Interview with Art Dealer Iwan Wirth

“There Is No Place Like London”: Dealer Iwan Wirth on the Intricacies of the World’s Second Biggest Art Market  

by Coline Milliard

In 25 years, Swiss gallerist Iwan Wirth has gone from teenage enthusiast to one of the most powerful contemporary art dealers in the world. Hauser & Wirth, founded by Wirth and collector Ursula Hauser in 1992, is a global brand, staging museum-quality exhibitions by the likes of Dan Graham, Subodh Gupta, and Martin Creed in its Zurich, London, and New York homes. Yet the gallery has managed to keep a certain family business charm, largely due to the affability of the man at its helm. The day before the opening of Paul McCarthy’s dramatic double exhibitions “The King, the Island, the Train, the House, the Ship,” ARTINFO UK caught up with Wirth in his gigantic Savile Row office.

You started your first gallery in St. Gallen aged 16 in 1986. What spurred you to do that?

Growing up in the countryside, the atmosphere in a gallery or in a museum was something I was — by birth, I don’t know why — attracted to. I thought naively that having a gallery would be the most efficient way to be surrounded by art and artists. That was a naïve thought and an impulsive reaction, and then the opportunity came up: there was a space available. It’s kind how I still work today. One thing I kept [from that period] is that kind of joy, playfulness, and openness towards new ideas and opportunities.

Now that you have such an extensive operation, it must be quite hard to keep this kind of flexibility.

Last year we did 22 exhibitions but some of them only came together at the very last minute. It happens: some artist comes here and has an amazing idea that can only be done within the next six months, or nine months. We have to make it possible. I’ve always seen my role as making things possible — and keeping all the options open for the artists. I also want to keep the freedom to say no, if something is not really going the way it should, or is not ready yet.

Next year’s program for London is pretty much together. Mary Heilmann and Michael Raedecker will do a show together in February, which is a fantastic idea. Then we have Ron Mueck, and Andy Hope. And then we have Thomas Houseago, and Isa Genzken. It’s going to be a spectacular year, but to make that work in both New York and Zurich is a challenge.

How did your relationship with Ursula Hauser influence the way you work with collectors today?

I never think of it as a one-way street. My ambition is to build collections, and to be involved with the artists. Artists don’t think about one piece, they are always thinking in terms of rooms, and bodies of works.

Coming out of the 1980s going into the 1990s, there was a vacuum between collectors, museums, dealers, and artists. Nobody was buying and that’s when Ursula started to collect contemporary art — I was inspiring her to do that. I would like to see it as a family business including the collector.

Do you try to keep a one-on-one relationship with them?

That’s the most ideal form. If you ask collectors that work closely with us, they’ll tell you that we don’t run our gallery necessarily like a shop. We are very involving. We try to build that bridge between the studio and the home of these pieces by bringing things together: curator, museum, artist, collector.

Next year is our 20th anniversary. As the gallery develops, you start to understand a little bit more what you are creating — where you are succeeding and where you are failing. But on the other hand, every day I still feel like I’m starting all over again and it’s a start-up company!

In those 20 years you’ve seen a boom and a crash. Do you think that the collector’s profile has changed?

No. The privilege we’ve had is to work with some of the most prolific artists, which today, and at the time, have also attracted some of the most prolific collectors. It is still the same: to watch someone discovering a body of works by an artist is as rewarding and as fascinating now as it was back then.

The business has changed, of course. I think art fairs have had the biggest effect on the way we are doing the actual business. And artists are way more realistic about the business part of the art world. They know that an art fair is not the most ideal way to look at art, but it is a fantastic way for people to get informed. To really see art, you have to go to the museum, and to the gallery shows. That hasn’t changed at all. And while the speed of art fairs has increased, the importance and depth of exhibitions in commercial galleries has also increased. We also have more museums than ever. We’ve had had 480 museum and institutional exhibitions by our artists this year. This has been growing enormously.

You are about to go to the India Art Fair for the first time. How do you see the market there?

Ask me after! We have two of the most important Indian artists [Subodh Gupta and Bharti Ker], and many clients there. We also have a lot of online traffic from that part of the world — I don’t know who: students, artists, curators, collectors as well. There are a lot of signs that India is going to play a major part in the cultural world, and there are different ways to engage with it. One is to open a gallery; another is to go to an art fair. In Hong Kong, Art Basel is going to be a major player in the education and development of Asia. 

You’ve touched on the role of the Internet. Did you do the digital-only VIP Fair?

Yes, we did — we tried.

Do you see a significant part of the business moving online?

I bought my first fax machine when I started the gallery. It was incredible. These things are evolving. The web is just an invitation for people to get familiar with our program, and then they come to the gallery. It will never replace a one to one relationship. I’m amazed by the online traffic we have, but we also have almost 100,000 visitors a year in the galleries. And our program is not blockbuster shows, it’s very cutting edge.

You are yourself a philanthropist, supporting various institutions. Do you think the role of a commercial gallery is also to educate?

Naturally — it’s the nature of the beast. We stage shows. There is a limit to what we can do, but we have a constant dialogue with the public. We work with museums, trying to support where we can. We have a lot of school classes coming. I’ve personally given three or four tours to schools last year. We also do a lot of loans, on behalf of the artists, on behalf of collectors, and on behalf of our own inventory. It’s really a massive traffic, and this is all education. These pieces are shown in public.

You represent the estate of several seminal artists, including Allan Kaprow, Eva Hesse, and Jason Rhodes. From the first of January 2012, the European artist’s resale right is going to be applicable in the UK to works by artists who died less than 70 years ago. What are your thoughts on this, and how do you think this will affect the gallery?

It’s certainly not something I support, but it won’t affect us too much. It’s just one more hurdle, and one more pain. It shouldn’t be, it’s wrong, but I won’t have a sleepless night over it.

Do you think it’s wrong because it’s a hurdle for you or do you think it’s wrong in principle?

I think it’s wrong in principle, but it’s very complex. Like many of these things, the idea is a good one, but it just always fails, because of the bureaucracy, and because of the nature of the art. Business will move away, because several places are excluded from this law. Such legislation is controlled and ruled by bureaucrats — not to the benefit of the artists or the art world.

There are these rumors that David Zwirner is opening in London, and Pace is now in town and about to open a very large space in 2012. How do you think London is changing?

It’s great for every gallery to come to London, and I think London can only benefit from it. I’ve personally experienced it as a very open place — when we opened here almost 10 years ago, it was a blank canvas. That has slightly changed, and the gallery scene is dramatically growing. London is the most international city in the world, there’s no doubt about that.

Over New York?

If you look at the exposure to Asia, India, and the Middle East, there is no place like London. New York is the biggest art market in the world and London is number two, but in terms of communities — the ones that play a role in the art market, London is certainly the most international.

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Wlliem de Kooning: A Retrospective

de Kooning | MoMA

September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012

This is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning, widely considered to be among the most important and prolific artists of the 20th century. The exhibition, which will only be seen at MoMA, presents an unparalleled opportunity to study the artist’s development over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s. Bringing together nearly 200 works from public and private collections, the exhibition will occupy the Museum’s entire sixth-floor gallery space, totaling approximately 17,000 square feet.

Two Figures in a Landscape | 1967 Oil on canvas 70 x 6′ 8″  - Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Representing nearly every type of work de Kooning made, in both technique and subject matter, this retrospective includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. Among these are the artist’s most famous, landmark paintings—among them Pink Angels (1945), Excavation (1950), and the celebrated third Woman series (1950–53)—plus in-depth presentations of all his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the breakthrough black-and-white compositions of 1948–49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid 1950s to the artist’s return to figuration in the 1960s, and the large gestural abstractions of the following decade. Also included is de Kooning’s famous yet largely unseen theatrical backdrop, the 17-foot-square Labyrinth (1946).

Woman II - 1952 Oil on canvas 59 x 43″ (149.9 x 109.3 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller

Methods & Materials

Organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture.

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis.

Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Additional generous funding is provided by Anne and Kenneth Griffin, Sid R. Bass, Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation, Inc., Donald L. Bryant, Jr., The Dubin Family, Glenstone, Robert B. Menschel, Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Gary and Karen Winnick, and Peter G. Peterson.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

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Bulgaria’s Museum of Socialist Art - Hall of Fame or Hall of Shame

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Movie Set :: Art as a center piece | Part 2

By Tim Lopreste

Another movie with a stunning set is Match Point. Luxury interior design and Artpieces from the beginning to the end makes this Woody Allen movie a must see for art lovers. Besides the suspenseful Hitchcock like plot, I also loved that the Tate Modern, and the Saatchi Gallery were both important settings of the movie.

The setup of the plot is familiar, almost old-fashioned, so it’s entirely appropriate that the style of the movie fall right in line. Much like Altman’s Gosford Park was a throwback to an earlier age of whodunit film, so Match Point recalls the simple, character-driven elegance of fifties noir. Sometimes familiarity breeds disinterest, but here it feels — mostly — like a welcome presence. It’s the enduring quality of a story told well.

That story is something of an extension of pretty much everything Allen has done. He’s a dab hand with the fish-out-of-water scenario, but here he takes it a bit further; the fish has climbed out of the water and is beginning to evolve legs and lungs, and finding that he rather likes a life with gravity. Chris’ ambition is shielded in a remarkably comfortable skin, despite the social disparity between his youth and his manhood. When his ambitions begin to crystallize in marriage, employment, and luxurious living, his mild obsession needs a new direction, and finds it in Nola, the fish wearing stilts to pretend it has legs.

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Art Institute of Chicago Names New Director

click to enlarge

Douglas Druick was named Director of the Art Institute of Chicago on Aug. 24, 2011. (courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago)

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A Perfect Movie Set :: Art as a center piece | Part 1

By Tim Lorpeste for Artistshowdown

Watching “A Perfect Murder”, for at least the 30th time, I thought it was about time to acknowledge the Perfect Movie Set by having Art pieces as the center piece of the love triangle suspense thriller.

“A Perfect Murder” was released in 1998 starring Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo Mortensen (also a visual artist). It’s loosely based on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film, “Dial-M for Murder”. Directed by Andrew Davis and Writer Frederick Knott (original play), Patrick Smith Kellu (screenplay), the story is one of the oldest in history. Infidelity, jealousy, greed, and millions of dollars set the tone of a sinister plan for murder. But what has drawn me to the movie so many times is actually the perfect movie set packed with art pieces. Love all of them, especially the ones by Viggo himself.

“The Perfect Murder” production designer Philip Rosenberg and set decorator Debra Schutt

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Ivald Granato :: A Multitasking Artist

Ivald Granato: The performer, the visual artist, the sculpturer, the engraver, the vanguard and multitasking artist. For many he is a resteless L’enfant terrible. At the age of 60, he has been active and engaged in the Brazilian and international art scene for the past 40 years. With an endless list of solo shows in Museums and Art Galleries around the globe, he is non stop. For all he has done and for all he has gained, throughout the years, one would guess he ought to rest and live his comfortable life in his amazing house in Brazil or simply spend his money and time traveling around the world. That isn’t far from the truth. However, he has never been able to tame the uncontrollable and restless ranger he actually is. Regardless if he is traveling or is in his sutdio, he is always thinking about new ways of doing things, as well as contradicting the staggered art scene he often calls manipulated and manipulative.

He’s now working on a new show format, actually it’s a 1 day pop-up show where he brings back the flair of the performances he used to do with Helio Otiticica, back in the 70’s and 80’s. It’s called “Parece que foi ontem”, something like ‘It seems like yesterday’.

“When we view Ivald Granato’s paintings, we often get the impression they were made quickly. Some could not have taken more than a day to come to being. That is indeed the truth. They were created in exactly forty years and a day.

Throughout the last forty years, Ivald Granato has been a constant and forceful presence in Brazilian art. During this time he did practically everything an artist can possibly do in the XX and XXI centuries: painting, drawing, sculpture, objects, ceramics, installations, performance, postal art, works in progress, muralism, art books, urban interventions, alternative journalism. It is through such restless and intensely participative activity that one can understand the history of our art simply by observing Granato’s work throughout its course. It is difficult to understand the history of Brazilian art without acknowledging the presence of Ivald Granato.

As an artist, Ivald Granato is gifted with a rare peculiarity. He organizes movement, gesture and energy and his creative process is similar to the result of painting. His ahs a particular method, of energetic impulse and a visceral dive into the construct of the figure. Notice how his figures – the core of his work – convey incessant movement as if the brush had a frenetic life of its own. The figure takes shape without prior drawing, without the need of a single stroke of contour, as it is established by the relationships among the internal pictorial volumes.

Ivald Granato is a gestural artist. Ivald Granato is an artist who immerses himself in the act of creation. For Ivald Granato, the creative gesture is also a body movement, a dance, particular and unique. And paradoxically, Ivald Granato, a member of our vanguard, an icon of the contestation movements and of the pursuit of new languages, is a classicist, given that the manner by which he constructs the figure – through the relationships among internal volumes – is best exemplified by the emblematic work of Paul Cézanne.”

Jacob Klintowitz

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Lucian Freud dies aged 88

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Rediscovered Warhol Self-Portrait Tops Christie’s Contemporary Art Auction

This Andy Warhol self portrait, out of public view since entering a private collection in the mid-1970s, was the top lot in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Christie’s on Feb. 16.   LONDON – An Andy Warhol self portrait, out of public view since entering a private collection in the mid-1970s, was the top lot in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Christie’s on Feb. 16. The sale, in which 92 percent of the lots sold, realized $99,190,888—the highest total for the category in London since June 2008. With buyers from 21 different countries, and more than 160 clients bidding by phone, the breakdown (by lot / by origin) was 51 percent from Europe (including the UK), 40 percent were Americas and 9 percent from Asia. Six artist records were set; for Jenny Saville, Martial Raysse, Miquel Barcelò, Wade Guyton, Ged Quinn and Adriana Varejão. “We saw fierce competition and strong prices for the works of both established artists as well as those from the 21st century; Andy Warhol’s rediscovered self-portrait sold for more than twice our pre-sale expectations for £10.8 million, while a masterpiece by contemporary Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão sold for £1.1 million—nearly four times the high estimate,” said Francis Outred, head of Christie’s Europe’s Post-War and Contemporary Art. “We are particularly pleased to have established a record price for a work by a living French artist with Martial Raysse’s masterpiece ‘L’année dernière à Capri (titre exotique)’ which realized $6.5 million against a pre-sale estimate of $1.6 million – $2.4 million.” Highlights of the sale: • The monumental-scale self-portrait by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) sold for $17,441,892. Recently discovered having been in a private collection since 1974, this previously unpublished work was executed in 1967 and is an addition to a historically important series of 10 self-portraits. It was offered with a presale estimate of $4.8 million to $8 million and was bought by a bidder in the room.   “L’année dernière à Capri (titre exotique)” by Martial Raysse   • “L’année dernière à Capri (titre exotique)” by Martial Raysse (b. 1936) sold for $6,582,372—a world record price for a work by a living French artist. It had a pre-sale estimate of $1.6 million-$2.4 million; proceeds will benefit a charitable Foundation. Painted in 1962, it is an exceptionally early milestone from the early history of Pop Art. It was offered at auction for the first time having been in the same private collection since circa 1975.   “Abstraktes Bild” by Gerhard Richter   • “Abstraktes Bild,” 1990, by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) sold for $5,134,436 against an estimate of $1.6 million-$2.4 million. A mesmerizing work that represents the pinnacle of the artist’s move into abstraction, it was one of four works by the artist offered at this auction, all of which sold.   “Winter Bears” by Jeff Koons   • “Winter Bears,” by Jeff Koons (b. 1955) sold for $4,772,452 (estimate: ($4 million-$5.6 million). Executed in 1988, it is a seminal work from the highly acclaimed “Banality” series, which launched him as an international art star in the late 1980s.   “Concetto spaziale” by Lucio Fontana   • “Concetto spaziale,” 1961, by Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) realized $4,410,468 (estimate: $3.2 million-$4.8 million). A sumptuous symphony of gold, this work is from the artist’s breakthrough series “Olii,” which includes the celebrated Venice series of the same year.   “Parede com Incisões a la Fontana II (Wall with Incisions a la Fontana II) by Adriana Vãrejao   • The auction presented a strong group of global artists from the 21st century. Leading highlights included “Parede com Incisões a la Fontana II (Wall with Incisions a la Fontana II),” 2001, an important masterpiece by Adriana Vãrejao (b. 1964), one of Brazil’s leading contemporary artists. It sold for $1,786,084—far exceeding the estimate of $320,200-$480,300 and setting a record for the artist’s work at auction.   “Grand Timonier” by Yan Pei-Ming   • “Grand Timonier,” by Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming attracted 11 telephone bidders from Europe, America and Asia and sold for $855,268 (estimate: $400,250-$560,350).

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China Police Confine Prominent Artist

By MICHAEL WINES Published: November 5, 2010, The New York Times

BEIJING — A phalanx of Beijing police officers confined the prominent artist and activist Ai Weiwei to his north Beijing home on Friday, a move he suggested came at the behest of unnamed but powerful political figures in Shanghai who feared that he was about to embarrass them.

If so, they were correct.

Mr. Ai had planned to fly to Shanghai on Friday to prepare a Sunday goodbye party at his million-dollar art studio meant to draw attention to its pending destruction. In telephone interviews this week, Mr. Ai said he built the studio only after Shanghai officials, on a campaign to burnish the city’s cultural credentials, implored him to. But in July, they ordered the finished building demolished at the command of anonymous higher-ups.

Mr. Ai’s response was the party, to be attended by eight rock bands and up to a thousand supporters from around China. But on Thursday night, he said, the officers came to his home and asked him not to go to Shanghai.

On Friday, after he said he was going anyway, the officers placed him under house arrest — reluctantly, Mr. Ai said.

“They’re sorry, very sorry,” he said by telephone from his home. “They say they understand me and really agree, but this is really beyond what they can do.”

Mr. Ai said the officers told him that “Shanghai is very nervous” about the party. Like Mr. Ai, however, they did not know precisely who in Shanghai was nervous, or how they managed to arrange his confinement in a city 650 miles away.

Mr. Ai said he did not even know why the unnamed Shanghai officials had ordered his studio demolished, although he had his theories.

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The artist Ai Weiwei inside his ‘Sunflower Seeds’ installation piece at the Tate Modern in London in October. The installation comprises 100 million hand-painted seeds made of porcelain.

This is not the first run-in with the authorities for Mr. Ai, an artistic polymath who seems to be alternately tolerated and hectored by higher-ups. An internationally known sculptor, filmmaker, architect and performance artist, he helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, then renounced his role after deciding that Chinese leaders had politicized the Games.

He was allowed to fly to Munich last year to stage a major exhibit that excoriated the government’s handling of children’s deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Yet months before, he was so severely beaten by the police in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, where he had gone to testify in the trial of a fellow activist, that he needed surgery to drain blood from his brain.

Mr. Ai’s latest run-in with Shanghai officials appears to exemplify that love-hate relationship.

As he tells it, he was approached more than two years ago in Beijing by the mayor of one of Shanghai’s districts — a government unit not unlike an American city ward — and beseeched to build a studio on an abandoned plot of farmland. Initially suspicious — “I told my assistant we’re not going to deal with government anymore,” he said; “there’s no honesty there” — he relented when the mayor flew to Beijing for a personal appeal.

Mr. Ai said he worked closely with the district to rehabilitate an abandoned warehouse on the site, spending about $1 million to create a vast working space fronting on a lake with a sawtoothed roof and sides laced with a concrete grid. Other artists began building their own adjacent studios.

Then last July, as work was wrapping up, there came a city order to tear down the warehouse.

“They said only we received the notice,” he said. “The other artists did not. We said, ‘Why?’ and they said, ‘Well, you should know, because of Ai Weiwei’s activities.’ ”

Which activities offended someone is, of course, not known. But Mr. Ai said he suspected he rankled officials in 2008, when his blogging on the case of Yang Jia, who murdered six Shanghai policemen after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle, created a national sensation. Mr. Yang was later executed. He said that officials also might resent his documentary this year on Feng Zhenghu, a lawyer and activist who spent more than three months in Tokyo’s Narita Airport after Shanghai officials denied him entry to the country.

Whatever the reason, Mr. Ai said, the district official who first recruited Mr. Ai returned to Beijing this week, apologizing profusely and promising to compensate him for the cost of the renovation if he would leave.

“I said, ‘Why? It took so much effort and energy, and you didn’t give us a clear reason,’ ” he said. “But they cannot really answer these questions. So I realize it’s inevitable. They’ll destroy the building.”

At the planned goodbye party for the studio, in lieu of chips and dip, Mr. Ai planned to serve river crabs — a sly reference to the Mandarin word hexie, which means both river crab and harmonious. Among critics of China’s censorship regime, hexie has become a buzzword for opposition to the government’s call to create a harmonious society, free from dissent.

In short order, 800 supporters from across China made plans to attend, and eight bands volunteered to play at the event. “They already call it Woodstock,” he said Wednesday in an interview. “I think it’s nice. It shows a kind of understanding and solidarity.”

On Friday, Mr. Ai said he thought the unnamed Shanghai powers were taken aback by the attention to the demolition and the party and reacted in typical fashion. And by doing so, they created a piece of performance art that called more attention to the embarrassment they were seeking to suppress.

“They put you under house arrest, or they make you disappear,” he said. “That’s all they can do. There’s no facing the issue and discussing it; it’s all a very simple treatment.

“Every dirty job has to be done by the police. Then you become a police state, because they have to deal with every problem.

“I think they hate me,” he said. “But I never imagined they would destroy an entire building.”

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Finding meaning in a Brazilian dump

The film follows the same hypnotic pattern, unafraid to move forward and back, from materials to images and then beyond. “Waste Land” focuses on Muniz’s mission to create art in the largest garbage dump in the world, Jardim Gramacho, which is located in Rio de Janeiro. A place where bodies from surrounding drug wars sometimes end up, the area is as inhospitable as you could imagine. Sifting through the refuse of Brazilian life are hundreds of catadores, or pickers, who make a living gathering recyclables from the vast piles of garbage that arrive every day.

They are a motley crew with personalities and attitudes as varied as the items they pick. There is Tiaõ, president of the Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho, a group that fights for the rights of the pickers. There is Isis, who hates the work and wants a better life. There is Zumbi, who collects discarded books and dreams of setting up a library for the pickers. There are around 1,300 pickers in Jardim Gramacho, but the one surprising thing they all have in common is pride. Whether it is pride at having avoided prostitution or pride at making the best of their poverty or pride at simply supporting their families, the pickers are very proud of what they do, even if they hate it.

The embodiment of this pride is Valter, an elderly man who appears in the film from time to time, dispensing wisdom to his fellow catadores. Valter manages to love what he does and believes that every little action and object is important. A figure in the spirit of Don Quixote, he seeks beauty even in the supreme ugliness of Jardim Gramacho. Muniz takes on a similar mission as he hires a small group of pickers to create murals out of garbage based on photographs of themselves. His ambition is to test the power of art, to introduce these people to another world and to allow them to see themselves in it.

And yet, art has its limits, and that is part of what makes “Waste Land” so fascinating. Is it enough to make art or does the artist bear responsibility for his subjects? How far does the power of art truly extend? Can these questions even be answered?

In “Waste Land,” there are moments of disgust, moments of sadness and sequences of extraordinary exhilaration. After a while, we realize that we are watching something like an expression and examination of the human spirit. And if parts of it are slightly jumbled … well, that’s just life. These people, simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, are what we take from the film more than anything else. “Waste Land” shows us a world and a way of life that we can only begin to imagine. There are materials and images, people and ideas. Pride and despair. Forward and back.

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Modigliani’s $69 Million `Post-Coital’ Nude Lifts Sotheby’s New York Sale

By Lindsay Pollock (NY); and Philip Boroff (NY) for Bloomberg in Nov 3,2010.

An Amedeo Modigliani 1917 nude sold for $68.96 million, a record for the artist, helping Sotheby’s reach its highest total for a New York Impressionist and modern art sale since May 2008.

The auction tallied $227.6 million with commissions, below Sotheby’s top estimate of $266 million, which doesn’t include the buyers’ premiums. That reflected a sober mood in the room brimming with cautious dealers and collectors. A quarter of the offerings failed to sell, including works by Francis Picabia, Joan Miro and Henri Matisse.

“The sale was strong in areas, and weak where it should be,” said London dealer Alan Hobart of Pyms Gallery, who bought Henri Matisse’s bronze “Deux Negresses,” for $8.5 million on behalf of a client.

“Nu assis sur un divan (La Belle Romaine),” a 1917 painting by Amedeo Modigliani. The work may fetch up to $40 million during the Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale on November 2. Photographer: Tom Starkweather/Bloomberg

Modigliani’s “Nu Assis sur un Divan (La Belle Romaine)” was offered early in the 61-lot sale, the first of the two-week New York autumn season. Five phone bidders vied for the work, described in the catalog as a “post-coital rendering.”

“It really set a benchmark,” said dealer David Nash of Mitchell-Innes & Nash. The artist’s previous record was set in June when a limestone bust went for $53 million, blasting past its $7 million estimate.

The sale provided further evidence of fine art’s recovery since the credit crisis. Yesterday, Sotheby’s shares rose $1.88 to $45.12, the highest closing price in almost three years. The New York-based auctioneer is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings tomorrow.

Coveted Nudes

Modigliani nudes are especially coveted. “La Belle Romaine” has an almond-eyed model, head cocked seductively and torso wrapped in white drapery that reveals more than it obscures.

It previously sold at Sotheby’s in 1999 for $16.8 million. The seller then was a member of the Sultan of Brunei’s family, dealers said. Last night it was estimated to fetch about $40 million.

The artist’s last major nude at auction was sold by Las Vegas billionaire Steve Wynn in 2003 at Christie’s International for $26.9 million.

Last night’s sale also saw a pair of paintings offered to benefit nonprofit organization YoungArts, established by the late billionaire Ted Arison. Dealers said the seller was his wife, Marilyn.

One of the works, Claude Monet’s 1917-1919 verdant water lilies painting, fetched $24.7 million. The Arisons acquired the work for $9.9 million in 1998 at Sotheby’s.

Long-Necked Muse

Dealers said Arison also sold Modigliani’s 1917 “Jeanne Hebuterne (Au Chapeau),” a portrait of the artist’s famed long- necked muse, tagged to fetch up to $12 million. It went for $19 million. The Arisons acquired the painting in 1996 at auction for $3.5 million.

Henri Matisse’s flirty 1942 portrait of an Italian countess decked out in a blue tutu, “Danseuse dans le fauteuil, sol en damier,” fetched $20.8 million. The work had appeared twice at auction at Sotheby’s in London in the past decade, fetching $7.5 million in 2000 and $21.7 million in 2007.

Another Matisse, the 1934 portrait of model Titine Trovato that failed to sell at Sotheby’s in November, 2008, against an estimate of $18 million, was offered again last night with a lower estimate of $8 million. It didn’t get a single bid.

Impressionist and modern sales resume tonight at Christie’s with an 85-lot sale slated to total from $199 million to $287 million. Sotheby’s charges buyers 25 percent of the hammer price up to $50,000, plus 20 percent from $50,000 to $1 million, and 12 percent above $1 million.

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International art market news in brief — November 2010

Calligraphy for Qatar, Paris art week proposed for June 2011, Sotheby’s Real Estate opens in Hong Kong, and more

By The Art Newspaper | Web only
Published online 1 Nov 10 (market)

Ali Omar Ermes’s “The Fourth Ode”, est $250,000-$350,000

Calligraphy for Qatar

In a move designed to make in-roads into the Middle Eastern market, Sotheby’s has announced the first sale dedicated to calligraphy to be held by an international auction house. “Hurouf: the Art of the Word”, featuring early Islamic, Ottoman, modern and contemporary calligraphic works, will take place at the Ritz-Carlton Doha hotel in Qatar on 16 December. Items consigned include a gold calligraphic Shamsa by Wazir Arif Kilani, 2003, est $7,000 to $10,000 (pictured); an Ottoman calligraphy with “Ninety-Nine Names of God (Isma Al-Husna)”, signed by Al-Sayyid Muhammad Bahir Bey (calligraphy teacher at the Topkapi Palace), 1859, est $50,000 to $70,000; and Nasrollah Afjei’s oil Untitled, 1972-2008, est $40,000-$50,000. Sotheby’s inaugural series of auctions in Doha early last year were lacklustre; its 18 March contemporary art sale, for instance, made $4.3m in total (est $13.7m-$19.6m). G.H.

A French specialist in corporate coaching is planning a “Paris Art Week” to be held from 10-12 June next year. Pierre Bérend, whose company organises “coaching courses” and has a sideline in buying and selling modern art, launched the project in Paris last month. He hopes to attract 200 to 300 galleries, who would pay from E3,000 to E6,000 to participate. “I will bring in top collectors, museum curators and art lovers,” Bérend told a small meeting of dealers last month. “This year there is a gap between the Venice Biennale vernissage (1-3 June) and the opening of Art Basel (14 June), so…the collectors would love to come to Paris,” he said. G.A.

Sotheby’s Real Estate opens in Hong Kong

Sotheby’s International Realty, which sells luxury residential property, has opened an office in Hong Kong, which it launched in conjunction with Sotheby’s October auctions in the city. The firm has several international offices, including in Singapore and Thailand, but Hong Kong is its first foray into China. “Hong Kong is a critical component of our growth plans across Asia,” Michael R. Good, the chief executive officer at Sotheby’s International Realty, said in a statement. One of the properties on its books is No 32 Stanley Village Road, a four-house development complete with swimming pools and lifts, selling for $103m. Sotheby’s no longer owns the real estate firm, but has a licensing agreement with Realogy Corporation, an international realtor, to use its name. M.G.

Michael Kohn celebrates 25th anniversary

Los Angeles gallerist Michael Kohn is looking back on 25 years in the business this month with a special anniversary exhibition focusing on artists he has worked with over the last quarter century including Warhol, Basquiat and Keith Haring. Kohn staged a Warhol show in November 1986—just months before the artist’s death. It was the first time the dealer had mounted a major show by a well-known artist, and he says he had to beg friends to buy the paintings for just $6,000. On the day of Warhol’s death, the same paintings were going for $18,000 and up. “The 25th Anniversary Show” opens on 19 November and runs until 1 January. K.A.

A fresh start for Eastern European galleries

One of Poland’s most established galleries, Raster, will close its existing space in Warsaw next month, with the intention of moving to a new venue early next year. “We would like to have a space that is better prepared for bigger solo projects and curated shows,” said Lukasz Gorczyca, the co-director of Raster. “Technically, the old space is not functional anymore—there is a lack of exhibition and storage space, and the condition of the whole building is getting worse and worse.” Gorczyca, together with business partner Michal Kaczynski, is negotiating with the city of Warsaw, who control many of Warsaw’s rental properties, to find a new space. Meanwhile, one of Romania’s top galleries, H’art, is in the process of relocating from its premises in central Bucharest to a five-room apartment. H’art will use the apartment as a “bureau” for staging private viewings, with full-scale exhibitions to be staged in temporary venues across the city. Among the artists represented by H’art is the formerly homeless Ion Barladeanu whose satirical collages date back to the 1980s. R.U.

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While the US and Europe face a test, Asia rockets towards recovery

The barometer for the global art market may no longer be New York’s autumn sales, but rather what is happening in Hong Kong and Beijing

By Anders Petterson | Web only
Published online 28 Oct 10

Poly’s spring auctions set a record

The speed of the recovery in the US and European contemporary art market has levelled out. After experiencing strong growth in the first half of 2010, early signs that the market is slowing again were evident in the London contemporary evening auction sales in June, which for the first time since the start of the downturn, fell 6.5% short of the low estimate. The weaker than expected results were brought about by a combination of post-Art Basel fatigue and aggressive estimates, coupled with heightened uncertainty around the brewing sovereign debt crisis.

Despite the wobble before the summer, the contemporary art market kicked off the autumn season with a confident, within-estimate sale from the Lehman corporate collection at Sotheby’s in New York, which partly quelled some of the worries about a possible “double-dip” scenario.

The mood was cautious going into Frieze Art Fair in London in early October, but solid demand during the opening days of the fair gave the primary market a welcome confidence boost and also provided support for auctions later in the week. The evening auction sales raised a total of £33.2m against a pre-sale estimate of £32.4m-£45.8m. But despite the total barely reaching the lower estimate, the results for Christie’s and Phillips de Pury (Sotheby’s didn’t organise an evening sale last autumn) were up by 74% and 29% respectively from October 2009. However, the ArtTactic Auction Indicator, analysing the relationship between the hammer price and the estimate, has been in negative territory since May 2010, suggesting that sellers’ expectations have become too high in the last two auction seasons.

The upcoming sales in New York will provide a better picture of the actual state of the recovery, as both auction houses are putting a large number of high quality works by Rothko, Lichenstein and Warhol on the block. The total average pre-sale estimate for Christie’s and Sotheby’s evening sales is $467m, 27% higher than the total value achieved in May 2010, and 158% higher than November last year. The strength of the 2010 recovery has so far been underpinned by rare works of art with important provenance—the question is whether the market is strong enough to digest so many of them.

Despite the revival of the financial services industry, Europe and US are facing difficult times ahead. And although the wealthiest segments of our society will easily stomach the severe cuts in public spending, the general economic uncertainty could be enough to halt the recovery process. ArtTactic’s latest confidence survey in June 2010 showed that 69% of the respondents felt that the economy was the biggest threat to the current art market.

There is also a moral or ethical dimension to buying art at auction these days. And although the market does not lack buyers who can afford buying art at the high end, the question is about appropriateness, and whether it sends the right signals in the current environment. The strong positive signalling effect that art buying has had for the emerging new class of wealth in the recent years could instead become a signal of ignorance, decadence and greed.

Whilst the Western economies are struggling many of the larger emerging markets are still growing at neck breaking speed. China and India are both forecasted to grow close to 10% in 2010, closely followed by Brazil’s 7.5%. China also became the second largest economy in the world this year.

As a result of the changing world economic order the global art market could also be on the verge of a structural geographical shift, mainly towards the East. Recent Sotheby’s auctions in Hong Kong supports this thesis, when a jam-packed week of auction sales raised a record $400m—the highest ever for a sales season in Hong Kong.

Another interesting aspect is what is happening in mainland China. Despite Sotheby’s and Christie’s domination of the international trade in Chinese art, it’s the local auction houses such as Poly and Guardian that are experiencing the strongest growth.

Although the main growth has been in the traditional collecting categories such as Chinese ceramics and antiquities, as well classical Chinese paintings, the Chinese contemporary art market is currently experiencing a rapid recovery towards 2007 levels. Again, domestic players, such as Poly Auction, are showing strong commitment to this collecting category. In Spring 2010, Poly Auction achieved a turnover of $22.6m for contemporary Chinese art, which was 45% higher than Christie’s and 57% higher than Sotheby’s.

Whilst major sale records used to be achieved in Hong Kong, this year has shown the strength of the domestic collector base, and the ability of domestic auction houses to attract top quality consignments. Poly Auction’s spring sales (all categories) from 2010 became the highest ever grossing auction season in mainland China. The total of $497m was significantly higher than Christie’s Hong Kong ($297m) and Sotheby’s Hong Kong ($257m) and shows a clear indication of the strength of mainland Chinese buyers.

Depending on what happens this month, the barometer for the global art market may no longer be the historically important New York autumn sales, but rather what is happening in Hong Kong and Beijing.

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Off Bienal 4 :: SP

By Tim Lopreste

From October 26th until November 27th, a group of 65 Contemporary Brazilian artists will have nearly 124 works displayed at Galeria de Arte Cidade Jardim, in São Paulo. The group show, called “Off Bienal 4”, raises attention to a top-notch art production that was left aside from the official São Paulo Biennial (the 29^th edition), during its opening last month. The exhibition is also a homage to its creator, Carlos von Schmidt (1930-2010). Mr. von Schimdt himself curated 2 previous São Paulo Biennials. He is highly regarded as one of the most influential art critics in Brazil of all times. Feeling that the official São Paulo Biennial had lost the concept of displaying the real art “production”, as well as no longer generating a timeline in art history, Carlos von Schimdt ventured in launching the Off Biennial as part of the Official art calendar in São Paulo City.The first one took place in 1996 at MuBE (Museu Brasilerio de Escultura), ten years later the second one took place at the same location. This year, Sonia Skroski, who worked with him for almost twenty years, is in charge of putting together the Off Bienal 4 with the help of artists Neno Ramos and Duda Rosa.

Jose Roberto Aguilar                                                       Fernando Ferreira de Araujo

Eliza Ramos                                                                                 Cris Campana

Invited Artists participating in the event:

Alessandro Giusbertti : Alex Orsetti : Alina Fonteneau : André Crespo : Andre Vasahrelyi : Anita Kaufman : Antonio Miranda : Antonio Peticov : Argênide : Caciporé Torres : Camila Pallavicini : Carla Petrini : Cássio Lázaro : Claudio Takita : Cleber Machado : Cristina Campana : Dácio Bicudo : Duda Rosa : Eduardo Lima : Eliza Ramos : Erico Santos : Fausto Chermont : Fernanda Eva : Fernando Durão : Fernando Ferreira de Araujo : Fernando Stickel : Gregório Gruber : Guilherme de Faria : Gustavo Rosa : Guto Lacaz : Heloize Rosa : Ivald Granato : José Roberto Aguilar : Ju Corte Real : Juan Esteves : Lorena Hollander : Luana Taylor : Luiz Cavali : Luiz Paulo Baravelli : Maramgoní : Marcelo Neves : Marcelo Paciornik : Marco Stellato : Margarita Farré : Margherita Leoni : Mello Pinto : Neno Ramos : Osmar Beneson : Paulo Queiróz : Raquel Taraborelli : Regiane Cayre : Regina de Barros : Roberto Silva : Ronaldo Calixto : Sergio Ferro : Sérgio Mancini : Silvia Titotto : Siron Franco : Sonia Menna Barreto : Sonia Von Bruscky : Sou Kit Gon : Tania Boutaud de la Combe : Vera Café : Walmir Teixeira

OFF BIENAL 4
GALERIA DE ARTE CIDADE JARDIM
Avenida dos Tajurás, 236 | Morumbi
SP - SP - Phone. 2359-1402
Opening: October 26th, 2010 at 8PM
Closing: November 27th, 2010
Working hours:

From Monday to Tuesday - 11AM to 8PM
Saturdays: 11AM to 3PM

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Pinault Browses Art Fair

By Scott Reyburn, Paris :: Via Mark Beech, Bloomberg

French billionaire Francois Pinault and singer Lenny Kravitz browsed France’s largest art fair, where a $2.8 million Lucio Fontana work was among the few early big-ticket sales.

Pinault, the owner of Christie’s International, “Leon” lead actor Jean Reno, Miami collectors Don and Mira Rubell and New York-based adviser Kim Heirston were among the invited visitors to the 114 dealers’ booths at FIAC, or the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, in Paris’s Grand Palais. Many wealthy buyers were hesitating, reflecting a sober mood in strike-bound France, said exhibitors.

“It’s a little quieter than last year,” the New York- based Per Skarstedt said in an interview at the Oct. 20 preview. “Maybe some people have been scared away by the strikes. We’ve done OK, though, with smaller things.” Skarstedt said he had sold five pieces by the early evening of the VIP day, ranging in price from $150,000 to $350,000.

FIAC — which features a further 81 galleries at an annex in the Cour Carree of the Louvre — comes a week after the Frieze Art Fair in London. There dealers spoke of a slow recovery in the contemporary art market, with many sales at post-boom price levels.

The Paris show coincided with nationwide French strikes against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age. Preview attendance was 21,608 people, 8 percent up on last year, the organizers said.

“Slug,” by Anish Kapoor. The 20-foot work is priced at 1.8 million pounds. Photographer: Charles Duprat/Kemel Mennourvia Bloomberg

“Untitled #132,” an artist’s-proof photograph by Cindy Sherman. The work sold for $250,000 at the New York-based Skarstedt Gallery at the preview of the FIAC art fair in Paris on Oct. 20. Source: Skarstedt Gallery via Bloomberg

Aluminum sculptures by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. The works were sold by the Paris dealer Natalie Seroussi during the preview of the FIAC art fair in Paris. Both dating from the 1960s, they were sold to a French collector for about 700,000 euros each. Source: Natalie Seroussi via Bloomberg

“Large Head #2 Original,” by Thomas Houseago. The work sold at the booth of the Brussels-based dealer Xavier Hufkens during the preview of the FIAC art fair in Paris, which previewed on Oct. 20. It sold to the French collector Steve Rosenblum for $80,000. Source: Xavier Hufkens Gallery via Bloomberg

Cindy’s Cigarette

As at Frieze, buyers chose items priced at $500,000 or less. The 1984 Cindy Sherman photo “Untitled #132,” showing the artist brandishing a beer and a cigarette, sold for $250,000, said Skarstedt. His most expensive work — the 1994 Richard Prince painting, “Anyone Can Find Me,” — had yet to find a buyer at $1.8 million by the end of the second day.

Among the other high-value items yet to attract firm offers were Anish Kapoor’s unique 20-foot-wide snake sculpture, “Slug,” dating from 2009, offered by Paris dealer Kamel Mennour for 1.8 million pounds ($2.8 million); the Takashi Murakami figure, “Kiki,” offered by fellow Paris trader Paolo Vedovi at $1.6 million; and a painting by Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell, dating from 1958, at $4.5 million with New York dealers Cheim & Read.

“People used to drop $2 million at a fair without thinking,” Adam Sheffer, a Cheim & Reid director, said in an interview. “Now that doesn’t happen anymore. They take longer to take negotiate. We’ve lost the buyers and the collectors have returned.” The gallery had sold a smaller Mitchell canvas, priced at $450,000, to a South American collector, Sheffer said.

Basquiat Sale

Collectors were also taking their time on the booth of New York dealer Christophe Van de Weghe. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1984 painting, “Desmond,” and the 1956 Alexander Calder mobile, “Lune Blanche,” marked at $2.8 million and $2.9 million respectively, were still available last night. Van de Weghe had, however, sold the 1987 Basquiat acrylic and oil word painting, “The Whole Livery Line,” to a U.S. client for $1.1 million.

“Because of Gagosian opening in Paris, there are definitely more Americans around this year,” Gaia Donzet, head of the Paris branch of the Italian dealers Tornabuoni Art, said in an interview. A four-slash red Fontana “Concetto Spaziale” from 1966 sold a U.S. collector on the second day for 2 million euros ($2.8 million), Donzet said.

Sculptures by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark were among the few works attracting early sales of more than $500,000.

In April, a 1960 Neo-Concretist aluminum “Bicho” sculpture by Clark sold for a record 367,250 pounds at Phillips de Pury & Co’s BRIC auction in London, underlining collectors‘ growing focus on the neglected field of contemporary Latin American art.

French Collector

Four more “Bicho” pieces from the 1960s were offered at the booth of the Paris dealer Natalie Seroussi. Two sold to a French collector during the morning of the preview for about 700,000 euros each, Seroussi said.

More than a third of the galleries at the event are based in France.

“The fair is very French,” the New York and Sao Paolo- based private dealer Andrew Terner said in an interview. “Paris has been struggling to find a place in the international art world. FIAC keeps the city in the game.”

New works by younger international sculptors with growing reputations continue to attract collectors. A unique 5-foot-high head by the British, Los Angeles-based artist Thomas Houseago priced at $80,000 was one of 15 sales made by the Brussels-based dealer Xavier Hufkens during the early hours of the preview in the $10,000 to $100,000 range.

Rosenblum Foundation

It was bought by the Paris-based collector Steve Rosenblum, whose foundation opens to the public this week. FIAC, unlike Frieze, includes dealers who specialize in early 20th-century art.

Last year’s FIAC tried a “Modern Project” section with dealers offering 24 museum-quality 20th-century works priced as much as $40 million. The innovation didn’t result in any publicly confirmed sales during the fair and wasn’t repeated. This year, dealers in modern art were vastly outnumbered. The 63 galleries exhibiting at FIAC for the first time or returning were dominated by specialists in contemporary works.

For many visitors, the modernist masterpiece of the 2010 fair is Max Beckmann’s 1934 portrait of his lover Hildegard Melms, or “Naila.” Shown by the Bern dealers, Galerie Henze & Ketterer, it is priced at 19 million euros and attracted a reserve before arriving in Paris.

“FIAC is different from Frieze,” Markus Rischgasser, director of the Zurich-based Galerie Eva Presenhuber, said in an interview. “In London, it’s all about the rush of collectors on the first and second days, and then you’re left with a crowded tent. Here you see serious people throughout the fair, and they take their time.”

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Humanscapes :: by Brazilian artist Fernando Ferreira de Araujo

The Brazilian contemporary artist Fernando Ferreira de Araujo is having a solo art show, Humanscapes, at the Brazilian Post Office Cultural Center - Centro Cultural Correios. The Brazilian Post Office Cultural Center is located in Recife City, the capital of Pernambuco state, at Av. Marquês de Olinda, 262. The exhibit will be on from October 20th to November 28th, 2010. The Cultural Center is open from Tuesday to Friday, from 9AM to 6PM and Saturdays and Sundays from 10AM to 6PM.

As the title of the show suggests, the works displayed on the show find the human figure as a starting point. He seeks new ways of expressing the figure, deconstructing the form while increasing its prominence in each piece. He fuses and equates an organic world with the pulsating life inherent in it. The compositional integration of the form into the surrounding environment is heightened by his use of light and dark. The intensity of his brushstroke guides the eye and creates a larger gesture and sense of movement. While looking at Ferreira de Araujo´s body of work we tend to relate it to “Modern Painters” by John Ruskin (1843-60). In his five volume work, Ruskin wrote of the poetic practice of ascribing human characteristics, such as emotions, feelings and sensations, to inanimate objects or to nature.

Fernando Ferreira de Araujo’s series of paintings, are both evocative of and inspired by the nature and the cosmopolitan life he experienced in his native Brazil, and those he continues to explore as a prolific artist while in New York. His loose painterly brushwork captures the changing moods of the natural world and his inner, psychic response to it. Formed and re-formed through color and tone, shapes shift, billow and blend. Light is reflected and refracted. Atmosphere comes alive, and is both sober and sensuous. The hallmark dripping of paint describes the continual evolving state of distortion that leads to an extremely captivating asymmetrical work. Reminiscent of the abstract expressionists, these paintings allow the viewer to form their own associations and subjective relationship to the images.”Ferreira de Araujo feels he needs to destroy defined lines and shapes. He needs to reach an unpredictable terrain, the thrill of the unknown.

SOLO SHOW: “HUMANSCAPES”
ARTIST: FERNANDO FERRERIA DE ARAÚJO
CURATOR: RAUL CÓRDULA
VENUE: CENTRO CULTURAL CORREIOS
AV. MARQUÊS DE OLINDA, 262 - RECIFE ANTIGO - RECIFE - PE
WEDNESDAY: 20.10.2010 - 7-10PM

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The It curators: A new breed of young socialites are selling art

They’re young, well-connected and passionate about art. Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, crown prince of the glamorous ‘gallerists’, talks to Charlotte Philby

Saturday, 16 October 2010

Once, the chances of a 25-year-old man – even if he was well-connected and stylishly-dressed – forging a successful career on the international art circuit were slim. The world of buying and selling sculpture and painting was a stuffy club reserved for an elite few with qualifications in History of Art from hallowed institutions. But times have changed.

Having survived the recession (so far), the contemporary art market continues to fuel a glamorous intercontinental scene that makes stars not just of its artists, but of collectors, gallerists and dealers: think of tycoon-collector François Pinault, or dealers and gallerists like Jay Jopling, Larry Gagosian and Charles Saatchi. An intoxicating blend of money, creativity and glitz is producing wave after wave of ambitious young art-mad socialites, many of whom aren’t just buying the stuff, but turning their largely untrained hands to curating, dealing and nurturing artists.

One of the best-connected is Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld. If part of his surname sounds faintly familiar, that’s because he is the son of Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue. Born and raised in a smart Paris suburb, he moved to America to study at the age of 17; eight years on, he is a fully-fledged art curator. This week, he is part of the contemporary art circus descending on London, as he shows the works of the painter Nicholas Pol at the Old Dairy in east London. Good-looking, well-connected and charming, Restoin-Roitfeld is the apotheosis of a type now teeming the art world: the “It” curator.

Paolo Verzone

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Eduardo Berliner

Biography

by Fiammetta Griccioli (study tour Brazil)

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Latin American artists put on strong show during Frieze week

Seven galleries from South and Central America at the main fair as interest in region’s art grows

By Charlotte Burns | From Frieze daily edition, 13 Oct 10
Published online 13 Oct 10

Cuban Los Carpinteros’ “Reading Room”, 2010, at Fortes Vilaca (E8) (Photo: Sara Eckholm)

LONDON. While Europe and the US are still licking their wounds from the downturn, the energetic scene in Latin America is “charming the pants off the international art world,” says New York gallerist and blogger Edward Winkleman. Last month the Pompidou Centre created a Latin American acquisitions committee, while the Lyon Biennale appointed an Argentinean curator, Victoria Noorthoorn, for its 2011 edition. The Istanbul Biennale will be co-curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, while the Arco art fair in Madrid has announced a three-year focus on Latin American galleries.

Even London, not particularly known for its Latin American links, has been struck by the fiesta feel: seven Latin American galleries are showing here at Frieze, including Fortes Vilaça (E8) with Los Carpinteros’ Reading Room, 2010 (priced €125,000). Latin American artists are on show across the fair: Marian Goodman’s Gabriel Orozco display (F16) includes Right Couple, 2010, at $20,000, Richard Ingleby (E17) is showing works by newly signed artist Iran do Espírito Santo, including Red Bulb 2, 2009, for $15,000, while the Deutsche Bank lounge has a dedicated Orozco display.

Slow build

Outside the fair, smokers can stub out cigarettes on Gabriel Kuri’s Frieze project commission—ashtrays; while Mexican artist Damián Ortega—whose installation Alma Mater, 2008, is at Kurimanzutto (D4) for $160,000—opens a new commission at the Barbican this Friday and Stephen Friedman (D5) has a Beatriz Milhazes exhibition in its London space.

“There’s a long tradition of important art in Latin America that we’ve only just begun to digest. It’s been a slow build, rather than a hot trend,” says gallerist Marc Foxx (B6), showing Argentinean artist Amalia Pica. The artist, who says there is a “huge internal and external dialogue right now,” is also showing Unintentional Monument, 2010, at Amsterdam gallery Diana Stigter (F25), priced between €4,000 and €7,000, and Dialogue (Paper and Mountain), 2010, for €7,000.

“The art has always been fantastic, but the market has caught up now,” says Frieze co-director Matthew Slotover.

“Museum curators and acquisition committees are going after art production—and there is no way you can ignore the lower end of the Americas nowadays,” says Eliana Finkelstein, from Galeria Vermelho (H8), where Rosângela Rennó’s Venetian Tour Scrapbook, 2009-10, is on show at £9,600.

Pilar Corrias (G14) is showing works by Brazilian artist Tunga in her gallery, including Untitled, 2008, for $75,000. Corrias says: “The economy is booming, there is a rich history of contemporary art, and the art market is becoming much more active.”

London’s hub status

More democratic politics have helped drive the dialogue, too. “Latin America has a tradition of producing art, but it was dimmed by conflicting governments. There is now a more established government, economy and society—which is reflected in the interest in the art,” says Rodrigo Editore from Brazil’s Casa Triângulo (F26), where works include Mariana Palma’s Untitled, 2010, for $35,000.

London seems an unlikely place to sell Latin American art—Britain has fewer historical links with South America than some other territories—but gallerists say interest is growing. “It’s getting better every year. London is a hub,” says Marcio Botner, director of Rio-based gallery A Gentil Carioca (E13), where the artist Lourival Cuquinha will stage a performance, The Jack Pound Financial Art Project, today at 3pm.

“London is one of our biggest collecting bases. People are starting to realise how influential the artists there have been,” says Alison Jacques (D17), whose booth features Lygia Clark sculptures from 1959 to 1964, priced between €180,000 and €460,000, as well as wall-based Hélio Oiticica studies from 1957-59, priced between €80,000 and €150,000. Kate MacGarry (E11)—showing Tiago Carneiro Da Cunha in her London gallery, priced from £3,500 to £10,000—says there are now lots of collectors in Europe and America that are exploring the scene.

Some of the greatest activity is coming from Brazil, where the economy is predicted to grow by 7% this year. More money means more galleries can show at fairs abroad, collectors can influence the market and curators and artists are in better positions to promote the work. “With a more globalised art community, Latin American curators and critics [are taking] up key positions in museums, biennials and galleries in traditional art capitals,” says Silas Marti, critic at Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo.

Back to the 60s

“It’s not an explosion [but] a growing, honest interest—which is much more healthy,” says São Paulo collector Jay Khalifeh.

The interest isn’t without historical precedent, says Isobel Whitelegg, director of curating at the Chelsea College of Art. “There was a real surge of interest around Latin American art in the 1960s. Lots of artists moved abroad because of political difficulties, and opened up new dialogues. That story needs to be amplified.”

Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, director of the Cisneros Foundation, agrees, but says: “The scale has changed—there is so much more interaction between the different sectors now—it has built up and is much more solid now.”

Perhaps the greatest incentive has been museum interest. “What’s more important than the economy is the international recognition of our artists,” says Brazilian gallerist Luisa Strina (F14), who founded her gallery in 1974 and is exhibiting at Frieze for the seventh time with works including Mateo Lopez’s Changing Matter, 2010, for $20,000.

Museums collecting

Collector Anibal Jozami, who is on the new Pompidou acquisitions board, agrees: “Museums started to realise that their collections were not complete without our art.”

The Tate is one of the biggest drivers. It has staged shows including Cildo Meireles in 2008 and will open a Gabriel Orozco exhibition, on tour from MoMA, next January. A quarter of all works in the Tate collection made by artists born after 1985 are from Latin America—more than North America (24%). Now in its eighth year, the Tate’s Latin American acquisitions committee is one of the world’s largest, numbering over 40 members. “We wanted a broader view of contemporary art—but how do you begin? Latin America made a lot of sense because there is a history of ties with Europe and North America,” says Tate curator Tanya Barson.

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Top 10 things to see during Frieze week in London (with videos)

Fired up by the 2010 Frieze Art Fair, London’s the place to be this weekend for lovers of art. No matter what your taste, the UK capital is sure to have something for every art fan. Museums, galleries, auction houses, fairs and art institutions are rolling out the red carpet to coincide with Europe’s biggest commercial art fair.

Here’s our top 10:

1) Frieze Art Fair: Taking first place is the annual fair, back again at Regent’s Park for 2010 — and this time it’s bigger than ever. “Frieze Art Fair messes with your head. There’s so much to see, not only in the tents but outside them too,” said White Cube curator Tim Marlow, in an interview with The Independent. “The London art world has crystallised around the idea that you save your best work for Frieze week. It’s shifted the calendar, and there’s now a labyrinth of activity going on around the fair. All of the major institutions time their openings to coincide with it.” We couldn’t agree more, which is why the Frieze Art Fair tops our list at number one.

This year, the highly-anticipated event will showcase works from over 1,000 emerging and established artists from across the globe. 2010’s Frieze features an unprecedented 173 galleries from 29 different countries exhibiting their art on the park’s fairgrounds. Frieze will offer an estimated $375 million of artworks to browse, according to insurer Hiscox.

So what are some of this year’s Frieze Projects highlights? To name a few, the fair’s ticket tent will be styled like a mobile phone concept store; spirit mediums will channel the souls of a number of dead artists; outdoor ashtrays will transform into elegant sculptures, and artist-designed donation boxes will be spread out across the grounds. This year the exhibition includes a special project featuring nine site-specific works — all relating to some aspect of performativity — from artists such as Annika Ström, Gabriel Kuri and Jeffrey Vallance (read our interview with Frieze Curator Sarah McCrory who was in charge of the project).

Other events to look out for at Frieze? Be sure to check out the return of Frame - a program started at last year’s Frieze — which highlights galleries under six years old; Frieze Music, Film, Talks; and an exhibition by 2010 Cartier Award winner Simon Fujiwara.

2) Sattelite Fairs: Orbiting around the famous Frieze are some sensational satellite fairs, such as the Multiplied Contemporary Editions Fair and The Moniker International Art Fair. Initiated by the preeminent auction house Christie’s in order to “promote emerging talent in two and three-dimensional contemporary editions,” Multiplied is a conglomerate fair that incorporates works from 39 different galleries, including White Cube, London ICA, and Emin International. For a more urban feel, Moniker is the “fairest of them all” with regards to “the finer side of the street art movement.” Featuring stellar street-art all-stars like Ben Eine and Steve Powers, with works from some of the top galleries in the street-art scene (Carmichael Gallery, Black Rat Press, Choque Cultural), Moniker is sure to please. In addition, returning to Mayfair for the 4th year, the Pavilion of Art & Design London will bring together exceptional works of Modern Art, Design, Decorative Arts, Photography, Jewellery and Tribal Art from 1860 to today from over 50 exhibitors.

3) Ai Weiwei, Tate Modern: The floor of the gallery’s vast Turbine Hall has been covered with 100 million porcelain seeds in a new installation by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. It’s an interactive experience as visitors are encouraged to pick them up and crunch them underfoot. Perhaps best known for his grand-scale installation pieces, Weiwei is the first Asian artist to be commissioned for a project at Turbine Hall. The seeds will form a carpet, eight inches thick. The tiny pieces of porcelain, handmade by labourers in China, were brought to Britain last week. Here’s a slideshow and a video follows:

4) Exhibtion #3 at The Museum of Everything: Touted in 2009 as one of the best new additions to the “Frieze season,” curator Peter Blake has once again organized a show featuring unique works from quirky to kitsch to just plain weird. This year, Blake showcases outsider art, including pieces from his own collection. Featured fare includes Shirley Temple dolls and Victorian Taxidermy, as well as lectures from artists Jeremy Deller and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

5) Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery: Fall got you feeling like dancing? Check out Move, which explores the relationship between movement and visual arts. The Show’s highlights include interactive pieces, such as Isaac Julien’s ‘Ten Thousand Waves’, a nine-screen video installation shot in China and featuring Maggie Cheung, and the captivating (and fun!) ‘The Fact of Matter’, by American dancer William Forsythe. Forsythe’s installation challenges visitors to cross the gallery without touching the floor, using 200 gymnastics rings suspended from the ceiling.

6) Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals, National Gallery: Coming in at number six is the highly-anticipated Venice: Canaletto and His rivals. Breaking waves (or leaves?) this fall is the National Gallery’s exquisite array of works lauding the much-beloved city on the water. In an unparalleled collection of Ventetian scenes, this show is expected to be a blockbuster. Featured are the celebrated gondolas, canals, and bridges captured on canvas by Canaletto and his rivals.

7) Auctions: As thousands of dealers come to town, all major auction houses are set to hold their slew of events. Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale is set to fetch over £22 million, including I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds by Damien Hirst that could realize up to £3.5 million. Another major sale at King Street is The Italian Sale, which hopes to realize over £20 million. Sotheby’s corresponding sales are set to fetch £13.6 million and £16.9 million, respectively. Phillips de Pury’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale will offer 56 lots for a total of £9.6 million as Autumn Pool (Paper Pool 29) by David Hockney is the top lot against a high estimate of £1 million. Click here to explore the auctions.

8 ) Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works, Hauser & Wirth: Before her death last year, Louise Bourgeois was working on this project, now showcasing at Hauser & Wirth’s new Savile Row location. While the show has four larger sculptures - including her infamous 2003 creepy crawler ‘Crouching Spider,’ the majority of the works featured are a departure from her larger installations. A life-long hoarder of clothes and household items such as tablecloths, napkins and bed linen, from the mid-90s Bourgeois cut up and re-stitched these, transforming her lived materials into art.

9) Marina Abramovi? at Lisson Gallery: Performance Artist Marina Abramovic will be showcasing her body of work for the first time at Lisson Gallery. The exhibit will display her physical and cerebral artistic endeavors over the past three decades, across both gallery spaces. Hailed by some as one of the foremost “defining artists of radical performance,” Abramovic will also be speaking at the Tate Moderns’s Talking Art series on Oct. 16th.

10) Tatiania Trouvé at South London Gallery: Works on canvas hang on walls adorned with burn marks; wax bags are suspended from ceilings by copper threads. For her exhibit at the SLG — the artist’s first major solo show in the UK — Trouvé literally brings to life the drawings from her most recent artist’s book, giving them new dimensions. At the SLG, both the artist’s designs from the book and the architecture of the space itself are transformed in tandem, while still maintaining their original features. At Trouve’s show, the visitor transforms as well — from passive viewer to active participant. Read our interview with the artist/a> about the show.

Well, turns out 10 is just not enough to cover it.. be sure to also check out James Turrell at Gagosian, Gauguin at Tate, Christian Marclay at White Cube, Damián Ortega at The Barbican and Anish Kapoor’s giant sculptures at The Royal Parks.

What is else is going on in the London art scene? Click here to find out

Written by MutualArt.com staff

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The 100 Brazilians who made it in New York :: 2010

Airam da Silva :: Alberty Levy :: Alexandre Bueno de Moraes :: Ana Oliveira :: Alex Ibrahim :: Alessandra Ambrosio :: Alexandre Thumlert :: Antonio Hasslauer da Costa :: Aparecida Texeira :: Arthur Mattos Casas :: Bebel Gilberto :: Béco Dranoff :: Camila Rosas Tarik :: Carlos Falchi :: Carlos Guimarães :: Carlos Junqueira :: Carlos Miele :: Carlos Saldanha :: Carlos Souza :: Casio Antonio Calil :: Claudine DeNiro :: Cláudio Mascarenhas :: Cristiana Mascarenhas :: Daniel Urzedo :: Daniela Rebouças Atwell :: Edilberto Mendes :: Eliane Elias :: Elma Reis :: Fernanda Lacerda :: Fernanda Motta :: Fernando Ferreira de Araujo :: Fernando Milani :: Fernando Tormena :: Francisco Costa :: Frederico Sève :: Frederico Wagner :: Gandja Monteiro :: Geová Rodrigues :: Giovanni Bianco :: Gisele Bündchen :: Gustavo Chácra ::Guto Barra :: Hélio de Souza :: Hsiang Jih Chen :: Janea Padilha :: Jyama Cardoso :: Jelon Vieira :: João de Matos :: João Paulo Rodrigues :: Jonas Rabinovitch :: Jorge Pontual :: Joseph Cohen :: Jupira Lee :: Jussara Korngold :: Jussara Lee :: Karin Dauch :: Karine Basílio :: Kellen Mori :: Leandro Carvalho :: Leona Forman :: Lily Gabriela :: Lorenzo Martone :: Lucas Mendes :: Luciana Curtis :: Luiz Ribeiro :: Malu MIllerman :: Marcelo Hallake :: Marcelo Gomes :: Marcelo Zarvos :: Márcia Grostein :: Marcelo Baptista :: Marcos Cohen :: Marcus Magarian :: Marcus Vinícius Ribeiro :: Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti :: Marjorie Andrade :: Martha Friedlander :: Michele Levy :: Oscar Metsavaht :: Osmar Chohif :: Patricia Cavalcanti Lobaccaro :: Paulo Szot :: Paulo Vieira da Cunha :: Pedro Andrade :: Rafael Azzi :: Raphael Mendonça :: Renato Almeida :: Richard Machado :: Roberta Mazzariol :: Sandra Alvim :: Sergio de Queiroz Duarte :: Sergio Esteves :: Sergio Millerman :: Simoni Morato :: Tania Cypriano :: Tania Menai :: Vik Muniz :: Walter Camassetto :: Yula Rocha ::Zeze Calvo

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Why pop-ups pop up everywhere

By Kira Cochrane :: The Guardian, Tuesday 12 October 2010

Article history

Temporary shops and restaurants were once a way for artists to subvert empty urban spaces. Now, they’re just as likely to be part of a corporate marketing strategy

A vintage pop-up market in Brick Lane, east London. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

In a dark, dank nightclub beneath some railway arches, with the clatter and chug of trains overhead, I am having a minor Proustian moment. This London club was last open in the late 1990s, and its smell sends me straight back to that era, my student days: to Britpop and Blur, late-teenage clinches, 70p for a vodka and Coke. The aroma is strong, sour, specific, but it won’t linger here for very much longer.

Over the last few weeks this long-abandoned club has been taken over by a group of young event organisers for an ambitious, 99-day pop-up project called Counter Culture. The programme will deliver photographers and DJs, comedians and poets, art exhibitions and parties, a different lineup each night, spiriting this sprawling, downtrodden building straight into the 21st century. One of the four organisers, 23-year-old Lee Denny, meets me at the door, apologises for his moustache (”I’m not trying to look cool, I promise”) and shows me around the venue he first discovered when he came to an underground party here.

Denny has some experience of pop-ups: five years ago, he started his own small music festival, LeeFest, in his back garden, and he still runs it each summer, albeit from a larger venue. He leads me into the smaller of the club’s two main rooms, kitted out with old, over-stuffed sofas and a much more expertly stuffed fox head. The artist responsible for the fox only works with roadkill, says Denny, and he’s particularly excited about a live taxidermy workshop she’s going to be running.

We move on through a small changing room, where a pair of grubby grey y-fronts hangs from a high ledge, and out to the main stage. On the opening night, in late September, the club filled up with 980 people, “and musicians kept arriving,” says Denny, “people who remembered the place, and had heard about what we were doing. There was Jazzie B from Soul II Soul, and Suggs from Madness. He said ‘Have you got a trombone?’ and then he got up on stage and was like,” he holds one hand to his mouth and slides a fist deliberately through the air, “rum-pa-pum-pum-pum.”

Counter Culture is just one of thousands of pop-up events that have opened in the UK and beyond over the last few years – ranging from the small to the large, the cool to the rubbish, the sublime to the ridiculous. There have been pop-up shops, restaurants and gardens; pop-up galleries– one in an abandoned Woolworths in Leytonstone – and cinemas – Tilda Swinton even carted one around the Scottish Highlands. There have been pop-up gigs in launderettes; restaurants in front rooms; films projected in disused petrol stations or on to hay bales in fields.

Those are the more guerrilla projects, the grassroots events, often put together on a wing, a prayer and a stiflingly small bank loan. But alongside these are the corporate-backed pop-ups, the temporary shops and bars and restaurants that appear with increasing regularity, often hosted by well-known venues.

The Double Club in London in 2008, a part-Congolese, part-western restaurant and bar backed by fashion label Prada, was particularly successful. A branch of Central Perk, the coffee shop from the TV series Friends, which opened in London’s Soho for a fortnight last year, was used to promote a limited-edition box set of the series. In 2006, Nike opened a shop in New York for four days, selling a special edition basketball shoe at $250 a pair. Gap has used a school bus, kitted out with merchandise instead of seats, as a travelling pop-up shop in the US.

There have been pop-up projects that have opened for an hour, like Mary Portas’s vintage clothes sale in 2008, and others so successful that they’ve eventually become a permanent fixture, such as Tom Dixon’s Dock Kitchen restaurant in Portobello Dock in west London. But what unites these disparate projects is essentially a strong fascination with the temporary, with the here-today-and-gone-tomorrow, the idea of excitement, urgency and a dynamic interaction with urban (and it is usually urban) spaces. These are projects that stand in opposition to clone towns, to the idea of uniformity and unending drabness.

The debut of pop-up businesses is often traced back to 2004, when Rei Kawakubo of the cutting-edge fashion brand, Comme des Garçons, set up a temporary shop in a disused building in Berlin. Realistically though, while the “pop-up” description might be fairly new, the idea is as old as the hills. The current craze has echoes in everything from the restaurants traditionally run in people’s homes in Cuba to the shop that artists Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin opened in London for six months in 1993, where they made and sold mugs and T-shirts and ashtrays.

The artist Dan Thompson set up his first pop-up gallery with friends in a bakery in Worthing in 2001; he now runs the Empty Shops Network, which advises artists who hope to start projects in one of the country’s many disused high-street stores. (It’s estimated that 13% of all UK shops are currently empty – and that one in five of those may never be used again.) He says that his inspiration comes from the magical curiosity shops that have appeared for centuries in fiction, “which no one can ever quite find again. I love creating something that’s gone so quickly that people say afterwards: ‘Was that you? Did that happen?’ I love that excitement that you can create in a town, that sense of – what’s coming next?”

While these businesses have counter-cultural roots, there’s no doubt they’ve become a corporate concern. As Ali Madanipour, professor of urban design at Newcastle University says, there are two key readings of pop-ups, which aren’t mutually exclusive. One is that they can be “a positive way of making more intensive use of urban space,” he says, “bringing life to parts of the city that are under-used – they can provide space for local activity, civil-society events, impromptu gatherings. But on the other hand, they can also be an aid to consumerism, in which brands create a stage setting, adding colour and texture to the general mall atmosphere that is the backdrop to many of our urban spaces. Pop-up businesses support shopping – they bring a festival atmosphere to shopping.”

The exclusivity of pop-up events means those that are ticketed often sell out extremely quickly. Denny says he now finds it “impossible to get excited about a new place that’s opening indefinitely – you think, ‘Oh yes, I’ll go to that at some point’ and you end up there in 20 years. Whereas if it’s temporary it’s like: ‘We’ve got to do it right now.’”

When pop-ups are hosted by established businesses, this exclusivity and popularity can lead to obvious rewards for both host and brand. Over the last few weeks, the London restaurant Meza has been hosting a MasterChef pop-up, with former contestants from the TV show cooking for diners at a cost of £49 for three courses. When I went there last week, the atmosphere was loud, buzzy, excitable – obviously good for the restaurant, and good publicity for MasterChef. It apparently sold out in 72 hours.

The Dock Kitchen in west London was so successful as a pop-up that it is to become a permanent fixture. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/©Antonio Olmos

One of the attractions of pop-ups for businesses is that they can act as an informal, unacknowledged market research project. Last week the smoothie maker Innocent ran a pop-up event in London called the Five for Five cafe – offering a two-course meal designed to deliver five portions of fruit and veg for £5. Dan Germain, head of creative at Innocent, said that the event, held in a disused tramshed, was “a no-brainer. Put on a bit of a party for the people who buy the drinks, meet and hang out with them, and find out stuff you wouldn’t discover in some weird research group . . . You get all these charts and graphs that say your customer is a certain age, that they live in a certain place, do a certain thing, and then you see the real people. We could just loiter in Sainsbury’s by the fridges and watch the people who come and buy our drinks, but we’d probably get kicked out.”

Like the MasterChef event, the Innocent cafe sold out quickly, and was cleverly run – the cavernous space was dressed with fairy lights, fruit trees and herbs on every table; there was friendly service, and good food. Any pop-up event this well thought out, prompting this much goodwill, is clearly an excellent piece of marketing.

Germain says a pop-up event is better value for money than running an advertising campaign. “You’re getting a more intense return,” he says. “Fewer people, yes, but you’re hopefully forging relationships that will last a lifetime.” Their pop-up event also enabled them to communicate their brand in an incredibly strong, concentrated way. “Everything we want to do was under that roof,” he says. Their core message was literally: “up on the back wall, written in big letters: Eat your greens.”

Stephen Zatland, a partner at management consultancy Accenture, says that pop-up businesses give retailers other benefits which might not be immediately obvious to the consumer. It’s a chance, he says, “to try out a new store location, to see if the kind of people they want to attract will start flocking there before they invest in a permanent site. Manufacturers can try out new products, new services, deliver them direct to the customer, promote a new brand, or try and re-invigorate an older brand”.

And they can carry out all this research and promotion for a relatively low price. Zatland says that compared to opening a permanent site, pop-ups are fairly inexpensive. The recession, with its surfeit of empty shops, has played a key role in this trend. “When a lot of Woolworths stores became available, for instance, retailers picked up on those and rented them for a short period to try out something new on the high street.”

The pop-up trend has been so big, for so long, that there have been whispers that it must be about to fizzle and die. But Zatland suggests this is unlikely. “There’s another interesting trend for a more permanent kind of feature,” he says, “where there’s a site for maybe eight different pop-up stores, and the content of that site will rotate, change, every eight weeks, or every three weeks. That will be good, I think, because it encourages customers to keep coming back to see what the new feature is.”

When I ask Thompson about the corporate fashion for pop-ups, about the way they’re being used to flog us more unnecessary stuff, I expect him to be disdainful. But it’s quite the opposite. “I love it,” he says, “I love the fact that such a daft idea, started by artists, has taken over. I went to a pop-up Gucci put on, and it was fantastic. It’s like Quentin Crisp said – don’t keep up with the Joneses, drag them down to your level. We’ve completely subverted all these great brands, who are now having to think differently, more creatively, and that has to be good for our town centres.”

There’s no doubt that pop-ups can aid regeneration and make a genuine difference. As Thompson points out, “if you live somewhere the size of Worthing or Coventry or Carlisle or Margate, and you lose a few shops, you really notice it. If that’s your home town, and you’re passionate about it, you’ll fight to make it better.”

Horton Jupiter (whose real name, he jokes, is “Mystic Rock”) is less positive about some aspects of the pop-up phenomenon. He has been running a cafe called The Secret Ingredient from his front room in Newington Green, London, for over a year now, and says he prefers the term “home restaurant”, because pop-up has “become something that people use as a marketing tool”. He appreciates the temporary, impromptu nature of pop-ups, but projects like his, he suggests, are meant to be precisely an escape from capitalism, from the robot on the end of the phone, towards something more illicit, subversive, personal and warm.

For landlords whose properties have been empty for a while, these events are a great way to promote their building, bring people flooding back in, and perhaps get some free maintenance and decorating work done too. Thompson says he’s never “paid anything more than a peppercorn rent – we cover business rates, we cover insurance, and in every shop we’ve been to we’ve left it in a better condition than we found it. We’ll give it a lick of paint, a clean and tidy. We took a shop in Shoreham-by-Sea, initially for six months, but now for another six, and a place that had been derelict for 10 years has been completely refurbished – which has led to two other derelict shops nearby coming back into use as well.”

Where artists go, corporations follow. And so does gentrification, as areas blossom, flourish and improve - and rents subsequently head skywards. Perhaps now, at a time of deep economic anxiety and trouble, we should just enjoy the most exciting of the pop-ups, those that bring life to depressed corners, flowers to abandoned skips, the flicker of film to the hollow beneath an underpass.

There is something slightly sinister about the marketing guile – and rampant consumerism – behind some of these projects, but many are straightforwardly brilliant, and there seems no shortage of people happy to get involved. “Every time I walk past an empty shop or building,” says Denny, “I think: I’ve got to do something in there, I just have to! If I had time, every empty space that was remotely intriguing would be filled.”

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Mike Kelley goes home again

The Michigan-born, Los Angeles-based artist talks about recreating his childhood home for Artangel’s first US public art project

By Ruth Lopez | Web only
Published online 11 Oct 10 (News)

Kelley’s “Mobile Homestead” in front of Detroit Central Station, built in 1913, abandoned in 1988

CHICAGO. Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, a recreation of his suburban Detroit childhood home, has a built-in trailer chassis and hitches to a semi-cab—fitting that a Motor City art project would end up having wheels. Four years ago, the London-based public art instigator Artangel contacted Kelley about working together. The result is Artangel’s first US commission and Kelley’s first public art project.

Mobile Homestead grew out of a 1995 work, Educational Complex, where Kelley built, from memory, a model of every school he ever attended. Kelley has lived and worked in Los Angeles since moving in 1978 from his native Michigan to attend graduate school. His work has centered, largely, on issues of personal history and memories and Detroit has provided raw material since the beginning.

For Mobile Homestead, Kelley attempted to purchase the suburban white ranch house he grew up in but the current owner had no interest in moving. Artangel and Kelley looked at plots of land, with the idea of building a replica, but it proved to be too big of a bureaucratic challenge. Then, the newly opened Museum of Contemporary Art of Detroit (MOCAD) invited Kelley to use the big lot adjacent to the museum. Kelley visited his old house in Westland several times, taking pictures and measurements, and recreated the house.

“Everything switched to downtown and the project really changed after that,” said Kelley. The idea to make it mobile was a way to hold on to the original idea. “I wanted to keep this connection out to the area where the house is,” said Kelley.

The house being able to travel opened up the possibility of performing community service. On its maiden voyage on 25 September, Mobile Homestead journeyed along Michigan Avenue, a major artery, on its way out to the suburb of Westland—Kelley’s home town—collecting food items along the way on behalf of various community organizations.

“When Mobile Homestead ended up downtown the social meaning changed a lot,” Kelley said. “It raises a lot of issues that would not have been there. If it had been built in the suburbs, I wouldn’t have bothered to address them.” For instance, Mobile Homestead portrays a reversal of “white flight” —a huge part of the white population left the city after the race riots in the 1960s leaving behind a devasted urban space.

The ranch house now sits amid shockingly different architectural styles of the city—large brick apartment buildings and Victorian houses—many vacant for decades. Since the project began there have been some signs, however small, of revitalization and gentrification.

Kelley said he has been working on plans for future additions to the Mobile Homestead but for now, the focus is on securing the longevity of the project. It’s an ambitious idea in an ailing city. “Will it be a ruin in itself or will it actually function,” said Kelley.

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Francis Bacon painting of cricketer to be auctioned in New York

Francis Bacon’s Figure In Movement. Photograph: Sotheby’s/PA

A Francis Bacon painting of a tortured cricketer twisting and writhing is to be sold at auction after hanging in Tate Britain for much of the last decade, Sotheby’s announced today.

The painting is being sold by Bacon’s friend and personal doctor, Paul Brass, who was given the portrait in 1985, the year it was completed.

After loaning it to the Tate, Brass has decided to sell and an estimate of $7m-$10m (£4.4m-£6.3m) has been placed on it ahead of the auction in New York on 9 November.

Figure in Movement, featuring a typically agonised figure, common in Bacon’s work, this time in cricket pads and against a black and bright orange background with blue cage-like struts, also featured in the major 2008 Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain, which toured New York and Madrid.

Brass took over the role of being Bacon’s personal physician from his father, Dr Stanley Brass, and was offered a choice between two paintings – the cricketer and one of a jet of water.

In an interview with the New York Times, Brass said: “I was tempted to opt for the jet of water, but when I told that to Francis, he said no, that painting happened by mistake when he spilled white paint on the canvas. He told me, ‘If I were you, I would choose the cricketer’.”

Bacon died in 1992 and his works attract some of the biggest prices for any 20th century artist although no one expects the painting to get anywhere near the record, set in 2008 when Bacon’s Triptych 1976 was bought by Roman Abramovich for $86m, reportedly to hang on the walls of his London home.

There have been disagreements about what is going on in Figure In Movement and who it is based on. The figure seems to resemble John Edwards, the man Bacon found solace in after the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971, but there have also been suggestions Bacon based it on David Gower, captain of the England cricket team in the mid-1980s.

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Spot the New Hirst as Frieze’s $375 Million Artworks Test Market Recovery

“The Onion,” a C-print by the performance artist Marina Abramovic. London-based Lisson gallery will be showing the work at the Frieze Art Fair, previewing on Oct. 13. Lisson will be selling a variety of works by Abramovic at the fair, ranging in price from 30,000 euros to 250,000 euros. Source: Lisson Gallery via Bloomberg

A welded-metal sculpture by Sterling Ruby. Brussels-based dealer Xavier Hufkens will be showing at the Frieze Art Fair in London, which previews on Oct. 13. Hukens will be selling four pieces by Ruby, with prices from $43,500 to $87,000. Photographer: Robert Wedemeyer/Xavier Hufkens via Bloomberg

A cast polyurethane sculpture by Austrian artist Oliver Laric. The work is shown by the London-based gallery Seventeen at the Frieze Art Fair, and priced at 4,000 pounds. Source: Seventeen via Bloomberg

Billionaire collectors looking for the next Damien Hirst at the Frieze Art Fair will have $375 million of artworks to browse, according to insurer Hiscox Ltd.

The first estimate of the value of Frieze comes days before the event’s Oct. 13 preview in London. This week also includes U.K. auctions that have more than 78 million pounds ($124.5 million) of works on offer, satellite fairs and gallery shows.

Frieze is Europe’s biggest commercial fair devoted exclusively to the work of living artists. This year’s edition will be held against a backdrop of a contemporary market still in recovery after the crisis depressed prices for more expensive, heavily traded names by as much as 50 percent.

“Frieze is much more of a treasure hunt than other fairs,” said Robert Read, fine art expert at Hiscox, which has a corporate collection of contemporary works. “It’s human nature for buyers to want to find young artists who are going to be gold in the future. Most of the pieces sell for comfortably below $100,000,” he said. Hiscox is the second-biggest Lloyd’s of London insurer.

Hiscox’s ballpark estimate for the works at Frieze was based on insurance valuations for between 40 and 50 percent of the exhibitors at the fair, Read said in an interview.

Frieze’s organizers don’t comment on the value of exhibited works or specific sales. The annual event, now in its eighth year in a temporary structure in Regent’s Park, has a VIP day before opening to the public on Oct. 14. The fair reveals only visitor numbers (about 60,000 for each of the last three years) and lists of galleries taking part (this time 173, eight more than in 2009).

New Exhibitors

Brussels-based dealer Xavier Hufkens is one of 20 new exhibitors at the fair.

“Frieze attracts an audience that’s looking for new, original work,” Hufkens said in an interview. “It’s another public. We won’t be bringing pieces by older artists.”

Hufkens will be showing four sculptures recently welded out of found metal by the Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby (born 1972) at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Exploring themes of industrial decay, they will be priced from $43,500 to $87,000.

“Collectors are looking for artists who didn’t nosedive in the last couple of years and for those who people are talking about,” said David Maupin, director of the New York-based gallery Lehmann Maupin, one of the fair’s established exhibitors. “There’s been a cleansing. Buyers want quality and value.”

Neon Emin

Women artists will dominate Lehmann Maupin’s booth. A hanging mixed-media piece by the Korean sculptor Lee Bul will be priced at $200,000, while two new paintings by the Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary will be offered at 50,000 pounds each. A new neon piece by Tracey Emin, from an edition of three, costs 60,000 pounds.

“My belief is that women artists have been undervalued,” said Maupin, who described the audience at Frieze as “very sophisticated and open.”

Belgrade-born performance artist Marina Abramovic, 63, is an artist that plenty of people are talking about after her 736- hour performance piece, “The Artist is Present,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, earlier this year.

The Abramovic retrospective at the Marylebone-based Lisson Gallery is one of the numerous dealer and museum shows that will draw collectors who have flown in for Frieze. Lisson will also be offering limited-edition photographs and a single screen projection by Abramovic at the fair. Prices range from 30,000 euros ($41,820) to 250,000 euros.

Frame Names

Last year, Frieze’s reputation for airing emerging names was enhanced by the introduction of Frame, a section of more than 20 galleries fewer than six years old, showing single artists.

At the 2009 event, East London dealers Seventeen sold all nine of U.K.-artist Susan Collis’s sculptures. Prices ranged from 6,000 pounds to 35,000 pounds, with five works falling to New York-based collectors.

This year, the gallery will be showing a video and sculptures on the theme of iconoclasm by the Berlin-based Austrian artist Oliver Laric (born 1981). The works are priced at 4,000 pounds each.

“Frame really freshened up Frieze,” Dave Hoyland, director of Seventeen, said in an interview. “The fair is embracing emerging artists at a time when an increasing number of collectors want to.”

Unlike the Art Basel fair in Switzerland, Frieze doesn’t include dealers who show earlier, 20th-century works.

Pavilion Masters

Those wanting to buy modern masters should make their way instead to the Pavilion of Art & Design London in Berkeley Square, previewing tomorrow.

Now in its fourth year, having grown out of a specialist design event, the boutique 50-exhibitor fair of art, design, decorative arts, jewelry and photography from 1860 to the present day will have a higher proportion than Frieze of items priced in millions.

Geneva-based newcomers Espace Nelombos will be bringing a group of 20 privately sourced works by Pablo Picasso tagged at as much as $6 million. London-based Simon Dickinson Gallery will be showing a Francis Bacon “Head’’ at $4 million and a Henri Matisse sculpture, “Verve, II, 8’’ at $3.5 million.

Frieze Week satellite events will also include “Multiplied” — an event devoted to contemporary prints, editions and photographs, organized and hosted by the auction house Christie’s International at South Kensington — and the Moniker International Art Fair in east London, focusing on urban art.

These new offerings replace ZOO and the New York-organized SCOPE London Art Show. The latter, longer-established events won’t returning this year after experiencing challenging market conditions in 2009.

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Scott Reyburn in London at sreyburn@hotmail.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.

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Daimler May Make $16 Million From New York Sale of Koons Balloon Sculpture

“Balloon Flower (Blue)” (1995-2000) by Jeff Koons. It is being offered for auction from the corporate art collection of the German luxury car-maker Daimler AG at Christie’s International in New York on Nov. 10. The pre-sale estimate is $12 million to $16 million. Source: Christie’s Images via Bloomberg

“Balloon Flower (Magenta),” a 1995-2000 high chromium stainless steel sculpture by Jeff Koons. The work sold at Christie’s in London in June 2008, for a record 12.9 million pounds. Source: Christie’s Images Ltd. 2008 via Bloomberg

A 2006 chrome-enamelled bronze sculpture by the German artist Anselm Reyle is included in Phillips de Pury & Co.’s Oct. 13, 2010, auction of contemporary art in London. One of 13 works entered by the New York-based collector Adam Lindemann, it is estimated to sell for between 100,000 pounds and 150,000 pounds. Source: Phillips de Pury & Co. via Bloomberg.

Daimler AG, the world’s second- largest maker of luxury vehicles, is hoping to raise as much as $16 million from the November auction in New York of a Jeff Koons sculpture from its corporate art collection.

The chromium steel work, “Balloon Flower (Blue),” will be included in Christie’s International’s Nov. 10 contemporary-art sale, the London-based auction house said yesterday in an e- mail.

Daimler is sure to receive a minimum preset amount, courtesy of an unidentified third-party guarantor, said Christie’s. The low estimate is $12 million.

The 11-foot (3.3 meter) work was made by Koons in 1995-2000 as part of his “Celebration” series of high-tech sculptures inspired by children’s parties and lovers’ gifts.

One of five versions in different colors, it stood for many years in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. Daimler acquired the work directly from the artist. Proceeds from the sale will be used to develop the Daimler Art Collection, which comprises almost 2,000 works, Christie’s said.

Auction prices for Koons’s “Celebration” sculptures surged during the art boom. In November 2007, New York-based collector Adam Lindemann sold “Hanging Heart (Magenta/ Gold)” at Sotheby’s in New York for $23.6 million, an auction record for a living artist. He was reported to have bought the sculpture from the Gagosian Gallery for $4 million in 2005.

Rachofsky’s Flower

Another version of “Balloon Flower”, in magenta, was sold by Dallas-based collector Howard Rachofsky at Christie’s in London in June 2008, for an artist record of 12.9 million pounds (then $25.8 million). Both sellers were guaranteed minimum prices by the auction houses.

Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury & Co. announced at the end of 2008 that they themselves would no longer be offering minimum prices to sellers after several high-value guaranteed works failed in the last quarter. Guarantees are now making a limited comeback, through third parties.

An external guarantor has promised a minimum price to the Los Angeles-based seller of David Hockney’s 1978 watercolor, “Autumn Pool (Paper Pool 29)” at Phillips in London on Oct. 13. The six-part work, featured on the front cover of the catalog, is estimated to fetch at least 700,000 pounds.

Lindemann is another seller at Phillips’s Frieze Week auction. The New York-based collector has consigned a group of 13 works by younger German artists such as Jonathan Meese (born 1970), Anselm Reyle (born 1970) and Andre Butzer (born 1973).

“This is just a small selection from Adam Lindemann’s German material,” Phillips’s London-based specialist Henry Allsopp said in an interview. “He thought the chance to sell in an evening auction during Frieze Week was a good opportunity.”

Most of the works had been acquired from Berlin galleries within the last five years. The most highly valued is Reyle’s Koons-influenced purple chrome abstract sculpture, “Untitled.” Dating from 2006, it is estimated to sell for 100,000 pounds to 150,000 pounds.

The Lindemann lots aren’t guaranteed, Allsopp said.

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Scott Reyburn in London at sreyburn@hotmail.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.

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Klimt lawyer’s fee funds museum

Klimt lawyer’s fee funds museum

New space for Los Angeles Holocaust centre opens in October

By David D’Arcy | From issue 216, September 2010
Published online 8 Oct 10 (Museums)

E. Randol Schoenberg escorts Maria Altmann an exhibition at Lacma of paintings by artist Gustav Klimt that were looted by the Nazis during World War II

new york. The US lawyer who negotiated the restitution of five paintings by Klimt has funded the relocation and expansion of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Its new $18m building opens on 10 October thanks to the generosity of Randol Schoenberg, who is the president of the museum as well as the lawyer who represented Maria Altmann in her family’s successful battle to recover paintings by Gustav Klimt that were seized in Nazi Vienna from her uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Five Bloch-Bauer Klimts returned from the Belevedere Museum were sold in 2006, including Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, which went to Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie allegedly for $135m (The Art Newspaper, October 2006, p9).

Schoenberg became president of the museum in 2005, before his success in the Altmann arbitration enabled him to contribute about a third of the project’s cost. “There’s definitely a connection, and I think it makes sense. I’ve been fortunate as a result of the Altmann case. What would be more fitting than to use some of that to build a museum for Holocaust education?” he said.

The museum, described as the oldest Holocaust museum in the US, was founded in 1961 by survivors who met in an English class at Hollywood High School. Earlier housed at Los Angeles’ Jewish Federation, the museum’s new home, designed by local architect Hagy Belzberg, will display humble objects of great historical value that reflect the experiences of Holocaust survivors and victims. “It could be documents, Red Cross letters, clothing, photographs, anything that helps tell the stories that we’re telling as part of the museum,” said Schoenberg.

Admission to the Holocaust museum will be free at the new site in Pan Pacific Park, which is near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Schoenberg expects 50,000 visitors a year. Most of LA’s remaining Holocaust survivors live within a mile of the park, Schoenberg said, yet “99% of the people going through aren’t going to know anything about the Holocaust.”

The museum’s exclusive focus on the Holocaust differentiates it from the Museum of Tolerance in LA founded by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

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Artists rally to defend Islamic centre

Studios and exhibition spaces are part of the so-called “Ground Zero mosque”

By Marisa Mazria Katz | From issue 217, October 2010
Published online 6 Oct 10 (News)

The city is divided over the plans

NEW YORK. While politicians and some clergymen continue to rail against the so-called “Ground Zero mosque”, there has been little acknowledgment of the fact that artists’ studios and exhibition spaces are an integral part of the proposed 13-floor, 120,000 sq. ft Islamic community centre. Now artists are rallying to defend the project in the lower Manhattan neighbourhood.

The centre, originally called the “Cordoba House” project and now renamed Park51, is the creation of Sufi cleric and chief executive of the Cordoba Initiative, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and the Manhattan real estate developer Sharif el-Gamal. Abdul Rauf first conceived the space, which is located two blocks from the World Trade Center (WTC), soon after inaugurating his multi-cultural and interfaith Cordoba Initiative foundation in 2002.

The multimedia Glass Bead Collective is one of the groups that have launched art projects to support the centre. Days before 11 September, the New York-based group projected the words “equality” and “unity” on to the façade of the site in several languages, including English, Arabic and Hebrew. “This is an attempt to recontextualise the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ in such a way that the far right can no longer use it as a rallying point for Islamophobia and hate,” explained collective member, Vlad Teichberg. Another ongoing arts initiative called “Concerned New Yorkers” asks people to write on pieces of paper, which are dotting utility poles across the city, their response to one of the following phrases: “The Islamic Com­munity Center should be built because” and “The Ground Zero mosque should not be built because”. The handwritten responses are recorded and posted on the group’s eponymous website.

Russell Simmons, hip hop mogul and a patron of contemporary arts via his Rush Philanthropic Arts foundation, has papered his downtown apartment’s windows with different religious symbols. He also wrote an editorial in the Huffington Post saying: “It is not insensitive to put a cultural center of any sort, that has a place of worship, anywhere in our city. This is what makes our country and our city great.” For artist Sandow Birk, whose recent “American Qur’an” show debuted at Chelsea’s PPOW Gallery, the proposed arts space is a welcome addition to the downtown landscape. “I think it’s great,” said Birk.

Neither of the project’s organisers were available to talk to The Art Newspaper, but Abdul Rauf told a community meeting in May that he hoped to close “the divide that exists between our great nation and the international Muslim world”. He said that the project was a step towards that goal, but added: “It will serve the needs [of the community] for recreational space, for meeting rooms and educational facilities, and for arts and cultural activities.”

Abdul Rauf is not a newcomer to the arts: in 2002, he participated in the “Garden of Remembrance” exhibition, “an artistic response” to 9/11, at New Jersey’s Newark Museum. It transformed a gallery into a garden, and featured work exploring religious coexistence between the Christians, Muslims and Jews of medieval Spain.

According to artist Mariam Ghani: “Artist workspaces in lower Manhattan have in the past created openings for different kinds of participation in the life of that neighbourhood.” She added: “If these studios invite public participation into a space that is often seen as private or closed, then it could have a beneficial effect.” Photographer Edward Grazda, added: “People are forgetting that a lot of culture, art, science and math has come out of Islam.” What’s more, he added: “New York City always needs more artist spaces.”

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Garbage and garbage pickers are the subjects of Vik Muniz’s work.

Portrait of picker and cook Leide Laurentina da Silva in Muniz’s Rio studio.

VIK MUNIZ/COURTESY VIK MUNIZ STUDIO

Conceptual artist Vik Muniz is known for using peanut butter and jelly, toy soldiers, or cast-off furniture to re-create famous pictures from art history or photojournalism, which he then turns into large-scale photographs. For his rendition of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, he shot a detailed drawing made with Bosco chocolate syrup. But Muniz has also taken on social issues such as the plight of sugarcane workers on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, by rerendering in white sugar on black paper snapshots of their smiling children.

For three years, starting in 2007, he turned to another politicized topic—garbage—observing and taking portraits of pickers from the world’s largest landfill, Jardim Gramacho on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The pickers live in a squatting community and earn money by scavenging for recyclable materials and scrap metal. “What I would really like to do is take a group of people and change their lives from the very materials I use every day,” Muniz says.

The resulting series, “Pictures of Garbage” (2009), is the subject of a feature-length documentary directed by Lucy Walker. Waste Land will have its theatrical release at New York’s Angelika Film Center on October 29. It has already won critical acclaim and awards at the Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, and Amnesty International Film Festival.

Waste Land follows Muniz as he combs the garbage heap and recruits pickers to help him build images. Rather than merely documenting Muniz’s art-making process, the film examines his subjects in depth, allowing them to speak about their lives and their pride in their work.

Muniz decides to take portraits of six of the pickers, which he projects at an enormous scale in the studio he built for this purpose in Rio. He then asks the pickers to fill in the backgrounds of the images with hundreds of objects from the landfill. Standing atop scaffolding, he photographs the completed pictures. After arguing with his wife and assistants about what the impact of the project will be, he decides to give the proceeds from the sale of his photographs to the Association of Garbage Workers of Jardim Gramacho. The project has so far raised more than $250,000.

One star of the film is Tião Santos, the charismatic leader of the workers’ association, whom Muniz photographs as the revolutionary leader in the bathtub in Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. Santos accompanies Muniz to London to witness the sale of his portrait for $50,000 at Phillips de Pury & Company. By the time the “Pictures of Garbage” series is shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, in 2009, Santos has become a celebrity, appearing on talk shows to promote his organization.

The São Paolo–born Muniz, who himself grew up in modest circumstances, sums up his feelings in the film. “Like these people, I was born in a lower-middle-class household,” he says. “If something happened to my parents, I could have wound up just like them.”

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Mitos Vadios 2 :: A cup of coffee Please!!

Organized by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, the 29th edition of the São Paulo Biennial hails the exhibition’s title, There is always a cup of sea to sail in – a line taken from Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima’s major work Invenção de Orfeu [The invention of Orpheus] (1952) –, sums up the primary objective pursued by the 29th São Paulo Biennial: to assert that the utopian dimension of art is to be found in art itself, rather than in what lies outside or beyond it. This “cup of sea,” this infinity close at hand which artists relentlessly produce, is what provides the power to move forward in spite of all adversity. Yet the whole curatorial team seemed in line, as far as the speech goes, the event fell short to expectations. Even before its opening, artists and critics predicted the lack of real study, research and concept on their part. Almost 160 artists were invited and very few worth seeing, based on the works they presented. This edition focused too hard on audio visual, and at times it seemed like an appliance fair, says artist Ivald Granato, who participated in 8 previous SP Biennials. On September 21st, the opening day for special guests and the press, Mr. Granato led a group of over 80 artists in a protest called Mitos Vadios 2 (something like Vagabond Myths), named to the first one, in 1978, when Helio Oiticia and himself protested against the 1st, and last, Latin American Biennial. The organizers of Mitos vadios 2 stated that the protest was not against the institution - SP Biennial - itself, on the contrary, but towards the shady way it was held. “Lets not forget it’s a Foundation and 29 million Reais (roughly $18M US dollars) were granted through public funds” says Ivald Granto, mentor and organizer of the event.

The theme is rooted in the idea that it is impossible to separate art from politics. By procedures and means that are distinctive to it, art constantly questions and interrupts the sensorial coordinates by which one perceives and inhabits the world, thus inserting themes, subjects and attitudes that did not fit there before. While visiting the 29th Biennial, visitors seemed not to grasp the concept of the theme, perhaps because the concept itself got trapped in words trying to explain what actually needed to be felt. According to Ivald Granto, the main goal of the 29th Biennial was to showdown artists that somehow are linked to galleries that controls the Brazilian art market, in a way to artificially boost their prices. “The 29th Biennial does not represent what actually has been produced, neither the real trend, of the Brazilian art, let alone worldwide. And just for the record, what we are doing here is not an art show, it’s a public performance, a protest full of surprises where artist are free to express their feelings. It’s not our job, at this point, to put on an art show to compete with them,  we just want to draw attention to the whole scheme around it.” says Mr. Granato. As opposed to a traditional art exhibit, the protest was as spontaneous as it could be,  performance, dance, happenings, artworks allover the sidewalk made the event a cheerful promenade.

Click on people’s faces in the photo to tag them.

Click on people’s faces in the photo to tag them.

Cacipore Torres & Claudia Furlani                    Ju Cortes Real and Antonio Peticov

Click on people’s faces in the photo to tag them.

Artists Haddy Dayan and Luhly Souza                           Artist Anna Anapana

Click on people’s faces in the photo to tag them.

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“Museums will take their share of the pain”

But the new British culture minister insists the government is not walking away from the arts

By Martin Bailey | From issue 216, September 2010
Published online 3 Sep 10 (News)

Art in the blood: Ed Vaizey, son of art historian Marina Vaizey, is having to make tough decisions on cultural funding

LONDON. Ed Vaizey, who under Jeremy Hunt took over as culture minister following the UK’s May election, knows the art scene well, having shadowed the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) for the Conservatives for nearly four years. But he is only too aware that things will get very much more difficult this winter, with looming government cuts across all areas of public life: for the arts scene, it is the lull before the storm.

The Art Newspaper: How will national museums fare?

Ed Vaizey: There will be cuts to the arts and museums. They will not be singled out as easy to cut, but neither will they be overly protected. They will take their share of the pain.

TAN: Will museums all face the same percentage cut, or will you examine their individual performances?

EV: We are in the middle of discussions with the Treasury, so it would be wrong to single out particular museums. However, we are going to consider how we can incentivise museums to raise money and reward them for doing so. But that probably would not be a change that we could effect immediately.

TAN: Will national museums be offered greater freedom?

EV: We were ready to consider legislation to give them greater independence, but we are now looking at a number of options. The decision is whether to maintain the status quo or give them clear independence from government. Both carry their own risks.

TAN: Are museums facing a crisis over acquisitions?

EV: There has always been an issue about acquisitions, particularly now with the extraordinary art market. It is obviously very, very tough. But I would not say there is a crisis. When gems come up, like the [Duke of Sutherland’s] Titians, funding is found. We want to get away from the mentality that we must have absolutely everything.

TAN: In opposition, you were critical of the Arts Council, particularly because of its spending on administration. How do you feel now?

EV: I have no doubt about the dedication and professionalism of its staff, but you have to look at the size of Arts Council England’s pot, £450m, of which about £320m goes directly to funded organisations and grants. There are programmes that the Arts Council is undertaking that it will have to think very hard about whether to continue.

TAN: What should the Arts Council drop?

EV: The Arts Council runs at arms length and it is up to them to decide. It is important that the blow is less severe on regularly funded organisations. Would you prefer to see the Arts Council cut a [general] programme or make a theatre go dark? Most people would come down on the side of saving the theatre.

TAN: You are increasing National Lottery money for the arts and heritage, but with the fall in grant-in-aid isn’t there a danger that the principle of “additionality”—that the Lottery should not replace government funding—is under threat?

EV: It may be that projects under threat are realised thanks to the Lottery. But what will certainly not be breached is the principle that the Lottery won’t be used as a substitute for grant-in-aid. The Arts Council has been creative, and I don’t use that term pejoratively, in the way they use the Lottery to fund projects. The additionality principle is still there.

TAN: Isn’t it difficult to ask private donors to give more when government funding is being cut?

EV: Yes, it is difficult. It is important to get across the message that the government is not walking away from the arts, although it is a particularly difficult time. I would say to philanthropists: the government will still be a part of the organisations which you support, and the reason we are reducing funding is to get the economy back into shape, so people can run successful businesses. We care hugely about philanthropists: we want to recognise and celebrate them much more.

TAN: There has been considerable cynicism about the Cultural Olympiad. Isn’t the Olympics diverting resources away from the arts?

EV: The Olympics is a once in a lifetime chance to do something great. I felt relieved when I came into government that Ruth Mackenzie is in charge of the Cultural Olympiad, with Tony Hall [its chairman]. It was very painful that it had taken so long to appoint someone. A lot of potential money has been dissipated. If there had been a focus three years ago we could be on track to have something really extraordinary. As it is, the person who can make something happen is Ruth Mackenzie.

TAN: After you had been shadow culture secretary for nearly four years, some people felt you were going native. Is it better to know your subject, or to come to it fresh?

EV: I think you need to know the subject area. You need to be able to ask your officials intelligent and awkward questions. The obverse is that you could come to a brief and ask the “dumb” questions, which are sometimes the most important ones. Why do we do this? Why does this organisation exist? Perhaps you can’t, if like me, you’ve been in this area for a while. That could potentially be a weakness, but it is outweighed by the strength of knowing and understanding. Enthusiasm counts for a lot in this sector. You’ve to punch above your weight in this department. You’ve to get other bigger, meatier departments interested in the work you are doing.

TAN: What do you enjoy about the job?

EV: The opportunity to do things. You set the direction of travel, and officials are there to help you get there. I often think that I would have been a much more effective opposition spokesman if I had had two months in the department. So once Labour has had its leadership election, I will probably invite the party’s culture spokesman to shadow me for a week so they can learn the job. You get a much greater insight into how things work once you are inside.

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Letter from Berlin :: THE DESIRE FOR FORM AND CONTEMPORARY ART FROM BRAZIL

THE DESIRE FOR FORM—O DESJO DA FORMA: NEOCONCRETISMO AND CONTEMPORARY ART FROM BRAZIL

AT AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE, BERLIN | SEPTEMBER 3 – NOVEMBER 7, 2010

by David Rhodes, The Brooklyn Rail

In late 1950s Brazil, amid cultural, social, and economic upheaval, changes were registered by new forms of literature, music, and visual art. In music, bossa nova shifted the energy of samba to a still rhythmic but gentler purveyor of lyrics that were often political as well as sexual in tone. In visual art, Neoconcretismo combined geometry with sensuality and expressiveness, absorbing examples of the Bauhaus and European modernism. Leading artists from this moment have been brought together by the Akademie der Kunst survey, including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Ivan Serpa, as well as architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa.

The exhibition’s inclusion of contemporary Brazilian artists such as Iole de Freitas and Carla Guagliardi establishes a continuing interest in Neoconcretismo. It’s not hard to imagine Beatriz Milhazes or Ernesto Neto also being represented here. In the exhibition Navedenga, seen at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, early this year, Neto certainly expanded the notions of social space and sensual experience very much initiated by the Brazilian art scene of the 1960s: the conflation of private and public space is easily extrapolated to ideas of political responsibility.

“Antropofagia,” or cultural cannibalism, the term used to describe the phenomenon of absorbing influences and forms from any and all cultures toward making something new and unique, is taken from Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” of 1928. It’s the basis for an open blending of appearance, style, and ideas, with the purpose of breaking down the racial, gender, and class barriers rife in Brazilian society of the 1920s and later.

Lygia Clark’s (1920 – 1988) divergent work, well ahead of the much vaunted Relational Aesthetics, also has a connection with the Constructivist movement in Russia, particularly the efforts from 1919 to the mid-1930s to combine Bauhaus ideals with social goals. Clark’s work, re-coined with an even wider catchment, added elements of play and sensuality. Her “Bicho” (1960–63) is a small-scale sculpture consisting of hinged metal planes that can be manipulated into many different configurations. How many? Clark would answer that she didn’t know, but that the Bicho did. Though formally beautiful, the intention behind the sculpture is to emphasize the importance of the viewer’s experience through the possibility of participation. “Don’t Touch” signs in museums these days prohibit this from happening. Franz West’s participatory objects, much influenced by Clark, are subject to the same museum censor.

This is equally true of Hélio Oiticica (1937 – 1980). A film, Héliophonia (2002) by Marcos Bonisson, uses archival film of Oiticica during his time in New York, where he had traveled on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970 and stayed until 1978. Installation and performance are used by Oiticica to place the artwork in a combined personal and public space. This approach to art-making is articulated by an admiring Vito Acconci, interviewed (during the run of the influential exhibition Information, 1970, at MoMA) acknowledging Oiticica’s realization of ideas and concerns that had become central to his own practice.

Hélio Oiticica: Relevo-espacial, 1959. Öl auf Holz, ca. 120 x 157 x 22,5 cm. Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich. Foto: Peter Schälchli © Projeto Hélio Oiticica

In Molecular Revolution in Brazil by Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik (Semiotext(e), 2008) the authors state, “I consider poetry to be one of the most important components of human existence, not so much in terms of value, but rather as a functional element. We should prescribe poetry in the same way that vitamins are prescribed.” Poetry, or visual art or music, regarded as essential to health, not a diversion—a position all too clear during the extreme malaise following Brazil’s military coup of 1964. The subsequent implementation of the Institutional Act, which allowed the regime to imprison anyone considered a subversive without recourse to habeas corpus, not surprisingly led to many artists, musicians, and writers living in exile.

Photographs and models illustrate the contribution of architects. Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1907), one of the designers of Brasilia, known for his expansive, curvaceous buildings, left behind the strict geometry of Mies van der Rohe and early Le Corbusier to explore aesthetic constructions related to human form and experience. These buildings of reinforced concrete flow in bold, soft shapes and eloquent voids of negative space. Niemeyer has said, “What attracts me is the free and sensual curve—the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of a beloved woman.” Again, as with Clark and Oiticica, the body is emphasized, drawing intellect into the arena of lived experience. Another Brazilian art form in a social space—football—articulates the same desire for freedom and poetry in how life is lived. A beautiful obsession: expressive, intelligent, and classless. As everyone knows in Brazil, the football also has a soul. When Dunga, the coach for Brazil during this year’s World Cup, tried to change tactics to a more static, defensive, less flowing form of play, he inspired considerable criticism.

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4 Continents on Bedford

4 Continents on Bedford
A Journey of New Works at Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery. Opening Reception: Thursday, May 6^th, 6-9 p.m. On view Thursday, May 6^th, 2010 to Saturday, June 12^th, 2010

CONN. - Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery presents, 4 Continents on Bedford, a selection of contemporary works from distinct artists spanning four continents of the globe. Viewers will journey through a collection of the gallery’s new in-house artists.  The exhibit is shaped by the culture of each artist while providing a novel view of illusions and experiences unified in one gallery on Bedford Street.

Damla Tokcan Faro is indubitably a skillful artist of abilities and talents learned internationally and easily recognized through a mere glance at her superb work. Ms. Faro has honed her photographic and print talents in areas as unique as Istanbul, Turkey andChicago, Illinois. Damla not only instills potent emotions and imaginative thoughts within her work, she literally hands an entirely new world of imagination to all who consider what they have just witnessed.

Whatever you may consider to be photography, Siddhartha Tawadey will alter, if not demolish your pre-conceptions. Mr. Tawadey of India is a gentleman of world-wide travels, experience and scope. It may be stated with confidence that observers of Mr. Tawadey’s work would be stricken and stimulated by his certifiably unique approach to depiction of “his world”, poetic, experimental, at times gorgeous, his, and fortunately, yours and ours as well!

Adam Grant, a native New Yorker and skilled sculptor and painter forms stone into florid shapes that will accentuate any room. If the connoisseur of sculptures seeks discovery of works of an artist whose future is now-he has been found in Adam Grant.  Exemplary of ancient finds, Grant creates passages through carved unprejudiced, still, truths of stories frozen in space.

Fernando Ferreira de Araujo, a Brazilian artist whose paintings poetically intertwine beings and nature, is collected internationally. His loose strokes filled with emotions are brought to live on each canvas, offering an intimate exchange with its viewer- each stroke whispering “I understand”. An abstract expressionist, his work has been described as “sober and sensuous.”

The selected works of 4 Continents on Bedford have been unified in one space, the Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery.

96 Bedford Street
Stamford, CT 06901
(888) 861-6791
info@fernandoluisalvarezgallery.com
www.fernandoluisalvarezgallery.com
Gallery Hours: Wed-Sun, 1-8 p.m./Admission Free

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Beauty, Beast Earn $6.8 Million as New Money Buys Old Masters

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — Hendrick Goltzius’ 1612 depiction of an erotic encounter between a voluptuous sleeping damsel and a satyr, once owned by Nazi Hermann Goering, fetched $6.8 million yesterday atSotheby’s in New York from an unidentified European collector who was bidding by phone.

The 6-foot-wide painting, “Jupiter and Antiope,” was estimated to sell for $8 million to $12 million, but drew interest from only one buyer.

Sotheby’s Old Master Painting sale otherwise sparked fairly healthy bidding, tallying $61.6 million.

“There is new money coming onto the field,” said New York dealer Richard Feigen, bidding from the front row. “The word is out that this is a good place to park money.”

Feigen was outbid on two 14th-century paintings, including Francesco di Vannuccio’s delicate gold-ground “Madonna and Child” reliquary which sold for $1 million, doubling the $500,000 presale high estimate. Feigen was bidding on behalf of a major U.S. art museum he declined to name.

The rare Goltzius had belonged to Abraham Adelsberger, a German Jewish toy manufacturer. His son-in-law sold the painting to Goering’s agents in 1941, according to Sotheby’s. It was eventually recovered by Allied troops who gave it to the Dutch government in 1946, where it remained on loan to various museums until it was restituted to Adelsberger’s heirs in 2009. The artist’s previous auction record was $1.5 million for the 1616 “Fall of Man,” sold at Christie’s in 1996.

Leonardo Wannabe

There was more paddle action on a painting of a woman with a mysterious smile, “Portrait of a Woman, Called ‘La Belle Ferronniere,’” which was once thought to be the handiwork of Leonardo da Vinci.

It was the subject of a high-profile court battle in the 1920s, pitting the U.S. owners against art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen, who had declared the work a copy. The work was sold at Sotheby’s as a “follower of Leonardo da Vinci,” and nevertheless went shooting over the $500,000 high estimate, selling for $1.5 million to an anonymous phone bidder. The work is now considered a French copy, painted around 1700-1750. “Anything even connected to Leonardo goes for a lot,” said Milan dealer Marco Voena, whose expression suggested he thought the price was excessive.

The top lot was Anthony van Dyck’s “Two Studies of a Bearded Man,” painted from a gaunt, bushy-bearded model. It was estimated to sell for $5 million to $7 million and sparked enough heat between two competing bidders to drive the price up to $7.25 million.

Disappearing Rembrandt

One of the stranger moments occurred as lot 194 came up for sale. Rembrandt’s 1632 “Portrait of a Young Woman in a Black Cap,” was estimated to sell for $8 million to $12 million. It had sold for $9 million in 2007 at Sotheby’s in New York.

At the current sale, Sotheby’s announced that the painting had been withdrawn at the request of the owner, leaving the European dealers clustered near the front of the crowded salesroom perplexed. One called out, “Why’s it not being sold?” No answer from the rostrum.

The Los Angeles Museum of Art was a big seller, unloading nine paintings, with funds slated for new acquisitions. The museum reaped $2.7 million, more than double the $1.3 million presale estimate for the group.

The museum’s priciest lot was Christoph Amberger’s circa- 1541 “Portrait of Hans Jakob Fugger,” depicting a handsome young man wearing a sword and posed in front of an emerald green drape. He hailed from the richest family in the Holy Roman Empire, according to Sotheby’s catalog, a famous banking and mercantile dynasty. The portrait fetched $1.2 million, well above the $300,000 presale forecast.

Museums were also big buyers this week. At Christie’s Jan. 27 sale, the top lot was Louis Leopold Boilly’s 1810 “The Entrance to the Turkish Garden Cafe,” which sold for $4.6 million to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Christie’s tallied $39.6 million including their Old Master painting, drawing and 19th- century artworks.

Estimates don’t include commissions, which are 25 percent on the first $50,000, 20 percent between $50,000 and $1 million, and 12 percent above $1 million.

To contact the reporter on the story: Lindsay Pollock in New York atlindsaypollock@yahoo.com;

SOURCE: Bloomberg.com

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Koons, Hirst Prices Drop 50%; May Take Next Decade to Recover

Dec. 30 (Bloomberg) — Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, the stars of the art boom, were deposed as auction bestsellers in 2009 as prices for some of their works fell 50 percent. It may take much of the next decade before their works return to record prices, dealers say.

Billionaire collectors shunned “noughties” favorites in the current decade’s closing year, preferring 20th-century modernist classics, Art Deco furniture, Old Masters and Chinese artworks. Contemporary-art auction sales dropped 75 percent this year as sellers were no longer guaranteed minimum prices.

“Right now, people are nursing significant losses on Hirst,” Philip Hoffman, chief executive of the London-based Fine Art Fund, said in an interview. “They’re reluctant to sell until prices start to rise again.”

Worldwide auction sales of contemporary art grew more than 10-fold between 2003 and 2008, according to the France-based research company Artprice. Its price index, based on total annual auction sales for Hirst, was up 996 percent over the 10- year period that culminated in his “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” event in September 2008. The two-day auction, which coincided with the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., is seen by dealers as the end of the boom.

“That auction was such a freak,” Robert Sandelson, a London dealer, said in an interview. “It skewed the statistics. Damien is down, like most other artists are down. The market now feels like 2000 or 2001. It’s not going to be anything like it was for many, many years.” Sandelson held a Hirst show in his Mayfair gallery during the Sotheby’s sale.

Kitsch Skull

Koons, 54, known for his super-sized kitsch sculptures, was the top-selling artist at auction with 81.3 million euros ($117.2 million) of sales in the year to June 2008, said Artprice. Hirst, 44, famed for his pickled animals and diamond skull, overtook Koons with his 111.5 million-pound ($178.5 million) Sotheby’s sale.

Auction sales of high-value works by Koons dropped 50 percent in 2009, when nine pieces fetched more than $1 million, according to the U.S.-based database ArtNet.

Koons’s chromium steel “Baroque Egg With Bow (Turquoise/ Magenta)” from his “Celebration” series, owned by hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, sold for $5.5 million, less than its estimate at Sotheby’s New York in March 2009. The $47 million total at that auction was 87 percent down on that achieved the previous year.

Balloon Flower

In June 2008, a Koons sculpture from the same series, “Balloon Flower (Magenta),” sold at Christie’s International, London, for a record 12.9 million pounds. It was one of 18 works by the artist to fetch more than $1 million that year, according to ArtNet.

“We were in an extravagant period then,” Dallas-based collector Howard Rachofsky, who was the seller of that guaranteed piece, said in an interview. “It was a unique bubble market, a fantasy market. There were mega-billionaires from the Middle East and Russia interested in about eight names they were told to be interested in.”

Thirty-two works by Hirst sold for more than 1 million pounds at auctions in 2008, said ArtNet. Twenty-four of these were achieved, it said, at the Sotheby’s sale, the biggest of works sourced directly from an artist.

Only one piece by Hirst sold at auction for more than 1 million pounds in 2009, said ArtNet. The 2006 butterfly painting, “The Importance of Elsewhere — The Kingdom of Heaven,” achieved HK$15.5 million ($2 million) at Seoul Auction’s Hong Kong autumn sale on Oct. 7.

Circular Butterfly

At Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” auction in London in October this year, a 2006 circular butterfly painting by Hirst titled “Retribution” sold to the New York collectorJose Mugrabi for 541,250 pounds. A similarly sized and colored 2008 butterfly work, “Reincarnated,” sold for 1.6 million pounds at the company’s “Beautiful” auction a year before. The works carried low estimates of 450,000 pounds and 500,000 respectively.

The ArtTactic Average Price Index for Hirst butterfly paintings has dropped 41 percent since September 2008, said the London-based research company’s founderAnders Petterson in October 2009.

“Hirst will come back,” Sandelson said of the U.K.’s richest artist. “In the short term, overproduction has been a problem. That didn’t harm the Andy Warholmarket in the end. In the future Hirst’s works, like Warhol’s, will be bought as classics.”

“Hirst made his mark on art history,” said Hoffman. “But in 30 years’ time collectors are going to focus on the earlier works rather than the pieces he made when he had a lot of assistants. At the moment the prices of Hirst’s earlier works are probably unchanged. I’m not sure I’d invest in a new work that was sold in 2008.”

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Scott Reyburn in London atsreyburn@hotmail.com.

SOURCE: Bloomberg.com

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Braz Dias - “Equilibrio” a Solo Show on May 26

With over 50 years of experience in the art scene, Braz Dias, a Brazilian artist from São Paulo, has done almost everything one can expect from an artist of his caliber. His resume is enhanced by a great number of national and international exhibitions, as well as awards received by acclaimed shows and institutions, such as: SALÃO DE ARTE MODERNA DE SÃO PAULO, BIENAL DE SÃO PAULO, MAM/SP (MUSEU DE ARTE MODERNA DE SÃO PAULO) and SALÃO NACIONAL DE ARTE MODERNA - RIO DE JANEIRO. The experience he had in Italy, as an apprentice at the ISTITUTO STATALE D’ARTE PER L’ILLUSTRAZIONE E LA DECORAZIONE DEL LIBRO DI URBINO, in the the beginning of his career, has indeed played an important role throughout the years.

Since the early 70’s, Braz Dias has more and more immersed into the Surrealism facet of his work. With a technique of his own, he expresses himself by surpassing themes that allow the viewers to daydream between fantasy and reality, always carrying a solid dialogue with a sheer poetic balance. From May 26 until July 11 - 2009, the Gallery Uffici presents a series of 14 masterpieces under the theme “EQUILIBRIO”, which means ‘Balance’, a tribute to his five decades of solid career.

At GALERIA UFFICI
Rua Est. Jeremias Bastos, 442, Pina, 51011-040 Recife, PE, Brazil
Phone: 55-81-3325-2634
http://www.uffici.com.br
Monday - Friday: 10AM - 6PM, Saturday: 10AM - 3PM

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The Times Square Building :: Digital Art Show

United Creators curated the art show on the two futuristic and predominant 7.5 x 15 ft large screen installations at the red carpet like, street level event in AFI’s new 2-story high-tech lobby in The Times Square Building, designed by Andres Escobar & Associates.

It all started when Lev Leviev, the Israeli billionaire, made many New Yorkers sit up and take notice when he bought the former New York Times Building on West 43rd Street in 2007 for $525 million, three times what the seller paid for it 30 months earlier. It was a bold declaration that Mr. Leviev, who planned to spend an additional $170 million transforming the landmark building into a first-class office building, wanted to be a real estate player in New York. It was also a deal emblematic of an era when buyers and bankers imagined that rents and values would soar forever.

Now that it`s done, The Times Square Building, where a classic architectural gem is combined with white glove services to tenants in an increasingly competitive office environment. Furthering the redevelopment story, a new Times Square retail destination will supplant areas where printer presses and delivery trucks once operated daily. To it`s reopening, United Creators curated the art show on the two futuristic and predominant 7.5 x 15 ft large screen installations at the red carpet like, street level event in AFI’s new 2-story high-tech lobby in The Times Square Building, designed by Andres Escobar & Associates.

The show is stunning with those huge flat screens by Bang & Olufsen. The high definition with the superb B&O image quality made the exhibition a dazzling show. The show was also taken to Frankfurt, London and Istanbul. The artists selected by United Creators reflect the time period of 1913, when the building was constructed, till 2010 in contemporary visual arts. Among the contemporary artists we found works by: Fernando Ferreira de Araujo, Mark Weiner, Paul Seftel, Joey Kilrain, Joan Belmar, Alberto Oliveira and Leyla Rosario.

The Times Square Building History: Formerly known as The New York Times Building, is an 18-story ( 81 m 267 ft ) building at 229 West 43rd Street in Times Square, that was the headquarters of the New York Times from 1913 through 2007. The building was built in three stages between 1912 and 1937.

The building, originally designed by Mortimer J. Fox, of the firm Buchman & Fox, was originally called the New York Times Annex because it was designed to supplement the One Times Square Times Tower built in 1905 at Broadway and 42nd Street (which gives Times Square its name). In 1922 the Ludlow & Peabody designed a 100-foot (30 m) extension on the west side as well as a five-story setback attic level in the style of the French Renaissance including the Mansard roofs. In 1930-32 Albert Kahn designed a further expansion to the west including a second lobby and roof-top studio. Further expansions included a 12-story New York Times North building adjoining it to the north on 44th Street.

The Times sold the building in 2004 to Tishman Speyer for $175 million. Tishman sold it to Africa Israel in 2007 for $525 million. Africa Israel is in the midst of a $175 million renovation including adding a new sign on the top and replacing a digital clock in place since 1962 with an analog version. Africa officially calls it “The Times Square Building.”

The Times Square Building

UNITED CREATORS AT THE FORUM AT THE TOP BY YDG / AFIusa
THURSDAY MARCH 12th, 2009

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Galeria Uffici - Group Show

   

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Donation of original paintings and sculptures to the “Requiem” project

Friends of Cindy Jackson have donated originals paintings and sculptures so that we can see her project started. Please go to The REQUIEM Project to see the project and the art work that is for sale. Not only will you get a wonderful work of art, but every penny you pay  will go directly back into the “Requiem” project.  Check some of the available works:

CINDY JACKSON

 www.cjacksonsculpture.com

 WORK FOR SALE: YO-YO-MAN
 Bronze Edition 1/9
 25″ tall on a 10.5″ round black granite base

This is a Museum Edition Bronze, cast at the Premier Foundry in LA- Decker Studio. Cindy Jackson is    featured in high profile American Collections and is shown throughout the United States.

A.A.S., B.S., B.F.A. Southern Illinois University, Webster University, Art Center College of Design.
Freelance, Public Art and Gallery Sculptor.
Past and Present Galleries:Sherry French Gallery, Tromp d’Oliel Gallery, Artworks Gallery, Vanier & Roberts Gallery, Peltz Gallery, Thomas Segal Gallery, Deson-Saunders Gallery, Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Loveland “Sculpture in the Park”. Clients include: Disney Theme Parks (California and Tokyo), Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Mattel, Hasbro, Applause, Burger King, Dreamworks, Anheuser-Busch, Monsanto, 7-UP and Xerox. Awards: Joyce and Elliot Liskin Foundation for “Young Sculptor of the Year”. Public Monument: Bronze monument to oil workers in Signal Hill, CA 2006. First Place in National Small Sculpture Invitational 2004. Currently teaching Figure Sculpture at Art Center College of Design and privately in her studio.

DAVID TANNER

WORKS FOR SALE:
STANDING NUDE (Anatomy Study) & SEATED NUDE
Both are 16″ x 20″ Arcylic on Canvas Paper, Framed

David Tanner is a lighting artist at Walt Disney Animation Studios. Throughout his career in visual effects and animation he has contributed to such films as Contact, Stuart Little, The Matrix Reloaded, X2, and Disney’s upcoming Bolt. As an artist he is intrigued by abstraction. He is working toward applying the fragmentation and layering techniques used in film compositing to his painting. Both of these paintings are done from life and both have a wonderful immediacy and presence about them.

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Guardian Caterpillars by Brazilian artist Fernando Ferreira de Araujo at Ornare - Art Basel Miami 4-7 Dec, 2008

For this exhibition, we are pleased to present the series “Caterpillars” from the Brazilian-New York based artist Fernando Ferreira de Araujo. Immersed into his strong expressionist language, we’re taken to the spiritual and mystical facet of the artist. Through his work, Ferreira de Araujo has always invited us to his most inner journeys, at the same time, surfacing our most deep feelings and insights.

Fabio Villas Pereira

Artist Showdown

Director/Chief Curator

“The series ‘Caterpillars’ represents the power of mutation, the wonder of changing from one being to another. I also honor the ‘Guardian Angels’ and forces that have always remained by our side, at all times. Specially at those moments we mistakenly believed there was nothing to hold on to. Then, we found the strength we had never thought we had before. As a matter of fact, we didn’t have it. It was given to us by the Guardians, that always accompanied us, and we so much take for granted.”  Fernando Ferreira de Araujo

www.fernandoaraujo.net

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Fernando Ferreira de Araujo at Uffici Gallery - Opening Nov 4

Solo show from the Brazilian New York-based artist Fernando Ferreira de Araujo. Opening Nov 4, 2008 at 7PM. Uffici Gallery. Rua Estudante Jeremias Bastos, 442 Pina - Recife/PE - Brazil www.uffici.com.br

Through a dramatic hue, specially the intense blue shades and deep siennas, Fernando Ferreira de Araújo shows he hasn’t forgotten his native Brazil. Without detaching himself from his cultural background, living in New York City, for five years, has added a new perspective to his long artistic journey - almost 18 years. With a contemporary language, his work is richly crafted. His expressionist brushstroke captures his essence and expose his bare soul. For this solo show, “Paisagens do Inconsciente”, we present landscapes retrieved from his unconscious memories. As a result, a spiritual connection is established, and all the joy and grief Ferreira de Araujo has employed to his paintings become part of the journey through his natural and organic world.

Julieta Pontes - Galeria Uffici

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:: Q&A :: Max Miller

Q: I’ve noticed your creation process has a lot to do with reality, at the same time a touch of fantasy and the imaginary. Can you tell us more about it ?
A: I’ve always been interested in the fantastic, and the mysteries that exist just below the surface. I think that that is what I have always tried to represent with my work. For so long I felt like a satellite around somekind of ‘truth’ that I kept missing. Recently as I’ve begun to add metaphysical and more supernatural elements into my work I’ve felt like I’ve begun to get closer to what it is I’m looking for. This stems naturally from my interest in creating a subjective reality.

Q: Based on your background, it’s clear art has always been part of life.When did you realize art was the center piece of your life and not only part of it?
A: I don’t think there was a moment of realization. As far as I can remember I always knew that I would be an artist when I grew up. I didn’t know what form that would take or what kind of art I would make, but I was lucky to have a supportive family that only helped me get where I wanted to go.Being that most of my family members were involved in the arts in one way or another it has always been a central part of my life.

Q: What has been the most important thing in your career as an artist?
A: It’s hard to say, I think that my interest in a general, and broad scope of things in literature and science has always led me to seek out different avenues to express myself. There was a moment a few years ago where it seemed that all of my various interests gelled into one focused thrust, almost like a bunch of strings being braided together. That was probably the most crucial part of my career as I had been disparaging the artist’s life for a quite awhile before that, and as of that moment I became more comfortable.

Q: What has been the most difficult part of being an artist?
A: Saying that I’m an artist. When I tell most people what I do they look at me as if I’m a bum or a bit of dirt on their shoe. I’m not certain where the initial derision comes from, but when they see my work they usually change their tone. For awhile I told people that I was a painter, this inevitably led to the question, “Oh, do you paint houses?”

Q: What’s the most important fact at the present stage of your career?
A: I think a consistent, dedicated work schedule will always be the most important factor in the creation of my work. I try to work between six and ten hours a day in the studio, every day, unless I have to go out of town. It’s important for me that my studio is separate from where I live so that when I’m there I can focus solely on creating work. This only works if you’re happy and comfortable with what you do though, or if have crushing commission deadlines.

Q: What do you think matters the most for an artist living in the XXI century?
A: I think that promoting yourself on the internet in as many ways possible is an amazing avenue that has not been previously available to artists. So many people experience my work first online, and then perhaps make it to a show after that to see the work in person. I don’t even know how many commissions I’ve gotten just from people seeing my website. An artist’s website is an invaluable tool.

Q: How do you see abstract paintings? Have you ever considered developing an abstract body of work?
A: This is an idea I’ve wrestled with since I started seriously creating work. I think abstract work can be beautiful and it can be disgusting, just like realist work. The difference is that I see abstract work like modernist instrumental music/jazz, or poetry, it isn’t held to as many hard rules or standards as realist work sometimes can. In that way it can sometimes be more emotion driven and it can also appeal to a larger audience in that it does not demand as much from the viewer, and it can be viewed as ’safe.’ I don’t think I’ll ever go fully abstract as I might be disappointed with myself if I did, but recently I have started to incorporate abstract elements into the outlying edges of my paintings and I’ve been pleased with the action and expression in that marginal area.

Q: Could you name your top 5 artists?
A: Jusepe Ribera, Egon Shiele, Phil Hale, Diego Velazquez, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

Q: What’s more difficult, dealing with the business part of being an artist or managing insights, turning projects and ideas into art?
A: Turning projects into art is as simple as breathing for me. At this point I have such a simple structure for how I work that it almost becomes meditative, though of course I hit snags every once in awhile. Managing the business of my art making is another story though. I think many artists, including myself, are put off of handling the business side because we’re told when we’re young “Oh, you’re so right-brained, you make your art, you just don’t have a head for business.” And this sinks in and then people find that the IRS is looking for them for all the tax they haven’t paid for twenty years. Once I started seriously making work and selling it I found that had to handle the business side to, and as soon as I really looked at, it became easier, it’s just a matter of focusing down on it and not being afraid.

Q: What advice would you give to those artists that sometimes don’t know how to tread the unstable beginning of their careers?
A: I think the most important thing is to get your work out there as much as possible, don’t worry about selling things for huge amounts of money. You may feel like you deserve it for all the work you put into your art, but no one else may know that yet. You have to build confidence in your work and yourself and the only way to do that is to show your work whenever and wherever possible.

www.maxmillerart.com

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Max Miller - August 2008 Featured Artist

“I’ve always been interested in the fantastic, and the mysteries that exist just below the surface. I think that that is what I have always tried to represent with my work. For so long I felt like a satellite around somekind of ‘truth’ that I kept missing. Recently as I’ve begun to add metaphysical and more supernatural elements into my work I’ve felt like I’v begun to get closer to what it is I’m looking for. This stems naturally from my interest in creating a subjective reality.”

August 2008 - Featured Artist

                     ::Portfolio::             :: Q&A ::                :: Max Miller ::

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Kevin A. Rausch - July 2008 Featured Artist

“I am my own person and reject culturally implemented or constructed scenes or trends, whether they be found in the realm of music, art or politics. If the cultural milieu were the sea, these constructed trends would be born underwater, only to float to the top and be swallowed whole by the great white business shark.” Kevin A. Rausch

July 2008 - Featured Artist

                     ::Portfolio::              :: Q & A ::                :: Kevin A. Rausch ::

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:: Q & A :: Kevin A. Rausch

Q: When did art first caught your attention?                           
A: I am quite sure it all began when I one day just decided to stop listening to my teacher. It simply felt better to stare out the window and pay attention to all the events taking place outside. My textbooks became the canvas for my first scribbles based upon these events. These were the first stirrings of artistic expression I noticed within myself, borne out of necessity, and bubbling to the surface.

Q: You come from one of the most beautiful regions in Austria, Carinthia. Do you believe it plays an important role in your creation process?
A: To a certain degree, Carinthia influenced my development as an artist but to say that the geography, physical or otherwise, is present in my work, is, if so, more a result of the subconscious.

Q: Your work if pretty much contemporary, in tune with the international art scene, yet unique. How would you describe the local art scene in your area?
A:I spent a period of my life traveling intensively, absorbing and reflecting upon a wide variety of cultures and artistic works which inevitably influenced my own artistic style. Generally, I don’t devote much attention to the Art Scene: I am my own person and reject culturally implemented or constructed scenes or trends, whether they be found in the realm of music, art or politics. If the cultural milieu were the sea, these constructed trends would be born underwater, only to float to the top and be swallowed whole by the great white business shark.

Q: Do you think an artist has to be in a major City where art is shaping up history, or you can make your own history pretty much anywhere?
A: I believe Art can happen anywhere, but the question must certainly be, what is art? We wasted an entire academic year trying to answer this unanswerable question. It is, of course, easier to make a name and present works in major cities than in small towns. Those that are interested in art collecting and exhibiting are to be found in the major cities- this is a matter that does not concern the will of Art as Art can exist in the mountains whether or not it be noticed.

Q: What has been the most important thing in your career as an artist?
A:I have trouble trying to narrow it down to one defining thing- there were many important steps along the way to where I am today. It is the sum of all these steps that have allowed me to go the distance.

Q: What has been the most difficult part of being an artist?
A:To keep on working, not to stand still, being able to discover myself over and over again, these are the my greatest difficulties in being an artist. A very cumbersome and omnipresent obstacle to success as an artist is the monthly bills that one doesn’t necessarily have the cash on hand to pay. However, if you believe in yourself and are committed to your work all the problems find, sooner or later, their solutions.

Q: What’s the most important fact at the present stage of your career?
A: At the moment, I have a desire to paint large-format pictures. Somehow, the years of experience have given me the courage to tackle large canvasses.

Q: What do you think that matters the most for an artist living in the XXI century?
A: To question as much as possible, keep an open perspective and keep your feet on the ground; Not to get confused between what is and what seems to be and to listen to your own voice; One must not become what others wish of him, but what he wishes for himself.

Q: There have been so many great Austrian artists. However I suppose Gustav Klimt is the most well known one. There is also the Pop Artist Kiki Kogelnik. Do you find international recognition of your work something that really matters to you?
A: Naturally, it is a good thing for my Works to be shown internationally, for their feelers or tentacles to reach out a little just as friction among differing cultures can create new points of view or discourse. I believe it to be of value to travel around the world with one’s art the way that musicians go on tour- it is of such benefit to an artist. I experienced this myself when I was invited to be an artist-in-residence in Cairo. Everything there was so contrary to my culture- it was a very exciting adventure.

Q: Could you name your top 5 artists?
A: Cy Twombly, Per Kirkeby, Antonio Tapies, Willem de Kooning, Georg Baselitz and many more…

 
Q: What’s more difficult, dealing with the business part of being an artist or managing insights, turning projects and ideas into art?
A: Successful artists were also good businesspeople. It is simply part of being an artist. However, place too much emphasis on business, and the art suffers as a result. Often, making art takes so much time that there isn’t much left over for anything else.
Q: What’s your long term goal as an artist?
A: It isn’t so meaningful to me to reach a goal- it’s more as if the process itself is the determining factor. So much takes place each day that if one stays aware of even a few of these daily events it becomes difficult to look to the future. Important, is to stay aware. Anyway, I certainly plan to present my work in chosen locations which I see more as stops along a journey than as goals.

Q: What advice would you give to those artists that sometimes don’t know how to tread the unstable beginning of their careers?
A: One should slowly build up a network and find ways to come into possession of the materials needed to realize his artistic endeavours. I always had the chance to trade paint, frames, etc., for finished works which left me more time to devote to my work. Of course, it is helpful to have a pool of art savvy people on your side; it helps to strengthen your spine. Mostly, these people are to be found where the artist resides and does most of his work.

www.kevinarausch.com

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Joe Goodwin - June 2008 Featured Artist

“Painting allows my subconscious perceptions to register graphically, similar to the way they do in dreams. I have come to see painting as a developing solution to the unconscious. If I allow myself enough freedom , painting  goes beyond the formal and aesthetic into a dialogue with the psyche.”

Joe Goodwin

June 2008 - Featured Artist

                     ::Portfolio::              :: Q & A ::                :: Joe Goodwin ::

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Robert Raushcenberg died on Monday 12 May at the age of 82

Robert Raushcenberg (1925 - 2008).

Recognised as an heir to Dada and precursor of Pop Art, he glued, assembled and happily combined all sorts of images and materials from his era, playing on their interaction in terms of shape, texture and colour. In 1958, Léo Castelli took him under his wing and organised an exhibition for him. At the time, his technique of Combine-Painting or Combineswas already well developed and he started to explore the transfer technique using solvents in his drawings.

The turning point in his career came in 1964 at the Venice Biennial. Robert RAUSCHENBERG was the first American Painter to receive the Grand Prize for Painting. Thereafter, all eyes were focused on the new artistic scene in America which captured the limelight from the Ecole de Paris artists. The Grand Prize and a retrospective exhibition in London the same year, crowned 10 years of innovative work in which the artist practiced the art of re-using “leftovers”… Numerous exhibitions followed and he soon became internationally recognised. Although recognised as a major contemporary artist for close to half a century, it wasn’t until 2006 that his auction prices really accelerated: after a decade of stability his price index shot up 270% between 2006 and the beginning of 2008.

In 2007 his cumulative auction revenue amounted to over 20 million euros, representing more than the total generated over the five previous years (between 2002 and 2005)! During the same year, four of his works sold above the million-dollar line: three at the May 2007 sales and one in November: a very large - but relatively recent - acrylic entitled Primo Calle Roci Venezuela (measuring over 5 metres, dated 1985, for 2.3 million dollars, at Sotheby’s).

Three Robert Rauschenberg paintings were sold on the 14th of this month at Sotheby’s big New York Contemporary Art sale. The most sought-after piece, Overdrive - a large mixed-technique work on canvas - had been in a private European collection since 1963. The work went under the hammer within its estimated price range at 13 million dollars, establishing a new price record for the artist.

Rauschenberg’s works are indeed hotly disputed at auction as the supply of his major works - not already in private collections or museums - is undeniably drying up. On the other hand, the rising prices may well prompt some collectors into reselling, which could offer the market a small number of exceptional quality pieces… as was the case for Overdrive on May 14 last.

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Howard Hodgkin at Gagosian Gallery - London - until May 17

May 17 is the last day of the solo show of Howard Hodgkin at Gagosian Gallery (April 3 -  May 17, 2008). His first show of new work in London since 1999, and his first at the Britannia Street galleries.

Hodgkin’s paintings are unmistakable with their assertive, compressed gestures, brush-swept, complex textures, daring, voluptuous palette, and dynamic interchange of light and dark. The presence of a subject, no matter how hermetic, allusive, or fragmentary, is felt to reside in the heart of each. Hodgkin is an artist who embraces spontaneity and directness in equal measure to the processes of reflection, capitulation, and disguise. Sometimes he will labour for years over what looks like a single brush mark produced in an instant. His pictures, with their incorporated frames and painted wooden supports, behave as both objects and images.

“My pictures are finished when the subject comes back. I start out with the subject, and naturally I have to remember first what it looked like, but it would perhaps also contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed, or made into a physical object, and when that happens, when that’s finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back…well, the painting is finished.” Howard Hodgkin

In twenty works completed in 2007 and 2008, Hodgkin explores themes of American freedom and erotic intimacy, successfully engineering the intermarriage of private memories with mainstream abstract painting– “the facts of life as visual art,” as the late Robert Rosenblum once described them. The works vary in scale, although there is a marked preference for the epic, whether in intimate, warmly expressive subjects such as Artist and Model and Blushing, or in bold and exhilarating landscapes, such as the huge, incandescent Where Seldom Is Heard a Discouraging Word and the fiercely rendered Home, Home on the Range.

Howard Hodgkin

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NY State of Mind - Photographs by Fernando Ferreira de Araujo

“Just like in his painting series, Fernando’s photographs bring a new perspective to every image and everyone’s imagination. You are invited to be more than a beholder, you are drawn to become part of his world.” Heather Barker - Transart Editor.

Ferreira de Araujo’s  Solo show in Miami - Crossroad, The Liminal State of Light and Dark - will be on until June 6, but he’s already working on three new projects. One of them, is a body of work of more than a hundred photographs inspired and taken in New York City. These images will be the starting point for his new painting series, carrying the same name - New York State of Mind - to be exhibited during the 2ND quarter of 2009 in his native Brazil.  Meanwhile he’s in negotiation for another solo show in Miami, in August, as well as on Art Basel Miami in December, 2008.

“This video is a tribute to New York City. I always carry my camera on me to capture the different angles around the city that we often take for granted.” Fernando Ferreira de Araujo

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