Catherine Sullivan in BOMB Magazine
In a BOMB Magazine web exclusive, Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan (pictured top right) and choreographer Meg Stuart discuss mining the history of the avant-garde tradition and emotional overflow in ensemble-based work. BOMB’s Summer 2008 print issue will include the full-length conversation.
The magazine’s online art section, which currently archives 1,206 articles and interviews, features numerous Art21 artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Andrea Zittel (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, Kara Walker (all Season 2), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).
Berliner Salon: Arturo Herrera at Galerie Max Hetzler
This evening, Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin opened the second installment of Always There, a group exhibition featuring work by Art:21 Season 3 artist Arturo Herrera. Herrera’s particular interest in the color gray, which he describes as a “problematic color” devoid of personality, provides the premise for the exhibition.
Featured in the first part of this two-part exhibition were Haluk Akak√ße, G√ºnther F√∂rg, Mark Grotjahn, Sarah Morris, Frank Nitsche, Yves Oppenheim, Anselm Reyle and Kelley Walker. Always There Part 2 presents works by Andre Butzer, Albert Oehlen, Richard Phillips, Michael Raedecker, Kay Rosen, and Christopher Wool. Herrera asked each of these artists to create a painterly work specifically responding to and employing the color gray (an appropriate motif for a Berlin-based exhibition considering the city’s perpetually overcast skies), in order to “analyze, define and deconstruct this non-color,” according to the press release.
The neutrality and ambiguity typically associated with what Odilon Redon termed “the quintessence of color,” as noted in the exhibition catalogue, are explored and manipulated by each artist’s individual approach to Herrera’s assignment. Herrera himself has long been engaged with “perfect shades of gray,” using water to manipulate black and white photographs of his drawings in order to create chance imperfections and subtle tonal variations that span the color’s gradient spectrum.
Photography is notably absent from Always There. Instead, Herrera limited the show to painting, although his own exhibited piece functions as both painting and sculpture. A single abstract shape made from felt, Catch (2008) recalls Herrera’s history of collage in a fitting representation of the artist’s celebrated formal tendencies. Similarly, Christopher Wool’s hectic brush strokes, Richard Phillip’s sexualized subject matter, Kay Rosen’s text (”Sky Fog Sea”) and Michael Raedecker’s delicate embroidery all infuse this seemingly mundane color with decisive individuality, exposing vivid personality despite their palette’s “neutral” predisposition.
The exhibitions are accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue that includes an essay by art historian Gudrun Inboden. Always There Part 2 will be on view until April 26th. View more images and read more about the exhibition here.
Prospect.1 New Orleans Coming in November
Slated as the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, Prospect.1 New Orleans will open November 1, 2008 and run through January 18, 2009. Founding director and chief curator of this new biennial, Dan Cameron (former Senior Curator of the New Museum and recently appointed Director of Visual Arts of the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans) was inspired to organize an exhibition in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The recently announced list of 75+ artists from around the globe includes Art21 artists Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford (both Season 4), Cai Guo-Qiang, Arturo Herrera (both Season 3), Janine Antoni, and Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2).
Calling for a total of 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, Prospect.1 New Orleans will be divided among several buildings in various historic New Orleans neighborhoods, including the Warehouse District, the Bywater, French Quarter, the Marigny, and the Treme. A number of existing institutions and halls - CAC, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art - will be used, along with converted warehouses, commercial structures and other public spaces and found sites throughout the city.
How will Prospect.1 New Orleans help the damaged city? “[It] will contribute to the cultural rebuilding of New Orleans by creating an entirely new narrative about the city, its architecture, and its history. By re-branding the city as a place where the visual arts can thrive, the long-term aim of Prospect.1 New Orleans is to create an entirely new category of cultural tourism for the city, and to broaden its image overall.”
While the Prospect.1 website is good for answers to logistical questions, and briefly addresses the terms “global art” and “biennial,” what is perhaps most important here (as demonstrated in the above excerpt) is attention to the city’s predicament and progress-Prospect.1 tells us the state of things in New Orleans.
For further information and updates, please go to the Prospect.1 New Orleans website.
Catherine Sullivan and Arturo Herrera in Adaptation in Chicago
While adaptation is a common practice in popular culture‚Äîfamiliar to moviegoers and booklovers who debate endlessly whether the film version is superior to the novel‚Äîit is perhaps less well known as a practice in contemporary art. The exhibition Adapation at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art looks at the use of this strategy in the recent work of Catherine Sullivan (Season 4), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), Guy Ben-Ner, and Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation. These artists have transformed source material to make their own adapted works of art, re-envisioning classic literature, painting, film, ballet, and even email as new video installations.
Adaptation is a tightly focused exhibition: each of the four artists is represented by one or two significant video installations. Arturo Herrera’s first-ever video installation, Les Noces (The Wedding, 2007; see http://adaptation.uchicago.edu/artists/herrera/ for a clip), enjoys its US premiere in this show, and is an animated adaptation of the ballet of the same name by Igor Stravinsky. Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need (2007; see http://adaptation.uchicago.edu/artists/sullivan/), builds from a notorious and ubiquitous type of mass e-mail scam, as well as a smaller-scale new work developed in collaboration with students from the University of Chicago.
Read more about each artist and their work and view video clips on the exhibition’s extensive website, http://adaptation.uchicago.edu.
Don’t Miss: Arturo Herrera at the Aldrich Museum
For his solo show Castles, Dwarfs, and Happychaps at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, Season 3 artist Arturo Herrera, uses a Renaissance technique called “pouncing” to transfer a design from paper to the gallery wall. Aldrich curatorial director Jessica Hough points out that “in the Renaissance a pounce drawing would be the starting point for an oil painting or fresco, but here Herrera uses the traditional technique to achieve a contemporary end.” Hough continues that “the result [is] a complex drawing of knotted dwarfs, complete with pick axes and gemstones, composed of dots of several colors.”
In his work, Herrera borrows imagery from children’s books and other popular culture sources to create hybrid works of art that are both familiar and foreign. These works can take the form of a large-scale installation of cut felt, a wall painting, or an intimate work on paper.
This exhibition features work dating from 1998 through the present and besides the 22-foot-long, floor-to-ceiling pounced drawing, the exhibition also includes works on, and meticulously cut from, paper.
Castles, Dwarfs, and Happychaps is on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through September 3, 2007. Read more about the exhibition here.
