Heckscher Museum Identity Crisis in Art

Heckscher Museum Identity Crisis in Art

Posted: 29 Jan 2012 06:13 PM PST

HUNTINGTON, NY .- The Heckscher Museum of Art presents Identity Crisis: Authenticity, Attribution and Appropriation. This exceptional exhibition which opened on January 15, 2011 and runs through March 27, 2011, explores issues relating to the artistic use of other artists’ styles and images in historical and contemporary works. Historically popular artists had followers, imitators and forgers, while more recent artists openly adopt well-known images and styles to comment on originality, authorship and culture. This exhibition presents old master and nineteenth-century works from The Heckscher Museum Permanent Collection, providing a framework for connoisseurship issues, such as authenticity and attribution. Artists to be considered include Canaletto, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-Desire-Gustave Courbet, and George Inness, among others. 
Contemporary appropriation artists add a new dimension to the use of adopted images, as seen in the work of such artists as Mike Bidlo, David Bierk, George Deem, Audrey Flack, Kathleen Gilje, Paul Giovanopoulos, Deborah Kass, Jiri Kolar, Sherrie Levine, Carlo Mariani, Yasumasa Morimura, Vik Muniz, Richard Pettibone, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and others, providing an instructive and stimulating counterpoint to the issues raised by the historical works in the show. 

Auction of the World's Largest Collection of Original Vintage Glamour Photography

Auction of the World's Largest Collection of Original Vintage Glamour Photography Posted: 26 Jan 2012 07:45 PM PST CALABASAS, CA.- George Hurrell’s iconic portrait of Jean Harlow on a white bearskin rug created for Vanity Fair magazine now spearheads the largest auction of Glamour Photography in art history. The original camera negative, as well as a custom print of this incomparable photograph is regarded as Hurrell’s most important portrait and is estimated to sell for well over $20,000. The multi-million dollar Michael H. Epstein and Scott E. Schwimer collection, which contains tens of thousands of the best examples of Hollywood fine art, will be auctioned by Profiles in History March 26-27, 2010. Worldwide bidding begins at 12:00pm (noon) PST both days. The Michael H. Epstein and Scott E. Schwimer collection is recognized as the world’s largest collection of George Hurrell and includes over 1,000 original vintage photographs as well as 500 camera negatives. Featured are dozens of the most valuable 8 x 10 camera negatives from Hurrell’s career. Included is the bearskin rug portrait of Ann Sheridan as well as the negatives used for the Hurrell Portfolios together with those of Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake , and Johnny Weissmuller from Tarzan, which is the most symbolic ever taken of a male subject in Hollywood .  The sequence of photographic lots include most of the heralded stars of Hollywood ’s golden age, including Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, and Norma Shearer. Incorporated are two custom photographs of Ramon Novarro taken in 1929 from Hurrell’s first sitting with a Hollywood subject. In addition to the Glamour photography collection, there are many significant master prints by Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Cindy Sherman, Julius Schulman, Jock Sturges, Howard Zieff and Edward Steichen. Moreover, the collection contains an incomparable assemblage of Len Prince and Mel Roberts works as well as fine art by Andy Warhol, Richard Duardo, Keith Haring, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Beatrice Wood and numerous others.  Epstein comments, “It’s time for Scott and me to share the fruits of our 25-year collection with the rest of the world. We want others to enjoy and embrace the most rewarding field of collecting with which we can ever imagine being involved.” Epstein continues, “There is no better organization than Profiles in History to entrust our collection. I am certain that Scott and I will be back collecting once this auction is over.”  Also included in the auction will be several hundred photographs and camera negatives from Hurrell’s contemporaries in Hollywood , featuring a comprehensive sequence from Clarence Sinclair Bull, who was Hurrell’s contemporary and stylistic rival at M-G-M. Included are dozens of master images from Bull’s most important subject, Greta Garbo. There are dozens of rare prints of some of the most important Hollywood subjects including a Louise Brooks from 1925 before she signed with Paramount , Marlene Dietrich by Edward Steichen, and unseen prints of a luminous teenaged Marilyn Monroe.  Len Prince is one of the few master photographers utilizing the large-format 8 x 10 view camera and detailed lighting in the fashion of Hurrell, Bull and Richard Avedon during their peak years. Prince rarely uses the digital format and prefers the "old school" refinement of shadows and highlights achieved by the rigorous demands of 8 x10 view cameras; he is recognized as one of the foremost glamour photographers. Among his celebrated subjects are some of the world's most beautiful women including his most recent muse, Jessie Mann, daughter of acclaimed photographer, Sally Mann. Drew Barrymore, Kirsten Dunst, Teri Hatcher, Kelly Klein and Sarah Jessica Parker are also featured. One of the most comprehensive collections of Prince's work ever to be offered at auction, Epstein and Schwimer's personal collection includes many custom prints created for them by Len and Charlie Griffin. Prince’s prints are almost all in expensive and archival permanent selenium toned papers, which produce rich deep tones.  The Harry Langdon archive includes the life work of a master photographer from the large-format fashion work of the 1960's to the present. He has photographed virtually every Hollywood celebrity from the magical Angelina Jolie at 15, to Ann-Margret, Halle Berry , Cher and Diana Ross at their most memorable. Also included, a young George Clooney, Will Smith, Cher, Rock Hudson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, all during their prime. Langdon’s impeccably high standard and style is widely recognized throughout the world. Included in the sale of this vast archive covering forty years of work in black-and-white and lush color includes approximately 50,000 vintage prints, black-and-white and color negatives and transparencies, as well as full copyrights.  The complete Mel Roberts archive will be also sold intact including several thousand vintage prints with many unpublished, black and white negatives and color transparencies, as well as his personal video collection. All reproduction rights and copyrights for his name and photographs will also be part of this archive. First published in a physique magazine in the early 1960's, Roberts took over 50,000 photographs of nearly 200 male models, many of them friends and lovers. They were not the perfectly bodied men common in the physique magazines of the time but tanned in the California sun and casually posed by the pool or beach. In 2003, The New Yorker described his “witty Technicolor pictures” as “capturing all the giddy delights of being young during summertime...” Mel Roberts’ photographs are included in many notable collections in Hollywood . Visit : http://www.liveauctioneers. com/

Annie Leibovitz opens new art show at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington

Annie Leibovitz opens new art show at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 08:06 PM PST

WASHINGTON, DC - Photographer Annie Leibovitz says she has come back from some dark days and revived her creativity with a new project now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that marks a departure from her popular celebrity portraits. Two years ago, Leibovitz was facing millions in debt and a mismanaged fortune that nearly cost her the legal rights to her own work, which includes some of pop culture's most memorable images. The ordeal was a good lesson in managing her business, Leibovitz said, but left her "emotionally and mentally depleted." At the museum she led a tour through the photographs she says renewed her inspiration with a few road trips through U.S. history. The idea grew out of a book she had wanted to make with her partner, Susan Sontag , with a list of destinations and an excuse to visit them. After Sontag died, she eventually revived the idea with her young children. On exhibition through 20th May.

Two Exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum Showcases 120 Years of Staged Photography

Two Exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum Showcases 120 Years of Staged Photography

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 11:02 PM PST

Saint Louis, Missouri.- The Saint Louis Art Museum is pleased to present "The First Act: Staged Photography Before 1980", on view at the museum from January 20th through April 29th. Apparent in the upcoming Focus on the Collection installation, the idea of staging pictures through scene setting, acting, and directing has been fundamental to the field of photography since its inception in 1839. "The First Act" provides a prehistory to the large-scale theatrical work in the concurrent feature exhibition, "An Orchestrated Vision: The Theater of Contemporary Photography", which explores various elements of theatricality in photography from the last 20 years, and can be seen from February 19th through May 13th. 

Photographers have visualized literary passages, constructed dreamlike imagery in darkrooms and studios, and drawn upon cinematic techniques in their pursuit of fabricating alternate realities. On view in "The First Act" will be twelve photographs spanning 120 years, including works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Clarence John Laughlin, Henry Peach Robinson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sandy Skoglund, Edward Steichen, and Cindy Sherman. "The Theater of Contemporary Photography" is a compelling survey of contemporary photographers, many presented in St. Louis for the first time. Seen together, the works reveal the remarkable potential of the photographic medium in contemporary artistic practice. On view will be over 40 works from an international group of artists which includes Thomas Struth, Carrie Mae Weems, and Gregory Crewdson. These photographers have focused on the elements of scene setting and directing to meticulously construct environments that are mesmerizing in their large scale, absorbing in their uncanny beauty, and haunting in their elusive meaning. They inventively exploit photography's unique capacity to operate in the boundaries between fact and fiction. Each image is the product of the painstaking execution of the ambitious vision of the artist.

The Saint Louis Art Museum was founded in 1879, at the close of a decade that saw the establishment of art museums in great cities across the eastern half of the United States. This Museum's comprehensive collections bear witness to the inspirational and educational goals to which its founder aspired and the moral and democratic imperatives he embraced. What began as a collection of assorted plaster casts, electrotype reproductions, and other examples of "good design" in various media rapidly gave way to a great and varied collection of original works of art spanning five millennia and six continents. Today the quality and breadth of the Museum's collection secure for it a place among the very best institutions of its kind. The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation's leading comprehensive art museums with collections of artworks that include those of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes, and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strength in 20th-century German art. The American art collection features masterworks of paintings and sculpture from Colonial portraiture through modernist and abstract art of the first half of the 20th century. The Museum's American holdings reflect the nation's longstanding fascination with landscape and include Hudson River School paintings by Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Cole, and John Frederick Kensett, as well as scenes of the Western frontier. The local landscape is well represented in the work of Missouri artists Henry Lewis, Charles Ferdinand Wimar, and George Caleb Bingham. The Election Series, illustrating three stages of the Missouri electoral process, is one of the highlights of the Museum's paintings by Bingham. The collection also includes major works by the late nineteenth-century artists Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, and Bessie Potter Vonnoh as well as Impressionist compositions by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Childe Hassam, and John Henry Twachtman. Important twentieth-century work by Georgia O'Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley, and Philip Guston is also presented.

The Collection of European Art to 1800 includes exceptional examples of art made across the continent of Europe and the British isles from the seventh through the eighteenth centuries. The earliest pieces in the collection are a pair of toga pins made in Spain in the seventh century. Other examples from the medieval period include enamels and metalwork; architectural fragments; stone, wood and ivory sculpture; manuscript illuminations; and stained glass. The Museum's medieval holdings are strongest in French and German Romanesque (c.1050–c.1200) and Gothic (c.1200–c.1500) art. Highlights include a French St. Christopher, a superb alabaster Madonna, an exquisite head of St. Roch, and a German gilded Christ of exceptional quality.The collection of paintings and sculpture comprises work made in Europe between 1300 and 1800. Highlights include a late Titian masterpiece (1570–76) left in his studio at his death; a marble Pan made in Michelangelo's workshop in the 1530s; one of only 37 known works by the baroque master Bartolomeo Manfredi painted around 1615; a copper painting made in 1612 by Artemisia Gentileschi; an important Neo-Classical narrative painting by François-André Vincent exhibited in 1785; and a stunning portrait by Hans Holbein depicting the wife of King Henry VIII's comptroller of 1527. The Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs houses more than 13,000 works of art on paper. There are approximately 8,500 prints, 3,000 photographs, and 1,500 drawings, watercolors, and collages from a wide range of periods and cultures. The department has particular strengths in art from Western Europe and the United States. It is internationally known for its German works on paper, and houses the largest public collection of Max Beckmann's prints in the world. The print collection also has impressive holdings by Albrecht Dürer, Max Klinger, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Jacques Callot. The collection of drawings features significant works by George Caleb Bingham, Edgar Degas, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The photography collection is strong in 20th century American with large holdings of works by Edward Curtis, Paul Strand, Andreas Feininger, and Moneta Sleet Jr. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.slam.org

Exhibition of Magnum contact sheets on view at the International Center of Photograpy

The Seventh Wave, 2000. © Trent Parke/Magnum Photos.

NEW YORK, NY.- Often compared to an artist’s sketchbook, a contact sheet is the photographer’s  first look at what he or she has captured on film, and provides a uniquely intimate glimpse into the  working process. It gives a behind-the-scenes sense of walking alongside photographers and  seeing through their eyes. Through May 6, 2012, Magnum Contact Sheets are on view at the  International Center of Photograpy, revealing how Magnum photographers have captured and  edited their best shots from the 1930s to the present. The images featured—both celebrated, iconic photographs and lesser-known surprise—encompass  more than 70 years of history: from the Normandy landings by Robert Capa, the 1968 Paris riots by  Bruno Barbey, and the war in Chechnya by Thomas Dworzak, to René Burri’s filmic sequence of  close-ups of Che Guevara, classic New Yorkers by Bruce Gilden, and Eve Arnold’s famous portrait  of the charismatic and image-savvy Malcolm X. “The contact sheet embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding,  a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to  transparent representation of reality,” said ICP Associate Curator Kristen Lubben, who organized the  exhibition. “It records each step on the route to arriving at a particular image, and thus provides a  unique window into the creative process.” This exhibition, through these fascinating and usually private series of images (many of them previously  unpublished), celebrates what and how Magnum photographers saw along the way for nearly a century. Coinciding with the publication of Magnum Contact Sheets (Thames & Hudson), edited by Lubben, the  exhibition will include a selection of some of the 139 contact sheets from the book. The exhibition functions—in the words of Magnum photographer Martin Parr—as an “epitaph to the  contact sheet,” marking the end of the analog film era and the rise of digital photography. “Magnum Contact Sheets provides a fascinating and surprisingly intimate survey of an aspect of the  craft of the photographer… To be able to follow dozens upon dozens of the most recognized images  of the 20th century backwards through the selection process gives these pictures a new immediacy  and vitality. Going through the contact sheets for, say, Burri’s 1963 session with a cigar-smoking Che  Guevara, or Hiroji Kubota’s series of shots of Buddhist monks praying before the extraordinary Golden  Rock on the side of a cliff in Burma, or, more intimately, Elliott Erwitt’s studies of his wife and newborn  baby, one experiences something of the excitement the photographers must have felt when they first  trained their loupes upon these fresh-made, still-damp sheets,” said John Banville in a review of the  book in The Telegraph. Among the many acknowledged photographic greats included in Magnum Contact Sheets are Henri  CartierBresson, Erwitt, and Inge Morath, as well as representatives of Magnum’s latest generation,  such as Jonas Bendiksen, ICP alumna Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Alec Soth, winner of ICP’s 2011  Infinity Award for Publication.

The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art

The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art Features Three New Exhibitions

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 08:36 PM PST

Toronto, Ontario.- The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is pleased to launch its 2012 season with three visually stimulating and contemplative exhibitions: "Tasman Richardson: Necropolis"; "Spectral Landscape"; and "Daisuke Takeya: GOD Loves Japan". All three exhibitions open on February 4th and remain on view through April 1st. The opening celebration for all three takes place on February 4th from 2-5pm.

Helmut Newton Foundation Exhibits 394 Photographs From Newton's Book Sumo

Helmut Newton Foundation Exhibits 394 Photographs From Newton's Book Sumo

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 05:11 PM PST

BERLIN.- With SUMO, the Helmut Newton Foundation presents what might just be the most spectacular and expensive photography book project ever. Ten years ago, publisher Benedikt Taschen persuaded Helmut Newton to agree to produce a gigantic book with a print run of 10,000 copies, all signed by the photographer. Accompanied by a custom-made book holder by Philippe Starck, the book found its way into the homes of well-heeled buyers. Now, for the first time, its 394 photographs will go on display to mark the 10th anniversary of a photography publication that today is a much sought-after collector’s item. To accompany this presentation, Taschen will publish a smaller and revised version of the book for the regular book market. 

In addition to SUMO, Mark Arbeit, George Holz and Just Loomis will be presented at the Helmut Newton Foundation with their photography under the title “Three boys from Pasadena”. In the late 70s, they were students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and later became assistants of Helmut Newton. 

In recent years, the photo book has attracted particular appreciation, not least of all through Martin Parr’s “The Photobook: A History” that examines some quite unusual photographic publications. A growing number of collectors have turned to this new field, and some photo books can fetch sums that are dazzling. At photo fairs from Paris to New York, photo book dealers appear in increasing frequency with especially valuable publications in tow. 

One of the most outstanding photo books of the last decade is Helmut Newton’s SUMO, which appeared in 1999 in poster format with 464 pages and considerable weight. It was Benedikt Taschen who convinced the photographer to this publishing feat; it proved to be a smash hit. Philippe Starck crafted the metal stand for this extraordinary publication that appeared in an edition of 10,000 copies, all personally signed by Newton. The sales price matches the format and exclusivity of the photo book, and has found its way into the hands of only the best-endowed Newton enthusiasts. The limited availability contributed to the book’s legendary status, the contents remained mostly unknown. 

The some 400 photographs in the book, many of which were published here for the first time, capture the essence of Newton’s work. His first and award-winning photo book in 1976, “White Women,” was followed by numerous publications with decidedly descriptive titles, such as 1981’s “Big Nudes,” whose circulation of over 100,000 copies to date has been Newton’s most successful book; or “World Without Men” from 1984. At irregular intervals between 1987 and 1995, Helmut Newton published his own magazine and showcase for his newest images, “Helmut Newton’s Illustrated.” 

But it was with SUMO that the Newton/Taschen team topped them all in the field of photo books. Such monumental tomes already existed in the history of books and bookmaking, but these were bibles, books of hours and atlases, followed later – in the second half of the 19th century – by illustrated travelogues with inserts of original large format prints. 

This presentation of the corpus of images comprising SUMO traces the book’s unique history. All of the book’s pictures appear 1:1 as framed pages; additionally, there is a selection of original photographs, in black & white and color. Still other prints document the book’s own elaborate production and glamorous presentation. Newton’s fashion and nude photography, portraiture as well as advertising images hang side by side in equal standing. Some of these images can be found in other Newton publications, while others premiered in the book and may only now for the first time be seen on exhibit. 

This “best of” selection overlooks not a single aspect of Newton’s opus. His portraits are intensely individual: Debra Winger returns our gaze while her half-hidden face fills the frame; David Bowie stoically bares his chest on the beach at Monte Carlo; and Liz Taylor bathes in the pool for Newton’s camera, a green parrot perched on her finger. Helmut Newton visually escorted the exclusive and eccentric lives of the rich and beautiful including all of its eroticism and gluttony. While doing so, he both served and questioned the clichés at the same time. 

In order to understand both his work and the vehement reactions it often evoked, one should try to imagine the cultural tenor and the dominant public conventions at the time of their publication. It is only then that the controversy and provocation of many photographs fully emerges. In the early 1970s for example, his portrayal of two women passionately kissing – the one naked, the other in a tuxedo – was seen as a direct affront on social mores. It is since these times that Helmut Newton became known for his insertion of subtle as well as radical nudity into his fashion and product photography. 

Finding the borders and overstepping them belong to the trademark of the photographer who scorns in constant battle the established notions of “good taste”. With his close-up reduction of a black stiletto heel, or the bulging fingers of a woman’s hand reaching greedily for dollar bills, Newton succeeded in producing symbolic images beyond compare. Helmut Newton’s seminal work remains singular and nonpareil. It is at the very latest while perusing SUMO that one realizes just how many icons of photographic history the photographer has indeed created. 
As with previous exhibitions at the Helmut Newton Foundation, the work of Newton’s companions will be presented in parallel to SUMO. Mark Arbeit, George Holz and Just Loomis were students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, when they met Newton in the late 1970s; later they would assist him regularly. 

Some of Mark Arbeit’s pictures are formally quite unusual. In his photo-technical experiments with deconstructed Polaroids enlarged onto photo paper, he reveals the other, flip side of the photographic image and its creation. Here and in his collages with African tribal art, Arbeit makes reference to experimental phases in the history of nude photography, for example in Surrealism. In another series, he portrays nudes in Parisian artist ateliers. The painters themselves are absent, represented only through their works on the easels and walls. The nudes in the studio medially paraphrase the paintings through their presence. 

In addition to his contract celebrity portraiture that includes the likes of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Madonna, George Holz also looks to the female form, naked and life-sized, in interiors or natural settings. Some of his more stylized images evoke stills from early Fritz Lang films, while others are strictly unaccessorized – such as his photograph of Rachele, reclining poolside in Hollywood. The reciprocal sexual attraction often evident in his images evokes a pastoral affinity reaching towards a mystical fusion of man and nature. What captures Holz’s eye here is timeless, natural nudity, occasionally cast by refined shadows varying subtly across the body’s surfaces. 

Just Loomis opts for a direct and unadorned look at American everyday life. In black & white and color, we see the faces of young waitresses, skateboarders or passers-by looking back at us, uninvolved and unaffected. Independent projects that have emerged from his magazine work in fashion and beauty, such as his documentations of the fashion industry backstage or images from on the road, are now on display at the Helmut Newton Foundation. Hardly anything seems staged – these are intensely visual encounters with strangers. Timeless and yet contemporary, the portraits of Just Loomis play with the beauty and the banality of the moment.

Results Show Strong Demand for Fine Art Photographs at artnet Auctions

Results Show Strong Demand for Fine Art Photographs at artnet Auctions

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 05:14 PM PST

NEW YORK, NY.- artnet Auctions sale of Icons: 20th-21st Century Photographic Portraits showed strength in the photographs market as the ten-day online photographs auction concluded June 25 with $135,000 in sales (including 10% buyer’s premium). The sale featured over 200 original fine art photographs of legends of fashion, film, music, politics, sports, arts and literature from Marilyn Monroe to Madonna. "The success of the sale points to the continued demand for high quality photographs at the right estimates" said Bill Fine, President of Artnet Worldwide. "Buyers and sellers alike are increasingly turning to artnet Auctions due to the quality of the works offered on our site, and our comparatively low 10% buyer’s and seller’s premiums." 

Exhibition of photographs by Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson opens in Paris

Exhibition of photographs by Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson opens in Paris

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:42 PM PST

PARIS.- Bringing together such different works by two great masters in the history of photography is not self-evident. There are many points of convergence, but their styles are profoundly different. The American’s immobility contrasts with Frenchman’s fluidity. They both traveled to Mexico during the same period and they crossed paths in New York in 1935 when they joined the political filmmakers’ group Nykino (which later became Frontier Films) in order to explore filmmaking at a critical point in their respective careers. The exhibition is on view at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson through April 22nd.

Schirn Kunsthalle Addresses the Complex World of Contemporary Art in "The Making of Art"

Schirn Kunsthalle Addresses the Complex World of Contemporary Art in "The Making of Art" Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:36 PM PST FRANKFURT.- The exhibition The Making of Art offers a look at the web of relationships of contemporary art, where the triangle of the artwork, the artist, and the viewer has long since been expanded in many ways. Not infrequently, the relationships between artists, collectors, dealers, curators, and critics influence the content of the works; often this is also illustrated: In a large survey from the 1960s to the present, this exhibition presents the positions of artists such as John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Tracey Emin, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Ryan Gander, Peter Doig, Christian Jankowski, Louise Lawler, and Jonathan Monk, These artists reflect on an increasingly elaborate system, question the criteria of art, examine its methods and its institutions as sites, and shed light on the diverse connections and networks. With approximately 150 paintings, drawings, objects, installations, and videos, the exhibition addresses the complex system of the art world in the era of upheaval we are currently experiencing. On view through 30 August, 2009 at the Schirn Kunsthalle. In a work from 1972, Jörg Immendorff described his dream of being an artist: Ich wollte Künstler werden (I wanted to become an artist) was the title of his self-portrait. In a romantic vision, Immendorff portrayed himself sitting on the floor in an attic before an easel. By moonlight and a burning candle, he plays the “impoverished poet” as painter, as if he were Carl Spitzweg. In this deliberately pathos-laden painter’s idyll, we are confronted with familiar ideas that have long since influenced the image or idea of artists as bohemians beyond all conventions whose only goal is making their visions, their genius, reality. It is an idea that is found in today’s art only as a caricature. Jonathan Monk treats Sigmar Polke’s Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! (Higher beings ordain: Paint the upper right corner black!) with irony by painting the corner, pink, blue, and mauve.  In the meanwhile, the exemplary character of the artist’s existence has since spread to broad swaths of society: If one believes recent sociological studies, the democratization of the values of creativity, freedom, and authenticity did not begin only yesterday. These days, everyone wants to be unique and innovative. “Everyone is an artist,” asserted Joseph Beuys in the 1960s, a statement that was as revolutionary as it was provocative, and put forward the anticapitalist equation Creativity = Capital. Meanwhile, artists no longer seem to be in opposition to society but have arrived at its center.  Currently, an image of the artist as networker is crystallizing. Working in groups is just one possibility among many. The models for cooperation are manifold: For example, four artists have joined together in the Polish collective Azorro to produce films together, such as Portrait with a Curator. The artists’ group Chicks on Speed work in different constellations with other figures.  The product can be a performance—like Art Rules! —a film, or a piece of music. The Scottish conceptual painter Peter Davies captures this “who with whom, when, and why” in gigantic cartographic depictions that are almost too large to take in visually. In fact, the world of contemporary art is closer to the industry based on the division of labor in the film world than it is to the romantic, isolated studio of the artist inspired by genius, and so some artists come across like small businesspersons. The triad of the artist, the work, and the spectator has long since broken down. These works reflect on an apparatus that is becoming ever more complex, almost represent a separate genre, a late modern tradition that extends from the early 1960s into the present.  The 1960s marked the birth of the artwork based on institutional critique. The result was interventions, works, and objects that for the first time directly addressed their relationship to their context. In the wake of social revolutions, the works even opposed their own nature as commodities. When Piero Manzoni, for his work Merda d’artista (1961), filled ninety tin cans with his own excrement, Manzoni expanded the concept of the work of art almost to infinity, in a way that was as spectacular as it was anarchic. The work operated with the superelevation of the role of the artist and was also a subversive gesture directed toward the art market. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a second generation of institutional critique followed, without which art since the 1980s can scarcely be understood or explained. The context of the work of art became the central theme of the work of a whole series of artists, and especially woman artists, in which they explored institutional functions and border zones in art.  Louise Lawler’s theme is the extended institutional framework of the work of art. She dedicates herself to the museum space, which she demystifies as the sublime space of high culture. She shows the preparations for a museum; seen in this way, the museum seems not like a finite form as much as one context among many. Candida Höfer also photographs museum and exhibition spaces, which she presents as empty, either in anticipation of being used or after the visitors have gone. She is interested in the side of the art world that is not on display. The artist shows the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the perspective of an insider, not as a place for presenting museum art: Preparations are being made on Mount Olympus. The Russian conceptual artists Komar & Melamid take it a step farther: their series Scenes from the Future presents the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York of the distant future as ruins in a pastoral idyll.  Other symptoms of decadence beyond the museum, which has recently been at risk of losing its leading role to private collectors and art fairs, have been chronicled by photographers from Martin Parr to Jessica Craig-Martin, documenting the party people at art fairs such as the Frieze in London, the life of luxury at Art Basel Miami Beach, and the glamour at Art Dubai. Whereas the second wave of institutional critique had its center in New York, such geographic filters have become almost entirely obsolete today. The art world appears to be truly globalized or is at least organized around a number of centers, and so artistic positions from Düsseldorf and Beijing, London, Kinshasa, the Philippines, Zurich, Glasgow, and Moscow all meet. Bucharestbased Dan Perjovschi caricatures the art world in cartoonlike wall drawings. His Bulgarian colleague Nedko Solakov sounds out the art world with subtlety and irony in equal measure with his large installation Leftovers —a selection of my unsold pieces from a private gallery I work with, treating his own success as a “leftover.” Using hidden surveillance cameras, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei films a visit by an international consulting group from MoMA to his “out-of-theway” studio in Caochangdi and presents their discussions to an international audience in the form of a video installation. Mladen Stilinovic plays with the parameters of success and cries out ostentatiously to the (still Western-dominated) art world: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist. The Moscow Conceptualist Yuri Albert roguishly turns a little painter on his head and states: I Am Not Baselitz! In the end, it is above all irony and subversion that today’s artists employ as they move between the poles of the museum and the market, success and crisis, romanticism and realism.  LIST OF ARTISTS: Yuri Albert, Pawel Althamer, Azorro, John Baldessari, Tina Barney, Tamy Ben-Tor, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Stefan Brüggemann, Chris Burden, Chicks on Speed, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkácová, Claire Fontaine, Clegg & Guttmann, Phil Collins, Jessica Craig-Martin, Peter Davies, Jirí Georg Dokoupil, Michael Elmgreen/Ingar Dragset, Tracey Emin, Dan Fischer, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Andrea Fraser, Ryan Gander, Peter Doig, Dieter Hacker, Candida Höfer, Bethan Huws, Jörg Immendorff, Christian Jankowski, Martin Kippenberger, Komar & Melamid, Jeff Koons, Sean Landers, Louise Lawler, Marcin Maciejowski, Piero Manzoni, Jonathan Monk, Dave Muller, Manuel Ocampo, Martin Parr, Dan Perjovschi, Raymond Pettibon, William Powhida, Tom Sachs, Chéri Samba, Nedko Solakov, Mladen Stilinovic, Thomas Struth, Goran Trbuljak, Andy Warhol & Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Waters, and Ai Weiwei

New Photographs by Todd Hido

Stephen Wirtz Gallery Displays New Photographs by Todd Hido

Posted: 16 Jan 2012 09:21 PM PST

San Francisco, California.- Stephen Wirtz Gallery is pleased to present "Excerpts from Silver Meadows", an exhibition of new photographs by Todd Hido, on view at the gallery until February 25th 2012. Sequenced to form an almost cinematic narrative, atmospheric landscapes of in-between, and isolated places in America provide the setting, and portraits of female subjects, broken starlets in suburban dress, stand in as the main characters. While the subject matter is mined from Hido’s own experience growing up in Kent, Ohio, what results is a collectively familiar, yet entirely imaginary and dreamlike melodrama untethered from a specific time and place, a visual pulp novel of Midwest mythology. Silver Meadows itself is a real place—a modest Midwestern suburban development that grew and pushed into former farmland on the outskirts of Kent.  The setting of Hido’s childhood, it also became the creative wellspring for his work. Compelled to contend with his personal history, Hido wanders deliberately yet randomly in search of imagery that connects with his recollections. 

Will Kurtz's Extra F***ing Ordinary opens at the Mike Weiss Gallery

Will Kurtz's Extra F***ing Ordinary opens at the Mike Weiss Gallery

Installation view of Will Kurtz's Extra F***ing Ordinary. Photo: Courtesy Mike Weiss Gallery.

NEW YORK, NY.- Mike Weiss Gallery presents Extra Fucking Ordinary, Will Kurtz's debut exhibition at the gallery. The show consists of life size figural sculptures constructed of collaged torn sheets of newspaper, wood, wire, screws, tape and everyday objects which depict the characters captured by  Kurtz's iPhone camera lens. Utilizing the observing eye of a curious urban voyeur, Kurtz spends large portions of his days combing the streets of New York for his subjects, which are later transformed into sincere and amusing life-size sculptures. It is not the subjects' aesthetic appeal that draws Kurtz as much as their essence and strong representation of the multitude of prototypes that typify New York City: from an old married couple and endearingly eccentric dog owners to curmudgeonly middle-aged smokers. Kurtz’s sculptures openly reference real people engaged in real scenarios, be it posing for group shots at a tourist attraction, walking their dog, awkwardly changing their clothes or reluctantly sweeping the floors. Kurtz holds an admiringly holds a magnifying glass to the genre of subjects and scenes that are commonly overlooked. The subjects collectively present a candid and unapologetic mosaic of New Yorkers in their blunt, colorful, borderline-manic ways made of the same papers they read in coffee shops and subways during their morning commute. As important as the subjects to understanding Kurtz’s works is the medium—discarded and recycled bits of print publication, DIY building and packaging supplies, along with everyday objects that bring a sense of familiarity to the works. Kurtz leaves the subjects’ skin and clothes unpainted, inviting a closer inspection of the kaleidoscopic bits of text and images that form each figure. By emphasizing the technique and the material life of his figures, Kurtz diverges from such realist sculptors as Duane Hanson  and Ron Mueck, famous for their meticulous replication of the human skin. Kurtz’s figures, therefore, are more emblematic than realistic, reminding viewers they are constructs of Pop-culture references— from daily savings coupons and scandalous political headlines to the cultural and fashion icons of the style section and page six. Kurtz’s work is more closely affiliated with the everyday reverence seen in Bill Cunningham’s snapshots of fashionable New Yorkers than any unifying sense of timeless existence.  It is Kurtz’s own insouciant and humorous reminder of life’s temporality. Will Kurtz received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art where he was the recipient of the Postgraduate Fellowship, 2009 – 2010. His work is currently in the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation,Jersey City; Tullman Collection, Chicago; Krupp Family Foundation, Boston and the Collection Majudia, Montreal. Kurtz was born in Michigan, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn NY.

New Illustrated Book Celebrates the World's Most Iconic Coca Cola

New Illustrated Book Celebrates the World's Most Iconic Coca Cola

Posted: 14 Jan 2012 09:22 PM PST

NEW YORK, NY- This illustrated book celebrates the world's most iconic beverage with the brand's photographs, advertisements, and designs as well as memories from film, social history, and pop culture. Decade by decade, Coca-Cola represents the zeitgeist with nostalgia and flair. For 125 years, Coca-Cola has connected with more people in more places than any other product the world has ever known. First sipped at an Atlanta soda fountain as a hot weather pick-me-up, Coca-Cola has triumphed by engaging people, one by one. The company’s long-time leader Robert Woodruff sought always to have it “within arm’s length of desire.”