Weekly Roundup

Vija Celmins, "Web #1" (1999). Courtesy Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

• Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland in February 2008.  The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh kicked things off this spring with the “rooms” of Vija Celmins (Season 2), Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman.  The show runs through November 8th.

• Season 2 artist Kiki Smith designed the minimalist stage set for “Pinter’s Mirror” at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts.  The production runs through August 2nd.

• Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) created a new work for Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin that will open July 10.   Compass divides the Kunsthalle horizontally and introduces a new level to the space, reducing it to less than one third of its normal height and rendering it inaccessible to the public.  Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads in an otherwise empty, resonating chamber.

• Last week the McNay Museum opened In Their Own Right, a  group exhibition focusing on the achievements of women printmakers from 1960 to the present. In Their Own Right showcases nearly 30 prints by contemporary women printmakers from the McNay’s collection, surveying the different trends and movements of American art over the past four decades. It includes artists such as Helen Frankenthaler,  Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Vija Celmins, April Gornik, Dorothy Hood, Yvonne Jacquette, Jane Kent, Agnes Martin, and Louise Nevelson. The show runs through August 23.

• Tokyo’s Gallery Koyanagi will open on August 1st a two-person show of architectural works by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Junya Ishigami. On display will be architectural models, such as Ishigami’s design for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology and Sugimoto’s maquettes for the S Foundation and Go-O shrine. Did you know the Season 3 artist was an architect too?

Weekly Roundup

• Krzysztof Wodiczko is the sole artist representing Poland at this summer’s Venice Biennale. The striking video installation of milky windows depicts the shadows of immigrant workers as they take on the daily tasks and routines of life, conversing in various languages. Above is a ScribeMedia video interview with the Season 3 artist.

• Elements of Photography opened this past weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.  The exhibition focuses on two fundamental elements of nature inherent to the medium: light and water.  The “naturalists” in the show include artists Luisa Lambri, Walead Beshty, Adam Ekberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), and others.  Through October 4.

• The Stenersen Museum in Oslo opens an intriguing show this week that explores the many dimensions of gender-based violence. Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women, and Art is curated by Randy Rosenberg of Art Works For Change.  Several of the 17 participating artists include Marina Abramovic, Laylah Ali (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Icelandic Love Corporation, and Lucy Orta. Through August 9.

• Ongoing at LACMA is Classical Frieze, an exhibit of recent films and photographs by Eleanor Antin (Season 2).  The works on display mimic the ancient world by way of  19th-century neo-classical paintings. Through September 14th.

• White Noise opens this week at James Cohan Gallery. The group show features works that exist at the intersection of visual art, music and sound, exploring “how sound can obliterate as well as elevate; how silence can involve both absence and presence.” Some of the artists include Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Joseph Beuys, Martha Colburn, Rodney Graham, Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, Christian Marclay, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). June 18-August 12.

Weekly Roundup

Shahzia Sikander, "Blood Lines," 2009. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins.

• Tonight at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts, Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko will engage in a discussion with Teddy Cruz and Marjetica Potrč about their socially engaged projects as part of the series Participation and Friction: Rethinking Art and Architecture as Public Culture.

• Congratulations to Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, recipient of the DeCordova Museum’s 2008 Rappaport Prize.

• A little follow-up on that Hiroshi Sugimoto image of the Boden Sea at Uttwil that adorns the new U2 album cover.  Read more about the Season 3 artist’s barter with Bono.

• At Mary Boone Gallery, dealer Javier Perez curates an exhibition of three of his favorite artists: Mike Kelley (Season 3), Terence Koh, and Jeff Koons.  The show opened April 4 and runs through May 16.

• Shazia Sikander’s (Season 1) solo exhibition Stalemate opened last week at Sikemma Jenkins, and features two video works and a series of drawings and paintings entitled Mapping the End of Something.

• At Circleculture Gallery in Berlin, scenes from the skateboarding, graffiti, and punk underground intersect in a three-person show of works by Barry McGee (Season 1), Ed Templeton, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). The exhibition opens April 10.

Sugimoto + U2

Word on the street is that one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images will be used as the cover for U2’s upcoming album No Line on the Horizon, scheduled for release March 3rd.  The Season 3 photographer follows in the footsteps of other Art:21 artists who have also crossed over and “exhibited” their work as album art.  Notable favorites include Raymond Pettibon for Sonic Youth (Goo, 1990), Tim Hawkinson for Beck (Mutations, 1998), and Matthew Barney for Arto Lindsay (The Prize, 1999).

In other news, I dare say that I may be the first and only Art21 blogger to have a weird utensil named after him.

Roanoke’s Taubman Museum of Art Opens This Weekend

I had the good fortune of being in Roanoke, Virginia and seeing the impressive new Taubman Museum of Art (formerly the Art Museum of Western Virginia).

A welcome addition to the skyline of this friendly Virginian city, the Taubman is known for its collections of 18th- to 20th-century American art, which features fine works by John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, Petah Coyne , Robert Motherwell, Thomas Hart Benton, Sally Mann (Season 1), as well as folk art objects.

If you have the privilege of traveling to Roanoke, be sure to check out one of the exhibitions that will open the museum entitled Rethinking Landscape: Contemporary Photography from the Allen G. Thomas, Jr. Collection. The show opens tomorrow (and runs until March 1, 2009) and will features works by Taj Forer, Andreas Gefeller, Anthony Goicolea, Bill Hensen, Sarah Ann Johnson, Chris Jordon, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, Sze Tsung Leong, Sally Mann, Andrew Moore, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Martina Mullaney, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Sarah Pickering, Kahn and Selesnick, Kerry Skarbakka and Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3).

Below are some street views of the structure designed by Randall Stout Architects.

Sugimoto at Four Venues

The traveling retrospective exhibition of works by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) is on view at the Museum of Art Lucerne in Switzerland through January 25, 2009. The artist has designed the exhibition, previously at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, specially for the conditions of the current venue.

Sugimoto’s work is also included in Modern Photographs: The Machine, the Body and the City, Selections From the Charles Cowles Collection, a collection of vintage and contemporary photographs at the Parrish Art Museum through November 30; and Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, an installation of works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Opening tomorrow at Gagosian Gallery in New York City, Seven Days/Seven Nights will display fourteen photographs from Sugimoto’s Seascapes series in an architectural setting of the artist’s own design. The exhibition closes December 20.

Watch Sugimoto discuss the series in this excerpt from Art:21.

Sugimoto and Tryon at the Freer Sackler

On view through January 25, 2009, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery exhibits 22 pastels by American landscape painter Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925) alongside six black and white photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) from his series “Seascapes.”

Seascapes: Tryon & Sugimoto is the first exhibition since the Freer Gallery of Art opened in 1923 that presents works from its American collection with works from outside the museum walls with works from the collection of the adjoining Sackler Gallery. According to the press release, “Although the works are separated by history and medium, they are linked by a common subject—the sea—and by formal resonances that encourage leisurely contemplation and quiet comparison.”

View other works in the exhibition here or visit the event calendar for related programs.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Sort of) at Madame Tussaud’s

In the June issue of Colloquy, art historian Elizabeth Howie writes about discovering two ‘anonymous’ Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) photographs hanging at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London. Though no labels were attached showing their authorship, the large black and white images of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth I near the entrance were actually part of a series of wax figure portraits Sugimoto had made at the museum in 1999.

The great fear of many artists is of course seeing one’s work die an anonymous death. Tussaud saved her own life during the French revolution through her skilled handiwork, forced to make commemorative death casts of her friends at the court of Versailles. For artists, their work ultimately becomes surrogates for the artists themselves, where paintings and sculpture (even of the wax variety) replace wax figures. In a culture and art market where celebrity artists are common in a parallel universe to Hollywood, it is particularly odd and fascinating to consider the predicament of anonymity within a museum context.

If every art museum were burned to the ground as Malevich and the Futurists had hoped, leaving merely traces of what was once “grand” in only public spaces and kitschy museums such as Madame Tussaud’s, then even stranger to discover the possibility that the artist may survive as somewhat of a “nameless soldier” in a tomb to the history of celebrity.

Will the fate that stricken the artist named “School of Rembrandt” or “Follower of Velasquez” one day befell the rest of us as well as Sugimoto himself, who ironically considered Madame Tussaud’s a place he wouldn’t normally visit as an art viewing experience, “but always with my work in mind”?

Berliner Salon: Sugimoto at the Neue and Street art in F-hain

As previously posted, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s retrospective opened today at the Neue National Galerie. Having seen the show in the context of Mies van der Rohe’s brilliantly minimal architectural monument, I can honestly say that Sugimoto’s work has never looked better. The installation is lovely and the clean lines of the Neue perfectly compliment the Japanese artist’s tendency for monochromatic refinement and pristine geometry.But, for those who are more interested in the lowbrow aesthetics of the public sphere, as opposed to the highbrow conceptualism of the institution, tomorrow marks the opening of the street art festival Urban Affairs, which will combine action painting, site-specific installation and original artwork by some of the graffiti genre’s most notorious activists. El Tono and Nano 4814, both of whom were recently commissioned by the Tate Modern to create large-scale on-site murals, will participate in the festival. Other notable urban artists on view include Dolk, El Bocho, Alias and Nomad, plus there will be an after party in the beer garden immediately adjacent to the venue, a converted former brewery located in the predominately punk neighborhood of Friedrichshain (F-hain) that boasts an unglaublich 900 sq. meters of exhibition space. Considering Berlin’s reputation as a graffiti mecca of the urban art world, this opening is not to be missed.In other news, there are fire works going off in Berlin right now, which is helping this American feel almost disturbingly at home. The American Embassy opened today after a prolonged construction coma and George Bush Senior himself is in town to do the inaugural honors, in an ironic nod to all of us Expats who left America to avoid the Bush family in the first place. Regardless, happy 4th of July! Schoenes Wochenende.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Retrospective in Berlin

Opening today, Neue Nationalgalerie presents the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) in what constitutes the Art21 artist’s most comprehensive retrospective exhibition in German-speaking countries. Berlin is the third stop for this traveling exhibition, which also goes to.Düsseldorf, Salzburg (Austria), and Luzern (Switzerland).

The exhibition consists of more than seventy photographs and a single sculpture. Sugimoto is planning an entirely different presentation of his work for Neue Nationalgalerie that will highlight relations to the Berlin collections, as well as the architecture of the Mies van der Rohe building. The exhibition is on view through October 5, 2008.