May

2013 Frieze Fair New York reports/NADA Art Fair reports

W
- Art & Design

FRIEZE FRAME: WHAT TO SEE THIS WEEK

Frieze New York is only in its second year, but the mega-art fair, which opens to the public on Friday, already feels like an institution. And like most of the city’s traditions, this one has built-in pageantry: a weeklong blur of deals, dinners, parties, and of course, splashy openings. To lure the big-fish collectors and international artelligentsia in town, galleries have pulled out the big guns—Koons, Kelly, McCarthy. Here are a few blue-chip shows to see and be seen at this week.

By Fan Zhong

May 2013

PAUL McCARTHY at Hauser & Wirth

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http://www.style.com/trendsshopping/stylenotes/050613_Frieze_Art_Fair/

WELCOMING PARTY

If Frieze has a mascot, it’s Paul McCarthy’s Balloon Dog. McCarthy has gained renown for a litany of idiosyncratic works. He’s presented decidedly alternative views of allegorical characters such as Snow White and Santa Claus; questioned the merit of celebrity in art, and art in general; and recently moved into satirizing pop culture, with Pig Island and Rebel Dabble Babble. His eighty-foot-tall Koonsian inflatable pooch announces Frieze’s arrival to anyone in view of the East River. It also serves as a colossal companion to the free-to-all Sculpture Park’s other works, which include the pieces by Tom Burr and Franz West pictured here.

In the Drink

During a 1971 diatribe about Manhattan, Woody Allen mused, “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?” At that point, the city’s most notorious “unseen world,” its 32,000 Prohibition-era speakeasies, was forty-one years into retirement. Double that, and nostalgia for the hedonistic twenties has led to the proliferation of legal speakeasies hidden, say, behind a phone booth in an East Village hot-dog shop. It also inspired L.A.-based artist Liz Glynn, who has concealed Vault, a speakeasy, within Frieze’s grid. Built like a ramshackle bank vault, with safe-deposit boxes containing symbolic objects, its location will be revealed to lucky fairgoers at random. On the cocktail menu: gin and vodka Vespers.

A 2012 installation by Glynn.

Photo: BLACKBOX (Bar), 2012, by Liz Glynn, stained wood, one hundred unique numbered glazed ceramic mugs, eleven stools, Xerox copies, and acrylic. Photograph by Calvin Lee. Courtesy of LAXART and the Getty Research Institute.

Epicurean Inspiration

“Not all food is art,” Frieze Projects New York curator Cecilia Alemani says. “But [both food and art] are creative processes that start from very simple ingredients and transform them into something magic.” That was the essence of Food, the legendary artist-run Manhattan restaurant opened in 1971 by Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden. At Frieze, the icon is reincarnated as Food 1971/2013, a restaurant featuring artists as guest chefs. For a more traditional culinary experience, a number of the city’s hottest restaurants will also be on-site: Frankies Spuntino will be reprising its full-service restaurant, while Prime Meats will offer picnic fare. Marlow & Sons and The Fat Radish are returning, and Mission Chinese will make its Frieze debut with an array of dishes worth waiting in line for, including its famous Kung Pao Pastrami.

Photo: Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, and Gordon Matta-Clark outside the restaurant FOOD prior to its opening, 1971. Photograph by Richard Landry. Courtesy Richard Landry, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York / London

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113180/frieze-new-york-randall-islands-glamorous-empty-weekend-art-fair#

ART MAY 10, 2013

Frieze New York, a VIP Art Fair for Our Gilded Age

BY JED PERL

Frieze New York, up and running through Monday, is a fashionista’s wet dream of what an art fair ought to be. Take a look if you want to know how the people who buy and sell contemporary paintings and whatnots are amusing themselves right now. Set in a meandering white tent on Randall’s Island in the East River—it’s just a quick taxi ride (or Frieze-organized bus or ferry ride) from Manhattan—Frieze New York is our Gilded Age art world’s answer to the perfect Edwardian country house party. The bleached-chic style can make ignorance and mendacity look pretty. At a time when the people with the heaps of money are terrified of anything that isn’t “curated,” whether it’s their Louboutins or their Warhols, Frieze is so finely curated that it becomes its own conceptual art work, annihilating whatever art happens to be on display. Even an interesting late painting by Joan Mitchell, at Cheim and Read, registers as little more than another color swatch. You don’t need an art critic to explain Frieze New York. Henry James would have savored the drop-dead elegance and seen straight through to the corruption, although you might want a little help from Marx or Keynes (take your pick) to explain exactly how it all works.

Everything about Frieze is designed to obliterate any particular impression.

Artistic experience is first and last a local experience—an experience of some particular thing seen in some particular time and place. The trouble with Frieze—and the same goes for Art Basel and all the rest of the high profile international art fairs—is that the particulars are effectively pulverized so as to create one grandiose global mash-up. To the extent that a fairgoer distinguishes one thing from another, it’s just a matter of determining the product placement in a top-of-the-heap trade fair. And whom does this all-in-one experience really serve? Well, it definitely serves the people who keep the galleries in business, because this is a constituency that has a lot of money but not a lot of time, at least so they will tell you. Contemplation is dead. Closing the deal is all that matters. At an art fair the mood is so keyed up that even the most lackluster work of art can begin to look as if it’s on steroids. And there’s always the chance that a collector will get in the mood and rev things up even further, with the adrenaline high of a purchase made more or less in public. Art collectors used to be inclined to be secretive. Now they’re pretty much all publicity hounds.

Actually, Frieze seems to have managed to send the entire Manhattan art scene into a mind-altering frenzy. This is only the second year Frieze, an established event in the London season, has appeared in New York. And it’s still fresh enough that the hometown team is eager to partner and stir things up—and make a bit of a rumpus—in the same few weeks that also include the major spring art auctions. Days before Frieze had opened, when I went down to Chelsea to see a few shows, there were already many more gallerygoers than you would normally see on a Tuesday afternoon. The international crowd had already arrived, anxious not to miss out on any of the fun. Over the weekend, the city is hosting a bewildering number of art and art-related happenings. And next Wednesday a major Jackson Pollock, November 19, 1948, is on the auction block in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale at Christie’s. I suspect that at least for all but the most exclusive events there may be some anxiety as to whether there are enough bodies to go around. At Frieze there are VIPs and VVIPs, at least so I gather. And to top it all off—and obviously coordinated with Frieze and the auctions—Jeff Koons, king of the trashmeisters and the top dog among the top selling artists, has a duo of shows opening in Chelsea. One is with his dealer of recent years, Larry Gagosian, but the second is his first appearance at the David Zwirner Gallery, which has a far more austere and intellectual atmosphere than Gagosian and might just persuade the chattering class that’s wearied of Koons to take another look. Koons is now ripping off the Greco-Roman sculptors and for all I know will be hailed for revitalizing neoclassicism.

John Berens/Frieze

Fairgoers stand in a room curated by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a New York art gallery.

I am sorry to be a party pooper. Of course I get a buzz out of Frieze, what with the people-watching and the suave food concessions (Blue Bottle Coffee, Court Street Grocers, The Fat Radish, Sant Ambroeus, and so forth). I could write about the work I saw that stood out a bit, including Mai-Thu Perret’s miniscule, minimalist, and possibly mystical gameboard-like paintings at Zurich’s Galerie Francesca Pia and Simon Evans’s pale, all-over collages featuring bits and pieces of lined paper and graph paper at New York’s James Cohan. But under the circumstances I refuse to be the well-behaved art critic assigning B- to this and C+ to that and maybe even a provisional midterm grade of A-. Everything about Frieze—from the blinding white light to the open floor plan with galleries flowing one into the other—is designed to obliterate any particular impression. And that’s what’s wrong with the whole godforsaken glamorous weekend. At Frieze, you’re being pushed to groove, not to grapple. You’re in the know, but you’re a know nothing.

John Berens/Frieze

“Smoking Room in a private Palais in Brussels, as seen from entrance, 1905,”by Maria Loboda.

The people who run Frieze certainly knew what they were up to when they positioned themselves on an island that has a bit of a never-never land feeling. It’s as if they had set out to deny New York’s great artistic history—what Donald Judd, in the title of one of his pioneering articles about the art of the 1960s, referred to as “Local History.” At Frieze, history is dead and New York’s legendary spirit of place is totally obliterated. Art is left to start from scratch every time, which perhaps explains the scratchpad stupidity of a lot of the work on display. It’s demagogues who want to obliterate the past. And there is something autocratic if not fascistic about the sleekly cosseted ambience in Frieze New York’s snaking white tent. Everybody walks around in a cheerfully hypnotic state. The flow patterns have been oh so beautifully worked out. If you go, you have no choice but to go with the flow.

Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic.

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30 Must-See Art Pieces at Frieze New York 2013

WWJD by Jack Early, 2012 (printed Lexan, lights, plywood, muslin, lentils, printed cotton)

Gallery: McCaffrey Fine Art B15

Untitled by Daniel Arsham, 2013 (broken glass, resin)

Gallery: Galerie Perrotin, C43

Fotini by Saint Clair Cemin, 2013

Gallery:Paul Kasmin, C13 (Sculpture Garden)

Special Report: The Art of Collecting

Frieze Art Fair Pitches Its Tent in New York

Graham Carlow/Frieze

Frieze New York offered a strong showing of North American work in 2012, with 35 percent of galleries coming from that continent, 51 percent from Europe and 14 percent from other regions. Those proportions remain consistent in 2013.

By ROSLYN SULCAS

Published: May 9, 2013

LONDON — When the Frieze Air Fair, the cool teenager of the contemporary art world, set up shop in New York last year, there did not seem to be much surprise. But Frieze New York, which opens its second edition Friday in Randall’s Island Park in Manhattan, remains a daring move and a gamble for the London show and its organizers.

Linda Nylind/Frieze

Contemporary art at last year’s edition of Frieze New York.

The fair, which runs through Monday, comes just two months after the centennial edition of the huge Armory Show in New York, and competes with Art Basel Miami Beach, another important U.S. destination for serious collectors.

There is also a risk that the expansion of Frieze to the United States could dilute the impact or panache of its London edition, take galleries and collectors away from the mother ship, or attempt too close a clone of London in a very different context.

Amanda Sharp, who co-founded Frieze with Matthew Slotover in 2003, said that although it “did seem like a very big challenge,” the impetus to take Frieze to New York came largely from the European galleries that were showing at the London fair.

“I had mentioned the idea to about two people,” Ms. Sharp, a Briton, said by telephone from New York, where she has been based since 1999. “Then a German newspaper got wind of it, and wrote about it, and the deluge of interest was so extreme that I knew I had to find a location.” She describes how she went to Google to look for large green spaces and eventually drove out to Randall’s Island. “I knew it could be perfect for us,” she said.

The choice of the island, a part of Manhattan between the East River and the Harlem River that is unknown to many New York City residents, was a contentious one. In the 19th century, it featured a poorhouse, a reformatory for juveniles and a hospital; now it is mostly parkland with a multipurpose sports complex. Getting there involves either taking a 20-minute ferry or a fairly long car ride via the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, anathema to the New York love of convenience.

“People said we must be crazy,” Mr. Slotover said by telephone. “But to an amazing degree, in the first few minutes of arriving, the consensus changed 180 degrees.”

Ms. Sharp and Mr. Slotover engaged the New York firm SO-IL Architects to design the tent for the fair, a caterpillar-like, curvy, light-filled structure that Holland Cotter described in The New York Times as “the architectural equivalent of a white stretch limo.”

The attractive environment, together with Ms. Sharp and Mr. Slotover’s attention to detail — the food on offer, the V.I.P. lounges, the special projects scattered throughout the tent and the sculpture park outside — contribute to Frieze’s trademark theatrical charm, which is deemed a considerable factor in drawing galleries.

“They are very good at managing the environment and putting artists’ projects at the center of the fair,” said Louisa Buck, the contemporary art correspondent for The Art Newspaper. “People do go from the U.K. to exhibit because it’s a chance to show in a place that’s a lot less creaky than the Armory. It provides a much more stylish, highly regarded alternative.”

Last year, Frieze New York offered a strong showing of North American work, with 35 percent of participating galleries coming from North America, 51 percent from Europe and 14 percent from other regions. Those proportions remain more or less consistent this year.

The London fair, on the other hand, has a higher European-to-American ratio; last year, about 63 percent of the galleries came from Europe and 24 percent from North America. But Mr. Slotover added that there was already a high crossover of gallery applications for the two fairs, suggesting that if curators like the Frieze brand, they consider it worthwhile showing in both cities.

But there is at least one market that Frieze London has struggled to capture. “There is certainly a bunch of New York-based collectors who don’t travel that much,” Mr. Slotover said. “And what astounded us when we started the London fair was the depth of collecting in New York and across the U.S. It really is much bigger than any other country, and galleries want access to that market.”

Maureen Paley, whose gallery in London has been a longtime Frieze participant, exhibited at both the London and New York Frieze fairs last year, as well as at the Armory Show. She said it seemed obvious to her that the opportunity to be in New York, at what she described as a prime time on the international arts calendar, was not to be missed.

“The galleries that do involve themselves with Frieze are often creating stands that are very curated, rather than just displaying their wares,” Ms. Paley said. “It creates a particular atmosphere that is a little bit niche. In that way, New York was very consistent with the feeling of the London fair.”

Despite that consistency, the New York fair has a different feel, Ms. Buck of The Art Newspaper said. “They hired American curators, they take collectors around to local galleries. They are very context-specific, so in that way it is very different to Frieze London. Yes, they are both in tents in parks, but in very different tents, in very different parks.”

But Kim Stern, an art consultant and curator who divides her time between New York and South Africa, said that the works on display at the first Frieze New York fair last year did not differ significantly from what she had seen in London.

“What people take to Frieze New York is, for the moment, very much based on its London reputation,” Ms. Stern said. “As it grows in New York, that will shift, and we will start to see a very different landscape, particularly since I think people feel the perception is that, in America, they can be more bold than in Europe.”

That potential differentiation could be an important factor for Frieze, as two very similar fairs could lead regular London exhibitors to shift their allegiance to New York.

Ozkan Canguven of the Gallery Rampa in Istanbul, which exhibited twice at Frieze London before going to Frieze New York last year, said that the New York edition had been the best fair the gallery had ever done. “I had thought we would do better business in Europe, but New York had such an international crowd of collectors,” she said. “Americans, Brazilians, Mexicans, and lots of Europeans. I think London was more local.”

Although Ms. Canguven said her gallery would continue to show at both Frieze fairs, Ms. Sharp acknowledged that some regular exhibitors felt that New York was a more important market. But “it works the other way round, too,” she hastened to add.

“Some galleries who came to us first in New York have now applied for London,” Ms. Sharp said. “And New York gives us a broader group to market to, which is the whole idea — to establish more relationships, that people understand what we do.”

Mr. Slotover said that while the first edition of Frieze New York had lost money, he hoped that the event would break even this year and be profitable in 2014. The real issue for Frieze, then, may not be whether there is a conflict of interest between its editions in Britain and the United States, but whether there is a sufficiently deep pool of collectors to support both Frieze New York and the Armory Show.

“I’m not sure that the New York art market can really support two enormous fairs that draw upon the same collector base and same galleries,” Ms. Buck said. “Which one will it be? The jury is still out.”

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by Karen Archey

May 10, 2013

Frieze New York

FRIEZE ART FAIR, New YorkMay 10–13, 2013

“Contemporary art: one, us: zero,” quipped a friend as we mistakenly toured what appeared to be the off-limits back room of Marian Goodman’s booth at Frieze New York. We were looking for Tino Sehgal’s performance Ann Lee. Aware of the nature of Sehgal’s work probing social boundaries through real life situations, my partner and I weren’t entirely convinced our foray into Goodman’s secret room wasn’t part of the performance itself. Our mishap was worthwhile though: it brought us to Ann Lee, an adolescent girl performing a monologue as a fictional Manga character originally developed by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno in 1999. The duo had purchased the rights to the character from a Japanese animation company, and subsequently invited other artists, such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Liam Gillick, to include her in their work. Originally a vacant character, she is figuratively filled by the artist’s intention. Sehgal’s version of Ann Lee comprises a rotating cast of confident, “robotic” 11-year-old girls, replete with mechanical limb movements, who directly engage audience members with questions like “Would you rather be too busy or not busy enough?” (Unsurprisingly, most audience members preferred to be too busy.) The piece examines a collective desire to be filled or occupied—with distraction, personal fulfillment, or what have you—and in turn, a fear of stagnation and vacancy. That “Ann Lee” focuses on the art fair goer seems an exceedingly apropos subject for the opening day of Frieze, which was mottled with well-shorn, busybody alpha patrons.

Though its performative nature and challenging salability is undoubtedly anomalous, Sehgal’s performance epitomizes the high quality of work at Frieze New York’s sophomore edition. The fair’s serpentine SO – IL-designed tent boasts twenty more booths than last year’s effort, reaching to 180 galleries in total. And while the titanic amount of galleries proves it impossible to adequately see the entire fair in one day (I was there a total of six hours and can only hope I caught a glimpse, at least, of everything), the overall tone of Frieze New York’s opening day was posh, bright, contemporary, and poised in addition to the usual bourgeois art fair goings-on, and the presence of decidedly cool, emerging artists penetrated the fair.

Most satisfying were booths resuscitating vintage chromogenic prints from decades past. Elizabeth Dee showed a photographic pairing by the lesser-known British photographer Mac Adams. The first photograph depicts a man seemingly wiring a bouquet of daffodils to spy on an unsuspecting woman, the second showing the subject at home amidst the arrangement, perhaps being unwittingly recorded. Titled Conversation [Diptych], the 1975 piece compresses crime narrative into highly staged mise en scène, a rare potential historical analog to the increasingly celebrated, idiosyncratic young conceptual artist Alejandro Cesarco. (With Murray Guy, Cesarco’s installation-cum-detective story The Streets Were Dark with Something More Than Night or the Closer I Get to the End the More I Rewrite the Beginning won the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2011.) For Frieze New York, Murray Guy presented Zoe Leonard’s vintage chromogenic prints, most of which were taken during her forays to remote Alaska in the mid-90s. The striking images—ranging from depictions of a dismembered bear and moose to a dead beaver laid prone in his watery grave—build upon feminist investigations into the gaze endemic to the 1980s, positioning the human being as predator and consumer. At Reena Spaulings, Ken Okiishi’s breathtakingly honest (but unsent) 1997 postcards addressed to art world luminaries such as Larry Clark or Jack Pierson track his coming-of-age lust for a straight friend—a gay rendering of the universal experience of potent desire, rejection, and consequent alienation.

The relative lack of work made before the 1970s was assuaged by a few unique, hard-hitting presentations from artists with decades-old careers. Gagosian showcased a work from Robert Rauschenberg’s lesser-known series of Gluts, metal assemblage sculptures made primarily in the late-eighties while the artist was visiting an economically depressed Texas. Paris’s Galerie Chantal Crousel showed an unusual vitrine-bound but characteristically explosive Thomas Hirschhorn, while B. Wurtz’s grocery-themed paper collages puzzled and dazzled at Richard Telles Fine Art.

The fair ushered in an exciting bevy of young London imports relatively unexposed in New York. London’s The approach brought Magali Reus’s strangely poetic custom-made stadium seats propped up by a crutch leg, meditating on notions of public support, as well as Alice Channer’s hybrid-state, droopy resin clothing. Carlos/Ishikawa, also of London, presented a solo showing by Steve Bishop one could likely smell before they see. In addition to a cutting of the gallery’s wall repositioned as a temporary structure delineating the booth, Bishop’s Listerine tray hilariously and noxiously permeates the fair—a new take on “cutting through fair bullshit.” Shoreditch’s Limoncello presented an Ikea kitchen-inspired installation replete with ceramics by Jesse Wine, who is perhaps on top of the never-ending surge in contemporary art pottery. David Raymond Conroy’s work at Seventeen wraps paravents in fabric (more commonly associated with African clothing), and juxtaposes them with photographic collages meditating on the functionality and history of photography.

London’s contemporaries across the pond presented equally successful, materially inventive work by young Americans. Gavin Kenyon’s bulbous yet phallic, fuzzy plaster works impart a dark take on relatively traditional sculpture at Lower East Side’s Ramiken Crucible. Fellow LES gallery 47 Canal shows the similarly inventive Stuart Uoo, who is the subject of a current two-person exhibition with Jana Euler at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Euler’s winsome paintings can be seen in the fair at Brussels gallery dépendance’s booth). Uoo’s work at 47 Canal comprises a set of busts representing, in a degraded, post-human fashion, each of the famed four females of “Sex and the City.” The mannequins, burnt, are fashioned with floppy hats, bandanas, and tutus, and tout wires for veins. Nearby hang a selection of exceedingly tacky yet expensive designer fabrics that help position Uoo’s busts as belonging to a private, post-identity fantasy world in which a gay (or straight, for that matter) man is just as likely to identify with Carrie Bradshaw as any undergrad co-ed.

If there’s anything surprising about Frieze New York’s second year, it’s perhaps the seamlessness of its presentation. Is the fair’s continued success too good to be true, especially given the long history of the Armory’s struggle for relevance? While the fair’s private usage of public, tax-supported New York property and the company’s refusal to hire unionized workers has precipitated heated New York City Council meetings (1), these issues have yet to turn many heads in the art world. No one wants to rain on the Frieze parade, presumably because New York has yearned so long for a hip, commercially viable fair. It could be argued that Frieze (and not entirely unlike this publication) is built on a highly commercial yet alternative, self-sustaining funding system. This well-oiled machine accrues cultural capital from Frieze’s exceptionally edited magazine, which in turn creates an attractive brand, fueling the pay-to-play desire to show in the fair. While this structure isn’t especially pernicious, it explicitly represents a new model of power: just to be rich or cool isn’t enough to claim your place at the front of the rat race. Today, you have to be both.

1) http://teamsternation.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-york-city-council-hearing-slams.html

Karen Archey is an art critic and curator based in New York. She is the 2012–2013 curator-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center.

1View of Frieze New York Sculpture Park with Paul McCarthy, Balloon Dog, 2013.

2Tino Sehgal, Ann Lee, 2013.

3Mac Adams, Conversation [Diptych], 1975.

4Zoe Leonard, Dead Beaver, 1997/1998.

5Ken Okiishi, Wish I Were Here (detail), 1997–2001.

6Robert Rauschenberg, Miami Glyph Late Summer Glut, 1987.

7Thomas Hirschhorn, Vitrine Murale “Natural Concretion,” 2007.

8B. Wurtz, Untitled, 2010.

9Magali Reus, Parking (shade), 2013.

10Steve Bishop, If Everything Has a Place, Place Too Has a Place IX, 2013.

11View of Seventeen at Frieze New York. Foreground: David Ramond Conroy, Broadway flats, 2013.

12View of Frieze New York, 2013.

13Stewart Uoo, No Sex, No City: Miranda III, 2013.

14David Maljković, Monochromes, 2013.

1View of Frieze New York Sculpture Park with Paul McCarthy, Balloon Dog, 2013. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth, Zurich and John Berens/Frieze. Photo by John Berens.
2Tino Sehgal, Ann Lee, 2013. Performance. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Photo by Karen Archey.
3Mac Adams, Conversation [Diptych], 1975. Color photographs, gelatin silver prints, 14.17 x 11.81 inches each. Edition 1 of 3. Courtesy of Elizabeth Dee, New York.
4Zoe Leonard, Dead Beaver, 1997/1998. Silver gelatin print, 24 x 17 inches. Edition of 6. Courtesy of Murray Guy, New York.
5Ken Okiishi, Wish I Were Here (detail), 1997–2001. Five framed archival inkjet prints 19.5 x 13.5 each. Edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York. Photo by Alex Ross.
6Robert Rauschenberg, Miami Glyph Late Summer Glut, 1987. Riveted metal and plastic parts, 60 1/5 x 102 x 12 1/2 inches. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo by Dorothy Zeidman.
7Thomas Hirschhorn, Vitrine Murale “Natural Concretion,” 2007. Four mannequin heads, prints, brown tape, cardboard, plexiglas, neon, 98 x 65 x 23.5 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Photo by Alex Ross.
8B. Wurtz, Untitled, 2010. Plastic lid, collage, string, 48 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles. Photo by Alex Ross.
9Magali Reus, Parking (shade), 2013. Polyester resin, fiberglass, pigments, powder, coated aluminum, rubber stop-end, car magazine cover, Artex, 21.3 x 37.4 x 19.1 inches. Courtesy of The approach, London. Photo by Alex Ross.
10Steve Bishop, If Everything Has a Place, Place Too Has a Place IX, 2013. Removed MDF wall, 78.7 x 43.3 inches. Courtesy of Carlos/Ishikawa, London. Photo by Alex Ross.
11View of Seventeen at Frieze New York. Foreground: David Ramond Conroy, Broadway flats, 2013. Dutch Wax fabric, acrylic paint, wood, hinges, sandbag, 94.5 x 30.4 x 47.2 inches. Courtesy of Seventeen, London.
12View of Frieze New York, 2013. Courtesy of John Berens/Frieze. Photo by John Berens.
13Stewart Uoo, No Sex, No City: Miranda III, 2013. Polyurethane resin, epoxy, ink, pigment, paint, wires, cables, clothing, accessories, ferrofluid, razor wire, steel, feathers, hair, make-up, glitter, eyelashes, flies, dust, 84 x 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy of 47 Canal, New York.
14David Maljković, Monochromes, 2013. Plexiglas, wood, 3 palm fronds, bull dog clips, acrylic on canvas, trestles, 28.34 inches high, Plexiglas, 29.52 x 78.74 x 33.46 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Annet Gelink, Amsterdam, and Metro Pictures, New York.
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http://www.artribune.com/2013/05/new-york-updates-nuova-sede-sulleast-river-immutata-vocazione-modernista-ecco-video-e-fotogallery-dalla-fiera-a-latere-nada/

New York Updates: nuova sede sull’East River, immutata vocazione modernista. Ecco video e fotogallery dalla fiera a latere Nada…

Scritto da Redazione | venerdì, 10 maggio 2013 · Lascia un commento

Altro “Pier”, altra fiera. Dalle parti del 36, sempre affacciati sull’East River ci sono i capannoni di Basketball City, scelta – azzeccatissima – come nuova location della fiera Nada, che vi approda dopo diverse peregrinazioni.

Meno entusiasmo per il livello degli stand che, con una allure modernista che spesso caratterizza questa fiera, hanno optato per allestimenti che strizzano l’occhio più alla vendita che alla ricerca: piccole opere, pochi progetti, booth piccoli, a dispetto di nomi di grande tendenza ai blocchi di partenza. Anche qui non manca una rappresentanza italiana, con gli stand di Thomas Brambilla da Bergamo – che per l’occasione sfoggia gli americani della sua scuderia e un giovanissimo italo-croato di vent’anni – e di Luce Gallery da Torino. Anche questi li vedete nel video e nella fotogallery…

Recommended Artists at Frieze New York

Posted: 05/09/2013 2:15 pm

The Frieze Art Fair made quite the first impression last spring during its opening New York exhibition. Ever since, expectation and curiosity levels were high among fair-goers, waiting to see what this year’s fair will bring. Over 180 galleries will be taking part in the five-day fair, making the journey to Randall’s Island well worth its while. With so much to see, finding some focus might be daunting, so MutualArt has put together a list of 10 artists not to be missed at the fair.

Dianna Molzan

Los Angeles based artist Dianna Molzan’s paintings are frequently described as sculptural and often break the convention of the picture surface as single, uninterrupted plane. But rather than shifting horizontally into the established register of another medium, it often feels as if her works are burrowing vertically, deeper and deeper into painting itself. The sculptural quality of the work is almost a by-product of Molzan’s investigation into the apparatus of painting in its most literal sense – the wood supports, the canvas, the paint.

Molzan has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2012), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011), and her gallery, Overduin and Kite in Los Angeles (2009). Several of her works were included in the show All of this and nothing at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011).

(Image: Dianna Molzan, Untitled, 2013, oil on canvas, 2 panels: 84 1/2 x 94 in / 214.6 x 238.8 cm overall, Courtesy of Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles)

Dianna Molzan’s work can be seen at Overduin and Kite, Stand C3.

Ivan Seal

Berlin-based Ivan Seal was a sound-artist before switching to painting a couple of years ago. Sound still plays a role in his art and at his In Here Stands It installation the paintings were shown alongside computer-generated sound works, whose structure and rhythm are akin to the flow of canvases on the gallery wall. Seal’s paintings share matter, scale and palette. He usually exhibits them in groups although they are conceived of independently and shown out of chronological order. The objects he depicts are inspired by his everyday surroundings and may seem plain and simple, yet Seal finds the eerie, dream-like quality in the mundane.

Recent solo exhibitions include Ivan Seal at Carl Freedman Gallery, London (through May 25th, 2013), the object hurts the spaceat RaebervonStenglin in Zurich (2011), True as applied to you; false as applied to you at Krome Gallery, Berlin (2011), I Learn by Osmosisat CEAAC, Strasbourg (2010) and Two Rooms For A Fall in Berlin (2009).

(Image: Ivan Seal, ‘prototype to get out no 3′ (2011), Oil on canvas, 70 x 60 cm, Carl Freedman Gallery)

Ivan Seal’s works can be seen at Carl Freedman Gallery, Stand C37

A 2005 featured artist at the Venice Biennale, Argentinean Jorge Macchi has gained international attention for his delicate meditations on the poetics of everyday life using a variety of media formats, from video installations to artist’s books to cut out newspaper collages. His work is characterized by a somewhat melancholic air, with subjects ranging from acts of random violence to unrequited love, the impossibility of conclusion, and the interplay between presence and absence.

Macchi solo show is up through June 16th at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland. Selected solo exhibitions include The Singers’ Room, in collaboration with Edgardo Rudnitzky, at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy (2008);The Anatomy of Melancholy at Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas (2007); Gallery Night at Luisa Strina Gallery in São Paulo, Brazil (2007); Jorge Macchi at Galeria Ruth Benzacar in Buenos Aires, Argentina (2007); and Time Machine at Kilchmann Martin Gallery in Mexico City (2006).

(Image: Music stands still, 2007 iron, courtesy: Galleria Continua, San Gimigango/Beijing/Le Moulin, Photographer: Ela Bialkowska)

Jorge Macchi’s works can be seen at Galleria Continua, Stand C42

Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci

French artist Marie Cool and Italian Fabio Balducci live and work in Paris and have been working together since 1995. The grand logic behind the work of Marie Cool Fabio Balducci is an enigma that cannot be resolved in a single definition. Their art, which includes both live actions and videos, is a personal ethic, erected movement by movement through a very peculiar sociability, which could be thus devised: What distance should I maintain between the others and me to build an unalienating “living together”, an unexiled loneliness? The actions and what comes of them (still objects or drawings in a broader sense) do not provide an answer. These shapes tell of a disciplined and self-sustaining life, which joins those whose desires are chained to the paradox of the tetherless freedom, to favour the Free Spirit, emancipated and uncluttered of itself.

Marie Cool Fabio Balducci work together in Paris. Their work was shown in solo exhibitions at Site Gallery, Sheffield, at La Maison Rouge, Paris and Attitudes, Geneva in 2008, at The South London Gallery in 2009, at CAC Brétigny in 2010, at Villa Medici, Roma in 2011, at La Synagogue de Delme art center, FRAC Lorraine, Metz and Le Consortium, Dijon in 2012-2013. They also took part in the exhibition On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century (cur. Connie Butler and Catherine de Zegher) at MoMA, New York (2010), The Living Currency (cur. Pierre Bal-Blanc, 2010) and in La cavalerie exhibition at CAN, Neuchâtel. Their works have recently been added to the collections of MoMa New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, Frac Île-de-France and Frac Lorraine, as well as Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul.

(Image: Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Untitled, 2008 (paper, table, 220 x 100cm), video: 37 sec, courtesy Marcelle Alix, Paris)

Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci’s work can be seen at Marcelle Alix, Stand B25

This year’s Turner Prize nominee David Shrigley will take over an entire wall of the Anton Kern booth with a vibrant range of themes and materials. Shrigley’s disquieting and often profound sense of humor becomes evident in every medium, i.e. drawings, prints, photographs, signs and paintings, mixing the mundane with the absurd. Shrigley draws a universe infused with satire. With a fierce line, he depicts human doubts and uncertainties, animating the twisted scenarios of our insecurities and obsessions. One of his works from “What the Hell Are You Doing?” titled “In I Go” depicts the artist (labeled as “me”) entering into a skull (labeled “my destiny”).

David Shrigley has recently presented solo exhibitions at Museum M, Leuven, Belgium (2010), Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2010), Kelvingrove, Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2010), Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen (2009), Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz (2009), Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2009), Fumetto, Kunstmuseum, Luzern (2009) and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich (2009). His work has been shown in numerous museums and international exhibitions including “Life on Mars”, the 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2008), “Laughing in a Foreign Language” at Hayward Gallery, London (2008), “Learn to Read” at Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London (2007), “The Compulsive Line: Etching 1900 to Now” at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006), and “State of Play,” at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2004).

(Image: “Reprinted from What the Hell Are You Doing? The Essential David Shrigley by David Shrigley. Copyright © 2010 by David Shrigley. First American edition 2011. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.”)

David Shrigley’s works can be seen at Anton Kern Gallery, Stand C2

The Brooklyn-based artist Martha Friedman often examines quotidian objects in her sculptures, manipulating the scale and material of such things as waffles, rubber bands, and nails, which emphasizes the surreal aspects of these familiar items. In Frieze, Friedman will show at the Wallspace gallery booth as well as an outdoor piece as part of this year’s Sculpture Park curated by Tom Eccles. Her outdoor piece is essentially a “tongue garden.” – – with glossy, pink tongues – a reoccurring motif in Freidman’s work – instead of tulips, and mulch that is made of black recycled tire rubber instead of dirt.

Friedman’s solo exhibitions include “Caught” at the Wallspace gallery 2012; “Erogenouse Zones” at the Jessica Silverman Gallery 2012; “Rub” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit 2010; “Rubbers” at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park 2010-2011.

(Image: Martha Friedman, Mechanical Disadvantage II, 2012, Steel, Concrete, 121x60x60, Courtesy of Wallspace Gallery)

Martha Friedman’s work can be seen at Wallspace Gallery, Stand C8

Zhan Wang is widely recognized as one of China’s leading contemporary artists today. Working in installation, photography and video, his sculpturally informed practice challenges ideas of landscape and environment, addressing the urban, rural, artificial and industrial. Zhan Wang’s art has a particular perspective fundamentally anchored in his relationship to his own cultural heritage. Among his most celebrated works is his series of “artificial rocks” – stainless steel replicas of the much-revered “scholar’s rocks” traditionally found in Chinese gardens. The mirrored surfaces of these often monumental objects absorb the viewer and its surrounding environment, enticing them to become part of the work,.The unevenness of the surface results in abstraction and a distortion of reality as reflected in the rock, thus creating a visual interplay between positions of tradition and modernity.

Zhan Wang has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries across the world including the National Museum of China, Beijing, China; Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts, USA; Kunst Museum, Bern, Switzerland; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; International Center of Photography, New York, USA; and the Asia Society Museum, New York, USA. He has also executed a number of art projects at significant landmarks such as Mount Everest and the Great Wall of China. His work was also included in the landmark exhibitions ‘Cities on the Move: Asian Contemporary Art’, Austria, France, USA, Finland, UK, Denmark (touring exhibition 1997-99) and ‘Synthi-Scapes: Chinese Pavilion’, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy in 2003.

(Image: Zhan Wang, Artificial Rock No. 71, 2004, Stainless steel, 185 x 165 x 100 cm, Courtesy of Long March Space)

Zhan Wang’s works can be seen at the Long March Space, Stand D26

Eileen Quinlan

Eileen Quinlan makes bold photographic works that range from bright abstractions to dark, organic landscapes. Created by taking detail shots of commonplace objects and materials, they are captivating in their use of light, color, and scale. Quinlan creates images of dimensional confusion by photographing modest studio constructions of foam, mirrors, and other common materials. She is interested in exposing the formal constructs of photography, like light and shadow. She has also addressed the artificial scarcity created by a limited edition by displaying entire editions side-by-side and treating them as a singular piece.

Quinlan participated in a number of group exhibitions in 2012, including Blind Cut at Marlborough Gallery and Accrochage at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York, Second Nature: Abstract Photography Then and Now at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA, and Printed at Mai 36 in Zurich. The highlight of last year, however, was unquestionably her September solo exhibition, Twin Peaks at Campoli Presti in London. Most recently, she mountedY? O! G… A., collaboration with Matt Keegan at The Kitchen in New York.

(Image: Eileen Quinlan, Ishtar, 2012, 60 x 48 inches, Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery)

Eileen Quinlan’s works can be seen at the Miguel Abreu Gallery, Stand B57

Shot between 1994 and 1997 while Zoe Leonard was living in an extremely remote part of Alaska, the photographs presented at Frieze show animals that the artist hunted and butchered herself and with friends: a bear, a moose, a beaver, and a duck. Astonishingly anti-picturesque, they are key works in Leonard’s long exploration of the relationships between photography and images of nature.”I was afraid at first that I would have a hard time making art in Alaska. What I found was the opposite. I was surrounded by the complexity of nature, and I began thinking about our “progress” as a people, about the choices we have made,” says the artist about her experience.

Zoe Leonard has exhibited extensively since the late 1980s. Major solo exhibitions include Observation Point, Camden Arts Centre, London (2012); Photographs, Fotomuseum Wintherthur (2007), which travelled to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2008), MuMOK — Museum Moderner Kunst Stifting Ludwig, Vienna (2009), and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2009); You See I Am Here After All, Dia: Beacon (2008); Derrotero, Dia at the Hispanic Society, New York (2008); Analogue, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and Villa Arson, Nice (2007).

(Image: Zoe Leonard, Bear Paw Hanging, 1996/1998 Silver gelatin print 24 x 17 in, Courtesy of Murray Guy Gallery)

Zoe Leonard’s works can be seen at the Murray Guy Gallery, Stand B5

Between 1954 and 1972, the Japanese avant-garde art movement Gutai (meaning “concrete” or “embodiment”) challenged traditional artistic media through spectacularly orchestrated exhibitions. Despite being one of the founding members of the Gutai Group, Tsuruko Yamazaki remains one of the less discussed members of the group. Her participation at Frieze New York 2013 will be the artist’s first solo presentation in the USA.

Starting in the 1950s, she created washes of colored dye, using hues of indigo, violet and magenta on outdoor installations in public parks before moving on to more Pop-influenced paintings in the 60s. She has presented a range of works including three-dimensional pieces made using sheets of tin, performances, and paintings. Throughout her decades-long career, Yamazaki has produced work on the themes of real and virtual images and sight/cognition/recreation that expresses her unique outlook on the relationship between the individual and the world.

Yamazaki’s solo exhibitions include “Tsuruko Yamazaki” at the Take Ninagawa gallry (2013); Lads Gallery Osaka (2012); “Beyond Gutai: 1957-2009” Galerie Almine Rech (2010); Gallery Cellar (2008-2009); “From Gutai to Today” Lads Gallery (2007); “Reflection: Tsuruko Yamazaki” Ashiya City Museum of Art & History (2004).

(Image: Tsuruko Yamazaki, Work, 2009, Dye, lacquer and thinner on tin , 47.5 x 47.5 cm, Courtesy of Take Ninagawa Gallery)

Tsuruko Yamazaki’s works can be seen at Take Ninagawa gallery, stand B23

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http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/the-market/2013-05-08/frieze-new-yorks-sophomore-outing-a-preview/

Frieze New York’s Sophomore Outing: A Preview

by Leigh Anne Miller 05/08/13

In the midst of setting up her booth at the Frieze Art Fair, Los Angeles dealer Susanne Vielmetter was presented with a last-minute problem. One of the artists she’s showing, Andrea Bowers, disagreed with the fair’s decision to hire non-union workers (an issue that plagued the fair last year as well). Two days before Frieze’s preview, which is this Thursday, May 9, Bowers had decided to display a pamphlet and a written statement calling out Frieze’s anti-union labor practices. When she spoke to A.i.A. on the phone, Vielmetter was in the process of drafting an e-mail to Amanda Sharp, co-organizer (with Matthew Slotover) of the fair, to inform her of Bowers’s plans.

View Slideshow Sara VanDerBeek: Roman Women V, 2013, C-print, 20 by 16 1/4 inches. Courtesy Altman Siegel, San Francisco.; Kathryn Andrews: Claire, 2013, polished aluminum, certified film prop, 10 by 10 by 36 inches. Courtesy David Kordansky, Los Angeles. Photo Fredrik Nilsen.;

“It’s a free country,” Vielmetter told A.i.A. “My most important role is as a representative of the artist.” In addition to Bowers’s impromptu pamphlet, the gallery is exhibiting two of her large drawings on found cardboard (the material references homemade signs held by protesters), as well as a suite of 10 new paintings by Nicole Eisenman and landscape paintings with psychological undertones by Whitney Bedford.

Despite her potential conflict with the fair’s organizers, Vielmetter echoed what many dealers had to say about Frieze’s pleasant, outdoorsy setting and airy, light-filled exhibition space: “It’s the most visually stunning fair in the world and the quality of the galleries really is extraordinary.”

Nearly 200 international galleries will show at Frieze’s second annual New York outing (May 10-13). Like last year, the tent, designed by New York firm SO – IL architects, is one of the biggest draws for both dealers and art enthusiasts trekking out to Randall’s Island. Frieze is divided into three sections: the main area has 139 exhibitors; Focus, which highlights projects and artworks made specifically for the fair, has 30; and Frame, featuring solo presentations by emerging galleries, has 24.

According to several dealers who spoke with A.i.A. off the record, booth prices in the main section run from about $30,000 for 430 square feet to $90,000 for 1,290 square feet. The costs for the subsections are approximately $9,000 for a 270-square-foot spot in Frame and $20,000 for 350 square feet in Focus.

In addition to the galleries exhibiting in the quarter-mile-long tent, Sharp and Slotover have, like last year, organized a range of programming. “I almost see them as curators, not just art-fair directors,” said David Maupin, of New York’s Lehmann Maupin, who is showing Do Ho Suh and Teresita Fernandez in his gallery’s booth. There’s a sound art component, specially commissioned installations in and around the tent, a sculpture park on the waterfront, and a series of debates, panel discussions and lectures.

The most talked-about project is a re-creation of and tribute to FOOD, the short-lived SoHo restaurant run by artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard and Carol Gooden in the early ’70s. Both Girouard and Gooden will participate (roasting a pig and making soup, respectively); also on hand as artist-chefs will be Matthew Day Jackson (wartime food) and Jonathan Horowitz (vegan cuisine).

Frieze’s presence in New York has, again, attracted a range of smaller satellite art fairs in Manhattan. NADA (New Art Dealers Association) will set up shop at Pier 36 on the Lower East Side (May 10-12). Pulse returns to the Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street (May 9-12). And PooL will take over the Flatiron Hotel on West 26th Street (May 10-12). Two fairs that jumped on the Frieze bandwagon last year—Red Dot and Verge—have decided not to return.

Claudia Altman Siegel, of San Francisco’s Altman Siegel, views art fairs in New York and abroad as particularly important. Her booth, in the Focus section, will have a solo presentation of work by Sara VanDerBeek. “Sara recently had a residency in Rome, and her new photos are depictions of women from Roman ruins in various stages of decay. They’re glamorous and sexy but in the context of stone sculptures,” Altman Siegel told A.i.A.

Gabrielle Giattino, of New York-based Bureau, is showing seven new paintings by Julia Rommel in Frame. In her mostly monochromatic paintings, Rommel manipulates the canvas, “dealing with the folds and staple holes that are a result of stretching and unstretching canvas.” Compared to some of the smaller fairs she’s participated in (Independent, Liste, NADA), Giattino finds Frieze to be more serious, with higher stakes. “Here, we’re small fish, and the mood is serious business. There’s more money at stake, and you can feel that.”

New York’s Tanya Bonakdar has a booth in the main section showing a small, pendulumlike sculpture by Sarah Sze and a painted wood bust by Mark Manders resembling unfired clay. Sze and Manders are both representing their home countries (the U.S. and the Netherlands, respectively) in this year’s Venice Biennale. Also on view is new work by Tomas Saraceno, Gillian Wearing and Olafur Eliasson.

Los Angeles’s David Kordansky is filling its booth with a range of work by many of the gallery’s artists. Highlights include three geometric, gravity-defying recent sculptures by John Mason, who has shown in the past with better-known L.A. ceramicists Peter Voulkos and Ken Price; a mid-60s hard-edge painting by Sam Gilliam that has been in his studio for 50 years; and, according to director Stuart Krimko, a “really killer” new John Pastore painting. Krimko seemed most excited about a conical Kathryn Andrews sculpture with a point so sharp it had to be hung high up on the wall to meet safety regulations.

Mehdi Chouakri, whose eponymous gallery is based in Berlin, is bringing a selection of artists he represents, including John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Saâdane Afif, Charlotte Posenenske and Mathieu Mercier. The combination of Fleury’s sculpture, made up of hairpins and curlers, Mercier’s functional sofa and Möbius strip-like leather belts, and Feldmann’s large-scale photos of his original bookshelves will give Chouakri’s booth a “furniture/design kind of esthetic, like a living room,” he told A.i.A. by phone.

Discussing Frieze’s inaugural outing last year, Chouakri recalled that, partly due to the setting, “people were scared and wondered if it would work. Now, it feels like part of the city.”

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http://www.coolhunting.com/culture/pulse-new-york-2013.php

In the lead-up to NYCxDesign, this weekend marks the opening of Frieze, NADA and Pulse art fairs in New York City. For art world regulars, it’s one of the few chances to see thousands of examples of contemporary art in a single go. For others, it can be pretty overwhelming. With Frieze’s takeover of Randall’s Island and NADA holding court at Basketball City at Pier 36, Pulse on 18th street remains one of the few convenient venues to get to—it also happens to be one of the most well-curated.

If you’re in the city and looking for a place to kick off your tour, we recommend dipping your feet at Pulse, where you can take in these highlights we spotted around this year’s NYC fair and more.

Rune Guneriussen

Photographer Rune Guneriussen explores the intersection of interior and exterior spaces, decorating natural landscapes with domestic items and traditional lighting. Ethereal and occasionally haunting, several examples of his most recent series are on view at Galerie Waltman‘s booth.

Alicia Cross

Multimedia artist Alicia Ross utilizes embroidery to create captivating portraits of the female form with religious undertones and overt sexuality. Her series “Moral Fiber” is currently showing at Black & White Gallery‘s space.

Sohei Nishino

Japanese-born artist Sohei Nishino creates his aptly named “Diorama Map” by walking around a city with a disposable camera, later arranging and pasting the results to create a textural, layered and rich urban portrait. Visit Michael Hoppen Gallery‘s booth to see Nishino’s portrayal of Berlin and various other world cities.

With contributions from Hans Aschim and James Thorne; images by Cool Hunting and courtesy of the artists.

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http://www.papermag.com/2013/05/amanda_sharp_frieze.php

PAPER

on the front lines of cultural chaos since 1984.

magazine

frieze frame

Frieze New York Founder Amanda Sharp On Her Mega Art Fair

By Walter Robinson / Portrait of Amanda created by Andrea Fella

Sometime early this century I invited Frieze magazine editor Amanda Sharp out to lunch. I took her to a glassed-in tablecloth joint down near the water in Battery Park. The location was good for a visitor from London, I thought, and close to the Artnet offices, where I had my own upstart magazine going. With Matthew Slotover, her partner in founding Frieze in 1991, she was soon to launch the Frieze Art Fair in London. Along with the new Tate Modern and the advent of Damien Hirst and Young British Art, Frieze would re-energize London as a global art capital.”New London Sun,” I titled the report I filed from the very first Frieze Art Fair in 2003, a reference not only to the stellar aspirations of the event but also to the beautiful weather, a rarity in the often overcast city. The 12-year-old glossy magazine was already “the arbiter of everything cool about Brit Art,” I went on to say. Now, the Frieze Art Fair would make it an eminence grise in the art market as well.Sharp grew up in London and studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. Her own art collection is modest but personal, she says, consisting of artworks by artist friends. She has been a New Yorker for at least a dozen years.Recently I caught up with Sharp on the phone to talk about the second installment of the Frieze New York Art Fair, taking place May 10-13, in a custom-made structure out on Randall’s Island in the East River. It’s a very contemporary scene, with over 180 galleries from 32 countries, including more than 50 from New York.Above: Frieze founder Amanda Sharp.Walter Robinson: When you launched the Frieze Art Fair back in 2003, was subsidizing the magazine an issue? Did you anticipate that you would be re-energizing London as a global art market?
Amanda Sharp: No, we weren’t far-sighted enough to think of the fair as a way to subsidize the magazine. In fact we worried that it might damage the magazine! We had thought for years that London needed its own contemporary art fair. In the end, we got frustrated that no one was doing it, and launched it ourselves. And we did not anticipate that the fair would “re-energize” the London art scene. It was the other way around, really. London was generating a lot of energy and we capitalized on it. Interest in young artists was exploding, more contemporary galleries were opening, the Tate Modern was inaugurated — all these events predated the opening of the fair.WR: The 2013 edition of Frieze New York, featuring galleries from 32 countries, suggests that we now have a global art world.
AS: Globalism is part and parcel of the way that the whole world is connected now, with constant and rapid cross-pollination and information exchange. If you ignore that, you are a dinosaur. And it’s funny, but an international fair serves a very local purpose, by bringing in interesting artworks that local artists wouldn’t have seen any other way.WR: A recent report showed a general pullback in the global art market by seven percent over the last year, with smaller galleries taking a disproportion-ately large share of the hit. Does your experience reflect that dynamic? Isn’t the market for contemporary art supposed to be growing?
AS: That’s not my forte, paradoxically. I think it’s clear that the interest in contemporary art is growing, and there are more people buying contemporary art than there were 10 years ago. But not everyone is benefiting, because we all know that a lot of the increase comes from big-ticket works that are going to a small number of people.WR: In the last decade or so we’ve seen a proliferation of digital art Web sites that offer a kind of virtual art market or digital art fair — most of them still in the beginning stages of development. So far, the art world seems to prefer the real-world fair experience. Does Frieze have any plans to adapt to the digital experience? What do you see happening in this virtual space going forward?
AS: I think people like to see art in the flesh, and I think there’s a good reason for that. One thing you can’t replicate digitally is the overall art fair experience, which involves looking at artworks right in front of you, not to mention the chance meetings, the networking and all of the accidental, enjoyable social interactions that don’t take place in quite the same way in the digital realm. Of course the digital experience has obvious benefits, and Frieze does a lot of stuff digitally — we have an app that helps visitors navigate the fair, and a mobile Web site — and we believe in the digital community. But it’s not the same as looking at art for real.WR: I understand Frieze New York is featuring a re-creation of Food, the late artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s pioneering SoHo eatery. Can you give us any details? Is the artist-as-chef a new category of artist?
AS: Cecilia Alemani, the curator of the project program, has been committed to this idea of bringing back an important exhibition from New York’s past and embedding it in the fair. Last year John Ahearn re-created what he had done at Fashion Moda, and this time around Cecilia thought of creating an homage to Food. Artists are cooking each day, re-creating some of its most beloved dishes — suckling pig stuffed with pineapple is one, and another is a roasted bone soup.WR: Frieze New York also promises a speakeasy, a cemetery and a color-coded garden. Can you give us any details on these features, or a preview of any other anticipated crowd-pleasers?
AS: Liz Glynn’s speakeasy is hidden inside the fair, and the lucky visitor is given a key. The barman will mix you a cocktail and tell you a special story — so it’s an immersive, playful experience. And the Andra Ursuta cemetery, if you come in on the ferry, as you walk up to the fair, you pass it on the way. Basically, it’s where images go to die, and the headstones bear fractured-image icons. So, it’s as if some dreams don’t quite make it out of that tent.WR: I imagine that managing the competing demands of several hundred alpha art dealers is something of a challenge. From your experience, can you characterize what makes an exemplary art dealer?
AS: The really good ones are those who find the artists, believe in the art, champion it, understand there’s a long view — they want to help artists find homes in the best museums. They are people who talk with passion and insight about the work. They are always prophets, aren’t they?WR: Fairs are great fun to visit, but it is art collectors and their purchases that fuel the all-important art economy. Can you give us any insight into what makes the contemporary art collector tick?
AS: Collectors are people who have caught a bug — it’s an obsession, it’s what they love, it’s what they devote all their time to learning about, they get enormous enjoyment and intellectual reward from looking at art and living with art and having access to artists. Their collections are totally personal and idiosyncratic. Those people are fantastic to meet and talk to, and those are the true collectors.WR: It’s been almost two decades since the launch of the new art fair era with the Gramercy International Art Fair at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York — are you sensing any fair fatigue?
AS: We have a lot of art fairs now, more than when we launched our fair 10 years ago, and I think there is some fair fatigue. But you don’t feel fatigue around the good fairs. Where good art is being shown, good galleries are present, and that’s always going to be an interesting event to visit. For some professionals, though, they can’t always be on an airplane every week. At some point there’s bound to be some sort of consolidation, where you’ll see a clear stratification between local fairs and international fairs.For more information visit friezenewyork.com

This story was published on May 8, 2013 11:15 AM

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Do Ho Suh recreates his apartment in cloth.

ICONS
May 9, 2013, 11:03 p.m. ET

Five Objects to Warm Up a Trip to Frieze

What will make New York’s art elite cross to a small island off Manhattan for a second year in a row? Try an 80-foot-tall inflatable dog, a re-creation of a famed SoHo eatery and 186 galleries participating in the Big Apple’s Frieze Art Fair.

‘Dominated Boat—Project’ by Maria Nepomuceno

The four-day event, which began Friday, is an offshoot of a London fair that’s become an important date on Europe’s art calendar. The inaugural New York version came close to selling out last year, with about 45,000 visitors and 180 galleries participating. (There are no plans to import London’s new Frieze Masters, which is oriented toward historical art.)

The fair has synced with major spring art auctions in New York and, once again, is touting its food offerings (particularly important given its remoteness from Manhattan eateries). A different artist will cook every day at the reincarnation of Food, a performance-art restaurant opened in 1971.

Here are five artists whose works visitors might want to put on their route:

Paul McCarthy: Towering over the fair tent, and visible from Manhattan, is the artist’s giant “Balloon Dog.” This spring, Mr. McCarthy, age 67, is having three shows at Hauser & Wirth’s two New York locations, as well as a show at the city’s Park Avenue Armory. The dog is made of tarpaulin rubber and inflated by a constantly-running blower.

Sarah Sze: The Chelsea artist, who won a MacArthur “genius” grant, is creating an installation for the Venice Biennale’s U.S. pavilion and working on a massive installation for New York City Transit’s new Second Avenue subway station at 96th Street. The 5-foot-high “Slow Sieve (Water Diviner),” at Tanya Bonakdar’s fair booth, includes screwdrivers, yarn, stones and a pencil. The gallery declined to disclose the asking price.

Cameron Platter: Working in a range of media, including wood sculpture, printmaking and drawing, the Johannesburg-born Mr. Platter has been dubbed the love child of Quentin Tarantino and Dr. Seuss. He’s been given a mini-exhibition by Whatiftheworld, one of three South African galleries at the fair. (Frieze this year hosts galleries from 32 countries.) His drawing “Cannibal” is priced at $12,000.

Maria Nepomuceno: An artist-run gallery in Rio de Janeiro, A Gentil Carioca, is showcasing this 37-year-old artist whose sculptures often feature floppy, tubular weavings or hammocks decorated with colored beads and pearls. Some of the rope she uses is recovered from ships. “Dominated Boat—Project” is an almost-5-foot-tall boat. The price is $25,000.

Thomas Ruff: The German-born artist’s ma.r.s. series is based on black-and-white photographs of the surface of Mars, taken by cameras aboard National Aeronautics and Space Administration craft. Mr. Ruff digitally altered the images, changing their perspective and adding color. David Zwirner’s booth is asking $95,000 for “ma.r.s.08 II.”

—Jennifer Maloney

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

The Frieze Art Fair in New York—the city’s answer to the famed London fair—kicked off Thursday morning in a torrential downpour. But intrepid fair-goers trekked to Randall’s Island by East River Water Taxi, where they were greeted by artist Paul McCarthy’s giant red inflatable dog, which towered over the fair itself. Unsurprisingly, the more than 180 booths inside offered everything imaginable. There is a slick Doug Aitken wall-mounted sculpture with the words “ART” written in cracked mirror (to remind us of our own narcissism? Of a discipline that’s falling apart? Or maybe just to serve as a mirror in case we have something in our teeth?) There’s a video by Chinese artist Qiu Anxiong, The Temptation of the Land (2009), which served as an animated commentary on the destruction caused by the construction of an Olympic stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest, on the natives of Beijing. There was an empty, haunting self-portrait by the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, her mouth ringed with plated gold. By midday, the fair was chock full of people: designer Valentino Garavani, in a perfectly tailored brown suit, went from booth to booth—as did the actor Andrew Garfield, who appeared to be led around by an adviser. And deals were happening here: quickly but quietly, art appeared to be selling, under the nose of tourists and kids taking Instagrams. Below, our list of art not to miss at the fair. (Frieze New York, on Randall’s Island, runs May 10-13.)

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

1. Francesco Vezzoli, Unique Forms of Continuity in High Heels, Bronze, 2012 (Yvonne Lambert Gallery)

When you’re wandering through the wide alleys between booths, this loping golden sculpture by Francesco Vezzoli will stop you in your tracks. It’s simultaneously a riff on and commemoration of Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a touchstone of Futurism. But the original was also a symbol of masculinity: a bullish, mulscular soldier, rumbling forward through space and time. Now, Vezzoli recreates the statue in high heels—which, hopefully, will cause some gender-studies student somewhere to write a dissertation on what all this means for gender identity. Here we all are, collectively rumbling forward, in five-inch stilettos.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

2. Katy Grannan, Anonymous, Bakersfield, CA, 2011, 2011 (Salon 94)

Haunting portraits by Katy Grannan ring the booth at Salon 94, faces that—even when you move past it to other booths—stay with you. Grannan, a young photographer who lives in Berkeley, Calif., has become well-known for choosing total strangers as subjects. She lets their cues dictate the photographs; these people aren’t posed, styled, or arranged. For the series shown here, Grannan traveled along California’s Highway 99—from the Mexican border to the top of the state—photographing people as she went along. The faces tell a million stories: of heat and hunger, poverty, and hard work.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

3. Thomas Ruff, Various Portraits, 1980-1984 (David Zwirner)

No collection of faces could be more different from each other than Grannan and Ruff’s. Thomas Ruff’s portraits, 12 in total, are stern and passport-like relative to the emotional, large-scale portraits at Salon 94. But here, the objective approach, which Ruff picked up at the Dusseldorf Art Academy in the 1970s, makes this grid of blank faces about as neutral as wallpaper.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

4. Marianne Vitale, Cockpit, 2013, P5

The fair is proudly touting “Frieze Projects”: a series of commissioned projects curated by Cecilia Alemani. Among them is FOOD, a recreation of the 1971 artist’s restaurant opened by Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden, which—in its new form—will serve food from a different chef each day of the fair. Another highlight: a monumental installation by Marianne Vitale, which towers at the center of the fair. Vitale, whose works consist of pieces of burnt bridges and outhouses, presents an enormous fragment of a burnt barn wall.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

5. Alex Hartley, The Future Is Certain, 2011

When you walk by it, this mixed-media print appears to be a feat of nature: it’s a glossy photograph of a craggy South American rock face that includes architectural and sculptural elements. The two-dimensional photograph becomes 3-D where the artist has constructed a little ledge with rocks. Similarly, small windows into 3-D homes are carved into the image of the rock face, bringing Hartley’s landscape to life.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

6. Dan Colen, To Be Titled, 2013, Gagosian Gallery

Dan Colen is known for his smashed basketball backboards, but here’s one unlike any we’ve seen before. The artist smashed backboards, set them in resin, and welded them together in an aluminum circle. It’s the centerpiece of Gagosian’s booth this year—and makes you sort of wish you were a hamster in a Dan Colen wheel.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

7. Zoe Leonard, Niagra Falls Postcards, 2009-2012, Galleria Raffaella Cortese

There was something nostalgic and sweet about Zoe Leonard’s table of neatly assembled postcards from Niagara Falls from the 1920s—arranged in a way that the horizon lines in each image were perfectly aligned, and stacked in a way to resemble the waterfall itself.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

8. Rodney Graham, Sunday Sun, 1937, Lisson Gallery

Two eerily beautiful pieces at the fair this year are the transparent photographic lightboxes by the Canadian artist Rodney Graham. Drywaller’s Boombox (2013), at 303 Gallery, depicts a construction site with a dirty boombox, and Sunday Sun, 1937, lights up a wall at the Lisson Gallery. They’re painstakingly detailed (and highly nostalgic) tableaux reconstructed from the artist’s memory.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

9. Pae White, Mobile, 2011, Andrew Kreps Gallery

American artist Pae White is fascinated with the idea of turning something transient and impermanent into something real. “It’s about monumentalizing something very temporal,” she has said. In the past, she’s made mobiles out of sculptural pieces of popcorn, and stage curtains for the Oslo Opera House, which David Coleman of Architectural Digest called similar to “crumpled tinfoil.” At Frieze, White presents a 2011 mobile of tiny pieces of fractured mirror, with the undersides painted with concentric rainbow circles. The kaleidoscopic mobile changes no matter how you look at it—or where you stand.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

10. Bjarne Melgaard, Theresa starting to show she will die, and other works, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 2013

Some booths are inviting—and then others are really inviting. The space at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is painted entirely purple this year, and lined with a thicket of brightly colored blankets, each based on sketches by Norwegian phenom Bjarne Melgaard. Melgaard has produced a series of abstract paintings that directly complement the blankets, but it’s impossible to see those paintings unless you’re willing to climb over the sea of quilts to get there (some guests just chose to lie down on top of them). The blankets, by the way—which, by the end of the weekend, will surely be covered in sludge from everyone’s muddy boots—are going for $12,000 each.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

11. Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2013

After a mechanized robot angrily moves its windshield-wiper arms at you, and making it through a room set up with steps toward a lit-up Jesus, there is nothing more simple and powerful than a gold Anish Kapoor bowl, glowing against an empty wall.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

11. Daniel Firman, Linda, 2013 (Perrotin Gallery Paris)

After walking from booth to booth for hours, it’s easy to get Art Overload: that feeling when your blood sugar dips, your stomach growls, and everything starts to look the same. It’s enough to make you want to pull your sweater up over your eyes, and, well, bang your head against a wall. That’s what French artist Daniel Firman has brought to life in Linda, a resin and plaster life-size portrait of a woman. She’s frustrated, she’s tired, and she is pressing forcefully against the outside wall of the Perrotin gallery. Part of the fun of looking at this piece, of course, is watching passersby react to it: they inevitably think she’s real, begin whispering to each other—Look at that eccentric art person!—until they realize she’s just a piece of plaster.

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

12. Gabriel Orozco, Roiseau 8, 2012, Galerie Chantal Carousel

One of the most mesmerizing pieces in the lot is a giant, circular bamboo reed affixed with hundreds of tiny feathers, by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. It’s punctuated by two photographic diptyches and illustrates the artist’s fascination with animals and the changing “equilibriums of the universe.”

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

13. Do Ho Suh, Wielandstr. 18, 12159 Berlin, Lehmann Maupin (C11)

“Unbelievable,” one woman said to her husband, while stepping into Lehmann Maupin’s booth. “Un-fucking-believable.” She was describing Do Ho Suh’s Weilandstr. 18, a life-size replica of the artist’s former apartment in Germany—rendered in polyester. Do’s structure is a feat of architecture and engineering—and shows a great mastery of material. The translucent green polyester has been stretched into door handles, moldings, and even a telephone.

Isabel Wilkinson/The Daily Beast

14. Tino Sehgal, Annlee, 2013, Marion Goodman Gallery

This is perhaps the most alarming—and downright creepy—piece at Frieze. You walk into a large room at the Marion Goodman booth, which is completely empty save for a few fluorescent lights overhead. In the center of the room, a little girl in jeans and a blue shirt is talking—talking robotically, theatrically, but speaking to no one. She moves her arms as if they’re being remote-controlled, and for a minute you think: “Wait a minute, is this kid a robot?” But she’s not, she’s just an actor in a weird and thrilling performance piece by British-German artist Tino Sehgal. “I’ve wondered, what’s worse; to feel too busy, or not busy enough?” the girl asks into the ether. Then she turns to you, locking eyes: “Can I ask you, would you rather feel too busy or not busy enough?” “Uhh,” we say. But she continues: “What is the relation between a sign and melancholia?” Outside, a representative for the gallery explains that the piece is a commentary on Annlee, a Japanese Manga character whose identity was purchased by two artists.

THE ART NEWSPAPER LONDON

Trends Contemporary art Fairs USA

A tale of two art worlds

Giant pieces take over New York as artists super-size their work—but bigger is not necessarily better

By Charlotte Burns. From Frieze New York daily edition
Published online: 09 May 2013

Paul McCarthy’s inflatable Balloon Dog towers over the Frieze tent. Photo: © Casey Fatchett, 2013

Two mammoth sculptures by the American artist Paul McCarthy straddle New York’s rivers this week. The 181,000kg bronze Sisters, 2013, hulks down by the Hudson River, while Balloon Dog, 2013, the artist’s irreverent 80ft-tall take on the Jeff Koons original, squats beside the Frieze New York tent next to the East River. Meanwhile, Koons himself, an artist of huge ambition with the production costs to match, has rival shows opening this week at David Zwirner (C48) and Gagosian galleries (B59).

From Ugo Rondinone’s colossal figures at Rockefeller Plaza to Orly Genger’s installation in Madison Square Park (her work is made from 1.4 million feet of rope, equating to nearly 20 times the length of Manhattan), artists in the city are super-sizing their work to fill public spaces and huge commercial galleries.

“The market, which is much larger than it was ten years ago, has opened the door for artists to scale up their work and realise projects they couldn’t have done before,” says the art adviser Allan Schwartzman.

McCarthy, represented by Hauser & Wirth (B7), “is one of the greatest artists of our time, who went decades without access to money. He scaled up the minute he started to make money—the resources have made it possible,” Schwartzman adds.

As fairs like Frieze proliferate, and countries and collectors around the world pour money into contemporary commissions designed to put themselves on the cultural map, it seems that art, like gas, is expanding to fill whatever space is available.

The trend towards gigantism comes at a price. “We’ve got millions of dollars tied up in production,” says the New York dealer Sean Kelly, whose eponymous gallery (B46) is due to open a show devoted to the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros on Saturday. “Irreversible” consists of three monumental sculptures, one film, two light pieces and a room-sized installation, and is described by Kelly as an “enormous production”. Prices for the works range from $60,000 to $200,000.

Fairs like Frieze New York, which opened to VIP visitors on Thursday, are fuelling this growth. “There is a wheel of hysterical activity focused mostly on auctions and art fairs, which service the upper-tier, hyper-scale buyers,” Schwartzman says.

The sheer quantity of work available in the tent this week puts pressure on dealers to create displays that grab attention in a sea of art—and some galleries have commissioned works specifically for the fair. New York’s CRG gallery (A10) is showing just one work at Frieze: Mix (Americana), 2013, an 8ft by 16ft concrete mixing drum by the artist Alexandre da Cunha. “We approached Alex and asked him to make us a big work,” says the gallery’s director Richard Desroche. “We’ve become aware of the impact of solo shows and large pieces at fairs.”

“If you only see art at fairs, you might have the feeling that art is getting bigger, but that’s because you always need a crowd-pleaser. Large-scale works stick in people’s minds,” says Alex Gabriel of Brazil’s Galeria Fortes Vilaça (C50), which is showing floor-hogging works including Ernesto Neto’s Na esquina da vida com uma planta na mão, 2013, priced at $205,000, and Valeska Soares’s Finale, 2013, a mirrored table-top covered in crystal glasses containing alcohol, priced at $120,000.

Size isn’t everything

This is not quite the full story, however. There is plenty of art at the fair that is more quiet, contemplative and homespun. “We focus on work where the artist is involved with the brush stroke,” says the dealer James Fuentes (D22), whose pared-down presentation of four paintings includes Jessica Dickinson’s Hold-, 2011-13, priced at $30,000, and John McAllister’s days gently embered, 2013, priced at $40,000.

“There are a lot of artists who want to maintain the independence of art practice and not rely on production, so have a more DIY approach,” says Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London. “We have a very complex world now where all of these realities can coexist.”

Marian Goodman Gallery (C7) is hosting a typically subtle performance by Tino Sehgal in which a child actor poses as a Manga character named Ann Lee and asks visitors questions, a personal approach that is the antithesis of the monumental.

Indeed, the trend for ambitious large commissions seems to be fanning a countercurrent. “There’s a real push away from what’s happening in Chelsea, which is becoming a place for blue-chip galleries showing expensive works,” says Loring Randolph of Casey Kaplan (A7). The gallery has a solo presentation of paintings by Julia Schmidt, ranging in price from $14,000 to $20,000.

For fair-goers in search of something less muscular than the giant art on show throughout New York, the Berlin gallery Wien Lukatsch (D30) is showing 49 clippings from Korean real-estate adverts pinned to the wall in a seven-metre installation by Haegue Yang. The work—Flat Utopia, 2004, on sale for €45,000—is so fragile that it has been shown only once before. “For me, it was tempting to show something so delicate and experimental,” says the gallery’s director Barbara Wien. “It’s a challenge for a collector.”

Click here for interview with Rondinone about his work at Rockefeller Plaza

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WALLL STREET JOURNAL

NY CULTURE
May 12, 2013, 10:46 p.m. ET

Frieze Frame: Art Fair Takes Manhattan

A Weekend of Art Events Around the City’s Frieze Fair

New York-Culture »

By MARSHALL HEYMAN

When Frieze opened on Thursday morning it offered not just art and people-watching—the two go hand-in-hand—but, as many attendees noted, a great selection of food. There was pizza from Roberta’s in Brooklyn; a salad bar courtesy of the Fat Radish; and Chinese cuisine from the notoriously busy Mission Chinese.

Billy Farrell Agency

Sofia Sanchez Barrenechea

“Just be careful with Mission Chinese,” said the philanthropist Jamie Tisch. There’s so much garlic, “your breath might smell until Frieze in London.”

That’s in October, by the way.

Billy Farrell Agency

Maria Baibakova and Rashid Johnson

Between now and then, the art world has a lot of work to peruse—and a lot of partying to do. Just after Memorial Day is the Venice Biennale, then there’s Art Basel in June. Think of this past weekend in New York as a warm-up, a conditioning exercise for the European marathon. Who will get the gold in seeing and being seen?

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Billy Farrell Agency

Phil and Shelley Aarons at the second-anniversary dinner for Artspace hosted by Maria Baibakova.

On Thursday, there was a big new Jeff Koons opening at Gagosian, as well as a dinner in honor of Artspace, the digital arts marketplace, hosted by the Russian collector Maria Baibakova that brought out Lauren and Andres Santo Domingo; Christie’s chairman Amy Cappellazzo; Thelma Golden; and Shelley and Phil Aarons.

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Billy Farrell Agency

James Franco

Billy Farrell Agency

Michaela de Pury and Stephanie French at a party hosted by Paddle8.

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Billy Farrell Agency

Poju Zabludowicz and Anita Zabludowicz

Billy Farrell Agency

Nicole Hanley Mellon and Stacy Engman

Billy Farrell Agency

Richard Chai at the Clocktower Gallery to celebrate G-Shock watches and Visionaire magazine.

Billy Farrell Agency

Nate Lowman and Shamim Momin

For each guest, Ms. Baibakova commissioned a work made by the married artists Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian. Mr. Johnson and Ms. Hovsepian photographed an air plant and a silver vase, encased it in a wood frame and then dipped it in wax to make each piece unique.

On Friday, Paul McCarthy showed his new work, inspired by Snow White and Disney, DIS +0.26% at Hauser & Wirth, and the German artist Tobias Rehberger, recreated the Bar Oppenheimer in Frankfurt at the Hotel Americano in West Chelsea.

So, by Saturday, there was thankfully a lot to talk about, like how does Disney allow Mr. McCarthy to use their intellectual property? And what did everyone think of what Gwyneth Paltrow said about the Costume Institute? This was a good thing, because there were long dinners both in Midtown and downtown.

At MoMA, Volkswagen, VOW3.XE -0.60% MoMA director Glenn Lowry and PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach hosted a dinner to celebrate the opening of Expo 1: New York, an ecologically themed exhibition at various venues. This attracted its fair share of celebrities, including James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, who came to enjoy a performance by Martha Wainwright.

Several of the guests at the Expo party did double duty with a dinner hosted by the virtual auction house Paddle8, Bulgari and Land, a nonprofit public art initiative that creates site-specific projects in Los Angeles. A big draw here—besides a live auction of paintings by Nate Lowman; Lucien Smith (which went for $24,000, even though it was estimated between $5,000 and $7,000); and Barnaby Furnas—was that it was taking place at Carbone on Thompson Street, probably the hottest restaurant in town right now. It’s delicious, too.

“New York magazine said the ribs are the best thing on the menu,” said Maria Bell, the Los Angeles art patron and television writer. “They’re a religious experience,” she added, after she tasted them.

Being on the art circuit on a weekend like this, said Stacy Engman, who, like many were also planning to go to Greenwich, Conn., Sunday morning for an exhibit at Peter Brant’s home, “can be exhausting. That’s why I always travel with these,” she explained, pulling a pair of sunglasses that covered nearly her whole face. This month, Ms. Engman has also made her sartorial choices simpler. She has been exclusively wearing a dress she had made from five yards of fabric in tribute to Vivienne Westwood “and the climate revolution.”

“You don’t smell badly,” said Rodman Primack, an interior designer and Paddle8′s head of auctions.

“Well, I’ve been washing it,” said Ms. Engman.

In an unusual twist, Simon de Pury, the auctioneer at this particular auction, purchased two of the six art lots, with his wife, Michaela, doing the bidding. There was a Wade Guyton “U Stencil” and one from Mr. Lowman, though not one of his now-famous bullet holes, which Mr. de Pury purchased for $100,000. (Its estimate: $30,000 to $40,000.)

“It’s very nice to let your auctioneer’s wife get away with that,” said Mr. de Pury. “A fantastic collection is being built right in front of my eyes.”

Meanwhile, a late-night art party at the Clocktower Gallery on Leonard Street showed how sometimes all you need are some Christmas lights and a little aluminum foil to make a great event.

Actually, Alex de Betak, the French furniture and fashion designer, and a team of 20 or so, spent days wrapping the various rooms in this majestic penthouse space with tin foil, mylar and silver confetti to create a kind of silver palace. The party was celebrating the 30th anniversary of G-Shock watches and the 63rd issue of Visionaire, which features indestructible, metallic plated 3-D reliefs of photographs of, among others, Kate Moss and Lady Gaga.

“For once you have a reason to make the Factory and push the envelope,” said Mr. de Betak, referring to Andy Warhol’s New York studio.

One room featured fans on which to throw the silver confetti; another featured tons of oversize mylar balloons. But perhaps the best space was the rooftop, which featured no silver at all, but just the best thing to look at, no matter the art fair: the cityscape of Manhattan.

Write to Marshall Heyman at marshall.heyman@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 13, 2013, on page A21 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Frieze Frame: Art Fair Takes Manhattan.

=========FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON

May 12, 2013 5:21 pm

Performance art, Frieze New York

By Griselda Murray Brown

Art fairs such as Frieze New York are increasingly incorporating performance art into their programmes

©Sarah Lee

Spartacus Chetwynd’s ‘cat bus’ at Frieze London 2010

When 7,000 people a day visited performance art veteran Marina Abramovic’s 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, it proved a breakthrough for the medium. No one anticipated that so many visitors would queue for hours to sit opposite the artist. Since then, performance has enjoyed something of a revival, one that has happened in the very places the original performance artists of the late 1960s and 1970s shunned: public museums and art fairs. Once considered deeply avant-garde, an anti-commercial edgeland of the art world, performance is more popular than ever – and art fairs recognise this, as Frieze New York, whose second edition ends on May 13, illustrates.

As museums have embraced more interactive work, contemporary art fairs have shrugged off their trade fair trappings and remarketed themselves as cultural “events” able to hold their own in the visual arts calendar alongside the openings and biennials. Their aim is still to sell art, but their approach has shifted. Established in 2003, Frieze London has blazed the trail, with a full-time curator and an ambitious programme of non-selling installations and performances called Frieze Projects running alongside (and sometimes against) the commercial thrust.

Where Frieze leads, others follow. Art13, the London art fair whose inaugural edition took place in Kensington Olympia this spring, featured large-scale installations neatly punctuating the rows of gallery booths, as well as talks and a special booth for performance art. “It’s about visitor experience,” the fair’s director Stephanie Dieckvoss tells me. “Performance art refocuses people’s minds in a different way. I thought it was important to have a balanced curatorial aspect to the fair.”

By branding themselves as cultural destinations, contemporary art fairs have sought to represent not only the art market but artistic practice more widely. And, given that it’s often impractical for galleries to stage performances on their cramped stands, the fairs themselves have stepped in to fund a performance element. As Amanprit Sandu, curator of Art13’s performance programme, says, “These are quite difficult times economically and a lot of the artwork I’ve been seeing at art fairs over the past two years is 2D: the offering is a bit more conservative.”

At Frieze New York, however, the Marian Goodman Gallery has taken the risk and decided to show a work by the performance artist Tino Sehgal. When I visited the small walled booth, adults were standing round the edges listening to a girl not more than 10 years old tell how she used to be the manga character Ann Lee but has become “an individual”. First seen at the Manchester International Festival in 2011, Sehgal’s extraordinary piece – called “Ann Lee” – assumed a new significance in the context of the fair. “Now that I’m an individual,” said the girl with a serious expression and unflinching gaze, “I’ve met people who are tired of being an individual and having all these decisions to make.” Collecting art is, essentially, about making decisions that express individuality. The girl’s audience, recognising this, looked variously awkward and amused, taken aback by her poise and apparent wisdom.

“Ann Lee”, an edition of four, has a starting price of €80,000. On Frieze New York’s VIP day, Marian Goodman’s associate director Karina Daskalov tells me there has been “a lot of interest from museums”. Ever adaptable, artists have found ways to sell performance – often in the form of photographs, video and even left-over props. At Frieze New York, Vienna’s Galerie Krinzinger is selling 45 photographs from 1971 documenting performances by Otto Muehl, an influential Vienna Actionist, for a hefty $190,000. But Sehgal, wanting his performances to be truly ephemeral, does not allow them to be photographed. So instead they are sold in an oral contract between the artist and buyer in the presence of a lawyer, during which Sehgal explains how to re-enact the work.

One visitor to the Marian Goodman booth was overheard describing Sehgal’s piece as “a complete tonic”. Despite not being as easily sellable as painting or sculpture, performance art has the advantage of immediacy. As Cecilia Alemani, curator of Frieze Projects at New York fair, admits: “I’m an expert and even I get tired after seeing 180 booths. But performance can capture viewers’ attention.”

Yet Alemani’s Frieze Projects are less about attention-grabbing performances than creating social spaces for, as she puts it, “those moments when people want to take a break from the fair”. One such space is designed by artist Liz Glynn: a Prohibition-style speakeasy hidden in the tent, to which 200 visitors each day are given keys. These lucky few are then treated not only to cocktails strong enough to take the edge off even the most hectic art fair, but also to bartenders who serve them up with stories and magic tricks – a performance in itself.

Another Frieze Project is Matteo Tannatt’s series of benches around the fair, each of which has a script displayed beside it. The benches double as stages, with an actor moving from bench to bench performing the script or improvising. This, however, is more elusive than the secret speakeasy: during my day spent pounding the aisles of the fair, I didn’t once see a bench used as anything other than something to sit on.

Different fairs have different ways of presenting performance art. The best performance at Art13 was Bedwyr Williams’ “Expedit”, written for the occasion. Like all his performances, it began with him asking the audience to pretend they were moles. “It’s usually a London audience I perform to,” he tells me, “and they’re used to following other Londoners blindly around tunnels.” In “Expedit” he asked his mole audience to imagine burrowing down through the floor and up into the fashionable home of a couple of designers in order to ransack it. “I thought designers were a good choice because they collect things. Although it’s not the same as collecting fine art, it’s similar. My gallery wouldn’t thank me for lampooning visual art collectors – although it’s on the agenda.”

Though Williams’ satirical piece responded to the art fair setting, the performance artists at Art13 were not specifically requested to do so – a measure of the fair’s relatively conservative approach in its first year. While the Frieze Projects often work as “interventions” around the fair – Spartacus Chetwynd’s show-stealing giant “cat bus” at Frieze London in 2010, for example – the performances at Art13 were safely contained in one booth. Art fairs tread a fine line between creating spectacle and keeping their galleries happy: few dealers would thank them for scheduling a loud performance next to their booth, and Sandu admits she had to turn down the “really ambitious” proposals that wanted to “infiltrate” the fair.

But as museums embrace performance art, and performance artists themselves increasingly engage with the market, the medium will only become more common at art fairs – and not just in special non-selling sections. Today, performance art is more usually bought by museums than individuals, but Williams predicts change: “Performances at institutions are really well attended,” he says. “I think there’s a clamour for that kind of thing. And when people want something, collectors are usually quite close behind.”

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Scenes From Frieze Art Fair New York 2013 (Photos)

Andy Jacobsohn/The Daily Beast

Johannes Kahrs at Zeno X Gallery

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The Enterprising Gavin Brown

It’s VIP Day at Frieze New York, which means half the designers in town have hightailed it to Randall’s Island to ogle the art. Gallerist Gavin Brown talked to Style.com about his love-hate relationship with the fashion business.

By Nicole Phelps

Published May 9, 2013

Frieze New York, the art-fair import from London, kicks off today, and with it comes another round of cocktail parties, “intimate” dinners, and late-night bacchanals—most sponsored by fashion and lifestyle brands, and all inevitably bigger and louder this time, owing to the runaway success of last year’s Frieze fair. Gallerist Gavin Brown calls the mutually beneficial schmoozing endemic to art fairs (see Art Basel Miami) “the fashion/art death lock.” The British-born Brown has a way with words that rivals his way with artists—Elizabeth Peyton, Urs Fischer, and Alex Katz are all on his roster at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. At Frieze, he’ll showcase the work of Bjarne Melgaard. Who better to discuss the way New York’s culture producers make their livings by feeding off of each other? Just don’t get Brown wrong—he might be ambivalent about all the art/fashion shenanigans, but he still likes to be invited to the party.

NP: Frieze is back for another year here in New York. What did you make of last year’s fair? What did it do for the New York art scene?

GB: I’m not sure what it did beyond add to the noise—which is already very loud.

What does Gavin Brown have in store for this year’s fair?

Sales, hopefully.

Last year, you fried up anti-fracking sausages with Mark Ruffalo, and you won the Stand Prize from Champagne Pommery.

Did I? I don’t remember that.

At the time, I believe, you said Pommery’s 10,000 pound prize was “better than a poke in the eye.” You seemed bemused but also slyly aware of the benefits that kind of publicity can bring. True?

This was, in fact, in London. I was a little embarrassed. Winning a prize for a booth is silly in the first place. And for me to win it was sillier still. There were many galleries—younger galleries—for whom a win like that would make a serious impact. Of course, I absolutely deserved to win. There’s no doubt about that.

My mistake! What do you think about fashion and lifestyle brands sponsoring art shows? What do they get out of it?

I doubt they pay for the whole thing. Barely a fraction. The organizers make vast sums from the exhibitors, who in turn are the attraction that brings in the paying public, who spend a few bills to get in and gawk, but not spend. It’s a very complex and interdependent food chain or ecosystem. What do the brands get? I guess this is at the crux of the question around the fashion/art death lock. They get to put on the Technicolored cloak of the mystery that is art. While they wear it, they seem more interesting than they think they are.

The give-and-take between fashion and art isn’t new, of course. Do you remember a time before mega-brands were hosting parties for the art crowd?

Yes—absolutely. It mostly happens at art fairs, but actually, as I think about it, it happens everywhere now. Dinners for museum shows are sponsored by fashion companies, and half the people there are from the fashion world. It wasn’t always like that. The shift was easiest to see comparing each successive Miami Basel—you could see the change happening before your eyes. It was in Miami, of course, that the fashion/industrial complex felt safe to show its face. It seemed to give itself permission to move in—like colonists in an Arcadian land. Swapping beads for an entire cultural history. Before they arrived, we were still an oddball backwater. But as everything else became exhausted, as it inevitably would, art was all there was left.

Photo: Courtesy of Gavin Brown

The Enterprising Gavin Brown

Continued (Page 2 of 2)

Do you ever want to go back to the halcyon days before artist/designer collaborations? Did they ever really exist?

Yes, they did exist. They were days when one threw a party to have fun. Not sell a name…. Ah, innocent days. Those parties are probably still happening—I’m just not invited. I never was. That’s why I threw my own parties.

How interested are your artists in collaborating with fashion brands? Has facilitating such partnerships become a bigger part of an art dealer’s job?

Some are. It makes sense for them. It’s part of the language they speak. Others are not. But the extraordinary profile of these businesses—they exist in the imagination like nothing else—is something that is a powerful lure to someone whose goal in life is to communicate. As to it being part of my job, not really. When it does happen, my job becomes more damage control than anything else.

How can such collaborations affect an artist’s career—for the better? For the worse?

Totally depends on the players involved.

Have we reached the art/fashion collaboration tipping point? Or did that moment come and go long ago?

I hope not. Now we are in it, let’s win it! I want more!

Do you have any dream collaborations, for yourself or for your artists?

I’m not sure. It’s not my job to think about that. I would love to throw some people in a room and see what happens.

Mark Leckey and Google, Urs Fischer and Norman Foster, Alex Katz and Marc Jacobs, Jeremy Deller and the Pentagon, Peter Doig and the Metropolitan Opera, Jonathan Horowitz and McDonald’s, Laura Owens and Walmart, Thomas Bayrle and Ford, Rob Pruitt and Claire’s. The list could go on and on.

What do fashion people get wrong about the art crowd? And vice versa?

The fashion crowd doesn’t get anything right about art. The two tribes speak two entirely different languages. You are either on one side or the other. This is a particularly interesting week to think about the difference: the punk Met Ball and Frieze Art Fair. Both sides using the other to dress themselves up as something they are not, and destroying something essential about themselves in the process. The punk Met Ball was particularly hideous. The final enslavement of one of the most powerful postwar social movements. Reduced to Sarah Jessica Parker’s fauxhawk. A sad and accurate diagram of the state of our culture. A crowd of shiny morons turning reality inside out so it matches the echo chamber of their worldview. Would Sid have been invited? What would he have thought? Is this what Mark Perry meant by “This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band”? The English art schools of the sixties and seventies—the cradle of this creative movement—must be writhing in their supply-side straightjackets. It only emphasizes to me that fashion—whatever that is—sees art (and artists) as an idiot-savant gimp, and they keep them on a leash, begging for glam snacks. And fashion follows along behind art, picking up its golden shit.

How different is the art world from the fashion world, in the end? Hasn’t all of the madness around collecting, and the obsession with which artist is up and which artist is down, eclipsed the art?

I see the fashion world with my nose pressed against the window, but from that perspective it seems dynamic, fast, frothy, and 99 percent empty. But that really isn’t so different from most cultural worlds—including the art world. There are creative and talented people doing incredible things at the heart of each arena. But both fashion and art suffer—in different ways—from the crushing weight of capital. And in this sense, they have both been co-opted to do capital’s bidding—as it reaches into every corner of the globe. Wherever you find an LVMH store, a brand-name contemporary art gallery will surely be very close by. The right bag and the right painting are the clearest ways possible for those with money to recognize each other.

What does art get wrong about fashion?

We think it’s important.

What are you looking forward to seeing at Frieze?

Roberta’s Pizza!

Photo: David X. Prutting / BFAnyc.com

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http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2013/05/130509-Cecilia-Alemani-Frieze-High-Line.asp

Newsmaker Interview: Cecilia Alemani

By William Hanley

May 9, 2013

Photo courtesy Frieze Art Fair

Alemani has organized a series of installations, talks, and other programming for the Frieze Art Fair in New York, held in a snaking tent designed by SO—IL, May 10-13.

Cecilia Alemani’s favorite work of public art is Maurizio Cattelan’s massive statue of a hand that stands in front of the stock exchange in her native Milan, with every digit severed but an insouciant middle finger. While Alemani enjoys the provocation, she mostly admires the way it confounds expectations about what public art should be.

As the director and curator of High Line Art, she brings that spirit of disruption to the elevated New York City park designed by James Corner Field Operations (with Diller Scofidio + Renfro). Since taking the job in 2011, Alemani has exhibited a pickup truck with a brick-filled bed, an exihibition on miniscule sculpture, and artist-designed billboards that riff on commercial imagery, among many other works along the park’s route. This season a new exhibition, titled Busted, shows artists tweaking the tropes of monumental portrait sculpture. As the show opens, Alemani is also reprising her role as curator of Frieze Projects, programming presented alongside the Frieze New York art fair. Begun in London 11 years ago, Frieze has its second turn in New York from May 10 to 13. Once again, it will occupy a 1,500-foot-long tent designed by Brooklyn architecture firm SO—IL, pitched on Randall’s Island, a grassy stretch in the East River accessible by ferry from Manhattan during the event.

The Frieze fair will shift the New York art world’s center of gravity to an out-of-the-way island for a few days. How does your programming respond to that?

This year, we’re showing work by five artists. They’re all pretty young and almost all female. The idea is to highlight the communal spaces that people create out there—we want to emphasize squares, plazas, and benches. Andra Ursuta is even creating a cemetery for art. Andra says when she grew up in Romania the only way she saw art was traveling to visit churches. In a way, that’s similar to what you do when you take a ferry to Frieze: you go on a pilgrimage.

You’re also doing a pop-up recreation of Food, the artist-run restaurant cofounded by Gordon Matta-Clark in the early 1970s. Why revisit that project?

When first started working on Frieze Projects, I had the idea for one of them should always be an homage to an art space that was very important in our tradition but is now closed. When I decided that the theme of this year would be gathering and a communal space, I started thinking about Food. It’s such a part of New York’s history and the underground scene. What people remember with lots of joy is the artist-designed menus on Sunday nights. Gordon Matta-Clark’s famous menu was all different varieties of bones.

At Frieze, it’s going to be a small stand outside where the tent does a zigzag. We will have four different chefs, one every day, do a menu, and it will be a mix of people from Food reinterpreting their legendary dishes or others who might not have been to food but whose practice is inspired by it. It’s going to be simple and cheap. For me, it’s not just about recreating the idea, but it’s about making the same gregarious gesture.

The High Line draws a much wider audience than just art pilgrims, but as a park, it certainly makes a gregarious gesture to the city. How is curating for it different?

Last year we had 4.4 million visitors, so it’s definitely about creating a dialogue with an audience that is not an art audience. Visitors don’t expect to see art. They encounter it, and the encounter could be disturbing. It could be pleasant. It takes them by surprise. The architectural and horticultural side of the High Line is so perfect, I see the art as an intervention to disrupt the beauty.

How do you determine where to intervene?

I just invite artists to come and take a walk with me. I want to see an artist’s take on something that shapes a location, something that breaks it or makes it even better. We use the city as a pedestal, but the tricky thing is, the landscape and the cityscape changes every week—you walk by one day, and wow, that building went up five more stories.

The High Line has been criticized for contributing to skyrocketing development in nearby neighborhoods. How do you respond?

It’s easy to blame the High Line, but galleries moved into Chelsea in the 1990s, and that was already part of its gentrification. The High Line could have been torn down and you would just have more buildings, but now it’s a free public amenity.

How will the High Line’s third phase and Hudson Yards development affect your work?

I’m excited, because half of section three will be renovated like the rest of the park, but half will be left wild. There I could see big monumental sculptures, but I really don’t have any idea yet. I usually just go to an artist I like, and I’m usually pleasantly surprised.

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Frieze New York 2013 in Photographs

LAST

1 / 40

By Andrew Russeth 5/09 3:02pm

Painting by Matt Connors at Herald St.

Ramiken Crucible

Lily van der Stokker at Kaufmann Repetto

Michael Krebber at Maureen Paley

Sam Lewitt hat trick at Miguel Abreu Gallery

Detail of Sam Lewitt at Galerie Buchholz

Standard (Oslo) with paintings by Gardar Eide Einarsson and sculpture by Oscar Tuazon

Gagosian Gallery

Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine

Thomas Ruff at David Zwirner

Antek Walczak Spams Real Fine Arts
Noam Rappaport and John McAllister at James Fuentes

Bjarne Melgaard at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal

Andy Boot at Croy Nielsen

Limoncello

Julia Rommel at Bureau

Shimabuku, Onion Orion, 2012, at Air de Paris

Nina Canell at Mother’s Tankstation

Zoe Leonard and Sergei Tcherepnin at Murray Guy

Canada

David Maljkovic at Metro Pictures and Annet Gelink Gallery

Sliding Liam Gillick doors at Esther Schippe

Anton Kern Gallery

There’s a nice five-part suite of drawings of Wimbledon courts mid-match by Jonas Wood on the back wall.

Ryan McGinley at Team

Dianna Molzan at Overduin & Kite

Aaron Curry at Almine Rech Gallery

Steve Claydon at Sadie Coles HQ

Bjorn Copeland at Jack Hanley

Antek Walczak Spams Real Fine Arts

John Henderson, Sam Falls and Daniel Rees at T293

An untitled 1991 Kippenberger from the “White Rubber Paintings” series at Gisela Capitain

The Fat Radish in the distance

Charline von Heyl’s Untitled (11/89), 1989, at Gisela Capitain

John Wesley and works by Mary Reid Kelly with Patrick Kelley at Fredericks & Freiser

The first new set of Wesley paintings since 2004.

Marianne Vitale in Frieze Projects

Marianne Vitale in Frieze Projects

Johannes Kahrs at Zeno X Gallery

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NADA New York 2013 Preview

Jamian Juliano-Villani, NIGHT FOOD, 2013

Rawson Projects

Lauren Luloff, Sunflowers (Black & White), 2013

Cooper Cole

Arthur Ou, Test Screen (Huntington), 2010

Brennan & Griffin

Michael Berryhill, Feathery Furnace, 2013

Kansas

Shannon Bool, The Analyst (2nd version), 2013

Daniel Faria Gallery

John Lehr, Office Door, 2013

Kate Werble Gallery

Damian Navarro, Cuisine-Cointet IV, 2013

Ribordy Contemporary

Mamie Tinkler, Three Glasses Two Ways, 2013

Kerry Schuss

Ruby Sky Stiler, Unique Copy (#2), 2013

Nicelle Beauchene

Joe Smith, Untitled, 2012

David Peterson

Scott Reeder, Post Good, 2013

Lisa Cooley

Liam Gillick, Allocated Table, 2012

Cumulus Studios

Jaan Toomik, still from Waterfall video, 2005

Temnikova & Kasela Galler

Adrianne Rubenstein, Self-Portrait as a Pile of Lumber Falling Backwards, 2013

Rana Begum, No. 363, 2013

Galerie Christian Lethert

Francine Spiegel, Lora, 2013

Loyal

Max Brand, untitled, 2013

Jacky Strenz Galerie

Oliver Michaels, Primordially Decorative and Insincere, 2012

Cole

NADA New York 2013 Preview

Marjorie Schwarz, Lamp, 2011

Cope Projects

Nairy Baghramian, Gueridon (brace), 2013

SculptureCenter

Alex Da Corte, Head, 2013

Joe Sheftel Gallery

Nancy Haynes, Retreat, 2012–13

Regina Rex

Joe Reihsen, I’m exceptionally fun at parties, 2013

Anat Ebgi

Anna K.E., Paris Bar, 2013

Interstate Projects

Martin Roth, Untitled, 2013

Louis B. James

Glen Baldridge, Fright Flight, 2012

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Breyer P-Orridge, Lucy Fur, 2004

Invisible-Exports

Sculptures by Denise Kupferschmidt

Halsey Mckay Gallery

Elizabeth Jaeger, Mudita, 2013

247365

Stephen Vitiello, Site-Sound Series (Polaroid): Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, FL, 2012

American Contemporary

Marsha Cottrell, Aperture series (variation 3), 2013

Petra Rinck Galerie, photo by Alan Weiner

Johanna Jaeger, Prussian Blue – American Vermilion I, 2013

Schwarz Contemporary

Meg Cranston, installation view of Emerald City, 2013

Fitzroy Gallery and Newman Popiashvili Gallery

Courtesy the artist and LAXART
Photo Credit: Michael Underwood

Ilit Azoulay, Red, 2013

Braverman Gallery

Richard Jackson, Bad Dog (Blue), 2007

Galerie Parisa Kind

Grayson Revoir, Untitled, 2013

Thomas Brambilla Gallery

Robert Davis, Here, 2013

Luce Gallery

Andrew Gbur, Untitled, 2013

Know More Games

Bea McMahon, A great organic stratification, 2013

Green On Red Gallery

Amy Feldman, Moodmode, 2013

Blackston

Lisi Raskin, Sky Fall, 2013

Churner and Churner

Works by Mariah Dekkenga

Eli Ping

Stephen Kaltenbach, Untitled, 2012

Independent Curators International

Jimmy Wright, Caves, 1973

Corbett vs. Dempsey

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https://www.openingceremony.us/entry.asp?pid=7921

OPENING CEREMONY

Thu, May 9, 2013

Culture Club

Frieze Art Fair New York 2013: The Food

by OC Family

Go for the art, stay for the food! This year’s Frieze Art Fair in New York is coming up with the goods, the food goods! Right now, several of our favorite New York and Brooklyn eateries are firing up the stoves and grinding the coffee beans to ensure we all leave the fair not only feeling cultured, but full! Frankies Spuntino and Marlow & Sons will have pop-up restaurants on-site while hotspots like Roberta’s, Mission Chinese, The Fat Radish, Saint Ambroeus, and Blue Bottle Coffee will be scattered in and about the 180 exhibiting galleries. We asked the chefs to share some sneak peeks of what they’ll be serving.

FRIEZE ART FAIR NEW YORK
Randall’s Island Park
New York The Fat Radish The Fat Radish Roberta’s Roberta’s Saint Ambroeus Saint Ambroeus Blue Bottle Coffe

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http://www.vogue.com/culture/article/what-to-expect-at-frieze-art-fair-in-new-york-/#1

Art

What to Expect at Frieze Art Fair in New York

by Ted Loos

Photo: Courtesy of Graham Carlow/Frieze

Some art-fair organizers are satisfied to put up a tent and offer what is essentially a supermarket—aisles and aisles of artworks for sale. But the organizers of Frieze New York, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, the fair having its second annual edition beginning Wednesday with a kick-off party and running through next Monday, are aiming substantially higher than that with their special programming.

“We want to engage all the senses this year,” says Cecilia Alemani, the curator of Frieze Projects. “All of the works touch on the idea of gathering places, both at the fair and in the rest of our lives.”

Alemani chose last year’s projects as well, enthusiastically embracing the fair’s out-of-the-way location on Randall’s Island. Turning constraints into an advantage is something of specialty for Alemani, since her other job is curating the works along the High Line, the elevated train tracks on Manhattan’s West Side that have been turned into a spectacularly successful park.

The most singular element of Frieze New York 2013 is a tribute to, and reboot of, FOOD, the early-1970s artists’ collective founded by Carole Goodden and the late Gordon Matta-Clark. It straddled a fine line between being an actual restaurant—one where Richard Serra and Philip Glass dropped in for a meal—and a kind of performance art. Alemani has tapped two of the original artist-cooks, Goodden and Tina Girouard, as well as young contemporary artists Matthew Day Jackson and Jonathan Horowitz. Each will cook for one day of the fair.

Although the Frieze organizers have a reputation for culinary sophistication—the lineup of restaurant options includes the acclaimed Roberta’s and Mission Chinese Food—mere eating isn’t the point. “It’s about the collective energy that made these spaces alive,” says Alemani. The five artists she chose for the other Frieze Projects are no less thoughtful. Liz Glynn has created a hidden speakeasy that harks back to the days of Prohibition in New York; it will be accessible only via a key and a set of directions that will be given out at random to a few fairgoers. Maria Loboda has taken nineteenth-century interior design as the inspiration for a color-coded garden, planted right next to the tent where more than 180 galleries will convene. And Andra Ursuta has created a cemetery of sorts, dotted with marble slabs, representing “where art goes to die,” says Alemani.

Adding to the sensory stimulation are three sound pieces, experienced from listening platforms, including Haroon Mirza’s mixing and rebroadcasting of actual fair sounds. These will also be available at friezenewyork.com. “Sound is not the first medium people pay attention to,” says Alemani, who is always looking to expand our idea of what art can be. “I consider sound works to be as good as paintings, and it feels like a fresh approach to me right now.”

Frieze New York opens to the public on May 10 at Randall’s Island Park, New York; friezenewyork.com.

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PAPER

on the front lines of cultural chaos since 1984.

Artsy Fartsy

Everything You Need to Know About FRIEZE and NYC’s Spring Art Week

By Gary Pini

New York’s Spring Art Week is here! The weather has finally come around and it’s a great time to get out and enjoy the tons of gallery openings, art fairs, auctions and parties taking place from May 6th to the 16th. Here’s what’s happening:

Scene from Frieze 2012

FRIEZE New York 2013
The New York spin-off of FRIEZE returns to Randall’s Island from May 10 to 13, with a big “Private View” on Thursday night, May 9. It will be open to the public daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. starting Friday and, for a second year, is taking place in a giant tent designed by Brooklyn architecture firm SO-IL. You can get there via ferry from the dock at 34th Street and FDR Drive, by bus from the Guggenheim Museum, free shuttle from the Joe Fresh store or you can drive. Admission to the fair is $42 ($26 students). Over 180 worldwide galleries will be exhibiting and there’s also lots of side-projects, lectures and a tribute to the early ’70s, artist-run SoHo restaurant, FOOD, with artists/chefs doing the cooking and “exploring the relationship between food and art.” There’s also a big sculpture park with works by Paul McCarthy, Fiona Connor, Saint Clair Cemin, Pae White and more. To buy tickets and to check out all the details regarding getting there and back, go HERE.

NADA New York
NADA is also back for a second year in NYC, and they’re moving the fair over to the East River on Pier 36. Over 70 galleries will take over a space that’s normally occupied by Basketball City (299 South Street) and fill it with “new art by rising talents.” The opening preview is on Friday, May 10, from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then it’s open to the public until 8 p.m. that day and thru Sunday. Admission to this fair is FREE, so be sure to check it out. Go HERE for more info.

Piece on display at PULSE New York 2012

PULSE New York
PULSE celebrates its eighth anniversary with over 50 galleries, plus their unique “Pulse Projects” program featuring large sculptures, installations and performances. They’ll return to The Metropolitan Pavilion (125 West 18th Street) in Chelsea and are open for a VIP brunch on May 9 from 9 a.m. to noon and then open to the public thru Sunday. Tickets are $20 ($15 students). HERE‘s the details.

Tyler Matthew Oyer, Gone For Gold Courtesy Cirrus, which will appear at Cutlog

CUTLOG New York
One of the new-fairs-on-the-block, Cutlog, comes from Paris, where it started four years ago. Running from May 9 to 13 in the Clemente Soto Velez Center (107 Suffolk Street) on the Lower East side, the fair features 45 galleries, plus several performances, talks and films. Downtown musician/actor/painter John Lurie will be speaking about his work and about the changes in the LES neighborhood. There’s also Free Car Wash presented by The Fantastic Nobodies who will be dressed as members of the Village People. There are two days of VIP and media previews, but Cutlog will be open to the public on May 9 from 5 to 9 p.m., May 10, 11 and 12 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and May 13 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is $15 ($12 students). Go HERE for more info.

Pool Art Fair New York 2013
This fair started in 2000 with a goal of bringing together artists that aren’t represented by big galleries. It will be open for three days, May 10 to 12, from 3 p.m.to 10 p.m. daily in the Flatiron Hotel (9 West 26th Street) and will include curated exhibitions, lectures, special projects and events. There is a suggested donation of $10.

COLLECTIVE.1 Design Fair
Another newbie this year, the Collective.1 Design Fair will focus exclusively on design and will include vintage as well as contemporary works. It was founded by the architect Steven Learner and runs from May 8 to 11 at Pier 57 on the Westside Highway at 15th Street. Tickets are $25 ($15 students). The details are HERE.

BKLYN Designs
The tenth edition of this showcase for Brooklyn-based designers runs for three days — May 10 to 12 — in DUMBO’s St. Ann’s Warehouse (29 Jay Street, Brooklyn). Over thirty designers will show original, limited-edition pieces and furnishings.

And, of course New York’s art galleries are taking full advantage of all the crowds in town for the fairs, and they’re opening new shows:

The acclaimed Cuban art collective Los Carpinteros are opening a show of new works called “Irreversible” in three rooms at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery (475 Tenth Avenue). You can check out some of their LEGO constructions, an installation entitled “Tomates” and a video of the reverse performance of a conga band and dancers. The opening reception is May 11 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. and the exhibit is up until June 22.

Jose Parla and JR open an exhibit of their recent collab, “The Wrinkles of the City: Havana,” on Tuesday, May 7, 6 to 8 p.m. at Bryce Wolkowitz (505 West 24th Street). It’s up until July 12.

Gagosian Gallery opens an exhibit of new works by Cecily Brown — it’s her first NYC show since 2008 — on Tuesday, May 7, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at their 980 Madison Avenue space. Also that night, they are opening a show of over 400 photographs from The Lost Album by the late Dennis Hopper on the fifth floor of 980 Madison. On Thursday, May 9, 6 to 8 p.m., Jeff Koons has his first New York show with Gagosian at 555 West 24th Street featuring new paintings and sculptures. And don’t forget to check out the current Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the gallery’s space at 522 West 21st Street.

Marlborough Chelsea (545 West 25th Street) is opening a big group exhibition called “Endless Bummer II – Still Bummin’” on Saturday, May 11, from 6 to 8 p.m. The show was curated by Drew Heitzler and Jan Tumlir and includes works by Ryan Foerster, Brendan Fowler, Jonah Freeman/Justin Lowe, Christian Marclay and many more. Mr. Heitzler also has his own show called “Comic Books, Inverted Stamps, Paranoid Literature” opening in the gallery on the same night.

Martos Gallery (540 West 29th Street) is hosting an exhibit of fifty “small” works from the collection of Anne Collier and Mathew Higgs called “Why is Everything the Same?”. The opening is Tuesday, May 7, 6 to 8 p.m. and the show is up until May 24.

There’s a big Bushwick gallery crawl AKA “Bushwick/Ridgewood FRIEZE Night” on Saturday, May 11, so head over there late and don’t miss the closing night of Brian Leo’s “100 Drones” that includes a “silkscreen print party” from 7 to 11 p.m. at David Kesting Presents (257 Boerum Street between Bushwick and White).

The High Line has an outdoor screening of “Modern Times Forever” by Superflex opening May 7 at the High Line’s 14th Street passage. It starts at 7 p.m. daily and runs until May 19th.

UK artist Tracey Emin will be showing an outdoor sculpture called “Roman Standard” in Petrosino Square (Lafayette Street between Spring and Broome) from May 10 to September 8. It’s a part of her show that’s on view now at Lehmann Maupin.

Roberta Bayley curated a group photo show called “Just Chaos!” that features images of early punk style. It opens on Thursday, May 9, 6 to 8 p.m. at Bookmarc (400 Bleecker St.) and will be up until May 23rd. You’ll find photos by Bayley, Laura Levine, Janette Beckman, Stephanie Chernikowski, Lee Black Childers, Godlis, Bob Gruen, Marcia Resnick and more.

The latest group show, “Wish Meme,” at the Old School (233 Mott Street) in NoLiTa includes over 50 artists spread over the building’s three floors and backyard. The works examine “21st Century wish fulfillment in the recession world.” There’s an opening reception on Wednesday, May 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. and it will be up until May 12th.

The Ed. Varie gallery (618 East 9th Street) is showing new work by three New York-based artists: Tyler Healy, Dean Levin and Evan Robarts. The three are participants in the Artha Project in the Brooklyn Navy Yards and there’s also a book — with photos by Clement Pascal and Johnny Knapp, designed by GG-LL — that documents the artist’s “process and studio environment.” The opening is May 10 from 6 to 9 p.m. and it’s up until June 2.

The Standard Hotel and the Paul Kasmin Gallery are hosting a book signing for “Kolors” by Kenny Scharf on Monday, May 13th, 5 to 7 p.m. at The Standard Shop (444 West 13th Street).

Peter Makebish curated a show of prints and works on paper from the Richard J. Massey Foundation for Arts and Sciences (601 West 26th Street).

Luxembourg & Dayan (64 East 77th Street) opens an exhibition, “Martial Raysse: 1960 – 1974,” on May 11. It’s the first U.S. show by the Paris-based artist in four decades and will be on view until July 13.

Leila Heller Gallery (568 West 25th Street) has a 5-day, multi-venue installation by London-based artist Reza Aramesh that starts on May 8, 11 p.m., at Marquee (289 10th Avenue) and winds up on May 12, 9 p.m., at the Bossa Nova Civic Club (1271 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn.) The gallery also has a show called “Bass! How Low Can You Go?” curated by Amir Shariat that opens May 8, 6 to 8 p.m., and runs until June 5th in their 25th Street space.

Vito Schnabel presents a group show curated by David Rimanelli called “DSM-V” in the “The Future Moynihan Station” (421 8th Avenue, enter on 31st Street) that will be open this week through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Charles Bank Gallery (196 Bowery) has a closing party for Garrett Pruter’s “Interiors” multimedia installation on Friday, May 10th, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Flux Factory (39-31 29th Street, Long Island City) hosts their monthly potluck and salon on Thursday, May 9. 8 p.m., with artist presentations, a poetry slam and more. “Please bring drinks or something tasty to share.” All the details are HERE.

A show of new works by Seth Price opens on Sunday, May 12, 6 tp 9 p.m. at Reena Spaulings Fine Art (165 East Broadway).

And finally, don’t forget the arty-parties. There are too many to mention and several are “invitation only,” but here’s a few that caught our eye:

There’s a big party on Tuesday night in honor of Paola Antonelli, the senior curator for architecture and design at MoMA, that’s hosted by Hannah Bronfman, Amani Olu and Larry Ossei-Mensah and sponsored by Beefeater 24 Gin.

Tate Americas Foundation has a live auction, dinner and after party on May 8 that is sponsored by Dior.

Visionaire magazine celebrates their “63 FOREVER” issue on Saturday night with an installation designed by Alexandre de Betak and music by Sebastien Perrin.

EXPO Chicago and Gallery Weekend Chicago are hosting a cocktail party on Friday in SoHo.

Whitewall magazine is hosting a “FRIEZE NY 2013″ party on Wednesday, May 8, at Le Baron (32 Mulberry Street). Jeremie Khait is DJing.

This story was published on May 6, 2013 4:00 PM

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THE LOWDOWN

http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2013/05/spring-art-fairs-converge-on-the-l-e-s-this-weekend.html

Spring Art Fairs Converge on the L.E.S. This Weekend

Basketball City is being transformed for this weekend’s NADA Art Fair. Photo: NADA’s Facebook page.

The spring art fairs hit New York this week, as Frieze comes to Randall’s Island for a second year, and several satellite fairs pop up around town. Cutlog, a new multi-media fair from Paris, has taken over the Clemente Soto Velez building; previews begin tonight. They open to the public on Friday and run through Monday, May 13th.

The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is coming to Basketball City this weekend and will be open to the public May 10 – 12. It’s the first time the international fair will be on the Lower East Side (it was in Chelsea last year). Heather Hubbs, Director of NADA, told us they decided to move the fair to the neighborhood for a few different reasons. “The new venue offers more room to breath for everyone involved and it’s uncharted territory which NADA has a history of inhabiting,” she said. “Also, many of NADA’s members have galleries on the lower east side and it makes sense to bring the fair closer to them.”

For an in-depth look at the burgeoning LES art scene, check out this month’s cover story

6 days ago Short URL Comments

New York/Vincent Johnson

May

Paul McCarthy: Uncanny Sculptures

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Hauser & Wirth to devote entire spring 2013 program

in New York to artist Paul McCarthy

‘Paul McCarthy: Sculptures’

10 May – 1 June 2013, Hauser & Wirth, 511 West 18th Street

‘Paul McCarthy: Life Cast’

10 May – 26 July 2013, Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street

‘Paul McCarthy: Sisters’

10 May – 26 July, Hudson River Park, West 17th Street

‘Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Rebel Dabble Babble’

20 June – 26 July 2013, Hauser & Wirth, 511 West 18th Street

HAUSER

WIRTH

32 EAST 69TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10021

Press Release

New York, NY…

Hauser & Wirth announced

today that it will devote its entire spring

program in New York City to Paul McCarthy,

one of America’s most challenging and

influential artists, via three interrelated

exhibitions and an outdoor sculpture

presentation. McCarthy has garnered

international acclaim for – and provoked lively

critical debate with – a constantly evolving

oeuvre characterized by wildly dark humor,

Bacchanalian chaos, and tragicomic narratives

that connect seemingly disparate bodies of

work. His practice is notable for its breadth

of forms and emphasis upon performance as

a tool for breaching established boundaries

between genres; using repetition and variation,

he has mined his preoccupying themes across

media and decades. McCarthy unleashes

debauchery and desire with extreme

technical daring, charting a territory where our

fundamental impulses collide with our most

cherished myths and hypocritical societal

norms. His work locates the traumas lurking

behind the gleaming stage set of the American

Dream and identifies their analogs in accepted

art history.

The latest fruits of McCarthy’s explorations will be presented by Hauser & Wirth in New York City

with three ambitious shows: ‘Paul McCarthy: Life Cast’ and ‘Paul McCarthy: Sculptures’ will open

to the public on 10 May at the gallery’s East 69th and West 18th Street locations, respectively.

In June, ‘Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Rebel Dabble Babble’, a vast, provocative video

projection and installation work, will open at 18th Street. The exhibitions are described by the artist

as components of a single on-going work in process: ‘They are parts of one enormous puzzle, very

much the way members of a family are individuals but at the same time connected as participants in

another whole entity’.

The Hauser & Wirth exhibitions will be complemented by outdoor public presentations of two major

McCarthy sculptures. The massive bronze composition ‘Sisters’ (2013) will stand outdoors in West

Chelsea through the summer on a site along the Hudson River at 17th Street, between Pier 57 and

the Sports Center at Chelsea Piers. And the 80-foot tall inflatable sculpture ‘Balloon Dog’ (2013) will

be shown on Randall’s Island during the Frieze New York art fair. All of McCarthy’s works on view

in Manhattan this spring relate directly to and provide context for the much-anticipated presentation

of the artist’s major work in progress, ‘WS’, a sprawling installation and video projection project that

will go on view at the Park Avenue Armory beginning 19 June. ‘WS’ will fill the Armory’s vast Drill

Hall with a dark and magical forest sculpture featuring soaring trees and a three-quarter scale exact

recreation of the house where Paul McCarthy grew up: these sets where he and his collaborators

created a video performance work will appear in multiple projections throughout Drill Hall. ‘WS’ uses

as its springboard the story of fairytale princess Snow White and those who have commoditized her,

in order to explore the Oedipal complexities of family, art-making, the institutionalization of history,

and pop culture consumption. ‘WS’ will remain on view through 4 August.

‘Paul McCarthy: Sculptures’

Beginning on 10 May, Hauser & Wirth 18th Street will open ‘Paul McCarthy: Sculptures’ (on view

through 1 June). In the gallery’s new 25,000 square foot venue, visitors will discover massive black

walnut wood sculptures depicting McCarthy’s versions of characters drawn from the famous 19th

century German folk tale Schneewittchen (Snow White) and his caricatures of modern interpretations

of the story, including those in Disney’s beloved 1937 animated classic film ‘Snow White and the

Seven Dwarfs’.

In the 2009 New York City exhibition ‘White Snow’, McCarthy unveiled his first drawings related to

the Snow White theme. With their antecedents in the artist’s earlier ‘Heidi’ and ‘Pinocchio’ series,

these drawings shifted a familiar European narrative back to the New World and pulled equally

from iconic representations of the fairytale characters and recollections from the artist’s own life.

Two years later, the 2011 New York sculpture exhibition ‘The Dwarves, The Forest’ reflected

McCarthy’s fascination with the aggressive and visceral messiness of the sculptural process as it

played out in his exploration of the Snow White story.

The new exhibition ‘Paul McCarthy:

Sculptures’ presents the next step in

McCarthy’s multi-platform mining of the

Snow White story. The new works began with

conventional sculpting. McCarthy developed,

abandoned, reworked and ‘fucked up’

figures based upon Snow White-themed

memorabilia and kitsch figurines. Subsequent

bronze casting and woodcarving constituted

a journey toward abstraction. In the case of

the monumental work ‘Sisters’ (2013), for

example, the artist passed through various

stages of engagement with a single figure of

Snow White. McCarthy started by building

a coherent clay caricature; later, he created

a second version, a near duplicate; then he

combined the two. He removed the heads of

these figures, scanned them to develop new

versions in different sizes, and recombined

the resulting array of heads with the bodies

of his ‘twins’. The resulting binary work was

mounted upon a platform and surrounded

by an accretion of other elements in a

performative attack over time. Such willful

distortion suggests equally offbeat and

charged psychic structures, and places such works firmly in the realm of expressionism. The

final 20-foot tall, 40-foot wide bronze cast of this cumulative, baroque composition, ‘Sisters’ will stand outdoors along the Hudson River at 17th Street in West Chelsea as a complement to the sculptures inside Hauser & Wirth’s 18th Street space.

Inside the gallery, visitors will find a substantial group of large-scale walnut sculptures ranging in

height from four to 14 feet. These include variations of McCarthy’s fractured fairytale characters

White Snow and the Prince. Referencing his 2009 drawings as well as images from auction

catalogues, illustrated books, tabloids, and pornographic magazines, McCarthy employs computer

mapping of figurines to digitally flesh out and manipulate shapes and details, gradually duplicating

and changing the scale of forms. His staged process ‘abstracts through merging’. Appropriating

images and narratives from the culture industry, McCarthy looks to Hollywood and draws from its

tactics for re-structuring reality. Like Walt Disney, he assumes the role of artist as producer, a role he

also performs in ‘WS’. With the latest White Snow works, McCarthy alludes to Disney’s contribution

to the Golden Age of Animation and raises questions about how an artist’s work rearranges and

deranges definitions of art, culture and thought.

McCarthy’s wood sculptures also embrace the ways in which his material’s grain irregularities and

color render compositions of their own. While carving ‘White Snow, Cindy’ (2012), an avatar of

innocence reborn as a sexualized saint, the artist found that his material retained its living properties.

Innate and unexpected details appeared and figures underwent a metamorphosis as random dark

spots emerged in surprisingly strategic places. McCarthy discovered that his Snow White bore an

ironic resemblance to a parallel pop culture icon and commoditized emblem of idealized femininity:

the American supermodel Cindy Crawford.

‘Paul McCarthy: Life Cast’

Also opening to the public on 10 May at Hauser & Wirth’s townhouse on 69th Street, ‘Paul

McCarthy: Life Cast’ (on view through 26 July) showcases highly developed themes and

narratives coursing through and connecting different areas of McCarthy’s vast and complex

practice. Here those themes are revealed through platinum silicone life casts – bravura replicas

of the artist and Elyse Poppers, one of the key performers in his most recent projects ‘Rebel

Dabble Babble’ and ‘WS’.

‘Horizontal’ (2013) is a haunting depiction of the artist in uncanny full-scale replica, naked and prone

in the gallery’s skylit ground floor south room. ‘Horizontal’ is a recent ‘repetition-variation’ of the

2005 work ‘Paul Dreaming, Vertical, Horizontal’, in which the artist’s own body was molded standing

upright. Defined by gravity’s pull, that earlier sculpture was half-clothed and subtly distorted, its

belly and penis distended outward. While ‘Paul Dreaming’ elicits thoughts of death, it also suggests

that the artist is very much alive and a bit of a bearded buffoon in socks and shirt, but no pants.

‘Horizontal’ presents an altogether different avatar and, in the artist’s words, ‘makes no bones about

the fact this is someone dead, without the mask of a clown or the possibility of sleep and dreaming’.

Cast with McCarthy in a prone

position, this morgue-like

caricature strikes a subversive

note in which absurdity and

pathos echo one another.

‘Horizontal’ was presaged

by one of McCarthy’s earliest

exhibited works, the hollow

metal ‘Dead H’ (1968), also

on view in ‘Paul McCarthy:

Life Cast’. ‘Dead H’ – at first

glance a Minimalist sculpture

in the then-prevailing style –

slyly mimics a dead body (and,

coincidentally, a toppled twin

of the first letter in Los Angeles’

famous Hollywood sign).

An ironic comment upon vanitas and the

ambitions and fables of art and culture,

McCarthy’s ‘Dead H’ is a fallen hero. Forty-five

years later, the artist’s study of the body as a

vehicle for liberation and exploitation continues full

force. Works on view at 69th Street also include

‘Rubber Jacket Horizontal, Rubber H’, a poignant

fragment from the life casting activities of the past

year that captures a sunken and hollow portion of

the artist’s own torso.

‘Paul McCarthy: Life Cast’ also presents four

female figures of uncanny verisimilitude. All are life

casts of Elyse Poppers achieved through a series

of painstaking processes at the leading edge of

special effects technology. ‘T.G. Awake’ (T.G. is

an acronym for ‘That Girl’ and refers to another

feminine icon, aspiring actress namesake of a hit

1960s situation comedy) is comprised of three

life-sized casts of the actress in similar sitting

positions, with her legs spread open to varying

degrees and eyes cast in different directions.

Together these static variations reference the

magical effect by which a series of still images can

be joined together to become film. ‘T.G. Awake’

found its origins in drawings that McCarthy made

of his wife Karen in the 1960s and relates to the first White Snow pencil drawings of 2009. The

sculpture ‘T.G. Asleep’ presents the same woman prone, her body curved and hands cupped, a

counterpoint to the dead figure of ‘Horizontal’.

The exhibition also includes ‘That Girl’, a four-channel video installation based in the process

by which ‘T.G. Awake’ and ‘T.G. Asleep’ were achieved. Capturing the molding process, the

model’s live movement studies, and the documentation of these through deliberately positioned

cameras, this work brings viewers into the action through which the sculptures on view were

made. ‘Life casting liberates the literal through a kind of unifying monotone,’ McCarthy has said.

‘It creates a different representation of the original thing that lets me explore where reality and

abstraction intersect’.

‘Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Rebel Dabble Babble’

On 20 June, Hauser & Wirth’s 18th street space will re-open with the third of the gallery’s spring

2013 exhibitions: ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ is a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son

Damon McCarthy. On view through 26 July, ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ is a large and complex installation

and video projection work originally inspired by both Nicholas Ray’s 1955 classic Hollywood film

‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and the furious rumors that swirled around the off-set relationships between

its director and his stars James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo. This densely layered opus

confronts definitions of power and role-playing, and expands far beyond the ’50s movie and related

legends. Ultimately, ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ is a meditation upon the archetypes and Oedipal tensions

that define family dynamics as they have been played out in private homes, in the evolution of art

history, and in the role of the entertainment industry in shaping our expectations and self-images.

At 18th Street, visitors will discover the gallery dimly lit and transformed into a hullabaloo of clanging

and clamor, yelling and coital grunting. This barrage of sound envelops two large stage sets installed

in the soaring space. One of these is a full-scale two-story house constructed by the McCarthys as

a stand-in for Nicholas Ray’s now infamous Bungalow 2 at the Chateau Marmont. For James Dean

and the 16-year old Wood, both of whom hailed from unhappy families, Ray’s cottage became a

surrogate household with the director as its unconventional patriarch. Rumors abound of quasi-

incestuous affairs between Ray and his actors, of swimming pool orgies and champagne bathtub

freak-outs. It is these scenarios that are the basis for ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’. On the back of the two-

story wooden house, a replica of the Hollywood sign is mounted – upside down. The second stage

set is a replica of the living room staircase in the home of Jim Stark, the central character played

by James Dean in the original ‘Rebel Without a

Cause’ and by James Franco (who also plays

Dean) in ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’.This set is turned

on its side, with props and the residue of filming

strewn exactly where they were left at the end of

shooting.

Video projections of scenes are presented on

and around these sets. In those projections,

Paul McCarthy and his actors play hybrids of

both Nick Ray’s cinematic characters and the

actors who performed as those characters,

and segue into universal familial roles – father,

mother, daughter, and son. Thus McCarthy plays

both Nick Ray and the Father of Jim Stark, as

well as the archetype of Father; James Franco

is both Jim and James Dean; Elyse Poppers is

Judy and the actress who portrayed her, Natalie

Wood, as well as the embodiment of Daughter.

Jay Yi appears as both Plato and Sal Mineo, the

actor who played Plato in the original movie. And

Suzan Averitt performs as the Mothers of both

Jim Stark and Natalie Wood. With its mind-

bending series of doubles, binaries, and inversions, ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ presents perversions

of interchangeable roles and fetish relationships. In the process, it investigates parallel icons in

the history of art – from Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ to Vito Acconci’s infamous

performances – and plays with the psychology of the family.

‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ reflects an important shift in Paul McCarthy’s engagement with the fantastical

tropes of such bodies of work as White Snow, Pirates and Pinocchio, toward more modern and

thoroughly American 20th century pop culture mythologies. As with the two sculpture exhibitions

presented by Hauser & Wirth New York this spring, this ambitious and challenging tour de force

delves deeper into the structures by which fiction successfully presents itself as reality.

Both locations of Hauser & Wirth New York are open to visitors Monday through Friday, 10 am until 6

pm. The general public can find additional information about the gallery, its exhibitions and programs

online at: http://www.hauserwirth.com.

======

Paul McCarthy: ‘I had this thing about exposing the interior of the body’

California – where stars are made and dreams come true. But it’s also where, for 40 years, Paul McCarthy has been creating creepy, stomach-churning art. So why does his rags-to-riches story read like a movie plot?

Jonathan Jones

- The Guardian, Friday 11 November 2011 18.01 EST
- Jump to comments (31)

Paul McCarthy: He began his career in the 60s, but didn’t sell anything until the 90s. Until then, he was, ‘basically just a guy covering himself in ketchup.’ Photograph: Amanda Marsalis for the Guardian

I’m here in Los Angeles to interview the artist Paul McCarthy, I tell a taxi driver on a freeway past the skyscrapers of downtown. He gets really excited – the veteran video, performance, body and installation artist who is soon to have a show in Britain must be a local hero, I suppose.

“The Paul McCartney?”

“No, Paul McCarthy.”

The taxi conversation ends.

At the hotel, a film crew are setting up their lights. Location trucks drive in and out of the hacienda-style forecourt, bringing equipment, food and dog blankets. The stars are waiting in their cages. The movie is Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3. Out of the window of my room I watch a – human – wedding on a stage set up on a lawn that is bright green, under the gold desert blaze of the sky.

The location is Pasadena, a city sandwiched between the LA sprawl and the San Gabriel mountains. McCarthy has lived in Pasadena for most of his working life, and I am to visit his studio somewhere beyond the giant palm trees of the Hollywood Chihuahua-worthy hotel. The avenues of this wealthy suburb turn out to be dotted with film crews: Pasadena’s mansions, some colonial, some Renaissance, some Spanish-style, some aping log cabins, were built by Old Money as long as a century ago and offered hideaways to the first generation of film stars in the silent era. Today they make perfect movie doubles for Beverly Hills. I am proudly shown the garden where the Steve Martin picture Father Of The Bride was filmed.

Crossing the LA river back into the larger city, the film memories are unavoidable: that concrete channel with its trickle of water is a cinematic legend in itself. Lee Marvin, Point Blank. Charlton Heston, Earthquake. Arnie in Terminator 2, or is it 3…

I know I am here to study the art of Los Angeles County and to meet one of its most celebrated living artists – even if some locals do confuse him with a Beatle – but how can you concentrate on fine art in the city that for a hundred years has shaped the world’s dreams?

This is in the question I most want to ask Paul McCarthy. What does it mean to be a serious visual artist in the shadow of Hollywood? How can American artists cohabit, here on the west coast, with American popular culture so close to its phantasmagoric source? How, in short, can he compete with Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3?

—

http://www.wall-mag.com/2013/04/les-sculptures-geantes-de-paul-mccarthy/

Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy

paul mc carthy 4 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy, artiste malin et provocateur, expose des sculptures géantes, gonflées en plastique. Cette immense crotte exposée à Hong-Kong, donne immédiatement le ton employé par cet artiste contemporain mélangeant habilement esprit Pop et subversion.

Giant sculptures by Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy, smart and provocative artist, exhibits giant sculptures, blown plastic. This huge mud exposed to Hong Kong immediately sets the style used by this contemporary artist, Blending spirit Pop and subversion.

paul mc carthy 1 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy paul mc carthy 2 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy paul mc carthy 3 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy paul mc carthy 5 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy paul mc carthy 6 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy paul mc carthy 7 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy paul mc carthy 8 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy paul mc carthy 9 Les sculptures géantes de Paul McCarthy

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Photos of Props from Performances:

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2 days ago Short URL Comments

Los Angeles/Vincent Johnson

May

Basquiat’s Market Reaches Dizzying Heights – updated

“Basquiat is the blue chip artist of the moment.”

Christie’s

“Dustheads” by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

By SOUREN MELIKIAN

Published: May 16, 2013

“This week, a young man who once passed for the buffoon of the American art scene was posthumously elevated to the level of the most serious contenders for the attention of multimillionaire buyers of contemporary art. Indeed, Basquiat was arguably the great winner in Christie’s sale.”

Bloomberg news 5.16.13:

“Last night, Basquiat’s “Dustheads” estimated to bring $25 million to $35 million, went for $48.8 million to an unnamed client on the phone for whom Christie’s international specialist Loic Gouzer was bidding. Gouzer worked with Leonardo DiCaprio on Christie’s May 13 auction to benefit conservation.”

“The record Basquiat canvas depicts two colorful, big-headed characters on a black background; one looks dazed, the other confused. The title refers to the street slang for the users of the drug PCP, or angel dust. The neo-expressionist painter died at 27 in 1988.

Although Christie’s didn’t identify the seller, dealers said the painting was consigned by collector Tiqui Atencio.

The Basquiat market has been on the rise. In 2012, his auction sales totaled $161.5 million, more than doubling from the previous year, according to Artnet. He ranked 8th last year, compared to 18th in 2011, overtaking Lichtenstein and de Kooning.

Last year, Basquiat records were set and toppled. In November, his untitled canvas depicting a fisherman with a halo sold for $26.4 million at Christie’s in New York. Less than five months earlier, a 1981 self-portrait sold for $20.2 million at Christie’s in London.”

===

HUFFINGTON POST

Priceless: Mr. Chow on Basquiat

Posted: 05/14/2013 10:51 am

When Basquiat was still sleeping on friends’ couches in the 80′s, Michael and Tina Chow were helping him survive. They purchased his paintings. They commissioned him to paint their portraits. They fed him and befriended an artist they believed in.

Few establishments were hipper in the mid-80s than Mr. Chow, on Manhattan’s East 57th street. On a given night, one could observe the biggest stars of New York’s exploding art scene there. Describing a dinner there attended by Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, Cathleen McGuigana observed for a New York Times Magazine cover story about Basquiat in 1985 that the restaurant’s fine menu and “elegant cream-lacquered interior” placed it “light years away” from artist hangouts a generation before.

“But art stars were different then,” she added.

It’s been 25 years since Basquiat died of a drug overdose, but Michael Chow still remembers the young, tragic art star vividly. He reflected on the brief and bright life of his friend in a conversation with Jim Shi for Christie’s, the art auction house. A May 15 auction of one of Basquiat’s most famous works, Dustheads (1982), is expected to break a record for the artist, currently set at $26.4 million.

Jean Michel Basquiat’s Journal
On Race

“Artists turn anger into beauty, into poetry. In Basquiat’s case, his radar sensitivity on racism was very strong. I’d never met anyone so sensitive to it, and with good reason. No taxi in New York City would stop for him. He faced a lot of prejudices: There was the notion that black people could not be artists, and when you introduced him to non-African Americans, if he sensed even the littlest bit of racism, he wouldn’t shake your hand.

On Sophistication

“He was an international painter and he wanted to be a worldly man. He was very curious. I remember when we traveled to Hong Kong and spent two weeks there and had a great time. I took him to my tailor and he went crazy, buying everything in sight. Then we met very prominent friends of mine who invited us to a very expensive restaurant at The Peninsula called Gaddi’s. He immediately called the waiter over and quietly ordered the most expensive bottle of wine.

On Painting

“At the end of the day, we’re talking about poetry, we’re talking about magic, and we’re talking about making paintings that speak. At the end, you just look at the painting and ask yourself, ‘does it move me or not?’ [Basquiat] had the charisma and his paintings were powerful. They moved you.”

Jean Michel Basquiat’s Journal
On Talent

“Most of the time when he painted, Jean-Michel didn’t look at the canvas. Like Francis Bacon and a few others, spontaneity was the most important thing for him — that organic mark. And yet he had this accuracy with anatomy and with truth, which is evident in his fantastic drawings.”

On Ambition

“Of course he was very ambitious. He wanted to be the greatest painter in his category, and he succeeded, I think. He was a powerful, powerful painter.”

On Friendship

“I didn’t know this at the time, but I was kind of a hero to him for whatever reason. His calling card, in order to introduce himself to me, came in the form of a painting of myself that he left on my doorstep in 1985. And since I acquired it so easily, of course my first reaction was that I didn’t treat it very well.”

“Soon after, we fell in love with each other, so to speak.”

Portrait of Michael Chow by Jean Michel Basquiat
On Put Downs

“Even during the period of his greatest success, the establishment still did not acknowledge him. They were still putting him down all day long.

“But the more times you go down, the more you come back with a vengeance. Someone once said all artists have to get knocked down three times. If you can do this, like Muhammad Ali did winning three championships, then you become the greatest.”

On James Dean… and Cuddling

“Like James Dean, one doesn’t know what the future would have held for Basquiat. Some do very well, some don’t do very well. Most artists, I believe, only have six golden years. After that, it’s difficult to reinvent again. Jean-Michel had his six years. If I saw him today, I would just cry for five minutes and give him a cuddle. I can’t put into words the impact he has had on me. In short, I loved him.

——

Eyes and Eggs by Basquiat (1983)

–

(excerpts from reportage on the explosive market for Basquiat’s works).

It is great to see Basquiat’s works skyrocket beyond any and all negative narratives about his life, to where now his works are consumed, visually devoured and poured over for their aesthetic powers and formal invention. His works are hopefully opening the door for more artists of color to have their works considered in this way, as verses continually being framed only in discourses about racism, slavery, struggle, poverty, urban despair and misery. Jazz musicians suffered just as much if not more than did Basquiat, yet it is the sheer beauty and astounding musical structures and execution that rose and still rises about any earthly elements that weighed down upon them in life.

Vincent Johnson 2/14/2013

the following texts have been compiled and excerpted by the artist and writer Vincent Johnson in Los Angeles.

http://www.vincentjohnsonart.com

Max Roach by Basquait (1984)

Riding With Death by Basquiat (1988)

Tuxedo by Basquiat (1982)

================================

The Korea Herald > Entertainment > Arts

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconic works on view in Seoul

Kukje Gallery offers broad survey of Basquiat’s major works and his life

Published : 2013-02-17 19:22
Updated : 2013-02-17 19:22

“Untitled (Hand Anatomy),” 1982 by Jean-Michel Basquiat. (2013 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris/ARS, New York)

African-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artistic career lasted only eight years before he died at age 27, but he still remains as a mainstay in the global auction market: A drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat was sold at the top price of $15.2 million at an auction last Friday in London.

And now, some of his iconic works are on view at Kukje Gallery in Seoul until March, offering a broad survey of his works that left a lasting impression in the contemporary art scene in the 1980s.

As Basquiat said about his artistic process, “I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life,” his paintings reflect his personal life and the world he lived in.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Julio Donoso/Sygma/TOPIC)

Starting as a graffiti writer on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan under the name of “SAMO” (Same Old S―-), Basquiat rose to fame when he emerged in the New York art scene in the 1980s. Despite his lack of formal arts training, he was praised in the American and European art circles for his unique works.

The artist not only contributed to bringing street art to mainstream, but also incorporated his artistic talent to T-shirt designing, jewelry making, and music performance.

His paintings feature multiple personal and social messages presented through symbolic texts, list of words and imagery.

Some of them comment on racial issues and refer to prominent black figures in American society such as jazz musician Charlie Parker and baseball player Hank Aaron.

Basquiat’s 1981 painting mixes his personal stories and his idol by using cars and airplanes with symbolic words to depict his sickness during childhood and a hammer that symbolizes the legendary baseballer Aaron, who in 1974 broke the home run record formerly set by Babe Ruth.

Anatomy is also a significant part of his art, reflecting his personal trauma of having to undergo a splenectomy after being hit by a car at age 7.

He developed an interest in anatomy into visual language after his mother gave him a copy of the medical text “Gray’s Anatomy” when he was in hospital.

Before he died of a heroine overdose at age 27 in 1988, he led a short yet prolific career, producing works that left a lasting impression in the contemporary art scene which later garnered him a reputation as a Neo-Expressionism icon.

When he was 21, Basquiat was the youngest of 176 artists to be invited to the Kassel Documenta in 1982. His works were shown at the international art event alongside those of such established artists as Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. He also collaborated with his idol Andy Warhol, whom he befriended in 1983 and whose death later made a great impact on him.

The exhibition runs through March 31 at Kukje Gallery in Jongno, Seoul.

New Yorker magazine

A museum-worthy show of fifty-nine paintings confirms a common assessment of Basquiat’s brief glory: rousingly fresh in 1981, masterly in 1982, and stumbling thereafter. (He died in 1988, at twenty-seven.) At his peak, the former graffitist commanded a synthesis of Abstract Expressionism and Art Brut, with blazingly original uses of written and symbolic language, like the maestro of a great jazz orchestra. Then his pictures lost coherence, becoming less than the sums of their parts. Was it drugs? Was it too-fast fame? Basquiat’s decline is easy to moralize but trivial relative to his rise, which remains as deathlessly marvellous as that of Arthur Rimbaud. Through April 6.

Through April 6, 2013

Gagosian—555 W. 24th St.

555 W. 24th St., New York, N.Y.

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10/19/2012 @ 4:05PM |2,201 views

Buying Basquiat

This story appears in the November 5, 2012 issue of Forbes Life. by John Keats,

“As a young artist in 1980s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat desired nothing so much as to match Andy Warhol’s success. This auction season, a quarter-century after both artists’ deaths, he’s coming tantalizingly close to fulfilling his wish. In May, Phillips de Pury sold an untitled 1981 painting in Basquiat’s characteristic street-naïf style for a record $16.3 million, nearly $2 million more than when the market for his work last peaked in 2007. A month later, Christie’s sold a larger 1981 canvas for $20.1 million, a record it expects to break in November with a third 1981 painting that the auction house is positioning as a sort of self-portrait in the guise of Jesus Christ.

The vintage of all three pictures is no coincidence. “Basquiat reached his peak almost at the beginning of his career,” says Christie’s specialist Loic Gouzer. “You have this raw character who’d just slipped from the street to the art world.” Within just two to three years of his breakthrough, the toxic combination of drug addiction and public adulation had all but done Basquiat in, and he finished himself off with a heroin overdose in 1988–at the age of 27–having produced approximately 1,000 paintings at a broad range of quality levels. “That’s a perfect market to work within,” observes market insider Richard Polsky, author of The Art Prophets. “There are enough paintings that we can deal in them, but it’s fairly finite because he had a short and sweet career.”

But why are prices now rising precipitously? According to Gouzer, Warhol deserves some credit, as do American masters such as Jackson Pollock. “With those artists, we’re no longer talking $20 million, so even a lot of very rich people are out of the game,” he explains. “When we look at what was done in America beyond those guys, Basquiat really shapes up to being numero uno. He was a great colorist, a great draftsman, and he had a great sense of scale,” Gouzer adds. “I think we’re going to see a $100 million Basquiat. People have this subconscious panic. People want to buy him before he becomes Pollock.”

Polsky agrees that the Basquiat market still has room for growth but is wary of putting him in Pollock’s or Warhol’s league. “Basquiat’s market is 100 percent speculative,” he argues. “It’s 100 percent market driven. It’s not art-history driven. Basquiat is a semimyth, and he’s on his way to becoming a full-blown myth.”

And in that respect, at least, Basquiat has aced the Warhol test.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Burroughs triptych to be sold at London auction

Work by US artist, who died aged 27 in 1988, is tribute to his favourite writer and is valued at between £4.25m and £6.25m

Mark Brown, arts correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 January 2013 07.01 EST

Detail from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Five Fish Species, a celebration of his favourite writer, beat author William Burroughs. Photograph: Sotheby’s

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s tribute to the mad and bad world of William Burroughs – including the unfortunate night in Mexico when he shot and killed his wife in a William Tell game – is to be sold in London after 30 years in the same ownership.

Sotheby’s said the painting, bought directly from Basquiat himself, would be one of the highlights of its contemporary art sale on 12 February.

“Basquiat is the blue chip artist of the moment,” said Branczik. “He is recognised today in perhaps the same way he recognised Burroughs in the 1980s as someone who was streets ahead of his time – Basquiat is the artist who everybody wants at the moment so we have high hopes of it doing well at auction.”

On View

‘Jean-Michel Basquiat’ at Gagosian Gallery

“Jean-Michel Basquiat, ‘Cassius Clay,’ 1982. (Courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

A quarter-century after he died of a drug overdose at the age of 27 in downtown Manhattan, Jean-Michel Basquiat needs no introduction. The fame that he pursued relentlessly and recklessly throughout his brief career seems secure, buoyed by museum retrospectives, films, books, sympathetic critics and a bounty of supremely wealthy collectors, who now buy major works by him for $20 million or more. For anyone who needed proof that this last part isn’t just the result of market hype, there is Gagosian Gallery’s current exhibition of more than 50 works.

The majority of the pieces on view come from 1981 through ’83, when the Haitian-American, Brooklyn-born graffiti artist made his improbable leap into the upper echelon of the art world. The trademark Basquiat work of the time has a central figure—a fisherman, a warrior, a boxer—hovering amid gnomic phrases, some of them crossed out, in front of high-pitched fields of color that compare favorably with Abstract-Expressionist masters Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still.

Though Basquiat fit perfectly alongside then-ascendant Neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel, who aimed to return figurative painting to the realm of vanguard art, a bit of distance shows that he was regularly outclassing them. One of the best works here, La Hara (1981), offers an unhinged-looking cop with blood-red eyes surrounded by an array of marks—smudges, scratches, a thermos and what may be a fence. No wonder he pissed people off.

Many of those early works are so colorful, so humming with anxious, energetic lines that they threaten to produce bodily shocks. Don’t forget, though, that Basquiat could also be uproariously funny (1982’s Obnoxious Liberals has a panicked figure wearing a shirt that reads “Not for sale”) and subtle, perhaps even romantic (1985’s Now’s the Time, an eight-foot-wide circular painting on wood that resembles the eponymous Charlie Parker record, its title written in little white letters at its center).

For me, the real joys come in ’83 and ’84, when Basquiat was cramming more text and bits of photocopied anatomical drawings into his paintings. The frenetic energy has dissipated, but the resulting tableaux, laden with an increasing number of competing figures, elicit intellectual rather than emotional responses.

The prevailing narrative, that Basquiat’s work declined as he reveled in fame and drugs, remains hard to dispute, but the show offers a few startling exceptions, like Riding with Death (1988), one of his last paintings. A nude man is astride a skeletal horse; he seems to be slipping into the bronze monochrome background, disappearing into the picture. (Through April 6)”

Auctions

Basquiat Sells for $20.1 M., a New Auction Record, in London

“The record-breaking work. (Courtesy Christie’s)

An untitled work by Jean-Michel Basquiat from 1981 just sold for $20,170,071, according to the Christie’s Twitter feed. The sum marks a new auction high for the artist, breaking a record set just this past spring at Phillips de Pury & Company where another untitled work from that year sold for $16.3 million.

According to the Artnet price database, the work that was purchased this evening in London last sold at auction in May 2007, when it made $14.6 million at Sotheby’s New York.

The new record reflects prices already achieved on the private market. After that Phillips auction, many collectors said they’d seen plenty of Basquiats sell for prices in the $20 million range.”

June 1, 2012, 2:59 pm

Is a Basquiat Painting Really Worth $16 Million?

By DAN KEDMEY NYTimes

“Richard Drew/Associated PressAndy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York , September 1985.

This week in the magazine, Adam Davidson examines what’s really driving some art prices to record highs. In part, it’s because “the value of any artist’s work is determined by an insider world of cultural arbiters who coordinate with one another,” Davidson writes.

Sergey Skaterschikov, an art-market analyst Davidson consulted, has spent years studying how insiders shape the market — one “completely based on manipulation,” he told me. A case in point, he said, is the surge in demand for the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“What happened is auctions and dealers succeeded in convincing collectors that Basquiat is a Warhol proxy, a peer to Warhol with a discount,” he said. These insiders used research, catalogs and special exhibitions to advance their arguments; the more demand they generated for Basquiat, the more money they could devote to promotional materials. “They all have a vested interest to keep the story going,” Skaterschikov said.

That’s one reason Basquiat’s art has been hunted so aggressively over the last six years. One of his paintings, optimistically estimated to be worth $12 million, recently sold at auction for $16 million. As Skaterschikov put it, “In this market, perception is reality.””

“Phillips de Pury

An untitled 1981 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat set a record auction price for the artist, $16.3 million, on May 10, 2012.”

5/10/2012 @ 11:48PM |2,681 views

$16 Million Basquiat Sets New World Record At Phillips Art Sale

“The contemporary art auction at Phillips de Pury tonight in New York set a new world record for a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Untitled from 1981 sold for $16,322,500 including premiums to beat the previous record of $14.6 million set in 2007. The work went to a private bidder.

Top sellers of the night besides the Basquiat were Untitled VI by Willem de Kooning, which sold for $12,402,500; Untitled (Bolsena) by Cy Twombly for $6,242,500; Brushstroke Nude by Roy Lichtenstein for $5,458,500; and two by Andy Warhol: Mao ($10,386,500) and Gun ($7,026,500).
The mood tonight was lively if not as electrifying as a certain diamond auction at Christie’s late last year. Women in Louboutin shoes and men with the long, artfully coiffed hair of European royalty milled around drinking champagne downstairs in the lobby before the sale started. Later in the main room they clapped appreciatively when the Basquiat sold. Most of the buyers were longtime art patrons, according to Michael McGinnis, Phillips’ worldwide head of contemporary art. Bidders from Russia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East are especially strong this year, he said.

Basquiat’s Price Soars Fivefold as $320 Million Auctions Start

By Scott Reyburn – Jun 27, 2011 4:51 PM PT Bloomberg news

“Self-Portrait”

“Phillips de Pury & Co. via Bloomberg

“Self-Portrait” by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The 1985 acrylic-on-wood painting at Claridge’s Hotel, London, on June 27.

A Jean-Michel Basquiat self-portrait sold last night as London…

The Basquiat, dating from 1985 and featuring a half-length self-portrait next to a wooden panel covered in bottle tops, fetched 2.1 million pounds ($3.4 million) at Phillips de Pury & Co.’s first contemporary sale at Claridge’s in Mayfair. The price was five times the $647,500 it fetched at Phillips de Pury, New York, in 2003.

Enlarge image "Self-Portrait"

“Self-Portrait” by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The 1985 acrylic-on-wood painting was included in a 32-lot auction of contemporary works held by Phillips de Pury & Co. at Claridge’s Hotel, London, on June 27. Source: Phillips de Pury & Co. via Bloomberg

Phillips de Pury & Co. via Bloomberg.

“The Basquiat was one of five works with minimum bids by third party guarantors. It fell to the guarantor, bidding by phone, for slightly more than the 2-million-pound low estimate.”

Metallica Drummer to Auction $12 Million Basquiat

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed) LUXIST
Oct 12th 2008 at 11:04AM

“Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich is selling a massive 8-ft. wide Jean-Michel Basquiat painting at Christie’s in New York on Nov. 12, where it’s expected to fetch about $12 million. Untitled (Boxer) (above), painted in 1982, is an important “proxy self-portrait,” Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international co-head of postwar and contemporary art, tells Bloomberg. “The black artist as defiant hero.’” In 2002, Ulrich, a noted collector, sold Basquiat’s 1982 Profit I at Christie’s for $5.5 million. In July, Irish rock band U2 sold the artist’s Untitled (Pecho/Oreja) for $10.1 million at Sotheby’s in London. The auction record for a Basquiat work was set at Sotheby’s in New York last year with the $14.6 million sale of 1981′s Untitled.”

At $1.5 Million, Basquiat Leads Auction

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: May 13, 2005

“Phillips, de Pury & Company

“Catharsis” (1983), by Jean-Michel Basquiat, sold for $1.5 million.

A classic 1983 Basquiat was the evening’s winner. The canvas, with red lines that resemble dripping blood and words like “thumb,” “spleen,” “left paw and “suicide attempt scrawled across it, was expected to sell for $1.2 million to $1.8 million. Two collectors went for the painting, which sold to an unidentified telephone bidder when the hammer fell at $1.2 million or $1.5 million with the fee Phillips charges buyers.

February 10, 1985

New Art, New Money

By CATHLEEN McGUIGAN

HEN JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT walks into Mr. Chow’s on East 57th Street in Manhattan, the waiters all greet him as a favorite regular. Before he became a big success, the owners, Michael and Tina Chow, bought his artwork and later commissioned him to paint their portraits. He goes to the restaurant a lot. One night, for example, he was having a quiet dinner near the bar with a small group of people. While Andy Warhol chatted with Nick Rhodes, the British rock star from Duran Duran, on one side of the table, Basquiat sat across from them, talking to the artist Keith Haring. Haring’s images of a crawling baby or a barking dog have become ubiquitous icons of graffiti art, a style that first grew out of the scribblings (most citizens call them defacement) on New York’s subway cars and walls. Over Mr. Chow’s plates of steaming black mushrooms and abalone, Basquiat drank a kir royale and swapped stories with Haring about their early days on the New York art scene. For both artists, the early days were a scant half dozen years ago.

That was when the contemporary art world began to heat up after a lull of nearly a decade, when a new market for painting began to make itself felt, when dealers refined their marketing strategies to take advantage of the audience’s interest and when much of the art itself began to reveal a change from the cool and cerebral to the volatile and passionate.

As an artist’s hangout, the elegant cream-lacquered interior of Mr. Chow’s is light-years away from the Cedar Tavern, that grubby Greenwich Village haunt of the artists of the New York School 30 years ago. But art stars were different then. Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and their contemporaries, all more or less resigned to a modest style of living, worked for years at the center of a small and intimate art world in relative isolation from the public at large.

But today, contemporary art is evolving under the avid scrutiny of the public and an ever-increasing pool of collectors in the United States, Europe and Japan; and it is heavily publicized in the mass media. Barely disturbed by occasional dips in the economy, the art market has been booming steadily.

As a result of the current frenzied activity, which produces an unquenchable demand for something new, artists such as Basquiat, Haring or the graffitist Kenny Scharf, once seized upon, become overnight sensations. In their circle, and certainly among the top artists whose careers took off a few years sooner, artists such as Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Robert Longo, annual earnings easily run into six figures. Not only are the numbers involved great – both the dollars and cents and the size of the art audience – so is the breathtaking speed with which work by a new artist can become a cultural fixture.TAKE BASQUIAT. FIVE YEARS AGO, HE didn’t have a place to live. He slept on the couch of one friend after another. He lacked money to buy art supplies. Now, at 24, he is making paintings that sell for $10,000 to $25,000. They are reproduced in art magazines and also as part of fashion layouts, or in photographs of chic private homes in House & Garden. They are in the collections of the publisher S. I. Newhouse, Richard Gere, Paul Simon and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

His color-drenched canvases are peopled with primitive figures wearing menacing masklike faces, painted against fields jammed with arrows, grids, crowns, skyscrapers, rockets and words. ”There are about 30 words around you all the time, like ‘thread’ or ‘exit,’ ” he explains. He uses words ”like brushstrokes,” he says. The pictures have earned him serious critical affirmation. In reviewing a group show of drawings last year, John Russell, chief art critic of The New York Times, noted that ”Basquiat proceeds by disjunction – that is, by making marks that seem quite unrelated, but that turn out to get on very well together.” His drawings and paintings are edgy and raw, yet they resonate with the knowledge of such modern masters as Dubuffet, Cy Twombly or even Jasper Johns. What is ”remarkable,” wrote Vivien Raynor in The Times, ”is the educated quality of Basquiat’s line and the stateliness of his compositions, both of which bespeak a formal training that, in fact, he never had.”

That favorable review came after Basquiat’s first solo show at the Mary Boone Gallery in May 1984. The same month, a self-portrait painted mostly in black and white – stark, powerful and sexually charged – was included in the international survey exhibition that celebrated the reopening of the renovated Museum of Modern Art. Then, proving the solid marketability of his work, a painting of his appeared for auction at Christie’s spring sale of contemporary art. Painted only two years earlier and sold originally for $4,000, it fetched $20,900 on the block.

THE EXTENT OF BASQUIAT’S SUCCESS would no doubt be impossible for an artist of lesser gifts. Not only does he possess a bold sense of color and composition, but, in his best paintings, unlike many of his contemporaries, he maintains a fine balance between seemingly contradictory forces: control and spontaneity, menace and wit, urban imagery and primitivism. Still, the nature and rapidity of his climb is unimaginable in another era. The audience for art is larger now than ever before, and collecting original art is no longer the sole province of the very rich. The upwardly mobile postwar generation, raised on art-history courses and summer trips to Europe, aspires to collect and has the cash to do it. Even when collectors lack cash, some institutions, including banks, now recognize their need. Sotheby’s, the auction house, is willing to lend a portion of the price of an artwork at 2 to 4 points above the prime-interest rate. Given the extraordinary prices of the older blue-chip artists ($1 million for a vintage Jasper Johns, for example), a lot of collectors naturally turn to the young up-and-coming painters whose works are still available for $50,000 and down. For many new art patrons, connoisseurship of contemporary art is a necessary part of the urban life style. They look for paintings that are esthetically aggressive, that physically assault space. The artworks offer proof of up-to-the-minute taste and have a perfect showcase in the reclaimed lofts or gentrified houses in which so many upper-middle- class urbanites now live. With all these new consumers, the number of dealers has mushroomed: in 1970, for example, there were 73 galleries listed in the Art Now: New York Gallery Guide; today there are nearly 450.

This expanding market for contemporary art coincided with a shift in the direction that art itself was taking. Since the late 1960′s, the contemporary mainstream had been dominated by the austere constraints of Minimalism – Brice Marden’s simple areas of solid color, for instance – or the cerebral concerns of Conceptualism, like the mathematical cubes of Sol LeWitt. The forms that art often took seemed to reject the collector – environmental art such as earthworks couldn’t be neatly crated and taken home to hang over the stereo system. But in the late 1970′s, artists such as Jonathan Borofsky, Neil Jenney and Susan Rothenberg began, in vastly different ways, to paint recognizable figures on canvas. Bold color and the sensuality of a richly painted surface returned, appealing to an art public that had been starved, baffled or bored for a decade. Many art patrons hadn’t felt a comparable excitement since the early 1960′s. Eugene Schwartz, for example, who, along with his wife, Barbara, amassed an important collection including Frank Stella, Morris Louis and David Smith, stopped collecting altogether in 1969. One day in 1980, he saw a painting by the artist Julian Schnabel in a dealer’s gallery. ”It brought us from the 60′s to the 80′s in about 14 seconds,” he said, and since buying it he has been collecting again – ”compulsively.”

Not everyone in the art world is overjoyed at what is happening. Some think neo- expressionism, as much of the new work is called, is a hyped-up fad, doomed to a short life. ”The new expressionism tends to be a generalized Angst ,” says Thomas Lawson, a painter and editor of Real Life Magazine, a small-circulation artists’ journal. ”You can’t tell what the artist is reacting to. It’s not very reflective.” Lawson thinks Basquiat is talented but that those of lesser skills will inevitably burn out.

In any case, Julian Schnabel’s highly publicized success made him the first art star of the 1980′s and created an atmosphere of expanded possibilities for any promising artist since. For someone as ambitious as Basquiat, high expectations are matched by the pressures of succeeding. Basquiat’s sometimes-stormy rise and struggle with the art establishment provide a look at how the artists’ names and their works are marketed in the art world today. His successful career demonstrates the competitiveness among dealers for artists; dealers’ pricing and marketing techniques; their control of supply and demand and the importance of the European market for today’s American scene. Further, Basquiat’s example shows how an artist tries to create and to preserve his autonomy in this heady environment. The danger is always that the glamour and fuss will cloud the meaning of the artwork itself. FROM THE START Basquiat has displayed a notoriously mercurial disposition, which certainly helped bring him early attention in a world in which a lot of noise doesn’t hurt. Like his paintings, which are at once childlike and fearsome, he can be both engagingly shy and temperamental. Henry Geldzahler, critic and former curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, comments, ”His personality, both charming and disdainful, is very attractive.”

He was born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father, a successful accountant, and a Puerto Rican mother. His parents separated when he was 7. Basquiat dreamed of becoming a writer and a cartoonist – his father brought home paper from the office for him to draw on, and his mother sometimes took him to museums. His renegade streak surfaced early. ”At 15, he left home and went to Washington Square Park, reported Suzi Gablik in her book ”Has Modernism Failed?” ”I just sat there dropping acid for eight months,” Basquiat told her. ”Now all that seems boring. It eats your mind up.” He dropped out of school again at 17 (after, he says, he threw a cream pie in the principal’s face) and began writing poetic messages and drawing odd symbols with a friend named Al Diaz on walls around town, especially in SoHo. The messages, in Magic Marker, were vaguely anarchistic and ranged from the obvious – ”Riding around in Daddy’s convertible with trust fund money”- to the ominous – ”Plush safe . . . he think.” They signed the phrases with the tag ”SAMO” and the copyright symbol. Basquiat explains that SAMO was meant to suggest a brand name or corporate logo; he has also said that it stood for the expresway, the graffiti captured a lot of attention. ”At that time, whenever you went to an art opening or a hot new club, SAMO had been there first,” says Jeffrey Deitch, a critic who co-manages the international art advisory service at Citibank and was an early Basquiat champion. (Citibank advises its customers that art of quality can be considered a good investment. And, with other leading banks, it also now accepts fine art and furniture as collateral against loans.) Eventually, SAMO was unmasked. For Keith Haring, who had admired SAMO’s handiwork, the realization came when he sneaked a young artist named Basquiat into the School of Visual Arts. The next day, SAMO’s leavings were scrawled all over the school.

Basquiat, like many aspiring artists, worked at a number of odd jobs, including selling junk jewelry on the street on the lower part of the Avenue of the Americas, and he crashed a lot of art parties and openings. ”He was always broke,” recalls Diego Cortez, a curator and critic who met him during this period at the Mudd Club, the now-defunct punk hangout that was headquarters for the art and rock underground. Basquiat was also painting designs on sweatshirts and coveralls and playing in a band called Gray. ”It was a noise band,” he says. ”I played a guitar with a file, and a synthesizer. I was inspired by John Cage at the time – music that isn’t really music. We were trying to be incomplete, abrasive, oddly beautiful.” It was not unlike his art. Basquiat exhibited some of the drawings he was making at occasional art shows at the Mudd Club and in the new-wave salons that Keith Haring organized at such popular nightspots as Club 57.

Neo-expressionist painting was having a growing impact on the SoHo scene in 1980. A trio of Italians, known as the three C’s – Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi, all of whom used the human figure in their epic- scaled, potent canvases – had major exhibitions in New York at the Sperone Westwater gallery. People began to talk about waiting lists for certain hot new painters. That summer, the emerging artists of the punk and graffiti underground had their own art event, at a rather unusual alternative space. In a former massage parlor near Times Square, a loose confederation of artists from the South Bronx and the Lower East Side collaborated to turn the dilapidated structure into ”a sort of art funhouse,” as Jeffrey Deitch put it in Art in America. Crammed with a crude, energetic assortment of drawings, posters, low-budget scraps of film, exotic fashions and sculpture, the ”Times Square Show,” as it was called, had a trashy exuberance that lived up to the neighborhood. (A work called ”Man Killed by Air Conditioner,” which was simply a life-size clay figure crushed on the floor by a real air-conditioner, typified the show’s deadpan humor.) Basquiat had contributed to the exhibition by covering an entire wall in splashes of spray paint and brushwork. ”A patch of wall painted by SAMO, the omnipresent graffiti sloganeer, was a knockout combination of de Kooning and subway spray paint scribbles,” wrote Deitch. That was Basquiat’s first press notice.

No one can remember exactly when the epitaph ”SAMO is dead” first began to appear scrawled around the Bowery and SoHo, but when Basquiat and his collaborator Diaz had a falling out, Basquiat killed off his alter ego. Diaz became involved in music, and Basquiat, though he had been the prime author of SAMO’s musings, turned increasingly to making art. He had no real materials: he painted on salvaged sheet metal or broken pieces of window casement and made assemblages out of junk. One work from that period, now owned by the artist Francesco Clemente, is a four-inch-thick slab of dirty yellow foam rubber on which a childlishly rendered car is outlined in black.

One day in 1980, Diego Cortez, who had been following Basquiat’s work with interest and had begun to act as his agent, brought Jeffrey Deitch to the tiny tenement apartment on the Lower East Side where the artist was then living with a girlfriend. The first thing Deitch saw was a battered refrigerator that Basquiat had completely covered with drawings, words and symbols, the lines practically etched into the enamel. ”It was one of the most astounding art objects I had ever seen,” says Deitch. Scattered all over the floor of the apartment were drawings on all sizes of cheap paper covered with images and smudged with Basquiat’s footprints. ”Jean kept on working as if we were interrupting him,” Deitch remembers. He picked out five drawings made on typing paper, and paid $250 in cash for them. This was probably Basquiat’s first sale; Cortez had to remind him to sign the drawings.

In January 1981, Cortez put together a show called ”New York/New Wave” at P.S. 1, the alternative-space gallery in Long Island City, Queens. Although the show featured work by graffiti artists, Cortez also showed some paintings by Basquiat, mostly minimal – lines of crayon or paint drawn in childlike fashion on unprimed canvas. The message was clear: though Basquiat had cruised onto the underground art scene on the crest of the graffitists’ new wave, his work was distinctly different. In fact, neither he nor the graffitist Keith Haring had ever ”bombed” – spray painted – dormant subway cars in the train yards at night, a necessary rite of passage in the authentic graffiti subculture. More importantly, as the critics pointed out, Basquiat’s paintings embodied more formal ties to the history of art. He may have grown up, like most kids, on a diet of comic books, but clearly he had also had a taste of Picasso. (Basquiat says that ”Guernica” had a big impact on him when he first saw it as a teen-ager in the Museum of Modern Art.)

Few dealers made the trek to Queens to see the P.S. 1 show, but several influential people did come. The Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who has a gallery in Zurich, saw Basquiat’s work for the first time there. Although he wasn’t ready to make a commitment to it, Henry Geldzahler was impressed indeed. Several months later, Geldzahler bought the first of the three works of Basquiat he was to acquire. It was half a door that Basquiat had found on the street to which he’d applied half-torn posters and layers of scribblings. ”It was covered with as dense and rewarding an array as a 1955 Rauschenberg,” says Geldzahler. ”I decided to overpay. I offered $2,000 for it. I knew he was authentic and I wanted to say, ‘Welcome to the real world.’ ”

For the Italian painter Sandro Chia, then new to America, Basquiat’s paintings captured the spontaneity and ”emotional reality” of the city. The paintings were full of disparate elements that somehow worked together, though there was no apparent system linking them – ”just like New York,” notes Chia. He commended Basquiat’s work to the Italian dealer Emilio Mazzoli, who promptly bought 10 paintings for approximately $10,000 and set a date on the spot for Basquiat to have a show at his gallery in Modena. That spring, Basquiat went to Modena (his first trip to Europe), made a few more paintings there and had his first one- man show. WHILE BASQUIAT was in Europe, the buzz of the New York art world was of the opening of the spectacular double show that Julian Schnabel was having simultaneously at the Mary Boone and Leo Castelli Galleries in SoHo. People gossiped about how Schnabel and his dealer, Mary Boone, had won the imprimatur of Castelli, who handles Rauschenberg and Johns and hadn’t taken on a new artist in nearly a decade. In fact, while Schnabel came to epitomize the new artist-as-celebrity, Mary Boone became a public persona in her own right, the best known of a new breed of young dealers: bright, aggressive and hardheaded in business matters.

Annina Nosei, who had opened a gallery in SoHo in 1980, invited Basquiat to join it in September 1981 at the suggestion of Sandro Chia. He needed money and a place to paint. He was given cash to buy supplies and the use of the gallery’s basement storeroom as a studio. ”He had, perhaps, seen in me the mother type,” says the dealer, who suggests that that image led to later conflicts.

Basquiat worked feverishly, encouraged by Annina Nosei, who sometimes brought collectors down to the basement while he painted. Now rich with color, his paintings began to evolve from the sparer look of the work in the P.S. 1 show: large, primitive figures were filled in and articulated with raw detail and there was less of the all-over drawing of symbols and words. In a book published last year, ”The Art Dealers,” by Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones, Annina Nosei described her strategy for selling these works: ”I was putting together major sales to important collectors who were buying, for example, the Germans. I told them that they should have a work by Jean Michel Basquiat also, for $1,000 or $1,500 more on the bill of $25,000 they had already run up. This worked quite well: these collectors gained an early commitment, told their friends, and all of a sudden Basquiat’s paintings were found in collections beside more well-known artists, as the youngest of all.” At first, she priced his works very low, so that ”later when I show paintings for $2,000 the improvement in that new work confirmed the small commitment already made.”

The dealer was said to be selling canvases by Basquiat at a brisk pace – so brisk, some observers joked, that the paint was barely dry. Basquiat says he did not always feel the paintings were finished. Meanwhile, the basement-studio arrangement was gaining a certain notoriety. Critic Suzi Gablik called it ”something like a hothouse for forced growth,” and Jeffrey Deitch referred to it when he reviewed in Flash Art magazine Basquiat’s show at Annina Nosei’s in March 1982. Deitch wrote: ”Basquiat is likened to the wild boy raised by wolves, corralled into Annina’s basement and given nice clean canvases to work on instead of anonymous walls. A child of the streets gawked at by the intelligentsia. But Basquiat is hardly a primitive. He’s more like a rock star. . . . (He) reminds me of Lou Reed singing brilliantly about heroin to nice college boys.”

What press attention Basquiat received from the show was mostly favorable, and one month later, when he made his West Coast debut with a show at the Larry Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, William Wilson of The Los Angeles Times wrote, ”We are simultaneously convinced that he is a tough street-voodoo artist and a painter of astonishing precocity.”

Basquiat began chafing in the hothouse. With a second show scheduled at Mazzoli’s in Modena, he went to Europe again. ”They set it up for me so I’d have to make eight paintings in a week, for the show the next week,” says Basquiat. ”That was one of the things I didn’t like. I made them in this big warehouse there. Annina, Mazzoli and Bruno were there.” (Bischofberger was now representing him in Europe.) ”It was like a factory, a sick factory,” says Basquiat. ”I hated it.” The Mazzoli show was canceled. After that episode, Basquiat decided to quit the Nosei gallery. ”I wanted to be a star,” he says, ”not a gallery mascot.” He returned to the basement, where there were about 10 canvases, most of them unfinished, that he wanted to get rid of. In a classic display of his notorious temper, he slashed them, folded them, jumped on them and poured paint on them. Although the dealer says that Basquiat simply was destroying work that he didn’t intend to finish, the art world buzzed about the incident. ”Jean Michel more than anyone has made a success story out of scandal,” says Cortez.

”Jean was ungrateful,” Annina Nosei says. She believes she was responsible for launching Basquiat’s career internationally. ”But he was sweet in the end.” According to the dealer, their relationship as artist and dealer was not clearly severed that fall. (As with most galleries, there were no contracts involved.) Many months later, in February 1983, she mounted a one-man show of his work while he was cementing a relationship with a new dealer.

During the autumn of 1982, Basquiat lived like a hermit in a loft on Crosby Street in SoHo. ”I had some money; I made the best paintings ever,” he says now. ”I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.”

The fruit of that work, painted in a privacy he never knew at the Nosei gallery, made a big splash when it was unleashed on the art world in November 1982 at a one-man show in the Fun Gallery, run by Patti Astor, a former underground movie actress, and her partner, Bill Stelling. Bold and colorful, the canvases were crudely, irregularly stretched, and the works had more of the gritty immediacy of the paintings he had done before he joined the Nosei gallery, in part because he returned to a more intense drawing of words and symbols. ”I liked that show the best,” says Bischofberger. ”The work was very rough, not easy, but likable. It was subtle and not too chic. The opening was great, too. It drew young blacks and Puerto Ricans, along with limousines from uptown.”

Late that winter, he spent time in Los Angeles, preparing for a second show at Larry Gagosian’s gallery and working at the dealer’s house. Again, he felt pressure and regrets now that paintings were released that ”I didn’t want released.” A number of dealers had been courting Basquiat in New York. (”It’s no honor,” he says wryly. ”There’re more dealers than artists these days.”) One was Tony Shafrazi, an Iranian who had been interested in showing Basquiat in his SoHo gallery as early as 1981. In 1974, he had sprayed red paint on Picasso’s ”Guernica” when it still hung in the Museum of Modern Art. Police removed him from the scene while he spelled out his name for bystanders. The painting, protected by varnish, was undamaged, and finally the case came to nothing. Ironically, Shafrazi has helped legitimize the graffiti-art movement by becoming the dealer for such artists as Haring, Scharf and Ronnie Cutrone, but, partly because of the Picasso incident, he got nowhere with Basquiat. Others who had discussions with the artist included Metro Pictures (Robert Longo’s gallery) and the Monique Knowlton Gallery.

Basquiat’s temperamental nature didn’t always allow him to receive these overtures with grace. One dealer, visiting his loft and noting his fondness for health food, went away and came back with a big jar of fruits and nuts. ”But what she really wanted were my paintings,” he says. ”She tried to tell me that her chauffeur, who was black, worked with her in her gallery, not that he was her driver.” As she walked out of his door in defeat, Basquiat leaned out his window and dumped the contents of the jar on her head.

When Basquiat finally did join a new gallery, he went straight to the major leagues and, to the surprise of some of his friends, joined Mary Boone. ”I wanted to be in a gallery with older artists,” he says. And he wanted to insure, as well, that any lingering associations with graffiti art were severed.

Mary Boone, perhaps reacting to a spate of publicity about herself and her business style, now is careful to avoid any appearance of hype and self- promotion. In fact, initially she regarded Basquiat with caution, she says, vaguely repelled by all the fuss. ”There was a period of about a year and a half, whenit was impossible to wake up in the morning and not hear about Jean Michel Basquiat,” she says. Introduced to him by Bischofberger, she says she waited until she became convinced that Basquiat had staying power. ”I’d walk into some collector’s home and there would be something by Jean, hanging next to Rauschenberg and Stella,” she recalls. ”It looked great. It surprised me.” She has sold his paintings to such longtime clients as Peter Ludwig, the German candy tycoon who has his own museum of contemporary art in Cologne, and to Sidney Janis, the 88- year-old dealer who has hung Basquiat’s work in three group shows at his gallery.

Though Annina Nosei encouraged his high productivity of paintings, since Basquiat joined Mary Boone’s gallery he has tended to hold on to pieces longer and rework them more, with his new dealer’s blessing. ”His output is high,” she says, ”but he’s getting more critical of what he holds back.” He estimates that last year he finished 30 or 40 paintings. Yet any danger of the market’s being flooded with Basquiats is offset by the fact that Mary Boone represents the artist jointly with Bischofberger – they split the standard dealer’s commission of 50 percent – who takes much of the work to Europe to sell. The Boone gallery’s promotion of Basquiat has been low key; he didn’t have a one-man show there until last May, his second season with the gallery, and the dealer charges $10,000 to $25,000 for a painting, a purposeful underpricing, she says.

For the most part, Basquiat is pleased, although the pricing of his work does bother him. Paintings by such Boone superstars as David Salle sell for $40,000 and up. ”David Salle’s been at it longer, I know,” sighs Basquiat. ”I should be patient, right?” DOWN ON THE Lower East Side, in a small newly renovated building that he rents, which is owned by Andy Warhol, four big empty canvases are waiting for the touch of Basquiat’s brush. The vast whiteness of the canvases seems a world away from the dirty walls on which he first exhibited his work. Downstairs, a friend named Shenge, who acts as major domo, has his quarters, while the floor above the studio is Basquiat’s domain, the place he keeps his VCR and a hundred or so cassettes of his favorite movies. In one corner is the director’s chair the late Sam Peckinpah used while shooting ”The Wild Bunch” and ”The Osterman Weekend.”

Basquiat takes a tube of paint and squirts a blob of brown pigment directly onto the virgin canvas, which is actually white paint spread over a work he never finished. It gives the surface a layered texture he likes. In fact, many of his paintings deliberately expose the buildup of layer upon layer, the shadow of an earlier version poking through. He ”edits” by painting over. Under his brush, a brown face soon begins to form on the canvas. ”The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings,” he says. ”I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them.” Some of the figures are taken from life. For example, one powerful painting was drawn from a sad old man in a wheelchair whom Basquiat saw on a neighborhood street last spring. ”He would say to the young Puerto Rican helping him, ‘Put me in the sun, put me in the sun.’ He was a Cajun, from Louisiana. I gave him some money and he wanted to hug me, to pull me in. I pulled back.” But the vision is transformed in Basquiat’s bold painting. It is saturated with red, the wheelchair like a throne, the old man almost a god whose head is a primitive mask, frightening and defiant.

”Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy,” a book by Robert Farris Thompson, lies on his studio table, and thus it raises the question of influences on his art. His early rendering of primitive faces was instinctual, he says; he studied African masks later. He has never been to Haiti and there was no Haitian art at home when he was growing up. But his early inspirations include the master employer of primitive impulses, Picasso. Actually, says Basquiat, ”I like kids’ work more than work by real artists any day.” SINCE I WAS 17, I thought I might be a star,” Basquiat says. ”I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix. . . . I had a romantic feeling of how people had become famous. Even when I didn’t think my stuff was that good, I’d have faith.” In the last year or so, Basquiat has established a friendship with an artist who probably understands the power of celebrity better than anyone else in the culture. Once when he was trying to sell his photocopied postcards on a SoHo streetcorner, he followed Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler into a restaurant. Warhol bought one of the cards for $1. Later, when Basquiat had graduated to painting sweatshirts, he went to Warhol’s Factory one day. ”I just wanted to meet him, he was an art hero of mine,” he recalls. Warhol looked at his sweatshirts and gave him some money to buy more.

In his show at Mary Boone’s last spring, Basquiat exhibited a painting called ”Brown Spots.” It is a portrait of Warhol as a banana, a sly reference to an album cover Warhol once did for the Velvet Underground. That same spring, in ”The New Portrait” show at P.S. 1, a portrait appeared by Warhol of Basquiat, an acrylic and photo-silkscreen painting, with Basquiat posed like Michelangelo’s David.

Their friendship seems symbiotic. As the elder statesman of the avant-garde, Warhol stamps the newcomer Basquiat with approval and has probably been able to give him excellent business advice. In social circles and through his magazine, Interview, he has given Basquiat a good deal of exposure. Though Warhol teases Basquiat about his girlfriends, Basquiat finds the time to go with Warhol to parties and openings. In return, Basquiat is Warhol’s link to the current scene in contemporary art, and he finds Basquiat’s youth invigorating. ”Jean Michel has so much energy,” he says. One acquaintance suggests that the paternal concern Warhol shows for Basquiat – for example, he urges the younger artist to pursue healthful habits and exercise – is a way for Warhol to redeem something in himself. When asked how Warhol has influenced him, Basquiat says, ”I wear clean pants all the time now.”

Through a series of working collaborations in the last year, the relationship between them has flourished. First, at the suggestion of Bruno Bischofberger, they made a suite of 12 paintings with Francesco Clemente, with each of the three artists working in turn on each canvas. Then Basquiat and Warhol collaborated on huge pieces of unstretched canvas, some of them 10 by 20 feet. Warhol would silkscreen or paint words or symbols, a blown-up headline from The New York Post, for instance (”Plug Pulled on Coma Mom”), or perhaps a giant corporate logo such as Paramount Pictures’ mountain peak. Basquiat would then tackle the canvas, painting in his own strange figures, words and symbols. Thirty of these collaborative works, now owned by Bischofberger, will probably be exhibited in Europe. ”I’d run out of ideas,” says Warhol, to explain his involvement in the project.

But after Basquiat’s show at Mary Boone last spring, some critics complained that his recent work had grown too soft, too slick – and one blamed the long shadow of Warhol. ”They’re fresh out of the Factory,” – wrote Nicholas A. Moufarrege in a blistering review in Flash Art. ”These new paintings are too charming, they lack the nitty-gritty hip-hop and the jagged power that his last New York show at the Fun Gallery emanated.” Geldzahler saw the influence, too, but not as a negative force: ”The paintings had a lot of Warhol, but that’s to be expected. Basquiat seems to be able to keep his balance.” The artist himself is pleased with the work. ”I think I’m more economical now,” he says. ”Every line means something.”

Success, however, and sudden public scrutiny, can mean an end to artistic experimentation in private. ”Basquiat, like Schnabel, makes a great many works,” explains the collector Eugene Schwartz, who has bought three of the artist’s works and donated one to a museum in Israel. ”In exploring new ideas, he makes mistakes. But within that work he also has made minor masterpieces. I say ‘minor’ only because they haven’t yet stood the test of time.” But for some artists, the pressure to succeed and simply to repeat past successes can be too much. ”I think there’s a greater tendency today for artists to burn out,” says Barbara Haskell, curator of the Whitney Museum. ”It’s a question of whether they can maintain a personal space to work out and take the next step.”

”People think I’m burning out, but I’m not,” Basquiat insists. ”Some days I can’t get an idea, and I think, man, I’m just washed up, but it’s just a mood.” What doubtlessly helps Basquiat and many other artists to transcend the pressure is simply their own deep drive to make art. ”There’s really nothing else to do in life, except flirt with girls,” he jokes, then gets serious. ”If I’m away from painting for a week, I get bored.” Even when he had been painting at Warhol’s studio during the day, or if he had been out in the evening, he would often go home alone to work. He still keeps rock-and-roll hours. ”He’ll run in here in an $800 suit and paint all night,” says his friend Shenge. ”In the morning, he’ll be standing in front of a picture with his suit just covered in paint.” MEANWHILE, ONCE A painting is finished, it takes on a life of its own. As part of the never-ending marketing effort, paintings by Basquiat and other hot young art stars are always being crated and shipped. They are flown to an exhibition in Europe, a dealer on the West Coast, a collector’s home. This winter, Basquiat’s work was shown at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, more work was part of a show of young Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and new paintings were unveiled for sale in Bischofberger’s Zurich gallery. And as the paintings move, their price escalates. Schwartz remembers the three Basquiats he bought less than four years ago. ”They were just lying there,” he says, ”No one wanted them. Now you can’t get them.” Geldzahler says he has been priced right out of the Basquiat market. And while the art public waits to see Basquiat’s newest work at his next New York show, next month at Mary Boone’s, his early paintings continue to pump life – and money – into the market. The works surface at auction, as five did at Sotheby’s last fall, or perhaps are quietly bought from a private collector by a dealer who will hold them and wait, dazzled by their meteoric appreciation. The artist, who does not profit from resales, may be off at work in a new direction, but even the paintings he said goodbye to long ago keep going round and round in today’s heady art world.

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Cosmos Suite paintings 2013: Celestial Storm by Vincent Johnson

CelestianStorm.overhead CosmosSuite.CelestialStorm.studio.artcat

Cosmos Suite paintings 2013: Celestial Storm by Vincent Johnson. Oil on canvas. 30″x40″.

This is the first painting I’ve created in the year 2013. Each of the paintings in the Cosmos Suite and Nine Grayscale paintings employs different elements in terms of paint application, type of painting media used, and the range of colors worked into the painted surface. This particular painting has four major layers of paint with more layers added and blended into the already laid down and worked paint. The second layer is allowed to bone dry before the last layers are applied. I’ve compiled several recipes for creating the paintings, which take several weeks as the underpainting layers are air-dried. After applying the third layers, I rest the work for a day or more to figure out what will be the plan of attack to complete and resolve the painting. With each work I strive to produce an elegant and beautiful image that is also compelling to engage from the perspective of the history of painting and of contemporary painting practices today.

Vincent Johnson

Los Angeles

1.21.2013

Celestial Storm: Studio view (2013)

Vincent Johnson is an artist and writer in Los Angeles

New Abstract Paintings: The Cosmos suite (2012)

Golden Dream (2012), part of the Cosmos Suite of paintings

: California Toilet, Filthy Light Switch (2010) by Vincent Johnson. Archival Epson print (Private Collection, Miami, Florida). I provided this image as I realized its clear similarity to Golden Dream, which I completed a week ago in my studio in Los Angeles.

Two at Night (2012) from the Cosmos suite of paintings, Oil on canvas, 30×40 inches

Cosmos. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson

Cosmos Red Yellow Green. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson

Green God. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson

This new painting series is part of my ongoing exploration of painting materials and techniques from the history of painting. The works combine knowledge of painting practices of both abstract and representation paintings. The works concern themselves purely with the visual power that paintings can do through the manipulation of paint. Some of the underpaintings are allowed to dry for months; some of those are built dark to light, others light to dark. None are made in a single setting. Most are worked and reworked using studio materials. Each new series takes a different approach to the painted surface from how the paint is applied, to varying the painting mediums. This suite concerns itself with the layering of paint by building up the surface and altering and reworking the wet paint with studio tools.

Two larger paintings will be completed and photographed on Sunday, July 15, 2012 and posted here.

Vincent Johnson, Grayscale painting: The Storm (2012). Oil on canvas, 30×40 inches, created in studio in Los Angeles, California

Vincent Johnson, Grayscale painting, Snow White/White Snow (2012). Oil on canvas, 30×40 inches, created in studio in Los Angeles

Vincent Johnson is an artist and writer in Los Angeles

Vincent Johnson, Nine Grayscale Paintings, Beacon Arts Center, Los Angeles, (2001). Oil on canvas. Each panel is 20×24 inches.

photograph of silver paint on my hands in studio, Los Angeles, during the creation of Nine Grayscale paintings.

Vincent Johnson – in Los Angeles studio working on Nine Grayscale Paintings, 2011

Vincent Johnson

Los Angeles, California

http://www.vincentjohnsonart.com

Vincent Johnson received his MFA in Fine Art Painting from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was selected for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 for the Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles. His 2010 photo project – California Toilet, Filthy Light Switch, is in exhibition at Another Year in LA gallery in West Hollywood through early March 2013. His work has appeared in several venues, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (Freestyle (2001, The Philosophy of Time Travel, 2007, and The Bearden Project, 2011-2012), PS1 Museum, Queens, NY, SK Stiftung, Cologne, Germany, Santa Monica Museum of Art, LAXART, Las Cienegas Projects, Boston University Art Museum, Kellogg Museum, Cal Poly Pomona.

vincentjohnsonart@gmail.com

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May

Reports on 2011 Frieze fair London

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Art

Frieze Art Fair 2011, London

‘Self Portrait I’ by Ryan Gander, 2011, at the Lisson Gallery stand at Frieze Art Fair

By Emma O’Kelly

Economic doom and gloom may be swirling overhead, but during the Frieze Art Fair wealth, glamour and decadence still reign supreme. At the VIP opening, fat-walleted, fashioned-up collectors queued in droves to get in and scope out the 173 galleries and their artworks, which, as always, ranged from incredible to inscrutable, to downright annoying.

What to make of the swirling umbrellas placed on upside-down zebra print wallpaper designed ‘in homage to famous new York restaurant Gino’ by Alex Zachary? How to respond to Andra Ursuta‘s ‘bog body’- a life-size sculpture of herself dragged from a marsh and covered in splodges of silicone to represent semen? A little goes a long way at Frieze; its size guarantees sensory overload, but straightforwardly beautiful pieces such as Doh Ho Su’s fabric sculptures of doorknobs, pipes and lightswitches, or Carsten Nicolai‘s tableaux at Galerie Eigen+Art provide anchors in the storm.

Christian Jankowski‘s Riva yacht could be bought either as a boat or an artwork, depending on how much you were willing to pay for it, and had men clustering to take their picture next to it. Though it was meant as a symbol ‘to open wide the structures behind selling art’ in the words of the artist, it felt more Ideal Home Show than art show. Less oblique was Michael Landy‘s Credit Card Destroying Machine, first shown, remarkably, in the Louis Vuitton store in Bond Street last year. You put in your card and receive a signed drawing.

Now in its ninth year, the fair is as buoyant as ever, if a little more conservative than in previous years, and 2012 will see a sister event in New York and an additional Frieze Masters fair in London, dealing in artworks made before 2000. At the Frame part of the show, in which 24 young galleries exhibit one artist, curators whispered that South American artists especially those from Brazil and Argentina, are the ones to watch.

The ripple effect created by Frieze means galleries across town pull out all the stops to woo collectors, and a host of excellent shows, among them Ahmed Alsoudani at Haunch of Venison, run long after the tent has gone. Opportunists too, pitch in; on the south side of the Regents Park, a strip of John Nash terraces have been converted into millionaires pads with price tags of up to £45m. During Frieze, one mansion is turned into a temporary gallery of works from private collections for a show called The House of the Nobleman. Around 700 guests sashayed across the park to the opening party – and this time it wasn’t art they were after.

Frieze Art Fair 2011

Galerie Eigen+Art dedicated its whole stand to Carsten Nicolai

Michael Riedell at the David Zwirner stand

Untitled work by Isa Genzken at David Zwirner

Untitled (tondo) by Jason Martin at the Lisson Gallery stand

‘Parking garage’ by Rita McBride at the Mai 36 Galerie Zurich stand

‘August 6, 1945′ by Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth

‘Crush’ by Andra Ursuta at the Ramiken Crucible gallery in the Frame area of Frieze

The Box Gallery from LA reignites the work of Judith Bernstein

‘Norman Foster’ by Xavier Veilhan at the Galerie Perrotin stand

Elmgreen & Dragset’s untitled piece suggests a woman in a morgue

Untitled by Ahmed Alsoudani, on show at the Haunch of Venison in Mayfair

The White Cube chose Frieze week to launch its third London gallery in a 1970s warehouse on Bermondsey Street. Retrofitted by Casper Mueller Kneer Architects, the building’s 780sq m South Galleries opens with ‘Structure & Absence’, a group show that uses the Chinese concept of a scholar’s rock as a motif. It features several veterans of White Cube and Frieze alike: Andreas Gursky, Brice Marden, Sterling Ruby, Gabriel Orozco and Damien Hirst
Photography by Ben Westoby, courtesy of White Cube

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The Wall Street Journal

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
October 14, 2011

All’s Fair in London

By EMMA CRICHTON-MILLER

Tony Kyriacou/Rex Features

A visitor admires Nigel Cooke’s ‘No Holidays’ (2011) at Frieze Art Fair.

Artists, collectors, critics, curators and dealers have descended on London through Sunday to take part in the seventh annual Frieze Art Fair (www.friezeartfair.com), a key marketplace for contemporary art globally, with 173 galleries from 33 countries, showcasing more than 1,000 artists. Frieze’s success has inspired an autumn art jamboree throughout the city, stimulating satellite fairs, auction sales and shows in other galleries.

Started in 2003 by Frieze Magazine editors Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp to sell contemporary art to a growing cohort of international collectors, fair participants are vetted by a committee of their peers to attract blue-chip galleries, as well as a high-spending, contemporary-art-loving audience. “We provide a focused contemporary art fair—that is our appeal,” Ms. Sharp says.

Almost since its inception, Frieze stole contemporary thunder from those old ladies of the art market—Tefaf in Maastricht, strongest in Old Masters and antiques, and Art Basel, which spans both modern and contemporary. The appeal of Frieze, says art consultant Tanya Gertik, is “the energy and the buzz. It’s very sociable.”

Courtesy of Cristina Grajales Gallery, New York

Sebastian Errazuriz’s ‘Porcupine Cabinet’ (2011) on show at PAD.

Since Frieze first opened, international art fairs, alongside their cousins—the biennials—have proliferated: Art Basel spawned Art Basel Miami Beach, which then generated Design Miami and, in turn, Design Miami Basel, set up to achieve the same market intensification for contemporary design that the mother fair had achieved for art. Older fairs, like Art Chicago and the Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair, have ceded some priority to newer fairs, such as Art Hong Kong and Masterpiece London.

But some collectors find the blockbuster model overwhelming, preferring a more intimate environment. “The minute a fair gets too large, the enjoyment goes out of it,” Ms. Gertik says. Bernard Hartogs, a collector of art and design, adds: “I don’t go to Frieze. It’s too big.” This is one reason why Frieze Week has also, quietly, become PAD week.

It was in 2007 that DesignArt first opened in Hanover Square, with just 19 galleries. Hoping to benefit from the seasonal delirium, French antique dealer Patrick Perrin and modern- and contemporary-art specialist Stéphane Custot, the founders of the successful Pavillon des Arts et du Design in Paris, launched a complementary fair to Frieze, offering one-off and limited-edition contemporary design mixed in with classic European modern design. A year later, the fair was offered Berkeley Square, a prime location, and the charmingly Continental mix of decorative arts, with modern and contemporary design, began to gel. By 2009, the duo felt confident enough to introduce modern art to the mix, experimenting in London with the formula pioneered in Paris. The renamed Pavilion of Art & Design London would invite galleries who specialized in fine art, decorative art or design that post-dated 1860—made after the advent of industrial mass manufacture, but without the contemporary art that is so well served in Regent’s Park.

Running through Sunday, PAD (www.padlondon.net), is small and selective, with only 58 galleries. The genial mix of art, design and fine craft—Cristina Grajales’s stand this week offers two striking cabinets by Christophe Côme and Sebastian Errazuriz, while Jousse Entreprise has a classic Jean Royère sofa—promotes a way of living with art as much as the buying of it.

Gérard Faggionato of Faggionato Fine Arts in London, says PAD “is comfortable, and people come back two or three times during the week.”

Like Frieze, PAD doesn’t issue an overall statement of sales, arguing that since sales often aren’t concluded until months after the event, such statistics are misleading. Instead, it points you to the quality of the exhibits. Andrew Duncanson from Modernity has rare pieces by Alvar Aalto; Todd Merrill, an outstanding 3.5-meter sculpture of a dandelion (circa 1960) by Harry Bertoia; and Bernard Jacobson, some magnificent Robert Motherwell canvases. “The material is very good,” Julian Treager, a collector of fine art, design and jewelry says. “Last year, I bought a vintage Cartier necklace from the 1970s. The year before, some pieces by Studio Job from Carpenters Workshop Gallery.”

For the past five years, these two very different fairs have flourished in a finely balanced symbiosis. Next year, however, things are set to change when Frieze launches Frieze Masters, a second fair that will partly encroach on PAD’s territory by exhibiting works of art from antiquity through 2000. Frieze Masters will occupy a marquee specially designed by New York art-space specialist Annabelle Selldorf, on the other side of Regent’s Park from the contemporary fair, with its own program of events. Ms. Sharp explains that they are “bringing a contemporary approach to historical art—we will bring this art to new audiences.” This initiative has been inspired by her recognition that “the past is present in every decision contemporary artists make. This is an opportunity to explore those connections more imaginatively.” Meanwhile, in May, Frieze hopes to recreate its London achievement in New York, with a contemporary fair on Randall’s Island Park, overlooking the East River.

PAD, however, remains unintimidated. Full of confidence in their concept, and with a line-up of loyal galleries, PAD too is launching a New York edition, Nov. 11-13. As Frieze and PAD continue in full swing, there is competitive tension in the air.

Mr. Perrin hopes his prime location, in Berkeley Square, will keep his modern dealers away from Frieze Masters. “If you bring the right collectors in front of the right booths, the dealers will trust you,” he says, adding that “Frieze had no interest in modern painting. The people from contemporary art have almost no interest in the past.”

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by J. J. Charlesworth

October 16, 2011

Frieze Art Fair

FRIEZE ART FAIR, London13–16 October 2011

Was the lack of booze a sign? Previously on opening night in the big tent, waves of waiters would set out at a given time to distribute a slow flood of Pommery, gradually inebriating a crowd of revelers.

This year change is afoot. After a hard afternoon of strolling the boulevards of the fair, we started to wonder when the sparkling wave would hit us. So it was a shock to notice that bottles of Pom were being quietly distributed to each gallery stand, to be served at the discretion of the dealers. This year then, getting a drink depended on how much a gallerist decided they liked you. The horror of a critic dependent on a gallerist for a free drink!

But to be fair to the fair, rationing the booze was a good move; after all, as various gallerists I spoke to pointed out, opening night in recent years has tended to get a bit messy. And for sure, the more subdued, polite atmosphere this year seemed to demand more seriousness and consideration from the VIP crowd. But turning down the fizz-quota seems to reflect the broader sense of caution and unease in this year’s edition: with economic uncertainty and the threat of a further worldwide recession casting a shadow on the art market, the mood was definitely downbeat.

Money was clearly a preoccupation and not in a good way. One gallerist in the Frame section (the “emerging” gallery section) brooded over the hike in stand fees; and that, combined with the grinding increase in VAT imposed by the government this year, made turning a profit tougher than ever. Throughout the fair, the need to cover costs appeared to determine how gallerists filled their stands. In good years, you tend to see stands with less work, bigger work, or single-artist presentations. This year, however, clutter and density was the rule, with dealers presenting often-smaller works across a greater range of their artists. Large sculpture, apart from the biggest galleries who can still afford to hold sizeable spaces, was notably lacking. And by and large, dealers were playing it safe with the kind of work on offer: swathes of uncontroversial, positive, and colorful paintings and sculptures, easy for collectors to like, gave the fair a weirdly lurid visual buzz, but little punch.

Was it anxiety over sales that gave this year’s fair too much of the pile-it-high trade-fair vibe? Or was it the changes to the layout of the fair? It seems trivial, but the cafés and drink counters, previously located throughout the fair, had been tucked away in separate wings of their own. Not so trivial perhaps, as the same shift out from the main spaces was also imposed on those special artists’ commissions that art fairs nowadays like to indulge in, and which has often been a highlight of a visit to Frieze. Frieze Projects, curated for the second year by London curator Sarah McCrory, seemed this year almost invisible, with the bulk of them either offsite, web-based or shifted into discrete spaces on the periphery of the fair. Pierre Huyghe’s unnervingly dreamlike aquarium, Recollection—with its bemused hermit crab inhabiting a replica of Brancusi’s bronze Sleeping Muse (1910) and creepy spider crabs grazing on Mars-like pinkish rocks—was tucked away in a space behind the restaurant. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the tent, Peles Empire (Katharina Stoever and Barbara Wolff) put up a vodka bar in a shared space with LuckyPDF (London internet-art hipsters) whose video studio was situated in a dark anteroom.

This only left Christian Jankowski’s bombastic and profoundly stupid The Finest Art on Water to occupy a space alongside the conventional stands. Jankowski’s project consisted of a 10m luxury motor yacht, being sold as a motor yacht, for €500,000. Alternatively, you could also buy it “as a work of art” for an extra €125,000. As far as “critical” gestures go, Jankowski’s insight into the vacuous intangibility of art-value displayed all the fatigued, witless cynicism of an art world now profoundly uncomfortable with the ethics of its relationship to private wealth, yet inertly incapable of doing anything about it. How else, also, to appreciate Michael Landy’s naively raging intervention at Thomas Dane’s stand? Visitors queued to have their credit cards shredded by a Tinguely-like credit card-munching machine, in return for various scrappy drawings by Landy. His bizarrely moralizing obsession with the ascetic rejection of consumer capitalism—at an art fair—seemed like a bad case of having your cake and not eating it.

Ironically, all this whining about the corruption of the art world by money accompanied a bit of belt-tightening when it came to the Frieze Projects and Frieze Talks themselves, with fewer projects and talks than in the last few editions—suggesting a budget cut, or at least a desire not to distract the punters too much from the urgent business of buying stuff, with or without their credit cards. It also starts to throw up the uneasy question of what kind of event Frieze Art Fair really is, especially when one considers that Frieze projects, for example, continues to receive public subsidy to put on artists’ commissions in what is essentially a trade fair for rich collectors, and where the entrance fee for members of the public unlucky enough not to have a VIP pass is now a dissuasive £27.

So the gloss, the glamour, and the fun of the fair have all faded a little. Frieze Art Fair needs to pay the bills and get ready for its leap across the Atlantic for its impending, Armory-busting edition next May in New York. On its Eastern Front, Frieze needs to stave off the increasing threat of the FIAC in Paris—and the danger that some galleries will opt for one over the other: already this year Barbara Gladstone and Friedrich Petzel have opted for FIAC without Frieze—perhaps a sign of things to come. In an art market no longer quite as fizzy and bubbly as before, the days of free-flowing champagne may not be back for some time.

JJ CHARLESWORTH is associate editor of ArtReview magazine http://www.artreview.com He blogs at blog.jjcharlesworth.com.

criticismism » Blog Archive » Found Objects 17/10/11

October 17, 2011

[...] much has been written about the fair this year, I know. But this sharp analysis by critic JJ Charlesworth makes a lot of [...]

Name

1Frieze Art Fair 2011.

2Pierre Huyghe, Recollection, 2011.

3Peles Empire, Noroc, 2011.

4Live from Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDFTV.

5Gagosian, Frieze Art Fair 2011.

6Christian Jankowski, The Finest Art on Water, 2011.

7Marine Hugonnier, Art For Modern Architecture Glr GuardianIranian Revolution/Hostage Crisis, Max Wigram Gallery.

8Michael Landy, Thomas Dane Gallery, 2011.

9Frieze Talks, 2011, Shooting Gallery: The Problems of Photographic Representation. Frieze Talks 2011.

1Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Linda Nylind. All images courtesy of Frieze Art Fair.
2Pierre Huyghe, Recollection, 2011. Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2011. Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Polly Braden.
3Peles Empire, Noroc, 2011. Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2011. Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Polly Braden.
4Live from Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDFTV. Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2011. Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Polly Braden.
5Gagosian, Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Linda Nylind.
6Christian Jankowski, The Finest Art on Water, 2011. Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2011. Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Linda Nylind.
7Marine Hugonnier, Art For Modern Architecture Glr GuardianIranian Revolution/Hostage Crisis, Max Wigram Gallery. Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Linda Nylind.
8Michael Landy, Thomas Dane Gallery, 2011. Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Linda Nylind.
9Frieze Talks, 2011, Shooting Gallery: The Problems of Photographic Representation. Frieze Talks 2011. Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2011. Photo by Polly Braden.

ART OBSERVED

AO on site photoset – London, Frieze Week: Opening night of the The Return of the House of the Nobleman, private viewing

October 16th, 2011
Yves Klein all photos by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed

This year marked the 2nd iteration of the House of the Nobleman, a privately sponsored exhibition which took place at the Boswall House, 15,000sqft mansion at 2 Cornwall Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park and the Frieze 2011 Art Fair. Art Observed was on site for the private viewing. On view were works by Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Peter Paul Rubens, Edgar Degas, Max Ernst, Damien Hirst, Marlene Dumas, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Sigmar Polke, Christian Boltanski, Anish Kapoor, Nick Hornby, Matthew Day Jackson, Cecily Brown, Lucian Freud, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Longo, Alexander Calder, Eugenia Emets, Francesco Clemente, Salvador Dali, Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, George Condo, Takashi Murakami, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Gerhard Richter.

Monet, Claude “ Chemin dans le brouillard”, (1879)

more images after the jump…

Boltanski, Christian “Reliquaire”, (1990)

Shaw, Raqib “Portrait of Dorothea Kannengeisser”, (2008)

Doig, Peter “C+ W (Country and Western)”, (1983)

Hirst, Damien “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue”, (2000). Calder, Alexander “Enseigne de lunettes”, (1976)

(left) Richter, Gerhard “Entwurf fur Grund (Basic Draft)”, (1972)
(right) Ernst, Max “Fleurs sur Fond Vert”, (1928)

Zaha Hadid

Ho Ji Yong, “Wolf 4”, (2007)

Takashi Murakami

Rolf Sachs, Pullus Domesticus (2010)

Bouke de Vries, Like a prayer (2011)

Anish Kapoor, Untitled (circle), (1996)

Stefano Curto “Evolution Involution”, (2011)

House of the Nobleman – Exhibition Site

AO On Site (with Photoset) – London: Frieze Art Fair 2011 Day 2 Review

October 13th, 2011

Doug Aitken, Now (2011) at 303 Gallery NY. All photos for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

AO is on site in London for this week’s Frieze Art Fair. With 173 galleries selling an estimated $350 million worth of art, a level of anxiety pervades as the week’s results will be indicative of the overall international contemporary art market. Works like Christian Jankowski’s droll The Finest Art on Water and Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine directly comment on the world economic state, while the overall demeanor remains upbeat, with art world moguls and A-list celebrities enjoying the festivities.

Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine (2011), Thomas Dane Gallery

More text and images after the jump…

Christian Jankowski, The Finest Art on Water (2011).

Retired fashion designer Valentino was photographed on the smaller of two infamous Christian Jankowski boats. Priced at €65 million while simply a boat, the 204-foot yacht jumps to €75 million once deemed a piece of art—as approved (with certificate) by Jankowski. When the Guardian asked Jankowski how the global recession is impacting art, to which he replied, “I don’t see the effect. I’m not one of the people who ever made much money.” No buyer information has been released thus far.

The Financial Times reports that the Tate team has been buying with its £120,000 budget, seeking mostly familiar artists. Among others, they have acquired works by two important woman artists: the yellow Tumour (1969) by Alina Szapocznikow is a wall-based polyester sculpture in toxic yellow from Broadway 1602 of New York, and a portfolio of Portuguese artist Helena Almeida spans four decades of the artist’s drawings and photographs from Madrid’s Galeria Helga de Alvear.

Iwan Wirth, at Hauser and Wirth

Ida Applebroog Modern Olympia (after giotto) (1997-2001), Louise Bourgeois Untitled (2005) at Hauser and Wirth

Paul McCarthy at Hauser and Wirth

Thomas Houseago, Hermaphrodite (2011). In Regent’s Sculpture Park

Other major sales include the purchase of Haus des Lehrers (2003) by Neo Rauch, sold by David Zwirner to an American collector for $1,350,000. Thomas Houseago has also been selling well, with his sculpture Hermaphrodite (2o11) reported at $425,000 and his Earth Mask II (2011) sold through Hauser & Wirth.

Artist Michael Landy with his Credit Card Destroying Machine (2011), Thomas Dane Gallery

Despite the platform of optimism and glamor, Thomas Dane’s presentation of Michael Landy’s latest work draws attention to the contradiction of this year’s fair. Credit Card Destroying Machine (2011) does what its name suggests: in order to make a drawing, Landy’s odd conglomeration of rickety wires and dead animal heads destroys a credit card. The work on paper is then given freely to the viewer who volunteered a now ruined credit card.

Landy supervised the showcase on Wednesday, telling onlookers that the machine is intentionally “very human”—sometimes it breaks, sometimes it gets caught on things. The analytical and journalistic consensus is that the work speaks to the underlying tension of Frieze this year: although upbeat and enthralling, the financial complications paired with human error are an undeniable, often unspoken presence at the fair. Landy’s work successfully targets the mixed emotions via disseminating sensationalism. The work is on reserve for $189,000.

Tom Dingle, Gallery Director at Thomas Dane of London, confirmed that spirits were high. “I feel no looming dread,” he told AO, “Frieze is always good fun and all our friends are here.”

Pierre Huyghe, Recollection (2011).

Another popular work is Pierre Huyghe’s Recollection (2011). Crowds discussed the hermit crab living inside a Brancusi Muse replica (originally 1910) with adoration and fascination. The work is reminiscent of Brancusi’s work during Art Basel, which was juxtaposed with Richard Serra’s more contemporary black paintings at Fondation Beyeler.

Art dealer Jay Jopling at White Cube booth.

White Cube Bermondsey is the gallery’s third space in London at a very large 58,000 sq ft, with the full site totaling 1.7 acres (74,300 sq ft). Prior to its renovation, the building was a warehouse. Its inaugural exhibition, Structure & Absence, is on view through November 26th, which includes Chinese scholars’ rocks, and comments on the work of living artists Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume, among others. At the new space, White Cube includes an auditorium to host lectures and other programs. Founding dealer Jay Jopling was on site at Regent’s Park, speaking animatedly near Damien Hirst’s fresh pastel dot paintings.

Hirst features heavily in this week’s contemporary auction sales, which thus far have proven successful. A standout example is art star Jacob Kassay, whose work exceeded its estimate at Phillips de Pury by $147,000, officially selling at $257,000. Just two years ago, Phillips de Pury had priced him at $8,000, surprising everyone with an actual selling bid of $86,500. Tomorrow at Christie’s, Gerhard Richter’s Kerze, or Candle (1982) has a high estimate of nine million pounds.

Anish Kapoor at Lisson Gallery

Although powerful gallerists traditionally dominate the crowd on site and by reputation, this year was one for the artist and activist. Correspondingly, Art Review announced the 100 most powerful people in the art world, and Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei ranked number one, with gallery tycoons Larry Gagosian and Ivan Wirth at numbers 4 and 8. Ai Weiwei’s designation follows his recent release from arrest and detainment by the Chinese government earlier this year.

Asian influence on the fair has been hotly debated by art critics and journalists. The Chinese economy has been largely accepted as a global powerhouse, and so too as an art market one. In 2011, White Cube and Lehmann Maupin both sought to open galleries in East Asia, and Galeri Perrotin and Lehman Maupin continue to seek space. Gagosian Gallery has a showroom in Hong Kong, as inaugurated by Damien Hirst’s diamond-covered baby skull in the Forgotten Promises exhibition. Many of the galleries at Frieze now also show at Art HK in Hong Kong, which was purchased by Art Basel Miami.

Along with the Asian presence, South America stood out as well with works such as Brazilian gallery A Gentil Carioca’s Visiting Portraiture by Laura Lama. For 50 pounds, visitors can purchase a professional ‘makeover’—a portrait of the visitor at a much older age.

Urs Fischer, Untitled (2003), Gagosian Gallery

In a crowd of friends and notables, celebrity sightings were numerous. Musician Gwen Stefani, and models Natalia Vodianova and Elle Macphearson were counted in the crowd alongside collectors like Princess of Sharjah Hoor al-Qasimi, Sir Nicholas Serota of Tate, and the Serpentine Gallery‘s power duo Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones (fresh from talks at Tuesday’s Bidoun Auction).

Ultimately, art, parties, and economic confidence largely diverge. Hesitations at the fair have yet to reveal booming sales results, and while the auction hammer prices are high, this does not fully quell fears. As the fair continues through the weekend, only time will tell.

Elmgreen & Dragset, The Fruit of Knowledge (2001), Victoria Miro Gallery

Art Dealer Thaddaeus Ropac at his booth.

Tony Cragg sculpture, Thaddaeus Ropac Booth

Erwin Wurm, Cajetan (2009), Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Antony Gormley at Thaddaeus Ropac

Bice Curiger, curator of the Venice Biennale

Artist Wim Delvoye

Pace Gallery’s Nicola Vassell

Chantal Crousel at her booth

Tacita Dean, More or Less (2011), Marian Goodman Gallery

Anri Sala, No Window No Cry (2010), Marian Goodman Gallery

Tara Donovan at Pace Gallery

Zhang Huan, Tara Donovan and Chuck Close at Pace Gallery

Jonathan Meese, Bortolami Gallery

Will Ryman, Rose (2011), Paul Kasmin Gallery

Jack and Dinos Chapman, The Milk of Human Weakness II and God Does Not Love You O.M.F.G., (both 2011), White Cube

Julian Opie, Modern Tower (2001), Lisson Gallery

Grayson Perry, Map of Truths and Beliefs (2011), Victorian Miro

Ali Banisadr, Time for outrage (2011), Marc Quinn, Shell sculpture (2011), Jason Martin Witch (2008), Jason Martin Witch (2008)

Pace Gallery

Sadie Coles Gallery

Sarah Lucas, Something Changed Raymond (2000), Sadie Coles Gallery

Tracey Emin, Sex Drawing Syndey Three (2007), Lehmann Maupin

Do Ho Suh, Cause & Effect (2007), Lehmann Maupin

Josiah McElhecny, Crystalline Landscape after hablik and Luckhardt III (2011), Donald Yound Gallery

Donald Yound Gallery

Mark Handforth, Coat Hanger (2010), Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Nate Van Woert, Not Yet Titled 7 (2011), Galerie Yvon Lambert

Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Tracey Emin, And I Said I Love You! (2010), Lehmann Maupin

François Ghebaly Gallery LA

Darren Lago, Mickey de Balzac (grand) (2009-2011)

Darren Almond, Perfect Time 8×7 (2011), Matthew Marks Gallery

-A. Bregman

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http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/12/frieze-art-fair.php#.UZHX1-t5FT4

~ Bring me home, please

Review of the Frieze Art Fair

By Regine
on December 19, 2011 5:46 PM

Paul Simon Richards for Live from Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDFTV. Photo by Polly Braden. Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze

As many of you probably know, i love contemporary art fairs. Yes, it’s pure porn art and there’s too much to see, most of which is quite frankly bad. But there are good surprises as well and i don’t mind spending hours in front of painted horrors if at some point i stumble upon a piece that will move me. I’m that easy. Besides, art fairs expose me to works and artists i would otherwise never have accepted to look at.

That’s how in mid-October i found myself in Regent’s Park, London, clutching my hard earned press pass (did they make bloggers sweat to get an accreditation!), expecting to be blown away. Year after year, i had read about the Frieze art fair in mags and newspapers. It looked extravagant and fearless. It looked like an art fair i would enjoy.

Alas! What the 173 galleries exhibited inside the gigantic pavilion was a bit uneventful.
Maybe the euro crisis had compelled gallery owners to be cautious and somewhat conservative in their selection of art works. Maybe my expectations were too high. I walked from corridor desperate for some excitement to photograph.

I was keen to see Pierre Huyghe’s crab living inside a Brancusi head but i never managed to locate it. I didn’t manage to miss Christian Jankowski’s 65-metre yacht though. Made by a specialist boat builder, the luxury ship could be purchased at the merchant’s prize for €500,000. Or for €625,000 if you fancied having the artist sign it. The references were obvious (Duchamp, financial crisis, bling culture, etc.), the whole point not so much.

Of course it wasn’t all pain and gloom. The PM3 of the talks are online, there was Nathalie Djurberg! there was Nathalie Djurberg!, i ended up in The Guardian (albeit in a photo gallery showing people who confuse art fairs with fashion shows) and i did find works that make this post worthy of a quick scroll down:

Michael Landy, Credit Card Destroying Machine, 2010 (Thomas Dane gallery). Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Frieze/ Linda Nylind

Michael Landy was showing a Tinguely-inspired eccentricity that shred your credit card in exchange of a drawing by the artist. You might remember that 10 years ago Landy spent 2 weeks destroying all of his worldly possession in an empty store on Oxford Street.

Over some 20 years, street photographer Igor Moukhin chronicled rallies and protest marches across Russia.

Igor Moukhin, Resistance (XL gallery)

Seb Patane, Untitled, 2011 (China Art Objects Galleries)

Brian Griffiths, Bear Work Wear (black), 2011 (Vilma Gold gallery)

As i screamed earlier, there was Nathalie Djurberg! there was Nathalie Djurberg!

Nathalie Djurberg, Woods, Gio Marconi. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze

In Encounter(s), Tejal Shah collaborated with artist Varsha Nair. Wearing a straightjacket, outstretching their bodies, they wrapped themselves around pilars, across stairs, through gates and against other pieces of architecture. The work amplifies the paradox of our highly networked reality wherein technology variously connects, only to ironically distance us.

Tejal Shah, Encounter(s), 2006

Marina Abramovic, The Levitation of Saint Teresa, 2010 (Lisson Gallery)

Probably my favourite painting at the fair:

Miriam Cahn, Herumstehen, 2005 (Elizabeth Dee gallery)

In case you were wondering ‘how much does the work below cost?’, i found some figures online: In Frame, the section in the fair for young galleries showing solo artist presentations supported for a second year by Cos, sales were also substantial. François Ghebaly sold out their Patrick Jackson booth, selling Dirt Pile on Table (roots&glass) (2011) priced at $9,000; two versions of Heads, hands and feet (2011) for $15,000 and 3 dirt pile sculpture for $20,000 all to significant international collectors.

Patrick Jackson, Head, Hands and Feet (black) + Head, Hands and Feet (red), 2011 (François Ghebaly Gallery)

Wolfgang Tillmans. Faltenwurf (Grey), 2011 (Galerie Chantal Crousel)

0DM 11 south african gallerist Kristin Scott Thomas 48x36_675_450.jpg
Dawn Mellor, South African Gallerist Kristen Scott Thomas is showing neo-institutional critique works by Zurich based artist Chaz Bono, 2011 (Team Gallery)

Ken Okiishi, Manhattan Transfer (Alex Zachary gallery)

Tobias Zielony, Yet Untitled (#14), 2009 (KOW Berlin)

Tobias Zielony, Powwow, 2009 (KOW Berlin)

Alex Hartley (of the Nowherisland fame) was showing what looked like a photo of the Unabomber cabin. Close (very close) inspection revealed that it was a sculpture with the architectural model carved and built into the photography of the landscape itself. The series is on show at Victoria Miro this Winter.

Alex Hartley, Waiting for Daylight to End (Kaczynski Cabin), 2011

Cinthia Marcelle, O Cosmopolita, 2011

This is the billy-goat costume that Paweł Althamer wore to travel the world on the footsteps of a Polish children’s-book character.

Pawel Althamer, The Billy-Goat, 2011

Glenn Ligon, Negro Sunshine, 2006

No art fair is conceivable without at least one work from Elmgreen and Dragset (i spotted 3 at Frieze):

Elmgreen and Dragset, The Fruit of Knowlege, 2011

Taryn Simon, The Wailing Wall, Mini Israel, Latrun, 2007

Cornelia Parker, 30 Pieces of Silver (with reflection), Frith Street Gallery

Matthew Brannon (Casey Kaplan Gallery)

Oleg Kulik, Kulik vs. Koraz, 1997 (XL gallery)

Sorry i have no title nor author for the following works:

More images.
Photo on the homepage: Paul Simon Richards for Live from Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDFTV. Photo by Polly Braden. Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze.

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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON

October 12, 2011 7:06 pm

Frieze Art Fair, Regent’s Park, London

By Salamander Davoudi

Five-day event will showcase $350m worth of art displayed by 173 galleries

London’s Frieze Art Fair opened its doors to VIP guests on Wednesday in an optimistic mood, defiantly showcasing the beautiful, the bohemian and the bizarre despite the volatility in world markets and concerns over the impact on the art world.

High-profile collectors and celebrities such as Russian entrepreneur Evgeny Lebedev and model Elle Macpherson gathered in Regent’s Park at London’s leading fair for the sale of contemporary art, which traditionally sees millions of pounds change hands.

This market has enjoyed several years of strong growth, especially at the top end, but amid global economic uncertainty and in the wake of a few weak London auctions last week, dealers are anxious to see if sales of contemporary art will hold up.“The market feels sound. For people who have accumulated wealth contemporary art is, in a way, one of the most sophisticated ways of enjoying it…But people do say that the middle part of the market is suffering,” said Nicholas Logsdail, owner of London’s Lisson Gallery, which made five sales in the first three hours.

The White Cube gallery reported brisk trade, selling Antony Gormley’s “Spy”, a rusted steel standing figure, for £300,000 as well as Andreas Gursky’s “Cocoon II” for €600,000. An untitled 2011 painting by Mark Bradford also sold for $400,000. New York’s David Zwirner Gallery, meanwhile, sold a 2003 work by the German painter Neo Rauch for $1.35m to a US collector.

Hiscox, the insurers, have estimated that the five-day event will showcase $350m worth of art, $25m less than last year, displayed by 173 galleries from all round the world, including dealers from Colombia, Peru and Argentina for the first time. As in previous years, the fair also includes a sculpture park.

Many of the pieces on display use the internet and social networking to examine the role of information. A project by the German artist Oliver Laric will exist online only – he is filming the fair and creating an archive of slow-motion footage.

Matthew Slotover, co-founder of Frieze, said: “More galleries applied than ever before to take part. When the markets turned down in August we were worried but good art always sells. This is about getting quality works through the door.”

Laurence Tuhey, associate director of the Timothy Taylor Gallery, said there had been significant interest in the New York-based artist Kiki Smith. Her stained glass piece “A Behold” sold in the afternoon for $125,000. “We had expected doom and gloom but the energy at the start of the fair was really good,” he said.

Among the more experimental pieces of art on display yesterday included Beijing artist Liu Wei’s video installation called “The 400 Blows” in which 400 men pull down their trousers and show their bottoms to the camera. French artist Pierre Huyghe created an aquarium featuring a hermit crab

The fair’s “Frame” section, dedicated to young galleries displaying solo artists, was bigger than in previous years. “This is the younger more experimental side of the market. But the work sells if the work is good,” said Francois Ghebaly, owner of the Ghebaly gallery.

Mr Ghebaly was displaying American artist Patrick Jackson’s work. Within two hours he had sold Mr Jackson’s “dirt piles” – tables piled with dung-like dirt, for $9,000.

Auctions at Sotheby’s Christie’s, Bonhams and Phillips de Pury will be held at the end of “Frieze Week” including Bonhams’ first “Contemporary One” sale on Thursday.

“People are generally quite nervous in the contemporary art market after the collapse of Lehman’s when the market fell off a cliff. That could easily happen again,” said Robert Read, fine art expert at specialist art insurer Hiscox.

“There is a hell of a lot of cash held by the uber wealthy that is looking for a home to go to. There are not that many investment opportunities generally at the moment. So the purchasing power is there but whether they will be tempted by the contemporary art market is another matter.”

Stefan Ratibor, director of the Gagosian gallery, which sold seven pieces in the first three hours said: “Sometimes we sell more sometimes we sell less but it is really too early to comment on the state of the market. We need to wait and see what happens in the auctions at the end of the week.”

14 October 2011 | Art

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/yablonsky/frieze-art-fair-10-25-11.asp

Close Encounters

FRIEZE WRAP 2011

by Linda Yablonsky

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The Frieze Art Fair takes place each October in central London, under a very big tent in Regent’s Park. The 2011 edition, the fair’s ninth, accommodated 173 galleries, and from the Oct. 12 VIP preview through the Oct. 16 close, 60,000 visitors passed through. It’s anyone’s guess how much money changed hands — with those numbers, presumably quite a lot. Despite the sinking global economy, there is money for art in London. There is also art for money.

At Frieze, Michael Landy and Christian Jankowski presented projects that made that point crystal clear. Landy is the YBA who publicly destroyed all his possessions in 2001– more than 7,000 items, everything inventoried beforehand — in a giant machine he built for the purpose, as a site-specific project for Artangel.

What a difference a decade makes. Landy brought a new, more Tinguely-like machine to London dealer Thomas Dane’s stand at Frieze. This crowd-pleaser, a 12-foot-tall assemblage of saws, animal skulls, hand puppets and countless gears, destroyed credit cards proffered by game collectors. In return, each received a drawing in marker made on the spot by the same machine, but signed by the artist. (The machine was priced at $189,000. No word on any takers.)

Jankowski’s readymade sculpture was even more absurd. One of nine commissions for Frieze Projects, a nonprofit (ha!) program curated by the Frieze Foundation’s Sarah McCrory, it was actually an Aquariva Cento speedboat that was dry-docked beside the model of a Ferretti super-yacht, the kind super-rich collectors parked in front of the Giardini during opening week of the current Venice Biennale — Jankowski’s inspiration for the project.

Both boats were for sale, either as personal sailing vessels or as Christian Jankowski artworks — lusting collectors had their choice. (For the speedboat, the price was £500,000; as an artwork, it went up to £650,000. The built-to-order yacht was going for €65 million; as a certified Jankowski, it would cost €75 million.)

A salesman from Ferretti, trained by the artist, was on hand to make the pitch either way. “Only by completing the deal does the artwork exist,” Jankowski said. At this writing, it is still a boat. And Frieze is still a marketplace, though I did appreciate the attempt to provide commentary and context for the fair’s vast expanse of art merchandise. And humor is always welcome when serious money is afloat.

Still, salesmanship is the name of the game at an art fair, where the best art is the art that sells itself. Evidently, that was the case at the front-and-center Gagosian Gallery stand, which was wrapped in posters gathered by Franz West. The artist was also represented by a pink, raised-finger bronze, a smaller version of the one he made for Venice. It sold early on, as did a Dan Colen painting that featured a supermarket cart and went for a good six figures.

Also at Gagosian, a fetching wall work of bulging ceramic pots by Piotr Uklanski was priced at $150,000. An equally effulgent red-on-black resin painting by Uklanski held a wall at the booth of Milan dealer Massimo de Carlo, who was offering as well a palm tree-on-bathroom tile painting by Rashid Johnson and a cartoony Kaari Upson drawing that amounted to an exegesis of her work to date.

Though Gavin Brown’s enterprise won the fair’s award for best booth with a clean, straightforward hang, I pegged Greene Naftali’s for the most colorful presentation. Anchored by a red, white and blue flying-drawing-table construction by Guyton/Walker, it showed a silvery, Jacqueline Humphries painting that is among her best yet, a terrific Rachel Harrison amalgamation, and a wall of monochrome paintings by Paul Chan that used old books as canvases. “It’s about the ambiguity of knowledge,” Carol Greene explained.

Dealers trade in information, and like everyone else, I went not just to look at art but to talk about it. Conversation is what rules an art fair, which is just another word for social networking, allowing people who might envy or despise each other in normal circumstances to bond over art. The passion grows in the aisles and spreads via daily after-fair dinners and inebriating parties, where the discussion continues, and deals are consummated, alliances are created, and opportunities for further discussion crop up.

Talk, as the one of the Sunday papers would note, is the new art form, and London was full of it. The fair hosted its own series of artist conversations, while at the ICA, Paul Chan had a face-off with Museum Ludwig director Kasper Koenig. Artist and filmmaker Duncan Campbell appeared at Hotel Gallery’s new Herald Street space (Wolfgang Tillmans‘ former studio) for a discussion of European economic theory with author John Lanchester that was as stimulating as Campbell’s postcard-based film about German economist Hans Tietmeyer was engrossing.

And at the Serpentine Gallery, co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist hosted his annual Frieze weekend marathon, an avant-garde variety show of brief lectures and performances. It really should be televised, though I’m not sure that Rodney Graham‘s lobbing of potatoes at a gong would be as edifying on the small screen as it was in person.

In fact, what Frieze has going for it is London, where exhibitions in museums and nonprofit spaces opening at the same time lend some welcome depth to the homogenizing effect of sheer commerce.

Tate Modern had Gerhard Richter and Tacita Dean. The Serpentine had films by Anri Sala. The Hayward Gallery had retrospectives for Pipilotti Rist and George Condo, the Whitechapel Gallery featured Wilhelm Sasnal, and the Camden Arts Centre had new videos by Nathalie Djurberg, who went all out at the fair and installed her furry, fantastically grotesque plasticine puppet sculptures in the stand of Gio Marconi from Milan.

If I had been a buyer at Frieze, I might have gone for an untitled abstract painting by Glaswegian Cathy Wilkes, a beauty that The Modern Institute sold easily for £15,000. I also liked Ryan Gander‘s Self-Portrait, a spread of palette-like glass discs bearing paint smears, that Lisson Gallery sold for £60,000.

But I was most intrigued by a Richard Wentworth book sculpture trailing audio tape and ribbons and placed high up on a mirrored shelf in the same booth — the only work in it that didn’t find a buyer. “There were conservation concerns,” said Lisson’s Nicholas Logsdail.

No such issues came up at Hollybush Gardens’ booth, where a long scroll of cheap paper marked with council-flat coal dust by Knut Henrikson was selling to DIY-minded collectors who relished the chance to recreate it themselves as soon as the paper disintegrated.

That and the Landy and Jankowski gestures aside, however, daring was not in the fair’s character. Not that it ever can be when the stakes are high, though that seems all the more reason for dealers to be bold.

A twisted Madonna and Child painting and sculpture by Jake & Dinos Chapman, at the entrance to White Cube‘s booth, was about as radical as anyone got, but it wasn’t half as compelling as Miroslaw Balka‘s skull-like glass rock encased in rusted wire, a work from 2007, in the same booth. Nor was it as sexy as Tillmans’ big blue abstract C-print at Maureen Paley‘s stand, where it sold for $78,000.

But who cares about prices when there are discoveries to be made? That was the draw for the Sunday fair, Oct. 13-16, 2011, an unpretentious satellite show of 20 young galleries organized by Limoncello Gallery director Rebecca May Marston. As the fair was located in the bowels of a university basement, finding it alone was an adventure. Inside, its open plan strongly resembled New York’s Independent fair, with overlapping presentations and friendly young dealers eager to do the required duty — talk about the art.

But what brought it all back home were the four elevating gouaches of plastic bottles and glassware by Allyson Vieria offered by Lower East Side dealer Laurel Gitlen. For me, they were the art highlight of the week, exciting enough to make me wish for $4,500 to burn.

Just goes to show: when it’s truth and beauty you want, look first in your own backyard. Come May, that’s where Frieze reappears next — on Randall’s Island in the East River. How well it makes the transfer to the shores of New York is open to question.

Let’s talk.
LINDA YABLONSKY is an art critic who writes for Artforum.com, the Art Newspaper, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, W and other publications.

The entryway to the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Artist Michael Landy with his credit-card destroying machine at the Thomas Dane booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Michael Landy’s credit-card destroying machine at work, at the Thomas Dane booth at Frieze Art Fair 2011

Artist Christian Jankowski at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Either the interior of a Ferretti speedboat or a sculpture by Christian Jankowski, at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Franz West’s wall of posters commissioned by Gagosian Gallery, with a painting by Steven Parrino

Dan Colen’s untitled assemblage at the Gagosian Gallery booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Piotr Uklanski’s resin painting in the booth of Milan dealer Massimo de Carlo at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Milan dealer Massimo de Carlo, left, in his booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Wade Guyton and Kelly Walker’s sculpture in the Greene Naftali booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Rachel Harrison sculpture in the Greene Naftali booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

New York dealer Carol Greene with a new work by Paul Chan at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Nathalie Djurberg sculpture at the Gio Marconi booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Ryan Gander self-portrait at the Lisson Gallery booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Lisa Panting and Malin Stahl of Hollybush Gardens Gallery at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

Dinos and Jake Chapman at the White Cube booth at the Frieze Art Fair 2011

The Sunday art fair in London 2011, installation view

Allyson Vieira gouache in the Laurel Gitlen booth at the Sunday art fair 2011

5 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

London/Vincent Johnson

May

Reports on 2012 Frieze Fair London and Frieze Masters

FRIEZE LONDON ::
AND BEYOND

Oh London! One always feels at the center of the universe. All the buzz, all the hype, all the chic&vip is right here, just at your hand’s reach.
As if one art fair wasn’t enough, Frieze, that has reached its 10th year, has doubled its capacity with Frieze Masters that collects and displays artworks from the 13th century until the year 2000. So if you are tired of all those newcomers on the other pavilion and miss your Picasso or Brancusi, just pop in here, in the quieter and posher gray hallways where Dali, Avedon and Freud talk classly to each other.
Frieze is gossip, parties, sales, talks, and art, of course. But London is so much more than Frieze. Just to give you an idea of how busy this town can be, let me mention the openings in this same week of Kiki Smith, Luc Tuymans and Anish Kapoor, topped off by Edward Munch closing at the Tate Modern, Christie’s Multiplied - another art fair -, PAD in Berkeley Square (Pavilion of Art and Design) and finally SUNDAY, another little sister of Frieze, the scrappy one that is becoming a swan. And last but not least, just to entertain a few more people, there was London Cocktail Week andLondon Film Festival, with stars such as Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter in town.

Are you still on your feet? Then run to the next party where champagne runs as water. Do you think you need to be one and thrine? Yes, you do. So for next year, if you plan to come, you better shape up.
VIPs here are very much taken care of with private views and openings on selected times and hours and I was fortunate enough to jump on this bandwagon a couple of times during this week.
On Tuesday 9th, I was at Paul Fryer‘s opening at The Hospital Club, one of those fantastic private spaces (and proud sponsors of Frieze) that would make any gallerist happy. Fryer is a well known visionary British artist who was recently at Gucci Museum in Florence. His exhibition Undivided Light was one of those little gems that didn’t go under Frieze’s tents because they deserve a better showcase. He was of course the star of the night, greeting, drinking and meeting everyone, always with a smile and as joyful as a child in a candystore. When I finally managed to talk to him he told me he was “very happily drunk for the outcome of the night” and confessed that “we need more visionary artists and more people who believe in the impossible possibility that we can change this world. But even more than that, we, naive artists, we do need more supporters “. Then I asked if he was planning to come to Italy again and he said that all the works on show were probably going to Turin for Artissima or Milan or Florence “but we are still talking because the Italians like to talk. A lot”.

In the meantime Charles Saatchi was buying his “Suspended woman” for an undisclosed amount of pounds.
And then Frieze opened, the public was quietly queuing as only the Brits know how to and the market was booming, as always, as expected. A few hours in and Hauser&Wirth were already selling the disgustingly interesting head of Snow White by Paul McCarthy. But. But there’s a big but this year, because collectors and dealers are choosing more wisely, less Damien Hirst and more Kippenberger, Bourgeois and Schutte. And a propos of Damien Hirst, his much talked about horrific gigantic statue “Verity” is now in Northam’s harbour and it will stay there for 20 years. Nobody wanted it, but this is the downside of having such an haunting artist as a local celebrity.
Haunting is a word that instead works well with Luc Tuymans’ works, but not in this exhibition Allo! where the Belgian painter was present for another VIP view at 24 Grafton Street. Here collector and gallerist David Zwirner has set new heights, also in terms of gallery space. A stunning three-storey building almost as precious as the painter he shows. Allo! takes inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but ends up talking about the final scene of the 1942 film The Moon and Sixpence, which is itself an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s eponymous novel from 1919. The plot is loosely based upon the life of Paul Gauguin and its Tahiti journey. Not as striking as other works from Luc but certainly worth stopping by.
A few steps away from the champagne and mojitos in Grafton Street, in the same night, Kiki Smith was offering beers (yes, you read right!) at her VIP meetings and greetings at Timothy Taylor Gallery where she was presenting Behold, a series of works in bronze, porcelain, stained glass in which she was “exploring this new concept of female, feminine and repetition through the recovery of medieval art techniques”. She was all smiles and happiness and seemed in great shape. But beer? No way!!
And now that this is over, what will remain after 175 exhibitors from 35 countries will go home? A few interesting pieces, a gigantic circus that keeps moving on and on and that will now jump on other flights to Paris for FIAC and in a few months to Miami for Art Basel, and again to New York for the American edition of Frieze. Are contemporary art fairs still a great conveyor of ideas through which understand and perceive reality or just big banks on the go?
Mh…

Elena Dal Forno
15.10.2012



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Frieze London is an annual fair showcasing contemporary art from around the world. Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the exhibition takes place in central London and runs from 11-14 October 2012.


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http://artobserved.com/2012/10/ao-on-site-london-frieze-london-and-frieze-masters-summary-and-photoset-october-14th-2012/

AO On Site – London: Frieze London and Frieze Masters Summary and photoset, October 14th, 2012

October 14th, 2012

Lynda Benglis and Hans Hurting at Cheim & Read
Lynda Benglis sculptures and Hans Hurting paintings at Cheim & Read’s booth at Frieze Masters. All photos by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed unless otherwise noted

Frieze Masters and Frieze London concluded on October 14th, with both fairs reporting solid sales on the high end. This year, there was a distinct focus on curated booths and curatorial projects and less of an overt feeling of commercialization. Frieze Masters in particular focused on serious connoisseurship and an academic approach, both of which translated into a successful fair for dealers.

Alexander Calder Triumphant Red 1959-63 at Helly Nahmad
A massive Calder hanging mobile, Triumphant Red , 1959-63 at Helly Nahmad’s booth at Frieze Masters was priced at $20 million

Auction week also coincided with the fairs, as well as the numerous exhibitions in private galleries and museums. In addition, Pace Gallery, David Zwirner, Per Skarstedt and Michael Werner inaugurated new spaces in London.

A Robert Mangold Painting, Red Frame/Yellow Ellipse, 1988 at Barbara Mathes Gallery at Frieze Masters

A Robert Mangold Painting, Red Frame/Yellow Ellipse, 1988 at Barbara Mathes Gallery at Frieze Masters

At Frieze, White Cube sold a new Damien Hirst, Destruction Dreamscape, for £500,000; Hauser & Wirth sold Paul McCarthy’s White Snow Head for £812,000 reportedly10 minutes after opening. At Frieze Masters, there were reports of at least two strong Picasso sales: Homme et Femme au bouquet, 1979 sold for $8.5 million at Christophe Van de Weghe’s booth; Acquavella also reported a Picasso sale of $9.5 million for its Buste d’Homme, 1969.

Sol LeWitt Open Geometric Structure _1990_Lisson Gallery
Sol LeWitt, Open Geometric Structure, 1990 (on floor) and John Latham, Untitled, 1958 (on wall) at Lisson Gallery, Frieze Masters

Frieze London (formerly Frieze Art Fair) has grown in size in the past ten years – 264 dealers from 35 countries showed work by over 2,400 artists. Compared to 2003, 124 galleries from 16 countries showed the work of 1,200 artists in a space about half the size. 27,000 visitors attended Frieze in 2003, compared to the approximately 60,000 this year. This was the first year for Frieze Masters, which also took place in Regent’s park.

Installation View of Pace Gallery’s booth at Frieze London, photo courtesy Pace Gallery

The total revenue for both fairs was over $1 billion, according to preliminary estimates by the insurer Hiscox Ltd.

Zhang Huan at White Cube
A Zhang Huan ash painting at White Cube’s booth at Frieze London, photo by Art Observed

Brazilian Gallery A Gentil Carioca at Frieze London
Installation view of booth of the Brazilian gallery, A Gentil Carioca, at Frieze London

Carol Bove The White Tubular Glyph 2012 David Zwirner
Carol Bove, The White Tubular Glyph, 2012 at David Zwirner’s booth at Frieze London

Fiona Tan Vox Popula London 2012 Frith Street Gallery
Fiona Tan, Vox Popula London 2012 at Frith Street Gallery’s booth at Frieze London

Gillian Wearing My Hand 2012 Maureen Paley
Gillian Wearing, My Hand, 2012 at Maureen Paley’s booth at Frieze London

Rosenquist, The Facet 1978 at Acquavellas booth at Frieze Masters
James Rosenquist, The Facet, 1978 at Acquavella’s booth at Frieze Masters

Frieze Projects Grizedale Arts, Yangjiang Group, Colosseum of the Consumed
Frieze Projects: Grizedale Arts, Yangjiang Group, Colosseum of the Consumed

A fairgoer at Frieze London

Frieze London

Haegue Yang Flip Fleet Flow Units 2012 Kukje Gallery
Haegue Yang, Flip Fleet Flow Units 2012 at Kukje Gallery’s booth at Frieze London

Bosco Sodi at Eigen+Arts booth at Frieze London photo by Art Observed
Bosco Sodi at Eigen+Art’s booth at Frieze London, photo by Art Observed

Donald Judd Untitled 1980 David Zwirner booth
Donald Judd, Untitled 1980, David Zwirner’s Frieze Masters booth

Alberto Giacometti at Thomas Gibson Fine Art,
Alberto Giacometti drawing and sculpture at Thomas Gibson Fine Art’s booth at Frieze Masters

Colle & Cortes Jusepe de Ribera
Aristotle by Jusepe de Ribera (1591‐1652) at Coll & Cortés’ booth at Frieze Masters

Thomas Schutte Wichte 2007 Frith Street Gallery
Thomas Schütte Wichte 2007 Frith Street Gallery’s booth at Frieze London

Standard Gallery Oslo
Installation View, Standard Oslo’s booth at Frieze London

Installation View, Pilar Corrias London’s booth at Frieze London

Ricci Albenda Sunrise_Sunset 2012 Marc Camille Chaimowicz Carpet III 2009 Andrew Kreps Gallery
Ricci Albenda, Sunrise Sunset 2012, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Carpet III, 2009 at Andrew Kreps Gallery at Frieze London

Marina Abramovic at Galerie Krinzinger Vienna
Marina Abramovic’s work at Galerie Krinzinger Vienna’s booth at Frieze London

Rosemarie Trockel Phobia 2002 Sprueth Magers Berlin London
Rosemarie Trockel, Phobia 2002 Sprüth Magers‘ booth at Frieze London

Sarah Lucas Mumum 2012 Sadie Coles
Sarah Lucas, Mumum 2012 at Sadie Coles’ booth at Frieze London

Farhad Moshiri Woman combing 2012 Thaddaeus Ropac
Farhad Moshiri, Woman Combing, 2012 at Thaddaeus Ropac’s booth at Frieze London

Thomas Scheibitz, Tanya Bonakdar
Thomas Scheibitz, Smiley (2009), courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Sprüth Magers Berlin London, in Frieze Sculpture Park, photo by Art Observed

Peter Liversidge Ingleby Gallery
Peter Liversidge’s Everything is Connected, 2012, courtesy Ingleby Gallery, in Frieze Sculpture Park, photo by Art Observed

-V. Artzimovich

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http://db-artmag.de/en/71/feature/dynamic-duo-preview-frieze-london-and-frieze-masters/

Dynamic Duo
Preview Frieze London and Frieze Masters

Since its premiere in 2003, Frieze London has grown to become what is probably the most important fair for contemporary art worldwide. As main sponsor, Deutsche Bank has been Frieze’s partner since 2004. To mark its 10th anniversary, the art fair is now on a mission to expand: following Frieze New York, it currently launches Frieze Masters, which shows art from antiquity to the 20th century from a contemporary perspective. Another reason to visit the British capital during “Frieze Week.”

Frieze Art Fair 2011. Photo by Linda Nylind. © Linda Nylind/Frieze
Frieze Masters, design by Selldorf Architects. © Selldorf Architects/Frieze
Dan Flavin, untitled (to Donna) 6, 1971. Photography by Billy Jim. © Estate of Dan Flavin / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery, New York. Frieze Masters
Joan Miró, Peinture (Le cheval de cirque), 1927. © Successió Miró / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012. Courtesy of Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York. Frieze Masters
Matti Braun, Untitled, 2011. Courtesy of BQ, Berlin. Frieze London
Maria Nordin, BITING, 2010. Courtesy of Galleri Magnus Karlsson. Frieze London
Lucy McKenzie, Tombraiders, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London. Frieze London
Eddie Peake, Glory Holes, 2010. Courtesy of Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Roma. Frieze London
Thomas Bayrle, Flugzeug (Airplane), 1982/83. Exhibition view documenta 13, 2012. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012. Photo Achim Drucks

In May, the first Frieze New York took place on Randall’s Island, located in the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. The start of the fair was highly promising, and the public and press alike were excited about it. “Frieze Art Fair electrifies New York” was how the Wall Street Journal summed it up. But the art fair in the British capital is also expanding. Frieze Masters now takes place parallel to Frieze London, which focuses on current works by living artists. Deutsche Bank, the main sponsor, also cooperates with the two new Frieze fairs.Over 90 international galleries show art from antiquity to the 20th century at Frieze Masters — in a temporary architecture designed by Annabelle Selldorf. The architect is considered to be a specialist for rooms in which art is presented and produced. Selldorf has not only designed the galleries of Barbara Gladstone and David Zwirner, but also the studios of Jeff Koons and David Salle. For Frieze Masters, she has created a design that is both elegant and contemporary. The new fair can be reached comfortably by foot from Frieze London, as it also takes place in Regents Park. Thus, visitors can inform themselves about current trends and also rediscover older art and classics of the 20th century from a contemporary perspective.

The expectations for the new fair are high. “Frieze Masters will attract the world’s most adventurous and imaginative art collectors to London,” says Nicholas Penny, Director of the London National Gallery. “The fair is designed to revolutionise the relationship between ancient and modern, old and new.” The Spotlight section is bound to be particularly exciting. Here, 22 galleries from the US and Germany as well as from Lebanon, Portugal, and Romania will each present a selected position from the 20th century. The focus is on conceptual and feminist positions from the 1960s and 1970s. These are the “pioneers working at one of the most radical periods of art history,” according to Adriano Pedrosa. The curator of the 2011 Istanbul Biennial acts as consultant to the fair in its selection of galleries for the Spotlight section.

Part of Frieze Masters’ contemporary approach are the talks that take place in the framework of the fair: for instance Cecily Brown, who processes influences by painters such as William Hogarth and Willem de Kooning in her gestural, expressive canvases, talks to Nicholas Penny about her reinterpretations of traditional art historical themes. While Glenn Brown discusses his versions of paintings by artists as varied as Georg Baselitz and Fragonard with Bice Curiger, Luc Tuymans explains how he turns historical events into painting in a conversation with Louvre curator Dominique de Font-Réaulx.

The tenth run of Frieze London is the most international to date: 170 exhibitors from 34 countries present themselves in fair tents designed, as last year, by the architectural firm Carmody Groarke. The new Focus section is reserved for younger galleries who opened after 2000. Some of those selected are Algus Greenspon (New York), Casas Riegner (Bogota), Chatterjee & Lal (Mumbai), and Chert (Berlin). The Frame section also dedicates itself to young galleries, showing exclusively solo presentations. The fact that 16 of the 21 galleries are taking part in the London fair for the first time promises fascinating discoveries. At the François Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles), visitors can experience the legendary underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar as draftsman. Experimenter (Calkutta) introduces the artist Bani Abidi, who was born in Pakistan and lives in India. In her humorous works, she trenchantly addresses the political and cultural differences and similarities between the two neighboring enemy states.

To prevent visitors from losing orientation despite the immense amount of art on view, Frieze implements innovative technology: visitors can download a free app for their iPhones and iPads, including an interactive plan of the fair—a service once again made possible by Deutsche Bank. As main sponsor, it presents itself at the fair with its lounge, where works from the Deutsche Bank Collection are juxtaposed under the title Pairs. At the premiere of Frieze Masters, works of Classic Modernism meet with contemporary works: Piet Mondrian, Vassily Kandinsky, David Bomberg, and Andreas Feininger encounter Daniel Richter, Ugo Rondinone, Adrian Paci, and Frank Auerbach. Between the pairs, correspondences in form and content arise that span decades. In addition, preliminary drawings to Keith Tyson’s 12 Harmonics are on view in the lounge. The monumental painting series was installed at the end of last year in the entrance hall of Deutsche Bank’s London Head Office. One of the drawings was auctioned off to benefit Help a Capital Child and the Meningitis Research Foundation.

Anyone interested in visiting ArtMag, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this October, should come to the press booths at Frieze London, where visitors can surf through the latest issue at stand M 20 and even win a trip to the next Frieze New York. Every subscriber to the ArtMag newsletter has a chance to win two plane tickets to New York including two nights at a hotel and two VIP tickets to the fair.

From the very beginning, the advanced accompanying program of films, talks, and commissioned works has played an important role in forging Frieze’s image. For this year’s Frieze Projects, curated by Sarah McCrory, Thomas Bayrle, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, DIS magazine, Grizedale Arts / Yangjiang Group and Joanna Rajkowska created site-specific interventions. While real actors from a TV crime series take part in Çavuşoğlu’s performance Murder in Three Acts, Bayrle accentuates the fair entrance with print works consisting of his typical motifs reproduced by the hundreds. The pioneer of European Pop Art has long been part of the Deutsche Bank Collection; his contribution to this year’s documenta was one of the highlights of the show.

Frieze London expects prominent guests for the talks, too: Tino Sehgal discusses conceptual art, choreography, and the work of art as object with Jörg Heiser, while John Waters converses with Sturtevant about the theme “stupidity.” Waters began his career making infamous trash films like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble; he now exhibits as an artist in the New Museum and at Gagosian. With her imitations of the icons of contemporary art, Sturtevant questions everything we think we know about the original and originality, aura and authorship. To arrange for an artist who says that she’s interested in nothing but making people think to get together with John Waters to talk about, of all things, stupidity guarantees an event that will be both funny and inspiring. Really, only the makers of Frieze would come up with an idea like that.

Achim Drucks

Frieze London/Frieze Masters
Regents Park, London
October 11 – 14, 2012

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ARTSATION

First impressions from Frieze Art Fair and Frieze Masters

October 10th, 2012

First visitors at Galerie Barbara Thumm, work by Teresa Burga,
Frieze Masters 2012,  Spotlight,  Image: Linda Nylind/ Frieze

The tenth edition of Frieze London takes place in London’s Regent’s Park from 11–14 October 2012. With exhibitors from 35 countries the tenth edition of Frieze London is the most international event organised by Frieze.

Participating Territories:

Argentina, Hungary, Austria, India, Belgium, Ireland, Brazil, Israe,l Canada, Italy,  China, Japan, Colombia, Korea, Czech, Republic, Lebanon, Denmark, Mexico, France, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Greece, Poland, Portuga,l Romania, South, Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, UK and USA

Frieze London is a presentation of 175 of the most forward- thinking contemporary galleries and will present new work by over 1,000 of the world’s most innovative artists. This year the fair is once again housed in a bespoke temporary structure designed by architects Carmody Groarke.

The tenth edition features a new section: Focus, open to galleries established after 2001, showing up to three artists. Focus was first introduced at Frieze New York, which took place 4–7 May 2012 in Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan. The Frame section of the fair is dedicated to galleries under six-years old, showing solo artist presentations. The selection of the 25 Frame galleries was advised by curators Rodrigo Moura and Tim Saltarelli. Frame is supported by COS.

This year, coinciding with Frieze London, Frieze also introduces Frieze Masters, a new fair with a contemporary perspective on historical art. Together the crossover between the two fairs will make London the focus for a broad international art audience.

Frieze Projects

Frieze Projects is a unique programme of artists’ commissions realised annually at Frieze Art Fair. Frieze Projects is curated by Sarah McCrory and supported by the Emdash Foundation with additional support from Maharam.

The artists commissioned to create five site-specific works for Frieze London are: Thomas Bayrle, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, DIS magazine, Grizedale Arts / Yangjiang Group and Joanna Rajkowska. The Projects programme includes an examination of the use-value of art by Grizedale Arts and Yangjiang Group in the form of a structure that will act as a forum for a number of artists who produce food, chaotic dining events, performances, and talks. In contrast, Joanna Rajkowska’s work will invite contemplation and reflection by transforming an area of Regent’s Park into a field of smoking incense. Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s recreation of a crime drama scene will find unlikely parallels between the production of murder mysteries and decisions made whilst making art. DIS magazine’s unique approach to the production of imagery will be a response to the fair, and a design by Thomas Bayrle will be dramatically woven into the fabric of the fair.

The winner of the Emdash Award 2012 is the Belgian/American artistCécile B. Evans, who is based in Berlin. Evans’ winning proposal takes the form of an audio guide to Frieze London accompanied by a holographic ‘host’. The audio guide will feature a panel of notable non-art experts.

Frieze Talks

Brian O’Doherty, Tino Sehgal, Sturtevant, Lynne Tillman, Marina Warner and John Waters are all part of the line-up of international artists, filmmakers, curators and cultural commentators taking part in Frieze Talks 2012.

Alexander Calder at Helly Nahmad Gallery, Frieze Masters 2012 , Image: Linda Nylind / Frieze

Sculpture Park

The Sculpture Park at Frieze London 2012 has been selected by Clare Lilley, Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Lilley has put together an ambitious selection of works, offering a rare opportunity to see a significant group of public-scale sculpture by internationally recognised artists. The 2012 Sculpture Park is the largest-ever presentation of outdoor sculpture at Frieze London.

Lilley’s selection features work by some of the most acclaimed international sculptors working today, both established and emerging. These include new pieces by Hemali Bhuta, Andreas Lolis, Damián Ortega and Maria Zahle. Other artists participating in the Sculpture Park include: Adip Dutta, Hans Josephsohn, Yayoi Kusama, Liversidge, Michael Landy, Peter Jean-Luc Moulène, David Nash, Simon Periton and Alan Kane, Anri Sala, Thomas Scheibitz and William Turnbull. The Sculpture Park at Frieze London is open free to the public.

Public opening dates and hours:

Thursday 11 October: 12-7pm Friday 12 October: 12-7pm Saturday 13 October: 12-7pm Sunday 14 October 12-6pm

Preview

Wednesday 10 October

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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON

Last updated: October 10, 2012 6:50 pm

Cool, calm and collectable

By Rachel Spence

The new Frieze Masters fair is a dignified partner for the funkier Frieze London

Picasso’s ‘Buste d’Homme’ (1969) sold for $9.5m

It’s still in the honeymoon phase, but the marriage between Frieze Masters and Frieze London looks made in heaven. With an inaugural VIP day praised by critics, collectors and dealers alike, Frieze Masters appears calmer and cooler than its contemporary counterpart, as befits a fair that spans the ages from ancient civilisations to the year 2000. Serene grey walls, avenue-wide aisles, VIP guests dressed to impress rather than kill and the presence of so much history in the aisles give this marquee the air of a pop-up museum. It was a thrill to see, for example, a panel by Venetian Renaissance master Bartolomeo Vivarini hanging just metres from a masterpiece by Pierre Bonnard, a trio of medieval gargoyles or prints by 20th-century US photographer Richard Avedon.

Solo shows were always on the menu for the Spotlight section, and even in the first hours it was proving lucrative as well as educational. New Yorker Franklin Parrasch’s decision to focus on Californian abstractionist John McLaughlin was rewarded by the sales of three paintings at around $38,000 each, and one large black-and-white picture priced at $250,000.

The aura of connoisseurship does not detract from commerce. Major early sales included, at New York’s Acquavella Galleries, Picasso’s “Buste d’Homme” (1969) at $9.5m. Gagosian reported sales of several of its Avedon prints; while London’s Lisson Gallery happily exchanged a mixed-media work by British conceptualist John Latham for £150,000.

Perhaps the biggest risk-takers here were the galleries that specialise in Old Masters and antiquities. Off to a “great start”, London’s Sam Fogg, who specialises in medieval and early Renaissance art, sold five works in the first three hours, including two stone sculptures of heads, a St Michael from 14th-century France and a 16th-century head of Christ, for £50,000 each. “We’ve been selling to existing clients, contemporary collectors and contemporary artists,” enthused Fogg, adding that the fair was “very well organised and beautifully arranged”.

Also satisfied were the Salomon Lilian gallery from Amsterdam, which specialises in Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. Here, sales included two diminutive oils, one by David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), “Old Man Reading” (£250,000), the other a panel by Frans Francken the Younger entitled “Death and the Miser” (£250,000). According to Loureen Lilian, the wife of the gallerist, “We are seeing collectors of contemporary and modern art viewing the Old Masters with real interest.”

Echoing this, London-based dealer Jean-Luc Baroni observed that many contemporary collectors are beginning to “want something more tangible”. A Klimt to go with your Koons, madam?

The following morning, Frieze London (formerly Frieze Art Fair) opened to sparkling sunshine and a funkier mood. One of the non-selling Frieze Projects commissioned by curator Sarah McCrory, German artist Thomas Bayrle’s mesmeric, Pop-style patterns turned the entrance corridor into a space for merriment – or migraine, depending on your state of mind.

Inside, healthy sales suggested that high spirits would prevail. Snapped up within the first 10 minutes was the spectacular sculpture “White Snow Head” (2012) by Californian star Paul McCarthy. Priced at $1.3m, the girl’s shell-pink visage, dripping with McCarthy’s signature goo, came straight from the artist’s studio to the stand of international dealers Hauser & Wirth. Other important transactions included a new silver-on-black scalpel painting by Damien Hirst, “Destruction Dreamscape” (2012), which departed White Cube’s space with an asking price of £0.5m.

On the stand of London gallery Victoria Miro, works by Grayson Perry, Peter Doig, Maria Nepomuceno and Chris Ofili grabbed the eye with their glorious interplay of tropical hues. Bestseller here was one of the signature painterly webs – this time in hot pink and yellow – by Japanese grande dame Yayoi Kusama. Made this year and entitled “Universe RYPK”, it was priced at $0.5m.

The effort by Frieze organisers to reach out to emerging artists, and spaces with curatorial projects and softer commercial sections, appears to be reaping rewards. Introduced at Frieze New York earlier this year, the new Focus section is devoted to galleries established after 2001. Satisfied participants here included Mihai Pop, of Plan B gallery in Cluj, Romania. Pop put together a display that embraced not only fashionable Romanian painters Adrian Ghenie and Victor Man but also unfamiliar, politically-minded installation artist Rudolf Bone.

“Nobody will buy that,” Pop said cheerfully of “Panspermia” (1984), Bone’s gritty grid of glass planes smashed by a rock. “But it doesn’t matter; sometimes it’s about showing the work.” He could afford to be generous: both Ghenie’s and Man’s canvases had sold in the first few hours for €35,000 each.

First impressions suggest that Frieze London’s famously exuberant appetites – both in terms of the art on display and the aura of its guests – may have been tamed slightly by its more dignified new partner. “It’s slightly less frenzied but that’s a good thing,” observed Victoria Miro, who is showing in both spaces. Her words were echoed by Sarah Goulet, public relations associate at Pace gallery, where a flurry of sales had included “System of Display” ($45,000), a silkscreen work on mirror by rising African-American star Adam Pendleton. “This year Frieze London feels like a reunion of old friends,” Goulet commented. “We are seeing a lot of big American and European collectors who have clearly been to both fairs. It’s a symbiotic relationship.” Long may the honeymoon continue.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters both run to Sunday, www.frieze.com

This article has been amended to correct the job title of Sarah Goulet, who is public relations associate at Pace


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Jim Lambie at Frieze London

Posted October 12th by Pas Un Autre in Art

Jim Lambie ‘Untitled’ (2012) at Sadie Coles HQ at Frieze London 2012. photograph by Linda Nylind

Paul McCarthy At Frieze

Posted October 12th by Pas Un Autre in Art

Paul McCarthy’s White Snow Head at Hauser & Wirth at Frieze Art Fair, London 2012. Sold for 1.3 million.

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ICONS
October 8, 2012, 5:22 p.m. ET

Cutting-Edge Frieze Art Fair Embraces the Past—With Caution

By MARY M. LANE

Entwistle Gallery

$305,000 | A Kota guardian figure, used for the protection of ancestral relics, from Gabon and offered by London gallery Entwistle.

Since its founding in 2003, Frieze Art Fair has competed with older fairs like Art Basel by successfully establishing itself as a London venue solely for contemporary artists whose works are often finished just days before the fair.

London’s Frieze Art Fair opens this week to mix the masters with the unknowns. Mary M. Lane will be there, and has a preview of the what to expect on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

The fair’s success led to New York’s first Frieze, a large-scale event in May. But in London, the 10th Frieze will change the recipe: While 175 exhibitors show fresh works, 101 galleries will sell art created before 2000 at the newly christened Frieze Masters.

Photos: Highlights from the Frieze Art Fair

Pablo Picasso, “Buste d’Homme,” 1969

A number of established galleries will visit Frieze for the first time, many offering works by older household names that may be less risky as investments.

“Nothing’s going to happen over the next five years that will change Picasso’s place in art history. That’s not guaranteed with a lot of newer artists,” said Nicholas Acquavella, director of New York’s Acquavella Gallery, which represents only four living artists.

Acquavella is bringing over 25 mostly 20th-century works, the same number it takes to Art Basel and Art Basel Miami, the gallery’s most important fairs. They include Picasso’s 1969 oil “Bust of a Man,” to be priced from $8 million to $10 million, an 1895 Degas pastel for at least $5 million and a 1978 oil, for $2.5 million, by Pop-Art pioneer James Rosenquist.

The art market has largely avoided the recession plaguing other European sectors, but second-tier works are facing challenges on both the primary and secondary markets as moguls snatch up masterpieces while penny pinchers opt for less expensive art.

“It’s like fashion: The top end like Louis Vuitton and Prada are doing well and the high street has accessible prices. It’s the ones in-between who suffer,” says John Rocha, a fashion designer who has attended Frieze for eight years and bought works there.

Frieze doesn’t release a full list of sales, but prices paid last year—when 60,000 people visited the fair—varied wildly. Modestly priced pieces sold for as little as $80, while “Strip (CR921-1),” a new Gerhard Richter painting, sold for $2.4 million.

Frieze’s main challenge now will be preventing Frieze Masters from eclipsing the edgy reputation of its contemporary counterpart. “It wouldn’t become as big as Frieze London,” at future Friezes, said Frieze Masters director Victoria Siddall.

New York’s David Zwirner has brought his eponymous gallery to Frieze since the fair’s debut and considers it Europe’s most important fair after Basel. Though Mr. Zwirner sold a $1.35 million painting by the German surrealist-influenced Neo Rauch last year, he predicts Frieze Masters will up the ante on prices. “Frieze has always had a little bit of a problem when it came to a higher price point,” compared with Basel, said Mr. Zwirner; he’ll show at both Frieze London and Masters.

Zwirner is one of several blue-chip galleries including Pace and Michael Werner to open spaces in London this autumn as the city, already known as a hub for older art, also takes advantage of its geography (a somewhat shorter trip than to New York) to attract Asian buyers.

The Masters fair has also caught the attention of Sotheby’s, which posted a 16.7% drop in auction sales the first half of 2012 compared with the year-earlier period. The auction house has timed its showing of a drawing by Raphael, to be sold in December, so that collectors coming to see Frieze Masters will drop by to see it. The drawing of an unidentified apostle, estimated between $16 million and $24 million, was drawn circa 1519 for Raphael’s last, nearly completed painting, “The Transfiguration.”

Crossover collecting, where buyers focus on art from different periods, is a slowly growing trend, dealers say. This year, 30% of buyers at Sotheby’s Old Master drawings sales had also bought in their contemporary sales, up from 7% in 2007.

“Drawings can often be read more easily by a contemporary eye. They’re immediate and spontaneous,” said Cristiana Romalli, senior director for Old Master drawings at Sotheby’s, adding that many collectors are more attracted to works without “details that pertain to a specific period.”

New York financier Leon Black, owner of the nearly $120 million pastel “The Scream,” paid Christie’s $47.6 million three years ago for a Raphael chalk drawing, a record auction price for a work on paper at the time.

Frieze Masters dealers are also hoping to harness the fair’s reputation as a contemporary art haven by bringing works with abstract themes.

“Longevity and angst were ideas that artists were also struggling with hundreds of years ago, even if they weren’t getting frequent commissions to paint them,” says David Koetser, whose Zurich-based gallery will be bringing around 22 paintings priced from $50,000 to $4 million. Mr. Koetser will hang four of them, including a still life circa 1630 by Margarete de Heer, in clear suspended cabinets so visitors can walk around them—much like the way one would display contemporary works. The four-day Frieze begins Thursday.

The art fair also will host Frieze Frame, a section for 22 galleries under six years old that hold solo shows in subsidized stands.

NYTIMES T magazine

Loud and In Tents | Frieze London

Culture

By ROCKY CASALE

October 11, 2012, 5:24 pm Comment

A collage by the artist Lygia Clark at Alison Jacques Gallery.

In its 10th year, London’s Frieze Art Fair is bigger and more extravagant than ever, with 175 of the world’s leading galleries, and some of London’s hippest restaurants like Hix and Rochelle Canteen, packed under one Carmody Groarke-designed tent. At the entrance visitors are clocked in the face by “Sloping Loafers,” a long corridor feeding into the fair and carpeted with a loud print of overlapping green, yellow and red loafer shoes, a collaboration between the Frieze Foundation, the textile company Maharam and the German artist Tomas Bayrle. Inside, the usual power brokers, like Gagosian and Victoria Miro Gallery, hog the prime real estate, showcasing a giant carbuncular sculpture by Franz West and Grayson Perry’s brilliantly colored and intricate tapestry work, respectively. But not to be overshadowed were smaller installations at Herald Street Gallery that included a sketch by Pablo Brownstein of London’s Liberty Department store being demolished or the Alison Jacques Gallery, where Lygia Clark’s relatively diminutive black and white collage works were on view. A sign of the economic times? On the whole, there were few showoff behemoth installations in favor of paintings, prints and sculptures on a more domestic scale.

Many visitors took advantage of the mild weather and milled around Regent’s Park where the Frieze is held, taking in the beautiful flower gardens and turning leaves, but also the scattering of sculptures like the giant spotted, dragon-necked flower by (surprise, surprise) Yayoi Kusama and Anri Sala‘s tall, warped “Clocked Perspective.” A 10-minute walk to the opposite end of the park revealed a second enormous tent (this one designed by the architect Annabelle Selldorf), dedicated to Frieze Masters, a new fair for art created before the year 2000. The masters fair aims to send a jolt into the market for work that wasn’t born yesterday. But admittedly it was a bit of struggle to leave the Frieze tent, buzzing as it was with exciting new artworks, cultivated eccentrics and unwashed asymmetrical hair sculptures, and move into a different tented world populated by Picasso prints and Andy Warhol drawings. Also in the jumble at Frieze Masters were exquisite Persian rugs, Roman statuary from the first and second centuries, and, my favorite, Giovanni Stanchi’s “An Allegory of the Four Seasons” — anthropomorphic portraits composed from painted flowers, fruits and vegetables.

Two off-site exhibitions not far from the Frieze tents are definitely worth a peek. Toby Ziegler’s “The Cripples,” concealed 14-floors below street level in an underground parking lot, is dazzling. Five large sculptures make reference to a work of the same name by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel and six enormous light boxes featuring thickets of horse legs glow and dim in the large concrete room (3-9 Old Burlington Street; through Oct. 20). And down the road at the Marlborough Contemporary, a new offshoot of Marlborough Fine Art, is Angela Ferreira’s exhibition “Stone Free”: sketches, photographs and installations connecting the Cullinan Diamond Mine in South Africa with Chislehurst Caves in South East London, ground zero of ’60s counterculture. (The title of the show comes from song by Jimi Hendrix, who performed there.)

The after-party, tonight at the Scotch, is a joint production with The Gentlewoman Magazine. Aside from a V.I.P. Frieze pass, it’s the hottest ticket in town.

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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON

October 12, 2012 8:44 pm

The Art Market: Spoilt for choice

By Georgina Adam

Fairs are multiplying madly. Is all this sustainable, and isn’t it leading to over-production?

Portrait of James Lord by Alberto Giacometti

‘Portrait of James Lord’, 1964, by Alberto Giacometti

The biggest buzz surrounded Frieze Masters, the latest addition to the Frieze stable, which opened on Tuesday in a separate tent near London Zoo, offering art from antiquity to the end of the 20th century. In a spacious tent elegantly fitted out by starchitect-to-the-artworld Annabelle Selldorf (three shades of grey were the only colours allowed, triggering many “50 shades” jokes), traditional dealers offered Renaissance gold ground paintings, Dutch still lifes, tribal art, Egyptian antiquities, modern art – and even contemporary art, as long as it was made before 2000.

The fair garnered praise for the high quality of the works on show and the cool minimalist presentation. Among the standouts was the stunning show of Calder and Miró at Helly Nahmad: one giant Calder, “Triumphant Red” (1959-63), bought just this June at Christie’s London for £6.2m (about $9.6m) and now being offered for an equally triumphant $20m, with a Miró painting (“The sorrowful march guided by the flamboyant bird of the desert”, 1968) at the same amount. An unconfirmed rumour held that both had gone to a Russian buyer.

Thomas Gibson was serenely showing a mainly not-for-sale group of Giacometti sculptures, drawings and paintings; McCaffrey Fine Art fielded a solo show of William Scott while Gagosian focused on Richard Avedon portraits. Sam Fogg showed a remarkable group of three 13th-century church gargoyles, at £2m.As the fair started sales were uneven, with modern art doing better than the Old Masters; but as adviser Lisa Schiff said, after looking at a 17th-century Dutch painting with a client, “These are not purchases you hurry into, you need to do some research before you pull the trigger.” This is exactly the sort of crossover collecting the Frieze organisers were hoping for when they created the new fair.

Frieze Masters did not steal the thunder of the contemporary Frieze London (now open to works made after 2000), which attracted the usual hordes of VIPs on Wednesday. This fair has shed its gritty, edgy image to become far more generic, and some collectors said it no longer contained any surprises. Its younger gallery “Frame” and “Focus” sections may be a little weakened by Masters’ “Spotlight” section, which slightly overlaps. We shall see how that plays out next year.

Nicholas Hlobo sculpture

Sales at Frieze London started off sedately, but Stevenson from South Africa was happy to see a Nicholas Hlobo sculpture bought for Tate by the Outset fund for €50,000; Cheim and Read sold a Louise Bourgeois sculpture for $1.5m, while Sprueth Magers found a European buyer for Condo’s “Red Profile” (2012) at $325,000.

. . .

In the midst of all this, the price data site Artprice reported that the market for contemporary art actually shrank 6 per cent between July 2011 and July 2012. The market is worth $1.1bn, it estimates, based on auction results. Asia, which includes mainland China and Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and Taiwan, represent a chunky 43 per cent of the market. The Chinese figures are to be treated with caution; Artprice maintains they are carefully checked, although I don’t quite see how. Basquiat was the highest grossing artist with $103m in sales, followed by Zeng Fanzhi and Christopher Wool.

. . .

In another counter-intuitive turn, when Phillips de Pury opened the auction week on Wednesday night with a £12.2m sale, it fell well short of the £15m-£22m expectations and saw a bleak 34 per cent bought in. The top lot was a Basquiat at £2.6m. While the auction house does not confirm this, it will be moving into huge new quarters next year at 30 Berkeley Square, just acquired for over £100m by its owners, Russian luxury goods company Mercury.

. . .

13th-century gargoyle

On the subject of crossover collecting, the hedge-fund mogul Christian Levett has joined forces with gallery owner Toby Clarke of Vigo, launching the new venture – which retains the name of Clarke’s old gallery – in the former Blain|Southern space in Dering Street this week. Levett collects in a number of areas, notably antiquities and modern art, as well as buying contemporary art. In 2011 he opened the Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins in the south of France, which displays Roman, Greek and Egyptian sculpture, vases, coins and jewellery as well as ancient arms and armour. He also collects living artists represented by Vigo such as Leonardo Drew, Biggs and Collings, Kadar Brock and Boyle Family, from whom he has commissioned a world series installation. “It is exciting to partner with a collector with such varied tastes, who is open to different forms of art,” said Clarke.

. . .

Many visitors to Frieze, almost overwhelmed with events, were questioning whether the whole art fair phenomenon is spiralling out of control. Hardly a week goes by without another art fair being created: the latest is Art Istanbul (September 2013), launched by Sandy Angus, one of the founders of the Hong Kong fair, now part of the Art Basel group. Is all this sustainable, and isn’t it leading to over-production? At a debate entitled “Does Size Matter?” this week a representative of Gagosian gallery affirmed, straight-faced, that “there is no over-production” – and went unchallenged. Considering that White Cube is showing Kiefer in Hong Kong, and both Gagosian and Ropac are launching their new spaces in Paris with Kiefer, it seems difficult not to believe that many artists might be overstretching their creative capacities.

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper

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Sam Fogg, London Frieze Masters 2012 Photograph by Linda Nylind Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze

So, Frieze is over. Or, rather Frieze London and Frieze Masters are over. And thus the most self-aware art festival closes its 2012 London extravaganza. It was quite a year, starting with the usual Nathan Barley moments: when I went to pick up my press pass, the queue at the press office was longer than the queue to get in the fair. Surely Andy Warhol would have enjoyed it: in 2012, everyone will be an art critic for fifteen minutes. At first, I was mildly concerned, that this might be the year that everyone who claims they’ll never go to Frieze again finally decides not to, but once inside, things were packed to the usual crowd-surfer-only levels.

I’m always suspicious of journalists who turn up with eerily perfect quotes in their articles, but when I heard someone saying “There’s so much to buy and so little time”

at one of the Frieze Masters‘ stalls, I suddenly had a tiny bit more faith in journalism as a profession. In many ways, the sheer incongruity and fundamental appropriateness of “so much to buy so little time” is what drives Frieze, both economically, of course, and creatively. When this review opened I said Frieze was self aware but that’s probably why Frieze inevitably ends up being more enjoyable than other art fairs, it knows what it’s there to do (i.e. sell art), but somehow avoids making that fact obvious. Sweaty dealers fretting over sales may make the art market what it is, but who wants to see that? Surely, Frieze reasons, a live, three-act murder mystery by Asli Cavusoglu is more fun to watch. Damn right it is.

What were the highlights? Frieze Masters certainly rates, not least for the sensitivity to

presentation of the participating galleries. The Frieze Masters‘ stalls were rather more like little art kiosks which you could duck into to escape both the pummel of London rain and the frenetic atmosphere of the contemporary fair across the park. A number of galleries chose to make their stalls essentially “mini-exhibitions” which focussed on the work of a single artist. Hauser and Wirth showed off a dazzling array of Eva Hesse drawings, Pace Gallery had a row of transcendent Kurt Schwitters collages, Wienerroiter-Kohlbacher brought out the Egon Schieles. It was almost too much to take in, but the difference with Frieze Masters was that there was enough space and time to return and look again rather than being pumped along by human peristalsis as in Frieze London, and you could buy a gargoyle if you had the extra cash.

Frieze London 2012 Phototgraph by Linda Nylind Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze

Not that there’s anything wrong with being pumped along by human peristalsis, it’s just about context. Returning to Frieze London, I did my damnedest to focus, especially on the Frieze Projects which always sound so great conceptually, but somehow underwhelm. I’m generally sorry to say it was another one of those years. The only one of the Frieze Projects which really managed the kind of otherworldliness I was hoping for was the project by Grizedale Arts and Yangjiang Group titled Colosseum of the Consumed, a modest wooden “colosseum” in which various artists and performers created works tailored to the surroundings and which was dotted with food stalls from the kind of organic and sustainable range of producers art-beings frequent — I must say, the kimchi on offer was a work of art in its own right. I only caught one of the performances, Bedwyr Williams’ autopsy of a humanoid curator fashioned from cake. His performance had the verve and poetry-

comedy linguistic flair he’s known for, and managed to rhyme “sambuca” and “puker” to a standard of which any MC would have been proud.

Joanna Rajkowska’s Frieze Projects piece was also worthy of note. You’ve heard of “sound pieces” no doubt, not least after Susan Phillipsz Turner Prize victory in 2011, but Rojkowska ventured into the lesser plumbed world of the “smell piece”. The idea was that Rajkowska would have incense burning near the entrance of the fair and this would have a transformative effect for all the fair goers and G4S security folks, perhaps turning the queue experience into a form of transcendental meditation. Rain, unfortunately, made it impossible to fully engage with the work, but the dry moments, were more interesting for how routinely life went on, incense or no incense. Perhaps we’re all so accustomed to bizarre odors in public, not least parks, that we’re rather

more likely to be reminded of Camden High Street than Xanadu when the incense does its thing.

For me, Frieze ended after a magisterial talk titled, On Stupidity, by John Waters in which the self-styled Pope of Trash explored the value of stupidity and the limits of intellect. The audience had dozens of questions, “Is art stupid?” “Is sex stupid?”, “Is the internet stupid” — no one was dumb enough to ask if talks on stupidity were stupid — Waters’ responses were all far too witty to condense (and many, this being Waters, were gloriously unprintable) but broadly the answers seemed to be yes, and long may such stupidities continue. Convert it to Latin and you’ve got a creditable motto for Frieze.

friezelondon.com

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Frieze Art Fair: Everything, 2012 by Servet Kocyigit

Servet Kocyigit, Everything (2012)

Frieze Art Fair: Colosseum of the Consumed by Coniston Institute

Frieze Art Fair: 'Untitled', by Koo Jeong A

Frieze Art Fair: Colour Phone by Mark Handforth

Mark Handforth, Colour Phone (2012)

Frieze Art Fair: Geoffrey Farmer and Casey Kaplan

Geoffrey Farmer, Casey Kaplan

Frieze Art Fair: 'Flowers That Bloom Tomorrow, 2011' by Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Flowers That Bloom Tomorrow (2011)

Frieze Art Fair: 'Self-Portrait as Rubbish Bin, 2012' by Michael Landy

Michael Landy, Self-Portrait as Rubbish Bin (2012)

Frieze Art Fair: Frieze Art Fair, Regent's Park London

The Telegraph London

Frieze Art Fair 2012: busier and buzzier than ever before

Ten years since its beginning, the Frieze Art Fair is still bringing all the glamour of the art world to the capital, writes Florence Waters.

Image 1 of 2

Arthur Kennedy 2012: A work by Caragh Thuring, who had a piece purchased by the Tate at Frieze Art Fair Photo: Tate Photography. Courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery, London

By Florence Waters

10:49AM BST 11 Oct 2012

Ten years on and Frieze Art Fair, London’s international contemporary art bazaar, is just one organ in what is now a city-wide festivity, an excuse for galleries to flaunt their best new art in a heady long weekend that brings collectors, dealers, scholars and all the glamour of the art world to the capital.

One of the most exciting things to observe on VIP day at Frieze, apart from the intoxicatingly light-handed exchange of cash and Tatinger, is the pace of the changing mood. One always notices the changes, and this year there are many. In typical austerity-defying fashion one New York gallerist told me yesterday that the first day this year was “busier and buzzier” than she had ever seen it, another told me that there was quite a different crowd than normal – and an unusual number of new collectors.

The biggest change is in the presentation of the wares themselves. On the whole, galleries have opted for restrained curation and honestly crafted pieces over big statements. Bombast is out, and art on a domestic, thoughtful scale is in. Precious Objets d’Arts with a contemporary twist were the order of the day; Matthias Merkel Hess’ glazed porcelain oil cans (‘Bucketry’, 2011-12) were selling like hot cakes at ACME; the French artist Jean Luc Moulène’s vase-sized gorgeous ornamentally entwined glass sculpture that requires three highly-skilled glassblowers in a costly high-risk process, was barely visible for the mob at the Thomas Dane Gallery. There was plenty of tapestry, crochet, gold, jewelry, a painting simply called ‘Baskets’, 2012, by Sigrid Holm Wood, painted in natural dyes all naturally sourced by the artist in Chinese healing plants.

Perhaps this conservative shift is in part due to the advent of the first Frieze Masters, which takes place across Regents’ Park this week (Ed Miliband has been among high profile guests), and the rising popularity of rival design fair, the Pavilion of Art and Design. This week sees the opening of more heavyweight satellite events than ever too, among them a major exhibition of new works by the master of refashioned formalism Anish Kapoor, at Lisson Gallery, and the crowd-pleasing “outsider” art wagon Museum of Everything which has landed at Frieze Masters.

But shifting interests reflect the times too. Last year, one of the artworks getting the most attention was a private “superyacht” (it cost €65m to buy as boat, and €75m to buy as an artwork, authenticated by the German artist Christian Jankowski). This year, in the same spot was erected one of the more memorable of this year’s “Frieze Projects”, experimental audience-participatory artworks designed to punctuate and enliven the monotony of the aisles. The Chinese artist collective, the Yangjiang Group, have teamed up with Cambrian organization Grizedale Arts to erect ‘Coliseum of the Consumed’, a plywood scaffold for food stalls and performances, which operates on the simple basis that “art should be useful”. I spoke to one of the stall owners who was selling juniper juice in plastic baggies and had raised £40 for Youth Group UK doing so.

For all the superficial changes, a decade after it first opened remarkably little has changed at Frieze, given how much has changed outside the marquee walls. Why, for instance, has it taken ten years for the first African art gallery to land at London’s international art fair?

Stevenson Gallery from Cape Town and Johannesburg had many reasons to celebrate yesterday. Not only were they a welcome addition to the contemporary art market bazaar, but the Tate had chosen to buy one of their works too. ‘Balindile I’ by young rising South African star Nicholas Hlobo is a long phallic hosepipe sculpted out of inner tubes which grow into a rubbery plant slumping like an undignified dead animal and sewn together with ribbon. It was among four new acquisitions the Tate made at Frieze yesterday, including a wonderful Seventies canvas by the underrated American painter Jack Whitten who was making sweeping cloth abstracts long before Gerhard Richter.

In terms of new artists, it’s always interesting to see who has been put out by dealers – and who is selling. Thomas Dane had almost completely sold a whole wall of nine works by British painter Caragh Thuring, one of them to Tate. Reminiscent of Hockney’s early stuff, she interprets environments such as a New York subway station by isolating symbols and patterns in architecture and arranging their forms onto linen in a simplified and flat manner that play tricks with our memory of a place. Overall, a Frieze year to enjoy.

Frieze Art Fair runs until Sunday in Regents Park

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Frieze: Cecile B. Evans audio guide with hologram Host

Frieze: 'Untitled' 2012, Maria Nepomuceno. Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Untitled, 2012 by Maria Nepomuceno at Victoria Miro

Frieze Week, various venues, round-up

As Frieze London draws to a close, Alastair Sooke gives his verdict on the exhibitions run in tandem with the contemporary art fair, including the National Gallery’s Richard Hamilton: The Late Works.

Richard Hamilton’s painting Lobby, from the Richard Hamilton – The Late Works exhibition at the National Gallery. Photo: EPA/ANDY RAIN

By Alastair Sooke

3:02PM BST 15 Oct 2012

An enormous flower is sprouting from the lawns of Regent’s Park. Crawling with black polka dots, it writhes and rears its head like something from The Day of the Triffids. Of course, it isn’t a real flower, but a sculpture by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama greeting visitors to Frieze London, the annual contemporary art fair that ended on Sunday.

Alluring yet dangerous-looking like a Venus flytrap, Flowers That Bloom Tomorrow (2011) made an appropriate gatekeeper for the fair. Inside the hothouse of the nearby marquee, the rarefied ecosystem of the art market offered up artists like exotic plants. Dealers and their clients were like Dutchmen in the grip of tulip mania. Frieze is by turns exhilarating and maddening. Nowhere else is the cross-fertilisation of art and money so flagrant.

Still, a welcome side effect of the fair’s success is that London’s galleries mount exciting exhibitions to coincide with it. One such show is Richard Hamilton: The Late Works at the National Gallery (until Jan 13; four stars). Having accepted the invitation to exhibit there in 2010, Hamilton, who pioneered British Pop art in the Fifties, worked on the show until his death last year aged 89.

The exhibition contains almost 20 riddling paintings, full of allusions to art history as well as the artist’s earlier work. Many of the pictures were designed using a computer, and their precise style, presenting nude women inside modernist interiors, is part Old Master, part Ikea catalogue.

The contemporary world looms large: we see vacuum cleaners — an obsession of Hamilton’s since his Pop collages of the Fifties — as well as mirrors and modish furniture. There are references to Hamilton’s hero, Marcel Duchamp.

But there is an awareness of older traditions, too. In several pictures, Hamilton draws upon religious painting. In An annunciation (b) v2 (2005), a curly-haired, naked Virgin receives divine news by telephone. Hamilton, who has a reputation as a cerebral artist, was no stranger to sensuousness and jokes.

Lobby (1985-7) replicates a Seventies postcard of the foyer of an upscale hotel in Berlin. It is a large, perplexing oil painting, in which mirrored pillars complicate the convincing representation of space. In the distance, we glimpse an expressionless attendant, but otherwise the scene is empty, anodyne, absurd. An Escher-like staircase leads nowhere. We can practically hear the “plink” of an elevator, and the dirge of piped music.

Hamilton called Lobby a “metaphysical” painting, since it presents “a kind of purgatory”. It offers a chilling vision of an excessively corporate world in thrall to shiny surfaces. Everything feels numb and hollow.

Hamilton once told me that for most of his life he felt “rejected”. I suspect he may be the most underrated British artist of the 20th century — the opposite of, say, his near-contemporary David Hockney. In recent years, Hockney has won acclaim for doodling on an iPad, whereas Hamilton, who was always at the forefront of using technology to make art, garnered none. In advance of a retrospective opening at Tate Modern next year, the National Gallery’s exhibition should start securing Hamilton the recognition he deserves. Better late than never.

There is one reason to see Mel Bochner: If the Colour Changes at the Whitechapel Gallery, and that is the American artist’s so-called “thesaurus paintings” (until Dec 30; three stars). In this recent series, Bochner, who is often described as one of the founding fathers of conceptual art, paints synonyms of words in bright capital letters.

In Sputter (2010), the title sparks a list of 20 related words (“stutter”, “stammer”, “sniffle”, “snort”, “yap”, “yelp”, and so on), culminating in the brutal monosyllable: “croak”. Here is a Beckett-like prose poem condensing existence to its grim essentials. But it is funny as well as bleak: the tasteless, Sesame Street colours clash with the pessimistic message that life is a struggle before we kick the bucket.

Master of the Universe (2010), which ends with the sting in the tail of “Gotcha by the Balls”, is a slangy satire upon Western capitalism. It is hard to resist paintings with such sly wit. In comparison, Bochner’s earlier work, some of which is on show at the Whitechapel, feels boring.

Franz West: Man with a Ball, an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery of work by the influential Austrian artist who died this summer, is full of infectious, rough-hewn energy (until Nov 10; four stars). Intestinal forms in baby pinks and blues wriggle and quiver like serpents hypnotised by a snake charmer — though arguably the fibreglass supports detract from the effect.

Amorphous lumps of papier-mâché and polystyrene splashed with bright acrylic paint levitate on slender steel sticks. (In some cases, West’s boulder-like forms balance on cheap ironing boards.)

Everywhere, there is a sense that the work — a jab in the eye of classical sculpture — is still in flux. This must be the most exuberant, freewheeling show in town.

Valkyrie Crown, a patchwork fabric structure by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos currently nesting like an alien life form in the upper gallery of Haunch of Venison, has a festive quality, like a massive piñata (until Nov 17; three stars). With its sprawling tendrils and tentacles, it is pleasingly unruly.

The same can be said for the humanoid sculptures of the Leeds-born, LA-based artist Thomas Houseago at Hauser & Wirth (until Oct 27; four stars). With their gloopy surfaces smeared onto jerry-built supports, these figures have an awkward, lumbering quality that imbues them with personality.

By contrast, Rothko/Sugimoto at the new Pace London gallery feels insufficiently anarchic (until Nov 17; three stars). Glowering late paintings by the Abstract-Expressionist Mark Rothko are paired with silvery-grey seascapes by the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The juxtaposition is superficially successful, in that the sea-versus-sky divisions of Sugimoto’s images echo the bands of Rothko’s canvases, which are dominated by dark colours.

But Rothko’s expressive, stormy brushwork feels much more exciting than Sugimoto’s numb, bleached-out vistas, which are the visual equivalent of mood suppressants. Still, sometimes a dose of tranquillity amid the turmoil of Frieze is just what the doctor ordered.

The Telegraph London

The best anti-Frieze in London

Colin Gleadell looks six of the best exhibitions with shows opening that aren’t part of Frieze art fair.

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Issues of womanhood: ‘Full Steam Ahead’ by Joana Vasconcelos is on sale at the Haunch of Venison gallery Photo: CUnidade Infinita Projectos

By Colin Gleadell

4:53PM BST 08 Oct 2012

Not all of London’s top galleries are taking part in this week’s art fair jamboree in the capital. For a variety of reasons, some are staying at home and mounting significant exhibitions. Here are six of the best that open to the public tomorrow, all within walking distance in Mayfair.

Frieze won’t accept the Haunch of Venison gallery because it is owned by an auctioneer, Christie’s, but the gallery will continue to apply on the basis of its excellent exhibition programme. In its New Bond Street galleries is a solo show for Joana Vasconcelos, who will represent Portugal at the next Venice Biennale and whose recent exhibition at the Château de Versailles was a sensation. A series of eye-catching sculptural installations that address issues of womanhood and nationality are composed of everyday objects such as tiles and textiles. Full Steam Ahead is a 2m construction in the shape of a water lily made from steam irons in which the petals open and close, emitting steam. Prices range from £8,000 to £400,000.

A surprising absence from the Frieze Masters line-up is Richard Green, with his enviable range of art from Old Masters to modern. But with his new gallery next to Sotheby’s proving a big draw, Green opted to play away last month at the Paris Biennale des Antiquaires and was rewarded with a handful of million-pound sales. For Frieze week, he has dipped into his collection for a broad survey of Britain’s leading 20th-century modernists, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Shelter drawings, family groups and reclining figures by Moore are juxtaposed with abstracts and carved reliefs by Nicholson, and bronze, metal and carved alabaster sculptures by Hepworth. Only half the works on view are offered for sale, priced from £125,000 to £2 million.

The last time Berkeley Street dealer Simon Lee showed at Frieze, he spent too much time in a taxi between the fair and his gallery trying to service clients at each. So this year, in addition to a gallery exhibition of Picasso-inspired paintings by Austrian artist, Heimo Zobernig, he has taken over a floor in a nearby underground car park for an installation by widely collected young British artist Toby Ziegler. In a nod to the aspirations of Frieze Masters to bridge the old and the new, Ziegler has rendered the subjects in Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Cripples as giant aluminium, three-dimensional, cubistic figures, looped around supporting timber frames instead of crutches. Prices for Ziegler’s Cripples are up to £50,000 each.

A star in the firmament of late-19th-century artists sometimes dubbed as British Impressionists, Sir George Clausen’s highest prices (around £500,000) have been for his 1880s scenes of rural peasant life, flecked in sunlight. For Frieze week, the Fine Art Society in New Bond Street, another surprising absentee from Frieze Masters, is presenting a Clausen retrospective in which his later landscape and still-life paintings are reassessed. Priced from £20,000 to £100,000.

Blain/Southern is the latest incarnation of a partnership that began 10 years ago, was bought by Christie’s, but has been independent for the past two years, not quite long enough to apply for the main Frieze fair. In that time, founders, Harry Blain and Graham Southern, have been rebuilding their stable of artists, and launch their new gallery in Hanover Square with a show for artist/punksters Tim Noble and Sue Webster, who last showed in London with the Gagosian Gallery five years ago. Entitled Nihilistic Optimistic, the exhibition comprises five new self‑portrait shadow sculptures composed from arranged debris and projection lamps, together with a splendidly teetering, unlit tower of junk, My Beautiful Mistake, priced between £60,000 and £300,000. The pair has also released a limited edition vinyl record priced at £200. Don’t buy it for the music, though, because there isn’t any.

Shizaru is a new gallery in Mount Street founded by Benjamin Khalili, the son of the Islamic art collector Nasser Khalili. So far, it has been feeling its way into the contemporary art market, but makes a major breakthrough this week with a vast exhibition curated by the renowned American collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, who sits on the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Bad for You is what it says it is – an exhibition about the relationship between art and human vices through the eyes of 67 American artists, from Andy Warhol to in-vogue photographer of uninhibited youth, Ryan McGinley. Prices range from £1,200 to £625,000.

Frieze Masters art fair reflects fashion for all things old

Frieze – a byword for modern and cool – is to be joined this year by a fair selling Old Masters and ancient artefacts

The Guardian, Friday 5 October 2012 12.20 EDT

Last year’s Frieze art fair in Regent’s Park, central London. This year it will be joined by Frieze masters. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Since 2003, the autumnal trees and clipped grass of Regent’s Park in London have been the scene of the annual Frieze art fair, the most important contemporary art fair in Britain and temple to all that is hyper-modern and cool. But this year it will be joined by something quite different – a new fair, Frieze Masters, that will be selling everything from ancient Egyptian statuettes and Old Masters to artwork made up to the year 2000.

If the emergence of Frieze art fair heralded, or confirmed, the hegemony of the modern in fashionable taste, then now we are being told something different: old is cool again.

The “Frieze effect”, as it is called (though you might argue about how far it is symptom, or cause, of the fashion for the modern) has not simply been about the predilections of the oligarchs, hedge-funders and Qatari magnates who have been hoovering up contemporary art. The taste for the new also filtered into style magazines, TV design shows, the way we furnish our homes. “It was the Wallpaper* magazine generation and the Blair generation,” says the Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover, who argues that fashion in art is inextricably connected to trends in wider taste.

“There was a feeling in the late 1990s and early 2000s that we need to be younger, more international looking. In the 1980s and early 90s, people aspired to houses that looked like mini-stately homes, with swagged curtains and antiques.” But, he adds: “Now both that 1980s look and the austere, minimalist look seem a little backward-looking.”

The idea that the arch-marketeers of the brand-new should now be urging the monied to buy medieval stonecarving and Tiepolos may seem a little startling, but Frieze Masters has not emerged from nowhere.

Slotover and his business partner Amanda Sharp, along with the fair director Victoria Siddall, have been impelled by what they are seeing around them: by what artists are saying and doing, by what kind of shows they see curators mounting. The worlds of contemporary and historic art – often institutionally sealed off from each other both in the academic and the commercial worlds – are opening up towards one another.

“It feels like a zeitgeist thing,” said Siddall. She ticked off a list of exhibitions where the old and the new had mingled. At last year’s Venice Biennale, Tintorettos were shown in the official main exhibition, generally regarded as the contemporary artworld’s most important state-of-art-now statement. Works by Poussin were paired with canvases by Cy Twombly, who died last year, for a show at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Ed Ruscha, the hyper-cool, pop-inflected Californian painter, has curated a show from the magnificent collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; at the same institution Jeff Koons had given a talk about medieval wood-carving.

In the UK, the Turner prizewinner Grayson Perry last year became the first contemporary artist to curate a show at the British Museum. This summer, brand-new works by Chris Ofili and Mark Wallinger were shown in the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery – a space more accustomed to Leonardos than edgy installation art. The current Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy in London – with Tony Cragg and Koons shown along with ancient Etruscan sculpture – is yet another example of the tendency.

According to Siddall, “to have all these events more or less at the same time feels like we are being offered a new way of looking at art. It’s something of course that artists have always done – to look at their own work in relation to that of the past – but the rest of us are catching up.”

According to Rupert Thomas, editor of the World of Interiors magazine, which covers art and antique fairs as well as taste in decoration, said: “Non-contemporary art, if you like, is what artists have been buying for years. Jeff Koons has been buying up old work, Corot and the like, for a fraction of the price of what his own work sells for. Frieze is picking up on what its own artists have been doing for a long time. They are brilliant at finding the right current, picking up on what works commercially.”

The message of Frieze Masters is not about a move away from the contemporary, but about seeing it in the light of history; the historic art, meanwhile, is given a cool edge by association with Frieze. It is significant that the exhibitors at Frieze Masters are obliged to show their work against a choice of four backgrounds: white, or three shades of grey. No red damask or swagged curtains allowed.

Xavier Bray, an Old Master curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, has just been hanging a show that pairs portrait heads by Lucian Freud and the 16th-century Bolognese artist Annibale Carracci for a new show at the Ordovas gallery. He has practical views on what he hopes Frieze Masters can do: “jumpstarting”, he hopes, the market for Old Masters, and helping draw attention back to the historic work that has recently taken second place to the excitement of the new. “We want to attract the hedgefunders to buy Old Masters and of course, eventually give them to us and regenerate our collections,” he said. People have, he said, “forgotten how to look at Old Masters” – which are seen as “not as edgy, not as exciting” as contemporary work.

While Bray finds himself working with contemporary art, recent years have also seen a burgeoning of contemporary curators appointed to museums with historic collections – the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Jasper Sharp works at the last, and invited Ruscha to work with the Viennese collection. As with Perry’s exhibition at the British Museum, the exhibition is about an intuitive, non-academic but fiercely intelligent eye revealing art in a way that no academically trained art historian would do. “The Brueghels he hung looked as if they had been painted 10 minutes ago,” Sharp said. “Sure, with some of these projects there’s a little tokenism: it has sometimes felt as though historic collections have needed a little stardust sprinkled over them.” But, he added: “Artists are the most articulate advocates of historical art. They can bring it alive.”

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Frieze art fair – review

As frenetic and irreverent as ever, this year’s Frieze also launched its first ‘historical’ art fair, featuring everything from medieval gargoyles to, er, David Hockney…

Miranda Sawyer

- The Observer, Saturday 13 October 2012
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Miranda Sawyer admires a William Eggleston at Frieze Masters: ‘They cost “185 US”, says the gallery owner, which means $185,000.’ Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer

I’m standing on a wooden balcony. It forms a square: slightly rickety, not too wide, not too high. Standing here is a bit like hanging in a tree house, except that where the tree should be there’s a space. A space for art to take place.

Here’s some now. Below us, a big man in red shoes, a red hat with floppy ears and a butcher’s apron is performing an autopsy. The corpse lies on a metal trolley. It appears to be naked – you can see the sparse hairs on its chest, its spud-like genitalia – but it’s wearing brown shoes and serious specs.

The man in the apron – artist Bedwyr Williams – addresses the corpse.

“Curator. Cadaver. Cake,” he announces solemnly, and wields his knife.

Williams has a problem with curators and has decided to address it by cutting up a curator cake. He talks as he does so (“They celebrate their eyes with unusual spectacles because their eyes is their business…”), gradually slicing the cake to reveal its brain and other organs. It’s funny, engaging, chaotic. He has a great way with words. And at the end, everyone gets a cup of tea and whichever bit of corpse they want to eat. Tim Marlow, curator and broadcaster, chows down on the penis. It looks tasty.

Tea and cake – whether art cake or just the ordinary kind – is always nice, and a welcome relief within the strange hall-malls of Frieze. It’s not just that looking at art is tiring, but Frieze itself somehow sucks up your energy and replaces it with an anxious jitteriness. Am I missing something? What’s going on there? Should I wait in this corner where an artistic murder mystery appears to be developing or should I try to get into a talk? Even when you slump, on groovy benches covered in laughing cows, you find yourself consulting your map, planning your next foray. Frieze is a fair in all senses: it exists to sell work, but it’s also a collection of entertainments. A festival; like Edinburgh, like Glastonbury.

This year, the 10th Frieze, is accompanied by the now familiar big gallery openings. London’s art orgasms are timed to chime with Frieze. There are great shows at the Serpentine (Thomas Schütte), the South London Gallery (Rashid Johnson), Tates Modern and Britain (William Klein and Daido Moriyama; the Turner prize and pre-Raphaelites), as well as interesting events happening all over the capital. The Rain Room at the Barbican. Lindsay Seers’s installation at the Tin Tabernacle in Kilburn. Sunday Fair, for smaller galleries that can’t afford Frieze’s prices. Arrrggh! Too. Much. Culture.

But my job here is Frieze, and its new companion, Frieze Masters, which promises non-contemporary art displayed in a contemporary manner. Meaning: no stripy wallpaper, no scary doormen and not much context. Instead, the art – from ancient Egyptian sculptures to medieval friezes, from old masters to (cough) ethnic art – is shown Frieze-styley: within white or grey boxes, easily entered, easily left.

It’s an enjoyable show: smaller and easier to negotiate than its big sister. Though it seems weird to see Warhol and Basquiat, Avedon and Hockney among the Rubenses, the Picassos. There’s even a series of Thomas Schütte photographs on display as you walk in. I thought this was the oldies’ section? I ask, and apparently the cut-off point for Frieze Masters is 2000, so Masters is essentially all art except that made in the past 12 years. Everything and everyone, from teenagedom onwards, is a potential master, it seems.

There are odd juxtapositions: one gallery shows Annie Leibovitz photos next to Watteau sketches, which looks… I think the technical word is shite. Better are the galleries that have the courage of their convictions. At Cheim & Read/Victoria Miro there are some gorgeous William Eggleston photographs, previously unprinted, carefully blown up into amazing large-scale pieces. Editions of two, one kept by Eggleston. They cost “185 US”, says the gallery owner, which means $185,000. Cheap when compared to a million-plus Turner.

The Museum of Everything is showing the cute, closed sculptures of William Edmondson, the manual labourer who became the first African-American artist to be given a one-man show at New York’s Moma. Opposite, at Alison Jacques, are some lovely paintings from Dorothea Tanning, who died in January this year at the age of 101. And I’m a fan of the three gargoyles at Sam Fogg, a gallery that specialises in medieval art. Almost all gargoyles were taken down from churches in the 19th century and replaced; these were once part of Notre Dame cathedral in Strasbourg. They’re displayed at an angle so they spring out at you, clawing camply at the air with a single paw apiece. Miaow!

Back in Frieze I wander and wonder. Sadie Coles has an arresting all-star display, including a familiar but still great Sarah Lucas piece called Mumum, which shows stuffed tights, like milky tits, packed together as a hanging chair. Nearby, the Lisson’s stall is equally showy. I like Ryan Gander‘s parade of squashy faux-designer objets. And I especially like the commentary on them from author Ned Beauman, in which he discusses the future of designer accessories: logo-laden pill boxes, overpriced OAP gifts.

I hear Beauman’s opinion courtesy of an audio guide, an artwork from young Belgian artist Cécile B Evans. You are guided to pieces to hear talks by Lionel Blue, Mary Beard, Patrick Moore, Grace Dent. I talk to Evans, who is lovely, and she tells me that she approached around 120 people to take part, and “I’ve never been rejected so many times”. Even luminaries such as Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Curtis demurred because “they didn’t feel qualified, they were scared”. It’s astonishing how intimidating art can be to people. They feel there is a “right” response, a respect that is due, a knowledge that’s needed before any opinion can be given.

Yet art doesn’t have to be anything. It can be a joke, a sentiment, a memory trigger, a cake. The art is often contained in the viewer’s response. It’s hard to free ourselves from the idea that art must be viewed reverently, in quiet contemplation of its beauty. Frieze, with its madding crowds, its fizz and daftness, its clutter, goes some way to liberating us from our fear. But I wish it would do more; let the humanity in, alongside all those paying humans. It has the hordes, why not give them some fun? As well as cake, of course.

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Art

Frieze Art Fair London 2012 report

Painting and mosaic by Julian Opie at the Lisson Gallery stand at Frieze Art Fair 2012

By Emma O’Kelly

Brothel-creeper patterned walls, a lawn breathing incense and a provocative mix of sculptures greet the long queues of visitors to this year’s Frieze Art Fair. ‘This would absolutely never be allowed in a public park in the US,’ says a well-groomed male couple in response to a white bust of a muscley naked lady by Alan Kane and Simon Periton.

Their reaction flies in the face of what Grayson Perry, in conversation with Martin Parr, said at talk sponsored by Italian lifestyle brand Yoox: ‘Shock is the standard response to art now because people want to be titillated. But it’s hard as people are inured to it.’ Tell that to Mitt Romney’s supporters.

But maybe Perry is right. Inside the tent, it seemed there were fewer genitals, less gore and shock horror than in previous years. The fair felt more grown up as it entered its tenth year. Could this be due to the arrival of Frieze Masters, a sister event at the north end of Regent’s Park, which features everything from ancient Mesopotamian treasures, Giacometti and Richard Avedon prints?

Nicholas Logsdail, founder of the Lisson Gallery, which was exhibiting in both shows says: ‘Masters is quieter than I had hoped, but I have seen more serious collectors in here than in the contemporary fair. It’s the first year, so we will see.’

Over at the contemporary tent – a positive bun-fight compared to the serene Masters show – crowds formed around a chalkboard map of the world by Rivane Neuenschwander on to which people were invited to pin fabric slogans taken from the Occupy movements. Featuring words like ‘debt’, ‘future’ and ‘nature’, printed onto fabric labels, the work – shown by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery – is to be sold as it appears at the end of the fair.

Tanya Bonakdar says: ‘It’s been the best year for me. It feels different and I think its due to Frieze Masters which has brought some serious collectors in to town.’

There was further crowd participation at Grizedale Arts, a farm-cum-arts-organisation from the Lake District, where people in white uniforms were throwing tomatoes at each other. ‘It’s the re-creation of an arcane village sport,’ explains curator Alistair Hudson, whose mission is ‘to show that art can be useful in society.’

To this end, Grizedale set up a model cricket pavilion designed by Chinese artists Yangjiang Group, and hosted a farmers market with a difference. Along with the sale of homemade bread, pickled eggs, kimchi and jam, over the weekend, various chefs appeared to cook unusual fare, the highlight being Sam Clark of Moro and his Vermin Dinner (including the likes of parasitic fungi and squirrel). ‘It’s the only place in the fair where you actually see cash changing hands,’ says Hudson.

Cashless transactions were continuing apace at Brazilian gallery Vermelho, where director Akio Aoki explained: ‘In Brazil, there’s a shortage of art. It’s almost impossible to get post-2008 works by Brazilian greats like Ernesto Neto and Beatriz Milhazes. And where collectors were spending £5000, they are now spending £50,000.’ He is hotly anticipating the opening in December of the White Cube in Sao Paulo where new works by Tracey Emin will go on show.

The Frieze effect sends ripples all across the city that encourage the big galleries to put on blockbuster shows, and smaller spaces to roll out their best artists. At the Zabludowicz Collection, located in a beautifully restored Methodist chapel, British artist Matthew Darbyshire created a fictional dystopian village featuring room sets decorated with furniture from Next, ironic corporate hoardings used by developers to cover repair-work on historic buildings and bad-taste civic architecture. Within the fair, at Herald St Gallery, he created vitrines featuring Avon aftershave bottles. The smell of the aftershave still lingers in his studio.

Over at Sunday, a show featuring works from 20 galleries less than 7 years old, sales and visitor numbers were up. ‘We could have sold Jack Strange‘s work six times over,’ says Rebecca May Marston, director of Limoncello gallery – one of the event’s founding galleries.

Despite its air of chaos and its down-at-heel location, people couldn’t get enough. This was the same everywhere you went; Lisson Gallery held an evening banquet and 700 people turned up. Three hundred more queued outside. At Tim Noble and Sue Webster ‘s after party at Tramp, it was one in, one out. A performance evening at David Roberts Art Foundation saw queues round the block.

Perhaps Perry, talking about why Internet art will never work, sums it up best: ‘I want to see different textures, different scales. I don’t want to see all my sculpture through a bit of flat glass. We are human animals. We need our tribal gatherings like Frieze.’

12 October 2012 | Art

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ART OBSERVED

AO On Site – London: Frieze and Frieze Masters Art Fairs at Regent’s Park, Through October 14th

October 12th, 2012 Toby Ziegler, "The Cripples" via Art Observed
Toby Ziegler‘s The Cripples, image via Art Observed

Back in 2003 in Frieze’s first year, no major international art fair had ever been hosted in London before. Frieze Art Fair, organized by Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, has helped take London from being a city without a focused art scene to its current state at the center of the European art market. Now in its tenth year, Frieze Art Fair in London’s Regent’s Park has seen around 60,000 visitors, with 264 dealers from 35 countries hoping to sell work (valuing an estimated £230m) created by more than 2,400 artists within 175 of the world’s leading galleries.

Aaron Young at Massimo de Carlo in Milan
An Aaron Young motorcycle burn out work at Massimo de Carlo in Milan, photo via Art Observed

Hauser & Wirth, Frieze London 11-14 October 2012, Jason Rhoades, Shelf (Mutton Chops) with Unpainted Donkey (detail), 2003
Jason Rhoades, Shelf (Mutton Chops) with Unpainted Donkey (detail), 2003 © The Estate of Jason Rhoades Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner, New York, Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich

Pace Gallery Booth via Art Observed
David Zwirner Gallery’s booth, with Donald Judd works, photo via Art Observed

This year, the activity has expanded outside the main tent. The biggest addition to Frieze – nearly overshadowing the main fair – is the introduction of a sibling-fair happening simultaneously: just a 10-minute walk to the opposite end of Regent’s Park, Frieze Masters is a second (less boisterous and eccentric – more intimate, hushed and exquisite) tent with 101 stands, 22 of which are solo presentations by singular artists, with art ranging from the late 13th century to 2000.

Notable works at Frieze Masters included “A Vanitas,” a human skull sitting on top of a tome, sculpted from 17th century Italian marble priced at £350,000 at Daniel Katz and Poussin’s “Apollo and Daphne” (ca. 1620), rediscovered by Louvre curator Pierre Rosenberg in the 1990s, priced at $1.75 million.

Frieze Masters via Art Observed

Frieze Masters via Art Observed
Frieze Masters via Art Observed

Buyers at the Frieze Masters have tended to be liberal in spending but conservative in choices, quick to buy (Rupert Wace, dealing in ancient Egyptian and classical art, who was selling megalithic axeheads sold four works in the first 36 minutes of the VIP hour), but leaning towards name brands and easily recognizable value. For lesser-known artists, the outcome has been on the disappointing end.

Nicolas Poussin, “Apollo and Daphne” courtesy Robiland + Voena Gallery

Hauser & Wirth (among others) had booths at both fairs. At Frieze Masters, the gallery dedicated an entire room to museum-quality works on paper by Eva Hesse. It also exhibited works by Alighiero Boetti, Yves Klein, and Atsuko Tanaka of the Gutai Group. At Frieze it presented a radical overview of sculpture by three artists: a sculptures in silicone by Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades’s massive neon pieces and a series of smaller, intimate reliefs from the 70s and 80s by Hans Josephsohn.

Nan Goldin Skinhead Dancing London Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Nan Goldin, Skinhead Dancing, London Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Matthew Marks Gallery presented a special installation of Nan Goldin photographs, as well as a group of five Fischli/Weiss flower photographs, new paintings by Gary Hume, and an installation of Ken Price drawings and sculptures, among other works by artists the gallery represents.

London is also full of off site exhibitions to keep fairgoers busy: Toby Ziegler‘s “The Cripples” located 14 floors below street level in a concrete parking structure features herds of dimly lit horse legs, and in the Malborough Contemporary down the street is Angela Ferreira‘s “Stone Free,” an installation in a variety of media, comparing the Cullinan Diamond Mine in South Africa with the Chislehurst Caves in South East London.

Claire Fontaine at Galerie Chantal Crousel via Art Observed

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, commented that “Frieze continues to be a fair in which we can all make discoveries of emerging and re-emerging artists.” The Tate collection has benefited from these discoveries, receiving 4 works as gifts from The Outset/Frieze Art Fair Fund, whose budget this year was a record-high £150,000 ($240,000).

Frieze Art Fair via Art Observed 2
At the Frieze Fair image via ArtObserved

The works include Hideko Fukushima‘s Ko 8, 1963; Nicholas Hlobo‘s Balindile, 2012; Caragh Thuring‘s Arthur Kennedy, 2012; and Jack Whitten‘s Epsilon Group II, 1977. Since 2003, the Tate has acquired 86 works from the fund – a project in which an international panel of curators annually selects pieces by emerging artists participating in Frieze London to contribute to the gallery’s national collection.

Jean Dubuffet at Waddington Custot Galleries via Art Observed
A Jean Dubuffet sculpture at Waddington Custot Galleries, image via Art Observed

There is a marked difference this year in more academic thoughtful curation over attention-getting pieces. Matthias Merkel Hess’ glazed porcelain oil cans (Bucketry, 2011-12) sold well at ACME; Jean Luc Moulène’s glass sculptures were in high demand at the Thomas Dane Gallery. Fairgoers may remember Christian Jankowski‘s ”superyacht” from last year, which was an artwork and a commodity – it cost €65m to buy as boat, and €75m to buy as an artwork, authenticated by the artist himself. This year in its place “Frieze Projects”showcased experimental performative works. The Yangjiang Group and Grizedale Arts built ‘Coliseum of the Consumed’, a structure of food kiosks and performance art, stating that “art should be useful”. The Telegraph spoke to one of the stall owners who was selling juniper juice in plastic baggies and had raised £40 for Youth Group UK doing so.

Hauser & Wirth, Frieze London Sculpture Park, Anri Sala, Clocked Perspective, 2012
Anri Sala, Clocked Perspective, 2012 Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/London

The Sculpture Park at Frieze London 2012 features Anri Sala‘s Clocked Perspective seen for the first time this summer at Documenta (13), and a group of Hans Josephsohn‘s reclining figures and torso. Art Observed will feature a follow up photoset of the Frieze 2012 sculpture park in a later post.

Gillian Wearing, Self Portrait at Twenty-Seven Years Old Courtesy Maureen Paley
Gillian Wearing, Self Portrait at Twenty Seven Years Old, 2012 Courtesy Maureen Paley Gallery

Anselm Reyle at Kujke Gallery, Seoul: Tina Kim Gallery
An Anselm Reyle work at Kujke Gallery, Seoul: Tina Kim Gallery, image via Art Observed

Frieze Art Fair via Art Observed
The main fair, image via Art Observed

A Carsten Holler sculpture at Gagosian Gallery, image via Art Observed

Frieze Art Fair via Art Observed
A sculptural work, image via Art Observed

A Chris Ofili work at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin via Art Observed

Sanja Ivekovic at Frieze via Art Observed
A Sanja Ivekovic work, image via Art Observed

Frieze Masters via Art Observed
A work by Tomas Saraceno at Tanya Bonakdar at Frieze, image via Art Observed

Darren Lago at Annely Juda Frieze Art Fair London 2012
A Darren Lago (a reference to a Mondrian in Lego) at Annely Juda, image via Art Observed

A Doug Aitken work at 303 Gallery, image via Art Observed

Rachel Garrard at Jack Hanley Gallery
A Rachel Garrard work (left) and a Jessica Rath scultpure at Jack Hanley Gallery

An Eric Wesley work at Bortolami, image via Art Observed

A Gavin Turk neon work at Almine Rech Gallery, image via Art Observed

Angela de la Cruz at Galerie Krinzinger Vienna via Art Observed
An Angela de la Cruz sculpture at Galerie Krinzinger Vienna, image via Art Observed

A Grayson Perry tapestry at Victoria Miro, image via Art Observed

A Jason Martin sculpture at Lisson Gallery, image via Art Observed

Image: John Chamberlain at Gagosian via Art Observed
A John Chamberlain sculpture at Gagosian Gallery, image via Art Observed

A Jonas Wood work at David Kordansky Gallery, image via Art Observed

A Katharina Fritsch sculpture at Matthew Marks Gallery, image via Art Observed

A Marcel Eichner painting at Contemporary Fine Arts, image via Art Observed

- E. Baker

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HOME › BLOG › London’s Frieze Art Fair & Frieze Masters 2012

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Alan Kane and Simon Periton, Eight Fculptures, 2012

Dan Flavin, Four Red Horizontals (To Sonja),1963

Diane Arbus at Timothy Taylor

Diane Arbus, Tattooed Female Impersonator Applying Make-up in Mirror, 1959 and Female Impersonator in a Round Mirror, NYC, 1960

Donald Judd, Untitled (Bernstein 80-19), 1980

Giulio Paolini, Idem V, 1975

Lee Ufan, Relatum (Formerly System), 1969:2012.

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1970

Walking through Regent’s Park between the Fairs

Francis Upritchard, Archer Plate and Gooose Vessel, 2012

Florian Meisenberg, Untitled, 2012

Marcus Coates, British Moths, 2011

Marc Hundley, They Can’t Hear a Word We’ve Said When We Pretend That We’re Dead, 2012

Ross Knight, Form of Togetherness, 2012

Hundley and Knight at the Team Gallery stand

Scott King, A Balloon For Britain, 2012

Amalia Pica, Catachresis No. 32 (Neck of the Bottled, Elbow of the Pipe), 2012

Sun, October 14, 2012

Culture Club

London’s Frieze Art Fair & Frieze Masters 2012

by Lola Lalic

This year, for the first time, Frieze Masters is running alongside Frieze Art Fair. With a focus on historical art, this new fair expands the organization’s focus and hopes to create new connections between contemporary and historical art.Undoubtedly a highlight of Frieze Masters is the David Zwirner space. Two of my favorites, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, are shown alongside Giulio Paolini, culminating in a colorful minimalist dream. London gallery Timothy Taylor has an eclectic mix of works by Diane Arbus, Sean Scully, and Philip Guston. Another notable piece was by Korean artist and philosopher Lee Ufan at the Blum & Poe stand. Titled Relatum (Formerly System), 1969/2012, the work consists of six steel plates elegantly placed in corners, bringing to mind the sculptures of Richard Serra.Walking through Regent’s Park from Frieze Masters to the main event, I came across Eight Fculptures by Alan Kane and Simon Periton in the sculpture park. A collaborative work, the artists re-imagine and subvert historical monuments and sculptures. Other highlights from the fair include London gallery Kate MacGarry, who showed works by New Zealand artist, Francis Upritchard. MacGarry also showed British Moths by Marcus Coates, an artist whose work is often connected to the idea of animal spirits. This piece comprises 24 small headshots of the artist covered in shaving foam, against a black background—his face appearing malformed and sinister.Team Gallery presented a two-person exhibition, showing advertising-inspired paper works by OC family member Marc Hundley and new sculptures by Ross Knight. Both artists employ found materials in their work: in Hundley’s case images and text from the past, while Knight re-contextualizes industrial elements like plastics and foam. The result is an exhibition that is both uncannily familiar and strange at once. I also loved British artist Scott King’s A Balloon for Britain at Herald St Gallery, a work that continues his exploration into the tension between pop culture and politics, questioning and undermining the idea of political symbol. The balloons are shown suspended over black and white images of suburban and working-class Britain, colorful and hopeful against the washed-out background.

Through October 14th, 2012FRIEZE ART FAIR
Regent’s Park
London, NW14RY

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Epicurean Inspiration

Frieze New York, a VIP Art Fair for Our Gilded Age

WWJD by Jack Early, 2012 (printed Lexan, lights, plywood, muslin, lentils, printed cotton)

Untitled by Daniel Arsham, 2013 (broken glass, resin)

Fotini by Saint Clair Cemin, 2013

A tale of two art worlds

Giant pieces take over New York as artists super-size their work—but bigger is not necessarily better

Frieze Frame: Art Fair Takes Manhattan

A Weekend of Art Events Around the City’s Frieze Fair

By MARSHALL HEYMAN

Performance art, Frieze New York

Johannes Kahrs at Zeno X Gallery

The Enterprising Gavin Brown

It’s VIP Day at Frieze New York, which means half the designers in town have hightailed it to Randall’s Island to ogle the art. Gallerist Gavin Brown talked to Style.com about his love-hate relationship with the fashion business.

The Enterprising Gavin Brown

Newsmaker Interview: Cecilia Alemani

Painting by Matt Connors at Herald St.

Ramiken Crucible

Lily van der Stokker at Kaufmann Repetto

Michael Krebber at Maureen Paley

Sam Lewitt hat trick at Miguel Abreu Gallery

Detail of Sam Lewitt at Galerie Buchholz

Standard (Oslo) with paintings by Gardar Eide Einarsson and sculpture by Oscar Tuazon

Gagosian Gallery

Tom Friedman at Luhring Augustine

Thomas Ruff at David Zwirner

Noam Rappaport and John McAllister at James Fuentes

Bjarne Melgaard at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal

Andy Boot at Croy Nielsen

Limoncello

Julia Rommel at Bureau

Shimabuku, Onion Orion, 2012, at Air de Paris

Nina Canell at Mother’s Tankstation

Zoe Leonard and Sergei Tcherepnin at Murray Guy

Canada

David Maljkovic at Metro Pictures and Annet Gelink Gallery

Sliding Liam Gillick doors at Esther Schippe

Anton Kern Gallery

Ryan McGinley at Team

Dianna Molzan at Overduin & Kite

Aaron Curry at Almine Rech Gallery

Steve Claydon at Sadie Coles HQ

Bjorn Copeland at Jack Hanley

John Henderson, Sam Falls and Daniel Rees at T293

An untitled 1991 Kippenberger from the “White Rubber Paintings” series at Gisela Capitain

Charline von Heyl’s Untitled (11/89), 1989, at Gisela Capitain

John Wesley and works by Mary Reid Kelly with Patrick Kelley at Fredericks & Freiser

Marianne Vitale in Frieze Projects

Marianne Vitale in Frieze Projects

Johannes Kahrs at Zeno X Gallery

Jamian Juliano-Villani, NIGHT FOOD, 2013

Lauren Luloff, Sunflowers (Black & White), 2013

Arthur Ou, Test Screen (Huntington), 2010

Michael Berryhill, Feathery Furnace, 2013

Shannon Bool, The Analyst (2nd version), 2013

John Lehr, Office Door, 2013

Damian Navarro, Cuisine-Cointet IV, 2013

Mamie Tinkler, Three Glasses Two Ways, 2013

Ruby Sky Stiler, Unique Copy (#2), 2013

Joe Smith, Untitled, 2012

Scott Reeder, Post Good, 2013

Liam Gillick, Allocated Table, 2012

Jaan Toomik, still from Waterfall video, 2005

Adrianne Rubenstein, Self-Portrait as a Pile of Lumber Falling Backwards, 2013

Rana Begum, No. 363, 2013

Francine Spiegel, Lora, 2013

Max Brand, untitled, 2013

Oliver Michaels, Primordially Decorative and Insincere, 2012

Marjorie Schwarz, Lamp, 2011

Nairy Baghramian, Gueridon (brace), 2013

Alex Da Corte, Head, 2013

Nancy Haynes, Retreat, 2012–13

Joe Reihsen, I’m exceptionally fun at parties, 2013

Anna K.E., Paris Bar, 2013

Martin Roth, Untitled, 2013

Glen Baldridge, Fright Flight, 2012

Breyer P-Orridge, Lucy Fur, 2004

Sculptures by Denise Kupferschmidt

Elizabeth Jaeger, Mudita, 2013