups Botborg and The Superusers, and his solo noise-karaoke project Company Fuck.

He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Mikołaj Tkacz

https://www.facebook.com/zespolWSZYSTKO/

https://vimeo.com/nikolaitkacz

Mikołaj Tkacz born in 1991 in Poznań. For years he was focusing on drawing comics, but later he started making music and experimental films. In his works he is focusing mainly on exercising narration and telling about things using abstract means of expression and humor. Poetic of his early works is well described a comic book „Nobody’s Adventures” in which the viewer goes through the empty rooms by 40 pages. In last years Mikołaj focused on musical project EVERYTHING in which he is concentrating to put everything in fact.

Now he is working on rap album called „Pro-nothing” and he is ending recording dance album „I am dancing for myself”. Moreover, he is working now on a concept of his project in which he will be making „exhibitions by chance”.

Łukasz Trusewicz

https://trusewiczlukasz.wordpress.com/

B. 1984. He graduated from the faculty of Sculpture and Performing Art on University or Arts in Poznan. Combines his sculptural practice with ephemeral potential resulting from the experience of performance art. Interested in both the role of the group and the individual spectator in the process of shaping an artistic action or object and the issues of social reception of art. Author of the projects created with the involvement of local communities - sculptures, objects, performative installations, urban interventions. In performance activities he mostly analyses the specific contexts of a chosen space. He refers to its social and urban problems or to local potential of historical memory. The artist is also a creator of cultural and social projects. He’s originator of the initiative of the Open Zone of Culture in Poznan whose aim is to create a cultural - artistic district in the Łazarz neighborhood of Poznań using the local potential of the space and cooperation with other initiatives, and in addition the city dwellers and the authorities. Author of international social sculpture project - babelproject.eu. He is also the originator and one of the curators of the Raczej Gallery & Perfex in Poznań - which presents and promotes performance art through local and international contacts. Board president of the Open Zone of Culture Foundation.

Chosen artistic activities: Iamesh Ephemeral Art Meeting, Księgarnia/Wystawa, Cracow, Poland, 2016; Supermarket Independent Art Fair, Stockholm 2016; solo show, City Art Gallery in Kalisz, Kalisz 2015; PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL MALAMUT, Ostrava, Czech Republic, 2015; PERFO! , Haihara Art Centre , Tampere Finland 2015; performance Skål, Performance Art Links Stockholm , PALS Play Tag Part1, Stockholm Sweden 2015; Month of Performance Art Berlin, 2013-15, PAO Festival 2014, Oslo, Norwey 2014, Body Plasticity Live Art Exhibitio, Beijing, China 2014.

CHCE (eng. WANT / WISH / FANCY)

Olga Dziubak & Barbara Gryka

https://www.facebook.com/chcechcechce

https://chceteam.tumblr.com/

Olga Dziubak

https://olgadziubak.tumblr.com/

Barbara Gryka

https://vimeo.com/user46598732

Performance art team CHCE is founded by two female polish emerging artists. At July of 2016 Olga Dziubak and Barbara Gryka met each other in the apartment at Czerniakowska Street in Warsaw. Their friendship from high school and love for performance art is appeared. Using a thread is connected those two personalities in performance art. CHCE use new media, the aesthetics of pop culture and contemporary ways of communication. CHCE team wants to create something more than visual image. Artists are focused on critical view for communication tools and cameras in the contemporary society. Olga and Barbara mostly spend time together online. They talk about position of young artist in the art world and function of art institutions at these times. CHCE dreams of better prosper of artists in the society.

Olga Dziubak currently lives and works in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She graduated on MA in Multimedia Art in Art Academy in Szczecin and BA on Painting in University of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland.

Barbara Gryka based Warsaw, Poland. She study on 2nd year on MA in New Media Art in Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw.

Performance program curated by Agnieszka Szablikowska of Raczej Gallery

Raczej Gallery

https://galeriaraczej.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/galeria.raczej

Raczej Gallery is an independent Gallery founded in 2011 in Poznan, Poland. From the beginning we’re focused on the promotion of the performance art. We mainly present the actions of young artists as well as renowned performers. Significant for us is to show the diversity of ephemeral arts. Within 6 year we presented about one hundred artists from all around the world, both in Poznan and abroad (as a part of international co-production projects.) We collaborated among others with Month of Performance Art in Berlin, Supermarket Independent Art Fairs in Stockholm, Performance Art Oslo, Performance Art Stockholm and a lot of other organizations. We organize performances, workshops, talks, festivals, concerts etc.

From 2014 Gallery have a new bigger space (Perfex) in Poznan and from 2016 has been developing its residency program by inviting artists to live in gallery’s new residency space and to create projects based on longer stays. Curators and founders of the Gallery (Agnieszka Szablikowska – Trusewicz & Łukasz Trusewicz) are also creators of ‘Open zone of the Culture” in Lazarus district in Poznan – an initiative focused on collaboration of different organizations in aim to create a cultural district.

Agnieszka Szablikowska - Trusewicz

Graduated from the Poznan University of Art (Specialty: Criticism and Art Promotion). She is a co-founder, coordinator and curator at the Raczej Gallery in Poznan. She also organized projects that resulted in Poznan new performance space – Perfex which is now a space of gallery Raczej events. Activities of Raczej Gallery are also connected to the local context with Artists in Residency program - invited artists live and create in urban areas of Łazarz district. She co-curated international projects as a part of Month of Performance Art 2014-2015 in Berlin, Performance Art Oslo Festival 2014, Performance Art Lin Stockholm in Fylkingen, Stockholm. She is one of the initiators and main coordinator of the Open Zone of Culture in Poznan as well the Vice President of the Open Zone of Culture Foundation. From 2015 she is involved in developing Pireus – Incubator of Culture in Poznan created as part of cross-sectoral cooperation, where currently she works as a coordinator of events.

She is interested in performance art especially in the context of public space and in revitalization through cultural activities especially created in collaboration with local communities.

https://www.facebook.com/galeria.raczej

https://www.facebook.com/otwarta.strefa

Project sponsored by the city of Poznan.

gr_und

Seestrasse 49, 13347 Berlin-Wedding

FB Event

#Jia-Jen Lin #scott sainclair #Raczej Gallery #Agnieszka Szablikowska - Trusewicz #Barbara Gryka #CHCE #Łukasz Trusewicz #Mikołaj Tkacz #gr_und

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niklasblomkvistartworks · 5 years ago

Photo

Installation view Orlando

Galleri Nordostpassagen Stockholm

February 2020

#art stockholm gallery exhibition painting drawing objects sculpture

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arthisour-blog · 8 years ago

Photo

Nationalmuseum is the national gallery of Sweden, located on the peninsula Blasieholmen in central Stockholm.

The museum’s benefactors include King Gustav III and Carl Gustaf Tessin. The museum was founded in 1792 as Kungliga Museet (“Royal Museum”), but the present building was opened in 1866, when it was renamed the Nationalmuseum, and used as one of the buildings to hold the 1866 General Industrial Exposition of Stockholm.

The museum is home to about half a million drawings from the Middle Ages to 1900, prominent Rembrandt and Dutch 17th-century collection, and a collection of porcelain items, paintings, sculptures, and modern art as well. The museum also has an art library, open to the public and academics alike.

The current building, built between 1844 and 1866, was inspired by North Italian Renaissance architecture. It is the design of the German architect Friedrich August Stüler, who also designed the Neues Museum in Berlin. The relatively closed exterior, save for the central entrance, gives no hint of the spacious interior dominated by the huge flight of stairs leading up to the topmost galleries. The museum was enlarged in 1961 to accommodate the museum workshops. The present restaurant was instated in 1996. The museum building closed for renovation in 2013 and is scheduled to reopen in 2018.

Nationalmuseum is Sweden’s premier museum of art and design. The collections comprise older paintings, sculpture, drawings and graphic art, and applied art and design up to the present day.

The museum building is currently under renovation and scheduled to open again in 2018. In the meantime, the museum will continue its activities through collaborations, touring exhibitions and a temporary venues.

Paintings and sculpture The Nationalmuseum collections of paintings and sculptures comprise some 16,000 works. Artists such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Renoir, Degas and Gauguin are represented, as are the Swedish artists Carl Larsson, Ernst Josephson, Carl Fredrik Hill and Anders Zorn. The collection includes art from the late Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 20th century, with the emphasis on Swedish 18th and 19th century painting. Dutch painting from the 17th century is also well represented, and the French 18th century collection is regarded as one of the best in the world.

Design and Applied Arts The museum’s collection of applied art, design and industrial design spans over a long period, from the 14th century to today. It consists of ca. 30,000 objects of which a third are ceramics and thereafter, in order of numbers, textiles, glass, precious and non-precious metals, furniture, books etc. Form and artistic value are the basic criteria for museum acquisitions. Pieces from Sweden and the other Nordic countries are given priority, but even other countries are represented, especially those that have been significant for design development.

Prints and drawings The collection of Prints and Drawings comprises about 500,000 items from late medieval times up to the year 1900. Central to the collections are in excess of 2,000 master drawings that Carl Gustaf Tessin acquired during his tour of duty as Sweden’s ambassador to France. Of particular importance are collections of works by Rembrandt, Watteau, Edouard Manet, Johan Tobias Sergel, Carl Larsson, Carl Fredrik Hill and Ernst Josephson.

National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Castles Collections From the beginning the Royal Castles Collections consisted, as appears from the name, of the parts of the art collections of the royal pleasure-palaces which were owned by the State. Today the Royal Castles Collections at the Nationalmuseum administer the majority of the paintings, drawings, engravings, and sculptures existing in five of the royal pleasure-palaces, i.e. Gripsholm, Drottningholm, Stromsholm, Rosersberg and Ulriksdal.The largest collection is the National Portrait Gallery founded in 1822 at the Gripsholm Castle which today includes 4,000 works of art. Gradually, the area of responsibility of the Royal Castles Collections has been extended and now comprises 18 palaces, manors and other units.

The Gustavsberg Porcelain Collection The Gustavsberg Porcelain Collection consists of approximately 35,000 objects, manufactured at the Gustavsberg Porcelain Factory from the 1830s up until the factory’s closing in 1994.

Nationalmuseum Stockholm, Sweden was originally published on HiSoUR Art Collection

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agosnesrerose · 8 years ago

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This Week in Art 2.13-2.19: Inescapable Politics

Protest at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Terminal 4, in New York City, against Donald Trump’s executive order signed in January 2017 banning citizens of seven countries from traveling to the United States. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Every week it seems there is more and more political news finding its way into these roundups. This week it comes in the form of a petition, signed by hundreds of artists, galleries, museums, critics and curators, against President Trump’s executive order suspending refugee entry and temporarily banning citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S.

Signed by Kara Walker, Barbara Kruger, Pierre Huyghe, Catherine Opie, Mark Dion, critic/curator Philip Tinari, Joan Jonas, and art history professor Douglas Crimp among a growing list, the petition states, “Our field is dependent upon international collaboration and cross-cultural exchange, and these cross-border and cross-cultural collaborations benefit the general public; the ban thus affects all of us.”

Also this week:

The Park Avenue Armory announced an upcoming symposium on gender, race and politics with Tania Bruguera and Ta-Nehisi Coates along with dozens of activists, authors, curators and artists. Entitled “Interrogations of Form: Culture in a Changing America,” the symposium is being held this Sunday, February 19 from 1–8pm.

And Minerva Cuevas is joining Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts as a Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Events & exhibitions

New York City

A new exhibition by Vija Celmins opened Friday at Matthew Marks Gallery. The artist’s first exhibition of new work in seven years, the exhibition includes nineteen new paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, and is on view through April 15. [Read a review in The New York Times.]

This coming Friday, February 17, an exhibition by Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) titled Prejudice at Home: A Parlour, a Library, and a Room is opening at James Cohan, where it will be on view through March 18.

Saturday, February 18 | 5-7pm—Printed Matter is hosting a reading with Eleanor Antin, in which the artist will read from her recent book An Artist’s Life—a hybrid literary/artwork written as her fictional alter-ego Eleanora Antinova.

Waltham, MA

Tommy Hartung is opening a new solo exhibition at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum this Friday. Titled King Solomon’s Mines, the exhibition features work created specifically for the Rose, as Hartung “extends his investigation of mythmaking and storytelling tied to powers of surveillance, wealth, and politics.”

Philadelphia

Last week Slought opened the exhibition Second Life, a project that explores thresholds in previously unfinished works about social and institutional boundaries. Featuring Krzysztof Wodiczko’s City Hall Tower Illumination (1987), the exhibition is on view through March 23.

San Marino, CA

This is the last week to see Lari Pittman’s Mood Books, an exhibition consisting of six large-scale art books that contain 65 hallucinogenic paintings styled after illuminated manuscripts. Mood Books closes a week from today on February 20 at The Huntington Library.

San Francisco

Eau de Cologne, a group exhibition featuring work by five prominent women artists including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman, is on view at Adrian Rosenfeld Gallery through February 25.

London

Marian Goodman Gallery is opening its first ever pop-up shop, selling a variety of products inspired and designed by John Baldessari, with prices starting at £1. The shop will be open for six days beginning this Saturday.

Edinburgh, UK

This is the last week to see the exhibition William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in letters and lines at Fruitmarket Gallery. Bringing together the work of two of South Africa’s most acclaimed visual artists, this exhibition foregrounds their forty-year friendship, and closes this Sunday, February 19. [Read a review in Apollo.]

Stockholm, Sweden

A new exhibition by Marina Abramović is opening this Saturday at Moderna Museet. Titled The Cleaner, the survey is on view through May 21 and includes early works through to today, in the form of film, photography, paintings and objects, installations and select archival material.

Zurich, Switzerland

Also opening this Saturday is a solo exhibition by Liz Magor at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. It’s the first extensive exhibition of the artist’s work in Switzerland, and is titled you you you, on view through May 7.

It’s impossible to include all the incredible exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!

from Art21 Magazine http://ift.tt/2kqgIqv

http://ift.tt/2kkQUAP

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micaramel · 5 years ago

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Artists: Pope.L, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Cheyenne Julien, Tschabalala Self

Venue: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

Exhibition Title: Embodiment

Date: September 12 – October 26, 2019

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Pope.L

Images:

Images courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

Press Release:

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present Embodiment, a group exhibition of works by Pope.L, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Cheyenne Julien and Tschabalala Self that explores the different ways in which corporeality is envisioned and depicted within the spatial confines of the two-dimensional picture plane.

The body and its representations have often been used to give physical form to the intangible: a stand in, so to speak, for an emotion, an idea, a time or even an atmosphere. In sculptural and performative works, the viewer is able to observe the metaphors of the body in physical space from his or her perspective. However, on the flat surfaces of paintings, drawings and text-based works that use the body as subject, the perspectival becomes a matter of embodying someone else’s point of view.

With their renderings of bodies animated in dance, play and chore, Chase and Julien allow us to glimpse the dynamic experiences and rich inner lives of their subjects. Self, meanwhile, zeros in on the black female body as her subject and asks us to grapple with the respective social perceptions that foreground identity construction. Pope.L’s work in this exhibition, however, approaches the body through language in a series of text-based works known as Skin Sets. In these pieces, the body is delineated through the artist’s absurdist phraseology—people of color (blue, green, brown, black and gold) are situated within nonsensical spaces. Always puzzling and, at times, illegible, Pope.L’s Skin Sets make a comment on the legibility and visibility of alienation, especially as it concerns the body in space—a performance that negotiates between self-definition and definition of the self by others.

The works in this exhibition show, through the respective viewpoints of its authors, not only the spaces inhabited by real or symbolic figures but also the complex and multidimensional identities, ideals and anxieties embodied by them. In this, there is in each of these works the incarnation of the “other”—an image of alterity that, paradoxically, is also a mirror that reflects back on the viewer. The worlds we see through these distinct, flattened windows are and are not, at the same time, our own.

Pope.L (b. 1955, Newark, NJ) is a Chicago-based visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create artworks in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money and uncertainty— not necessarily in that order.

Pope.L will be the subject of a trio of complementary exhibitions in New York this fall collectively titled Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Public Art Fund. Recent exhibitions, performances and projects include One thing after another at La Panacée, Montpellier (2018); Flint Water Project at What Pipeline, Detroit (2017); Whispering Campaign at documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); Claim (Whitney Version) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial (2017); Baile at the 32nd Biennal de São Paulo (2016); The Freedom Principle at ICA Philadelphia (2016) and MCA Chicago (2015) and Trinket at The Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015).

Jonathan Lyndon Chase (b. 1989, Philadelphia, PA) is known for his figurative paintings that highlight the complex nature of identity construction in contemporary society by centering the existing but often overlooked tenderness that finds form in the everyday. Chase’s abstracted and dream-like depictions of queer black men serve to tie the corporeal with the psychic, structuring the interiority of his subjects and their environments in ways that capture a range of emotions from joy to melancholy and offering up the suggestion of unconditional love for, from and between these characters. Apart from painting, Chase’s practice also encompasses drawing, collage and sculpture, and his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Miami; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Wedge Collection, Toronto; and the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia. Chase has had solo exhibitions at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Company Gallery, New York (2018); and has been included in notable group exhibitions including Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney, at Deitch Projects, New York (2018) and Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection at the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke (2018).

Cheyenne Julien (b. 1994, Bronx, NY) uses portraiture to convey quiet yet powerful moments of affliction, humor or pensive fascination, while using the body to negotiate a way of seeing that engages both the narrative of her personal experiences and the collective history of the larger world around her. Despite the cartoon-like features of her subjects, Julien imparts an undeniable and exuberant realism to anxiety, fear, happiness and contemplation. Avoiding an overtly politicized didacticism, the artist’s paintings and drawings are instead reflective, focusing on the effects of trauma rather than its causes. Cheyenne Julien received her BFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Cheyenne Julien & Tau Lewis at Chapter New York, New York (2018) and Homegrown at Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2017). Julien’s work has also been included in group exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise/Unclebrother, Hancock (2018); Almine Rech Gallery, New York (2018); Karma, New York (2018); Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2017); and White Cube Bermondsey, London (2017).

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, Harlem, NY) is a New York-based figurative painter who uses the black female body as her primary subject. These figures, or “avatars” as she is known to call them, are often situated within the familiar public spaces of everyday life, such as the corner bodega or a neighbor’s front stoop. In other works, her figures are shown floating in space, staring defiantly back at the viewer. Self’s canvases are noteworthy for its sewn elements, often incorporating fabrics and furs—a practice that is tied to the artist’s memory of her mother and the emotional and physical labor traditionally associated with women. Self’s work often upturns the conventions of the feminine ideal, wary of adding to the myth of the ideal female body. Her paintings of bodies accentuate identity as it is formed and affected by not only race but also by the spaces, both symbolic and physical, it inhabits. Tschabalala Self received her BA in Studio Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2012) and her MFA at Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art, New Haven (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include Bodega Run at Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2017), which traveled to the Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); Tramway, Glasgow (2017); Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London (2017). Self’s work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Crystal Bridges, Bentonville (2018); James Fuentes, New York (2018); Foxy Productions, New York (2018); Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); and the New Museum, New York (2017).

Link: Group Show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

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from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2J7WRvn

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micaramel · 5 years ago

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Artist: Gabriel Orozco

Venue: Chantal Crousel, Paris

Date: September 7 – October 5, 2019

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artist and Chantal Crousel, Paris. Photos by Florian Kleinefenn.

Press Release:

We are pleased to welcome Gabriel Orozco’s seventh solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, from September 7th to October 5th, 2019. A series of new works created in Mexico City and Tokyo is on view: sculptures in obsidian and tezontle; drawings and watercolors on Japanese calligraphy boards (shikishi), and tempera on canvas paintings.

The artist’s practice draws nourishment from his daily environment, culture and nature he finds in his surroundings. He incorporates local materials and artisanal know-how into his work to create his own lexical system.

Hence his encounter with Balinese stone-carvers gave birth to the Dé series previously shown at Galerie Chantal Crousel in 2017: sculptures hand-carved in limestone whose forms are simultaneously intuitive and geometric; As Briony Fer writes, “Carving, sculpture’s oldest skill, provides the means to destroy a square stone block and fill it with holes: which means putting in play the right angles of a cube together with the circular rotations of the parts that have been cut away in order to expose the empty core that is the inside.” The obsidian and tezontle sculptures presented in this current exhibition, are a continuation of this reflection, which began in Indonesia and continued in Mexico City. Like limestone, these typical rocks from Mexico are evidence of a tradition, a history, and a territory. “The diversity of the mediums of the sculpture reflected a diversity of fabrication sites. A French automobile garage, a South Korean sign-shop, and a British billiard table factory certainly have nothing in common other than their role as sites for making work by Gabriel Orozco. […] There is no way to identify a work by Orozco in terms of physical product. Instead it must be discerned through leitmotifs and strategies that constantly recur, but in always mutating forms and configurations.” The starting process for this new series of sculptures is the same as for the limestone works: the artist used a compass to trace circular geometrical shapes on the stone. However, in this instance, mechanical tools were used to carve the valuable stones. Motifs and shapes are always similar, only the medium varies. The circle, axes, and the rotative motion seem to dominate Orozco’s œuvre, less as a pictorial motif than as a work process or strategy. “A circle is not a form in a composition, let alone an aesthetic form that reveals the hidden order behind things, but an instrument or operation.” In this case, the circle strategy serves new sculptures, fluid and porous, drawing upon the artist’s recent wanderings. In these works, geometry encounters geology.

For over ten years, his pictorial practice has continually attested to a spatial thought system. It is the result of a strategy, or of pre-existing rules of the game. However, the system may occasionally venture off-trail. Éclaircie (2019), begun in 2008, introduced new, unexpected colour and texture palettes. Also, the circles no longer accumulate, but overlay each other, their edges forming a “fractured curvature made up of color segments that seem to float on a white ground.”

In the case of the work mentioned above, a metallic-like background, nearly coppery, that the artist rubbed and reworked, until rebirth of the canvas.

Yet, these pieces are always well oganized in a grid-like pattern. Two of the watercolours in the show (Untitled and Untitled) attest to this. Although the result of the procedure appears intuitive, it is nevertheless the product of a strict system. In the canvas paintings (Tigerfish, L’envol and Mémoires de plantes), thoroughness establishes a subtle dialogue with perceptible reminders of nature, its colours, movements and counter-movements.

A series of watercolours –Suisai in Japanese– is exhibited in parallel with these paintings. As usual, he uses the materials around him to create. In this case, he adopted boards used for Japanese calligraphy. Their gilded surface enhances the properties of the watercolour. The motion of the raised hand is an appeal. The strict grid and circle structure seem to have disappeared; the geometric system has mutated somehow. “Even if the object itself doesn’t show a circle, there is a circular movement in the process of the making and the way of circular action and a circular or cyclical way of working.” The process is still organic, with a visible trace. However here, the shapes are free and the spots flow, accumulating and spreading. If we see mainly abstract compositions, we sense the presence of flowers, plants, but also landscapes. The watercolour technique enables Gabriel Orozco to discover new shapes, more traditional, more turbulent. They allow him to apprehend painting in a different way, and to focus on both gesture and medium. Playing with the multiple degrees of opacity and transparency offered by watercolour and its diluted substance, spinning brushstrokes bring the work to life.

In 2019, Gabriel Orozco was chosen to orchestrate the transformation of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City into a nerve center at the crossroads of art, culture, and nature.

Gabriel Orozco has had solo shows in the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan (2015); Aspen Art Museum, U.S.A. (2015); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2014); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2013); Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2011); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A. (2009); Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico (2006); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, U.S.A. (2000); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1998).

Link: Gabriel Orozco at Chantal Crousel

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/309YdjP

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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9 Artists to Watch at NADA Miami Beach

NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

NADA celebrates its 15th year in Miami this week, returning to the venue—Ice Palace Studios—where its very first edition took place. The fair is a far cry from the blue-chip bustle of Art Basel in Miami Beach. Here, collectors hang out on surreal hammocks designed by Ioanna Pantazopoulou, and the indie-rock icons Superchunk played a Thursday afternoon set on the outdoor patio. Artsy walked the booths to highlight nine of the strongest talents to watch, with works ranging from Grateful Dead readymades to intricately layered abstract paintings.

Marie Herwald Hermann

B. 1979 in Copenhagen. Lives and works in Detroit

Reyes Projects, Booth 1.08

Installation view of Reyes Projects’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

“With clay, you have 10,000 years of history to work with, or against,” the artist tells me, describing a practice that mixes ceramics with mass-produced materials like thread, resin, and latex. This smartly curated solo booth is papered with a William Morris wallpaper that the artist grew up with in her grandmother’s Danish home. As Reyes Projects managing director Bridget Finn tells me, Hermann’s style grows partly from her upbringing: the “clean line, white-box aesthetic” favored by her architect-parents, and the more florid, ornamental spirit of her grandmother. Both divergent tastes combine in Hermann’s delicate, light hearted assemblages, which place elegant vessels alongside often humorous, thumb-imprinted forms on porcelain shelves. A few of the intimately scaled sculptures are on offer for around $3,000, with the largest piece here commanding $6,500.

Jessica Dickinson

B. 1975 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

James Fuentes, Booth 1.05

Installation view of James Fuentes’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

At this point in contemporary art history, the mere phrase “process-based abstraction” might understandably have you running for the door. But reserve your judgement for this New York-based artist, who makes tactile, assiduously worked paintings—many of them oil on polymer—that have the sculptural feeling of reliefs. (A gallery representative tells me that Dickinson once studied abroad in Italy, where she became obsessed with frescoes.) Each finished work, priced here at around $75,000, takes about a year to complete, and comes with a sequential series of graphite rubbings—dubbed “remainders”—that the artist creates as she adds and subtracts layers of paint, sands down the surface, and rethinks her composition. A recent gallery show in New York presented one finished work with nearly 20 rubbings that charted its progress.

Mark A. Rodriguez

B. 1982 in Chicago. Lives and works in Los Angeles

Park View/Paul Soto, Booth 7.10

Installation view of Park View/Paul Soto’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

The artist’s diverse practice encompasses everything from ramshackle lamps to giant painted sculptures of flowers. In 2nd Gen (2010–17), he drills down on a very niche group: Grateful Dead fanatics who recorded, hoarded, and traded live concert tapes. As Paul Soto tells me, the artist made it his mission to source and collect around 2,800 of these cassettes, compiling them into what he thinks of as an “archaeological hippy relic.” The goal, in short, is to take “economics of desire or ego” and “bring them into art context.” Rodriguez’s piece could, of course, double as a usable music archive for any Jerry Garcia groupie who still owns a tape player. But as a sculpture it also becomes something of an unnerving monument, all those cassette spines reminding us that we’ll be DEAD DEAD DEAD someday, too.

Tracy Thomason

B. 1984, Gaithersburg, Maryland. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Marinaro, Booth 8.01

Installation view of Marinaro’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

The abstract painter builds her surfaces up, and up, and up, painstakingly constructing lines out of pigment mixed with marble dust. Scratches, angles, and swooping curves occasionally converge into hints of figuration, but for the most part the main event here is the interplay of texture, color, and energetic shapes. Her inclusion at NADA comes in tandem with a solo show at Marinaro back in New York, on view through December 22nd. (Full disclosure: My own apartment-based gallery project, Teen Party, inaugurated with a two-person exhibition that paired Thomason with Peter Halley—the Day-Glo, Roll-a-Tex-favoring painter whose legacy she continues to be inspired and informed by, but to very different effect.) Smaller canvases are $3,300, with the largest available work for $6,600.

Scott Alario

B. 1983 in New Haven, Connecticut. Lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island

Kristen Lorello, Booth 5.02 (NADA Projects)

Installation view of Kristen Lorello’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

The handful of photographs (all dye-sublimation prints on metal) depict familial moments, many starring the artist’s three-and-a-half-year-old son, Marco. As Lorello tells me, Alario thinks of his wife and kids as active collaborators in his practice. Here, we see Marco wide-eyed, holding a lollipop; obscured by the neon-pastel netting of a hammock; or hiding behind a Star Wars cereal box. The underground art scene in Alario’s home base of Providence, Rhode Island, is “almost synonymous with an exuberant, colorful, almost psychedelic palette,” Lorello says, citing a tangential influence on these photographs from local collectives like Forcefield. New Yorkers not down in Florida for the fairs can check out Alario’s solo show “Soft Landing,” opening December 13th at Lorello’s Lower East Side gallery. The photos here are all in an edition of three, with tiered pricing between $2,800 and $3,200.

Amba Sayal-Bennett

B. 1991. Lives and works in London

Carbon 12, Booth 6.10

Installation view of Carbon 12’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

Using ink and marker, this Goldsmiths Ph.D. candidate makes schematic, playful drawings that can resemble buildings, jewelry, electrical diagrams, or anything in between. (Gallery director Nadine Knotzer calls them a “reduction of daily objects,” noting that the artist would rather their individual inspirations remain a mystery.) Complex geometries are enlivened by squiggly patterned passages that owe a lot to the Memphis Group. Each tiny—8 ¼-by-5 ⅞ inch—drawing is available for $700 each; larger compositions on gridded paper run $1,400. Sayal-Bennett also occasionally makes floor sculptures that bring the same formal concerns into three dimensions; an example is on view here, a unique MDF-and-automobile-paint installation with a price tag of $16,000.

Karen May

B. 1950

White Columns, Booth 1.03

Installation view of White Columns’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

May works with the NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California—a nonprofit dedicated to assisting artists with disabilities—and the drawings on view here are all done on repurposed Artforum ads. The artist marks up and augments the glossy, full-page endorsements—for the likes of Tony Cragg at Marian Goodman, or James Lee Byars at Michael Werner—using them as a structure upon which to build new compositions. White Columns director Matthew Higgs explained that May soon noticed how prominent each artist’s name loomed in the advertisements, so she began adding her own name to the front of her drawings, even bigger. (The same tactic certainly worked out well for Josh Smith.) They’re priced to move at a modest $200 a piece, framing included.

Cheyenne Julien

B. 1994 in the Bronx, New York. Lives and works in New York

LOYAL, Booth 2.09

Installation view of LOYAL’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

The buzzy Stockholm gallery only has a single canvas by this 23-year-old New Yorker, but it’s a winner. In Emerging Artist, an aspiring youngster upends a bucket of paint over her own head, looking simultaneously exuberant and befuddled. (It’s an expression that feels familiar after a week of Miami art fairs.) Julien’s other compositions are generally more colorful than this one, offering figurative scenes of domestic life. This large painting—a black-and-white departure from the artist’s typically colorful palette—is on offer for $8,500.

Elizabeth Atterbury

B. 1982 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Lives and works in Portland, Maine

Mrs., Booth 8.22 (NADA Projects)

Installation view of Mrs.’s booth at NADA Miami Beach, 2017. Photo by Alain Almiñana for Artsy.

Atterbury apparently used to make compositions in sand, ephemeral drawings that she would then photograph. Since then she’s moved into a more sculptural mode, using wood, sand sourced from Maine or Florida, and mortar to create discrete objects and paintings, of a sort. Gallerist Sara Maria Salamone explains that the artist’s underlying system is built upon a hermetic, self-generated alphabet, albeit one that’s not legible to outsiders. Other forms are culled from unexpected sources (like a hairpin, or the tops of breast-milk storage containers). Each piece has its own distinct personality; when arranged in mixed company, they become “an ensemble, like a cast,” Salamone says. Mrs.’s pocket-sized booth arrays a number of individual pieces into a tableaux. A free-standing, painted-wood frame runs $1,800; mortar paintings are $1,500; a seductively simple “hairpin” form carved from wood will set you back a mere $800.

from Artsy News

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caveartfair · 8 years ago

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15 Artists to Watch at SP-Arte

Installation view of Alexandre Heberte’s work at SP-Arte, 2017. Photo by Mark Rosen.

SP-Arte opened the doors to its 2017 edition on Wednesday in São Paulo. Now in its 12th year, the fair welcomes 159 galleries into the halls of Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo. The fair has grown considerably in its number of international exhibitors, which is up to 44 this year, spanning galleries from Europe, Central and South America, the U.S., and Japan. The audience of fairgoers, which is 95% Brazilian, has also grown (from 6,000 in 2009 to 27,000 in 2016).

Exhibitors to a great degree catered to that audience, presenting choice works by historic and contemporary Brazilian artists, from modernist Alfredo Volpi, to the recently deceased Tunga, to Vik Muniz. The fair also represented the strong design history in the country, with 25 Brazilian design galleries exhibiting. More broadly, it placed greater emphasis on modern artists and the trajectory of contemporary art—a new curated sector, Repertório, is devoted to artists who have made integral contributions to contemporary art. Also notable this year is a curated exhibition of Japanese artists, in honor of the city’s new cultural center, the Japan House, which opens next month.

Ahead of the fair, SP-Arte director Fernanda Feitosa addressed the weight of the current economic crisis in Brazil. She said that while there is no good time for an art fair now, “we cannot live by expecting a good time or a better time.” In times of crisis, she said, galleries must tighten their business practices and tap into creativity in order to strengthen their programs.

“The art market is not immune to the ups and down of the economy, not in Brazil, not anywhere else,” Feitosa said, “but we have a different strength, we’re moved by passion, we are moved by a piece you really want to buy and these passions are not limited by prices.” This not to say that SP-Arte has been unaffected by the crisis. While the fair witnessed a decline in sales between the 2015 and 2016 editions, the director remains optimistic. “These are cycles, you have to be prepared.”

While blue-chip international galleries and Brazilian galleries primarily brought their most prominent and sought-after artists, there was a strong range in terms of medium. “The artistic language in Brazil is very broad,” Feitosa said, pointing to the country’s strong art-historical traditions in painting, photography, sculpture, Minimalism, concrete art, and abstraction. Exhibitors, attuned to this history, focused on these more traditional mediums rather than digital and video works.

While the fair was flush with mid-career and established Brazilian artists, there were still discoveries to be made. Below we share 15 artists who are producing innovative and thoughtful work, from Brazil and beyond.

Joanna Piotrowska

B. 1985, Warsaw • Lives and works in London

Madragoa • Solo Section, Booth SL11

Installation view of Joanna Piotrowska’s work at Madragoa’s booth at SP-Arte, 2017. Courtesy of Madragoa.

The Polish artist began a project last year in Lisbon (ahead of her show with Madragoa there), where she visited people in their homes and asked them to build shelters from their personal belongings. She then photographed the shelters with their creators, resulting in a series of somewhat dark though intriguing images of people confined (some appear trapped) within these structures. Drawing upon the childlike affinity for building forts, she chose to do this with adults, questioning how the act would change. As the photographs evidence, with adults, these makeshift structures become portraits of their creators—some sturdy and others precarious, some minimal and others elaborate—that reflect survival instincts and the basic need for shelter among impoverished peoples. Presented in brightly colored frames that might be found in a child’s room, and titled “Frantic,” the works are meant to surface the sensation of building these structures, from the excitement of a child to the anxieties of an adult. Piotrowska is currently continuing the project, now working with people living in Rio de Janeiro.

Andrea Rocco

B. 1977, São Paulo • Lives and works in São Paulo

Galeria Rabieh • Main Section,Booth J12

Portrait , 2017. Andrea Rocco Galeria Rabieh

Rocco creates paintings and sculptures that include coy references to art history, infusing its principles and themes with her distinctly contemporary approach. At the fair she’s filled a wall with over 100 portraits—a diverse range of vibrant small canvases filled with joyous characters, all imagined, and created with various types of paints and materials, even an occasional dash of glitter. The works are part of a three-part research-driven project for which the artist is rethinking the historical frameworks of painting in art history: portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy

B. 1984, New York • Lives and works in Los Angeles

Mendes Wood DM • Main Section, Booth H1

Installation view of Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s work, courtesy of Mendes Wood DM.

Lutz-Kinoy makes playful ceramic sculptures and large-scale paintings that represent and respond to the human body. The New York-born, L.A.-based artist recently became represented by Mendes Wood DM, where he just closed a large solo show. While his practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, many of the works on view at SP-Arte, created during a three-month-long residency in São Paulo, were made using a traditional Japanese kiln and techniques. Tapping into the strong Japanese culture present in the city, his works are, as the gallery’s Magê Abàtayguara describes, “in dialogue with traditional ways of creating vases and masks.”

Alexandre Heberte

B. Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará • Lives and works in São Paulo

Projeto Melissa Meio-Fio • 2nd Floor

Installation view of Alexandre Heberte’s work at SP-Arte, 2017. Photo by Mark Rosen.

Heberte was hard at work at his loom for the duration of the fair’s first day, weaving enticing new textiles as part of his ongoing Tramo São Paulo project, which surrounded him like dozens of narrow curtains. The São Paulo-based artisan and weaver is a current student at Faculdade Paulista de Artes, and for this project, he researched the various regions of São Paulo where he has traveled. He spoke with people and culled together objects, ultimately choosing 33 regions to create a long woven panel to represent each one. Heberte uses brightly colored yarns as well as plastic, synthetic textiles—he even weaves objects, like watches, into his works. Drawn to weaving for its use throughout disparate time periods, he highlights its historic traditions and the medium’s ability to connect various groups of people.

Bel Barcellos

B. 1966, Boston • Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro

Gabinete de Arte k²o • Main Section, Booth A4

Série "nós" (1), 2016. Bel Barcellos Gabinete de Arte k2o

Série "Aonde está você?" (3), 2016. Bel Barcellos Gabinete de Arte k2o

This Rio de Janeiro-based artist focuses entirely on embroidery, creating fine figurative scenes that she sews directly into the canvas. Last year, several of the artist’s works were acquired by esteemed collections, including that of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros and the Museu de Arte do Rio. For a past series, Barcellos was inspired by the Neo-Concrete movement, particularly the works of Lygia Pape, and created compositions where the figure appeared amid blocks of embroidery. More recent works have pictured couples and explored relationships; her latest series, titled “Enigma,” comprises somewhat surrealistic scenes of couples floating above or below blue embroidered waves.

Ana Elisa Egreja

B. 1983, São Paulo • Lives and works in São Paulo

Galeria Leme • Main Section, Booth F7

Currently featured at Leme’s gallery space, Egreja is known for her realist paintings, and emerged among a group of likeminded painters, which formed in 2008. She creates large oil paintings that illustrate not only her deft abilities with paint, but also a thoughtful focus on interiors. The large-scale painting at the fair, picturing a kitchen with yellow cabinets and windows that look out on an idyllic vista, is part of the series featured in her current show, which documents her grandmother’s home. Egreja made the house into her studio, but it will soon be torn down. Ahead of this fate, she rented various types of animals and set them loose in rooms of the house, then photographed the bizarre scenes and painted them. The resulting images see octopi slithering across the bathroom, chickens perched on the stairs, and yellow birds flitting through a room she had covered in graffiti—among others.

Gabriel Abrantes

B. 1984, North Carolina • Lives and works in Lisbon

Francisco Fino Art Projects • Solo Section, Booth SL5

"A Brief History of Princess X", 2016. Gabriel Abrantes Francisco Fino

Following debuts of new works at the Venice Biennale, Berlinale, and the Locarno International Film Festival, the young American artist and filmmaker is building strong momentum. He’s becoming known for his sharp, well-produced videos—he writes, films, produces, and occasionally acts in them—which tackle historical narratives, politics, psychology, and social issues like gender and sex. At SP-Arte, Francisco Fino shows a video commission titled A Brief History of Princess X (2016), which Fino described as a “pseudo-documentary” meant to “cross video art and cinema.” The work is a tongue-in-cheek narrative based on the true story of Brancusi creating a distinctly phallic, and thus controversial, sculpture for Marie Bonaparte. It humorously delves into eroticism, female sexuality, and psychoanalysis, and imagines how these ideas played out during a notable chapter of modern art. An edition of five, the first edition was already sold to a museum, and the second was on offer for €11,000.

Pier Stockholm

B. 1977, Lima, Peru • Lives and works in Paris

Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer • Solo Section, Booth SL10

By Endurance we conquer #3, 2016. Pier Stockholm Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer

Civilization # 3, 2017. Pier Stockholm Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer

Stockholm is inspired by elements of architecture, the Age of Exploration, mountain-climbing, and the passage of time. At SP-Arte he presents a series of new sculptures, priced on the range of €3,200–€4,500, made from concrete and the blue foam commonly used to create architecture models. He calls these intimate sized works “civilizations.” Stockholm also shows a large, finely detailed drawing (priced at €9,000) and works on paper and collages (priced between €1,400–€3,500), which also include blue foam, though focus on photographs of the peak of Mount Everest—a recurring image in his work, as a symbol of a goal that is at once horizontal and vertical.

Marina Weffort

B. 1978, São Paulo • Lives and works in São Paulo

Galeria Marília Razuk • Main Section, Booth J7

Work by Marina Weffort. Photo courtesy of Galerie Marília Razuk.

Among Weffort’s elegant textiles on view at the fair, certain works appear to comment on Brazil’s rich history of geometric abstraction, taking shape as monochromatic grids that embrace lightness and levity. Other works depart from squares and rectangles, utilizing the flexibility and movement of the diaphanous fabrics she employs. Weffort creates these works through a time-consuming process of cutting into swathes of fabric and pulling threads out one by one, to develop patterns and textures. Some works appear as taut rectangles, stretched in frames or attached to pins, while others hang loosely, allowing for the threads to drape and form dynamic shapes. The works are also kinetic—the fine threads softly sway with even the gentlest wind.

Dan Coopey

B. 1981 • Lives and works in London

Kubikgallery • Main Section, Booth F16

Untitled (Potosi), 2015. Dan Coopey Kubik Gallery

Ahead of his April solo show with Kubikgallery, which just recently began representing him, the London-based Goldsmiths grad is being exhibited in São Paulo for the first time at the fair. The artist is showing fine rattan sculptures that are suspended from the ceiling or mounted on a booth wall. Woven painstakingly by hand from fine strands of palm, the rounded, undulating forms are inspired by indigenous craft traditions and display a reverence for natural resources. Coopey leaves some works in their natural beige tone, while he dyes others with watercolors, rendering them in a pale rainbow of color that adds a hint of the contemporary to a medium that is often considered craft. Coopey began creating these works during a recent residency in São Paulo at Pivô, which is where the gallery first encountered his work.

Lucas Bambozzi

B. 1965, São Paulo • Lives and works in São Paulo

Galeria Emma Thomas • Solo Section, Booth SL13

Sussurro 2, 2017. Lucas Bambozzi Galeria Emma Thomas

As coisas caindo, 2017. Lucas Bambozzi Galeria Emma Thomas

Bambozzi’s work addresses our smart-phone obsessed society. He focuses on the manufacturing cycle of phones, highlighting the disconnect between the desire to innovate and the wasted materials that come with that innovation. The new series at the fair, “Último sussurro” (“Last whisper”), includes a pile of hundreds of old phones and discarded malfunctioning parts; some flicker with videos, representing the short lifespan of a cell phone. In past works he’s captured the exploitative labor practices in the Congo that occur in order to mine the minerals needed for cell phones; and he even created a machine to crush discarded cell phones, in order to separate the parts and make them easier to recycle. In Brazil, phones must be sent abroad to be recycled due to lack of infrastructure; for his large installation of old phones and parts at SP-Arte, Bambozzi sourced broken phone parts from a local store that fixes phones, with a promise to ensure that the parts are recycled if the work is not sold.

Celina Portella

B. 1977, Rio de Janeiro • Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro

Galeria Inox Arte Contemporânea • Showcase Section, Booth SC2

A former dancer, Portella creates photographic works that include images of herself or parts of her body, which are placed in custom frames and often attached to mechanisms to emphasize strength, agility, and movement. “You see the relationship between the body, dance, and history,” says gallery director Guilherme Carneiro. Works on view at the fair include framed images of the artist grasping a rope, from which an actual rope extends that is attached to a pulley system.

Ivan Grilo

B. 1986, Itatiba, Brazil • Lives and works in Itatiba

Casa Triângulo • Main Section, Booth H5

Delírio Tropical #1 (Não existe pecado do lado de baixo do equador), 2017. Ivan Grilo Casa Triângulo

Delírio Tropical #2 (Ainda há chão), 2017. Ivan Grilo Casa Triângulo

The young artist’s research-driven practice has for several years drawn the attention of Brazilian institutions, several of which, like Museu de Arte de São Paulo, have acquired his works. Grilo often addresses issues of immigration in Brazil through his works, which take shape as conceptual installations that combine found objects, texts, and images. The works on view at SP-Arte touch upon issues of inequality in Brazil. One work, Delírio Tropical #1 (Não existe pecado do lado de baixo do equador) (2017), documents the coast of Maranhão, Brazil, where the tides are so varied that the ocean recedes eight meters over the course of six hours. The work mirrors the gap in the distribution of wealth in Brazil, where in the same place, there can be people flush with wealth, and others in poverty. Another work, Delírio Tropical #2 (Ainda há chão) (2017),is a reflection of the subtropical region. It pairs two images of jubilant people in saturated colors with a glass of cheap liquor, responding to a study that found that the region is home to great poverty.

Rodrigo Torres

B. 1981, Rio de Janeiro • Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro

SIM Galeria • Main Section, Booth J8

Though Torres has long been been creating cut-paper collage works—intricate, fantastical scenes created using currency—over the past two years he’s also begun to work with ceramics. On view at the fair are two vessel-like sculptures that draw on the history of Chinese porcelain, but rather than the pristine, decorative vases found throughout China, his works appear to be packaging for them. Beginning with real Chinese vessels, Torres creates clay forms that wrap around them, and paints them with acrylic to mimic the textures and materiality of cardboard and masking tape. Remarkably realistic, the works cleverly question porcelain traditions and the value of ceramics.

Alberto Simon

B. 1961, São Paulo • Lives and works in São Paulo

Luciana Brito Galeria • Main Section, Booth G6

Alberto Simon, Untitled, 2017, mineral pigment on cotton canvas, 138 x 190 cm. On view at Lucianabrito Galeria at SP-Arte, 2017. Courtesy of SP-Arte.

Simon is showing with Luciana Brito for the first time at the fair, ahead of his inclusion in a group show at the gallery this summer. He presents a work from a new series of digital paintings printed on canvas, for which he simulates layers of brush strokes and daubs of paint, and intersperses them with digital, graphic motifs. While this painterly approach is new, the artist estimates he’s been working with the idea of “faking the medium” for some two decades. The work, Untitled (2017), is on offer for R$60,000 (approximately $19,000) and is one of the few digital works at the fair. “Digital hasn’t set foot in Brazil yet,” Simon said, which he suggested is due to conservative tastes. “People are not used to it, but if it’s on canvas it’s more acceptable.”

—Casey Lesser

from Artsy News

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