Happy Famous Artists

The first New York edition of London’s FRIEZE Art Fair takes place from May 4 till May 7. Located in temporary structure (designed by SO-IL architects) on Randall’s Island Park and overlooking the East River, the fair will be divided in 3 sections: main section with internationally established galleries; Frame, presenting solo projects of artists represented by young galleries (less than 6 years old); and Focus: galleries that have opened in or after 2001. Talks, 8 artists’ projects & sounds (3 commissioned audio works) will accompany the main fair program. See Guardian’s photo preview of some pieces which are to be shown on the fair.

And in case u’re already in NY tonight, pop by MoMA PS1 between 8 to 11 pm for the kick-off party. Martha Wainwright will perform a full concert in the museum’s courtyard dome, including couple of her famous Edith Piaf covers plus some Kraftwerk-inspired tributes.

This year will mark the 30th anniversary of Art Brussels, which is slowly but surely becoming a not-to-miss event on the agenda of most art lovers & collectors. Preview & vernissage for the invitees will be held tomorrow, and as of Thursday 19th the fair will be open to general public until Sunday 22nd. Art Brussels is organised within three different zones: The Galleries (the largest part with 182 galleries from 25 countries) – located in Hall 1 and mainly presenting well-established artists; Young Talent – reserved for galleries that represent emerging and mid-career artists; and First Call – new generation of art galleries that have never before participated at Art Brussels (among which e.g. Harris Lieberman and Alex Zachary from NYC, Brussels’ D+T Project or the Berlin & Cluj–based Galeria Plan B).

Outside of the fair walls, numerous other initiatives will take place, such as the Brussels Gallery Night.

Although not listed on the gallery night program, we greatly recommend to visit 2 shows in downtown Brussels:
Running with Rocky @ Harlan Levey Projects, which has opened last weekend and shows photographs, videos and artifacts of four long-term performance–based projects by artists Zoe Strauss, Jeroen Jongeleen, Abner Preis and Jordan Seiler.
Waxy Pith pop-up exhibition, presenting new works by Stian Ådlandsvik, opening on Fri 20 April from 6pm @ Hunting and Collecting.

Dates & opening hours Art Brussels:

Preview & Vernissage Wed 18 April (Preview 12pm-4pm/ Vernissage 4pm-10pm)
Thu 19 – Sun 22 April 2012 (12pm till 7pm; Nocturne on Thu 19 April 7pm till 10pm)
And don’t forget to download your Art Brussels iPad app!

It’s the time of the year for Cologne & Brussels art fairs. 46th edition of Art Cologne opens its door today @ 5pm. The rumor has it that this once prestigious, but in recent years less interesting, fair is moving back up the ranks again, so should be worth a visit! Consult the online catalogue for list of exhibitors & artists’ preview. Dates & opening times of the fair are April 18th – 22nd.

For the first time the fair organizers will co-operate with the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) in premiering the first European NADA fair.  The New Positions section of the fair (giving young artists free exhibition space located right next to the stands of the galleries representing them) will showcase 23 young artists, focusing mainly on installation. The New Contemporaries selection will include, amongst others, Berlin’s PSM Gallery, Aanant & Zoo and Croy Nielsen and London’s Paradise Row and Bischoff/Weiss.  The fair will also host special exhibition dedicated to Swiss/Icelandic artist Dieter Roth at the South entrance to the Koelnmesse.

Other major exhibitions featured in Cologne & nearby:
Kasper Koenig’s “Vor dem Gesetz” and Cosima von Bonin in Museum Ludwig;
Warhol, Basquiat and Clemente in the Art and Exhibition Hall, Bonn;
Albert Oehlen and Kris Martin in the ART MUSEUM BONN;
Roman Ondak in K21 in Dusseldorf;
Ai Wei Wei in the DKM Museum, Duisburg;
and Monica Bonvincini in the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach.

Damien does make sure he’s always present in the news. We’ve done enough coverage of him in the last months to last couple of years, but his new website is certainly worth another post. Launched in parallel with his Tate retrospective, damienhirst.com is worth the brand it presents, designed and developed by Bureau for Visual Affairs (amongst whose clients are also The National Gallery, Tate, Artangel, Creative Review etc) under the art direction of Jason Beard, and featuring more than 250 artworks spanning 31 years of the artist’s career.

It comes with a live, high resolution video feed of Hirst’s Science studio from 2 different angles (pretty cool!) and zoomable images allowing the user to experience artwork in detail at full screen. You can also search the site for any term, turning the results into your own personalised collection of artwork, projects, events and news articles.

Happy to see that visual artists are finally embracing the digital realm in style. The ball is in your court, Jeff Koons!

(And by the way, our own brand new HFA website is in the final stage & wil be a real digital treat as well!!)

When a computer blog starts using big words like « Electrochemical Arbitrage », you just sit up and listen. (Trust us.) Turning a primary school science experiment into a piece of installation Art, Jonathon Keats is showing us how petri dishes, salt water and coins can be used to power an electronic calculator. Based on the idea that money produces energy (and thereby mistaking the physical representation of money for its actual worth), the installation supposedly calls on all those who exploited energy to their own benefit in order to increase their wealth. It is also ripe with symbolism, in that it offers the people an opportunity to see, test and touch the worth of their fortune, participating in a democratic miniature stock exchange system. All the gory details are freely available on Wired if you feel so inclined. As for this Happy Famous Author, he shall keep his pennies safely in a jar, thank you very much.

We attended the press preview of the Damien Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern this morning and captured a photo set of 115 images to excite the eye. At a time when conservative forces are attempting to delegitimise Hirst’s work, the breadth and strength of the displayed pieces are a solid rebuttal to accusations of con artist and dilettante.

The show brings together more than 70 key works from Hirst’s oeuvre, from the amazing A Thousand Years (installation of cow’s head, flies and insect-o-cutor), The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind on Someone Living (shark in formaldehyde) and Mother and Child, Divided (bisected cow and calf in formaldehyde), through series of medical cabinets, butterfly, spot and spin paintings and includes 2 major installations: The Pharmacy and In and Out of Love. In and Out of Love, with live butterflies flying around and landing on visitors – thus making them part of the piece – is, on its own an experience not to miss. And as a shiny last stop, the For The Love of God (diamond skull) is on display @ the Turbine Hall till June 24.

The show opens for public on April 4 and will stay on display till September 9 2012. It is, without any doubt, a must-see. Watch the photos and believe the Hype!

If you plan to visit the Gallery Weekend in Berlin, which takes place from April 27th – 29th, don’t miss a new project of our comrade Steve Schepens. He and curator Philippe Braem are setting up a pop-up art space in Mitte, showing works from 9 Belgian and Berlin–based artists. Title of the show: Who’s Afraid of Black, Yellow And Red, location still to be announced. Follow @artmachtfrei and be the first to know!

Images credit:
Steve Schepens: BELGIE one two three
Vadim Vosters

Damien Hirst’s grand retrospective opens in 2 weeks @ Tate Modern & we sure hope to make it to the preview to see the Creator in flash & blood, so stay tuned! In the meantime get acquanited with the man behind the brand, who apparently still believes that “art is more powerful than money” and offers some further interesting insights in last week’s interview in the Observer.

A group show with a great name Cultural Production opens tomorrow @ 6pm @ Andrea Rosen Gallery in NY, bringing together 4 conceptual artists of different generations: Josephine Meckseper, Alexandre Singh, Hanne Darboven and Allen Ruppersberg. Meckseper – whose installations resembling shiny shopping window displays always catch our attention on art fairs - is since couple of months represented by Andrea Rosen, so the gallery website announces. Great addition to the stable, and now maybe also time to redesign that 80s web interface? The show runs till March 24 and promises to be one not to miss.

Daan Samson, a “prosperity artist” and guru of shameless self-promotion (blog category usually reserved solely for our own production) never ceases to entertain and to astonish. The idea for his latest project was born out of intense intellectual & creative struggle… and some urgent material needs. In order to pimp up his Rotterdam HQ, Daan approached numerous producers of luxury domestic appliances, finding plenty who were willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of the arts, the economy and the artist’s personal welfare.

And so the Parade of Exchange and Gain, with plenty of desirable lifestyle goods (including enormous leaf blowers, sleek red kitchen, sexy fitness equipment or bright winter-sport roof cases) will proceed this Saturday through the Dutch city of Groningen, starting @ 5pm in the city centre and following the attached itinerary. After the parade and a short exhibition, all luxury items will find a permanent place within the artist’s residence in Rotterdam.

With Jake & Dinos Chapman’s installation gracing their shop windows, Dover Street Market – a “must” on London’s to-do list - has presented their new spring/summer 2012 selection this weekend. We’ve browsed through the 6 floors & took some quick snapshots of the stuff that shall rule every fashion victim’s life in the coming months. Warning: ‘bankrupt danger’ price tags unfortunately accopany the ‘desire hazard’ tag.

Note: Dover Street Market is since recently open also on Sundays and the Rose Bakery on the top floor is a great destination for Sunday brunch, mixing culinary treat with great crowd watching!

It’s hard not to notice the spotted commotion at the Gagosian Empire. Quite some fuzz from art critics and bloggers, clearly some people have had enough of the Hirst-iarrhea that is celebrating the height of its boredom – hence success with the coincidence of the 11 Spot Painting Shows throughout the world. “Why? Just because they can” to quote ArtFagCity.

The spot paintings are passé in so many ways. They are a small, visual, nihilistic joke; the crystallization of artistic self-reduction of a great marketeer; a best-practice of how the 90s art world was more fueled by Wall Street bonuses than by artistic integrity, both from the artist and the buyer side, pushing the gallery owner in a purely commercial/transactional role.

And this is exactly why this show is irrelevant – it is boring because it is coming too late, it looks back at what nobody with a genuine interest in art is excited about today. It doesn’t tell us something new: not about the work, not about the artist and surely not about the world we live in today. It’s all been there, done that. So let’s move on and focus on the more exciting stuff happening in the art world today!

On a more positive side, we really like “The Complete Spot Challenge“. This idea is brilliant: let people travel across over the world to see shows and give them the chance to acquire their very own Hirst print. It pushes the loyalty card to another level; it stays a prestige trip but must be a great experience too. Was it Hirst’s idea? Larry’s idea? Some agency’s idea? Hey, look at it as an act of appropriation of the loyalty card in the context of the ultimate luxury art goods. It certainly made us smile. And that is already more than the dots galore will do.

(image by Doanie: Hirst’s pickled shark – the true collector’s catch)
On the eve of the Turner Prize 2011 winner announcement, we also unexpectedly have a nominee for the Brit Art Comedian of The Year award: Charles Saatchi. Saatchi has been nominated for his hilarious article in this week’s Guardian, trashing the new generation of “masturbatory” & “eurotrashy” collectors plus other vulgar players of today’s art world. The youth these days…

(image: For The Love of God by Damien Hirst, 2007)

Damien Hirst retrospective on display @ Tate Modern from April 4 to September 9, 2012

Although the Olympic circus that’s about to explode next year in London is most advisable to avoid, there are couple of events accompanying it which should not be missed – even if simultaneously experiencing alarming audio & olfactory stimuli which large crowds offer.
Damien Hirst retrospective @ Tate Modern is one of them – whatever your opinion of the aging Brit-art l’enfant terrible might be. Plus a chance to see live his £50 million diamond skull, one of the most-talked artworks of the last years.

(nice article about this topic can be found on Artinfo)

(Image: I Can See the Whole Room…and There’s Nobody in It by Roy Lichtenstein from 1961. The painting fetched a record $43.202.500 yesterday.)
Christie’s postwar and contemporary art evening sale which took place last night in NY delivered rayher impressive results, achieving total sum of $247 million (and coupe of hundred thousands extra, whatever…). Records were broken, moods were high, celebrities (incl. Leo diCaprio) were present.

“The world’s top ten collectors were present in the saleroom tonight, and a global community of collectors was bidding aggressively on works by the pre-eminent artists in this category – from Lichtenstein to Bourgeois, Ligon to McCarthy, Gursky to Ray. We are delighted to report more than a dozen new records for many well-deserving artists, and a new top price for any photograph sold at auction.”thus spokeBrett Gorvy, Chairman and International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s.