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Iona Rozeal Brown, Sacrifice #2 (detail), 2007
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Macy's Floats Koons' Rabbit
(New York Times, November 23)
Jeff Koons' famous 1986 stainless-steel Rabbit sculpture was transformed into a 53 x 26-foot inflatable for this year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The giant bunny
joined Shrek, Hello Kitty Supercute, Abby Cadabby, and Arrtie the Pirate as a new character in the parade, but it has the
distinct honor of being the first piece commissioned for Macy's Blue Sky Gallery. One of the biggest challenges was replicating Rabbit's reflective surface, which was achieved by covering the helium balloon with metallic-coated fabric. In a related story,
Koons' Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold) recently sold for $23.6 million at Sotheby's in New York, making him "the priciest living artist at auction."
Whitney Biennial 2008 Artists Announced
(Artnet, November 16)
The Whitney Museum of American Art has released a list of the 81 artists to be featured in its 2008 Biennial, which opens to the public on March 6. The non-thematic
exhibition — organized by Whitney curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin and overseen by Donna De Salvo — mostly focuses on mid-career artists, with established and emerging artists rounding out
the mix. Half of the artists reside in New York, and more than a quarter live in Los Angeles. The Art Production Fund is collaborating with the museum on a series of opening-month performances, temporary installations, and other events at the nearby Park Avenue
Armory.
Nouvel's New Tower Joins MoMA
(New York Times, November 15)
French architect Jean Nouvel has been chosen to design a new 75-story tower in midtown Manhattan, next to the Museum of Modern
Art. MoMA sold the narrow lot to real-estate developer Hines earlier this year for $125 million, and now Hines has unveiled
its project, which already has its own website. The glass-clad tower will feature a hotel, luxury apartments, and — most importantly for the museum — three floors of additional
gallery space. Nouvel's bold design received quick praise from Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, who said it could be the city's "most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation."
Artists Customize the Zune
(Cool Hunting, November 12)
Microsoft has commissioned 18 international emerging talents to illustrate an "Originals" line of its 80GB MP3 player. Launched at a party/exhibition at New York's Skylight — the former Ace Gallery space — the new Zune device is tattooed with 27 different figurative and
abstract artworks. Participating artists and designers include Catalina Estrada, Iosefatu Sua, Klaus Haapaniemi, Laurent Fetis, and Nobumasa Takahashi, who created a live painting during the celebration. DJs Peter and Bjorn (of Peter Bjorn & John) and Stunners International also performed, while a crowd of hipsters queued for a free Zune with the design of their choice.
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Dutch teen arrested for stealing virtual furniture more »
New York contemporary art auctions yield strong sales despite fears more »
Influential collector opposes Miami Art Museum's plans for Herzog & de Meuron building more »
Should galleries be funding their artists' museum shows? more »
Ohio photographer documents mystery artist's graffiti writings for five years more »
New York Times touts its own Renzo Piano masterpiece more »
Beijing's architecture for 2008 Olympics already winning praise more »
Menil Collection curator Franklin Sirmans profiled more »
Exhibition highlights Eero Saarinen's design prowess more »
The changing world — and value — of craft more »
Zaha Hadid adds futuristic railway to Alpine landscape more »
Art lover fined for kissing Twombly painting more »
Does Doris Salcedo's Tate crack symbolize an art-market shift? more »
Animation used to produce provocative art more »
Swedish museum declares its Warhol Brillo boxes fakes more »
Form and function meet at border fence more »
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[ Art Basel Miami Beach ] |
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Dzine / Cary Kwok / Nathalie Djurberg / Robin Rhode
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In its sixth year, Art Basel Miami Beach explodes with 200 gallery booths and a dynamic program of video, sound, performance, and public art. Beyond hot-selling Basquiats and Rothkos, the main Art Galleries section features Valeska Soares' mixed-media installations and Luiz Zerbini's shimmering canvases from São Paolo's Galeria Fortes Vilaça. Brussels-based Xavier Hufkens showcases Erwin Wurm's bronze sculpture Anger Bumps, full of irrepressible fury and humor. New York's Lehmann Maupin focuses on new work by female artists, including Shirazeh Houshiary's layered paintings, Teresita Fernandez's onyx confections, and Jennifer Steinkamp's smoke-based installation, while Berlin's Galerie Eigen + Art shows recent paintings by Leipzig star Neo Rauch.
As part of Art Nova's focus on new work, New Delhi's Nature Morte and New York's Bose Pacia share a booth that features Bari Kumar's surrealist ochre canvas, Silence I. Lombard-Freid Projects of New York presents Mounir Fatmi, whose photographic series Evolution or Death portrays women with books strapped to their bodies like bombs, while Giò Marconi in Milan shows Nathalie Djurberg's claymation video Camel Drink Water. Phillip Allen's paintings of geometric constellations are on view at Dublin's Kerlin Gallery, and Lithuanian artist Zilvinas Landzbergas draws on his country's post-1989 transition in his sculptures, shown by Amsterdam's Galerie Fons Welters.
In the new Art Supernova section, Paris' Galerie Art Concept promotes Gedi Sibony's haphazard arrangements and Philippe Perrot's grayscale drawings, while London's Herald St showcases Cary Kwok's inked Japanese women, including Plumage — Japanese (Heisei). El Anatsui, at Jack Shainman New York, uses sparkling aluminum bottle caps to construct a massive, undulating tapestry, and Nina Katchadourian puns with maps in Coastal Merger, on view at Sara Meltzer Gallery. Richard Wathen's Aubrey, an ethereal nude portrait of a young boy in muted colors, hangs courtesy of London's Max Wigram Gallery.
Video and sound art find a home in the Botanical Gardens with the Art Video Lounge and Art Sound Lounge. WPS1.org co-hosts the latter and also broadcasts interviews with artists and critics throughout the fair. Art Projects presents art in public places, such as Susan Philipsz' Songs Sung in the First Person on the Theme of Longing, Sympathy, and Release, and Art Positions erects a beachfront village of shipping containers, where 20 emerging galleries show off promising young
talents. Aneta Grzeszykowska contributes her video Black, as well as hand-sewn dolls, to Warsaw's Raster Gallery, and Jennifer Nocon adorns New York's Tracy Williams' shipping container with draped, hand-dyed fabric. Art Perform rounds out the fair with a daily performance art program curated by Jens Hoffmann and the Open Air Cinema, showcasing assume vivid astro focus' video montage Butch Queen Realness with a Twist in Pastel Colors Video Show. It all kicks off on December 5 with Art Loves Music, a free, public performance by Iggy Pop and the Stooges. (ASA)
Art Basel Miami Beach is held in and around the Convention Center from December 6 to 9. For details on the many fringe fairs
in Miami, check out our list of recommendations, and for information on other cultural events around the city, look no further than our sister publication Flavorpill MIAMI.
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Roy Arden
Vancouver
Vancouver Art Gallery
Now through January 20
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A founding member of Vancouver's conceptual photography coterie with Jeff Wall, Lucy Pullen, and Alex Morrison, Roy Arden has exhibited internationally since the '70s. The Vancouver Art Gallery's mid-career overview of more than 100 photographs
surveys Arden's work from 1980 to the present. Arden's work in the '80s emphasized the conceptual underpinnings of the medium,
but by the '90s he had moved on to large-format color works documenting Vancouver's rampant but dreary modernization. In one
such work, Development, Arden depicts a denuded landscape with rows of townhouses under construction. Although the photograph resembles a traditional landscape, with the inclusion of his own shadow in the foreground Arden critiques the pieties of traditional image-making
that demand the artist's absence. (NB)
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Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry: Now, Tomorrow and Forever
Los Angeles
Kinkead Contemporary
Now through December 1
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Through the prism of their own interracial relationship, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry make collaborative multimedia and performance art that investigates social injustice. At Kinkead Contemporary, they show more than two dozen
paintings — in their exhibition named after George Wallace's inflammatory 1963 pro-segregation speech — made by mining publicly archived photos of the Civil Rights movement. The duo
translates these records into black-and-white paintings and overlays reprints of the original photographs on transparent silk
to create double images. The strongest works include Moving through Cloud, which captures balletic figures amid a crowd disturbance, and Disorder, an eerily languid aerial view of another protest's aftermath. McCallum and Tarry's gestural craftsmanship communicates anew
the historical disgraces of race relations in America, forcing the realization that as long as scandals like Jena occur, Wallace's anti-integration vision is preserved. (SND)
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Kirsten Hassenfeld: Dans la Lune
Houston
Rice Gallery
Now through December 9
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With its unprecedented scale, Dans la Lune is Kirsten Hassenfeld's most ambitious installation to date. Six large pendants of intricately manipulated archival papers descend from the gallery
ceiling, embellished with paper swags. Miniature ornaments evocative of French decorative arts — including delicate leaves,
mythological scenes, cameos, crystals, and rosettes — adorn the pendants, all rendered in tissue and vellum. Internal lighting elements create dramatic shading that enhances the sculptural quality of the all-white pieces while casting an ethereal glow
about the gallery. Dans la lune is a French idiom for daydreaming, and with these works, Hassenfeld transports viewers into a moonstruck world of decorative
excess, where exquisitely crafted objects satiate desires and soothe pangs of longing. (LLP)
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Kendell Geers: Kannibale
Paris
Yvon Lambert
Now through December 8
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Politically engaged artist Kendell Geers calls for enlightenment over violence in Kannibale, his first solo show at Paris' Yvon Lambert. The South Africa-born artist stencils a replica of the classical Nike of Samothrace with a black-and-white chain-link pattern designed from the lettering of the word "fuck;" it presides over an installation of colorless artworks, while nearby, there's a white-neon skull, text-decorated animal craniums, and
videos, including one where "fuck" reappears, repeating in looped proverbs and becoming almost tender. In the main gallery,
Geers uses violent materials to form positive symbols, such as stacks of horrifyingly beautiful razor wire and a yantra-style hexagon, H.E.X., made from billy clubs exploding outward. The blue neon spiral Manifest asks WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN? as Geers pleads for action, not just answers. (EC)
Kendell Geers' work is also on display at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, through January 6.
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Jon Kessler: The Blue Period
Berlin
Arndt & Partner
Now through December 20
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In Jon Kessler's tumultuous The Blue Period installation at Berlin's Arndt & Partner, the New York artist trains a fleet of pivoting video cameras onto life-size, blue-streaked
cutouts of gallery-goers, gallery walls smeared with denim-blue paint, monitors showing distorted media-culled imagery, and
kinetic sculptures. Simulcasting these multimedia mise-en-scènes onto dozens of adjacent monitors, all in real-time, Kessler utilizes the live-feed cameras
to place viewers within a chaotic collage. As in Dan Graham's Time Delay Room, Kessler creates dizzying false realities and unnervingly expands on the problems and pleasures of surveillance, continuing
his focus on current affairs. Manipulating the three-dimensional reality of the gallery space, Kessler renders it into a grotesquely
flat caricature, imitating how globally distributed imagery misrepresents actual events. (SS)
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[ Studio Job ] |
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Studio Job
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Founded by Design Academy Eindhoven graduates Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel, Belgian/Dutch design company Studio Job crafts stylized and often gleefully impractical home furnishings. While Smeets brings an expressionistic, sculptural approach
to the practice, Tynagel imparts a sharp graphic-design sense. Since joining forces in 2000, the pair — whose pieces were
once accused of being ostentatious and self-indulgent — have since become celebrated design innovators.
Smeets and Tynagel take a uniquely symbolic approach to design; they select archetypal objects, such as a candlestick or a bowl, and play with scale and materials to create absurdist, semifunctional pieces. For their early Craft collection, they cast workers' tools in bronze, producing large-scale implements that could barely be lifted. Challenging
mass production and functionalism, the couple also reaffirms the role of pure artistry with limited editions and sensual materials.
Their recent Perished series features wood furniture inlaid with intricate animal–skeleton forms, and their Insects wallpaper and fabrics swarm with silhouettes of bugs. Released in May, the new Paper Furniture suite is a collection of elegant tables and chandeliers, made entirely of bone-white papier mâché.
Having attracted attention at design fairs around the world, Studio Job now works with high-end producers such as Makkum and Moooi. Smeets and Tynagel show at this year's Design Miami in the Moss Gallery booth, which celebrates their clever designs in a special exhibition, Robber Baron: Tales of Power, Corruption, Art and Industry. The cast-bronze objects evince an expected ornate decadence while hinting at the unsavory pitfalls of a robber baron's lifestyle.
Pushing the creative limits of limited-edition furniture, Smeets and Tynagel infuse artistic curiosity into everyday objects. (BR)
Studio Job's work is on view at the Moss Gallery booth at Design Miami from December 7 to 9 and in Bold, a retrospective exhibition at Designhuis in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, through December 16.
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[ Naomi Fisher and Jim Drain ] |
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Jeremiah Clancy / Jen Stark / GisMo / Javier Hernandez
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| Naomi Fisher was born in Miami, where she has been an active member of the local art community for more than ten years. Her provocative
nature photographs and expressionistic drawings and paintings have been exhibited and collected worldwide. Her partner, Jim Drain — a former member of art collective Forcefield and the Fort Thunder art and music scene in Providence, Rhode Island — is an internationally exhibited sculptor who moved to Miami in 2005. Artkrush editor Paul Laster interviews Fisher and
Drain about the Miami art scene and the impact different forces have had upon it. |
AK: Naomi, you grew up in the Miami area and attended the city's New World School of Art in the early '90s. What was the Miami art scene like back then?
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NF: In my experience, it was primarily a bunch of galleries in Coral Gables that showed mediocre South American painting. There
wasn't much that interested my friends and me until some people started creating alternative art spaces in Bird Road, this
remote warehouse district west of the Miami International Airport. Space Cadette — a record label and venue — had a little
gallery in front, which is where I first started showing in Miami. The Box started soon after, just around the corner — they kept that going for years doing interesting projects. We were just a bunch
of kids no one took seriously. I didn't think Miami was somewhere I could come back to after finishing school, but my hatred
of winter brought me home. The return of other friends and these beginnings of a scene made for an inspiring group that took
form in the later '90s.
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AK: I first saw your work in the group show The Fashion Issue: Four Simple Steps Towards Younger Looking Skin, which also included Team Waif (Hernan Bas) and Bert Rodriguez, at Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami in 1998. What role has Fred Snitzer played in the development of your career and the Miami art scene?
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NF: At the time, Fred was one of the few people who took notice of what we were doing out on the fringes of the Miami art world.
Bert and I worked together at the Rubell Family Collection, and we had so many ideas since we were constantly talking and thinking about art. We came up with that show, which also
included another photographer, Shannon Spadaro, and proposed it to Fred. Things really took off from there. Miami is thought of as a transient city, so this was the first
time that a largish group of Miami-bred artists were continuing to stay — or at least still identifying with the city. Fred
was the main advocate for all these new voices.
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AK: From your perspective, what impact has the Rubell Family Collection had on the cultural development of Miami?
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© Murakami
Dick Hebdige, Midori Matsui, and Scott Rothkopf
Rizzoli
As the title of this massive tome declares, Takashi Murakami has become well known as a multinational brand, possessing as much art-world clout as superstars Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. His rise to fame has been rapid — from the creation of his first manga-inspired character, DOB, in '93, to his pop-art-meets-business collaborations with Louis Vuitton nearly a decade later (although not a single LV product is reproduced in the book). With a BFA, MFA, and Ph.D under his belt,
and great knowledge of both Eastern and Western art, Murakami brings subtle social criticism to his candy-colored creations.
After inventing "superflat," his own art movement, he established the Kaikai Kiki stable of artists to produce work in this new aesthetic. The essays in © Murakami discuss his approach in relation to Warhol, Disney, Sanrio, and others, but it's the vibrant reproductions of his work that
convince us of his artistic potency. (PL)
The exhibition © Murakami is on view at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art through February 11. Kaikai Kiki presents GESAI Miami, hosted by PULSE Miami, from December 5 to 9.
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Cover Art
Iona Rozeal Brown
Sacrifice #2, 2007
Mixed-media on framed panel
52 x 38 in./ 132.1 x 96.5 cm
Courtsey Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles
All Rights Reserved
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Editor
Paul Laster
Deputy Editor
Bryony Roberts
News Editor
Greg Zinman
Reviews Editor
H.G. Masters
Contributing Editors
Jennifer Y. Chen
Shana Nys Dambrot
Allison Kave
Sarah Kessler
Doug Levy
Andrew Maerkle
Mark Mangan
Marlyne Sahakian
Peter Stepek
Contributors
Noah Becker
Erin Cowgill
Lauren McKee
Lisa L. Powell
Sarah Stephenson
Mailer Design
Jessica Bauer-Greene
Mark Barry
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Production
Anna S. Altman
Anjuli Ayer
Morgan Croney
Teel Lassiter
Andrew Steinmetz
Daphne Yang
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About Us
Artkrush is a twice-monthly email magazine, featuring current news, people, and events in the international art community.
All stories and links are pure editorial, never paid advertisements.
In addition to this twice-monthly digest of the visual arts, Flavorpill also publishes ten other email magazines, covering
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© 2007 Flavorpill Productions LLC. All Rights Reserved. |
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