WRIGHT'S GUGGENHEIM AT 50

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1943–59. Perspective, 1943. Ink and watercolor on art paper, 50.8 x 61.0 cm. Lent by Daniel Wolf and Mathew Wolf in memory of Diane R. Wolf.
FLLW FDN 4305.749 © 2009 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona

Fifty years after the realization of Frank Lloyd Wright’s renowned design, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates the golden anniversary of its landmark building with the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. On view from May 15 through August 23, 2009, the 50th anniversary exhibition brings together sixty-four projects designed by one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, including privately commissioned residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces, as well as unrealized urban mega-structures. Presented on the spiral ramps of Wright’s museum through a range of mediums—including more than 200 original Frank Lloyd Wright drawings, many of which are on view to the public for the first time, as well as newly commissioned models and digital animations—Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward illuminates Wright’s pioneering concepts of space and reveals the architect’s continuing relevance to contemporary design. During his seventy-two-year career, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who died just six months before the opening of the Guggenheim, worked independently from any single style and developed a new sense of architecture in which form and function were inseparable. Known for his inventiveness and the diversity of his work, Wright is celebrated for the awe-inspiring beauty and tranquility of his designs. Whether creating a private home, workplace, religious edifice, or cultural attraction, Wright sought to unite people, buildings, and nature in physical and spiritual harmony. To realize such a union in material form, Wright created environments of simplicity and repose through carefully composed plans and elevations based on consistent, geometric grammars.

Danish and Nordic Pavilions, (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden)
Curators Elmgreen & Dragset

53rd Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition
7 June–22 November 2009

For the first time in the history of the Venice Biennale, two national pavilions will merge to present one single exhibition. The Danish Art Council‘s Committee for International Visual Arts and the Nordic Committee are honored to announce that the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset will curate both the Danish and the Nordic Pavilions at the Giardini, with a show titled ‘The Collectors’ stretching across the two neighboring venues. Together with a selection of invited international artists, Elmgreen & Dragset will transform the existing architecture of the two pavilions into domestic settings, and invite the audience to be guests in a homely ambience. Here, dining rooms and bedrooms, furniture, fireplaces, a stained glass skylight and the artworks nestled within the households will reveal the uncanny stories of various fictional inhabitants, their obsessive characters and their diverse lifestyles. The public will be guided on a tour by a real estate agent through a ‘For Sale’ Danish Pavilion, and will be told the story of the Ingmar Bergman-style family dramas that used to haunt this house. A long swimming pool will lead the visitors to the neighboring Nordic Pavilion – a flamboyant bachelor's pad. Inside they will encounter the domestic remnants of the mysterious Mister B, and be met by a group of young male hustlers sipping vodka tonics in an environment that could be a case study house motif taken from a David Hockney painting.



As the title of the show indicates, the curators will approach the topic of collecting, and the psychology behind the practice of expressing oneself through physical objects. Why do we gather items and surround ourselves with them in our every day lives? Which mechanisms of desire trigger our selection? The selected artworks, alongside the interior design, kitchenware, clothing and even a collection of flies, will compose the complex narratives of this double exhibition. Through the house décor and the collection of artworks, the garments in the wardrobes, the porcelain in the kitchen and the books in the library, the identities of the fictional inhabitants, their passions and melancholy, will emerge piece by piece. ‘The Collectors’ is not a group show in the conventional sense. The pavilions will undergo a radical reconstruction, and more than twenty artists and designers of all ages, ranging from established to emerging ones, will contribute to creating a different kind of exhibition format, one that will appear closer to a film set than a conventional art display. The curators aim to establish a unique atmosphere of intimacy with their staged exhibition – one that can run counter to the official spectacle and formal nature of the Biennale – and, in close collaboration with the participating artists and designers, they hope to circumvent all the usual competitive aspects of the larger art event. The artists and designers included in the exhibition are Thora Dolven Balke, Massimo Bartolini, Hernan Bas, Guillaume Bijl, Maurizio Cattelan, Elmgreen & Dragset, Pepe Espaliú, Tom of Finland, Simon Fujiwara, Han & Him, Laura Horelli, Martin Jacobson, William E. Jones, Terence Koh, Jani Leinonen, Klara Lidén, Jonathan Monk, Nico Muhly, Norway Says, Henrik Olesen, Nina Saunders, Vibeke Slyngstad, Sturtevant and Wolfgang Tillmans.


Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have been collaborating as an artists’ duo since 1995, and have exhibited in art institutions around the world, including Tate Modern and the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, and the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, both in Paris.

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AGATHE SNOW ACQUIRED BY GUGGENHEIM

Agathe Snow, The Goldfinch, 2008. Curtain rods, key chain, papier-mâché, acrylic, thrift-store jacket, plastic, thread, and ceramic, 39 x 25 x 92 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2008.58. Photo: Farzad Owrang

The Guggenheim recently acquired Agathe Snow’s (b. 1976, Corsica, France) Goldfinch (2008). Snow’s work balances visions of apocalypse and entropic decay with an earnest faith in the redemptive power of human ingenuity and community. Her performances, ranging from carnivalesque banquets to her legendary dance marathons, operate as scenarios for uninhibited social exchange, always enacted with a fierce conceptual commitment. Performative elements and elaborate fictions also underpin Snow’s sculptural installations, which she fashions from an exuberant array of debris scavenged from local streets. With the transformative addition of paint, plaster, and collage, she coaxes her found objects and their attendant histories into evocative new forms that frequently develop and mutate over the course of an exhibition. Demonstrating the artist’s sustained fascination with mythic structures, Goldfinch (2008) is drawn from a body of work inspired by the fables of Leonardo da Vinci, in which she elucidates a relationship between Renaissance ideas and the modern paradigm of the American Dream. In this hanging mobile, painted papier-mâché bunnies—redolent of Jeff Koons’s iconic 1986 sculpture Rabbit—are combined with an inverted silhouette of a girl’s profile, an old sweater, and kitschy religious icons in a moment of tense suspended animation that evokes a tangle of narrative associations.

CHICAGO'S ART INSTITUTE OPENS THE MODERN WING

The Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago opens its new Modern Wing on May 16, 2009. The Second City will have the second-largest art museum in the United States. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, the $300 million, 264,000-square-foot building will bring the museum’s total square footage to approximately 1 million — half the size of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Its most extraordinary feature, called the “flying carpet,” is an aluminum sunshade that floats above the roof of the three-story limestone-and-glass structure. Cantilevered blades block southern rays, while allowing north light to enter the skylights of the galleries below. With glass curtain walls on the north and the south, Piano’s building is all straight lines and right angles. Located at the museum's northeast corner, it comprises two three-story pavilions that together provide 65,000 square feet of new gallery space. A 20,000-square-foot education center occupies the entire first level of the east pavilion; the floors above house galleries for European painting and sculpture and contemporary art. Between the two pavilions, a long street-level court runs from the Modern Wing’s Monroe Street entrance on the north to the existing building on the south. The area includes new galleries for photography, which also has space in the existing building. The east pavilion has the “flying carpet,” but the west pavilion has “the blade,” a 620-foot-long pedestrian bridge that runs from the building’s third floor over Monroe Street into Millennium Park. Designed by Piano, the white-painted structural steel bridge with a rounded bottom was inspired by the hull of a boat. The “blade” moniker derives from the sharp profile of the 15-foot-wide structure. The west pavilion houses galleries for special exhibitions on the first floor and architecture and design on the second floor. The third floor has a fine dining restaurant with a window wall offering spectacular views of Michigan Avenue architecture. It also has an open-air sculpture terrace, where the inaugural exhibit will feature works by Scott Burton. The Art Institute is applying for silver LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for the Modern Wing, which is expected to use half the energy of the original structure. A 14,000-square-foot interior garden, between the east pavilion and the older building, is one of the structure’s many green aspects. Looking south, visitors will see a 56-foot-long, fan-shaped wall sculpture commissioned from Ellsworth Kelly installed on the wall of the older building. Renzo Piano has put his stamp on the museum world with his work on the career-making Pompidou Center in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Beyeler Foundation Museum in Basel, Switzerland. And in 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture. The entrance facade on the north is a window-wall system of double glass intersected by vertical steel mullions that are a realization of Piano's principal goal -- to create a space with as much transparency and light as possible. "Natural light is good for people and good for looking at paintings," he said. "It adds an emotional quality to the experience. It is just more vibrant, more interesting, more three-dimensional than artificial light. What is better than watching a cloud go by and sensing the changes in the weather? And because most of the light in this new building is from the north, it tends to have a uniform brightness."

MARC NEWSON'S "LOCKHEED LOUNGE"

Madonna relaxes on Newson’s “Lockheed” on-camera in 1993 "Rain" music video.

The 46-year-old futurist designer Marc Newson created his iconic “Lockheed Lounge” chair in 1986 and in recent years it has become the most famous pieces of designer furniture to ever change hands at auction. Last week saw an artist proof of the silver aluminum chaise lounge that previously belonged to the artist’s mother (and once made an appearance in Madonna’s 1993 “Rain” music video) close out the design auction at Phillips de Pury in London for a record $1.6 million, a new record for a piece of design furniture. The chair broke its own sales record previously established at a 2007 Sotheby’s auction when the chair brought in $968,000. Amazingly, the design world has managed to buck the sales slump currently facing the art world with resale values remaining virtually undiminished and demand for stellar pieces consistently high. The biomorphic chaise consists of a fiberglass core clad with sheet aluminum and riveted into place and it changed the Australian industrial designer's career. The handcrafted piece, one of four artist proofs which preceded a limited edition of 10, is considered a precursor to the aerodynamic forms Newson would go on to create using computer software and more advanced production processes.

EVA ROTHSCHILD AWARDED DUVEEN AT TATE BRITAIN

Eva Rothschild. Photograph: Gautier Deblonde/PA

Eva Rothschild has been named the sixth artist to take on the Duveens Commission at London's Tate Britain. Rothschild will follow in the footsteps of former Turner Prize-winner, Martin Creed, whose installation last year featured runners dashing through the Duveen galleries at 30-second intervals. The Dublin-born sculptor, 36, will be the first artist to design a single work that will stretch the full 70m length of the Duveen Galleries. Rothschild says she hopes "to create something that will agitate the architecture of the Duveen Galleries, tangling with your perception of space". An exhibition of Rothschild's work was held at Tate Britain last year. She works with steel, "seedy sex-shop leatherette", strips of rubber, Plexiglas and more, infusing what have been called her "venomous" sculptures with pop-culture allusions. Eva Rothschild's sculptures derive from the abstraction of different visual codes and imagery, rich in iconography that is informed by contemporary culture – music, film, literature – and by religion. She is particularly interested in the way objects have a power over us, especially in relation to religious thought and superstition. This is reflected in her fascination with sacred or lucky symbols, ranging from spheres and pyramids to new age charms. In this way, competing influences are combined to create hybrid forms that explore how meaning is ascribed to things. Her art explores the relationships between volume and mass, surface and structure and how sculpture lightly yet effectively occupies the space and references the art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Minimalism. Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, praised Rothschild for "creating works that beguile with their subtlety and illusion". The Duveens Commission, which aims to highlight contemporary sculpture, has been made an annual event with the financial support of Sotheby's auction house. Rothschild's installation will be unveiled on June 29th at the galleries in Millbank, London, and displayed until November 29, 2009.

POOR LITTLE RICH GETTY

"Rich and dumb" typically describes starlets or heiresses, not art museums -- but the Getty Trust in Los Angeles may change all that. From sexual shenaningans in the executive suite (described by Sharon Waxman in Loot) to the ignominious ouster of Getty director Barry Munitz and the indictment of curator Marion True for antiquities smuggling, the Getty has faced one embarrassment after another. Now, the Getty has announced that its endowment was so poorly invested -- including an unbelievable two-thirds of the total in unsafe "alternative" assets -- that drastic cuts in programming and personel are necessary. In all, the institution is cutting about $75 million from its $300-million budget, and eliminating more than 200 positions, including 62 jobs at the Getty Museum. Perhaps one employee who imay prove superfluous is James Williams, chief investment officer at the trust, who told the press that his portfolio is "consistent with the best institutional funds out there." One would have to agree that his results seem certainly as good as the work at Bear Stearns or A.I.G. As for Getty Trust CEO James N. Wood, he has a plan: the cost of parking at the Getty is going up from $10 to $15.
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