Marilyn Minter’s Inspiration for Show on Perspiration

August 30th, 2010

By Kiša Lala

Marilyn Minter, Trickle, 2010 C-Print

Marilyn Minter, Trickle, 2010 C-Print

Far from the sweaty sidewalks of New York in the cooler climes of Gstaad, better known for its ski resorts, Marilyn Minter is co-curating a show with Fabienne Stephan titled SWEAT. The show at Patricia Low Contemporary includes works by Matthew Barney, Kate Gilmore, Mika Rottenberg, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith among others – with depictions of the skin’s secretions ranging from the erotic to the mundane.

Cindy Sherman : Untitled 1985

Cindy Sherman : Untitled 1985

Sweat is the conditional response of our skins, the body’s largest organ: try as we might to mask the hint of arousal and exertion, the thin wet odorous film is a primitive and instinctual expression of our latent desires, a Pavlovian reflex to fear and sex. While Minter’s work explores the erotic surface tension of dirt and sweat, Kiki Smith’s work is one of abstract crystallized droplets, and Ryan McGinley photographs a runner in the saintly glow of exhaustion.

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New Visions of the Apocalypse

August 27th, 2010

By Kiša Lala

Horizon Features, An image from “Beautiful Islands”

Acqua Alta in Venice, An image from “Beautiful Islands,” Horizon Features

A recent surge in apocalyptic films indicates the mood of the zeitgeist. With 2012 fast approaching, our oceans at peril, and the gloom of global warming, the average recession-hit consumer cannot see past their shrinking funds to worry about other mammals going extinct.

The hottest Pakistani summers on record followed by uncharacteristic floods seems to all underscore the creeping panic, while for those on the other side of the debate, the future’s so bright, they’re just happy to wear shades.

Lucy Walker’s film Countdown to Zero, on the likely threat of a nuclear holocaust, is the latest venture by Lawrence Bender of An Inconvenient Truth, in which Walker asserts that, “steps needed to be taken to blow up New York City not only could happen but had already happened.”

Another documentary, Beautiful Islands, by Japanese director Kana Tomoko, examines three sinking islands with widely different cultures, Tuvalu in the South Pacific, Shishmaref in Alaska and Venice, Italy. In her attempt to show the plight of the indigenous people of Tuvalu, the first nation reportedly scheduled to be under water by 2050, her camera becomes infatuated by the sun, sea and the island’s blissful inhabitants – painting such an idyllic picture that one almost feels a pang of schadenfreude at their imminent demise.

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Polly Morgan’s Psychopomps Escort One into the After-Life

August 24th, 2010

By Kiša Lala

Polly Morgan, Systemic Inflammation, 2010, Taxidermy finches and canaries, steel, leather © Polly Morgan

Polly Morgan, Systemic Inflammation, 2010, Taxidermy finches and canaries, steel, leather © Polly Morgan

UK artist Polly Morgan’s artworks have rarely been exhibited across the pond, and for that matter, they may well be quarantined before we get a closer look. Morgan trained early in her career as a taxidermist, specializing in skinning and mounting animals before recontexutalizing her work in a gallery setting, presenting the stuffed, trussed specimens like bizarre Victorian curios: rats in champagne glasses, dead chicks spilling out of the crevices of old coffins, and exquisite corpses entombed in jewellery cases. But within these fanciful visions lie an implicit meditation on death.

Flight of Fancy (Nuthatch)

Flight of Fancy (Nuthatch), 2009 Crystal jewellery box, 2009 Crystal jewellery boxtaxidermy Nuthatch, © Polly Morgan

In Psychopomps, her latest solo-show at Haunch of Venison in London, she presents the animals as mythical flying creatures that convey souls into the after-life. The suspended taxidermist sculptures are fabulous allusions to their mythological counterparts, death’s escorts like Hermes and Charon and Anubis the jackal-headed Egyptian God, or the Norse Valkyries, who choose those who die in battle and bring them into Valhalla.

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Living with Art: Celina Alvarado, Founder of One by One Gallery

August 23rd, 2010

One by One Gallery: photo Gloria Suzie Kim

Alphabet City is a part of the East Village that has only been slightly more immune to the charms of gentrification than its more westerly psychogeographical* end; it’s an ethnographic hodge-podge of Dominicans, transplants, hipsters, and assorted New York crazies that roam the streets like ghosts, sometimes wearing their pajamas, sometimes throwing a fit, sometimes both.

Embodying a brilliant synthesis of transplanted culture and crazy street-talk, is an art and design gallery located in a small, non-descript apartment on Avenue D. The gallery is owned by Madrid transplant and one-woman show, Celina Alvarado. The gallery is called One by One and is located in the foyer of Alvarado’s apartment.

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Phillips de Pury & Company prepare to launch in uptown Manhattan

August 20th, 2010

Phillips de Pury's new location at 450 Park Avenue, Manhattan

Phillips de Pury & Company, the world’s third largest auction house, has been expanding their ventures worldwide – and this may not come as a surprise in view of recent auctions such as at Sotheby’s, which announced record sales, an indication that the art market isn’t softening in this recession, and that investors are willing to bypass the stagnant stock market for the safety of old masters and blue-chip moderns.

Apart from their recent Contemporary Art sale with record auctions of $50 million worth of art sold, Phillips de Pury had also begun a series of innovative and profitable “theme” sales titled BRIC, MUSIC and AFRICA. The highly successful BRIC auction in April in London focused on the so-called BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Repackaging art around themes has had lucrative pay-offs, and now with the economic rise of Asian countries, Phillips de Pury and other auction houses are creating a new buying frenzy among these nations’ patriotic elite.

Phillips’ move uptown to the new 25,559 square feet space, at 450 Park Ave will attract buyers who may find their other Meatpacking District location a bit out of reach – and put them in closer proximity to midtown rivals Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

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Nick Knight pays tribute to i-D Magazine’s 30th Birthday

August 16th, 2010

Nick Knight -self-portrait (2006)

Nick Knight, Self Portrait (2006)

By Kiša Lala

For its 30th anniversary this August, the now venerable, i-D magazine, has just released three birthday editions shot by photographer Nick Knight. The collectible issues with staggered release dates are titled Then (Pre-Fall), Now (Fall) and Next (Winter) with Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Lady Gaga as cover stars.

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Film director Lucy Walker projects her imagination onto fields of trash, and onto nuclear landscapes

August 13th, 2010

A scene from Lucy Walker's Countdown to Zero

A scene from Lucy Walker's Countdown to Zero. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

At Sundance this year, director Lucy Walker was one of few filmmakers present with two feature films being screened. The first was Waste Land, a collaboration with the artist Vik Muniz on a recycling project with the inhabitants of the world’s largest garbage dump ‘Jardim Gramacho’, just outside Rio. The film is an inspiring depiction of trash-pickers who recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage and through the process, begin to re-imagine their lives.

Her second film though, Countdown to Zero, is very different but just as powerful and enlightening, on the subject of a global nuclear arms crisis. The film was produced by Lawrence Bender (An Inconvenient Truth), and Walker was given the go ahead to create a film without any particular mandate.  At the film’s screening in Sundance she said that while researching the project and speaking to experts on the actual realities of nuclear proliferation, she was shaken out of her own complacency and forced to reeducate herself.

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Exhibition Highlights from “Newspeak” – Show of New British Art at the Saatchi Gallery

August 9th, 2010

Pink Cher, Scott KIng, 2008, Screenprint and paint on canvas, 3x2m photo:Kisa Lala

Pink Cher, Scott KIng, 2008, Screenprint and paint on canvas, 3x2m photo:Kisa Lala

By Kiša Lala

The current summer show at the Saatchi Gallery in London  brings to the fore a whole new generation of young British artists that now form the vanguard of the previously christened YBAs. But this show unlike its notorious predecessor, Sensation (1997), did not inspire scandal, which perhaps is a good indication of the current exhibition’s rather muted showing.

Newspeak, titled after George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, refers to a kind of abbreviated language that results from a gradual whittling away of expression and censorship of thought. This exhibition though claims to be about the opposite, showing that the range of “visual languages being exploited and invented by these new artists is, in fact, expanding and multiplying.”

Though the show seemed cursorily curated incorporating many visual styles and strategies, there were still many inspiring artists that stood out. Scott King’s Pink Cher, the sole artwork represented by this artist in the show, is graphically striking for its sheer simplicity and comedic pun. But the painting also is a sardonic reference to Warhol, celebrity obsessions, and the commodification of a revolution and homogenization by the media.

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Cy Twombly’s Ceiling at the Musée du Louvre, Paris

August 6th, 2010

View of the The Louvre's ceiling by Cy Twombly

View of the The Louvre's Ceiling by Cy Twombly Photo: Christophe Ena

Giotto's star-ceiling in the Cappella Scrovegni, Padua.

Giotto's star-ceiling in the Cappella Scrovegni, Padua.

Cy Twombly’s newly commissioned ceiling at the Louvre in Paris is monumental in scale, and covers more than 350 square meters. It was painted with the assistance of several artists and apprentices in a warehouse outside Paris before being affixed like wallpaper to the ceiling of the Salle des Bronzes. Looking up one sees an immense blue sky, painted with spheres and white insets inscribed with the names of leading Greek sculptors from the 4th century: Cephisodotus, Lysippus, Myron, Phidias, Polyclitus, Praxiteles and Scopas. The round shapes appear like shields, planets, or coins, while the blue background evokes either the sky or the sea.

Cy Twombly is the third contemporary artist invited to install a permanent work at the Louvre. He follows in the footsteps of a long lineage of artists including Le Brun, Delacroix, Ingres that have been honored in this tradition.  In the 20th century, the invitation has been extended to Georges Braque, (who has painted a ceiling with black birds against a starry midnight-blue sky ) and more recently to François Morellet, and in 2007 to Anselm Kiefer.

Though Twombly is American born, he has been living in Italy since 1959, and this work not only evokes the spirit of the Mediterranean, but also the colors of Chinese prints, and the lapis lazuli paint used by Italian Renaissance artist Giotto – who the artist says he has also been inspired by.

By Kiša Lala

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Emerging Art Fairs: Reinventing a Global Language with Art

August 4th, 2010

By Kiša Lala

New York The Armory Show 2010 © Gabriele Heidecker, Berlin

Barry Friedman Ltd. Work: Gottfried Helnwein, NY, The Armory Show 2010 © Gabriele Heidecker

Art fairs, with their aggregation of art dealers forming a one-stop shopper’s marketplace for art, attract high-spending collectors, generate greater sales, and have to some extent replaced galleries with their increasing drawing power. Before the recent market collapse, the frenzied demand for new art had peaked with the proliferation of smaller, budding art fairs. Some as satellites to the major European events, the biennials, art festivals and fairs such as Basel, Venice, Documenta, catered to lesser known, emerging artists. Even more notable are the fairs that have sprouted in Asian countries and off the map destinations, creating alternate markets for art, challenging the existing western hegemony – such as the Shanghai Contemporary, Art Dubai, Art Summit New Delhi and SP-Arte in Sao Paulo.

Berlin based photographer, Gabriele Heidecker has been documenting this new trend for the last few years, as a follow-up to her already published volume Art Affairs, containing candid behind-the scenes images of such events as Art Basel Miami Beach, London’s Frieze, ARCO Madrid, FIAC Paris, Art Cologne, which serve as watering-holes for artists, dealers and high-rolling investors alike. Heidecker’s photos reveal the subtext of commerce under the carnival-like atmosphere of the fairs, making us wonder if the transformative value of art is subsumed by its monetization.

11 Fieze Art London 2004 © Gabriele Heidecker, Berlin ART AFFAIRS, Nr.65 -art affair_S063_2

Lady on the floor, Frieze Art London 2004 © Gabriele Heidecker

I met Gabriele Heidecker aptly enough, on a plane from India to the Emirates as she globe-trotted between art events in Kolkata to Art Dubai and Sharjah, which are emerging capitals in the nexus of new art in the Middle East. I asked Ms. Heidecker about her new book in progress.

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