VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 11, NOVEMBER 2017 Modern Painters
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modernpainters NOVEMBER 2017
RICHARD SERRA
MONUMENTAL, EPHEMERAL
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LOUVRE ABU DHABI
WHAT WOULD YOU MARVEL AT?
Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, Jim Dine, Adrián Villar Rojas, Stella Hamberg
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN DELIMITING THE PAINTING
SUZI MORRIS The Viral Sublime November 28 December 17, 2017
Herrick Gallery 93 Piccadilly, Mayfair London W1J 7NQ +44 (0) 20 7493 9929
www.herrickgallery.com/suzi-morris Birth of Pandora Oil on aluminium 190 x 115 cm www.suzimorrisart.com
VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 11
Louise Blouin Mark Beech Kimberly Conniff Taber Archana Khare-Ghose GROUP EDITORS
Chris Welsch CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Matthew Rose Joseph Akel Nina Siegal Louisa Elderton Cody Delistraty Annie Godfrey Larmon Sarah Moroz Tina Xu Zandie Brockett CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Ajit Bajaj CREATIVE DIRECTOR INTERNATIONAL
Akhil Sharma Karanjeet Makkar ART DIRECTORS
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LETTER FROM THE EDITORS // NOVEMBER
NEW NAMES, NEW PLACES Art is a living thing. In MODERN PAINTERS, we celebrate the Contemporary by definition: rising artists in their studio, the oils still wet on the canvas; acrylic barely dry on board; encaustic paint cooling or silkscreen damp with inks. We also celebrate Modern works of a slightly older vintage, and we are especially delighted in this issue to give sneak peeks to new and revamped galleries that showcase the best of the best. Franca Toscano gets a first sight of “the Louvre in the sand” — the French museum’s second offshoot, designed by Jean Nouvel and located off the coast of Abu Dhabi. After questions about the nature of the artworks to be displayed and delays to the opening, the project is ready to go and it is clear that the result is spectacular and worth the wait. The Monnaie of Paris has also been reinventing itself, with the mint making itself into a work of art, as Sarah Moroz reports. We also get the inside story on more Paris restoration — that of a Keith Haring mural. Cody Delistraty tells the story. Artists familiar and less so form the backbone of our reportage. Writer Matthew Rose introduces us to collage artist Lance Letscher, whose career is documented in the movie “The Secret Life of Lance Letscher.” Annie Godfrey Larmon interviews another American artist, the 77-yearold Carolee Schneemann, who is getting a New York retrospective. Schneemann is known for kinetic representations of the body. Some of her comments take us full circle to art as a living, moving thing: “Whether you are looking at or making just a stroke of paint, it takes muscular involvement. When you look at the accumulated strokes, even in a Velasquez, you see a kinetic gestalt.”
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MODERN PAINTERS NOVEMBER 2017 BLOUINARTINFO.COM
FRANK STELLA
EXPERIMENT AND CHANGE NOVEMBER 12, 2017 – JULY 8, 2018
Frank Stella, Lettre Sur Les Sourds et Muets II, 1974. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 141 x 141 x 4 inches. Private Collection, NY. ©2017 Frank Stella / Artist Rights Society (ARS). Photo Credit: Christopher Burke.
Exhibition presented by Dr. David and Linda Frankel and S.Donald Sussman and Michelle Howland. Four Seasons Private Residences Fort Lauderdale and The Surf Club. Additional support provided by the David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation, Wege Foundation, Vontobel Swiss Wealth Advisors AG and Sandra Muss. 60th Anniversary presented by
Exhibitions and programs at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale are made possible in part by a challenge grant from the David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation. Funding is also provided by Nova Southeastern University, Hudson Family Foundation, Wege Foundation, Broward County Board of County Commissioners as recommended by the Broward Cultural Council and Greater Fort Lauderdale &RQYHQWLRQ 9LVLWRUV%XUHDXWKH6WDWHRI)ORULGD'HSDUWPHQWRI6WDWH'LYLVLRQRI&XOWXUDO$ƁDLUVDQGWKH)ORULGD&RXQFLORQ$UWVDQG&XOWXUH168$UW0XVHXPLVDFFUHGLWHG by the American Alliance of Museums.
Presented by nsuartmuseum.org | (954) 525-5500 | @nsuartmuseum One East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301
15 minutes from Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport. From Miami, I-95 express lanes now go all the way to Fort Lauderdale.
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Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All (still), 1997, single channel projectors, players, sound system, paint, carpet
Features
Portfolio 14
Newsmakers
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New Lease of Life
modernpainters MONUMENTAL, EPHEMERAL
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LOUVRE ABU DHABI
WHAT WOULD YOU MARVEL AT?
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN DELIMITING THE PAINTING
Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, Jim Dine, Adrián Villar Rojas, Stella Hamberg
How a Keith Haring mural in a Paris hospital for children was rescued by Cody Delistraty
NOVEMBER 2017
RICHARD SERRA
What are the big movements across galleries this season?
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Introducing Bright and busy collages of Lance Letscher reflect how beautifully he has fought his demons by Matthew Rose
ON THE COVER: Richard Serra, St. John’s Rotary Arc, 1980. Installation view, Richard Serra: Arc, New York, 1980
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Curator’s Take Natasha Bullock, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, writes on the upcoming show, “Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean”
Louvre in the sand The Parisian museum gets a place of pride in the sands near Abu Dhabi, and seems worth the wait of a decade by Franca Toscano
Standpoint 84 A Tragic Hero
The Tate Modern’s survey of Modigliani throws light on the artist as a 21-year-old who came to Paris to realize his dreams by Sarah Moroz
Healer 114 The Suffering from keratitis, Suzi Morris has learned to tackle the virus by giving it a character in her works of art by Archana Khare-Ghose
F R O M TO P : C O U R T E SY T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D L U H R I N G AU G U S T I N E © T H E A R T I S T; A R T W O R K © 2 017 R I C H A R D S E R R A /A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K . P H OTO :G I A N F R A N C O G O R G O N I
CONTENTS
N OVE M B E R 2 017
CONTENTS
N OVE M B E R 2 017
94 BELOW:
F R O M L E F T: © LO U V R E A B U D H A B I . P H OTO G R A P H Y: M O H A M E D S O M J I ; © 2 017 C A R O L E E S C H N E E M A N N . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, P. P.O.W, A N D GA L E R I E L E LO N G, N E W YO R K . P H OTO : A L G I E S E ; © S U C C E S S I O N P I C A S S O 2 017 P I C A S S O
Carolee Schneemann Meat Joy, 1964. Chromogenic color print of the performance in New York. 12.7 X 10.2 cm
64 ABOVE:
The bewitching facade of Louvre Abu Dhabi
Datebook 124 What After Art?
Adrián Villar Rojas explores space, time & human understanding of both at MOCA, Los Angeles by Zandie Brockett
128 The Bountiful Years
Willem de Kooning could have stopped painting in 1950s but the last decade of his working life proved otherwise by Nina Siegal
142 Datebook Picasso & Maya 142 Tender father-daughter
the latest works by the American artist
Gallagher 150 Ellen Racism is at the core of the artist’s take on slavery in New World
Pablo Picasso Maya with doll and horse, 1938. Oil on canvas, 73 X 60 cm
Datebook A Bird’s Eye View 154 Vancouver-based Stan Douglas shares his photos of uprising, protests and riots
memories from the artist’s archives
Baldessari 148 John Emojis as inspiration in
ABOVE:
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Lynda Benglis Hybrid sculptures of the American great return to the West Coast
158 Victor Man
Romanian-born artist travels east for his first solo show in Japan
Modern Painters, ISSN 0953-6698, is published monthly with combined Winter (December/ January/February), March/April, and June/July issues by LTB Media (U.K.) Ltd., an affiliate of BlouinArtinfo Corp, 80 Broad Street, Suite 606/607, New York, NY 10004. Vol. XXIX, No. 1. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER, Send address changes to: Fulco, Inc., Modern Painters, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-3000.
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MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM PRESENTS:
PHILEMONA WILLIAMSON: METAPHORICAL NARRATIVES Through January 7, 2018
Metaphorical Narratives is the first major museum solo exhibition of contemporary artist Philemona Williamson. Her dynamic paintings feature adolescents intermingled and engaged in evocative poses and actions, fraught with mystery and universal significance.
#PhilemonaWilliamson
Members see all exhibitions for FREE
3 South Mountain Avenue Montclair, NJ montclairartmuseum.org
Philemona Williamson, Eventual Autumn, 2003. Oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and the June Kelly Gallery, NY. All MAM programs are made possible, in part, by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, Carol and Terry Wall/The Vance Wall Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and Museum members.
CONTRIBUTORS // NOVEMBER
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Matthew Rose
Louisa Elderton
Joseph Akel
Annie Godfrey Larmon
Nina Siegal
The artist, writer and musician Matthew Rose is an American, who has lived and worked and played his mandolin in Paris for some 25 years. Matthew’s exhibition of rooms layered with his wall-to-wall collage works have taken him across the US and Europe; and he’s recently published a catalog of his drawings — “evidence.” He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Art & Antiques, and dozens of art publications. He has profiled the artists James Rosenquist, Richard Serra, Ray Johnson, Gilbert & George, Peter Schyuff and David Wojnarowicz among others. His columns for The Art Blog range from political art essays to profiles, street and ephemeral art and critical takes on some big guns in the art world. Here, Matthew writes about the pop master Jim Dine and the collage genius Lance Letscher.
Louisa Elderton is an independent Contemporary art curator, writer and editor based in Berlin and London. She was project editor of Phaidon’s recently released book “Vitamin C: Clay + Ceramic in Contemporary Art” and is currently working on the next book in the Vitamin series. For this issue of MODERN PAINTERS, she reviews the exhibition of Stella Hamberg’s sculptures at EIGEN+ART’s Berlin gallery.
Joseph Akel’s writing has been published in The New York Times, the Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Most recently, Akel was the editor of V and VMAN magazine. He has contributed essays to several artists’ monographs, including the 2015 exhibition catalogue for Doug Aitken’s retrospective at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, as well as editing “Wolves Like Us” (2015), a monograph accompanying the Sundance award-wining documentary of the same name. Akel presently lives in New York City where he is working on his first novel. For this issue, he writes about the artist Richard Serra, who, at 79, will exhibit several new works at David Zwirner this month. “I am amazed at the vitality of his practice,” Akel says. “Looking back on his career, one realizes Serra’s sheer prodigiousness is remarkable.”
Annie Godfrey Larmon is a writer and editor based in New York. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and her writing has also appeared in Bookforum, Frieze, MAY, Spike, Vdrome, and WdW Review. The recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing, she is the editor of publications for the inaugural Okayama Art Summit and a former international reviews editor of Artforum. She is the co-author, with Ken Okiishi and Alise Upitis, of The Very Quick of the Word (Sternberg Press, 2014), and she has penned features and catalogue essays on the work of numerous artists, including Okiishi, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Ben Thorp Brown, Alex Da Corte, Loretta Fahrenholz, Marianna Simnett, and Cally Spooner. Here, Godfrey Larmon speaks with artist Carolee Schneemann on the occasion of her retrospective at MoMA PS1.
Nina Siegal is an American author and journalist who has been based in Amsterdam for 11 years. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, writing about European museums, art crimes, and Dutch old masters, among other topics. She also writes for The Economist, Bloomberg News, and various art and culture magazines. Until she moved to the Netherlands, Nina wasn’t aware that Willem De Kooning was born in Rotterdam, although she had been a great admirer of the abstract expressionist since her teens. In this issue, she writes about a show of his late paintings at the Skarstedt Gallery in London.
MODERN PAINTERS NOVEMBER 2017 BLOUINARTINFO.COM
Cody Delistraty
Sarah Moroz
Tina Xu
Zandie Brockett
Based in Paris, Cody Delistraty writes profiles and cultural criticism for the deadtree and digital pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Esquire, among others. He also works on art and editorial projects for Dior, and he was named one of the best young writers of 2017 by British Vogue. On these pages, he explores the restoration of a Keith Haring mural at a children’s hospital in Paris.
Sarah Moroz is a FrancoAmerican journalist and translator; she has been based in Paris for the past decade. She writes about photography, art, fashion, and other cultural topics for The New York Times, the Guardian, New York Magazine, and i-D, among other publications. She is the co-author of a forthcoming illustrated guide to Paris, which will be published by Rizzoli in spring 2018. In her reporting for this issue, she was intrigued by the new media connections made regarding Amedeo Modigliani’s œuvre, on view at London’s Tate Modern this fall. Across the channel, she applauds the visibility the Monnaie de Paris will be giving international female artists — in its latest exhibition, and at regular intervals thereafter — under its new direction.
Tina Xu is a writer-filmmaker drawn to stories about the fragmentation and evolution of culture in an interconnected world. She grew up between California and China and is currently based in Beijing and Boston. She is inspired by the ways in which artists serve as prophetic voices in the midst of frenetic change and writes in this issue about four young Contemporary artists in Asia who pierce the conscience of society with new and age-old questions about history, modernity, morality, urbanity and ecology. Formally educated in political theory and international relations, she believes that art can contribute to a more peaceful world by luring viewers toward empathy and contemplation.
Zandie Brockett is a curator, researcher and writer based between Beijing and Los Angeles. She founded the cultural platform, Bactagon Projects, serves as the Editor-in-chief of its bilingual, literary journal, BaJia, and was the Associate Curator of the biennale, the Shanghai Project. Her research seeks to understand the relationship between social practice art and societies that are increasingly transformed by technology and urban life. For this issue, she reviews two shows in Los Angeles focused on Latin American artists: Martín Ramírez and Adrián Villar Rojas.
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INS OUTS YOUR RELIABLE CHEAT SHEET FOR ART WORLD NEWS
Jessica Kreps (left) has been named a partner at Lehmann Maupin galleries. Kreps joined the gallery in 2009 and became a director in 2014. Before working at Lehmann Maupin, Kreps was a sales director at Two Palms gallery. Born in Montreal and raised in New York, Kreps has a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors from Emory University in Atlanta. In addition to her work in sales, Kreps has also served as an artist liaison at Lehmann Maupin for Kader Attia and Shirazeh Houshiary. She speaks French and currently sits on the Artist’s Council of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Rachel Lehmann says that she trusts the fresh energy and entrepreneurial skills that Kreps brings to the gallery. Founded in 1996 by Lehmann and David Maupin, the gallery has three venues, two in New York and one in Hong Kong.
F R O M L E F T: M AT T H E W H E R R M A N N ; B O B K R A S N E R
The Rubin Museum of Art marks a major “in” with its appointment of Jorrit Britschgi (right) as the next executive director of the museum, which specializes in the art and ideas of the Himalayan region, including Tibet and India. Britschgi will be leading the museum into “The Future,” a yearlong connecting theme of programs for the museum. Announced at the museum’s annual gala, Britschgi’s new role comes at a pivotal moment as the institution evolves its SURJUDPPLQJDQGVHHNVWKHÀQDQFLDO underpinning to realize a grander vision. Britschgi aims to focus on expanding and engaging audiences locally and virtually, building the organization’s philanthropic backbone, creating strategic partnerships and further cementing the Rubin’s leadership within the arts and cultural community. Before his appointment as an executive director, Britschgi worked as director of exhibitions, collections, and research with the Rubin. Britschgi will be replacing Patrick Sears, who is retiring after KDYLQJOHGWKH0XVHXPIRUWKHSDVWÀYH\HDUV
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Somogy Art Publishers since 1937 w w w. s o m o g y. n e t © Luc Fournol, Cyril Clément, Estate Luc Fournol ‘A few carefree moments in a life otherwise devoted to work. Bernard never realised how elegant and handsome he was. Seductively wrapped in solitude and modesty-that’s how I knew and loved him’, Château l’Arc, 1958
MUSÉE DE MONTMARTRE JARDINS RENOIR
A view of the Monnaie de Paris on the Left Bank of the Seine in central Paris
© 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S | B E R N A R D TO U I L LO N
THE ART OF MAKING MONEY THE MONNAIE DE PARIS , SITE OF CONTEMPOR ARY EXHIBITIONS SINCE 2014 , HAS OPE NE D A NEW MUSEUM THAT CELE BR ATE S ITS FUNCTION AS THE FRENCH MINT BY SARAH MOROZ
An assortment of various objects on display at the new 11 Conti Museum at the Monnaie de Paris
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dedicated to currencies — in a building that was part of the mint, but was not publicly accessible — called 11 Conti, while at the same time expanding the amount of space given over to Contemporary art. For 11 Conti, the architect Philippe Prost reimagined the buildings, while the architect of historical monuments Hervé Baptiste refurbished the archival components. Altogether, the two institutions encompass 36,000 square meters of patrimonial lore and exhibition space. The new 11 Conti space is at once a museum and a functional factory: along the circuit, visitors gets glimpses of the workshops in operation, where some 150 artisans toil away chiseling, gilding, engraving and ultimately minting the country’s coinage on
“The hammer strikes,” at the Manufacture 1 room, patrimonial collection, at 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris
FAC I N G PAG E: © 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S | B E R N A R D TO U I L LO N ; T H I S PAG E: © 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S
aking money is art,” Andy Warhol once stated, “and good business is the best art.” The Monnaie de Paris is the epitome of this dictum. Located on the southern quay of the Seine facing the Louvre, it has retained its function as the French mint for nearly 250 years: the architect Jacques-Denis Antoine laid the first stone in 1771 and the building was inaugurated in 1775. The mint, sequestered from the public for over two centuries, began hosting exhibitions in 2007 and opened as an official museum for Contemporary art in 2014. This fall, the site opened a second museum
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© 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S | B E R N A R D TO U I L LO N
Besides its own collection of 170,000 objects, the museum also showcases a selection of Monnaieexclusive creative collaborations behalf of the French State. The museum’s collection of 170,000 objects encapsulates centuries-old traditions and artisanal skills, a-glimmer with gold and silver coins, civil and military medals, medallions and piasters, casts and carved objects. There is a selection of Monnaie-exclusive creative collaborations like a jewelry line with interior designer Andrée Putman, a “cello goddess” sculpture with the artist Arman, or the designer Philippe Starck’s gold-and-silver “last franc,” made when the euro became the single European currency in 2002. The mint is presented not only as a vector of fiscal developments but also as an exemplar of natural history, archaeology, technology and art. There is a raw materials room of key minerals and metals (samples include iron from the Ural mountains in Russia and zinc smithsonite from Namibia), and vitrines dedicated to monetary culture, including the 1906 issue of “La Croix Illustré” depicting the arrest of a counterfeiter on its cover. One room is given over to treasures: a discovery from Rue Mouffetard revealed coins dating from the 18th century, belonging to a high-ranking official under King Louis XV; as well as war-time bounty stolen by the French colonial troops from the empire of Annam in Asia in 1886, consisting of gold ingots, gold medals,
Architectural details inside 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris
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© 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S | B E R N A R D TO U I L LO N
Various objects on display at 11 Conti– Monnaie de Paris
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© 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S
A group exhibition at the venue, titled ‘Women House,’ which opened last month presents works by 40 female artists who address themes around domestic space
and silver bars. At the adjacent Monnaie de Paris, rotating Contemporary art exhibitions are hosted within renovated historic rooms. The opulent Salon Guillaume Dupré is especially breathtaking, with an elaborate fresco by 19th-century academic painter Jean-Joseph Weerts. The grand baroque staircase leading up to the Salon was a royal commission under Louis XV. Since January, the Contemporary exhibition program has been overseen by Camille Morineau, formerly the senior curator of Contemporary collections at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The new director of exhibitions and collections says she plans to build on the work of her predecessor, Chiara Parisi, who inaugurated the exhibition space in 2014
The Akan weights in the Collectors Room, patrimonial collection at 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris
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TGA R T, G E R M A N Y © G E R H A R D R I C H T E R 2 017
L E F T: © 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S ; A B OV E: © 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S | B E R N A R D TO U I L LO N
Left and above: Items in the Collectors’ Hall, patrimonial collection at 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris
with Paul McCarthy’s “Chocolate Factory.” The wave of exhibitions that followed featured Marcel Broodthaers, Jannis Kounellis, Bertrand Lavier and Maurizio Cattelan, among others. Morineau plans to more emphatically highlight certain categories at large: female artists, French artists and works of sculpture. To create symbolic links with 11 Conti, Morineau says she will also celebrate the neighboring venue’s longstanding past as a cornerstone of societal progress, with yearly exhibitions focused on the 17th and 18th centuries. “It was a venue for reflection; a philosophical milieu in the Age of Enlightenment. We want to revive this revolutionary history — where one could change things a little bit, could shift the paradigm,” she said. For example, next year “L’Enfance d’un Roi,” an exhibition about Louis XV’s childhood pedagogy under the influence of the Duchess of Ventadour (his governess and a thinker in her own right), will investigate how “an art object can open the gaze, enable thinking about the world
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differently,” Morineau stated. Though different, the programming between the two buildings will “have a coherence,” as she put it. “The gestures of the artisan are of interest to Contemporary artists: a return to techniques and small-scale production,” she said. Nonetheless, she said that the Monnaie “must remain a contemporary space, one engaging with its era.” Morineau’s chosen fall exhibition engages by way of a feminist début. “Women House” (October 20-January 28) is a group exhibition of 40 female artists who address themes around domestic space. This kicks off an ongoing triennial exhibition cycle dedicated to female artists. Co-curated by Morineau and Lucia Pesapane, the show surveys everything from the housewife to the dollhouse. It includes work by titans like Claude Cahun, Helena Almeida, Laurie Simmons, Louise Bourgeois, Martha Rosler, Mona Hatoum, Birgit Jürgenssen and Rachel
Arman’s “Venus with cellos,” (the Manufacture 2 Room, Exceptional Objects), patrimonial collection, at 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris
T H I S PAG E & FAC I N G PAG E: © 11 C O N T I - M O N N A I E D E PA R I S
Next April, the Monnaie will showcase works by the multimedia Indian artist Subodh Gupta, and next October an exhibition of the English artist Grayson Perry that will travel to Paris from Kiasma in Helsinki
Whiteread. The idea was inspired by “elles@ centrepompidou” — an exhibition of female artists pulled from the Centre Pompidou’s collection, staged seven years ago under Morineau. Other key influences include Virginia Woolf’s 1929 seminal essay “A Room of One’s Own” and Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago’s 1972 project “Womanhouse,” an abandoned dwelling in Hollywood transformed into a short-lived academic refuge cum exhibition space exclusively for female artists. While 11 Conti is all new, the alreadyestablished Monnaie has gained 300 sq m of supplementary exhibition space to its existing 600 sq m. It will be deployed to its full scale, mounting shows produced through partnerships that can travel at an international level. (“Women House” will be shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington beginning in March 2018.)
Back at the Monnaie in 2018, there will be a showcase of the multi-media Indian artist Subodh Gupta in April (in the main space), and next October an exhibition of the English artist Grayson Perry will travel to Paris from the Kiasma in Helsinki, occupying the entire 900 sq m. The museum is not limited to its inner sanctum: the courtyards showcase freely accessible sculptures that “are also a complementary exhibition space,” Morineau said, calling it an “exceptional” outdoor annex, as there are “few œuvres within the public sphere in Paris, because there is so little room.” Works by Niki de Saint Phalle, Shen Yuan and Joana Vasconcelos will be the first monumental examples, an accent on “Women House” and a foretaste for passersby on the unexpected wonders within the Monnaie. MP
“The Art of Engraver (bis),” the Manufacture 1 room, patrimonial collection, at 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris
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RESCUING KEITH HARING’S
N AT I O N A A L A R C H I E F W I T H C R E AT I V E C O M M O N S
“TOWER” T H E A M ER ICA N A RT IST DI DN’T L I V E LONG ENOUGH , BU T LEF T A SOU RCE OF L AST I NG JOY TO CON VA LE SCEN T CH I LDR EN W I T H H IS M U R A L AT HÔPI TA L N ECK ER– EN FA N TS M A L A DE S I N PA R IS. I T’S GOT A N EW LE ASE OF L I F E NOW BY CODY DELISTRATY Keith Haring at work in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam,1986
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In 1998, Jérôme de Noirmont, then a curator and gallerist, took his fiveyear-old child to the emergency room at the Hôpital Necker–Enfants Malades, a children’s hospital in central Paris. Fortunately, the complication was minor and his child was fine, but de Noirmont remembers something else about that visit: the giant mural by the American artist Keith Haring that stretched along an entire external stairwell. Painted freehanded, Haring’s mural depicts his favored “radiant babies” as well as brightly colored adults interacting happily with children. Free-form shapes in green, blue, red and yellow provide a cheerful background to his thick, blacklined figures. “I painted it for the enjoyment of the sick children in this hospital, now and in the future,” Haring wrote in his journal in May 1987, around the time he completed the mural. Only 29 years old, Haring was then at the height of his artistic powers. He had already created nearly 50 public works around the world, including a sprawling mural in the lobby of Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center, and he had been taking on grand themes, such as anti-apartheid, AIDS and the epidemic of crack-cocaine in New York. But while creating the mural in Paris, Haring began to sense that his time was limited. “The odds are very great and, in
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fact, the symptoms already exist,” he wrote at the time, referring to his belief that he already had AIDS or a precursor to it. “I don’t know if I have five months or five years, but I know my days are numbered. This is why my activities and projects are so important now. To do as much as possible as quickly as possible.” Haring, tragically, was right. Months after completing the mural, he was diagnosed with AIDS, from which he would die in 1990, at age 31. The mural stands, therefore, as a testament to Haring’s artistic talent but also as a ray of light in otherwise dark times. Even with his prescient sense that he would soon perish, he managed to create an artwork of singular beauty and happiness that has been bringing enjoyment to sick children for many years. It was newly unveiled in September, after undergoing a complete restoration orchestrated by de
Noirmont. “His art moved me by its accessibility and by the messages it supports,” de Noirmont — now the co-founder of an “art production” company with his wife, Emmanuelle — said during an interview in Paris. “Children were an essential audience to Keith Haring, especially sick children.” The year after he first saw the mural, de Noirmont curated the exhibition “Keith Haring: Made in France” at the Musée Maillol in Paris. He remained interested in Haring over the years, but that interest took on a new dimension in 2011 when the Hôpital Necker was planning to expand and to modernize. Haring’s mural had been severely damaged by weather and wear, and the hospital had announced that it was on the verge of condemning it to demolition. De Noirmont leapt into action. Working with the Keith Haring Foundation based in New York,
“I painted it for the enjoyment of the sick children in this hospital, now and in the future,” Haring wrote in his journal in May 1987, around the time he completed the mural. Only 29 years old, Haring was then at the height of his artistic powers.
P H OTO T. JAC O B © K E I T H H A R I N G F O U N DAT I O N , C O U R T E S Y N O I R M O N TA R T P R O D U C T I O N , PA R I S
Keith Haring’s “Tower” at Paris’s Hôpital Necker– Enfants Malades after restoration
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Haring’s mural had been severely damaged by weather and wear, and the hospital had announced that it was on the verge of condemning it to demolition.
he set about raising the money needed to restore the mural, which the hospital couldn’t afford to do on its own. Most notably, de Noirmont organized a charity auction at Sotheby’s in 2013, which exclusively comprised artist donations and was, according to de Noirmont, the single largest source of revenue for the fundraising project. After the necessary finances were in order, de Noirmont liaised with Denis Marchal, the head of real estate at Paris’ Public Hospitals Organization, as well as Philippe Gazeau, the architect charged with renovating the Hôpital Necker. Will Shank — a former chief conservator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who now consults on how to best care for fine art collections — was tapped to restore the mural, along with Antonio Rava, a Turin-based conservator. Shank and Rava collaborated with the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France. Together, they analyzed the state of the mural. The “iron armature was poking through the
painted surface alarmingly in many key places, disrupting the visual harmony of the mural,” Shank wrote in an unpublished essay that he shared with MODERN PAINTERS. “The black lines themselves had suffered from extreme seasonal changes in temperature, lifting and peeling away from the tower over about eighty percent of the surface.” The restoration process was not easy, and stretched to six years. “By May of 2017,” Shank wrote, “when we applied a protective coating so as to minimize future color fading and water damage from the sometimescruel weather of Paris, the mural looked almost new again.” Now an 88.5-foot-high artwork called “Tower,” (it was previously unnamed) Haring’s newly restored mural was unveiled on September 7. But the process continues. A 97,000-square-foot garden surrounding the mural has also been planned for next year. “It will symbolize ‘the opening of the hospital onto the city,’ ” de Noirmont said, adding that the garden will be accessible both to children in the
hospital as well as to anyone who lives nearby. The idea behind both the garden and the tower, he said, is to “bring nature and life to the center of the hospital, offering a beautiful view and walking spot.” Throughout his short life, Haring created other public artwork in Paris, including “Life of Christ,” a triptych that his foundation donated to the Saint-Eustache Church in central Paris in 2003. A year before he died, Haring also painted the “Monte Carlo Mural” at the Princess Grace Hospital, the only public hospital in Monaco. In doing so, Haring was named a “Chevalier de l’Orde du Merite Culturel” by Princess Caroline, making him the youngest — and sole American — to gain this honor. Yet while all of Haring’s works shine brightly, it has taken a particular and sustained effort to bring “Tower” back to its former glory. “Those of us who saved his luminous mural,” Shank wrote, “feel certain that he would be pleased to know that his thirty-year-old ode to joy has come alive again.” MP
“The iron armature was poking through the painted surface alarmingly in many key places, disrupting the visual harmony of the mural,” wrote Will Shank, a former chief conservator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art BLOUINARTINFO.COM OCTOBER 2017 MODERN PAINTERS
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INTRODUCING
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Lance Letscher’s “Sunday Painter,” 2017. Collage, 12 3/4 X 21 inches
INSIDE A BEAUTIFUL MIND L A N C E L E T S C H E R , C O U R T E S Y PAV E L ZO U B O K GA L L E R Y
A NEW FILM ON LANCE LETSCHER’S CAPTIVATING COLLAGES TELLS THE STORY OF HOW HE TURNED TO ART TO WORK OUT HIS DEMONS BY MATTHEW ROSE
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Lance Letscher’s talent for constructing beautifully insane chutes-and-ladders worlds from bits of cut paper has landed him in the movies. The Austin, Texas, artist’s ingenious patterning of images is the subject of a documentary film, “The Secret Life of Lance Letscher,” opening November 7 at New York’s Roxy Hotel, just before he’ll have a solo exhibition, also in New York. Letscher’s materials, typically hijacked from vintage magazines, books and old metal cans, unfold into stunning labyrinths of color and shape. The film tells Letscher’s poignant life story and walks us through the creation of an immense outdoor metal collage for South Congress Books in Austin. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, Letscher follows Picasso, Ernst,
Cornell and Ray Johnson in charting a unique path in the art world with X-Acto blades, scissors and vintage papers. But Letscher, 55, also accesses his visual acuity and poetic sensibility to work out his demons — depression and anxiety, which he says was set off by his father’s suicide,
committed with a pistol. By drawing, painting, repurposing objects and perhaps through the pathological balm of cutting paper, the artist fashioned lyrical bodies of work that charm and beguile. Those works will be on view at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York when his show, “Cut & Staple,”
Lance Letscher in his studio
C O U R T E S Y: F I L M R I S E
Thoughtful and soft-spoken, Letscher follows Picasso, Ernst, Cornell and Ray Johnson in charting a unique path in the art world with X-Acto blades, scissors and vintage papers
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L A N C E L E T S C H E R , C O U R T E S Y PAV E L ZO U B O K GA L L E R Y
Lance Letscher’s “Little Garden,” 2017. Collage, 22.5 X 17.5 inches
L A N C E L E T S C H E R , C O U R T E S Y PAV E L ZO U B O K GA L L E R Y
Lance Letscher’s “First Prize.” Collage, 14 X 11 inches
L A N C E L E T S C H E R , C O U R T E S Y PAV E L ZO U B O K GA L L E R Y
Lance Letscher’s “Corner Cabinet.” Collage, 22 X 17 inches
“Well, that [father’s suicide] was the source of the angst... I spun out mentally over the first three years, then periodically into the present. Insomnia, physical pain, panic attacks, two psychotic episodes, suicidal thinking — a rough ride”
L A N C E L E T S C H E R , C O U R T E S Y PAV E L ZO U B O K GA L L E R Y
opens on November 9 . “Lance’s tumultuous life is underscored by his moving articulation of his ideas about creativity and the subconscious,” said Sandra Adair, director of the new film. “I had to tell his story.” Matthew Rose interviewed Letscher for Blouin Modern Painter.
Lance Letscher’s collage,“Capitol Gain”
One can’t help getting caught up in your designs, your stories —the visual tangle of thoughts is at times terrifying. There’s a link, too, to Outsider Art with your brand of compulsiveness — the inner rollercoaster, a descent downward perhaps, but also inward. I do feel those feelings, but by discarding much of what I learned in art school, I began to consider the mental mechanics
of creativity — the struggle for dominance between the conscious and unconscious. In your early pieces, you covered objects with lead: children’s chairs, tricycles, a dissecting table. A series of small, dark paintings of angels, people carrying off dead friends and relatives were all sober, all black and white, each loaded with a narrative of death and survival. Most were made in the late 1980s at the University of Texas graduate school. I’d read a lot about the concentration camps and then visited Owicim, where Auschwitz and Birkenau were located. The Holocaust permeated my work at that time. I was taken by the child’s ballet slipper, a pillow that looked like someone had slept on
it, an isolated arm — all intimately sculpted from white marble. I found some white marble tombstone blanks in East Austin in 1989 and just dove into this beautiful, luminous material. Eventually, though, carving marble became too time consuming, the work too fragile. It was then I started the first quick and simple collages to gain back spontaneity, to work through ideas in a more direct way. In the film, a collector cites your collage — a pair of two of hearts playing cards mirroring each other, citing their poetry, their symmetry. That was made when I first met my wife, Mary — a love note to her. How did you go from the light poetic pieces — tea-
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INTRODUCING
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Lance Letscher’s “Fox and Rabbit,” 2017. Collage, 10 1/2 X 18 3/4 inches
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INTRODUCING Lance Letscher’s “Ampersand,” 2017. Metal collage, 27 3/4 X 27 3/4 inches
stained cloud and graphite flower collages to the large organized riots of color and narrative in your current work? It happened over an 18-year period. The work evolved gradually with a couple of breakthroughs, but mostly the changes happened in doing the work. Which artists influenced you along the way, and what was it about collage that stirred you? I read about Egon Schiele when I was about 11; my mother had art books around the house, and years ago I discovered Hannah Hoch; importantly, too, I discovered the quilts from Gees Bend. The African American women’s quilt-making collective from Gees Bend,
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Alabama… Yes. These ladies prized innovation, amazing palettes and geometric compositions. Plus, art based on utility is very appealing to me. I know from the film that the suicide of your father had a very powerful impact on you — and your work. Well, that was the source of the angst…I spun out mentally over the first three years, then periodically into the present. Insomnia, physical pain, panic attacks, two psychotic episodes, suicidal thinking — a rough ride. Yet, your control of the chaos is dizzying. “Window Study,” 2017, is a precise and exquisite study in illusion. “Sunday Painter,” 2017, is a
kind of right brain/left brain see-saw. One can’t help but see the works as metaphors for the conscious and unconscious mind… I follow color, line and perspective to create movement within the composition. The expressionistic qualities arrive on a different train — not the conscious mind. With the collages, I’m driven by what’s at hand — so the windows allowed me to play with the illusion of depth, gravity and vertigo. Themes come through the cutting — that’s 95 per cent of the work. Then I try to coax the evolution along. The works sort of detach themselves from me… and become kind of a dream within a dream. MP Matthew Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris, France.
L A N C E L E T S C H E R , C O U R T E S Y PAV E L ZO U B O K GA L L E R Y
“With the collages, I’m driven by what’s at hand — so the windows allowed me to play with the illusion of depth, gravity and vertigo. Themes come through the cutting — that’s 95 percent of the work”
PULSE MIAMI BEACH CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR
DECEMBER 7-10, 2017 INDIAN BEACH PARK
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C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D L U H R I N G AU G U S T I N E © P I P I LOT T I R I S T, P H OTO G R A P H : L I N DA N Y L I N D
Pipilotti Rist, Administrating Eternity, 2011, installation view, Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage, Hayward Gallery London, London, 2011
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...WATCH THE INSIDE OF THE HEART OF THE OTHER Following is an excerpt from the catalogue essay by NATASHA BULLOCK, the curator for “Pipilotti Rist: Sip my Ocean,” a major new exhibition of the Swiss artist’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Nov 1 - Feb 18
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e begin Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition “on the road,” with a video of a woman (Rist) in the back of a car, speaking about what she sees, her dreams and ideas. In a monologue to the self the artist proposes philosophies on life and love. The talk is smooth but skips from a discussion of childhood and descriptions of trees seen outside the car window to the meaning of existence and relationships. In its form and content “Kleines Vorstadthirn (Small Suburb Brain),” 2001, echoes many of the key ideas that sustain Rist’s art making. This early philosophical manifesto is an ode to the heart and the intellect, to the big emotions that sustain us and to the beauty of the world and the universe around us. As Rist says in the work: “To redirect poetry back to metaphysics, physics, ethics … return theology back to physics — even logic — technology, epistemology, and even psychology. Yes, even psychology belongs to physics. I mean psychology is also physics. Ethics is politics.” Here, in this dialogue, is the idea of a chain reaction, of an awareness that everything and everyone is intrinsically linked and that to “care for ourselves is to care for each other.” (Juliana Engberg, “A bee flew in the window...,” in Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton (eds), “Pixel Forest: Pipilotti Rist,” Phaidon Press, New York in association with New Museum, New York, 2016, p 15) We know that the aspiration of physics is to explain the physical world — how things behave in space and time. Rist’s art is akin to this, with a longing and a need to reflect and understand the phenomena of what is around and within us, physically and otherwise. (Rist studied theoretical
Pipilotti Rist, Administrating Eternity, 2011, installation view, Komm Schatz, wir stellen die Medien um & fangen nochmals von verne an, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, Austria, 2011
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Left: Pipilotti Rist, Sip My Ocean, 1996, still from a two-channel video installation, sound, color: projectors, players, sound system, paint, carpet, sound by Anders Guggisberg and Pipilotti Rist after Wicked Game, 1989, by Chris Isaak
C LO C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D L U H R I N G AU G U S T I N E © P I P I LOT T I R I S T, P H OTO G R A P H : L I S A R A S T L ; C O U R T E SY T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D L U H R I N G A U G U S T I N E © T H E A R T I S T; DA N I E L B O U D
Below: Natasha Bullock, curator of the exhibition
physics for one semester. When she was accepted into Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst Wien (Academy of Applied Art Vienna) she remarked that her ‘goal was to visualise philosophical and physical systems in a graphical way.’ Pipilotti Rist, in “No.290: Holiday clips: Pipilotti Rist,” The Modern Art Notes Podcast, 26 May 2017, manpodcast.com/portfolio/no-290- holiday-clipspipilotti-rist/ (accessed July 2017).) She brings ideas and feelings together, and does so through the prism of video. Her imaginary worlds carve a unique vision, with all the attendant depth and weight of painting — an art form that has culturally sustained us, and our imaginations, for centuries. Rist, however, paints with light, cameras and keyboards. As she explains: “I regard videos as moving paintings, behind glasses or caressing away walls.” (Pipilotti Rist in “Pipilotti Rist: Cubic meters,” Flash Art, November/December 2008, p. 66.) Her work is a 21st-century vision of our bodies, the heavens, our wildest dreams and our cultural imaginings: “I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself. I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within.” […] (Pipilotti Rist in Stephanie Rosenthal, “Be My Friend!,” “Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage,” Hayward Gallery, London, p. 21) “Kleines Vorstadthirn (Small Suburb Brain)” is the first work that we encounter in the exhibition “Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean.” It is presented adjacent to two of the artist’s earliest and most well-known dual-channel video projections: “Sip My Ocean,” 1996, and “Ever is Over All,” 1997. It was after seeing that jubilant woman in “Ever is Over All” — walking down a street in a turquoise dress and sparkly red shoes, casually smashing car windows with a red hot poker flower made of iron — that I first fell for Rist’s work, rejoicing in her gleeful lack of
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C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D L U H R I N G AU G U S T I N E © P I P I LOT T I R I S T, P H OTO G R A P H : L I N DA N Y L I N D
Pipilotti Rist, Administrating Eternity, 2011, installation view, Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage, Hayward Gallery London, London, 2011
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C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D L U H R I N G AU G U S T I N E © T H E A R T I S T, P H OTO G R A P H : E P W S T U D I O
Pipilotti Rist, 4th Floor to Mildness from the Mildness Family, 2016, installation view, Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, New Museum, New York, US, 2016
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C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D L U H R I N G AU G U S T I N E © T H E A R T I S T, P H OTO G R A P H : L I S A R A S T L
Pipilotti Rist, Gnade Donau Gnade (Mercy Danube Mercy), 2014, installation view, Komm Schatz, wir stellen die Medien um & fangen nochmals von vorne an, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, Austria, 2015
inhibition, her anarchy. Indeed, “Ever is Over All” is considered one of Rist’s breakthrough works. On one screen is projected the waltzing woman, while on the other is free-flowing footage of a lush field of red hot poker flowers, or Kniphofia. Nature is everpresent. Rist herself has said that the work is “honoring nature, by exaggerating the power of a tender, fibrous plant.” (Pipilotti Rist in Steiner, Rochelle (ed.), “Wonderland,” (exh. cat.), St. Louis: The Saint Louis Art Museum, 2000, p. 91) There is also a celebratory slapstick humor to “Ever is Over All,” especially when a policewoman waves and smiles in approval at the window crashing action. “Ever is Over All” alternates with “Sip My Ocean” — the work after which this exhibition is named. “Sip My Ocean” presents a pulsating underwater paradise. Sexually suggestive of the body, its title characteristically fuses the intimate self with the world, personifying nature and, at the same time, broadly acknowledging that we too are animals within this cosmos. Mirrored across the corner of a room, it shows fragments of a man, and a woman in a salmon dress and a yellow bikini, swimming underwater and in waves with objects including a toy camper van, teacup and toy heart that sink to the ocean floor, along with seaweed and coral. The music and lyrics cover Chris Isaak’s love ballad “Wicked Game,” 1990. A voice is heard singing and finally screaming “I don’t want to fall in love.” These words are interwoven with the imagery, which plays hypnotically with the music, morphing in and out of the corner of the room like the ebb and flow of the tide, and like our attempts to be in sync with another person. Early in her career Rist explained: “I like installations that really get you involved, that make you part of them, or that even work like a
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Pipilotti Rist, Pixelforest Mutterplatte, 2016, installation view, Pipilotti Rist: Your Saliva is my Diving Suit in the Ocean of Pain, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2016
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Pipilotti Rist, Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless In The Bath of Lava) (still), 1994, single-channel video installation, sound, color, LCD screen set into the floor, player
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C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D L U H R I N G AU G U S T I N E © P I P I LOT T I R I S T
lullaby. When I do projections, I want people to go inside them so that colors, movement, pictures are reflected on their bodies.” (Anderson, Laurie, “Laurie Anderson and Pipilotti Rist Meet Up in the Lobby of a Hotel in Berlin on September 9, 1996,” Parkett, Zurich/New York, no. 48, 1996, p. 114) The combination of lush, colorful imagery and mesmerising music — the latter often created with the artist’s long-time collaborator Anders Guggisberg — are features of Rist’s work: an aesthetic and sonic salve to the worries that surround us and an attempt to imitate the strong colors found in nature. “Sip My Ocean” shows these characteristics and is also one of Rist’s first works to explore the effects of wall projections on the viewing experience. (“Leibesbrief ” (1992) was the first of Rist’s films to be projected into a corner.) With its hallucinogenic visual mirroring, colour and lyrics, it describes the impulses of desire. It is a serenade about an impossible wish to not fall in love again and to be in synchronicity with the other… […] Although “Pixelwald Motherboard (Pixel Forest Mutterplatte),” 2016, is not the final work we physically encounter in “Sip My Ocean,” it is the exhibition’s spiritual climax. The work imagines a television monitor exploding into a room, referencing how images on a screen are made from hundreds of pixels. “Pixel Forest” metaphorically expands pixels into forms that look like crystals floating in three-dimensional space. Produced in collaboration with Kaori Kuwabara, the work is made from a forest of 3,000 LEDs (light-emitting diodes) encased in resin and suspended from cables that overlap across the ceiling like jungle vines. Viewers can walk on a path through these hanging light vines. Each sculptural LED is operated by a separate video signal that reacts to music in the corresponding exhibition spaces. Together, these signals create a sequence, and if we could stand far enough away from the work we would be able to see a complete image. The floating pixels are ever changing, with sequences of light that twinkle or surge like a wave of vibrant color in response to the music. Rist also notes how the work looks like an abstract screen and a simplified brain. The work refers to different kinds of lights, from the sparks in the nerve cells that pass through neurons to sunlight: pixels, brains and the sun. Along with nature and the body, the sun is the fulcrum of Rist’s work. It is, she notes, “the biggest projector of all” and the most important source of energy and life on earth. (Kerry Ingram, “Every dot knows where it is: a chat with Pipilotti Rist,” Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas, mfah.org (accessed 6 July 2017).) The sun shines, strikes, glimmers, illuminates, and creates colour, warmth and fire. In other ways
“Pixelwald” is an expansion of the water imagery that also dominates Rist’s visual language, as the sculptural elements of the work could resemble the oxygen bubbles emitted by sea grass. In its combination of technology, nature and the body, “Pixelwald” fuses the physical with the psychological. It is an abstracted screen, a simple brain and an imaginary forest glowing with energy and color. In experiencing Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition we have travelled close to the surface of the earth and into the soil and dirt, looked up at the skies and stars, walked through the air, lay submerged under the water, looked inside the body, sunk down into the lava and metaphorically exploded into hundreds of atoms and pixels. Exploding pixels, exploring neurons, dissolving
“SIP MY OCEAN”... IS ALSO ONE OF RIST’S FIRST WORKS TO EXPLORE THE EFFECTS OF WALL PROJECTIONS ON THE VIEWING EXPERIENCE atoms, bursting molecules. The synapses of our life experience — and all in full-blown color. “My blood is boiling,” observes Rist in “Kleines Vorstadthirn (Small Suburb Brain).” “How would you react when your love says she/he wants to leave? Under what circumstances could you really in any way truthfully be able to answer such a question? And to whom?” As we leave Rist’s exhibition we encounter this work and sense again how desire surges through her art. A desire for compassion, “mildness,” warmth and hope; to understand each other and ourselves, and the world in which we live. (Rist, artist statement, “4th Floor to Mildness.”) Pipilotti Rist creates vast yet intimate spaces for contemplation and understanding. As she says: “If you kiss someone, you want to know what the other person is feeling. I want to find pictures that express what the other feels. I want to produce images that allow the viewer to be closer and watch the inside of the heart of the other.” (Christine Ross, “Fantasy and distraction: an interview with Pipilotti Rist,” Afterimage, vol.28, no.3, November/December 2000, p.9.) MP BLOUINARTINFO.COM NOVEMBER 2017 MODERN PAINTERS
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THE LOUVRE IN THE SAND
THIS MONTH SEES THE OPENING OF THE LOUVRE’S FIRST INTERNATIONAL OFFSHOOT, DESIGNED BY JEAN NOUVEL AND LOCATED ON THE MANMADE ISL AND OF SA ADIYAT, OFF THE COAST OF ABU DHABI — A PROJECT A DECADE IN THE MAKING
BY FRANCA TOSCANO
The Louvre Abu Dhabi with Abu Dhabi skyline in the background
The latticed dome of Louvre Abu Dhabi is reminiscent of Arab “musharabiyya” carved-wood latticework
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FAC I N G PAG E: © LO U V R E A B U D H A B I , P H OTO G R A P H Y: M O H A M E D S O M J I
T The Musée du Louvre was born in Paris in 1793, four years after an angry mob stormed the Bastille and marked the start of the French Revolution. The museum was the fruit of a revolutionary desire to share the collections of the nation with the people, and free access was given three days a week to its displays, which in those days totalled 537 paintings and 184 objects. That same year, the island of Abu Dhabi — a wildlife haven whose name means “father of the gazelle” — became the seat of the Al-Nahyan family. They were part of the Bani Yas, a tribe of Bedouins that had settled on the island some three decades earlier. Back in the late 18th century, nothing linked the Louvre to the dynasty that ran Abu Dhabi. But this month sees the opening of the Louvre’s
first international offshoot, located on the manmade island of Saadiyat, off the coast of Abu Dhabi — a project a decade in the making. The mammoth Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by the PritzkerPrize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, consists of a medina-like cluster of 55 white buildings — 23 of them exhibition galleries — with a massive dome hovering above them like an upside-down dish. The latticed dome, measuring 180 meters in diameter and reminiscent of the Arab “musharabiyya” carved-wood latticework, flecks the structures underneath with sunlight and provides shelter from the often sweltering temperatures. “Louvre Abu Dhabi is France’s greatest international cultural project of the 21st century, and no doubt one of the most ambitious cultural projects in the world,” Jean-Luc Martinez, the Louvre’s president, said at a preopening October press conference in Paris. He said the project was innovative in many ways, starting with the building by Nouvel and its seemingly suspended dome. “This building will be one of the icons that will mark our era, like I.M. Pei’s pyramid,” he said, referring to the glass outdoor structure built by the Chinese-American architect Pei during
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Left: “Shiva Dancing,” Asia, 2nd half of 10th century AD, Lost-wax bronze (copper alloy) cast, 83.0 x 47.5 x 24.5 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi
The mammoth Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by the Pritzker-Prizewinning architect Jean Nouvel, consists of a medina-like cluster of 55 white buildings — 23 of them exhibition galleries — with a massive dome hovering above them like an upside-down dish. 68
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©B OT L AU H RI M E NAG G ERSE E©NLO F I EUL V DR E A B U D H A B I / T H I E R R Y O L L I V I E R
Far left: “Portrait of Fayoum,” Egypt, Antinoopolis, 225-250 AD. Encaustic on wooden panel, 42.7 x 23 x 0.9 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi
© LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / T H I E R R Y O L L I V I E R
“Madonna and Child,” Venice, between 1480 and 1485, Giovanni Bellini (14301516). Venice, oil on panel, 109.0 x 85.0 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi
The Louvre Abu Dhabi is part of a complex of museums and cultural institutions that are being planned on Saadiyat Island; construction has not yet started on any other project.
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civilization that builds it, to its history and to its geography.” On his preliminary trips to the island, he saw “sand, water, sky, and the perception of a horizon with the city on one side and the sea on the other.” Using those elements, he decided on “the creation of a museum that wouldn’t be a simple building with a door, thick walls, and artworks frozen inside,” but a museum that would be a “meeting place” for everybody to keep coming back to. For its inaugural display, Louvre Abu Dhabi will show some 600 works — half of them acquired by the new institution, and the other half, one-year loans from 17 French national institutions including the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Pompidou Center, the Château de Versailles, and the Musée Guimet. Many of these traveling artworks will be absolute masterpieces, and key pieces of France’s national heritage: Leonardo da Vinci’s “La Belle Ferronnière” (from the Louvre), Van Gogh’s 1887 “Self-Portrait” (from the
“The Subjugated Reader,” 1928, Le Perreux-sur-Marne, by René Magritte (1898 1967). Oil on canvas, 92 x 73.5 x 2 cm, 114.0 x 95.0 x 7.6 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi
F R O M L E F T: © LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / T H I E R R Y O L L I V I E R ; © A DAG P, PA R I S 2 016/LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / AG E N C E P H OTO F
“The Gypsy,” 1862-1867, Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Oil on canvas, 116 X 81.5 X 11.5 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi
his transformation of the Louvre in Paris in the early 1990s. “I’m convinced that Louvre Abu Dhabi will become one of the most beautiful museums in the world.” The Louvre Abu Dhabi is part of a complex of museums and cultural institutions that are being planned on Saadiyat Island; construction has not yet started on any other project. Of the two still being planned, one is the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a museum of contemporary visual culture designed by Frank Gehry. Another is the Sheikh Zayed National Museum, dedicated to the culture and heritage of Abu Dhabi, which is being created in collaboration with the British Museum in London, based on designs by the architect Norman Foster. At the Paris press conference, Nouvel stepped up to the podium to explain how he first got involved in the project. He recalled getting a phone call in late 2006 from Thomas Krens, then the director of the Guggenheim Museum, who said he had been tasked with bringing together an “architectural cast for a new cultural quarter on an unprecedented scale, to be built on what was then still a desert island, the island of Saadiyat.” “It was an absolutely astonishing proposal,” said Nouvel. “Once the question was put to me, I could think of nothing else.” Being a “contextual architect,” Nouvel said, he felt strongly that a museum had to “belong to the
© LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / AG E N C E P H OTO F
“Game of Bezique,”Paris, 1880. Gustave Caillebotte (1848 -1894). Oil on canvas, 148.2 x 190.0 x 11.3 cm (with climatic frame), 125.3 x 165.6 x 3.4 cm (without frame), Louvre Abu Dhabi
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© LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / J O N AT H A N G I B B O N S
“Maitreya,” Asia, c. 12th century. Gilded copper, semiprecious stones, 60 x 16 x 9 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi
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The museum is the product of a historic accord signed between the governments of France and Abu Dhabi and negotiated by the Louvre’s then deputy director, Didier Selles. Musée d’Orsay); Manet’s “The Fife Player” (also from Orsay); and JacquesLouis David’s “Napoleon Crossing the Alps.” Louvre Abu Dhabi’s own acquisitions, which will also go on show, include Giovanni Bellini’s “Madonna and Child” (1480-85), Manet’s “The Gypsy,” (1862-1867) Gauguin’s “Children Wrestling” (1888), and a Bactrian princess from Central Asia dating from the late third to early second millennium B.C. Visitors will also be able to view a temporary exhibition on the history of the Louvre Museum, told through 150 artworks and objects. What happens in the second year, when the masterpieces make their way back to France? A second set, “of an equivalent standard,” is being negotiated, said Manuel Rabaté, the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s director at another pre-opening press briefing, in London.
He said there were extremely heavy works — such as the colossal statue of Ramses II, made of diorite and dating to between 1279 and 1213 B.C., which is traveling to Abu Dhabi from Paris — that would stay longer than a year. Highly fragile works, such as photographs, would be shown over shorter periods for conservation reasons, he said. He added that visitors would be traveling “through time, room by room,” and witnessing objects from different civilizations in the same rooms, “sometimes in the same showcases, dialoguing together.” The museum is the product of a
“Children Wrestling,”PontAven, 1888, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Oil on canvas, 93 X 73 cm, 121 X 101.2 X 9.5 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi
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“Eagle-shaped fibula from Domagnano, Republic of San Marino, 2nd half of 5th century AD. Gold and garnets, 12.1 X 6.4 cm. Louvre Abu Dhabi
“Standing Bodhisattva, (Maitreya ?),” Asia, 2nd3rd AD. Schist, 155 X 50 X 20 cm, 198 kg. Louvre Abu Dhabi
A L L I M AG E S : © LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / T H I E R R Y O L L I V I E R
“Octagonal box,” Asia, 8th century AD. Wood, tortoise shell, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and painted amber beads, 12.2 X 38.5 cm. Louvre Abu Dhabi
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“Ottoman dagger with damascened blade,” Tabriz or Herat, c. 15301550. Steel, gold, 26 cm. Louvre Abu Dhabi
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historic accord signed between the governments of France and Abu Dhabi and negotiated by the Louvre’s then deputy director, Didier Selles. Under the terms of the accord, Abu Dhabi agreed to pay the Louvre and a group of (then) 11 partner French museums the approximate sum of 1 billion euros, according to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. In exchange, Abu Dhabi would be allowed to use the Louvre name, receive loans from France and program exhibitions curated by its French counterparts. The works would be selected in a dialogue between the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the French lending museums and arts institutions, which today number 17. When the project was first mooted a decade ago, there was an outcry among French museum directors and art historians, concerned that the artworks would be damaged in the journey. La Tribune de l’Art, an online magazine edited by the writer Didier Rykner, launched an online petition against the Louvre Abu Dhabi that received hundreds of signatures. His complaint: that money was the primary motivation for the project, which otherwise had no real curatorial underpinnings. Françoise Cachin, the former director of the Musée d’Orsay, co-authored an angry column in Le Monde with Jean Clair, the former Picasso Museum
director, and another signatory to protest that artworks were seriously endangered by their dispatching around the world. “It’s our political leaders who went over to present this royal and diplomatic gift,” they wrote. “Isn’t that selling one’s soul?” The complaints have since died down — thanks to the size and importance of the project, and the public’s realization that art is increasingly global — allowing Louvre Abu Dhabi to open its doors in a relatively tranquil environment. Yet the Louvre is careful to emphasize that it is not big-footing the Emiratis in this artistic exercise, and that this is a two-way street that’s enriching for the Paris institution, too: it’s redefining the original mission of the Louvre as a “universal” museum, an 18th-century concept by which its duty was to represent the whole world. “Louvre Abu Dhabi is helping us to change perspective,” Martinez told the Art Newspaper for its special issue on the museum. “Today, we are trying to rethink the relationship between national and universal and what it means for museums. Before Abu Dhabi, this question was not being discussed. “We are a universal museum, but our galleries do not present the whole universe, and we are putting more emphasis now on complementarity.” MP
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Under the terms of the accord, Abu Dhabi agreed to pay the Louvre and a group of (then) 11 partner French museums the approximate sum of 1 billion euros. In exchange, Abu Dhabi would be allowed to use the Louvre name, receive loans from France and program exhibitions curated by its French counterparts.
A L L I M AG E S : © LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / T H I E R R Y O L L I V I E R
“Head of Buddha,” Northern China (from Henan to Shandong), Eastern Wei dynasty (534-550 CE) or Northern Qi dynasty (550577 CE). White marble, 50 X 33 X 28 cm, 87 kg
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© LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / T H I E R R Y O L L I V I E R
“Turban helmet,” AqQoyunlu or Ottoman, 2nd half of 15th century. Steel, inlaid with silver, gold traces, 61 X 26 X 31 cm. Louvre Abu Dhabi
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80 MODERN PAINTERS NOVEMBER 2017 BLOUINARTINFO.COM L E F T: P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . © G E R H A R D R I C H T E R 2 017; A B OV E: F R O E H L I C H C O L L E C T I O N , S T U T TGA R T, G E R M A N Y © G E R H A R D R I C H T E R 2 017
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Mask, Mexico, 150-550 CE. Black stone, 20 X 18 X 12 cm. Musée de Quai Branly, Paris
F R O M L E F T: © LO U V R E A B U D H A B I / T H I E R R Y O L L I V I E R ; © S U C C E S S I O N A L B E R TO G I AC O M E T T I ( F O N DAT I O N G I AC O M E T T I , PA R I S E T A DAG P, PA R I S ). C R É D I T P H OTO G R A P H I Q U E : C E N T R E P O M P I D O U, M N A M - C C I/P H I L I P P E M I G E AT/D I S T. R M N - G P
“Bactrian princess,” Central Asia, end of the 3rd -beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE. Chlorite (body and headdress), calcite (face). 25.3 X11.5 X 9.5 cm, Louvre Abu Dhabi
“Standing Woman II,” 1959-1960, Alberto Giacometti ( 19011966). Bronze. Ex.: 6/6 Cast : Susse Fondeur, Malakoff (France) Purchased by the State in 1964 Attribution 1970 Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle
Left: “Mask d’mba, Baga style,” Africa, Guinea, end of the 19th-beginning of 20th century. Style Baga, wood, rope and metal, 130 X 55 X 68 cm. Paris. Musée du Quai Branly Right: “Apollo Belvedere,” 1541-1570, Francesco Primaticcio (1504-1570). Bronze, 218 cm. Château de Fontainebleau
When the project was first mooted a decade ago, there was an outcry among French museum directors and art historians, concerned that the artworks would be damaged in the journey.
“Breastplate of Marmesse,” Marmesse, Haute Marne, France, 9th-8th century BCE. Bronze, 51.2 cm. Musée d’Archéologie nationale – SaintGermain- en-Laye, (National museum for French Archaeology)
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THE INFLUENCERS IN A TRAGIC HERO’S LIFE & ART Tate Modern’s Modigliani survey tells the story of the young artist who arrived in Paris as a 21-year-old with dreams to realize
“Juan Gris,” 1915, Amedeo Modigliani (1884 - 1920). Oil paint on canvas, 549 X 381 mm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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T H I S A N D FAC I N G PAG E: C O U R T E S Y TAT E M O D E R N
BY SARAH MOROZ
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The Tate Modern will soon stage the most comprehensive Amedeo Modigliani exhibition ever held in Britain, assembling celebrated figurative portraits, sculptures once shown at the 1912 Salon d’Automne, and drawings created throughout his short life (1884– 1920). The Italian-born Jewish artist moved to Paris at age 21, where he toiled experimentally, mingled with turn-ofthe-century creative luminaries, and frequented shows by Gaugin and Cézanne. Across almost 100 works — including his then-incendiary nudes — the exhibition examines the abundant influences that shaped Modigliani’s spectacular output. MODERN PAINTERS speaks to Emma Lewis, an assistant curator at Tate Modern, about the show — which opens on November 23, 2017 and runs through April 2, 2018 — and about finding a fresh take on a beloved art-world icon. The exhibition is framed as a way to “reevaluate” Modigliani — what in particular does this show reconsider about his aesthetic, his approach, or his legacy?
Modigliani’s “Selfportrait as Pierrot,” 1915. Oil paint on cardboard, 430 X 270 mm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
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Modigliani is undoubtedly one of the best-loved painters of the 20th century, and his biography — he died young, in somewhat tragic circumstances — has left been left open to become the stuff of anecdote and myth. One of the main things that we’re looking at is the idea of the artist as a young man, who just arrived in Paris, and thinking about the effect that that environment would’ve had on him at such an impressionable time in his life. We are looking closely at the influences that he exposed himself to, we’re looking at the people he surrounded himself with, the art he was looking at, and using that as a starting point to really better understand his life and work.
“Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz,” 1916, Amedeo Modigliani (1884 - 1920). Oil on canvas, 813 X 543 mm. The Art Institute of Chicago
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What were some of those key influences that would have informed his practice and outlook? One thing that’s so exciting about Modigliani’s work is that he experimented with some of the developing styles at the time, such as Cubism. But he didn’t completely embrace it, and in fact he decided to forge his own style. So he experimented widely, and he was in conversation with and absorbed some of the ideas of the vanguard movement of the time — but he also kept himself at a distance, and established his own path. One example of how we’re highlighting influences within the show: we assembled nine of his sculptural “Heads.” By seeing his sculptures together, you can see the ambitions of his work: the intentions of the sculpture. You can see the influence of his friend
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“Jeanne Hébuterne,” 1919, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Oil paint on canvas, 914 X 730 mm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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“The Little Peasant,” 1918, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Oil paint on canvas, 1000 X 645 mm. Tate, presented by Miss Jenny Blaker in memory of Hugh Blaker, 1941.
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“Head,” 1911, Amedeo Modigliani (18841920). Stone, 394 X 311 X 187 mm. Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, Gift of Lois Orswell
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“We’ve also unearthed what we believe is unseen footage of one of his exhibitions in his lifetime. Something really tangible — but I want to leave some surprises,” Emma Lewis, assistant curator, Tate Modern Constantin Brancui; it’s there in the carving. You can also see the influence of Egyptian, Cambodian and African artifacts on his sculptural practice. And that’s something that he later translated to his paintings, stylistically. He socialized with other artists and even depicted several (Diego Rivera and Jean Cocteau among them). Who was part of his Paris art community at the time? It was a rich, vibrant community that he drew influence from. Modogliani’s circle included Brancui, Juan Gris, Moise Kisling, Chaim Soutine, to name just a few. It also included poets, like Beatrice Hastings, who is a figure we are shining a new light on in the show, giving her the credit that is very much due. And it included actors, such as Gaston Modot. There was a four-person team of curators on the show. You assisted the independent curator Simonetta Fraquelli; Nancy Ireson, the Tate Modern curator of international art; and Marian Cousijn, the Mondrian Fund Curatorial Fellow. What was that collaboration like? Fraquelli, who knows Modigliani’s work incredibly well — she curated his exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2006 — focused on one of the very under-researched aspects of Modigliani’s practice, which is the work he produced in the South of France. Ireson looked at Modigliani’s nudes in the context of what it meant to be a woman in the 1910s working as a painter’s model: completely recasting them from muses to active independent women. My own background expertise lies in lens-based media: photography and film. I used that to work very 90
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closely with archives and find new documentary material, notably his interaction with cinema in the 1910s. Were there any surprises or discoveries in the archival research you did personally? One of the most exciting discoveries for me was that: we know Modigliani lived in a disused convent on the rue de Douai for a short period in 1910. I also found, from my research, some secondary sources that say Picasso, André Salmon, and Max Jacob were visiting the cinema on that street at the time. Through delving in archives and finding photographs and reading newspapers at the time, I found that Modigliani was actually living in a former convent at the same time as it was being used as a cinema, as a sort of ad-hoc space. So connections like that have been fascinating. It shows, in this instance, the new medium of the cinema was quite literally on his doorstep, which brings up the question of the influence it might have had on him — in his artwork, and in his social life as well. We’ve also unearthed what we believe is unseen footage of one of his exhibitions in his lifetime. Something really tangible — but I want to leave some surprises. That’s thrilling. In terms of multimedia, there’s also a virtual reality component to the exhibition… can you expand on that? In the penultimate room of the exhibition, we have a virtual reality room, which is sponsored by HTC Vive. You put on the headsets and are transformed back into Modigliani’s studio on 19 rue de la Grande Chaumière, where he lived the last months of his life with his partner Jeanne Hébuterne. We’ve worked with experts around the world to be able to
create the experience of being immersed in the studio. You’re able to see the materials that he worked with, what his living environment was like; there’s a narration by people very close to him at the time. You can see the canvases up close and learn more about the brushes he was using. It’s a completely unique insight into these aspects of his life and work. A recent Modigliani retrospective toured Helsinki, Budapest, and Lille. How would you differentiate the Tate’s perspective on him? It’s different in terms of the story told and loans secured. Also, the starting point to our thinking was the experience of being a young person moving to a big city for the first time. We imagine that as a universal experience: a young man moving to Paris, in the same way people can remember being 21 and moving to London from a much smaller part of the country. So tapping into something that many people can relate to — it crosses geography, and it crosses time as well. Does this show have a particular resonance with now, with 2017/2018? It’s fascinating how a modern master, whenever the story is told, will inspire different readings depending on the moment and place that is hearing it. The internationalism of Modigliani’s circle is something that has a special resonance now. I think it’s implicit in the way that the exhibition is hung, to see how people from different walks of life were living, working together and exchanging ideas in this incredibly diverse, fruitful environment. That perhaps takes on new meaning a hundred years later, in the political situation that we’re in. MP
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“Beatrice Hastings,” 1915, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Oil on paper, 400 X 285 mm. Private Collection
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I M AG E S C O U R T E S Y TAT E M O D E R N ; P H OTO C R E D I T F O R I M AG E O N R I G H T: H U G O M A E R T E N S
“Reclining Nude,” 1919, Amedeo Modigliani (18841920). Oil on canvas, 724 X 1165 mm. Museum of Modern Art, New York
“Seated Nude,” 1917, Amedeo Modigliani (18841920). Oil paint on canvas, 1140 X 740 mm. Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Lukasart in Flanders
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T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . G I F T O F T H E A R T I S T.
Carolee Schneemann’s “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera,” 1963/2005, 18 gelatin silver prints, 24 x 20” each (61 x 50.8 cm)
E E S ’ L N O N R A E A E CCAEREO MLEICE N’S N L A N T O M R E E H A S E ’ G C N N C N I H N N S C NKEINENEMTAI C I K H C SC KPA G I T N I E T N I N I PA NTING I A P T H E A RT IST’S R ET ROSPEC T I V E AT MOM A PS1 IS A N I N DICATOR T H AT T H E R ECE P T ION TO H ER LONG U N DER-AC K NOW LEDGED WOR K IS F I NA LLY SH I F T I NG. T H E A PPR EC I AT ION, I N EV I TA BLY, H AS LEF T H ER CON F USED
BY ANNIE GODFREY LARMON
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If you don’t feel or identify with the momentum of those strokes, you might
end up where my dad was, thinking, oh he spilled some spaghetti... There is a field of energy already perceptually established there. 96
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Kineticism has long played a role in your work — you have incorporated into the space of painting the moving body, but also motorized mirror systems. Could you describe your own interpretation of and approach to kinetic painting? It’s a process that engages the energy experienced when carefully perceiving elements of a landscape, which are constantly, from my point of view, subject to change. Our perceptual values are also subject to energies that have to do with our physical position in space and our estimation of what we are looking at. In my experience as a
painter, all of this requires muscular energy, kinetic perception. In the inherited tradition of looking at Abstract Expressionism, there is no way to viscerally relate to the energy of those paintings without putting a sense of muscular energy into it — particularly if you look at Pollock. If you don’t feel or identify with the momentum of those strokes, you might end up where my dad was, thinking, oh he spilled some spaghetti. Whether you are looking at or making just a stroke of paint, it takes muscular involvement. When you look at the accumulated strokes, even in a Velasquez, you see a kinetic gestalt: There is a field of energy already perceptually established there. In terms of the body as a critical aspect of that field of energy, you have often spoken about fusing the roles of the image and the image-maker. Indeed, this takes on a feminist valence, in terms of dismantling the status of the female body as it has appeared in art history. But this notion, of merging image and image-maker, perhaps has different connotations today, given the ubiquity of digital media and communication. Have you re-conceptualized this idea over time? Yes, this notion has been displaced — my initial prescription was very simple. I’d been an artist model and my inheritance of art history involved an obsession with the female figure and female figuration made by men. As I studied art history, I saw that when women painted their own lives or themselves, these images were trivialized by the culture. They never entered the realm of masculine depictions of the female body. So it was a risky position in 1963, with “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions,” to put my body into the context of my painting constructions, because it didn’t have any confirming history around it. And now this gesture is completely commonplace and it has a little root right into selfies — the origin has a good strong political contextualization, but in its evolution it has been lost.
FAC I N G PAG E: © 2 017 C A R O L E E S C H N E E M A N N . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, P. P.O.W, A N D GA L E R I E L E LO N G, N E W YO R K .
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or more than five decades, Carolee Schneemann has made fervent, genre-defying work about the complexities and limits of perception, agency, and subjectivity itself, siting her inquiry in the female body and its representation. Her performances “Interior Scroll” (1975) — in which the artist unravels a script from her vagina — and the orgiastic “Meat Joy” (1962), are iconic for their expression of a feminism grounded in both politics and erotics. Known, too, for her pioneering contributions to video and installation, Schneemann has always taken up the elements and constraints of painting, bringing gesture and image-production into mutually experienced time and space. In 2015, the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg mounted “Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting,” a retrospective of Schneemann’s work, and MoMA PS1 has now brought the exhibition to New York (through March 11), where the longunder-acknowledged artist was a doyenne of the downtown avant-garde community and where her efforts were critical to such movements and projects as the New York School, Judson Dance Theater, and feminist antiwar resistance. MODERN PAINTERS speaks with the artist about her methodology and politics, the shifting reception of her work, and the implications of a career retrospective.
Carolee Schneemann’s “Flange 6rpm,” 2011-13. Seven foundry-poured aluminum sculptures, motors (6 rpm), and video (color, silent). Dimensions variable.
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The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors
Carolee Schneemann’s “Up to and Including Her Limits,” 199697. Exhibition view. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, US, 1996-97
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Facing page: Carolee Schneemann’s “Portrait Partials,” 1970, 35 gelatin silver prints. 26 7/8 x 26 3/4” (68.3 x 67.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Peter Norton Family Foundation.
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The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors
Carolee Schneemann’s “Four Fur Cutting Boards,” 1963. Oil paint, umbrellas, motors, light bulbs, string lights, photographs, fabric, lace, hubcaps, printed papers, mirror, nylon stockings, nails, hinges, and staples on wood. 90 ½ x 131 x 52” (229.9 x 332.7 x 132.1 cm). The Jill and Peter Kraus Endowed Fund for Contemporary Acquisitions; The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation (by exchange); The Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange).
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Carolee Schneemann’s “Meat Joy,” 1964. Chromogenic color print of the performance in New York. 5 × 4” (12.7 × 10.2 cm).
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Carolee Schneemann’s “Native Beauties,” 1962-64. Wooden box, photographs, Limoges cup, bones, dead bird, oil paint, glass shards, twig, paper, and wood. 26 x 41 x 5 ½” (66 x 104.1 x 20 cm)
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This exhibition first appeared in Salzburg before the United States presidential election, the results of which brought new, or perhaps renewed, pressures on women’s bodies, agency, representation. Are you in any way differently conceiving the iteration of this exhibition in New York? I mean this in terms of political events, but also because you have worked here for so many decades? To answer your second question first — many aspects of this show are peculiar to me. I worked for so long without much support and in relative isolation, taking the position of a painter’s painter or an artist’s artist. So this appreciation is extremely confusing, and it demands a diplomatic position that I’ve never before had to occupy. I must accept the aesthetic politics of all this appreciation, and be respectful and grateful and approachable, but my normal work procedure is more isolated and inward. I have always proceeded without expecting appreciation and support. How did this happen and why did it take so long? It’s a bittersweet thing — of course it is a huge achievement and it is overwhelming in its density and time configuration. There are over 350 works in the exhibition? Yes, and there are 150 works languishing here in my studio. I am hoping that since the other material has a life, interest might also extend to works that I made because I had to investigate a certain energy, property, or dynamic; work that I would make whether it was going into the world or not. Now I’m very keen to see what will happen with this more extensive depiction of what I’ve made, whether it will make an approximate contact with the earlier kinetic and projection works, the installations that have been shown maybe once in this lifetime. Returning to the political question: I feel like I’m hovering under a huge tsunami of destructive, misaligned, misappropriated, structures of power and greed. The diminution of ecological and humanitarian crises, the distractions from larger
issues, really puts question to everything of cultural value. I keep thinking that my students should go to the Friends’ service committee or other outreach organizations to be of assistance in places where people’s lives are threatened. It’s paradoxical now to have the luxury to be an artmaker, a visionary, to transform principles of regard. So many artists I speak with now are struggling with this issue, the impulse to directly respond to the current socio-political context while wanting to remain true to the work they’ve always done. When I’ve done my most challenging work in terms of war and disaster, it has been met with a ferocious reaction because of the impression that, first of all, a woman shouldn’t have the right to depict anything that’s not heroic, in the canon of American power. “Terminal Velocity” (2001), my work picturing the falling bodies of 9/11, was often received with a violence that I could only explain as a response to images that opposed Americana mythologies of “we don’t fail, we win, and if we destroy something it’s for your own good.” Critical theory and insight often provoke a reaction of a kind that is encouraged by our current president’s political vision to be fascistic, to be right wing, to be insane, hostile, furious, macho — to demand that masculine values of power and control are part of American privilege and history and should be respected as such. This moment is more paradoxical even than the era of the Vietnam War, where we would say that the country is polarized — now, everything is exploding at once. Like you’re in the kitchen and everything is boiling, spilling, cracking, on fire, falling over. In what ways are these issues entering the work you are making now? I’m working on a history of images of corpses. A history of the ways in which these most atrocious and forbidden images finally enter culture through photography, starting with the civil war. These images allow new realms of empathy and identification that wouldn’t reach us otherwise, as the depicted images are often beyond imagination. MP
So many artists I speak with now are struggling with this issue, the impulse
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RICHARD SERRA’S LATEST DRAWINGS AND SCULPTURES CONTINUE A DIALOGUE THAT HE BEGAN ALMOST HALF A CENTURY AGO. WHILE METHODS HAVE CHANGED, THE CONVERSATION HE IS HAVING REMAINS THE SAME BY JOSEPH AKEL
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EPHEMERAL AND MONUMENTAL
Richard Serra, “St. John’s Rotary Arc,” 1980. Installation view, Richard Serra: Arc, New York, 1980.
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Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981. Installation view, Federal Plaza, New York, 1981.
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t age 79, the artist Richard Serra shows no signs of slowing down. For his current exhibition at David Zwirner, “Drawings and Sculpture,” the prodigious king of Process art continued to churn out works that foreground his preoccupation with embodied experiences of art and a hands-on approach to making it. Marked by the debut of two new largescale sculptures forged in weatherproof steel, including “Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure” (2016-2017), the show also features a selection of recent and never before seen works by Serra. Bringing into focus twin practices that have long-defined the artist’s oeuvre, Serra’s ongoing interest in drawing and sculpture — parallel practices which the artist sees as separate, but conceptually aligned — underscore a dynamic engagement with the dualities of ephemerality and monumentality. The biography of Serra, a figurehead of minimalism, is wellknown. A San Francisco native, the former high school football half back and surfer moved east to attend Yale, beginning in 1961, where he received his MFA. At Yale, Serra mingled with the likes of Chuck Close and Brice Marden while working for Josef Albers. Interested in drawing from an early age, Serra flirted with painting at the beginning of his career but, as the story goes, during a trip to the Prado in Madrid in 1966, he encountered Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” and concluded he could never match the Baroque master’s talent and gave up the craft. Drawing, however, would continue to play a central role in his artistic career. That same year, he moved to New York City. Along with artists like Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson, Serra began experimenting with everyday industrial and natural materials. Intrigued by the processes of making art, he composed his “Verb List” (1967-1968), a hand-written, two-page document with four columns, gathering together verbs indicating specific actions — to cut, to crease, etc.
The document served as a proscriptive set of ways for Serra to approach materials, codifying a methodology of production that would inform much of his early work, including pieces such as “To Lift” (1967) — a sculpture made of folded vulcanized rubber — and “Casting” (1969). Scooping molten metal with a kind of large ladle, Serra created “Casting” by flinging the super-heated liquid along the board trim of a wall at the Whitney Museum. Once cooled, he then pried off the long shards of jagged metal and arranged them in rows. Meanwhile, in another early work, “One Ton Prop (House of Cards)” (1969), Serra enlisted the aid of Chuck Close to arrange four standing square sheets of lead at his Duane Street studio — each sheet four feet tall and weighing some 500 pounds. While these early sculptures are not included in the current Zwirner exhibition, Serra’s latest works continue to interrogate the same conceptual issues that first appeared in the artist’s practice more than 50 years ago. By the early 1970s, Serra was beginning to construct largescale, site-specific works outdoors, including “Shift” (1970), a series of six large concrete slabs, arranged in a zig-zag formation over four hectares in what was then a potato farm in King City, Ontario. “Shift” marked a turning point in the artist’s career — which from that point on was marked by prodigious output and a penchant for the colossal (“Tilted Arc” (1981) and “Torqued Ellipses” come to mind). As with “Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure,” Serra continues to grapple with the physical relationship that exists between his sculptures and the viewers who encounter them. And yet, in the digital age, when so much occurs on flat screens that foreclose embodied interactions, where does Serra’s work fit in? When posed this question via email, the artist’s response is telling. “The basic tenets of my sculpture,” he notes, “are the physical penetration of space and the measure of time.” In the age of wireless browsing, Serra goes on to say, “The experience of my
By the early 1970s, Serra was beginning to construct largescale, site-specific works outdoors, including “Shift” (1970), a series of six large concrete slabs, arranged in a zig-zag formation over four hectares in what was then a potato farm in King City, Ontario.
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Richard Serra, Equal, 2015. Installation view, Richard Serra: Equal, 2015.
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sculpture is dependent on walking and looking. That, by definition, excludes the virtual.” That same emphasis on physical gestures holds true for Serra’s drawings, works that lay bare the materiality of their very inception. When asked about the import of process and physicality in his drawing, Serra notes in the same email, “Matter informs form,” before going on to observe that, “The investigation of the properties of materials used in the making of drawings can only be achieved through a continuous process which involves concentration and physical effort.” Incorporating everything from charcoal and ink, to his specially-made paint sticks — the products of a time-intensive process involving boiling, straining and molding — Serra’s drawings, always in black, vacillate between the sublime and the decidedly brooding. Early works, such as “Taraval Beach” (1977), a floor-to-ceiling field of black, evokes the utter oblivion of form and reference that inspired Malevich. Meanwhile, in Serra’s later drawings, including “September” (2001) and “Black Tracks” (2001), the artist’s flirtation with representational forms — coiled spirals and densely rendered spheres, thick with paint — is readily apparent. To be sure, Serra’s latest drawings and sculptures continue a dialogue that he began almost half a century ago. And, while Serra’s methods and scale change and evolve, the conversation he is having remains the same: encounter the physical to understand one’s place in the world. However, what is most intriguing when considering his latest works is to gauge whether what he is saying can resonate with a generation whose “checkingin” mentality is more akin to checking out. MP
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“The experience of my sculpture is dependent on walking and looking. That, by definition, excludes the virtual,” says Serra in response to a question on where his work fits in at a time when so much occurs on flat screens
Richard Serra, Band,2006.
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PAINTING THE VIRUS AS SCI ENCE ST RUGGLES TO DEA L W IT H T H E LET H A L CONSEQU ENCES OF T H E EN T IT Y CA LLED ‘V I RUS,’ A RT ISTS SUCH AS SUZI MOR R IS T RY TO LOOK FOR T H E SU BLI M E I N ITS MOR BI D U N I V ERSE , A N D LEN D IT A N A NOM A LOUS CH A R ACT ER
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P O R T R A I T BY B I L L G I D DA , E Y E M E D I A S T U D I O S . M A K E - U P BY DA N I E L A S A N TA M A R I A
Suzi Morris
Suzi Morris, “Waiting for CRISPR,” 2017. Oil on canvas and aluminium, 190 cmx 140 cm
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There are not many artists who use biological science as an inspiration for their art. You have used it to overcome your fear of the condition in your left eye, yet you continue to be worried about your eye. Do you think art has a lot more to do to help you overcome it totally? Art helps us all in different ways to overcome life’s challenges and I expect to never stop wanting to make art. Part of my inspiration comes from growing up with a scientist father. National Geographic magazines became my sources of inspiration, while feelings of isolation resulting from the loss of my artist mother, fuelled my
T H I S PAG E A N D FAC I N G PAG E: P H OTO: PAU L G R E E N L E A F
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ristan Loraine, CEO of Fact Not Fiction films (a film and documentary production company based in West Sussex, England) first met Suzi Morris when she was an art director on his Academy Award-contender documentary, “Shady Lady.” Morris had to create a large-scale, accurate replica of a map of Balikpapan harbor for use in a scene in the film where a squadron of pilots was being briefed before a bombing mission in World War II. BBC News was at the scene to film the shoot and interview the lead actors. But the news channel got more fascinated with the detail Morris had created in the map than the lead actors and this became the focus of its news story. While recalling the episode, Loraine says that it showed him that Morris, despite her problems with her vision (she suffers from keratitis, a viral inflammation of the cornea) “was driven to always produce the highest quality work and had immense pride in her work. This is reflected today in her oil paintings with her trademark lines and a use of color that make her work unique.” That also led to Loraine’s company making a documentary film, “The Residency,” that follows five emerging, leading artists in the UK (including Morris) spending time at the da Vinci residency in Nuremberg, Germany. The documentary, directed by Monika Grassl (“Girls Don’t Fly,” 2016) and supported by da Vinci and Schmincke, is due to be released next year. In the meanwhile, the first exhibition by the artists of the residency took place in September in London, which completed the film. The second exhibition (“The Viral Sublime: Suzi Morris”), featuring works by Morris — the lead artist of “The Residency” documentary — will be held November 27 - December 17 at the Herrick Gallery at Mayfair, London. MODERN PAINTERS spoke to Loraine and Morris about “The Residency” and the very different art that the latter practises. Here are excerpts from the conversation with Morris.
Suzi Morris, “On the Origin of Species Homage to Morris.” Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
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Suzi Morris, “Complexities of Viscera,” 2016. Oil on aluminium, 61 X 46 cm
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perception of the metaphysical. My eye problems emerged when my mother died and have continued ever since. The only way to relieve the anxiety of worrying about my vision deteriorating is painting. When I’m painting there are periods of time when I’m elsewhere and nothing else matters. I forget the physical world and the problems associated with being host to an unwanted virus. I don’t think you ever overcome the gradual loss of a sense, particularly eyesight. It’s a case of doing everything that you can in terms of leading a healthy lifestyle to manage the condition. Keratitis can cause blindness and each occurrence causes permanent loss of vision so it’s a constant battle against fear. There are no words to describe the thought of not being able to see to paint, and yet having supported charities such as Cam Sight, through exhibitions sponsored by MLM [an engineering consultancy], I’ve met some amazing artists who are visually impaired. I’m a fairly positive and driven person so I think a condition like mine makes you value every day. Studying for my doctorate and really “‘unpacking”’ what I am doing in my painting practice made me realize why I was driven to make the marks that I make. The experiences of such regular medical interventions and the therapeutic language used in the process of suppressing the virus have seeped into my imagination and practice. Your work also reminds one of the anatomical and botanical drawings and illustrations that helped make sciences visually understandable a few centuries ago. Have you ever been inspired by those drawings and illustrations? Absolutely. Before the advent of photography, artists were key to making science visually understandable. Advancements in medical research and science had such broad implications on painting that it’s been fascinating to research and understand how artists throughout history have responded to the science of their time. I’m drawn to many of the artists of the 19th-century when the discoveries in science, astrophysics and medicine marked a historical shift analogous with the science of epigenetics and the discovery of ribonucleic acid (RNA) modifications, which are becoming one of the key conceptual revolutions today. I’m inspired by the drawings of the artist and pioneer of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. I admire the fragility of his drawings: how he depicts the axon lines that wrap around the bulbous soma and its dendrites. He made groundbreaking discoveries about nerve structures and their connectivity, no doubt playing a part in my painting, “Burden of the Dendrite.” I’ve also come to understand how the influence of the new sciences and genomics is as key to situating my practice as the discovery of microbes, X-rays and unseen
Suzi Morris, “Burden of the Dendrite,” 2017. Oil on aluminium, 61 X 46 cm
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Suzi Morris, “The Nakes Virus,” 2017. Oil on canvas, 190 X 120 cm
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The very word “virus” stands for most things negative and the word “sublime” is in just the opposite spectrum. Did this juxtaposition baffle you initially? I don’t see them as being antithetical to each other, however it has taken my entire doctorate to begin to understand the complex interrelationships between the virus, the notion of the sublime and my painting practice. The main turning point in my research was discovering how science is now harnessing the lethal powers of certain virus families using new technologies of genetic engineering to develop cures for cancer. A virus being put to therapeutic use is a paradox: its “‘kill”’ or “‘cure”’ properties afford it a far greater status than it has been used to. This understanding not only generated thoughts of disembodiment and resurrection in my painting: it led me to question if viruses can be engineered for specific purposes where does this lead and how will it affect being human in the future? Furthermore, it is effectively the birth of advancing technologies in the digital era that have enabled science, as a consequence of the Human Genome Project, to reveal the human blueprint. Until now orthodox medicine has tended to treat the symptoms of diseases as opposed to seeking out their underlying causes and eliminating them. The implications of genetic engineering techniques are vast, generating questions about the proximity of Huxley’s “Brave New World” where the natural processes of birth, ageing and death are no longer recognizable. As scientists delve deeper into previously misunderstood biological systems, the prospect of being human in the future or, indeed post-human, is increasingly hypothesized. This insight paved the way towards my taking the virus from being something more commonly perceived as degenerative or as you mentioned “negative,” and offering it new life as something awe inspiring. MP
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energies was for artists such as the French Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, and the Czech painter and graphic artist, František Kupka. Redon represented invisible microbes and what would be regarded today as viruses. Some of his works evoke the terror from pressures resulting from the Industrial Revolution as it brought diseases. Kupka was one of the earliest artists to pioneer abstraction so he is a strong influence. He studied the new sciences at the Sorbonne, particularly electromagnetism thus his interest in the objectivity of science and the subjectivity of unseen energy resonates with my thinking. In my diptych, “Waiting for CRISPRCas9,” [CRISPR/Cas9 is genome-editing technique that could herald a cure to genetic disease] the curved shape of the substrate echoes thoughts of the curvature of a lens, space-time curves, or of the virus without acting as a direct reference.
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The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors
DATEBOOK The best shows from around the world this month SHANGHAI
Hugo Boss Asia Art Award finalists at Rockbund Art Museum trade liberalization. The Chinese video artist Li Ming reflects that “their ‘puberty’ coincided with that of the country.” Growing up a decade after the Cultural Revolution attempted to wipe out all vestiges of traditional culture, Li observes that “common ‘national’ memories were gradually disappearing and being replaced by fragments of personal memories.” The question of ego becomes central to Li’s video installations. His pieces depict the fracturing of ego into digital lives as well as the dissolution of ego into the collective. In his videos, Li is often chasing something until he realizes he is chasing nothing, and
then continues to run anyway. In one instance, Li announces “nothing happened today” through a megaphone from morning to dusk. In the shadow of the “decomposition of grand themes by consumerism,” Li unmasks modern pathologies through allegory and captures the raw emotional tenor of daily life with ruthless honesty. Where Li’s characters struggle with feeling historically unmoored, Tao Hui’s characters are often ensnared by society. Tao articulates his artistic practice as challenging “hegemonic thinking” and forcing “viewers to confront their own cultural history, way of living and social Disposable Lighters — ping guo, 2014-2016, Li Ming (born 1986). 9-channel HD video, color, sound, wallpaper, iPad, hanging device, speaker, disposable lighter. Dimensions variable. Hugo Boss Asia Art, 2017
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COURTESY OF ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
to apocalyptic and encyclopedic to absurdist, the finalists of the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award vary widely in spirit and style. Four distinct visions of a continent converge in one kaleidoscopic exhibition: Old and new works from Li Ming, Tao Hui, Robert Zhao Renhui and Yu Ji are on display in Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum through January 7, 2017. The winner of the award will be announced in November. All four artists belong to a generation born in mainland China or Singapore during the 1980s, a decade of rapid regional FROM ACTIVIST
COURTESY OF ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
Red Crab Migration, 2016, Robert Zhao Renhui (born 1983). Hugo Boss Asia Art, 2017
identity.” Growing up in a mountainous village overlooking the Yangtze River, where folklore proliferated alongside popular TV dramas, Tao conjures seemingly anachronistic scenes, such as an immortal with a long white beard standing stoically on a lone yacht churning through the water. The friction between tradition and change underlies many of Tao’s works, whether he is confronting gender, religion, family, or other social institutions. Even so, the stories are far too dreamlike to be didactic; they provoke more than they answer. Rather than Li’s overt symbolism, narrative innovation and performance form the backbone of Tao’s work. Tao’s video installations combine architectural fixtures, sound and video into an immersive encounter that blurs the line between fiction and reality, often placing the viewer onto the center stage of a grisly scene. The artist Robert Zhao Renhui also traffics in illusions, but of a speculative bent. “Let’s not try to pretend that photography is still a medium we can trust,” he remarks. “Although some of my methods include falsification, I am attracted to truth and I pursue that in my work. The fiction I
create comes from my observations on seldom-questioned systems of knowledge.” Zhao’s fixation on truth creation leads him to embody the persona of a scientist and historian. Zhao is captivated by the mystical and often dystopian elements of natural history, from genetically modified organisms to invasive species. A native of Singapore, Zhao describes the city’s insect fumigation clouds as “dreamy, surreal and suffocating.” Whether the subject is a nation, a skyline or an urban ecology, Zhao applies the aesthetic of an artist with the ethic of a researcher, accompanying photography with archival footage, private memoirs, maps and oral histories to weave a vision of ecological balance and imbalance. The Chinese artist Yu Ji meditates on the way time and geology mark civilizations through sculpture. Whether depicting the partial torsos of human bodies, Communist era toilets, or rocks from sulfurous mines, Yu’s works are artifacts from environments of ecological and social richesse. Standing in a mountainous crater, she internalizes “a heavy sense of death left by things of Nature as time changed and disappeared,”
and muses that “stones are remains of the ancient soil that wrap up a full containment of human beliefs, hopes and yearnings.” Process, for Yu, is as important as product. Yu works strenuously with her hands as an exercise of endurance and selfreflection. She states, “Creative work is not a tool with which I discuss issues; it is the issue itself, which exists in the self consciousness.” Yu draws inspiration from ancient Asian caves and temples alongside volcanoes and geothermal energy, ultimately producing works that explore the callous hand of time that erodes civilizations and mountains. For an emerging artist award whose mission is to foster dialogue among the region’s top contemporary artists, Hugo Boss has assembled four strikingly different artists into one exhibition: an absurdist who paints color onto persimmons, a sculptor who grafts human hair onto rocks, a naturalist who catalogues square apples, and a folklorist who spins tales of amputated fingers. Audience members may emerge at once startled and enlivened, horrified and heartened. — TINA XU
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LOS A N G E L ES
Adrián Villar Rojas | The Theater of Disappearance Through February 26, 2018 The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA The Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas continues his global exploration of space, time and our human understanding of both in a new exhibition at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles. Positing the question, “What happens after the end of art?” Villar Rojas probes both the institutional space and the material remains of classical “art” in an attempt to question their impermanence and our own, as we ascribe meaning to our physical world. The site-specific work meditates on the poetics of space, as it employs a myriad of special Hollywood-style lighting effects in order to challenge the ways audiences perceive and move through the exhibition space. By using a vast array of materials including concrete, stone, raw clay, inorganic and organic things that both decay and evolve in their own physicality over time, Villar Rojas does not enable the pristine preservation of the “artwork” in a conventional sense. In doing so, he also brings into question the value and intentions of the museum itself. Bound neither to genre or even a singular distillable narrative, Villar Rojas’s new installation attempts to remove “art” from the “art space”; it is this very ontological inquiry in a post-human world that renders it “art” once again. — ZANDIE BROCKETT Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance, 2017. The Roof Garden Commission, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo courtesy: The artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris / London, and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
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F R O M L E F T: P H OTO : J Ö R G B AU M A N N , C O U R T E S Y M U S E U M O F C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T, LO S A N G E L E S ; P H OTO BY M A R I O
Adrián Villar Rojas, born 1980, Rosario, Argentina
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126 MODERN PAINTERS NOVEMBER 2017 BLOUINARTINFO.COM P H OTO C O U R T E S Y ADRIÁN VILLAR ROJAS , M A R I A N G O O D M A N GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K /PA R I S/LO N D O N , A N D K U R I M A N Z U T TO, M E X I C O C I T Y, P H OTO BY J Ö R G B AU M A N N . C O U R T E S Y M U S E U M O F C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T, LO S A N G E L E S
Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance, 2017, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz
P H OTO C O U R T E S Y: T H E A R T I S T, M A R I A N G O O D M A N GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K / PA R I S / LO N D O N , A N D K U R I M A N Z U T TO, M E X I C O C I T Y. P H OTO BY J Ö R G B AU M A N N C O U R T E S Y M U S E U M O F C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T, LO S A N G E L E S
Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance, 2017, NEON Foundation at Athens National Observatory (NOA), Athens
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LONDON
Willem de Kooning: Late Paintings The Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning, who became one of America’s greatest post-World War II artists, could have stopped working all together in 1953 and still maintained his position in the art historical pantheon as a founding Abstract Expressionist. But de Kooning kept experimenting, constantly innovating with form, style and even medium, up until he ceased painting in 1990 at age 84. Rather than develop a signature style, as he liked to say: “You have to change to stay the same.” The last decade of his working life in the 1980s was a particularly productive period of development. The art critic and curator Robert Storr has described some of his work from that period as “among the most distinctive, graceful, and mysterious de Kooning himself ever made.” It has been highly influential for a range of artists who came after him, such as Cecily Brown, Brice Marden and Joan Mitchell. Although his late work was the subject of a 1995 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition that traveled through 1997 and ended at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it remains a lesser-known aspect of his oeuvre. That is part of the reason that Skarsedt Gallery in London decided to present “Willem de Kooning: Late Paintings” (until November 25), an exhibition of eight paintings from the 1980s, with loans from institutions and only a few works offered for sale. “It’s very important for us that we’re showing work from that particular decade, because so many of the artists that the gallery is involved with, such as Christopher Wool and Albert Allen, have really been influenced by the final
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Untitled XXIX, 1986. Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). Oil on canvas, 77 X 88 in (195.6 X 223.5 cm)
© T H E W I L L E M D E KO O N I N G F O U N DAT I O N / A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2 017 C O U R T E S Y O F S K A R S T E DT.
Through November 25, Skarstedt Gallery
© T H E W I L L E M D E KO O N I N G F O U N DAT I O N / A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2 017.C O U R T E S Y O F S K A R S T E DT
decade of de Kooning’s life.” After many years of struggling with bouts of depression and alcoholism, de Kooning at age 75 became sober with the intervention of his periodically estranged wife, Elaine de Kooning, who also helped organize his studio and got him working again, said the director of Skarstedt, Bona Montagu. “He comes to these early 80s late paintings with an absolute renewed sense of focus and energy, and I think it’s very apparent in the paintings,” said Montagu. At the end of his career, de Kooning would surround himself with his older work and use elements that he wanted to revisit. He would also trace and draw directly onto the canvas, said Montagu, so that the drawings and paintings became one. The show includes works often referred to as “ribbon paintings” from the early 80s, which have open, airy spaces and ribbonlike colorful lines — among his most accomplished and influential works. “That’s what’s interesting about someone who reaches the end of a career,” said Montagu. “There’s this confidence and assuredness in himself. He talks very much about walking in his own landscape, and you really feel that.” — NINA SIEGAL CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE:
Untitled, 1985. Willem de Kooning (19041997). Oil on canvas, 77 X 88 in (195.6 X 223.5 cm)
Untitled, 1986. Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). Oil on canvas, 70 X 80 in (177.8 X 203.2 cm)
Untitled XXIX, 1986. Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). Oil on canvas, 77 X 88 in (195.6 X 223.5 cm)
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PA R I S
Jim Dine: Montrouge Paintings November 4 - December 23 Daniel Templon
“IT WAS A TAXI garage — no windows, quiet and cool in the summer and well-insulated for the alchemy that one prays will take place along the way,” says Jim Dine about his new studio in the Paris suburb of Montrouge. “It is always a pleasure to unlock the big doors,” he says, “and enter last night’s dreams — good or bad.” At 82, Dine is as busy as he was at just 27 when Walter Hopps included him along with Warhol, Lichtenstein and Ruscha in the ground-breaking “New Painting of Common Objects” at the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles. Indeed, his “Montrouge Paintings” at Daniel Templon in Paris, November 4-December 23, show the artist’s well still overflowing with intoxicating, audacious colors and a toolbox that is both idiosyncratic and iconic. Dine’s newest works dive deeper into what has become his aesthetic mantra —
Jim Dine’s “Seeing Thru The Stardust, The Heat on the Lawn (Claude),” 2017.
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Jim Dine during the installation of his exhibition in Rome in September this year
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subconscious chaos, madness and violence. “Jawlensky,” 2017, an abstracted crowd scene of shifting hot and cool colors, pays homage to the Russian expressionist’s drunk-with-color canvases. “Me at Night on Horseback,”2017, a large acrylic and sand-on-canvas self-portrait features an outline of Dine’s head in a haze of neon yellows, reds, blues and pinks, peering out of a nightscape. “I can’t think of a more interesting subject than one’s unconscious,” says Dine about his obsession with self-portraits. “On my face, the long historical novel is printed in very indelible ink.” Along with hearts and bathrobes, tools have always played a significant, if not magical, role in Dine’s works. The artist’s Pinocchio sculptures seemed brutally charmed out of tree trunks —but with a chainsaw. In the Montrouge show, hammers, axes, paintbrushes, saws and wrenches all float like running thoughts inside the silhouette self-portraits. “Tools in a Puzzled Vessel #5” and “The Bees and their Merriment,” both 2017, are joyous plays on Dine’s self-conscious image-making, and the literal and figurative tools he’s long employed to produce art. “My grandpa had a hardware store, and tools were things for me as a child to wonder over, and to draw in a crude way,” he recalls. “They evolved from use and work, informed my romance about them; my desire to let the monster out of the box was a passport to art and particularly, to still life.” Dine has painted and drawn tools since “forever,” he says. “They are my bones and I try to respect their function in real life, but more importantly in my meditations on them to make a picture.” In 2016, Dine was invited by Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, perhaps the most important porcelain manufacturer in Europe, to collaborate on a series of unique works. Along with his assistants, Daniel Clarke and Olympe Racana-Weiler, Dine fashioned 10 large vases by hand from “four tons of wet clay.” At the same time, Dine was writing a long poem loosely based on correspondence between Claude Levi-Strauss and the late French anthropologist’s parents.
Jim Dine’s Me At Night On Horseback, 2017. Oil, acrylic and sand on linen. 21.5 X 212.5 cm
“When the vessels were ‘cooked,’ the three of us wrote the poem on the 10 jars in sequence,” says Dine. Bronze tools cast from wax are welded onto the tops of the pots —“like violent lids.” The large, white vases with black texts —were displayed last month
in Paris, during the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporaine (FIAC) in the Jardin des Tuilleries. But in the end, Dine is a painter, he says, and now, “the obsession to paint is much more urgent. I am in a state of joy in front of the canvas — however challenging or daunting.” — MATTHEW ROSE
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BERLIN
Stella Hamberg Sculptures FOR HER FORTHCOMING exhibition at EIGEN+ART’s Berlin gallery, November 9 - December 20, German sculptor Stella Hamberg’s typically figurative motifs shift toward the abstract, reduced to essential form and line. Known formerly for making bronze works so dark that they appear to be almost black, her sculptures absorb the light and express only a gentle sheen, combining symbols from different cultures to evoke a timeless mythological space — a two-headed apparition recalls a dinosaur, horse or dog in a hybrid confusion; a skeletal figure rides a crudely modelled horse; a masked man crouches, feet transforming into roots; and lonely human figures silently lean against walls. “àtravers la tête”is titled to suggest the inside space of the head or a psychological state, and sees Hamberg’s identifiably crude modelling sitting alongside a more smooth and reduced sculptural language. The works are arranged in space to recall a stage set of different characters that perform for an audience who weave in and out of the action. The exhibition’s centerpiece measures 2.3 metres, or about 7 feet, 6 inches, in height, as a bronze sculpture of two tall legs extending toward the ceiling. The curvature of the figure’s calves and feet contrasts with a rough textural finish that becomes increasingly course as your eye travels toward the waist. Modelled to evoke mangled flesh or even the bark of a tree, these corporeal forms are simultaneously disturbing and alluring, indicative of both
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violence and elegance. Hamberg’s figures are often in a state of flux, as is the case with her amorphous plaster sculptures, which rest on the floor to draw the viewer’s gaze back downward. The artist normally uses plaster as a means of creating negative space from which her sculptures can then be cast, but here, she inverts this process, using the materials of wood and plaster to swiftly create objects that recall heads or organic plant-like structures, which she sees as “part of a meditation on negative and positive spaces.” Elsewhere, a series of abstract sculptures comprised three “legs” arranged in a tripod form. One of these is three meters in height, and a beam of black locust wood rests atop, countering the strong verticality with a horizontal line that slices through space — as if arms were outstretched. The wood’s warm surface is known for its durability and weather resistance, and here, it contrasts with the exhibition’s coolness of the bronze and porous plaster, in a dynamic dance of material, weight and composition —LOUISA ELDERTON
TOP:
A view of Stella Hamberg’s exhibition, 2015 at Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig RIGHT:
Stella Hamberg’s à travers la tête, 2017 Bronze, patinated 235 x 86 x 89 cm
F R O M TO P : P H OTO : U W E WA LT E R , B E R L I N C O U R T E S Y GA L E R I E E I G E N + A R T L E I P Z I G/B E R L I N ; C O U R T E S Y GA L E R I E E I G E N + A R T L E I P Z I G/B E R L I N P H OTO: M I C K V I N C E N Z
November 9 - December 20 EIGEN+ART
C O U R T E S Y GA L E R I E E I G E N + A R T L E I P Z I G/B E R L I N P H OTO : M I C K V I N C E N Z
Stella Hamberg’s Trance, 2016. Bronze, 90 X 90 X 90 cm, Edition 3
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BEIJING
Virtual Reality Art: Tony Oursler November 26 - January 5 Faurschou Foundation THE NEW YORK-BASED artist Oursler is known for his immersive experiences incorporating both ancient and modern technologies, working with painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and video. His pioneering use of new media examines the effect of technology on the mind, and is known for its use of irony and humor. Oursler is the monthlong focus of an exhibition at the presented series. Oursler’s piece, “space men r My friended” (2016), immerses the viewer in a
narrative of a false memory, exploring UFOs and aliens through the perspective of George Adamski. The work allows the viewer to delve into the mind and memory of Adamski, a widely discredited “contactee” who, in the 1940s and 50s, claimed to have been the first person to have interacted with aliens and to have visited other planets. The piece presents Adamski’s story and the vast research archives of both Oursler and Adamski. Exploring the origins of UFO
photography, “space men R My friended” recalls Oursler’s film “Imponderable” (201516), an immersive 90-minute film that examines the intersection of technology and occult phenomena such as spirit photography, telekinesis, and stage magic. “Imponderable” encourages the viewer to cast a skeptical lens on the thin line between illusion and reality, and to not be susceptible to easy solutions to what are in reality unanswerable questions about the universe. —CONSTANCE CHIEN
P H OTO BY L E I J I A N Z H O N G © FAU R S C H O U F O U N DAT I O N
A view of installation of Tony Oursler’s virtual reality art at Faurschou Foundation
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Installation view of the exhibition at Faurschou Foundation
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Martín Ramírez: His Life in Pictures, Another Interpretation Through December 31 Institute of Contemporary Art the new Institute for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is showcasing the work of the Mexican artist Martín Ramírez, curated in conjunction with the Pacific Standard Time initiative. Allured by the promise of employment on the railroads, Ramírez (1895-1963) arrived in California in 1925. Leaving behind his pregnant wife, three children and a small piece of land in Jalisco, Mexico, he embodied the spirit of the migrant as he sought security and economic opportunity to support his life back home. Ramírez, much like today’s 65 million migrants who have been displaced globally, was perpetually found adapting to alien scenarios. Nevertheless, relying on his courage, perseverance and self-taught creative ingenuity, he was determined to change the narrative imposed on him by the conditions of the sharecropping life. Not long after Ramírez arrived in the United States, however, the Great Depression of 1929 hit, leaving him without work or shelter. Homeless on the streets in San Joaquin County, he was apprehended by the police, and likely given his inability to communicate with doctors in English, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was first institutionalized in 1931, and perhaps out of desperation to articulate his own narrative and preserve some semblance of sanity, started collecting brown paper bags, scraps of examining-table paper as well as pages of old books, newspapers and magazine clippings. It was on these collaged paper materials and with his self-
Martín Ramírez’s Untitled (Horse and Rider with Frieze), n.d. Gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on pieced paper 89.2 × 61 cm. Collection of Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson
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P H OTO : TO M VA N
FOR ITS FIRST EXHIBITION,
FROM FAR LEFT:
Reina, c. 1960-63, Martín Ramírez. Paint, crayon, pencil, and collage on pieced paper 121.9 × 41.9 cm. American Folk Art Museum, New York; Gift of the Family of Dr. Max Dunievitz and the Estate of Martín Ramírez
F R O M L E F T: P H OTO E L L E N M C D E R M OT; C O U R T E S Y R I C C O/ M A R E S C A GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K
Untitled (Double Courtyard), 1952–53, Martín Ramírez. Graphite, tempera, and crayon on paper, 170.2 × 88.9 cm. The Museum of Everything, London
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made inks that he made his first drawings. In his earlier works, Ramírez depicts a myriad of passages — tunnels and tracks that enabled the movement of trains from one world to another. It is unsurprising imagery, as in 1887 the railroad linking his hometown in Jalisco with California was completed. Mirroring his own journey northward, many of his tunnels, however, disappear into despondent black holes of no future or end; caught in between two locales, though unable to move forward or to return home. The optically rhythmic Art Deco motifs repeating throughout his drawings and in which his concentric tracks are decorously framed, allude to the hope of Modernity that he encountered in the United States. Nearly 20 years after first arriving in a sanitarium, Ramírez was transferred to a state hospital in Auburn, California where he met a professor of psychology and art, Tarmo Pasto. Recognizing Ramírez’s talents, Pasto supplied the patient-artist with large rolls of paper and colored pencils for the first time. It was in these larger and more colorful works that Ramírez expanded his images to include various architectural forms; horn players; farm animals; fantastical, historical and religious figures; and callaberos reminiscent of his ranchero past and Mexican Catholic identity. Over the years, as Ramírez has entered into esteemed collections at MoMA, the American Folk Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, amongst others, he has been often identified as a “self-taught” or “folk” artist. Nevertheless, his fine draftsmanship, resourceful usage of materials and unhindered exploration of motifs aligning with his immigrant identity, demonstrate his aptness for participation in relevant artistic dialogues confronting the challenges of migratory life today.
Martín Ramírez, Untitled (Horse and Red Rider), n.d. Gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on pieced paper, 87.6 × 62.2 cm. Collection of Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson
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P H OTO TO M VA N
—ZANDIE BROCKETT
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DATEBOOK Not-to-be-missed shows this month PARIS
“PICASSO AND MAYA: Father and Daughter,” curated by Diana Widmaier Picasso, showcases major works from the 1930s and the 1940s, including a collection of intimate portraits of Picasso’s oldest daughter, Maya, and her mother, Marie-Thérèse Walter (Widmaier Picasso is the daughter of Maya). There are also sculptures and paper cuts-out that Picasso made for his daughter. As with many other favorite portraits of family members, most of the pieces remained in Picasso’s personal collection until his death in 1973. There will also be a selection of archival material — unpublished photographs, films, letters and poems — in the exhibition, which is at Gagosian Paris through December 22. The works explore the relationship between father and daughter, while providing an invaluable record of Picasso’s portrayal of his family life. Maria de la Concepción, nicknamed Maya (b.1935), was the subjectof numerous drawings and paintings by her father, who observed with fascination and tenderness her physical and mental development. Maya’s mother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was one of the artists’ most well-known models and his long-time lover. After his daughter’s birth Picasso chronicled intimate details of their private life together “enfamille,” exploring the archetypal theme of maternity.
Pablo Picasso, Maya with doll and horse,1938.Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm
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T H I S A N D FAC I N G PAG E: © S U C C E S S I O N P I C A S S O 2 017 P I C A S S O
‘Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter’ at Gagosian
“At one moment during the corrida, Picasso’s three children all put their hands on their father’s head. On the right is Jean Cocteau,” Vallauris, 1955
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© S U C C E S S I O N P I C A S S O 2 017 P I C A S S O
Maya and Picasso. Le mystère Picasso, Nice (Studios de la Victorine), 1955
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C O P Y R I G H T: H I R O S H I S U G I M OTO. C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D M A R I A N G O O D M A N GA L L E R Y
LONDON
‘Snow White’ by Hiroshi Sugimoto at Marian Goodman Gallery “ SNOW WHITE ” at the London location of the Marian Goodman Gallery features a selection of works from the photographer’s “Theaters” series through December 22. The innovative photographs are long exposures of theater interiors across the United States and Europe. The images include Drive-ins, abandoned theaters, and most recently Italian opera theaters. The series began as an experiment in which Sugimoto exposed an image for the entire length of a film, resulting in a
detailed image of the theater interior dominated by a screen that shines with an eerie white glow. The exhibition is one half of two simultaneous shows at the London and Paris locations of the gallery.
Villa Mazzacorrati, Bologna, 2015, Hiroshi Sugimoto. Gelatin silver print, neg. #34.012, 149.2 X 119.4 cm. Edition of 5
PARIS
“SURFACE TENSION” by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) features a selection of images from the artist’s “Seascapes” series. For Sugimoto, the sea symbolizes connection between the past and the present; it also connotes the history of the location where the photographer sets up his camera. The unifying element in the series is
the dividing line between the fluid and the airy. The selection on display covers a range of his seascapes, beginning in the 1990s and extending to his recent photographs of the Tasman Sea in 2017. “Surface Tension,” through December 22 at Marian Goodman in Paris, will also include works from his “Five Elements” sculptural series. This is one half
of simultaneous exhibitions at the London and Paris locations of Marian Goodman Gallery. Sugimoto has been the subject of numerous solo shows and other exhibitions, including at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. He was the subject of a restrospective at the Mori Art Museum Tokyo in 2006. FAR LEFT:
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Kegon Waterfall,” 1976. Gelatin silver print. Image: 119.4 x 149.2 cm Edition of 5 LEFT:
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s N. Pacific Ocean, Ohkurosaki, 2013. Gelatin silver print. Image: 119.4 x 149.2 cm
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C O P Y R I G H T: H I R O S H I S U G I M OTO. C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D M A R I A N G O O D M A N GA L L E R Y
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘Surface Tension’ at Galerie Marian Goodman
© M I C H A E L E A S T M A N , S T. LO U I S / C O U R T E S Y E D W Y N N H O U K GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K & Z Ü R I C H
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Michael Eastman’s ‘Buenos Aires: Southern Light’ at Edwynn Houk Gallery
Colegio Passage, Buenos Aires,” 2017, Michael Eastman (born 1947). Mixed media, 88.98 X 75.2 in
Michael Eastman’s recent photographs are the subject of an exhibition, “Buenos Aires: Southern Light’’ at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York, November 16-January 20, 2018. The series of photos — mostly of elegant, empty interiors, rich in color and ornamentation, but devoid of human beings — are characteristic of much of his work. He has also photographed Italian palaces, decrepit Midwestern American towns and he is perhaps best known for a series of photos in Havana, Cuba, where he made five trips during the 1990s. One of the usual themes present throughout his work is historic preservation. His work is characterized by a rich color palette, geometric precision, and the elevation of setting to subject. Eastman (b.1947) studied at the University of Wisconsin and has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant, the National Addy Award and he was a Paris Photo BMW Prize Finalist. His work is represented in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the International Center of Photography, among other places. For details, visit www.houkgallery.com
BERLIN
‘Hulduklettur’by Hreinn Fridfinnsson at Galerie Nordenhake its 10th anniversary with an exhibition of work by the Icelandic artist Hreinn Fridfinnsson in collaboration with Galerie Nordenhake. One of the leading conceptual artists in Iceland, Fridfinnsson will present recent works at the exhibition, November 24-January 13, 2018.Fridfinnsson’s work — spare, evocative and often poetic — ranges from photography to drawing to installations, and often makes use of everyday materials (like cardboard) and common objects (books) to create thought-provoking juxtapositions. Fridfinnsson often uses his creations to investigate the concepts of self and time. In his own words, “Notions of time are always compelling. I read what comes my way about physics and mathematics, but I read as one who is uninitiated. The feeling and the interest in the essence of time is serious, but my dealing with time is not knowledge-based; it is more exploratory and feeling-based.” Fridfinnssonwas born in 1943 in Baer Dölum, in rural Iceland. He became one of the leading figures in the Icelandic avant-garde art scene after he founded the group SUM with three other artists in Reykjavik in 1965. In the early 1970s, he moved to Amsterdam, where he continued his art practices and has been living and working there ever since. He has been the subject of solo shows at the National Gallery of Iceland, 1993; at the 45th Venice Biennale, 1993; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, 1992.
C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D GA L E R I E N O R D E N H A K E
GALERIENHAUS BERLIN CELEBRATES
Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s House Project, 1974. Site specific installation near Hafnarfjödur, Iceland
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COLOGNE
Giorgio Morandi at Galerie Karsten Greve presents a solo exhibition of paintings, watercolors, drawings and other graphic works of the Italian artist Georgio Morandi, November 4-December 9 in Cologne, Germany. The exhibition, gathered from private collections, showcases more than 50 first-class works, including 38 stilllifes and 15 landscapes, presenting a rare opportunity to see a range of works by this wellregarded artist. Morandi (1890–1964) recognized the beauty and variety in everyday objects. “One can travel the world without seeing anything,” Morandi once said. “To understand something, there is no need to see many things. One just has to inspect them closely.” Morandi often painted or drew utilitarian objects such as dishes, jars, bottles, jugs, mugs and vases, which he placed in particular arrangement as a way to explore the relationships between objects. He usually painted the objects against a neutral background, so that the different combinations create a contrast, sometimes of light and shade, sometimes of spatial contours. For details, visit www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
John Baldessari’s Int. The Wood Shop - Day Todd First of all...,” 2017. Varnished inkjet print on canvas with acrylic paint, 158.8 X 137.2 X 3.8 cm
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John Baldessari at SprüthMagers
Giorgio Morandi’s Natura Morta, 1957. Oil on canvas, 38 X 36 cm. Private Collection
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TWENTY YEARS AFTER the American artist John Baldessari’s first solo exhibition with Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, the gallery, in collaboration with Marian Goodman Gallery, is dedicating its space to a show of recent work by the artist, through December 9. The 26 large-scale paintings in the show are based on emojis and were created earlier this year. The theme expands on Baldessari’s long-term investigation of visual as well as written language. Exploring the newer ways of transmitting as well as interpreting information, the “Emoji” series showcases gecko, tiger, or pig figures, juxtaposed with snippets of dialogue from screenplays. As a result, the compositions get a humorous twist with thoughtprovoking connections between the portrayed images and the texts. The wit implied in these compositions questions the increasingly ambiguous nature of everyday communications using high technology. Baldessari (b. 1931), initially a painter, has incorporated many forms into his work, including found photographs, print-making, film, video, installations and sculpture. For details, visit www.spruethmagers.com
F R O M TO P : © J O H N B A L D E S S A R I . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, M A R I A N G O O D M A N GA L L E R Y A N D S P R U E T H M AG E R S . P H OTO G R A P H Y © J O S H UA W H I T E ; P H OTO J O C H E N L I T T K E M A N N . © VG B I L D - K U N S T, B O N N 2 017
GALERIE KARSTEN GREVE
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F R O M TO P : © M I C H E L A N G E LO P I S TO L E T TO; C O U R T E SY O F T H E A R T I S T, L U H R I N G AU G U S T I N E , N E W YO R K , GA L L E R I A C H R I S T I A N S T E I N , M I L A N , A N D S I M O N L E E GA L L E R Y, LO N D O N / H O N G KO N G; © A DAG P, PA R I S A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2 017
‘Scaffali’ by Michelangelo Pistoletto at Luhring Augustine Gallery WITH “SCAFFALI,” the Luhring Augustine Galleryin New York presents a number of mirror paintings of industrial shelving units, or “scaffali,” by Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933), one of the founders of the Arte Povera movement, bringing about an interplay between the aesthetic and utilitarian, and between viewer and object. The paintings, characteristically produced on metal polished to a mirror finish, portray shelving loaded with tools and vessels belonging to various trades, including paint canisters, camera lenses, and automotive parts. In his earlier paintings, Pistoletto wanted to use the mirror’s reflective surface to unify the pictorial space with the physical space of the viewer. The “Scaffali” paintings, on display November 4-December 22, are somewhat different. The shelves reflect a sense of a fixed time and place, leaving less space for the viewer’s self image and surroundings and hence, participation. Pistoletto has exhibited extensively since the 1950s, and his work is owned by numerous top museums and institutions worldwide. He has received several awards throughout his distinguished career, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003. For details, visit www.www.luhringaugustine.com Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Scaffali – attrezzature elettriche, 2015. Silkscreen on super mirror polished stainless steel, 98 3/8 x 59 inches (249.9 x 149.9 cm)
N EW YO R K
‘Nuvolo and Post-War Materiality 1950–1965’ at Di Donna Galleries THE SHOW FEATURES 20 never before seen artworks by the Italian painter Nuvolo, also known as Giorgio Ascani (1926-2008), alongside works by other Post-war artists such as Alberto Burri, Ettore Colla, Lucio Fontana, and Cy Twombly among others. The selection of works, on display at Di Donna Galleries New York, through January 26, 2018, includes pieces from the artist’s series “Cuciti a macchina,” “Daini,” and “Diagrammi.” These works reflect Nuvolo’s level of artistic variation and use of materials and processes. The show examines and charts the artist’s
development and his radicalization of the existing traditional notions of painting and sculpture through the use of physical properties inherent in raw materials. The artist’s first exhibition was held in 1955 and was organized by the poet Emilio Villa. Following that, his works were showcased by leading gallerists in Italy, including Peggy Guggenheim, who also acquired works by the artist and bequeathed them to major American museums. For details, visit www.didonna. com
Untitled, 1960, Nuvolo (Giorgio Ascani). Sewn canvas and deer skin, 55 X 72 cm. Collection Renghi, Città di Castello
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LO N D O N
‘Do Not Open Until 2081’ by Merlin Carpenter at Simon Lee Gallery AN EXHIBITION of wrapped paintings by Merlin Carpenter at the Simon Lee Gallery in London, through November 25, challenges the very idea of a seen painting. During the past two decades, Carpenter has made personal “archaeological excavations” of cultural situations linked to the recent history of art. In 2009, he was inspired by a group of paintings by the British artist John Hoyland (1934-2011) and asked his permission to reinterpret them. Refused by Hoyland, he created the paintings anyway and wrapped them in layers of cardboard to try to get around issues of copyright. These packaged creations, complete with packing tape and transport labels, cannot be opened until 2081 by contractual agreement with anyone who buys them. Carpenter (b. 1967) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and projects, and his work is in major private and public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. For details, visit www.simonleegallery.com
LOS A N G E L ES
Ellen Gallagher’s ‘Accidental Records’ at Hauser & Wirth The exhibition, November 4-January 28, 2018, features new paintings, drawings, and film installations by the American artist Ellen Gallagher (b. 1965). These works explore the complex history of racism in the United States and the lives of Africans after being kidnapped and brought as slaves to the New World. Her solo exhibitions include “New Work” at Hauser & Wirth, London; “AxME” at Tate Modern, London (travelling exhibition), and “Ellen Gallagher” at Gagosian Gallery, New York. Gallagher has received the Medal of Honor from School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2001), the American Academy Award in Art (2007), and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (1997) among others.
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Ellen Gallagher’s Odalisque. Slide projection with gold leaf, Haus der Kunst installation, 2014. Dimensions variable
For details, visit www.hauserwirth.com
20.1.63, 2009, 2017 by Merlin Carpenter. Cardboard, plastic and acrylic on canvas, 174 x 174 x 5.5 cm
A N T I C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: © E L L E N GA L L AG H E R . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R A N D W I R T H . P H OTO : E R N S T M O R I T Z ; © E L L E N GA L L AG H E R . C O U R T E S Y H AU S D E R K U N S T, M U N I C H ; C O U R T E SY O F T H E A R T I S T A N D S I M O N L E E GA L L E R Y LO N D O N/H O N G KO N G
Ellen Gallagher’s Aquajujidsu, 2017. Oil, ink and paper on canvas, 188 x 202 cm
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DATEBOOK The season’s top picks from all the art capitals Varlin paintings at Galerie Carzaniga in Basel THE EXHIBITION, through November 25 at Galerie Carzaniga in Basel, showcases the extraordinary works of the Swiss painter Willy Guggenheim (1900-1977), popularly known as Varlin. His paintings, spanning a
lifetime, often expressed his feelings about the fragility of life. Varlin holds a special place in the history of 20thcentury Swiss painting; a Jew and something of an outsider, he painted vibrant, colorful portraits, landscapes,
still lifes and nudes in a distinct, energetic style. His relationships with contemporaries such as Karl Geiser (1898-1957) and Friedrich Kuhn (1926-1972) enriched his artistry. For details, visit www.carzaniga.ch
VA R L I N/ W I L LY G U G G E N H E I M . C O U R T E S Y GA L E R I E C A R Z A N I GA
Notfallwagen in Viareggio, 1965, Varlin/ Willy Guggenheim (1900-1977).Oil on canvas, 50 X 70 cm
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VA R L I N/ W I L LY G U G G E N H E I M . C O U R T E S Y GA L E R I E C A R Z A N I GA
Frauenportrait, 1948 by Varlin/ Willy Guggenheim (19001977). Oel auf pavatex, 68 X 58 cm
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Images of protest by Stan Douglas at Victoria Miro, Mayfair show the Tottenham riots of August 2011, sparked by the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a local drug dealer, and protests in his hometown of Vancouver. The photographer conducted an indepth research that involved mining sources such as contemporary aerial news reports
and still images. These new works address the tensions and confrontations pertaining to race and class. Douglas questions notions of authorship, reality, and truth and what we see within the medium of photography. For details, visit www.victoria-miro.com
Stan Douglas’s Overview Downspark Queensdown, 2017. Video still.
© S TA N D O U G L A S , C O U R T E S Y V I C TO R I A M I R O
The photography of Vancouverbased artist Stan Douglas is featured in this show at Victoria Miro gallery in Mayfair, through December 10. Douglas documented a variety of uprisings, protests and riots beginning in early 2010, when the Arab Spring uprisings began. His large-scale images
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I M AG E S C O U R T E S Y GA B R I E L R I C O A N D P E R R OT I N
Gabriel Rico installations at Perrotin in New York THIS SOLO SHOW, November 4-December 23, presents Mexican artist Gabriel Rico’s (b.1980) latest body of work at the Perrotin gallery in New York, marking his debut in the city. Deriving its title, “One Law for The Lion & The Ox is Oppression,” from the final line of William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ”the exhibition encompasses a range of installations with varied forms, including mounted animals, neon shapes and found natural objects, to create artificial environments that point to the artist’s view of the relationships between nature, architecture and the dystopic future of civilization. These creations, based on the behaviors and survival techniques he observed in animals like the Golden pheasant, unpack the complexities of the current human condition. For details, visit www.perrotin.com
Below: Gabriel Rico’s Dos, 2016, from the series “Conjunto Compacto.” Brass, branches, deer head, glass fruit, stones, paint, knife, neon, 60 X 150 X 15 cm
Gabriel Rico’s Naturaleza Muerta, 2016. Wood, pheasant skin, plastic fruits, neon rope, 115 X 50 X 50 cm
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Sculptures and other works by Lynda Benglis at Blum & Poe in LA
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phosphorescent, cast-polyurethane sculpture “Hills and Clouds,” 2014. Spanning the gallery’s two levels, these sculptures reflect a series of hybrid compositions, embracing the subjective touch of the artist’s hand and the inextricable link between process, material, and form. For details, visit www.blumandpoe.com CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHT: Lynda Benglis’s Inner (Warrior), 1993. Glazed ceramic, 32 X 16 X 16 in; Storm Pattern, 2003. Cast bronze fountain, 29 X 27 X 25 in; LS and Clouds, 2014. Cast polyurethane with phosphorescence and stainless steel, !! X 19 X 19 ft
© LY N DA B E N G L I S/L I C E N S E D BY VAGA , N E W YO R K C O U R T E S Y C H E I M & R E A D, N E W YO R K A N D B L U M & P O E , LO S A N G E L E S/N E W YO R K / TO K YO
The exhibition presents the American sculptor and visual artist Lynda Benglis (b.1941) in her first solo on the West Coast since her 2011 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Running through December 16 at Blum & Poe in LA, the exhibition showcases three decades of work by Benglis, highlighting her wide range of styles and forms, which include glazed ceramic works, examples from her bronze fountain series, large-scale biomorphic aluminum sculptures, a selection of her recent paper wall works, and the nearly 20-foot-high
Fiber works by Françoise Grossen at Blum & Poe in New York at Blum & Poe in New York presents sculptural works by Swiss-born, New York-based textile artist Françoise Grossen (b.1943), known for her braided and knotted rope sculptures. The exhibition, her third solo with Blum & Poe and running November
THE EXHIBITION
2-January 6, 2018, showcases three segments of works from the artist’s four decades of artistic practice —hanging sculpture, floor works, and a series of maquettes that served as models for a selection of her installations in the 1970s. The show highlights Grossen’s
varied interests and inspirations as a young fiber sculptor who went on to take a pioneering role in this field of art, which helped define the archetypes of 1960s and 1970s architecture, design, and aesthetics. For details, visit www.blumandpoe.com
© F R A N Ç O I S E G R O S S E N , C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D B L U M & P O E , LO S A N G E L E S/N E W YO R K / TO K YO P H OTO : G E N E V I E V E H A N S O N
FROM LEFT:
Maquette with heavy braid, 1980. Linen, cotton, 26 X 7 1/2 X 2 in; Alpha (detail), 1991-1992. Partially painted paper piping cord. Linen, 95 X 14 X 12 in
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THIS EXHIBITION, November 10-December 22, marks the first solo show in Japan for Romanian-born artist and painter Victor Man (b. 1974). The works on display at Blum & Poe’s Tokyo gallery are a focused selection of small-format portraits and still lifes that defy any clear interpretation and invite an investigation on the cycle of life and death. These intimate paintings are linked thematically through their surreal forms and colors and subject matter, a mix of human imagery, plant life and architectural motifs. For details, visit www.blumandpoe.com
ABOVE:
Early Paradise (A Draft for all Nation’s Flag), 2016. Oil on canvas, 70 X 50 cm; Right: Self-Portrait at Father’s Death, 2016. Oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 27 X 19 cm
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© V I C TO R M A N , C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D B L U M & P O E , LO S A N G E L E S/N E W YO R K / TO K YO P H OTO : M AT H I A S S C H O R M A N N
Portraits and still lifes by Victor Man at Blum & Poe in Tokyo
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Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875
GALLERY LISTINGS Edwynn Houk Gallery
Galerie Hans Mayer
745 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10151 +1 212 750 7070 [email protected] houkgallery.com Paolo Ventura, through November 11 Michael Eastman: Buenos Aires, November 16-January 20
Grabbeplatz 2, 40213 Düsseldorf +49 211 132 135 [email protected] galeriehansmayer.de Wim Botha, opens November 17
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie Buchholz Fasanenstraße 30, 10719 Berlin +49 30 88 62 40 56 [email protected] galeriebuchholz.de Tomma Abts, November-December
Galerie Daniel Templon
NUVOLO (GIORGIO ASCANI) Untitled, 1961, dyed and sewn deerskin, 32.625 x 39.375 inches at Di Donna
Acquavella Galleries 18 E 79th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 734 6300 [email protected] acquavellagalleries.com Jacob El Hanani: “Linescape: Four Decades,” thru November 17 “Three Dimensions: Modern and Contemporary Approaches to Relief and Sculpture,” thru November 17
Casey Kaplan 121 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 645 7335 [email protected] caseykaplangallery.com Garth Weiser: New paintings, November 2-December 23
David Nolan Gallery 527 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 925 6190 [email protected] davidnolangallery.com “Berlin Now: A Place Where East and West Meet,” November 9-December 16
Di Donna 744 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10065 +1 212 259 0444 [email protected] didonna.com “Nuvolo and Post-War Materiality: 1950-1965,” curated by Germano Celant, through January 26
Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art Cheim & Read 547 W 25th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 242 7727 [email protected] cheimread.com Donald Baechler, November 2December 23
37 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019 +1 212 517 2453 [email protected] edwardtylernahemfineart.com Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Masters
Veydtstraat 13A, 1060 Brussels +32 2 537 13 17 [email protected] templon.com Philippe Cognée: “Nocturnes,” through December 23
Galerie Eigen + Art Auguststraße 26, 10117 Berlin 49.30.280 6605 [email protected] eigen-art.com David Schnell: “vert,” through November 4 Stella Hamberg, November 11December 20
Galerie Greta Meert 13 Rue du Canal, 1000 Brussels +32 2 219 14 22 [email protected] galeriegretameert.com Anne Neukamp: “L’objet Familier,” through November 4 Joe Zorrilla, through November 4 John Baldessari, November 24January 20 Enrico Castellani, November 24January 20
Schöneberger Ufer 61, 10785 Berlin +49 30 26 39 49 85 [email protected] bortolozzi.com James Richards: “Mouth Room / Crumb Mahogany,” through November 4
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff 78 Rue Julien Lacroix, 75020 Paris +33 1 42 03 05 65 galeriewolff.com Guillaume Leblon, through December 23
Galerie Karsten Greve 5 Rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris +33 1 42 77 19 37 [email protected] galerie-karsten-greve.com Claire Morgan: “Perpetually at the Centre,” through December 23
Galerie Krinzinger Seilerstätte 16, 1010 Vienna +43 1 5133006 [email protected] galerie-krinzinger.at “Icon – Idea. Ideal. Inspiration,” through November 4
Galerie Lahumière 17, rue du Parc Royal, 75003 Paris +33 1 42 77 27 74 [email protected] lahumiere.com “On Love and Art: A tribute to Anne and Jean-Claude Lahumière,” through December 22
Galerie Lelong & Co.
Galerie Nordenhake
Lehmann Maupin
Matthew Marks Gallery
528 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 315 0470 [email protected] galerielelong.com McArthur Binion: “Route One: Box Two,” through December 9
Lindenstrasse 34, 10969 Berlin +49 30 20 61 48 3 [email protected] nordenhake.com Mirosław Bałka: “EIN AUGE, OFFEN” through November 18 Hreinn Friðfinnsson, November 24January 13
536 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 255 2923 [email protected] lehmannmaupin.com Gilbert & George: “THE BEARD PICTURES,” through December 22
523 W 24th St, 522 W 22nd St, 526 W 22nd St New York, NY 10001 USA 212-243-0200 [email protected] matthewmarks.com Katharina Fritsch, November 4December 22 Gary Hume: “Mum,” November 4December 22 Nayland Blake: #idraweveryday, November 4-December 22
Galerie Martin Janda Eschenbachgasse 11, 1010 Vienna +43 1 5857371 [email protected] martinjanda.at Jan Merta: “Look,” through November 18
Galerie Max Hetzler 57 Rue du Temple, 75004 Paris +33 1 57 40 60 80 [email protected] maxhetzler.com Bridget Riley: “Measure for Measure,” new disc paintings, through November 25
Galerie Michael Haas Niebuhrstraße 5, 10629 Berlin +49 30 88 92 91 0 [email protected] galeriemichaelhaas.de Tanja Nittka Les Chambres, through November 4
Galerie Nagel Draxler Weydingerstraße 2-4, 10178 Berlin +49 30 40 04 26 41 [email protected] nagel-draxler.de Stephan Dillemuth, through November 4
Galerie Nathalie Obadia 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, 75004 Paris +33 1 42 74 67 68 [email protected] galerie-obadia.com Seydou Keïta, November 6December 22
Galleria Continua 46 Rue de la Ferté Gaucher, 77169 Boissy-le-Châtel +33 1 64 20 39 50 [email protected] galleriacontinua.com 10 Years of Galleria Continua in France (2007-2017), thru Dec 31
Gladstone 64 130 E 64th St, New York, NY 10065 +1 212 206 9300 [email protected] gladstonegallery.com Alfredo Volpi, November 4December 22
Hauser & Wirth 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET +44 207 287 2300 [email protected] hauserwirth.com More Dimensions Than You Know: Jack Whitten, 1979–1989, through November 18 Marcel Broodthaers: Un Jardin d’Hiver, through November 18
Luhring Augustine 531 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 206 9100 [email protected] luhringaugustine.com Michelangelo Pistoletto: “Scaffali,” November 4-December 22
Marian Goodman Gallery 79 Rue du Temple, 75003 Paris +33 1 48 04 70 52 [email protected] mariangoodman.com Hiroshi Sugimoto: “Surface Tension,” through December 22
Marianne Boesky Gallery 509 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 680 9889 [email protected] marianneboeskygallery.com Dean Levin: “Arches,” November 2December 22
Metro Pictures 519 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 206 7100 [email protected] metropictures.com Jim Shaw, November 2-December 23
Michael Werner 4 E 77th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 988 1623 [email protected] michaelwerner.com Peter Doig, through November 18
Mitchell-Innes & Nash 534 W 26th St, New York, NY 10002 +1 212 744 7400 [email protected] miandn.com Mary Kelly: “The Practical Past,” through November 22
Howard Greenberg Gallery 41 E 57th St, New York, NY 10022 +1 212 334 0010 [email protected] howardgreenberg.com Raghubir Singh: “Bombay,” through December 9 William Gedney: “India,” through December 9 Kenro Izu: “Eternal Light,” through December 9 GILBERT & GEORGE BEARD CODE, 2016, mixed media, 100 x 177.95 inches (254 x 452 cm), LM25901 © Gilbert & George. Courtesy the artists and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
Mnuchin Gallery
Paula Cooper Gallery
Sadie Coles HQ
Sperone Westwater
45 E 78th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 861 0020 [email protected] mnuchingallery.com Sam Gilliam: 1967-1973, November 2-December 16
534 W 21st St, 521 W 21st St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 255 1105 [email protected] paulacoopergallery.com Cecily Brown, through December 2 Douglas Huebler, through November 22
62 Kingly St, London W1B 5QN +44 20 7493 8611 [email protected] sadiecoles.com “Zhongguo 2185:” Curated by Victor Wang 王宗孚, through November 4
257 Bowery, New York, NY 10002 +1 212 999 7337 [email protected] speronewestwater.com Michael Landy, November 3December 20
PACE 32 E 57th St, New York, NY 10022 +1 212 421 3292 [email protected] pacegallery.com Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle, November 2-January 13
Pace/MacGill Gallery 32 E 57th St, New York, NY 10022 +1 212 759 7999 [email protected] pacemacgill.com Emmet Gowin: “Here on Earth Now – Notes from the Field,” through January 6 Richard Avedon: “On Nothing Personal” on view at 537 West 25th Street, NYC, November 17-January 13
Sprüth Magers Samar Albader
Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90038 +1 310 276 5424 benthornborough@ regenprojects.com regenprojects.com Gary Simmons: “Balcony Seating Only,” November 11-December 22 Jack Pierson, November 11December 22
+965 24819767 [email protected] [email protected] www.samaralbader.com
Simon Lee Gallery 12 Berkeley St, London W1J 8DT +44 20 7491 0100 simonleegallery.com Merlin Carpenter: Do Not Open Until 2081, through November 25
Richard Nagy Ltd
Skarstedt
22 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4PY +44 20 7262 6400 [email protected] richardnagy.com
8 Bennet St, London SW1A 1RP +44 207 499 5200 skartstedt.com de Kooning: Late Paintings, through November 25
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Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Berlin +49 30 28 88 40 30 [email protected] spruethmagers.com Barbara Kruger: “Forever,” through December 16 LLyn Foulkes: “Transfiguration,” through December 22 Jon Rafman: “Dream Journal ’16-’17,” through December 22
To be included in Modern Painters’ Gallery listings, contact [email protected]
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Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875
AUCTION CALENDER
November 1
LONDON Sotheby’s Collections LONDON Sotheby’s From Earth to Fire
2
LONDON Phillips Photographs
7
KNIGHTSBRIDGE Bonhams Asian Art
LONDON Christie’s Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art
8
LONDON Sotheby’s Important Chinese Art NEW YORK Bonhams 19th Century European Paintings LONDON Bonhams The Misumi Collection of Important Works of Lacquer Art and Paintings
9
LONDON Bonhams Fine Chinese Art LONDON Bonhams Fine Japanese Art PARIS Christie’s Stripped Bare: Photographs From The Collection Of Thomas Koerfer
10
PARIS Sotheby’s Photographie PARIS Sotheby’s Importante Collection Europeenne de Photographies
PARIS Christie’s Photographies
13
NEW YORK Sotheby’s The Collection of Edwin & Cherie Silver New York Sotheby’s American Art
NEW YORK Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale
14
NEW YORK Bonhams Impressionist And Modern Art LONDON Sotheby’s 20th Century Art – A Different Perspective
LONDON Christie’s Lalique NEW YORK Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Works on Paper
NEW YORK Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale NEW YORK Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale
15
KNIGHTSBRIDGE Bonhams Fine Glass And British Ceramics LONDON Bonhams The Greek Sale LONDON Christie’s European Furniture, Works of Art & Ceramics
LONDON Christie’s English Furniture & Works of Art LONDON Christie’s Silver & 19th Century Furniture, Sculpture & Works of Art
NEW YORK Bonhams Post-War & Contemporary Art NEW YORK Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
NEW YORK Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale NEW YORK Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale
16
NEW YORK Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale Part I & II
NEW YORK Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction NEW YORK Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
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23
LONDON Christie’s British Impressionism Day Sale LONDON Christie’s Modern British & Irish Art Day Sale
25
HONG KONG Christie’s Asian 20th Century & Contemporary
17
NEW YORK Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Auction
20
LOS ANGELES Bonhams California And Western Paintings And Sculpture New York Bonhams American Art
21
KNIGHTSBRIDGE Bonhams British And European Art SYDNEY Bonhams Australian Art And Aboriginal Art NEW YORK Phillips Latin America LONDON Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated LONDON Sotheby’s Scottish Art LONDON Bonhams Prints and Multiples NEW YORK Sotheby’s European Art LONDON Christie’s Australian Art NEW YORK Sotheby’s Unveiling the Americas: The New World Rediscovered
NEW YORK Sotheby’s Latin America: Modern Art, Part I PARIS Christie’s Collection Verite NEW YORK Christie’s American Art NEW YORK Sotheby’s Art Treasures of America, The Collection of John F. Eulich
22
PARIS Sotheby’s Jacques Grange | Collectionneur LONDON Bonhams Modern British and Irish Art LONDON Sotheby’s Modern & Post-War British Art LONDON Christie’s Modern British & Irish Art Evening Sale LONDON Christie’s British Impressionism Evening Sale PARIS Christie’s Arts D’Afrique Et D’Océanie NEW YORK Sotheby’s Latin America: Modern Art, Part II NEW YORK Christie’s Latin American Art
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Art (Evening Sale)
26
HONG KONG Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale
HONG KONG Christie’s Asian 20th Century Art (Day Sale) HONG KONG Christie’s Asian Contemporary Art (Day Sale)
27
HONG KONG Christie’s Chinese Contemporary Ink HONG KONG Christie’s Fine Chinese Classical Paintings and Calligraphy
LONDON Christie’s Russian Art
28
LONDON Sotheby’s Russian Pictures LONDON Sotheby’s Russian Works of Art, Faberge & Icons HONG KONG Bonhams Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art
LONDON Bonhams Antiquities HONG KONG Christie’s Fine Chinese Modern Paintings PARIS Christie’s Exceptional Sale
29
KNIGHTSBRIDGE Bonhams Prints And Multiples LONDON Sotheby’s Ancient Sculpture and Works of Art HONG KONG Bonhams Important Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art
LONDON Heritage Auctions The Russian Sale
30
MILAN Sotheby’s Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
09.12 NOV 2017 GRAND PALAIS MAIN SECTOR - GALLERIES ACB AKIO NAGASAWA ALINE VIDAL ANITA BECKERS ANNET GELINK ASYMETRIA ATLAS AUGUSTA EDWARDS BAUDOIN LEBON BENDANA | PINEL BENE TASCHEN BENRUBI BERNHEIMER BERTRAND GRIMONT BEYOND BINOME BLINDSPOT BO BJERGGAARD BRUCE SILVERSTEIN BRYCE WOLKOWITZ CAMERA OBSCURA CAMERA WORK CARLIER | GEBAUER CARLOS CARVALHO CAROLINE SMULDERS CATHARINE CLARK CHARLES ISAACS CHELOUCHE CHRISTOPHE GAILLARD CHRISTOPHE GUYE CLAIREFONTAINE CONTINUA DANIEL BLAU DANIEL TEMPLON DANZIGER DIEHL DIX9 - HÉLÈNE LACHARMOISE DU JOUR AGNÈS B. EAST WING EDWYNN HOUK EMMA MOLINA ERIC DUPONT ESTHER WOERDEHOFF ETHERTON FIFTY ONE FILOMENA SOARES
NEXTLEVEL NORDENHAKE ODILE OUIZEMAN PACE/MACGILL PACI PARIS-BEIJING PARROTTA PARTICULIÈRE - FOUCHER-BIOUSSE PETER FETTERMAN PHOTO&CONTEMPORARY POLARIS POLKA PROJECT 2.0 PURDY HICKS RICHARD SALTOUN ROBERT HERSHKOWITZ ROBERT KLEIN ROBERT KOCH ROBERT MANN ROBERT MORAT ROCIO SANTA CRUZ ROLF ART RX SAGE SCHOOL OLIVIER CASTAING SEE+ SHOSHANA WAYNE SIES + HÖKE SILK ROAD SIT DOWN SOPHIE SCHEIDECKER SPRINGER STALEY-WISE STEPHEN BULGER STEPHEN DAITER STEVEN KASHER STEVENSON SUZANNE TARASIEVE TAIK PERSONS TAKA ISHII TANIT TASVEER TEMNIKOVA & KASELA THESSA HEROLD THOMAS ZANDER TOLUCA TOM CHRISTOFFERSEN
FLOWERS FRAENKEL FRANÇOISE PAVIOT GAGOSIAN GILLES PEYROULET GITTERMAN GREGORY LEROY GRIMM HAMILTONS HANS P. KRAUS JR. HOWARD GREENBERG IN CAMERA INGLEBY JAMES HYMAN JEAN-KENTA GAUTHIER JOAN PRATS JOHANNES FABER JORGE MARA - LA RUCHE JUANA DE AIZPURU JULIAN SANDER KALFAYAN KARSTEN GREVE KICKEN KLEMM’S KOW LE RÉVERBÈRE LELONG LES DOUCHES LES FILLES DU CALVAIRE LIA RUMMA LOOCK LOUISE ALEXANDER LUISOTTI LUMIÈRE DES ROSES M97 M BOCHUM MAGNIN-A MAGNUM MARTIN ASBÆK MAUBERT MÉLANIE RIO MEM MICHAEL HOPPEN MITTERRAND MIYAKO YOSHINAGA NAILYA ALEXANDER NAP NATHALIE OBADIA
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TRAPÉZ V1 VAN DER GRINTEN VINTAGE VU’ XIPPAS YANCEY RICHARDSON YOSSI MILO YUMIKO CHIBA BOOK SECTOR - PUBLISHERS & ART BOOK DEALERS 21ST EDITIONS ACTES SUD AKIO NAGASAWA ANDRÉ FRÈRE APERTURE FOUNDATION BENRIDO BESSARD BOOKSHOP M CONTRASTO DAMIANI DELPIRE DEWI LEWIS FILIGRANES GOLIGA HARPER’S HATJE CANTZ KEHRER KERBER KOMIYAMA LA FÁBRICA LES YEUX OUVERTS LIBRAIRIE 213 LIVRARIA MADALENA MACK ONLY PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOSYNTHÈSES RM SUPER LABO STEIDL TASCHEN TEXTUEL XAVIER BARRAL Index 31 August 2017 Subject to modification
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