Thursday, August 28, 2008

Hank Willis Thomas...A MUST HAVE!

Black Power, 2006
Hank Willis Thomas
Price now $1,200.00
Description
First 10: $900, Nos. 11–20: $1,200, Nos. 21–30: $1,500
Paper: 20" X 16"
Image: 20" X 16"
C- print
Edition of 30 and
5 artist's proofs
At Aperture Foundation.



Hank Willis Thomas
Branded Chest, 2003
Platinum print, 10 x 6.5”
$450 - NOW ONLY $405
Available at Light Work.org



ARTmostfierce highly recommends start collecting Hank Willis Thomas work NOW!!!
The moment and the prices are NOW!!!
Please go to his site and take a look at the Branded series and also read his personal statement. The MoMA got it and already purchased some his work. His book 'Pitch Blackness' will be released by Aperture Foundation and it is also a must have.

His work looks at race, class, and history through advertising, focusing predominantly on the use of the African American male body in advertisements in an exploration of the "familiar." The work is not only important but, also is a reflection of the current times we live in.

I think either one of these images has a quite strong iconic potential and you should let the Credit Cards take a stroll before you go on and splurge on drinks, food and momentary sustained fabulousness during the Labor Day weekend. Look at it this way...The photos will be there when you get back from the holiday ...the hungover might linger on because you just wasted money !

So take a real Glamorous Break, do the Math and do a savvy investment. Get both prints!

Hurry before prices go up!

Have a great Labor Day Holiday Weekend!!!

Update as Sept. 3, 2008
Folks, the price already went up to $1,200.00
Still haven't got one?




See his work at: http://www.hankwillisthomas.com/

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Elizabeth Peyton @ The New Museum!

This is one of the Fall 2008 must see shows. Elizabeth Peyton is considered one of the best artists specialized in modern portraiture.

"Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton" is the first survey of Elizabeth Peyton's work in an American institution. The survey will include more than 100 works made over the past fifteen years. The show runs from October 8, 2008- January 11, 2009 At the New Museum at 235 Bowery.

She was born in Connecticut in 1965. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1987. She lives and works in New York. Peyton’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is represented in the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg; the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.




Democrats are more beautiful (after Jonathan Horowitz)
2001
Oil on board
10 x 8 in
25.4 x 20.3 cm
Collection Laura and Stafford Broumand





Piotr on Couch
1996
Oil on board
9 x 12 in
(23 x 30.5 cm)
Seattle Art Museum, Gift of the William E. Weiss Foundation, Inc., 97.11





Zoe’s Kurt
1995
Oil on board
14 x 11 in
(35.6 x 28 cm)
Collection Zoe Stillpass

Monday, August 25, 2008

Aperture Foundation Art Crawl!



ARTmostfierce recommends starting the fall season September 4, 2008 by hitting the marathon of events in one night!
Get the cab fare and a pair of comfortable shoes(stilettos) ready !
Alicia in a Golden Dress, Ukraine, 2005Michal Chelbin
Paper: 16" X 20"Image: 11" X 11"C-printEdition of 30 and 5 artist's proofs
Description:First 10: $750, Nos. 11–20: $850, Nos.21–25: $950, Nos.26–30: $1,100 Signed and numbered by the artist.
Please read below press release by Yseult Chehata of Aperture Foundation and also pick up a couple of prints from the Aperture's Limited Edition Prints collection(like the Michal Chelbin shown above) so, you can start fall with a bang and something fierce and valuable on the wall!

As the summer draws to a close, and the art photography community gears up for another busy season, I am pleased to share news of four exhibitions opening on September 4 in New York City featuring Aperture artists. Following are details on what we are referring to collectively as the “Aperture Art Crawl.” Thanks in advance for sharing news of this diverse array of exhibits with your readers.

Aperture Gallery Presents:
Invasion 68 Prague
Photographs by Josef Koudelka


This unprecedented exhibition, co produced with Magnum, and coinciding with the publication of the Aperture book of the same title, presents Josef Koudelka's remarkable body of work taken during the Soviet-led invasion of Prague in 1968 that brought to an end the short-lived political freedom in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring. The show will feature large-scale prints, including many images that have never been seen before. Opening on the same day from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. at Pace/Mac Gill Gallery (32 East 57th Street) is a companion show presenting vintage and recent prints of some of Koudelka’s most iconic images from this work.


Opening Reception with the Artist:
Thursday, September 4, 6:00–8:00 p.m.

Exhibition on View:
Friday, September 5, 2008 – Thursday, October 30, 2008

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th floor
(between 10th and 11th Avenue)
New York, NY
(212) 505-5555


RFK Funeral Train­ Rediscovered
Photographs by Paul Fusco

As a staff photographer for Look magazine in 1968, Fusco was commissioned to document all the events surrounding the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, and Aperture’s release of Paul Fusco: RFK, the long-awaited follow-up to Paul Fusco’s acclaimed RFK Funeral Train, Danziger Projects is reopening an exhibition of this work. To celebrate the opening, Paul Fusco will be there to sign copies of his new monograph that includes seventy never-before-seen images, many selected from the untapped treasure trove of slides that comprise the Library of Congress’s Look Magazine Photograph Collection.


Danziger Projects
521 West 26th Street
New York, New York
(212) 629-6778

Opening reception and book signing with the Artist:
6:00–8:00 p.m.

Exhibition on view:
September 4–October 4, 2008



Strangely Familiar
Photographs by Michal Chelbin

This marks Michel Chelbin’s debut exhibition at Andrea Meislin Gallery, featuring work from her first, and recently released publication Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes, and Other Traveling Troupes (Aperture, 2007). One of the art world’s rising stars, Chelbin’s portraits of small town performers in circuses and other traveling troupes from Eastern Europe, Russia, Israel and England, offer a glimpse into worlds that are both strange and familiar. The setting, costumes, and subjects may seem exotic, but Chelbin’s portraits look beyond to capture a transcendent sense of individual character.

Andrea Meislin Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Suite 214
New York, New York
(212) 627-2552

Opening reception and book signing with the Artist:
6:00–8:00 p.m.

Exhibition on view:
September 4–October 18, 2008


Games of Consequence
Photographs by Polixeni Papapetrou


Australian photographer Polixeni Papapetrou’s exhibition, Games of Consequence, is opening at Foley Gallery. Her series, Haunted Country, featured in Aperture magazine (Issue 184, Fall 2006) and in Aperture’s limited-edition prints program, presents staged images of lost children in her country’s bush inspired by her own childhood experience of being lost in the woods on a summer school holiday. In Games of Consequences, Papapetrou continues this trajectory, considering the landscape as a medium in which she can explore ideas about the contemporary social landscape of childhood.

Foley Gallery
547 W 27th Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10001
(212) 244-9081


Opening reception:
6:00–8:00 p.m.

Exhibition on view:
September 4–October 11, 2008


If you have any questions and/or would like to receive images, please do not hesitate to contact me. As always, thank you for supporting Aperture artists.

Yseult Chehata
Communications Coordinator
aperture foundation
547 West 27th Street, Fl. 4
New York, NY 10001
T (212) 946-7108
F (212) 979-7759
ychehata@aperture.org

The 30 shows, installations, and artworks you really cannot miss this fall.

These are some of the Fall 2008 ART events from New York Magazine so , you don't have to be running around like a headless chicken all over town trying to find out what to do.

Update your fall calender!
Enjoy !


Frankie.1995
(Photo: Catherine Opie/Courtesy of the artist and Regan Projects. Los Angeles


The 30 shows, installations, and artworks you really cannot miss this fall. Please click on link below:
http://nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2008/art/49472/

7. “Catherine Opie: American Photographer”At the Guggenheim Museum, Sept. 26– Jan. 7. Opie’s magnetic self-portraits have made her the visual bard of lesbian life. But her hazy, almost minimalist series of surfers and architectural photographs avoid the identity-politics ghetto.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Public Art, Eyesore to Eye Candy


Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times
Anish Kapoor’s reflecting “Cloud Gate,” an abstract public art piece nicknamed the Bean, at the Millennium Park in Chicago.
Photo: Rafa Rivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Puppy By Jeff Koons outside at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Spain


ARTmostfierce is quite burned-out from the summer extra curricular activities. Besides work , there is a lot on the plate right now so, blogging will be limited.

Lord knows it is hard to stay in shape with the schedule but, the photo project helps. Being on a bicycle Saturday for 4 hours and Sunday for 6 more hours taking photos all over Manhattan ...you know it helps to keep you fit and trim.

I still need a vacation!

I n the meantime please read and enjoy this article by Roberta Smith of the New York Times about public art.I agree with her views and look forward seeing greater examples of it.
Enjoy!

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: August 22, 2008

ART adores a vacuum. That’s why styles, genres and mediums left for dead by one generation are often revived by subsequent ones. In the 1960s and ’70s public sculpture was contemporary art’s foremost fatality — deader than painting actually. The corpse generally took the form of corporate, pseudo-Minimalist plop art. It was ignored by the general public and despised by the art world.

Public Sculpture Steps Up At the time many of the most talented emerging sculptors were making anything but sculpture. Ephemeral installations, earthworks and permanent site-specific works were in vogue, and soon the very phrase “public sculpture” had been replaced by public art, an amorphous new category in which art could be almost anything: LED signs, billboards, slide or video projections, guerrilla actions, suites of waterfalls.

But over the past 15 years public sculpture — that is, static, often figurative objects of varying sizes in outdoor public spaces — has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one.

To be sure, this new public sculpture is not always good. (Damien Hirst’s “Virgin Mother” at Lever House comes to mind.) If this kind of work may not be batting much above .300, hits are happening, showing art’s ability to reach larger audiences (as it satisfies its core one) and to create a communal experience that is in some ways akin to movies or popular music in its accessibility.

Some recent successes have included Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House,” a concrete cast of the interior of a London terrace house; Mark Wallinger’s 1999 “Ecce Homo,” a life-size figure of Jesus crowned with thorns, hands bound, standing amid the din of Trafalgar Square in London; Takashi Murakami’s wicked aluminum and platinum leaf Buddha shown in the atrium of the IBM Building in New York in the spring; and Anish Kapoor’s abstract “Cloud Gate,” nicknamed the Bean, at Millennium Park in Chicago. Freely mixing elements of Pop, Minimalism, conceptual art and realism, these pieces also often benefit from new technologies and materials that make them dynamic and provocative. (Jean Dubuffet’s giant, cartoony “Group of Four Trees,” at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza in Lower Manhattan, is a marvelous, unsung ancestor, but then it arrived in 1972, when sculpture was in an uproar.)

Certain artists may do their best work in the public arena. The Kapoor Bean’s giant, mercurylike dollop of brilliantly polished steel gives the phrase plop art robust new life and converts this artist’s sometimes glib involvement with reflective surfaces into an enveloping experience both humorous and almost sublime. From outside, the Bean’s curving exterior casts distorted reflections of its world — plaza, sky, city, people — back at us. It makes itself seem larger than it is by making us seem smaller, but its distortions change with every step we take, tilting the world this way and that, as if the universe were slightly adrift.

Beneath the sculpture is an arched space the size of a small chapel. Here the curving surface of the piece reflects itself, creating a dark violet cloudiness except at the highest point, which is reflection free. This small gleaming circle of silvery steel suggests a Baroque occulus letting in light; it has all the mysterious illusionism of a hole-in-the-roof church ceiling painted by Correggio but restated in modern, nondenominational terms.

No one has been more important to the revival of public art than Jeff Koons, contemporary sculpture’s genius lightweight, whose up-and-down, hellbent-on-perfection career is the subject of an illuminating if rather crowded survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It was Mr. Koons’s giant “Puppy” — a West Highland terrier covered with dirt, planted densely with flowers and first shown 16 years ago — that broadcast most loudly and clearly that public sculpture was neither an exhausted form nor necessarily a dumbed-down one.

“Puppy” was well placed and well timed. It stood in the courtyard of a handsome, mustard-colored Baroque palace that framed it perfectly. It was June 1992, and a few miles away, in the German city of Kassel, the international megashowDocumenta 9” was opening. Scores of art-world denizens made the short schlep to Arolsen to see what Mr. Koons was up to.

What they found was a shocking simplicity, accessibility and pleasure. “Puppy” was intensely lovable, triggering a laugh-out-loud delight that expanded your sense of the human capacity for joy. It was a familiar, sentimental cliché revived with an extravagant purity, not with enduring materials like marble or bronze but with nature at its most colorful and fragile. The flowery semblance of fur made “Puppy” almost living flesh, like us.



The sculpture could also be read as a redemptive gesture, a kind of mea culpa after the sexually explicit harshness of Mr. Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series, exhibited the previous year at galleries in New York, Brussels and Lausanne, Switzerland. Four of these paintings hang in the Chicago show behind a wall flanked by dire parental warnings, showing them to be almost anti-public compared with most of his subsequent work.

Public Sculpture Steps Up “Puppy” also provided a karmic bookend for an occurrence that happened almost exactly three years before its Arolsen debut: the removal, in March 1989, of Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” from the plaza at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. The dismantling came after a court ruling, complaints by the people who worked in the building — they hated the Serra — and days of acrimonious public hearings overseen by the General Services Administration.

“Tilted Arc” was in many ways the dark before the dawn not only of the Koons “Puppy,” but also of the shining achievement of Mr. Serra’s post-Arc work. He has in essence taken his revenge on the public by making stronger, more elaborate pieces that it could not resist — judging from how people line up these days to walk through his torqued ellipses, spirals and arcs.

The “Puppy” set a high standard that Mr. Koons reached again only with his recent works in gleaming high chromium stainless steel, especially his big hatched egg and his prim yet erotic “Balloon Dog” sculptures. The dogs imbue a greatly enlarged child’s party toy with the tensed stillness of an archaic Greek horse while subtly evoking various bodily orifices and protrusions. “Balloon Dog (Yellow)” is on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it draws crowds, functions as a photo op and yet retains its dignity. “Balloon Dog (Orange)” is among the Chicago survey’s high points.

That show is almost a primer of dos and don’ts in public sculpture. The best of its 60 pieces have the same irresistibility of “Puppy”: you are drawn to them by their familiarity only to realize that they are unprecedented. Spanning from 1979 to 2007, it has been organized by Francesco Bonami, the museum’s former senior curator, and is the most comprehensive museum survey of Mr. Koons’s career. It reveals an artist whose work has proceeded in fits and starts and has improved as it has shed its often abstruse conceptual, not so vaguely Scientological story line.

Mr. Koons’s theme is transformation, enacted literally with familiar restated objects in uncharacteristic material or scale. It is a basic Pop Art strategy but much easier to pull off on canvas than in sculpture, where it requires a level of perfection, the pursuit of which has, at times, nearly brought Mr. Koons’s art to a standstill.

The show demonstrates that his work has constantly returned to notions of weightlessness, floatation and levitation, often conflated with innocence, and that his progress has to some extent been a matter of getting his elaborate sculptural chops together. He broached weightlessness from the start, first with simple Duchampian ready-mades: plastic inflatable flowers and bunnies; vacuum cleaners set aglow by fluorescent light tubes and sealed in Plexiglas cases; and finally basketballs afloat, embryolike, in aquariums. In Chicago it is a little startling to see how much of middle-period Koons — the late 1980s bronze casts of an aqualung and life raft, the stainless-steel casts of portrait busts, a Baccarat decanter set or a miniature train (also liquor decanters) so central to his early reputation — now seems inert, heavy with irony, kitschy obviousness and sheer material. The most overt sign of the Koons to come is “Rabbit,” the 1986 stainless steel cast of an inflatable bunny that joins weightlessness and reflectivity and remains his best-known work.

Mr. Koons’s art enacts the basic exchange of public sculpture. We literally see ourselves in his alluring reflective surfaces; his buoyant forms reach deep into our childhood with its feelings of hope and optimism. At the moment his biggest projects include an enormous public sculpture commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which, echoing his stainless steel liquor train, will involve a locomotive suspended from a crane. He also has a show at Versailles opening Sept. 10 that could build on the felicitous placement of the Arolsen “Puppy.”

Ever since Jasper Johns’s flags and targets pointedly addressed the viewer with “things the mind already knows,” much, maybe most art has set out one way or another to reach a broader audience more directly. The welter of strategies began simply enough, with the elimination of the sculpture’s pedestal and the siphoning of images from pop culture, and it now extends to the Internet. The revival of public sculpture is perhaps only the latest ripple in this continuing wave, but it is also the most public. Its manifestations are out there and easy to find.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky




Josephine Meckseper. Blow-Up (Tamara, Portrait). 2006. Chromogenic color print, 78 11/16 x 62 7/8" (199.9 x 159.8 cm). Courtesy Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart; Arndt & Partner, Berlin/Zurich; Elizabeth Dee, New York. © 2008 Josephine Meckseper, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn





Mikhael Subotzky. Residents, Vaalkoppies. 2006. Chromogenic color print 41 9/16 x 50 11/16" (105.5 x 128.7 cm). Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery. © 2008 Mikhael Subotzky












ARTmostfierce recommends checking out this upcoming photo show at the MoMA.
See information below and consider getting one of Josephine Meckseper prints at Printed Matter before they sell out or prices go up!

New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky
September 10, 2008–January 5, 2009


The Robert and Joyce Menschel Photography Gallery, third floor




New Photography is the annual fall showcase of significant recent work in photography. This year's exhibition features the work of Josephine Meckseper (German, b. 1964) and Mikhael Subotzky (South African, b. 1981). In her photographs and signature vitrine displays, Meckseper explores the media's strategy of mixing political news and advertising content. Her installation includes a selection of life-size photographs of models dressed in vintage lingerie from the 1950s, from her 2006 Blow-Up series. Also included is Quelle International (2008), a new group of pictures culled from a mail-order catalogue popular in Germany in the 1970s that have been printed on reflective Mylar. In both series the artist uses the semantic codes of advertising to address issues of power and consumerism.

Subotzky's recent body of photographic work, Beaufort West (2006-2008), portrays a small desert town in South Africa's Western Cape blighted by unemployment, rampant crime, domestic violence, poverty, and segregation. The artist was drawn to this subject by the local jail, which is strangely situated in the center of the town, in a traffic circle at the intersection of the main highway between Johannesburg and Cape Town. His photographs of Beaufort West's various populations—inmates, outcasts, families, residents, and passersby—formulate a stirring vision of South Africa's strained post-apartheid condition.




Organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.

The New Photography series is made possible by JGS, Inc.



You can still get a nice print from Josephine Meckseper at Printed Matter. Very affordable and a small edition of 75. Hurry before the show opens at MoMA!


Josephine Meckseper
Untitled (%) Shelf
[2007 Fall Benefit edition]
New York, : Printed Matter, Inc.. 2005/2007
Synopsis: Digital C-Print, 18 x 14 inches

Category: Printed Matter Edition
Process: photographic process
Edition 75
Signed: Signed and Numbered


Price Info: $350.00


Josephine Meckseper
Untitled (March on Washington 9/24/05, Coffins, Xray)
[2007 Fall Benefit edition]
New York, : Printed Matter, Inc.. 2005/2007
Synopsis: Digital C-print, 18 x 14 inches

Category: Printed Matter Edition
Process: photographic process
Edition 75
Signed: Signed and Numbered


Price Info: $250.00


http://printedmatter.org/

*All dates are subject to change

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Holly Andres ''Sparrow Lane''coming to NYC!





ARTmostfierce is so thrilled that the ''Sparrow Lane series and the work of Holly Andres is getting great recognition these days. Article in Art of America ,  solo show at Robert Mann Gallery ...you name it. 


Remember a couple of blogs ago I told you about her...and her $50.00 print...well now you can still get a 20 x 24 for only $800.00...you snooze 
...you lose!

Please see some photos from the series  
and read below press release from Erik Schneider's Quality Pictures Gallery.




Photos of Holly Andres Sparrow Lane some of the  series  in order from top to bottom:




1. The Glowing Drawer
2007
C Print
24 x 20 in. Edition of 12
40 x 50 in. Edition of 3

2.The Secret Portal
2008
C Print
24 x 20 in. Edition of 12
40 x 50 in. Edition of 3

3.The Pink Chair
2008
C Print
24 x 20 in. Edition of 12
40 x 50 in. Edition of 3

4.Outside the Forbidden Bedroom
2008
C Print
40 x 50 in. Edition of 3
24 x 20 in. Edition of 12


After a very successful and critically acclaimed exhibition of Sparrow Lane at Quality Pictures in June, Portland's Holly Andres is stepping up to a larger stage in the upcoming months and we are thrilled to share the news with friends and collectors.
Art in America Review
Holly's show at the gallery will be getting a review in the national art magazine Art in America. It will be her and the gallery's first national review.

Exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery in NYC
Opening October 23, Holly's Sparrow Lane series will be shown at the Robert Mann Gallery, one of the country's most prestigious photography dealers. Holly will be adding several new works to the series which will make their debut at her solo show there.
Exposure at Paris Photo, Pulse & Photo LA
Robert Mann Gallery has plans to show Holly's work at Paris Photo, an international photography fair in Paris France and at the Pulse Art Fair in Miami. In January 2009, Quality Pictures will bring the work to Photo LA in Los Angeles.
More Media Attention
Holly and QPCA director Erik Schneider will be David Bragdon's guest on an upcoming episode of Outlook Portland on CW32 here in PDX. Tentative discussions are underway for an appearance on Oregon Art Beat on PBS and a book of the Sparrow Lane series is in its formative stages.

Upcoming Price Increase
In advance of her show in New York a modest price increase is scheduled for the Sparrow Lane works. However, there is still time to acquire a piece from the series at their original (and very reasonable) prices. 20 x 24" works from the series, in editions of 12 are all currently at $800 (with the exception of "The Lost Mitten" which is at $1200). 40 x 50" works in an edition of 3 are priced at $3200 which includes all mounting charges.
About Quality Pictures
Quality Pictures is a contemporary art gallery located in the Pearl District of Portland, OR and is owned and directed by Erik Schneider. The gallery shows works in all media with an emphasis on contemporary photography. Our aim is to bring new artists and works to the Northwest while at the same time introducing the best the Northwest has to offer to a wider audience. We offer complete services to collectors and institutions to assist them in acquiring and maintaining art collections that are both personally enriching and will grow in value and importance over time.

Quality Pictures
Erik Schneider
Director
916 NW Hoyt
Portland OR 97209
erik@qpca.com
www.qpca.com

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Zaha Hadid's Chanel Pavilion Set for Central Park






ARTmostfierce loves the great and innovative designs of Architect Zaha Hadid. From her building, furniture, paintings and even shoe designs this design diva is a true master of creativity.
Please see below article from Interior Design by Nicholas Tamarin telling us about Zaha's next design wonder.

Zaha Hadid's Chanel Pavilion Set for Central Park
The 20-foot-tall, 95-foot-wide, polymer-clad structure is fashioned after Chanel's iconic 2.55 quilted handbag.
by Nicholas Tamarin -- Interior Design, 8/11/2008


When Chanel’s Mobile Art exhibition touches down in New York’s Central Park on October 20 for a 21-day stay, an as-yet-announced lineup of international artists will be showcased inside a temporary pavilion. But most of the buzz will likely be reserved for the structure itself, conceived and designed by two boldface names who can claim rock-star status in their respective fields: Chanel artistic director Karl Lagerfeld, and Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid.

Resembling a futuristic magnification of Chanel’s iconic 2.55 quilted handbag, the polymer-clad pavilion will land in the park's Rumsey Playfield, near Fifth Avenue and 69th Street. It spans 20 feet tall by 95 feet wide and contains 2,300 square feet of exhibition space, which is wrapped around central court illuminated by a translucent skylight.




"Why did I choose Zaha Hadid? She is a kind of Coco Chanel of today, not in fashion but in architecture," says Lagerfeld. "This all began with a small sketch, a computer drawing a concept. I gave Zaha the general idea in a few moments, and her interpretation and fulfillment of that idea is more than perfect."

Created to examine the relationship between contemporary art, fashion and architecture, the free exhibit embarked upon a two-year, worldwide tour in Hong Kong in February, then moved to Tokyo. Following New York, which is the pavilion’s only American stopover, it travels to London and Moscow before ending in Paris in 2010. As in previous cities, works in the New York exhibition will be selected with the assistance of curator and Beaux Arts editor Fabrice Bousteau.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Young Curators, New Ideas

Gerald Edwards III, Investigation into the Disruption of Power, 2006


ARTmostfierce
plans to attend this show. Looks like a good one. You have to RSVP!
Don't miss it. See you in Brooklyn!


OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 RSVP REQUIRED: rsvp@bondstreetgallery.com
PRESS PREVIEW: 4 – 6 pm PUBLIC RECEPTION: 6 – 9 pm
ON VIEW: Wednesday, August 13 – Saturday, September 6, 2008
PRESS INQUIRIES: kate@bondstreetgallery.com

BOND STREET GALLERY
297 Bond Street Brooklyn, NY 11231 (Carroll Gardens)
718.858.2297 DIRECTIONS: F/G to Carroll St. or R to Union St.

GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday – Saturday 11 am – 6 pm

BOND STREET GALLERY is pleased to announce Young Curators, New Ideas, a group exhibition organized by amani olu and curated by Alana Celii & Grant Willing (Fjord Photo), Michael Bühler-Rose, Jon Feinstein (Humble Arts Foundation), Laurel Ptak (I Heart Photograph), Amy Stein (amysteinphoto.blogspot.com), and Lumi Tan (Why + Wherefore).

The exhibition examines different trends and perspectives in contemporary art photography through the bias of six new and seasoned curators. Each curator (or curatorial group), using roughly ten feet of space, aims to engage viewers in a discussion on where he or she believes art photography is today.

Völuspá, curated by Grant Willing and Alana Celii, focuses on the themes of magic, otherworldliness, secrets and nostalgia. The exhibiting photographers were curated from the Fjord collective, and include Mikaylah Bowman, Gerald Edwards III, Bryan Lear, Miranda Lehman, Seth Lower, Mark McKnight, Erin Jane Nelson, and Jesper Ulvelius. The images from these eight artists represent the ideas of a multi-verse, which is a self-contained, separate reality. All of the photographs point to a place or moment that feels familiar, but objectively is known to rarely exist. These spurious emotions allow the viewers to address a personal memory or follow one's spiritual quest; yet when presented with the facts that directly make up the photographs, they feel like something that cannot be experienced.

Artist Michael Bühler-Rose presents Opposing Photographers by Charles Benton. Benton's work examines the nature of portraiture by returning fine art photography to its roots in conceptual art practice. Benton enables the viewer to be placed within the middle of a photographic "volley" to experience not just the gaze of the photographer towards his or her subject, but also to reflect that gaze back and enable the viewer to experience both subject and object simultaneously. Through this lo-tech presentation Benton reassess the slide presentation/photographic document's traditional function of "pointing to..." and enables the viewer to experience being pointed at.

In Jon Feinstein’s exhibition, Light and Color, he explores notions of science, mysticism, astronomy and the unreal using photographs from Hannah Whitaker, Talia Chetrit, Noel Rodo-Vankuelen, and Ann Woo. Much of the work utilizes stripped down elements such as prisms, rainbows, and seemingly banal sunsets to investigate common themes in art history and larger conceptual issues surrounding the process of image making.

Laurel Ptak's exhibition takes the show in a different direction by commissioning 26 photographers, designers, and new media artists to embrace the animated GIF. Appropriately titled Graphics Interchange Format, the show explores how a lo-fi digital image technology invented in 1987 fares in contemporary context. Ptak gave artists only 3 days to complete the commission and encouraged the use of photographic materials. A few of the artists had never made an animated GIF before, while others were notorious for it. "Some use the form epically," says Ptak, "like a novelist or film director; others are self-reflective about the limits of technology and representation; many challenge photography's usual atemporal disposition; and then some just make me giggle." The results are 67 artist-made animated GIFs shown on 44-inch flat screen in an infinite loop. Each are sold in an unlimited edition for $20, accompanied by a personalized note from the artist.

Graphics Interchange Format features works by Victor Boullet, Tyler Coburn, Petra Cortright, C. Coy, Daniel Everett, Thobias Fäldt & Per Englund, Martin Fengel, Jason Fulford, Nicholas Grider, Pierre Hourquet, Konst & Teknik, Eke Kriek, Emily Larned, Matt MacFarland, Katja Mater, Kelci McIntosh, Ilia Ovechkin, Robert Overweg, M. River, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Asha Schechter, Trevor Shimizu, Jo-ey Tang, Anne De Vries, Karly Wildenhaus and Damon Zucconi.

In her exhibition, photographer and critic, Amy Stein, selects five photographers working in the tradition of Cindy Sherman, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Gregory Crewdson. Featuring Alison Brady, Olga Cafiero, Alix Smith, Alex Prager, and Ofer Wolberger, these photographers employ directorial image making strategies to explore identity and representation of the self. Whether they are directing loved ones, friends or relative strangers, these five photographers bring us lush, evocative cinematic moments that transport the viewer into a space that is alternately unsettling yet strangely familiar.

Writer and curator, Lumi Tan, presents three photographs from Brian Bress. In these photographs, Bress conflates the space around us, leaving the viewer disorientated and distracted by a certain distorted familiarity. His use of ordinary objects in seemingly chance combinations and chaotic arrangements are uncanny, asking to be decoded but simultaneously resisting interpretation. By engaging the viewer in absurd performative exploration, he points out how easily we are lost in our own cultural detritus.

For additional information or visuals, please contact Kate Greenberg at kate@bondstreetgallery.com.

Victor Grasso @ Soma Gallery in Cape May

Artmostfierce always liked the great paintings of Victor Grasso since his debut at the 2008 Pool Art Fair in NYC.
Now the Soma Gallery in Cape May, New Jersey presents the new paintings by Victor in his latest solo show tilted ''For The Love Of The Deep'' .Opening was August 2, 2008 . If you happen to be in the Cape May area please stop by and see this show...you will not be disappointed!