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Financial Times

YAYOI KUSAMA AT TATE MODERN

9 February – 5 June 2012

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 obsessively charged 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.

NICK RELPH BILLBOARD TATE BRITAIN LONDON

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET "THE FOURTH PLINTH"

Trafalgar Square’s next FOURTH PLINTH commission is a quietly subversive work by Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset titled "The Horse and His Boy" to be unveiled this Thursday. Since the beginning of the Fourth Plinth art project in 2005, the works commissioned for the space have been willful provocations, designed to upset the square’s militaristic air. Now comes an image more innocent, and more subversive still: a young boy on a rocking horse. "We wanted to make an image that was a different depiction of masculinity from what you find in most public monuments. Men don’t have to be conquerors. Maybe you can be a hero in a different way, a more fragile way.”

SWISS INSTITUTE OPENING MARCH 7

HEART TO HAND UNTIL APRIL 15

ALEX HUBBARD AT HAMMER

OPENING TODAY UNTIL MAY 20, 2012
Construction and art materials, urban detritus, domestic items, and even the occasional animal make their way into New York-based artist Alex Hubbard’s dynamic videos. Avoiding a single point of focus, he constructs his videos in layers, creating all-over compositions in which movement is multi-directional and time seems non-linear. Also a painter, his videos and paintings are constructed through parallel strategies, both exploring the construction, composition, mass, color, and depth of images in unexpected ways. Hubbard’s elaborate Foley soundtracks add a delightful and provocative dimension to his adventurous visual narratives that challenge notions of duration and question the difference between looking and watching. Hammer Projects: Alex Hubbard will mark the debut of his newest video, Eat Your Friends (2011). Presented alongside The Border, The Ship (2010), the exhibition will highlight Hubbard’s increasingly complex videos that engulf viewers with bold colors, performative gestures, and evolving compositions. Organized by Hammer curatorial associate Corrina Peipon, Hammer Projects: Alex Hubbard is his first one-person museum exhibition.

LONDON AUCTIONS ARE LIN-SANE!!

Christie’s evening auction of Post-War and Contemporary art managed to bring in $126.5 million, the second highest total for the category at Christie’s London and a post-2008 high. The rare sale of a Francis Bacon painting pushed sales at Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary Art auction this week to levels not seen since 2008. When the hammer came down on the final lot, the auction house had pulled in £80.5m and achieved its second highest earnings for a contemporary sale since they began in 1977. Art experts say that growth at the top end of the market has been partly driven by a new wave of Asian billionaires, especially from China. Also the Qatari government is dominating the market right now, as they purchase items for the country’s new museum. Not to be overlooked, a auction of print works by the late Lucian Freud resulted in a record-breaking sale of prints by the artist.

CHRIS WOOL 7.8 M. ARTIST RECORD AT CHRISTIE'S

At Christie’s London contemporary sale, Christopher Wool’s "Untitled" set a new artist record. The price, after the buyer’s premium, was £4,913,250 ($7,758,022) way above the estimate of £2,500,000-3,500,000 ($3,947,500 – $5,526,500). The work spells out the word “FOOL,” and beat out the artist’s last record, $5,010,500, which was set by Blue Fool, a painting with the word “FOOL” spelled out in the exact same way and in the same lettering except the previous record is in blue and the new one is in black.

Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei to Create 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2012 OPENS MARCH 1

The 2012 Biennial features works by approximately 50 artists working in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, dance, and performance. Elisabeth Sussman (co-organizer of the influential, politically provocative 1993 Whitney Biennial) and Jay Sanders provide an insightful joint essay, and a group of art historians and critics contribute entries on common themes and ideas from the represented artists' techniques and influences. In addition, a significant portion of the catalogue is devoted to original contributions from each of the participating artists, in a unique effort to provide a more experiential understanding of the exhibition. 352 pages. 300 color, 100 b/w illus. Paperback with flaps. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012.

PRE-ORDER NOW

Massimiliano Gioni has been appointed the commissioner of the 2013 Venice Biennale.

STEVN HOLL ARCHITECTS TO DESIGN MFAH EXPANSION

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston announced Thursday that the award-winning American firm Steven Holl Architects has been selected to partner with the museum to develop an architectural project on a two-acre site adjacent to the Cullen Sculpture Garden. At the center of the expansion effort will be a new museum building set to house the MFAH's galleries for art after 1900 as well as traveling exhibition space, educational facilities, a library and resource center, lecture halls, a theater and a restaurant.
Winner of the American Institute of Architect's Gold Medal for 2012, and named by Time Magazine as America’s Best Architect, Steven Holl is best recognized in the US for 2003's Simmons Hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as for his innovative 2007 addition for Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., which New Yorker magazine heralded as “one of the best buildings of the last generation.” The building (and parking structure) will occupy the two-acre parking lot across the street from the Mies Van Der Rohe building, adjacent to the sculpture garden and the Glassell School. The expansion will allow the museum to enlarge presentations of its collections, exhibitions and myriad educational programs. The project will entail the construction of a new museum building intended primarily for art after 1900 to complement the Audrey Jones Beck and Caroline Wiess Law Buildings. The decision follows a comprehensive international search that resulted in three firms—Steven Holl Architects, Snøhetta and Morphosis—developing site-specific concepts for the planned expansion. Following presentations by each firm, the long-range planning committee of the board of trustees selected Steven Holl Architects. “After extensive consideration of the three finalists, there was a strong consensus that Steven Holl Architects could provide an outstanding building that would integrate itself beautifully into the MFAH campus,” said Richard D. Kinder, chair of the museum’s long-range planning committee.
“This is a proud moment not only for the MFAH, but for the city of Houston,” said Cornelia Long, chair of the Board of Trustees.
BBI congratulates Steven Holl and his incredible team!

MIKE KELLEY DEAD AT 57

Artist Mike Kelley, described by colleagues as an “irresistible force” in contemporary art, has died at his home in Los Angeles, having apparently taken his own life. He was 57. After graduating college in 1976, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts, studying alongside teachers like John Baldessari and Laurie Anderson. Kelley's career took off in the early 1990s, with solo shows at the Whitney, LACMA, and other international venues. He and Oursler organized a well-recived installation — a kind of monument to punk — at Documenta X in 1997. In the early 2000s, he began exhibiting with Gagosian Gallery after 20 years with Metro Pictures.
Kelly's work will be included in the upcoming Whitney Biennial. It is the eighth time his work has been included in the biannual exhibition. According to the New York Times, he was also in the process of putting together a show for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Kelley's studio released a statement to the L.A. Times saying, "Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art... We cannot believe he is gone. But we know his legacy will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us."