Happy Famous Artists

We made a short selection of recently published art and architecture books,
which we found pretty amazing. They are, in no particular order:
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Hauser & Wirth 20 years
Published by Hantje Cantz and just out in stores, this impressive looking hardcover has been brought out to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hauser & Wirth gallery.
Its 1050 pages are almost entirely filled by beautiful full-page photographs of the gallery’s artists and their work. The names speak for themselves: Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Paul Mc Carthy, Matthew Day Jackson, Andy Hope 1930, Thomas Hauseago, David Claerbout, Isa Genzken etc. The last 100 pages follow chronologically the gallery’s history, from its first public space in Zürich in 1992, through a shared gallery with David Zwirner on East 69th Street in NY (from 2000 until 2009), till the present day. At the moment the gallery has 5 permanent exhibition spaces: 2 in London (Picadilly, opened in 2003 and Savile Row, in 2010), 2 on Manhattan (at the former Zwirner & Wirth space on East 69th Street; the second has just opened on the 18th Street next to the Highline) and 1 in Zürich (at the Lövenbräu art complex, which has reopened in June last year). The gallery is run by Swiss-born and London-based dealer Iwan Wirth, together with his wife Manuela and his mother-in-law Ursula Hauser. And it’s definitely one of our favorite galleries in London!
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Commissioning Contemporary Art 
The full title is “Commissioning Contemporary Art, A Handbook for Curators, Collectors and Artists” – and if you’re one of these, or just an art lover, you should read it! Written by Louisa Buck (art critic, author of several books and writer for the Art Newspaper) together with Daniel McClean (lawyer specialized in art, cultural and intellectual property law as well as independent curator and writer), it sheds light on the intricate practice of art commissioning from its various angles, discussing the perspectives of artists and patrons, describing the actual process with its pros and contras and the aftermath (what happens with the commissioned work once its created & handed over). The book offers lot of important advise from the legal and practical points of view, as well as giving you a taste of what it’s like to commission a piece. It also serves as a great guide to important public and private art projects of the last years. Plus it’s an exciting read! Highly recommended. The book was published in 2012 by Thames & Hudson. (Might also be of interest: “Art as an Experience” by John Dewey; it’s on our bookshelf, but we haven’t cracked it yet.)
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The Art Prophets
Couple of years ago we read the very amusing “I Sold Andy Warhol (too soon)” by American art adviser/dealer/author Richard Polsky, so when we heard that his new book “The Art Prophets: the Artists, Dealers and Tastemakers Who Shook the Art World” is out (published by Other Press in 2011), we dived in immediately. Same as “I Sold Andy Warhol”, it is a page-turner which you read in one day while at the same time absorbing plenty of valuable information. In 10 chapters, Polsky tells stories of 11 art visionaries thanks to whom new art categories were created or brought out of obscurity. The fact that he knew/knows all of them personally makes it even more compelling and engaging read. The 11 personalities and movements discussed are: Ivan Karp and Pop Art; Stan Lee and Comic Book Art; Chet Helms, Bill Graham, and the Art of the Poster; John Ollman and Outsider Art; Joshua Baer and Native American Art; Virginia Dwan and Earthworks; Tod Volpe and Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture; Jeffrey Fraenkel and Photography; Louis Meisel and Photorealism, and Tony Shafrazi and Street Art.
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Modernism London Style
Another splendidly-looking hardback, “Modernism London Style: The Art Deco Heritage” was published in January this year by Hirmer Verlag in English & German. Edited by architectural historian Christoph Rauhut, with essays by Adam Caruso and beautiful black & white photography by Niels Lehmann, it portrays the architectural art deco heritage of London through 230 buildings, amongst others the Simmonds Aerocessories Factory, St Olave House,  Saville Theatre, The White House Hotel or Royal Institute of British Architects. We only found out about this book yesterday through The Modern House blog, so we haven’t read it yet, but first impression says “awesome”. And it comes with a detailed register of buildings and maps, so we are already planning our own modernist architecture weekend tour – when the weather gets bearable, that is.

Last night we attended the opening of Sterling Ruby‘s debut show EXHM (stands for “exhumation) at Hauser & Wirth gallery Savile Row, London. The completely packed exhibition was truly amazing: monumental, fresh, with a dark sense of humor and into-your-face. Ruby presents pieces in various media: his signature shiny, dripping urethane sculptures; bleached canvases with torn rugs glued on them; impressive cardboard collages made out of various residues from the artist’s studio; series of fabric installations; and large-scale ceramic sculptures titled “Basin Technology”.
(You can read in detail about the exhibited works in the gallery’s press release).

Here are some snapshots from the opening – but we’ll be back for more.

The artist’s background and influence is as intriguing as his work: Ruby was born on an American military base in Germany to a Dutch mother and an American father and family relocated to the US shortly after his birth. After attending high school, he worked in construction, was a professional skateboarder and played in several punk bands. He eventually went on to study art, first at the unaccredited Pennsylvania School of Art and Design, followed by BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California (where he was a teaching assistant to Mike Kelley). He now lives in LA.

His various influences include aberrant psychologies (particularly schizophrenia and paranoia), urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop culture, craft, punk, masculinity, violence, public art, prisons, globalization, American domination and decline, waste and consumption as well as the author and psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling (authors of the broken window theory”, cultural anthropologist Lorna Rhodes (author of Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison), and the novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Harry Crews.

Ruby practice spans various media from sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, ceramics to photography, video and performance. His works are rough and “dirty” (the fabric sculptures at Hauser & Wirth look like they’ve been stepped on numerous times – incl. during the opening), commenting on subject of social pressure, conflicts between the individual and the society, American domination and decline etc.

We’ve seen Ruby’s work couple of years ago at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and loved it (wish we bough something that time :-/). Now his career explodes, with exhibitions all over the world: apart from London, he has shows planned at the new beautiful Kukje Gallery pavilion in Korea, at MACRO Rome, and – our Belgian followers will be pleased – starting in October at Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle.

EXHM runs at Hauser & Wirth Savile Row (both galleries) till May 4th 2013.
Don’t miss it!

Another must-see expo is coming to Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels.
On March 28th starts a solo show of Californian artist Tauba Auerbach, titled
Tetrachromat. Auerbach plays with the spectator’s senses of perception, creating works that disturb the way visual and spacial informations are understood. To produce her paintings, the artist employs a neat formula of folding or rolling large pieces of raw canvas into various configurations, then laying them flat and painting their surface with an industrial spray gun to achieve a trompe l’oeil effect.
Tetrachromat was initiated, and previously shown, in Bergen Kunsthall.
It will run in Wiels till June 3rd. Don’t miss it!

The title of the exhibition plays on the notion of ‘tetrachromatic’ vision. People normally perceive the world around them trichromatically (in three colours). Humans have three types of receptor for the perception of colour with varying sensitivities: red, green and blue. A new theory exists that there may be a small percentage of people (only women) who have a fourth colour receptor, which makes them ‘tetrachromatic’. In order to play on such ideas of a fourth component which, if it could be proven, would radically change our view of the world, Auerbach employs two analogies in this exhibition – the spatial (the idea of a fourth dimension) and the spectral (a fourth colour spectrum). – excerpt from the press release

(↬ Patrick Nguyen)

We’ve finally made it to the Science Museum to see an exhibition dedicated to life and legacy of one of our personal heroes, the British mathematician, philosopher and computer scientist Alan Turing. Titled Codebreaker, the show celebrates the 2012 centenary of Turing’s birth. Most famous for his input in decrypting German military messages during WWII by breaking the code of the Enigma machine, Alan Turing was also one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence and of the first electronic ‘universal’ computer (Pilot ACE, on display).

Interested in whether cognitive mind can exist outside human body, another of his groundbreaking proposals was a test devised to established whether computers were capable of independent thinking. No machine has yet officially passed the Turing Test.

Breaker of not just science-, but also the 50s society codes, Turing’s personal life made a tragic turn when a conviction of gross indecency due to his homosexuality and a forced chemical castration (this was only 60 years ago!) ultimately drove him to suicide at the age of 41.

The show stays on display till end June 2013. It’s worth a visit and so is the Science Museum itself (and the gift shop!).

Also opening last night was Paul Wackers’ solo show Early Romantics at New Image Art gallery, Los Angeles. Wackers was born in New Haven, Connecticut and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His paintings of still lifes and landscapes oscillate between figurative and abstract, with some influence of the 20th century avantgarde, but have their own distinct style and identity – a very seductive one, we should say.

The artist employs various paint techniques and vivid color palette to create contrasts in the painted surface and to bring forth his own interpretation of forms and space. Subject-wise he focuses on what’s “left behind, or abandoned, from various kinds of human activities: facsimiles of the natural world, vacant interiors, and clusters of accumulated objects“. We couldn’t help but think of a secret anthropological study of human artefacts… possibly commissioned by a mysterious alien race.

Have a look through the photos on the left (courtesy of the artist and New Image Art), of some of the latest paintings exhibited at Early Romantics and admit that you are intrigued! And if you can, go and see them in real – they stay on view till March 30th.

Wackers’ previous shows included his last year’s solo Wait and Watch Awhile Go By at Alice Gallery in Brussels and his 2011 show Of Life at Morgan Lehman in NYC.

Michael Riedel’s solo PowerPoint opened last night at David Zwirner gallery in NewYork. PowerPoint builds further on Riedel’s brilliant way of using postproduction as model for a self-sustaining artistic output: images, text and recordings of past exhibitions and events serve as points of departure for new works, repeating and reinventing their impact in new contexts. In the artist’s own words: they “reintroduce the system of art into the art system”.

The starting point for this new series was Riedel’s amazing 2011 solo in the same gallery space. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog reflected digital distribution processes by taking data from various websites that mentioned Riedel’s work, translating them into strong geometric compositions of text and graphics and presenting them as large canvas prints mounted on matching wallpaper. Riedel later ran this imagery through a PowerPoint presentation software, freezing the moments of transition between two slides and thus generating a new work that “takes place between two existing works”, or, in some cases, between the work an an empty slide. As the press release mentions, the fact that each new work creates a gap that can be filled again suggests the idea of endless production.

Riedel’s work is amazing and must be seen in real to fully appreciate its monumental impact, so if you happen to be in NYC between now and March 23rd, make sure that you definitely go. Plus an extra incentive: same as last time, the gallery invitation is small artwork in itself – featuring a CD with a song by Woog Riots, composed especially for the show (we have our signed copy secured already, HAHA!! – courtesy of special agent Geofrrey from According 2G ).

Michael Riedel was born in 1972 and currently lives and works in Frankfurt. Apart from exhibiting internationally, he also started an experimental artist space at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 in Frankfurt, where he restaged cultural events held at other locations throughout the city. In 2004, communal dinners were introduced at the venue and later relocated to the Mainzer Landstraße 105 in Frankfurt, where they continue until now under the name Freitagsküche.

(Photos courtesy of David Zwirner, Jason Schmidt & According 2G)

Rotterdam is the place to be this weekend, with art fairs, exhibitions and pop-up events all over the city. Highlights: Transformation at Garage Rotterdam, Paola Pivi at Witte de With, Alfredo Jaar in the Fotomuseum and J.P. Gaultier at the Kusthal.
Art Rotterdam itself is full of great galleries and artists this year. To name a few:
Wilfried Lentz showing Michael Portnoy, Carroll / Fletcher with the ab-fab Michael Joaquin Grey, Rotwand showing Luc Mattenberger and Office Baroque with work of Leigh Ledare. Plus don’t miss the stands of Torch, Meesen de Clercq, Grimm, Gabriel Rolt and Ron Mandos galleries.

At the New Art Section, drop by Nettie Horn and Base Alpha. And we hear that the Art Rotterdam Projections is great too.

At Re Rotterdam make sure that you go to the top-floor and see the spam texts of Niels Post (one of them pictured here on the left) and the Double Blinds by Jeroen Bosch.

Trendbeheer has plenty of reviews of the weekend art agenda (in Dutch) and there’s also the official website of Art Rotterdam Week with an overview of the full program.

One show to definitely see this month is Situation Classic Pervery – Sarah Lucas’ latest display at her one-year-lease project space “Situation” at 1st floor / 4, New Burlington Place in London. Provided by Sadie Coles gallery (Sadie Coles HQ is located at the same address on ground floor), Lucas can use the apartment and small kitchen as a studio, showroom or an event space. She periodically adds or removes works and invites other artists to exhibit alongside her own pieces.

Works included in the current set-up are all hers, and range from new ones, such as the Tit Chair, the Loungers series or the Soup wallpaper (all 2012), to older ones, e.g. Hysterical Attack (1999).

Here are our photos from the show.

Classic Pervery was preceded by six other shows that all took place last year and included works by Franz West and Rohan Wealleans. It will stay on display till March 2013, when it will be succeeded by Situation No 8, the last one in the series.

Lucas is also preparing a large survey of her sculptures for the Whitechapel Gallery, which is planned to open in October 2013.

Couple of weeks ago we interviewed Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, duo of experimental artists/designers. The article about their practice will be published in the Elastic Minds series still this month, but here’s already a small teaser: Tuur and Revital kicked off their latest project, titled Kingyo Kingdom which documents the phenomenon of massive breeding and competitions of a particular type of goldfish (Ranchu) in Japan. The project asks questions about the status of the animal as a pure consumer object and about the concept of manipulating nature for aesthetic purposes. Stay tuned for the interview to find out more!

Kingyo Kingdom is currently on display in Southampton, as part of the art exhibition Transformism.

(via Disegno Daily)

And for the impatient ones: Régine from We Make Money Not Art interviewed Cohen Van Balen last year for our fav radio programme Artists in Laboratories.

Design Museum London opened new exhibition of its permanent collection yesterday. Divided into six themes, it tells stories of everyday objects that turned into iconic design pieces and contributed towards shaping contemporary lifestyle and culture. The exhibited items include furniture, product design, fashion, transport and architecture alongside a selection of prototypes, models and commissioned films.
The exhibition itself is beautifully designed by Gitta Gschwendtner, with graphics by A2/SW/HK.

The 6 themes include:

Identity & Design, with objects that define what one understands under being typically “British”, such as the red phone box and post box, motorway signage, traffic light etc. Even the hated 2012 Olympic logo made it to the selection.

Taste, covering the period of modernism in Britain, with examples of furniture, textiles, architecture etc.

Why We Collect presents one of the Design Museum’s newest acquisition, the Handlebar Table of Jasper Morrison, aside with several selected pieces of design made with found objects.

Materials & Process tells the story of the dominance of plastics in our lives in the last 75 years. The section is illustrated by numerous objects, from toys and household items, to furniture and Apple Macintosh computers.

Icons, presenting several versions of one iconic design: George Carwardine’s
Anglepoise lamp.

Fashion shows selection of garments from 1980–2000, from the collection of Lady Ritblat.

Here are our photos from the preview.

Opening today is a fantastic exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, titled Light Show. It presents works of 22 artists who created influential and groundbreaking pieces using artificial light as their medium. The works vary in approach, technologies and references, exploring different characteristics of light (colour spectrum, duration, change, projection etc). Some of the contemporary pieces in the show make use of latest technologies to create a rather immersive and sci-fi atmosphere.

Here are some photos from yesterday’s opening.

Chronologically the exhibition covers five decades, from the pioneers of the early 60s (Turrell, Wheeler, Flavin…), through the LED-light installations of Jenny Holzer and projections of Anthony McCall’s in the 70s, to today’s computer-programmed perceptual effects of Leo Villareal and moonlight emitting bulbs of Katie Paterson.

It’s really difficult to pick up some favorites, as all the works are quite stunning. Ivan Navarro’s infinity neon installation stay impressive, so do James Turrell’s light perception spaces and Carlos Cruz-Diez chromosaturations. Four pieces which we loved instantly were Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal (2005), Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a Timeless Garden (2011), David Batchelor’s Magic Hour (2004/7) and Conrad Shawcross’ Slow Arc inside a Cube IV (2007).

McCall’s work is installed in a separate dark room and involves strong ‘solid-light’ projection from one source, casting light sufraces accross the room, through which you can walk and become part of the work (entering the surface takes some inner
persuasion ‘though). The projection also casts light shapes of line, ellipse and a travelling wave on the opposite wall.

Olafur Eliasson’s installation uses stroboscopic lamps flashing light on small water streams and creating the effect of frozen movement. Pretty intense: you won’t be able to stay in that room for longer than couple of seconds, but you’re not likely to forget it.

David Batchelor used bunch of discarded shop signs stacked on each other, facing you with their back full of cables and dirty metal plates and emitting soft multicolored lights towards the wall. The title of the work, Magic Hour, is a reference to the twilight sky above Las Vegas – the moment when the sun goes down and the lights come up. It works fabulously on your imagination.

Conrad Shawcross’ device casts constantly transforming geometrical shadows through the patterns of a large metal cube. The artists describes his work as a “metaphor for the discipline of science” and compares it to the process of mapping molecular structure of insulin by means of crystal radiography. Well, it does look sophisticated, as wel as quite hypnotizing.

Light Show is curated by Dr. Cliff Lauson and will be on display @ Hayward till 28 April 2013.

3D printing seems to be everywhere. Search on YouTube or on Kickstarter and you get plenty of hits. The technology and the ideas are not new – MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld illustrated the power of this technology in his 2006 TED talk about the Fab Lab project – but decreasing prices of 3D printers, entrepreneurs looking for business opportunities and trekkies seeing their replicator dream coming true might be the main reasons for this rise in popularity.

With all this hype, you start to wonder if 3D printing is the next new thing in digital. Will Chris Anderson, who left his editor-in-chief role at Wired last year to become CEO of a robot/3D/drone-startup, be for 3D printing what Bill Gates was for the computer industry? Will we soon all have 3D printers on our desks and in our homes?

In an interesting talk at General Assembly‘s New Year Resolutions event, James McBennett of the start-up Fabsie helped us to see the real disruptive power of 3D printing: it is not a game of selling these printers to everybody, but a game of changing the value chain of product development. In a world where 3D printing would be the norm, prototyping will be quicker and cheaper and designs can be transferred via email and printed anywhere. Online market places will be able to link designers with printers/producers. And companies that will embrace this new technology will even be able to provide spare parts online, letting their customers download and print the piece that needs replacing.

Fabsie is focussing on ready-to-assemble furniture and will start selling its first product – This Stool Rocks – in February this year. And a bit of googling sketches which other directions this movement can take:

the geeky one: on Thingiverse, a platform/marketplace for digital designers and 3D printers created by one of the manufacturers of 3D printers MakerBot, you find the Utah Tea Pot, a hommage to 3D icon Martin Nuwell;

the kinky one: on MakerLove you get the free code to 3D print a vibrator with the head of Justin Bieber (!); or

the ambitious one: in a recent post on the architecture and design blog of the Guardian, Oliver Wainwright talks about a project by Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars in collaboration with mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs. They have designed a residence that they hope to start constructing using a 3D printer.

The revolution is out there, the choice is yours, don’t be late!

Another great show at Carroll / Fletcher gallery: after computer pioneer Manfred Mohr (one and zero, Nov–Dec 2012), American artist, inventor and toy designer Michael Joaquin Grey fills the space with Orange between orange and Orange, an absorbing installation of intriguing, playful (and often bright orange) models, drawings and animations related to the myths of Western science, art and spirituality. The pieces need a bit of explanation to be enjoyed fully, so take your time when visiting the gallery, it’s worth it!

Amongst the exhibited pieces are:

Morphologies (2012), a collection of televisions, cameras and radios arranged to show their technological morphology. Grey sees them as historic objects that have framed and mediated our view of the world, extending our sphere of absorbing and processing information while simultaneously limiting it;
C Drop Experiment (2012), a model of pewter funnel on a stand filled with a chunk of anthracite, referencing the Pitch Drop Experiment, that has been going on for 80 years at the University of Queensland; or the
Plain P Copier (2012), clay model of the first commercially available copier Xerox 914, which might be considered as one of the most influential inventions in information distribution, after the Guttenberg Press.

Photos of the exhibition can be seen on our Flickr.

As far as educational kits go, this one’s our favorite! The Dangerous Drugs—Identification Kit contains harmless facsimiles of the more commonly abused dangerous drugs. The Kit was designed to be used primarily as an instructional aid in educational and training programs directed toward combating the existing narcotics and dangerous drugs problem. It consists of a plastic container which is transparent and durable. Plainly visible within the container are facsimiles of amphetamines and barbituates, reproduced with exacting fidelity in terms of color, size, shape, and other distinguising characteristics.

Want!!!

Via Dangerous Minds and Laughing Squid, with photos by Rusty Blazenhoff and Ken Dashner

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On this 63rd anniversary of the death of Eric Arthur Blair aka George Orwell, may I advise you just this once to judge a book by its cover? This new Penguin edition designed by David Pearson is a perfect thing of beauty that conveys so much about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four even before you read the first line ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ There really is little excuse not to click this link to Penguin books and purchase a copy (other than poverty which fair enough is a solid and growing excuse in this era of feral elites, marauding aristocrats and fundamentalist neo-liberals). For just seven pounds and ninety nine of our English pence you will have mailed to you this perfect item (though dear non UK readers outside of this Septic Isle you will be charged a postage fee sadly). This objet d’art  also has a cunning information storage and downloading function, just open the pages and you can quickly assimilate into your mind one of the greatest and most important novels in the English language, that is forever relevant. Nevermind ebooks, you want this baby in your hands, to feel the papery flesh, imbibe the forbidden words and the censored thoughts. The only dilemma one really has is does it belong on your bookshelf or displayed alongside your artworks? That and what are you going to do when the thought police come a knockin’?