Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012 Designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei

The Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012 will open June 1st. It will be the twelfth commission in the Gallery's annual series, the world's first and most ambitious architectural program of its kind. The design team responsible for the celebrated Beijing National Stadium, which was built for the 2008 Olympic Games, comes together again in London in 2012 for the Serpentine's acclaimed annual commission, being presented as part of the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad. The Pavilion is Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei's first collaborative built structure in the UK. This year's Pavilion will take visitors beneath the Serpentine's lawn to explore the hidden history of its previous Pavilions. Eleven columns characterizing each past Pavilion and a twelfth column representing the current structure will support a floating platform roof 1.4 meters above ground. The Pavilion's interior will be clad in cork, a sustainable building material chosen for its unique qualities and to echo the excavated earth. Taking an archaeological approach, the architects have created a design that will inspire visitors to look beneath the surface of the park as well as back in time across the ghosts of the earlier structures.

PUBLIC ART FUND NYC SUMMER 2012

THOMAS DEMAND at MOT

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) Thomas Demand Saturday 19 May–Sunday 8 July 2012 Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Thomas Demand. This exhibition will be the first in a Japanese museum to present a comprehensive view of Demand's activities, from his early works to his recent film pieces as well as his well-known pieces such as Bathroom (1997) and Grotto (2006). Thomas Demand (born 1964) is one of the leading figures on the German contemporary art scene. He is famous for recreating a scene himself then photographing this to produce carefully constructed pictures. Demand often recreates scenes of political or social events made of paper life-sized models, based on photographs from mass media, then photographs the result. He cuts common images out of ordinary daily life—a bathroom with a glimpse of the bathtub, and a sink full of unwashed dishes, which, at first glance, could almost be mistaken for the real thing, but closer inspection reveals that the space contains an unnaturally uniform texture, producing a strange feeling of wrongness. Significant places, psychological landscapes set against everyday backgrounds; Demand quietly confronts us with these in a thrilling fashion.

MAKER MAGAZINE

ALEX KATZ: GIVE ME TOMORROW

Tate St Ives Summer Exhibition 2012

Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, Alex Katz is one of the most important and respected living American artists. In 2012 Katz will celebrate his 85th birthday, and a career that spans a remarkable six decades. For his exhibition at Tate St Ives Katz brings together over 30 canvases, plus collages and cut-outs, that span the full breadth of his career from the 1950s to now. Given the Gallery’s location on the beach, and the nature of the summer season here, the exhibition places a special emphasis on Katz’s seascapes and beach scenes, as well as images of family holidays and friends, painted in his own seaside retreat of Lincolnville, Maine, where he continues to spend his summers.

ROB PRUITT AT KUNSTVEREIN FREIBURG

ROB PRUITT HISTORY OF THE WORLD MAY 5-JULY 12,2012

Source material for Hoarder Landscapes, 2012 © Rob Pruitt, Courtesy Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York

Jeremy Deller picked for British pavilion at 2013 Venice Biennale

DAVID WEISS 1946-2012

With the passing of the Swiss artist David Weiss, who died on April 27 at the age of sixty-six following a battle with cancer, the world has lost one of the greatest artists of our time. Weiss’s death marks the closing of one of contemporary art’s enduring partnerships—a prolific collaboration with the Swiss artist Peter Fischli that began in 1979 and would continue for thirty-three years. Fischli/Weiss created some of the richest, most memorable, and most profoundly human work of the past three decades. The American critical theorist Fredric Jameson famously observed that our postmodern era is marked by a “waning of affect”—a loss of sincerity and authenticity, and their replacement by irony. Yet Fischli/Weiss demonstrated that irony and sincerity could not exist without one another—that, indeed, there is no sincerity like irony. Hans Ulrich Obrist