KOONS BALLOON FLOWER OPENS IN LONDON

A giant sculpture by American artist Jeff Koons is to go on display in London before being sold for an estimated £12 million.
The work, in the shape of a pink, shiny balloon twisted into a flower, will be in St James's Square from June 21 until Christie's sale of post-War and contemporary art on June 30. Balloon Flower (Magenta), 1995-2000, is the most valuable and significant work by Koons to be sold in Europe. It is being sold by the Rachofsky Collection in Dallas. At about three metres square, the sculpture, which was designed to be in the open air, is too big to get through the doors of the auction house. The work is one of a series, called Celebration, that Koons, 53, created over the course of a decade.

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS

MAY 9 -AUGUST 3, 2008
JOHN ARMLEDER and OLIVIER MOSSET

This spring, conceptual artists John Armleder and Olivier Mosset take over the galleries at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Strongly influential for a younger generation of artists working in the U.S. and in Europe, Armleder’s and Mosset’s work remains unfamiliar to a wider American audience.
The inaugural show of the Contemporary’s new curatorial team signals a commitment to artist-centered exhibitions. Jointly conceived by the artists—who have been close for more than twenty years—the exhibition represents neither a curated two-person show nor two independent solo exhibitions. Instead, it proposes an active juxtaposition of parallel and opposite artistic approaches where artworks act as obstacles, and obstacles act as artworks. Armleder contributes new pour and pattern paintings, a site-specific fifty-foot wall-painting, an installation of Mylar Christmas trees, and strips of metallic vinyl. Mosset, in addition to a series of his infamous “circle paintings” from the late 1960s and early 1970s, presents a large-scale installation of several dozen Toblerones, large cardboard sculptures based on anti-tank structures used by the Swiss army.
John Armleder has produced thousands of sculptures, paintings, drawings, books, and performances, creating an art of impenetrable surfaces that collapses the unique into the generic, and vice-versa. Olivier Mosset, on the other hand, chooses to remain firmly committed to blankness, stripping art of any content, and pursuing a decelerated process, rejecting our conventional notions of progress and insatiable hunger for the new.

TERENCE KOH. CAPTAIN BUDDHA

TERENCE KOH
WARHOL REMAINS AS A CHINESE WINTER
GARDEN IN MY HEART (SELF PORTRAIT), 2006
Courtesy Peres Projects, Los Angeles Berlin
copyright the artist

28 May - 31 August 2008
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Frankfurt, Germany

Terence Koh is installing one of his signature monochrome environments especially for the Schirn; for this exhibition, he will initiate the surreal objects, ritually summoning them to life, in a secret performance. Under the title “Captain Buddha”, visitors who set foot in the luminously flooded room are invited to accompany the artist on a journey that will take them on a search for themselves through the entire world – India, China, Burma, Belgium, Africa, Mexico and Canada are just some stations along the way – one that aims to reach nirvana and ends in nothingness.
For his installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Koh links two worlds that at first glance seem almost antipodal: Buddhism and that popular classic of world literature, Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” – the tale of the fateful quest of charismatic and supremely obsessed Captain Ahab for the Great White Whale. But the two worlds are alike in their descriptions of endless and irresolvable search - a unity conveyed in the title “Captain Buddha”. For this installation, Koh himself set out on a quest: clad as a monk in a golden robe, he journeyed to fifteen places – Canada, Japan, China, Thailand, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Iceland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Africa, and the USA – in his search for objects, much as Captain Ahab sailed the world over in search of the White Whale. In Terence Koh’s words: “I’m like the captain in Moby Dick. I’m trying to find the White Whale in the white objects, but in the end I find nothing.”

JEFF KOONS LENDS ART TO US EMBASSY IN CHINA

Jeff Koons is lending his sculpture Tulips, an edition of which is shown here in the courtyard of the Nord/LB bank in Hanover,
Germany, to the US embassy in Beijing for ten years.

WHAT'S LEFT FOR THE YEAR

June
Early June Artranspenine08
http://atp08.blogspot.com/
3 - 8 June Scope Art Fair, Basel
www.scope-art.com
4 - 8 June: ArtBasel, Basel
www.artbasel.com/go/id/kh/
12 June - 12 Sept: BP Portrait Award, London
www.npg.org.uk/live/bpmenu.asp
14 June - 14 Sept Folkestone Triennial, Kent
www.folkestonetriennial.org.uk/
18 June - 7 Sept: Sydney Biennial
www.biennaleofsydney.com.au
20 June - 2 July: London festival of architecture
www.lfa2008.org
21 June - 6 July: Whitstable Biennial, Kent
www.whitstablebiennale.com/
June 22 - October: 26 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico
www.sitesantafe.org/biennial_2008/biennial2008fr.html
July
19 July - 2 Nov: Manifesta, Italy
www.manifesta7.it/
8 July - 14 Sept: Rencontres-Arles Photo Festival
www.rencontres-arles.com/
August
25 Aug - 17 Sept British Glass Biennale http://www.ifg.org.uk
September
5 Sept - 9 Nov: Gwangju Biennale, Korea
http://www.gwangju-biennale.org/
6 Sept - 15 Nov: Yokohama Triennale, Japan
www.yokohamatriennale.jp/2008/index_en.html
8 Sept - Nov: Shanghai Biennale
www.shanghaibiennale.com/
11 Sept - 16 Nov: Singapore Biennale
www.singaporebiennale.org
Mid Sept: Jerwood Drawing Prize opens in London
www.jerwoodspace.co.uk
18 - 21 Sept: 100% design
www.100percentdesign.co.uk
20 Sept - 30 Nov: Liverpool Biennial International 08
www.biennial.com
20 Sept: New Contemporaries Opens as part of Liverpool Biennial
www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/
20 Sept - 4 Jan: John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/
26 Sept -12 Oct FRED, Cumbria
www.fredsblog.co.uk/about.html
October
Brighton Photo Biennial
www.bpb.org.uk
7 - 19 Oct: Origin - The London Craft Fair
www.craftscouncil.org.uk/
15 - 19 Oct: Scope Art Fair, London
www.scope-art.com
16 - 19 Oct: Frieze Art Fair, London
www.friezeartfair.com/
16 - 19 Oct: Bridge Art Fair, London
www.bridgeartfair.com/
17 - 20 Oct: Zoo Art Fair, London
www.zooartfair.com
23 - 26 Oct: FIAC, Paris
www.fiacparis.com/page.php?lang=uk
30 Oct - 2 Nov: Bridge Art Fair, Berlin
www.bridgeartfair.com/
November
7 Nov - 11 Dec: Jerwood Photography Awards, London
www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/photography/
December
4 - 7 Dec: ArtBasel, Miami
www.artbasel.com
4 - 7 Dec: Bridge Art Fair, Miami
www.bridgeartfair.com/
6 Dec - mid Feb 2009: Artsway Open 08
www.artsway.org.uk/

THE JOKES ON...

“Recession? What recession?” Barbara Gladstone, Richard Prince's dealer since 1988, said jokingly as she was leaving Sotheby's salesroom. Seems the jokes on her! Ever since art-industry newsletter the Baer Faxt made the pithy announcement that “Richard Prince is working independently,” the rumor mill has been in the kind of overdrive that would befit the 1980s-era soap. Some say Prince sold paintings out of his Guggenheim show directly to billionaire Ukrainian collector Viktor Pinchuk. Others say Larry Gagosian took a commission on the deal. Indeed, word has it that Gagosian Gallery has lined up an exhibition in Rome. Although the gallery would not confirm that Prince had joined the roster, one of its senior directors was willing to assert... A new gallery with a new tier of collectors can take an artist up an echelon.

MAY AUCTIONS EVENING SALES

MAY 13, 2008-CHRISTIE'S CONTEMPORARY DOES $348 MILLION-the second-highest total ever.
Lucian Freud’s large-scale Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, brought $33.6 million with buyer’s premium, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. Lucian, the grandson of Sigmund, is eighty-five years old.
MAY 14, 2008 -SOTHEBY’S CONTEMPORARY DOES $362 MILLION
The auction, which totaled $362 million, was the biggest in the company’s history. Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, said the sale was the result of “global hunger” on the part of “global individuals” who “live everywhere.” Enlightening!
A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties.
MAY 16- PHILLIPS CONTEMPORARY DOES $59,345,000, with 55 of 64 lots selling, or almost 86 percent. Top lots included Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 Untitled (Fallen Angel), which sold for $11,241,000; Jeff Koons’ 1991 marble Self-Portrait, which sold for $7,545,000; and Gerhard Richter’s 1986 Abstraktes Bild 610-1, which sold for $4,521,000.

Art collectors shrug off market woes

Art collectors this week shrugged off the US economic downturn and global financial turmoil to buy solidly at the big New York auctions although there were some signs of a more cautious mood seeping into the market. Sotheby’s and Christie’s had bet that record-breaking prices would prevail at their Impressionist and modern art sales last week, and they were largely proved right, although both auction houses had tempered expectations by reducing the number of lots on sale compared with similar auctions last year.
Source: FT

Carnegie's "Life On Mars"

Detail of of a large installation by Barry McGee.

"Lately, it seems, biennial exhibitions don’t do much except sit there, looking good and offending no one. Instead of being shows that people “love to hate,” or vice versa, these big, often international affairs now inspire mild interest or resigned indifference. Their underlying message seems to be: Careful now, don’t frighten the trustees.“Life on Mars,” the 55th Carnegie International, is the latest exercise in handsome, measured, frictionless thoughtfulness. It may actually have more than its share of interesting art and poetic juxtapositions. Yet almost nothing happens.
It has been organized over the last three years by Douglas Fogle, who was a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1994 to 2005, when he joined the Carnegie as curator of contemporary art. For his advisory committee Mr. Fogle selected Daniel Birnbaum, the director of Portikus, an alternative space in Frankfurt, who will organize the next Venice Biennale; Chus Martínez, director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein; and Richard Flood and Eungie Joo, the chief curator and director of education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
In the lead essay of the show’s exceptional catalog Mr. Fogle notes some questions posed by his show’s title. Are there other forms of life in the universe? Can art help us explore what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called its “intimate immensity”? And, more pertinent, has the human race turned Earth itself into an alien planet, a place of rampant waste, arrogance, immorality and violence?
The show itself has little of the catalog’s pointedness. It seems selected largely from a preapproved list of veterans of shows just like this. When the exhibition’s participants were announced, I was dismayed to realize that I knew the work of all but three or four of the artists listed. Mr. Fogle has beaten some of the odds of so many usual suspects by selecting exceptional artworks and installing them with great sensitivity. Still, his failure to think outside the curatorial box is close to stunning.
Despite the international character of the Carnegie, more than half of its 39 artists are from only three countries: the United States, Britain and Germany. Worse yet, 16 of the 39, more than a third, are represented in New York by just three prominent Chelsea galleries: Gladstone, Tanya Bonakdar and Anton Kern.
Curators have about the most complicated and daunting job in the art world; they are pulled apart by pressures to raise money, write, hunt out hot new artists and oversee acquisitions, while organizing shows that attract the public. Their value and responsibilities seem less and less appreciated by trustees, who are experiencing their own kind of pressures. Jobs and budgets are at stake. These are expensive shows; don’t make waves.
Biennials need to be laboratories, not annual reports. And the world is far too full of interesting artists for shows like this to be drawn from such a small and known gene pool. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it reduces the capacity for risk and dulls the imagination." Roberta Smith

Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms

Beyond the familiar Campbell's Soup cans, Brillo boxes, silkscreened Marilyn Monroes, and floating silver mylar pillows--20 years after pop icon Andy Warhol's death, we are still picking through his incredibly prolific output to understand what his artistic legacy actually is. Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms, published on the occasion of the major exhibition by the same name at Amsterdam's renowned Stedelijk Museum, provides some new insight, digging into Warhol's lesser-known film, video, and audio tape works. Important--and just a little scandalous--films like Blow Job and Kiss, audio tapes of celebrities, friends, and anonymous hangers-on talking, and other marginalia are considered alongside a selection of key photographs, drawings, screen prints and spatial installations, such as the spectacular Silver Clouds.

Edited by Eva Meyer-Hermann and with contributions by Geralyn Huxley, Greg Pierce, and Warhol Museum Archivist, Matt Wrbican, who is currently unpacking hundreds of never-before-seen Warhol Time Capsules in Pittsburgh, this volume brings readers up to date with the most recent developments in the way we see the late artist's oeuvre.

WILFREDO PRIETO WINS THE CARTIER AWARD 2008

Untitled (Footprint)

Frieze Art Fair is delighted to announce that the winner of The Cartier Award 2008 is Cuban artist, Wilfredo Prieto. Prieto, based in Barcelona, is a talented young conceptual artist whose works often take the form of site-specific installations. His winning proposal was chosen from over 400 applications submitted by artists across the world. The award allows an emerging artist from outside the UK to realise a major project at Frieze Art Fair as part of the influential Frieze Projects programme curated by Neville Wakefield. Wilfredo Prieto was born in 1978 and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Universidad de Habana in 2002. His work has been exhibited at SMAK (Ghent) in 2008, the 52nd Venice Biennial in 2007, at the Kadist Art Foundation and Apolitical at the Louvre Museum in Paris as well as the VIII Havana Biennial in 2006 and in A Moment of Silence at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 2003. Prieto was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2006.