Saturday, February 27, 2010

AN INSPIRATION: ERNST BEYELER (1921–2010)



Wassily Kandinsky's Improvisation 10, 1910
Oil on canvas
120х140 cm
Basel. Switzerland. Collection Ernst Beyeler
ABC reports that Ernst Beyeler, whose early eye for undervalued Picassos and Impressionists helped him assemble one of Europe’s most famous art collections, has died, according to a statement made by the Beyeler Foundation earlier today. He was eighty-eight. The son of a Swiss railway employee, Beyeler became a widely respected art patron after World War II by acquiring hundreds of works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, and others. He presented them to the public in his Basel gallery and later in the Beyeler Foundation designed by Renzo Piano in Basel. His art collection eventually grew to a value of at least $1.85 billion, according to the Swiss finance magazine Bilanz, thanks to Beyeler’s taste for quality and his personal connections with painters such as Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, and Alberto Giacometti. He also was a friend of Picasso. In 1948, he married Hildy Kunz, who became a constant companion in his art business until she died in 2008. Together, they mounted numerous art exhibitions featuring modern classics in the 1950s, drawing on debts and even paying a forty-five-hundred-dollar price in installments to make Wassily Kandinsky’s masterpiece Improvisation 10 his first major acquisition. “There are pictures we always wanted to live with,” Beyeler once said, adding that it gave him a better feeling than having money in the bank. In the sixty years since, more than sixteen thousand paintings, drawings, and sculptures, including Picassos, Monets, and Vincent van Goghs, changed hands at his Basel gallery. He kept the Kandinsky painting, and today it could be worth twenty-five million dollars at auction, according to published estimates.

Friday, February 26, 2010

TOBIAS MADISON AT THE SWISS INSTITUTE, NY

Tobias Madison
Yes I Can! Yes I Can!
Zürich, January 2009


Tobias Madison
Hydrate + Perform
Yes I Can! The Movie: Preview
March 8 – April 24, 2010

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 6, 2010
6 - 8 PM
Swiss Institute
495 Broadway 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10012

Thursday, February 25, 2010

ARI MARCOPOULOS: WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2010

Ari Marcopoulos
Still from "Detroit", 2009
High-definition digital video
color; sound; 7:32 minutes

Photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos is showing a new film called Detroit at the Whitney Biennial 2010, February 25 - May 30, 2010.
Says New York Magazine journalist Jerry Saltz: "After seeing Ari Marcopoulos’s intense video in which two young kids make electronic music in their tiny Detroit bedroom, I left the museum with a giant burst of happiness for the infinite creativity of America."
Here is a short film in which Ari and curator Gary Carrion-Murayari play a round of virtual FIFA 10 soccer in the artist's bedroom while blasting a track from Ari's lo-fi noise tape collection called “Nail Paint Mausoleum."

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

JEFF KOONS CURATES "SKIN FRUIT" EXHIBITION AT NEW MUSEUM

Paul McCarthy, "Paula Jones", 2007. Fiberglass, 82 x 57 1/2 x 107 inches.

The New Museum announced details of “Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection,” its much-anticipated exhibition curated by artist Jeff Koons. “Skin Fruit” will be the first exhibition in the United States of the Athens-based Dakis Joannou Collection, renowned as one of the leading collections of contemporary art in the world. This will also be the first exhibition curated by Koons, whose early work inspired the evolution of the Joannou collection. “Skin Fruit” will be on view from March 3 through June 6, 2010, and will include over 100 works by 50 international artists spanning several generations. Focusing on the body in contemporary art, the exhibition will spotlight the age-old preoccupation with the human form as a vessel of and vehicle for experience. Koons’s title “Skin Fruit” alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. Skin and fruit evoke the essential tensions between interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume. Starting with the first, now-legendary exhibitions, such as “Artificial Nature” and “Post Human,” at his DESTE Foundation’s non-profit museum in Athens, Dakis Joannou has focused on works that present a new image of man. It is no coincidence that his collection developed in the cultural context of Greece, where Classical sculpture defined the Western canon of anatomical representation. Artists have arrived at a much more uncertain image of mankind in this new century, in which bodies are still idealized but also are assaulted by forces of our own making. Joannou’s collection is comprised of more than 1,500 works by 400 contemporary artists, from the most eminent to those just emerging. For “Skin Fruit,” Koons has selected sculptures, works on paper, paintings, installations, and videos by a group of artists including David Altmejd, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Nathalie Djurberg, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Paul McCarthy, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Kiki Smith, Christiana Soulou, Jannis Varelas, Kara Walker, and Andro Wekua, among others. The show will also premiere new works such as Charles Ray’s re-envisioned "Revolution Counter-Revolution" (1990/2010); a new public installation of Jenny Holzer’s "Selections from the Survival Series" (1984); and a special 3-D book project by Italian artist Robert Cuoghi, and will include living sculptures by Pawel Althamer and Tino Sehgal. “Skin Fruit” will feature only one work by Koons—his One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985)—the first major artwork that Dakis Joannou acquired, initiating the collection that would grow to be one of the world’s finest. Within the context of the exhibition this influential object, with its both familiar and mysterious orb suspended in fluid, becomes a womb, a point of origin and of departure. The installation for “Skin Fruit” has been conceived by Koons as a kind of panorama, with frequent shifts in scale and unconventional juxtapositions. Role-playing games and dramas occur: a man will stage a religious ritual; a sculpture literally sings out; white chocolate monuments tower above visitor’s heads; voracious creatures eat themselves and each other while bodies are buried or frozen; icons and deities are adored or dethroned. With the exhibition “Skin Fruit,” the New Museum launches The Imaginary Museum, a new exhibition series that will periodically showcase leading private collections of contemporary art from around the world, providing the opportunity for rarely seen, great works of art to be accessible to a broader public. The Museum invited Jeff Koons to curate the first in this series. Koons had his first museum exhibition at the New Museum in 1981. In addition to being one of the most accomplished artists of our time, Koons is a committed and highly informed art lover and collector whose interests span from Greek and Roman sculpture to contemporary art. Koons has said that he collects art “to have a world besides my world, to have another field of experience.” It is the combined perspective of artist, collector, and connoisseur that he brings to the task as curator of the New Museum exhibition. Jeff Koons and Dakis Joannou have enjoyed a close friendship and artistic dialogue for nearly three decades. Joannou has been a great supporter of Koons’s work from the beginning of his career, and a large concentration of Koons’s work from all periods is at the core of the Joannou collection. Koons’s role as curator reflects the ideals at the forefront of Joannou’s collection: ongoing conversations and collaborations with artists. In addition, it also signals the New Museum’s continued experimentation with adventurous curatorial formats. With this exhibition, the Museum seeks to further dialogues about alternative collaborations and the history of artist-curated exhibitions. When the New Museum announced that it was presenting an exhibition, curated by Jeff Koonshttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/arts/design/11museum.html it triggered a tidal wave of controversy. Bloggers, art critics, and reporters pointed to several perceived improprieties in the museum’s showing the pieces, the principal ones being that Joannou is a private collector as well as a trustee of the institution and that among his holdings are 40 works by Koons, the curator. Somewhat overlooked in the ethical debate are the scope and importance of the assemblage. Despite the grumblings and even calls to scrap the show entirely, many look forward to seeing the works in the U.S. for the first time.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

MARCH MADNESS IN FEBRUARY

BLINKY PALERMO
UNTITLED (STOFFBILD)

London's February contemporary art sales are a huge success. At Sotheby's 74 of the 77 lots offered sold for £54.07 million, or about $84.5 million. While greater totals have been recorded in the past, a contemporary art sale with a 96 percent success rate is an unheard-of occurrence. For example, there is no common denominator between Chris Ofili’s “Through the Grape Vine,” dated 1998, and Blinky Palermo’s “Untitled (Stoffbild),” executed between 1967 and 1969, except for one — both nearly doubled their high estimate within minutes of each other, each time setting a new world auction record. Ofili’s work, executed in acrylic, oil, resin, glitter, collage and, for good measure, elephant dung, is an attempt at tongue-in-cheek humor with its figural, faux naïve vine branch painted in shades of pink. That earned its creator the Turner Prize in 1998. Bidders deferentially ran up the Ofili to a stupendous £802,250. “Untitled (Stoffbild)” by Palermo, who died in 1977, could not be more different from Ofili’s prize winner. The Palermo work, a large square panel of cotton fabric on burlap, is painted with two bands of solid color of uneven height, respectively dark blue and turquoise. It fetched an equally amazing £1.11 million. Immediately after, an “Abstract Picture” signed in 1988 by Gerhard Richter, rose to $2.5 million. Buyers and sellers have been encouraged by results such as the $43.8 million paid for an Andy Warhol at Sotheby’s, New York, in November. The ArtTactic Confidence Indicator for the U.S. and European contemporary-art markets has risen from 28 to 58, the highest level since November 2007.Last night’s highest price was 4 million pounds, given by a telephone buyer for the 1983 de Kooning abstract “Untitled XIV.” It was being sold by a European collector who acquired it from the painter’s estate. The work had been expected to fetch as much as 3 million pounds. It's obvious people feel confident about buying art again. They’re not getting interest in the bank, the stock market is erratic and  investors want to sink money into fine paintings. On Wednesday, neither style nor aesthetic achievement had a bearing on prices. Bidders were prepared to go for anything, as long as the artists had achieved a degree of prominence. Buyers seemed eager to spend their money and obtain something tangible in exchange, however flimsy the aura surrounding the works might appear to be. Never before has contemporary art received such an unreserved financial accolade.

TOM FRIEDMAN "UP IN THE AIR"

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall

February 5 - June 6, 2010

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall is proud to present Tom Friedman's first solo exhibition in Scandinavia. Over the past year the artist has been working on a new piece, "Up in the Air", for the exhibition at Magasin 3, an enormous installation that summarizes Friedman's work and his artistic perspective on contemporary reality. In this comprehensive exhibition they are also presenting key works from the breadth of his varied production up to the present day.

 Tom Friedman is an inquiring artist who follows his own precise logic and creates astonishing objects out of everyday materials. Like an alchemist he extracts the essentials of a thing and then proceeds to turn the ordinary into something extraordinary. Friedman encourages us to question how we see and what we consider to be real. An artistic sensibility that is at once serious, playful and profound.
Curator Richard Julin says:

"Friedman attempts to understand the world through his work, and every new artwork represents an act of discovery. He hopes to create a space for us viewers to slow down, room to explore thoughts that we have not had previously."



Tom Friedman - installation at Magasin 3 from Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall on Vimeo.


The exhibition "Up in the Air" by Tom Friedman at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall. Comments by the artist. Filmed during the installation of the exhibition. Made by the exhibitions' curator Richard Julin.