Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman Gallery

Recent paintings by Art21 artist Kerry James Marshall (Season 1) are on view May 22 through July 3, 2008 at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. The exhibition, titled Black Romantic, is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery in many years.

According to the website ArtCal, Marshall takes his show title from the 2002 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated by Thelma Golden. Using Golden’s Black Romantic as a point of departure, Marshall continues his exploration of the black figure represented in pictorial space. Whereas Golden “explored populist notions of ‘Black Art’ and the uncritical realm of image making,” Marshall “investigates the critical pretensions of the fine art establishment in which he participates.” In these new works, the artist employs genres of painting, ranging from seascapes to classical artist self-portraits. Marshall will also present a mixed media sculptural installation.

Jack Shainman Gallery is located at 513 West 20th Street. An opening reception takes place tomorrow from 6-8pm.

Watch the Art:21 video “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self,” to hear Marshall discuss the first painting in which he used his signature black figure.

(Artist) Frays Book

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Blood on Paper: The Art of The Book, showcases book-based work by a wealth of modern and contemporary artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 1).

Since the book form implies a beginning, middle and end, it’s always been a popular form for artists looking to meddle with heads, from Max Ernst’s superlative The Hundred Headless Woman onwards. The exhibition traces a significant transformation in the definition of the artist’s book: from a kind of freeform improvisation on textual illustration (Matisse’s Jazz, Sol LeWitt’s take on Borges’ Ficciones) to an artwork taking the form of a book as its conceptual jumping-off point (Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton’s Inter Faces and Richard Tuttle’s NotThePoint). The connotations of books as cornerstones of religious doctrine are underscored by Damien Hirst’s New Religion, a huge, plinth-mounted mixed-media sculpture in the form of a shelved Bible, set off by a display of Francis Bacon’s much-pored-over ephemera, battered Muybridge photos and snaggly Polaroids, displayed in glass like the fingerbones of a saint.

The most fun is to be had in the illumination artists’ work can cast on a canonical text; Balthus replays Wuthering Heights as a pas de deux of feral adolesence; Paula Rego turns Jane Eyre into a mad psychodrama of Gothic puppetry. Serialism found an easy home in the book form, with Ed Ruscha’s deadpan series of swimming pools and gas stations repeated on every page of a pocketsize book, insouciance itself. Meanwhile, the pages of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Danger Books, charred with the spidery remainders of fireworks, indicate the book as a site of explosive excitement, and anyone who’s ever been 7 will probably agree.

Mike Kelley at the National Museum Kraków

According to Artforum.com and The Art Newspaper, the National Museum, Kraków is scheduled to open a new department of contemporary Western art this month—the first devoted to a collection of this kind in Poland. The collection is an eclectic gathering of ten post-modern artists, each of which will be housed in a separate room. The artists are Mike Kelley (Season 1), Nobuyoshi Araki, Miquel Barceló, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, David LaChapelle, Sherrie Levine, Andreas Slominski, Philip Taaffe and Andy Warhol. The total of fifty works will go on public view May 29, 2008.

The National Museum, Kraków was established in 1879, and is the main branch of Poland’s National Museum, which has permanent collections around the country. Visit Wikimedia Commons for a glimpse of their collection.

Kelley’s retrospective exhibition, Educational Complex Onwards, 1995-2008, is currently on view at the Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels, Belgium.

Pettibon’s Punk Epocha at BFAS

Raymond Pettibon’s (Season 2) Punk Epocha: 70 Drawings from the Eighties opens this Thursday at Blondeau Fine Art Services in Geneva. The solo exhibition runs through July 19 and includes numerous black and white works that incorporate cartoonish illustration, political satire, insightful absurdity, and preposterous predicaments that have come to define the artist’s ’signature style’.  Punk’d indeed.

2008 California Biennial

The Orange County Museum of Art recently announced the names of fifty artists selected to participate in the 2008 California Biennial (CB08). The Museum launched the California Biennial in 1984; it has since become a premier exhibition for emerging artists in the state. This year’s exhibition, for the first time, incorporates off-site projects with collaborating venues from Tijuana to Northern California. Off-site installations include projects by Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon, Karl Haendel, High Desert Test Sites, Walead Beshty, Jedediah Caesar, and Piero Golia. Read the complete artist roster here.

CB08 is guest-curated by Lauri Firstenberg, founder and director/curator of LAXART in Los Angeles. The exhibition opens to the public on October 26, 2008.

Berliner Salon: The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and Alec Soth

Disclaimer: the following post is biased, self-indulgent, anecdotal and probably too long for a blog.

Yesterday I had the delight of seeing one of my all time favorite people for the first time in almost two years, the brilliantly poetic photographer Alec Soth. Alec was in Berlin for two openings, Dog Days, Bogotá at Wohnmaschine and Fashion Magazine, Paris/Minnesota at C/O Berlin, the latter of which was being presented in conjunction with the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, given this year to Esko Männikkö. Alec had been shortlisted for the prize in 2006, which was ultimately rewarded to Art21 Season 4 artist Robert Adams, who then promptly donated the entire £30,000 cash award to a human rights organization.

I first came to know Alec when he was picked up by Gagosian Gallery, where I had recently begun working after graduating from a small liberal arts college in Vermont. The combination of a modest, laid-back Minnesota native and an idealistic and totally naïve Vermont transplant, both (relatively) new to the elite milieu that is Gagosian had the potential to be utterly disastrous. Fortunately, we somehow managed to survive his first exhibition at the gallery, despite the opening being pushed up by several months, not to mention technical difficulties at the printers and a slew of other behind-the-scenes obstacles.

Alec’s show, NIAGARA, was well received and the accompanying monograph, published by Steidl, won that year’s Golden Light Book Award. He is a Magnum Photos associate photographer and he was recently exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and yet, Alec remains one of the most humble, self-deprecating and genuine artists, with whom I have had the pleasure of working. “I was just in China and I’ve been wearing the same clothes for I don’t know how many days. I just want to hide,” he told me before leaving Wohnmaschine to give his speech at C/O Berlin. “Don’t worry,” I assured him, “wearing the same clothes for multiple days means you’re truly a Berliner.”

When addressing the audience that had gathered in C/O’s upper floor in honor of the Deutsche Borse, Alec stayed true to form, emphasizing that he had, in fact, been a Deutsche Börse “loser.” His works on view, a series of photographs depicting the world and personalities of couture fashion, are not emblematic of his signature style (typically melancholic portrayals of banal beauty and subtle humanity), which Alec also noted. “These are fashion photographs, but I’m not a fashion photographer. There are also advertising photographs, but I’m not an advertising photographer…and I’m here in Berlin, with stylish 20 year-olds everywhere I look, but as you can see,” he gestured towards his black t-shirt over black jeans, “I’m not really stylish, and so I’m not really a Berliner.”

The connection between Alec’s photography and the shortlisted nominees for this year’s prize is precisely the social conscious, however fragile, that Dog Days, Bogota exposes. Images of forlorn stray animals, vacant decaying living quarters and other intimate spaces, wide-eyed children and overcast ramshackle urban landscapes dominate the exhibition. Similarly, John Davies (UK), Jacob Holdt (Denmark), Esko Männikkö (Finland) and Fazal Sheikh (USA) all address these themes through their individual lenses, converging in an exhibition that speaks of the human spirit, as well as the pain that we, as a collective society, inflict on ourselves and on our natural habitat.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize will be exhibited at C/O Berlin through July 18. Dog Days, Bogota will be on view at Wohnmaschine until June 28. Both exhibitions are absolutely worth seeing and every photographer included should be accredited with contributing a powerful and honest voice to the international discourse of contemporary art and photographic imagery. Schoenes Wochenende.

Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House

In and Around the House, the first comprehensive survey of early black and white photographs by Art21 artist Laurie Simmons (Season 4), opens tomorrow at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in New York. An opening reception with the artist takes place tonight from 5-7pm. The exhibition is on view through June 28, 2008.

From the website:

“This seminal body of work [made between 1976-78] put Simmons at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose photographic works began a new dialogue in contemporary art.

The use of set-up photography combined with the notion of child play – the images were shot in the rooms and before the facades of disassembled dollhouses – enabled Simmons to control perception and make reference to both general stereotypes and her own personal memories. As she arranged and rearranged the small vignettes, consisting of female dolls, dollhouse furnishings, miniature props and postcards, she was in her own words ‘… looking for the way your memory white-washes the image when you think about something from the past - making it far more perfect’.”

Carolina Nitsch Project Room is located at 534 West 22nd Street, New York, NY. Gallery Hours are Tuesday - Saturday, 11am to 6 pm.

Allora and Calzadilla at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland celebrates its 10-year anniversary with the exhibition Fluid Street-Alone, Together. Art21 artists Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (Season 4) are included along with fifteen other artists who use the streets of Madrid, Istanbul, Vienna, São Paulo, Copenhagen, New York, Berlin and other locations as subject, backdrop, material and/or live setting. Read the complete list of participating artists here. 

Kiasma’s anniversary year aims to provide the public with personal experiences. In Kiasma Magazine, Director Berndt Arell, says:

“People always experience art on a personal level even though in some fields of art, it is possible to arrange for several people to have the experience simultaneously. Since we can’t build individual exhibitions for each single visitor, we endeavour to build a wider ranging exhibition so that as many people as possible find something that touches them personally.”

Performances, events and interventions will take place in the Museum’s theatre, on surrounding streets, and elsewhere in the city over the course of the exhibition. Fluid Street closes on September 21, 2008.

Explore Flickr’s most interesting photographs of the Steven Holl designed Museum. Read more about MCA Kiasma in an article translated to English from Finnish Wikipedia.

Berliner Salon: Gallery Weekend Redux

The Berlin art world is still recovering from last weekend’s gallery marathon, which witnessed an unprecedented number of events in what can only be described as the city’s most strategic p.r. ploy since Mayor Klaus Wowereit inadvertently labeled Berlin “poor but sexy” and, in doing so, accidentally created his Hauptstadt’s unofficial slogan. Well, Berlin seems to be losing its poor status, while remaining as sexy as ever, with new (and often extravagant) spaces opening en masse and major patrons opening their collections to the public now more than ever before.

Last weekend saw the opening of Loock, a beautiful new space run by Friedrich Loock, the founder of Wohnmaschine, which exhibits Alec Soth and other internationally renowned artists. In addition, Carlier Gebauer inaugurated their new space, a massive venue that boasts 800 square meters and has major solo exhibitions planned in upcoming months for artists such as Paul Graham, Janaina Tschäpe, Ryan Trecartin and Art:21 Season 2 artist Paul Pfeiffer. The new gallery will feature a “media room,” essentially a movie theater, which will also be used for lectures and workshops “to develop an intensive communication program with an emphasis on the gallery’s focus on installation pieces working with video and film,” according to the press release.

Among the private collections that were open last weekend was the Sammlung Boros, an amazing selection of artworks, many by local art stars like Anselm Reyle and Olafur Eliasson, housed in a converted bunker that behaves like a concrete contemporary art labyrinth full of neon light and surprising sculptural installations. Adding to the weekend’s intense art itinerary, Italian collector Mariano Pichler opened a curated exhibition entitled Leftovers, which featured works by Maurizio Cattelan, Steven Parrino, Zilvinas Kempinas and Art:21 Season 2 artist Gabriel Orozco. The exhibition only ran for the duration of Gallery Weekend, but Pichler’s decision to bring his collection to Berlin proves that despite this city’s penchant for poverty, it still knows how to attract money, if only for the weekend. Schoenes Wochenende.

Judy Pfaff Curates at CUE

Up through May 31st at the CUE Foundation is an exhibition by David Krueger, curated by Art:21 Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff. Krueger has recreated his childhood post office in Encino, Texas, where his grandmother was the postmaster. The installation details the artist’s fascination with stamps and mail centers that were the town square’s “gossip hub.” Using a computer and manual perforating machine from 1918, Krueger has laid out a grid of new “commemorative” 21st century stamps that pay worship to the millennium’s new values and heroes. The stamp sheets are subsequently given away and distributed freely.

CUE Art Foundation is a non-profit forum for contemporary art, giving artists, students, scholars and art professionals resources at many stages of their careers and creative lives.