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Edouard Levé, Untitled (detail), from Fictions, 2006
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Made in Paris
November 15-28, 2006
Although it's known to the masses for old-world charm and iconic masterpieces, Paris is getting its avant-garde edge back
with a new crop of experimental French artists and unconventional art spaces. Paris Photo takes over the Louvre this week, showcasing the latest work from French photographers and international figures including
Bill Henson and Erwin Wurm. In the vibrant realm of French conceptual art, Bruno Peinado attacks American culture with pop installations and Claude Closky lures viewers into absurdist computer games. Shaping the Parisian scene are experimental curators like Marc-Oliver Wahler, who brings a playful imagination to his new position as director of the Palais de Tokyo. Outside of the city of lights,
Gillian Wearing debuts new video work in London and painter Lisa Sanditz explores color and perspective in a striking Los Angeles show.
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Adobe's new online experience takes you inside The Creative Mind to explore all that Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 has to offer. Navigate three animated worlds while learning about the latest tools and features. Listen to cutting-edge designers
talk about how the suite assists their creative process. And try out CS2.3 for yourself. All within The Creative Mind.
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Pollock Sets Price Record
(Guardian, November 3)
Taking the big-money art crown from Gustav Klimt, whose Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was purchased by Ronald Lauder for $135 million in June, a Jackson Pollock painting recently sold for $140 million through
a private transaction at Sotheby's. The painting, No. 5, 1948, is a landmark abstract expressionist work and was previously owned by publishing magnate S.I. Newhouse, Jr., who subsequently sold it to media mogul David Geffen. Although Geffen has not commented on the sale, the buyer is believed to be David Martinez, a Mexican financier who has been
on a spending spree of late, having just purchased a Willem de Kooning at Basel in June for $15.5 million, as well as a $55
million apartment in New York's Time Warner Center. In a related story, a 73-year-old truck driver claims to have bought a Pollock for $5 from a San Bernardino thrift store 15 years ago. If the
piece is authenticated, it is expected to be valued at $50 million.
Pompidou Preps Birthday With Expansion
(The Age, October 31)
Trying to recover from some recent bad press, Paris' Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers-designed Centre Pompidou has big plans for its 30th anniversary next year, including expansions in Europe and China. The new Centre Pompidou-Metz, designed by Japan's Shigeru Ban, will soon be breaking ground in its titular city, which lies near the French borders of Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
Inspired in part by a Chinese bamboo peasant's hat that Ban found in a Parisian market, the building will feature a luminescent
"crown" of latticed, fiberglass-coated timber. Meanwhile, a second new Pompidou is being planned in the LuWan District of Shanghai, though no architect has been named at this time. Back in Paris, Pompidou officials have
been courting young viewers, offering WiFi, free admission to those under 18, and a show dedicated to Tintin cartoonist Hergé set to open in December.
"Katrina Cottages" Gaining Popularity
(CBS News, October 8)
First used as an alternative to trailers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, low-cost model homes are attracting buyers well beyond the Gulf Coast, where more than 50,000 residences were destroyed last year. Designed by
New York architect Marianne Cusato and produced and distributed by national hardware giant Lowe's, a "Katrina Cottage" comes as a 544-square-foot two bedroom or a 936-square-foot three bedroom, costing between $27,000 and
$46,800. The cramped quarters are balanced out by the inclusion of a generous front porch. Lowe's claims that it has received
over 7,000 inquiries for the cottages since January. Experts say the previously overlooked "tiny house" market carries an
appeal beyond flood victims to those looking for inexpensive housing choices or rental income.
Tate Gets Modern Right
(New York Times, November 1)
New York Times art critic Roberta Smith visited the Tate Modern in London recently. She came back to the Big Apple thinking about how the former power station succeeds despite its limitations
and how New York's Museum of Modern Art does so poorly in its costly new $858 million home. Smith praised the Herzog & de Mueron-designed Tate, with its raw wood floors, its creative curating that compensates for gaps in the collection, and its galleries'
newfound sense of flow — a result of the museum's recent reorganization. On the other hand, Smith took MoMA to task for its
underused lobby atrium, lack of inexpensive eats, and the overall sense that its "design aims to impress rich collectors."
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Art Cologne plans expansion more »
Koons wins appeal in copyright suit more »
The Whitney tries to decide which direction to go, literally more »
Mr. Mendes da Rocha goes to Washington more »
Spotlight on sculptor Kiki Smith more »
Kidman receives low marks for her portrayal of Diane Arbus more »
Bill Viola awarded French Order of Letters more »
Chelsea, king of art commerce more »
Helen Molesworth tapped as Harvard contemporary art curator more »
Burnt Dutch furniture proves popular more »
Hedge fund manager preps $13M art sale more »
Rooftops get a rethink from architects more »
Marden has his MoMA moment more »
Pontus Hulten, contemporary art impresario, dies at 82 more »
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[ Paris Photo
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Joel Meyerowitz / Roger Ballen / Sze Tsung Leong / Bill Henson
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Arguably the best photography fair in the world, Paris Photo returns for the 10th time with 106 exhibitors from 21 countries. Stylishly situated in the Carrousel du Louvre, the fair is expected to attract 40,000 visitors viewing and collecting 19th-century, modern, and contemporary photography,
as well as photographic books and editions from publishers such as Steidl, Phaidon, and Hatje Cantz.
Amsterdam's Torch Gallery features Teun Hocks' surrealistic scenes, which always star the now-aging artist. Following in Hocks' sly footsteps, Kerry Skarbakka depicts himself stumbling down stairs or falling out of buildings at Fifty One Fine Art Photography from Antwerp. London's Michael Hoppen Gallery offers bizarre domestic nudes by Jeff Bark, and Jackson Fine Art of Atlanta presents Roger Ballen's black-and-white, psychological portraits of poverty-stricken South Africans.
A number of galleries hail from New York, including Yossi Milo, which brings several stars from its stable, including the
digital portraitist Loretta Lux and Chinese cityscape photographer Sze Tsung Leong. Charles Cowles displays another take on China's rapidly changing environment by Edward Burtynsky, and Edwynn Houk exhibits Robert Polidori's apocalyptic views of Chernobyl and poignant images of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Predictably, Parisian dealers are well represented. Baudoin Lebon shows Didier Massard's meticulously constructed fantasy worlds while Magnum Photos gets real with documentary photographs from Alec Soth's romantic series Niagara and Lise Sarfati's alluring portrayals of youth. Anne de Villepoix brings photos of Erwin Wurm's absurd one-minute sculptures and Martha Rosler's photomontages critiquing the Iraq War.
Nordic artists are honored this year in the Statement section with one-person shows organized by eight galleries from Denmark,
Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Standouts include Trine Sondergaard & Nicolai Howalt's snowy hunting scenes at Copenhagen's Martin Asbæk Projects and Axel Antas' artificial clouds and washed-out landscapes at Galleria Heino from Helsinki. All three artists are short-listed for the
coveted BMW-Paris Photography Prize, presented
during the fair. (PL)
Paris Photo is open to the public November 16-19.
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James Angus
Sydney
Museum of Contemporary Art
Now through November 26
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James Angus' mini-retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art brings together all aspects of this mid-career artist's work. Angus
plays with scale and context while subtly warping viewers' perceptions. Bugatti Type 35, a full-scale racing car built in a distorted, elongated perspective, defies focus, questioning the immutable nature of three-dimensional
objects. Off-site, Shangri-La offers a large, inverted hot air balloon inside the foyer of the Sydney Opera House. Angus returns repeatedly to nature, creating schematic models of manta rays, gorilla skulls, and mosquitoes, linking organic forms to architectural mock-ups, topographical maps, and abstract, mathematically
derived objects. In so doing, he creates a stylized, sculptural world where nature and artifice share unusual equivalence. (AF)
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Lisa Sanditz: The New Frontier
Los Angeles
ACME
Now through November 25
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Concurrent with her first solo museum exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, The New Frontier at ACME features a group of Lisa Sanditz's recent paintings. The formidable five-foot canvases usurp the viewer's entire field of vision with dramatic color and strong
perspectival elements. Fiori di Como and Moss Wall borrows from glass artist Dale Chihuly's ceiling installation at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. The colorful glass pinwheels and stalactites bend down to meet a matching wild carpet, which
points out the lobby door towards a distant desert landscape. Her self-possessed style is most evident in this masterful integration
of small scenes into otherwise ponderous canvases. (KB)
Lisa Sanditz: Flyover is on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art through January 7.
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Dario Robleto
Greensboro
UNC Greensboro Weatherspoon Art Museum
Now through December 17
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Dario Robleto's latest series of poetic sculptures try to understand war's effect on families. He assembles intensely crafted talismans
— love letters, bullets, and uniform fragments — into dioramas, wreaths, and Victorian mourning ephemera that memorialize the death, love, and loss resulting from battles fought on American soil. By framing horror within universal
experience, Robleto convincingly addresses the transitory nature of existence. Baroque material lists seem unlikely ("cast
and carved bone dust from every bone in the body") but are essential to Robleto's alchemical mixing of documentary truth and
poignant personal history. Like Alan Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, Robleto's sculptures are meditations on how we weave together meaning from manifold sources. (LC)
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Angela Strassheim
New York
Marvelli Gallery
Now through December 2
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Angela Strassheim's large-format, dreamily saturated color photos revisit the unsettling period between childhood and adolescence through crafted
domestic tableaux. In one photo, Strassheim captures a bikini-topped Lolita reading lazily in a sun-splashed garden; in another, a father awkwardly holds his little girl while sitting in a doctor's
waiting room. Strassheim's approach to composition breaks down the images into disparate parts, accentuating the sense that her subjects
are isolated by their uncertain stage of development, while the eerie crispness of her focus dispels any sense that these
are documentary scenarios, despite their realism. As the girls fail to sync with their formally constructed environments,
the tension lends itself to metaphors for the relationship between individuals and societal prescription. (JG)
Angela Strassheim has a concurrent exhibition, Left Behind, at the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, through December 10.
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Gillian Wearing
London
Maureen Paley
Now through November 19
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Gillian Wearing's work can feel homely and prosaic in comparison to her more attention-grabbing YBA peers. Best known for semi-static video portraits and everyday photos betraying emotional disturbance, she explores the idea
of family in her latest exhibition. The centerpiece installation responds to the 1974 British TV documentary The Family. In a room painted faded yellow and lit by retro wall lamps to resemble the artist's childhood home, a TV shows a child actress
playing Wearing talking about the program. In a video in another room, Britain's answer to Oprah, Trisha Goddard, interviews The Family's teen protagonist Heather, now an adult. Wearing delivers a thoughtful probe into domesticity, voyeurism, nostalgia, and
women's changing roles. (FG)
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[ Bruno Peinado ] |
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Bruno Peinado
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A pop-culture alchemist, French artist Bruno Peinado appropriates, flattens, and distorts familiar symbols to create wry new icons. Perpetuum Mobile, his 2004 solo show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, was a three-dimensional collage of leaping Michael Jordans, oversized
air fresheners, glittering disco balls, and soaring eagles, all set against backgrounds of color fields. The exhibition epitomized
Peinado's combination of cool minimalism and Warholian pop glee in the service of wicked cultural critique.
Born in Montpellier in 1970, Peinado is now based in Douarnenez, France, but his outlook is distinctly international. In his
early work, Peinado reacted to the spread of American culture by painting graffiti-inspired wall texts in English and crafting political sculptures such as The Big One World (2002). After being a resident artist at New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2002, he began showing his work internationally
at the Istanbul, São Paulo, and Lyon Biennials and in solo exhibitions at the Swiss Institute in New York and the Migros Museum in Zürich.
In the last two years, Peinado has streamlined his minimalist and pop influences, often reducing appropriated forms to black,
white, or silver icons. The new works achieve a subtle tension between abstraction and loaded symbolism. At a 2005 solo show
at Parker's Box in Brooklyn, he showed glowing lightboxes stripped of commercial signage and an aluminum "dreamcatcher" of amalgamated Mercedes and Air Jordan logos. This year, Peinado's as mischievous as ever — at a solo show at Galleria Continua
in March, he poked fun at his minimalist influences with a series resembling dented John McCracken sculptures. (BR)
Bruno Peinado's work is on view at the Busan Biennale 2006 in Busan, South Korea through November 25, and his design for a Louis Vuitton bag is on display at Espace Louis Vuitton in Paris until December 31.
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[ Marc-Olivier Wahler ] |
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Mark Handforth / Tony Matelli / Loris Cecchini / Michel Blazy
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| Marlyne Sahakian interviews Marc-Olivier Wahler, former artistic director of the Swiss Institute in New York, about his new position as director of the Palais de Tokyo and his unique approach to organizing exhibitions. |
AK: Your inaugural program at the Palais de Tokyo is titled FIVE BILLION YEARS. Can you speak to the relationship between this program and the exhibition of the same title that you curated at the Swiss Institute in New York in 2004?
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MOW: You can use the same title but have a completely different show. The Palais de Tokyo presents a new context and a new volume
of space in comparison to the Swiss Institute. My shows are never based around a theme; I always start with a few artworks
that become the bones or the skeleton, and then I build a whole show around them. For the Palais de Tokyo show, I've built
the structure around the works of Vincent Lamouroux, Philippe Decrauzat, and François Morellet. This is totally different from the Swiss Institute where I started with artwork by Lang/Baumann and Michel Blazy. These artists are included in the Palais de Tokyo show but are presenting new works in a different setting.
This new permutation is interesting for me because the shows I do are very much about interpretation. For me, artwork can
be seen as a kind of schizophrenic machine that gives answers that remain only on the tip of the tongue. You almost get it,
but then you never quite do and it can be a bit frustrating. My shows are about the dynamic of searching and curiosity, not
about an established aesthetic. It's an electric oscillation between two poles — a dynamic, not a result.
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AK: At the Swiss Institute, you organized several thought-provoking group exhibitions, including OK/OKAY, EXTRA, and UNDER PRESSURE. How do you plan to continue this style of programming at the Palais de Tokyo?
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MOW: I try to build a body of exhibitions where each exhibition relates to the one before it in a type of sequence. You could
say that all of the shows you mention build up to FIVE BILLION YEARS in New York — or rather to CINQ MILLIARDS d'ANNEES in Paris. An exhibition can be like the living dead, something that keeps coming back, something you just can't kill. You
can even try hacking away at it with a chainsaw, but it will always come back. There should be a sense of déjà vu with an art show, like the black cat in The Matrix. It's a bug in the system, but it's never quite what it seems either. A show is a critical tool that helps puts things in
perspective. It should provoke thoughts on what an exhibition is today, how group shows should be organized, and how an institution
such as the Palais de Tokyo should be in sync with artists.
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AK: The difference between the Palais de Tokyo and the Swiss Institute, in terms of architecture and space, is quite striking.
Is there any difficulty in displaying the work of younger artists in a much grander, more intimidating space?
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Claude Closky: Hello and Welcome
Carole Boulbes, Lynne Cooke, Alexandra Midal, Frédéric Paul, François Piron, David Platzker, and Eric Troncy
Domaine de Kerguéhennec
The recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2005, Claude Closky is the ultimate contemporary conceptual artist. Working in a variety of media — from simple collages, artists' books, and minimal paintings to looping slide shows, video installations, and digital art projects — Closky appropriates seductive advertising imagery and slogans and manipulates them to his own absurd end. He constructs visual games that often leave viewers wondering if they are actually
looking at "art" or merely revisiting familiar information — wallpaper made from enlarged NASDAQ listings or Family Snapshots torn from the pages of magazines. This comprehensive, bilingual exhibition catalogue, which was designed by Closky to resemble a weekly news magazine such as Time, provides a rousing overview of an enigmatic yet insightful artist. (PL)
Claude Closky's work is on view at Florence Loewy's booth at Paris Photo and in the exhibition Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples/1960 to Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Cover Art
Edouard Levé
Untitled (detail), from the Fictions series, 2006
One of ten black-and-white photographs in a boxed set
9 3/4 x 11 3/4 x 3/4 in./ 25 x 30 x 2 cm
Courtesy Florence Loewy and Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris
All Rights Reserved
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