Weekly Roundup

Julie Mehretu, "Berliner Plätze", 2008-2009. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 168 in. © Julie Mehretu

Where in the world are Art21 artists?

• In Germany — where the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today — a new suite of paintings by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu is on view at the Deutsche Guggenheim. This specially commissioned body of work, titled Grey Area, evokes the “psychogeography” of the city of Berlin and its past, raising matters of erasure, decay, and liminality. A number of programs will be held throughout the exhibition, including a lecture by culture journalist and author Magdalena Kroener; and a commissioned concert by Jochen Neurath based on Mehretu’s new paintings. Get the complete schedule here.

• Also in Berlin, an exhibition of works by John Baldessari (Season 5) will open at Sprüth Magers Gallery on November 20. In Hands And/Or Feet (Part Two) Baldessari takes these extremities as his focus in five large-scale diptychs of found photographs or media images, characteristically painted over and colored in by the artist.

• In London, Stephen Friedman Gallery is displaying works by Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare. Several “meaty” images of Shonibare’s new photographic and sculptural series, which is based on both Arthur Miller’s protagonist Willy Loman, and an early photograph of a fatal car crash, are available on the gallery’s website.

• Circling around to California, beginning November 14 new paintings by Jeff Koons (Season 5) will be on display at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills. “At first glance,” reads the press release, “the works may seem abstract and gestural, but at the same time they are embedded in the traditions of figurative  painting. The brush strokes, which are photorealistic in their application, are actually fake brush strokes in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.” On view through January 9, 2010.

• Down in Atlanta, Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will deliver a lecture at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) as part of their inaugural deFINE ART festival, which celebrates the SCAD School of Fine Arts. The event takes place on November 11 at 7 pm.

• Here in New York there’s a lot happening as usual: On November 12 Stitches opens at Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery in  midtown. This large group exhibition, curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, will feature works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) and Kiki Smith (Season 2) among others.

• Opening that same day at Paul Kasmin Gallery (in the Chelsea art district) is an exhibition of new paintings by Walton Ford (Season 2). Works on view include In The Island, a painting conjuring the paranoia that caused Tasmanian settlers to hunt thylacines into extinction in the 20th century. The show continues through December 23.

• And last but not least, the exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum of American Art has been reviewed by Roberta Smith of the New York Times. She writes of Horn (Season 3): “She has expanded the art of drawing with works that swing dramatically between intimate and monumental. Her method involves splicing two or more smaller sheets with nearly identical images into a single very large one — a process that cannily combines carving, cartography and quilting. In breathtaking photographs she has documented the terrain, shoreline and geothermal wonders of Iceland, whose strange, isolated beauty is one of the mainstays of her art.” Read the entire piece here.

Weekly Roundup

Matthew Ritchie, "Line Shot" Installation (detail), 2009. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery.

• The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host a talk with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie and brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner (of indie rock band The National) on Saturday, October 31 at 6pm. The event is held in conjunction with their collaborative performance The Long Count, which opens at BAM on Wednesday, Oct 28. Ritchie’s work is currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery in the solo exhibition Line Shot.

• Songs of Ascension by Ann Hamilton (Season 1) and Meredith Monk (also currently at BAM) was featured in a New York Times music review last week. Read the article here.

• For Performa 09, Mike Kelley (Season 1) will present three short dance/performance pieces inspired by his film and video installation Day Is Done (2005). These performances bring to life some of the characters featured in the film, all of whom are based on found photographs of extracurricular activities from American high school yearbooks. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns. Kelley’s show runs Nov 17 – Nov 19 at Judson Memorial Church. Purchase tickets here.

• Between Being Born and Dying, a site-specific installation by Barbara Kruger (Season 2), is on view at Lever House through November 21. Bloomberg.com describes the installation: “Kruger’s aphorisms are written in massive black-and-white letters all over the Lever House’s atrium, both inside and outside. They are printed on vinyl panels covering the floor, windows, walls and columns. The results are striking but disorienting. The 17-foot-tall letters are so big you can’t take it all in at once–or at all.”

• Season 2 artist Paul Pfeiffer has created a special project for the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The project opens with Vertical Corridor, in which Pfeiffer encourages the viewer to peer through a tiny peephole in the wall of the gallery. The peephole is the only access to an immense space, and questions “the validity of the spectacle … reminding the viewer that every such spectacle must bow to the limits of one’s perspective.” This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Russia.

• Kara Walker (Season 2) will introduce a screening of the 1926 film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York on November 11. Directed by the German animator and film director Lotte Reiniger, it is the earliest feature-length animation still believed to exist, and considered one of the greatest animated films of all time. The program — part of MoMA’s To Save and Project festival — begins at 8pm.

• Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock will speak at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai on Tuesday, October 27 at 5pm. Two print portfolios Fix (2007) and The Ossifies Theosophied (2005) will be on display in conjunction with the event. Hancock is featured in the exhibition Young Americans at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai through November 15.

• Mirror, Mirror: Contemporary Portraits and the Fugitive Self, a new exhibition at the Brigham Young Museum of Art in Utah, features works by 32 artists, including Oliver Herring (Season 3), Rebecca Campbell, Hasan Elahi, Harrell Fletcher, Douglas Gordon, Nikki Lee, and Takashi Murakami. The exhibition explores the influence of rituals, facades, social media, and the family on the formation of individual identity. On view through May 2010.

• Art critic Tyler Green talks to MoMA curator Connie Butler (organizer of the feminist exhibition, Wack!) about Season 4 artist Nancy Spero, who passed away last week. Read the interview on Green’s blog Modern Art Notes.

• Work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) is included in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Learning Modern: Bauhaus Legacy in Downtown Chicago. Building on the legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Learning Modern features projects by artists and architects who continue a legacy of interdisciplinary innovation for better living, while exploring the central role of experiential education in the modern vision. Continues through January 9, 2010.

• Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall, the fifth exhibition of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, is on view through November 20. The earliest known documentation of a fatal car crash provides a pictorial metaphor for Shonibare’s new body of photographic and sculptural work. Photographed in 1898, the image records death as a spectacle for the first time; a crowd surrounds the carcass of a motor vehicle. Shonibare has created a similar scene in the gallery, a sculptural dramatization of the death of Arthur Miller’s infamous protagonist, salesman Willy Loman. The installation suggests a parallel between Miller’s 20th century examination of greed and the human condition, and the present day.

• Now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Focus on Artists celebrates the museum’s 75th anniversary, and its close ties with modern and contemporary masters as demonstrated by works from their collection. SFMOMA holds a number of sculptures by Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo; pieces from her Unland (1995–98) and Untitled “Cabinet” series (1989-present) will be on view. Continues through May 23, 2010.

• On the occasion of Grey Area, a new work by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, the current issue of ArtMag (the online art magazine of Deutsche Bank) focuses on artists who investigate urbanism and cultural identity. Joan Young, curator at the Guggenheim Museum, has contributed an essay about Mehretu’s recent work. Read it here.

What’s Cookin at Art21: A Weekly Index

Hungry? Here’s some arty brain food for you all…

• “Sometimes the most interesting thing about an artist is the disparity between their work and the established perception of it. Eva Hesse, the late German-American sculptor of ratty latex and dog-eared fiberglass, has suffered from what Nabokov called ‘dotting every i with the author’s head….’” Ben Street writes to us from London in Part II of Hot Scots.
• It’s the start of the gallery season!  If you’re in New York, what openings did you hit up last night? There’s still much to see this weekend! Thanks for the update, Trong.
• “Breaking free of routines, while at the same time making investigation and inquiry part of the first few days, can kick things off in surprising ways…” Another beautiful post by Joe Fusaro in the weekly column, Teaching with Contemporary Art.
• PLAY ART LOUD: Creating Characters on ArtBabble
  Works by: Pierre Huyghe, Joshua Mosley, Catherine Sullivan, Eleanor Antin, Tara Tucker, Marci Washington, and more!
• “Lecturing doesn’t do it, you have to see the light in the students’ eyes that they get it.” Meet John Baldessari in this Season 5 sneak preview.
• Have you been to the Brooklyn Museum to see the Yinka Shonibare MBE exhibition yet? Erin Riley-Lopez asks some pertinent questions in this review.
• A body that is once imaginary and hyper-real? Blogger Dehlia Hannah “thinks on” the relationship between the intersection of art and science alongside with the works currently on view at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, Anatomy in the Gallery.
• Art21 Exclusive: Artist Ida Applebroog discusses the differences between making work and living in New York City versus her home in upstate New York
• New Flashpoints Topic! Introducting Systems
• It’s the BOMB: Check out this vintage interview with Barbara Kruger by Richard Prince.

Weekly Round-Up

Trenton Doyle Hancock, "A Hello Hollow Lullaby," 2008, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.

Happy Labor Day!

• Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), Erick Swenson, and Alison Elizabeth will be making their Shanghai debut in a three-person exhibition at James Cohan Gallery.  The three young guns in Young Americans all work in distinct, narrative modes.  September 11 through November 15.

• Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny opens his second solo exhibition with Andrea Rosen Gallery on September 12.  Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism is a “devoted analysis of twentieth century modernism and its ideological legacies.” The exhibition’s centerpiece is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glass-clad skyscraper. Through October 17.

• Opening this thursday at the Tyler Art Gallery is Kara Walker: The Emancipation Approximation Series. 26 large-screen prints  by the Season 2 artist feature her signature silhouettes that explore race and gender in America. Through Oct. 10.

• Kara Walker is also in a two-person show with Mark Bradford (Season 4) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Both employ paper, collage, and assemblage to produce much of their art, which also share an interest in exploring societal and cultural issues.  September 10 through October 17.

• Up Against is an exhibition of new work by Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine. On view from September 12 through October 24, Up Against continues the Season 2 artist’s exploration of the body as measure. From the press release: Moving between the monumental and the miniature, the artist’s own body is dwarfed, extended and aligned with various architectural structures. Through these relationships, Antoni explores ideas of destruction, motherhood, and fantasy.

Weekly Round Up

Bob and Roberta Smith, "So I Came to Bourgeois." Courtesy Grey Gallery.

• Last year the Guardian asked its sports and art writers to swap pieces for a day. Tennis correspondent Steve Bierley reviewed a Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) exhibition, which Bob and Roberta Smith fell in love with and subsequently made into a text-based painting. As part of the current Edinburgh Art Festival, Smith (it’s one person) has turned the project into a full fledged exhibition at the nomadic Grey Gallery. Now if only they would swap athletes and artists salaries for a day….

• In other sports and arts news, America’s team the Dallas Cowboys just finished building their state of the art football stadium at the cost of $1.15 billion dollars. Owners Gene and Jerry Jones formed an art program that brings site-specific installations to the venue, including commissioned works from Franz Ackermann, Olafur Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), and Matthew Ritchie (Season 3).  Additionally, the program will develop educational initiatives and tours focused on the collection of works.

• Through September 20th at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Your Bright Future, a show of twelve artists from South Korea who were born between 1957 and 1972. Your Bright Future includes, among others, Kimsooja (Season 5), Jooyeon Park, Do-Ho Suh (Season 2), and Haegue Yangthe.

• Season 2 artist Kiki Smith has received the Edward MacDowell Medal at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.   She is the 50th MacDowell Medalist, with past recipients including I.M. Pei, Merce Cunningham, Georgia O’Keeffe, and John Updike.  The award is given each year to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to his or her field.

• Through September 7, the Pompidou Centre is displaying the “feminine side of its own collections” in an exhibition titled elles@centrepompidou.  Giving the galleries over to 200+ women artists from the 20th century to now, sub-themes take the headings of Pioneer, Free Fire, and Body Slogan, and includes many notables like Art21’s Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger.

Weekly Roundup

Pepón Osorio, "Lolo," 2008. Pins, digital image, plexiglas and slippers, 8 x 12 x 13 in. Photo: Catherine Serrano. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

• Works by Art21 artists Pepón Osario (Season 1) and Eleanor Antin (Season 2) are currently on view in the exhibition Black&WhiteWorks at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. The show includes painting, sculpture, drawings and prints by more than twenty-five artists, many of whom are associated with the history of the gallery, which was founded in 1971. The exhibition continues through July 31.

• Through October 19, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will display a selection of objects from their permanent collection with a particular focus on the past five years. Titled Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, the exhibition includes works by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and William Wegman (Season 1).

• Wegman’s work is also on view at the Scottsdale Museum of Art in Arizona in the solo exhibition, Unexpected Wegman. All forty-five pieces on view are held in the museum’s permanent collection; some have never before been exhibited. In addition to the artist’s well-known Weimaraner portraits, the exhibition includes facile prints Wegman made with the Segura Publishing Company beginning in 1985. Unexpected Wegman continues through January 2010.

• Season 1 artist Barry McGee is included in the group exhibition Work Now, which explores the concept and meaning of “work” in our present society. The exhibition is on view at Z33 in Belgium through September 27.

• See images of Lance Armstrong’s bike–with graphics by McGee–at Supertouchart.com. According to the website, the bikes was created to commemorate Armstrong’s competition in the Tour of California this year. McGee’s signature characters “populate a carbon fiber frame masterfully altered to resemble a vintage metal race cycle literally ‘ridden hard and left out in the rain’ one too many times.”

• Kara Walker and Martin Puryear (both Season 2) are mentioned in Kinshasha Holman Conwill’s recent article about the push to bring greater diversity to the White House art collection, and the importance of supporting African American artists. Read Conwill’s piece for the Art Newspaper here.

• Through September 12, the Otis College of Art and Design presents Superficiality and Superexcrescence, an exhibition focusing on the work of thirteen Los Angeles-based artists–including Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan–who remake superficiality “not as a condition to be resisted, but rather one to be analyzed and manipulated.” A full-color catalog is available for purchase.

• The Southwest School of Art and Craft presents Texas Draws I, an exhibition of drawings by thirteen artists from various parts of Texas. Work by Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) is included, along with drawings by Benito Huerta, Jules Buck Jones, Jayne Lawrence, Mona Marshall, Christine Olejniczak, Katie Pell, Jimmy Peña, Regis Shephard, Bonnie Young, and Eric Zimmerman.

• Season 4 artist Mark Bradford will lecture at the Dallas Museum of Art on July 23 at 7pm. Bradford’s work is featured in the museum’s exhibit, Private Universes, which continues through August 30.

Touring Prospect.1 (Part 5), the Warehouse District

Roughly located between New Orleans’ Business and Garden Districts, the Warehouse Arts District was a major concentrations for Prospect.1 displays. Dominated by warehouses and old industrial spaces, there is little of the ornamental architecture that gives the rest of New Orleans its distinct flavor.

While there were a few works scattered in warehouse and neighborhood non-profit spaces, the vast majority of art was on display at the city’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) which is located near many of the city’s other museums, including the World War II Museum, the Children’s Museum, the Civil War Museum and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

A modern and spacious building, the CAC was expertly curated with dozens of works that felt like a biennial in and of themselves. The Warehouse District may have been a starting point for many biennial visitors but I chose to end my posts with a jaunt through this post-industrial neighborhood.

Jacqueline Humphries, installation view at Ideal Auto Repair; work on the bottom: Soft Machine (2008)

Born in New Orleans, Humphries chose a site that evoked the fact that her family once owned a auto repair shop. Using auto enamel and oil, she created five large gestural works that came alive in this naturally lit space full of grays, browns and dirty whites. The metallic pigments seemed to absorb the subtle light and I could’ve stayed for hours to watch how the light created subtle changes in the work. There was also a curious backroom to this exhibition which included picket-like forms painted in the same manner as the larger works. They were unidentified and posted in a dark room. I could only guess they were studies for the larger panels.

Robin Rhode, Kite (2008) at CAC

One of the funniest and most poetic works in the biennial, Rhode’s work included a video component (which is hard to identify in the photograph) that displayed the sky behind the imaginary kite. Hands on another canvas held the kite into place. The work creates a mood of nostalgia and loss. Place in a darkened corner of the museum, you sense you are experiencing a very private and intimate moment.

Continue reading »

Trenton Doyle Hancock in Chelsea (with video!)

At last! An update from Art:21 Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock’s Lower Realm has reached us in Chelsea. Hancock recently opened a new chapter in his ongoing saga of the war between a race of emaciated mutant Vegans and their fleshy Mound counterparts in Fear, his fourth solo show at James Cohan Gallery. But instead of painting scenes of all-out warfare, Hancock captures super-charged moments of tense waiting or vivid torture, suggesting that his epic narrative has reached a crossroads.

Hancock once explained that conflict compels him as an artist but in this show, confrontation itself is his topic. Instead of continuing to develop his elaborate storyline, he has arrived at an introspective moment in a tale so intricate that it no longer matters who’s winning or losing. A grid of paintings, each featuring a set of huge eyes peeping over a horizon line, suggests that their owners are either conducting surveillance or hiding out. The fear alluded to in the show’s title and written in black drops (blood? sweat?) on the walls isn’t anchored to a specific event. Pieces like Descension and Dissension (2008), which looks like a torture scene in which a bound Vegan (St Sesom?) is drained of mound meat yet at the same time enjoys a shower of life-giving color, are equally hard to pin down.

It’s been over a decade since Hancock began elaborating his storyline and detailing the complex identities of his host of characters. His hilarious The Trenton Doyle Handbook, Vol. 1 is a great resource for piecing together a who’s-who of the Vegan underworld. But given Hancock’s absorption in his self-created universe it’s not hard to imagine that his cosmology would grow too complex for anyone other than committed fans to keep up with. So the more abstract quality of this show not only opens his project to newcomers and recommits to the ambiguity that has made his work relevant to so many conversations: religion, race, politics and more.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to him about Fear in a public discussion organized by the New York Center for Art and Media Studies and hosted by James Cohan Gallery. Hancock provided insights on his themes and working methods, his performance art, his project Cult of Color with Ballet Austin last spring, and hinted of major changes to come in his work. The entire video interview is posted here, but check the video page on my website: for a shorter version and transcription coming soon.

FEAR at James Cohan Gallery

A new body of work by Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will be on view at James Cohan Gallery New York, November 20 through January 10, 2009.

FEAR, Hancock’s fourth exhibition at the gallery, includes paintings, wall drawings, and a new portfolio of twenty mixed media prints that the artist recently completed at the Rutgers University Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions. The exhibition continues Hancock’s story of an epic battle between the forces of good, as represented by his characters the Mounds and their color-filled world, and evil, as embodied by the skeletal Vegans who live underground in a world of black and white. The centerpiece of the show is a grid-like arrangement of eight five-foot-square canvases installed atop a wall painting that references the underworld battleground between forces. In the title painting, Fear, a Baby, recognizable by its large egg-shaped head, looms above the horizon as the black background is showered in Mound Meat, a pink substance on which Mounds survive and once ingested allows all to experience a life of color. Seven other works in this series illustrate a Baby head amidst the Vegan landscape, lined up as if marching off to battle.

James Cohan Gallery will host a conversation between the artist and Merrily Kerr, a New York-based art historian and writer, on Friday, November 21 at 6:30pm. The talk is organized by The New York Center for Art and Media Studies.

I Left My Heart in New Orleans

Prospect. 1 New Orleans, the largest biennial international contemporary art ever held in the United States, opened to the public today. Produced by U.S. Biennial, Inc. and directed by Dan Cameron, Director of Visual Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, the biennial was conceived to help expand on New Orleans’ already rich cultural profile and galvanize art world participation in the city’s post-Katrina rebound.

Art21 artists Mark Bradford,  Allora & Calzadilla (both Season 4), Arturo Herrera, Cai Guo-Qiang (both Season 3), Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Janine Antoni (both Season 2) are included in this exhibition of works by 81 local, national and international artists that is spread across more than 25 venues. Bradford’s wooden Ark is located in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. The artist utilized the shell of a destroyed house and other discarded scraps of wood from the area to construct the piece (in situ above). 

Traversing installations in the Lower Ninth Ward–where you can also find works by Antoni, Superflex, Wangechi Mutu, Nari Ward, Paul Villinski, Miguel Palma, and Robin Rhode–sheds light on the devastation and loss that occurred three years ago. It is still heartwrenching today. Where the levee breached, sweeping houses off of their foundations and submerging the area under water, installations by Ghada Amer (above) and Leonardo Elrich (recently featured in ArtKrush) rise from the ground. On surrounding lots only grass and weeds, concrete slabs, and steps that once lead to a front door remain. Katharina Grosse’s painting/mural below (top) stands a short distance from the house on the bottom, which still displays the force of Hurricane Katrina.

To learn more about efforts to rebuild New Orleans, visit the websites for Make it Right Foundation, a project by actor and philanthropist Brad Pitt; Common Ground Relief, a community-based volunteer organization that offers support to Lower Ninth Ward residents that suffered losses in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; and, of course, Prospect. 1. The exhibition closes January 18, 2009.