It was cast and unveiled (in my opinion) at the peak of the Banksy hype in 2006.

It’s an edition of 12 and measures 25 by 30 by 21cm.; 9 7/8  by 11 3/4  by 8in.

Catalog quotes Banksy:

They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.

It’s painted bronze measuring 91 by 54 by 57cm.; 35 7/8 by 21 1/4 by 22 1/2 in. Executed in 2006.

Marc Quinn:

I was looking for the current incarnation of the Venus/Aphrodite archetype, and I looked at the various film stars and models. It was Kate’s ubiquity and her muteness that made her seem to me more like a classical divinity than any of the others I considered; she is someone who never really speaks but who is continually spoken about; that makes her a very effective mirror of ourselves – our desires, our obsessions, our dreams. What’s still more intriguing is the way that her and her image have parted company – she has one life and the image has a different one.

If I had the funds, I’d buy it.

On view, at Jerome Zodo‘s booth, was one of Solmi’s most controversial works, The Evil Empire, a 4-minute video that chronicles the exploits of a porn-addicted Pope in the fictional town Vatic-Anal-City (A trailer of it is at the end of this post). I watched it a few times, back to back, and with each viewing, I chuckled and marveled at the genius of it. The subject matter definitely inspired conversation; it hit every scandal that the Catholic church should be ashamed of, and then some. But the beauty of it all was how it was presented – a series of crude, bright drawings strung together stop-motion style. This was probably the first time I ever gave consideration to owning video art. Well, this was before I came to know the price – $20,000! And being around since 2008, all 10 copies of this video are now accounted for. I was able to at least leave with a copy of the catalog.

In addition, there were a bunch of these panels from the film mounted on wood that appealed to me.

…and if things go my way, I may be able to acquire a few of them.

Here’s a copy + paste of Federico’s Artist Statement:

As an untiring observer of the alienated scenery of the metropolitan reality, I am focusing in my works, to analyze the paradoxical and neurotic urban landscape and the colossal contradiction of contemporary society. These are the key themes on which my artistic search has been based.

The protagonists of my videos are always catapulted into the middle of an undecipherable reality. Typically they are all lost characters; confused inhabitants of a world in which are desperately seeking their role and their identity and forced to live inside a mad and hostile society without rules. This is a world that inexorably continues to regenerate and to renew itself, while at the same time is falling in front of our eyes. The universe that I like to represent is the exaltation of a present that is crumbling apart. It is also a criticism of a system that approves and trusts without questioning the fragile foundation on which our culture and post-modernist society is based.

 Here’s a video clip of The Evil Empire:

Link: Federico Solmi

this is how I roll…

saw this on my way out. funny.

Link: ALAC

Notes from LACMA:

During a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2000, Ligon held workshops in which children were invited to fill in images taken from coloring books from the 1960s and 1970s that were intended to foster cultural knowledge and pride among black children. The books included historical and contemporary African Americans, including Harriet Tubman, Malcom X, and Isaac Hayes.

The participating children hailed from diverse ethnic backgrounds and were mostly unaware of the figures they colored or the ideological agenda they were meant to promote. Sometimes they painted them a deep brown, but in other instances afros became bright orange, Frederick Douglass’ eyes blue, and Hayes’ beard blond.

These images became the basis for the paintings… “Icons are made and remade,” he has remarked. “The project is about getting at that mutability through these kids’ drawings and my reiterations of them… The slipperiness of the images…and the anxiety around that slipperiness was interesting to me.”

 =)

Really great stuff.

Showed us some of his past projects…

…. he gets around in a silver BMX bike… very cool… he was also a gracious host and had wine (with his own label), beer, and chocolate covered deliciousness for us.

 a couple of photos sit at the foot of this painting…

masking tape still on….i really like seeing behind the scenes shit like this…

a multi-blue sculpture in front of the painting…

this larger painting really caught my eye….

i could see myself living with this piece. once i get my finances in order, going to have to commission a panel.

..Definitely, one artist to keep an eye on…….Cheers!

Link: Topher Chin

View from the street….lots of people in black (myself included)…

Free booze!

tasty..

Live auction conducted by Christie’s…

the only art work I considered buying… by Ned Vena.

….. everything else was not so good.

Link: LAXArt

The art was kind of crap.

Fortunately, the pretty people in attendance made up for it.

Copy + Paste of the Press Release from Gagosian:

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition “11.11.11” by Adam McEwen, his first in Los Angeles.

The numerical and graphic symmetry of the title gives an epochal feel to this major exhibition by McEwen, which makes explicit the interrelationships between individual works and persistent themes in his oeuvre via a specifically devised scenography. Wall-size grids of black-and-white photographic wallpaper—from the firestorming of Dresden, to McEwen dressed up as Bomber Harris (the British air commander who perfected the technique of carpet-bombing German cities during WWII), and gum-spattered New York sidewalks—line several galleries, drawing an analogy between planned destruction and urban desecration. They provide backdrops for droll “gum” paintings and impassive, machined graphite “paintings” that recall Minimalist compositions but which are, in fact, modeled on the figured, non-slip metal doors inset into New York sidewalks.

In 1994, McEwen made a drawing of a block, labeling it BLOCK OF GRAPHITE. But it was not until 2007 that, fascinated by the possibilities of this common but often unrecognized material, he began producing via industrial machining finely carved graphite sculptures that mimic real objects. In this exhibition, precise representations of everyday items—a water cooler, a roll gate, a safe—animate the galleries with their eerie reticence, a series of simulacra perfectly and perversely rendered in what is, in reality, dark, light-absorbing, compressed carbon. (The dust from the graphite industry is sold on to pencil companies.)

In a reverse Midas-effect, McEwen has answered to the shimmering claims of Minimalist art by creating contemporary work that is freighted with the leaden melancholy of modern history. As a meditation on the many lives and deaths of art, he has created a space that conflates a beleaguered present with the afterlife of a potent and contentious moment in art history, in much the same way as his obituaries narrate the future-perfect of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, and the notorious. McEwen’s dead zone of dark relics and faded memories confronts us, literally and metaphysically, with the filthy lucre of our past and present.

Adam McEwen’s work has been included in numerous group shows including “Haunted,” the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); “Beg, Borrow and Steal,” Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2009); “The Reach of Realism,” MoCA Miami (2009); “Into Me/Out of Me,” PS1 / MOMA, New York; and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. He curated “Fresh Hell” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, as the 2010 edition of the Carte Blanche series.

Link: Gagosian

Close up of Big Dipper, 2011, Oil on canvas, 9′ (H) X 12′ (W)

MH and his girl messing up my photo of Desert Stream, 2010, Oil on canvas, 9’ (H) X 12’ (W)

My favorite from the show: Reliance, 2010, Oil on canvas, 8′ (H) x 6′ (W)

quite crowded.

Copy + Paste of Ace Gallery’s Press Release:

In 1976, as a young painter David Amico embraced an unstylized, abstract and demanding approach to painting and has been committed to this process ever since. He executes each abstract painting by never allowing himself to follow a particular technique or style so that each painting has its own unique composition and application of paint. Over his 35-year career, this non-serial pursuit has allowed him to explore painting in a most unrestrictive and innovative manner. This inventive engagement with painting can be experienced in the compositions and paint applications of his two most recent bodies of work, the Factory/Park Series, installed in his current exhibition at Ace.

Ace Gallery is the host of the first exhibition of Factory Series in the United States (the first exhibition of this series was in Singapore last year), an exhibition that will be combined with the newly created Park Series. The imagery found in both series is jointly inspired by the urban debris of Amico’s immediate environment: the Skid Row district of downtown Los Angeles. He transforms what has been discarded and considered unsightly into building blocks of beautiful contemplative spaces. Discarded cardboard, metal piping, broken concrete, shards of glass, graffiti, vandalism, and fabric scraps from the nearby garment factories – all these materials have participated in an unlikely transformation, inviting the viewer to share in what Doug Harvey has called “a zone of phenomenological flip-flop, where [the art is] neither one thing, nor the other, nor both, and not neither. Which is where paintings belong. The result is artwork that is unusually alive, that feeds information to the viewer in a flickering, almost cybernetic light, extending an invitation for the observer to partake in the continuity between the world, the artist, and his art.” (Doug Harvey, David Amico: Coloring Outside the Lines).

Amico has a relationship with these materials far beyond mere observation; he studies them in search of their quintessence. He then meticulously abstracts their qualities in paint, distorting the reality of the original subject. His precision in creating texture is so thorough that several works such as Augustine (2009) and Window (2009) convey the illusion of a layered collage but were in fact executed through the process of detailed paint application. Beyond the masterful manipulation of his medium is a deliberate use of compositional decision-making that separates Amico from the fluid chaos of Abstract Expressionism.

Amico’s practice is an exploration in the nebulous space between art and life, blurring the lines between the junk-objects we pass unnoticed, and the art-objects we admire. No matter what the origin of the abandoned material, each has arrived in the same place – on the streets of Los Angeles – bringing into focus a visual-syntax, and ultimately democratizing the relationship between the discarded object, the art work, and the artist himself.

David Amico has established himself as one of Southern California’s most influential contemporary painters. Amico’s first major solo exhibition was held at P.S.1 in New York in 1976 and he has since exhibited in galleries in the United States, as well as Switzerland, Mexico, and China. It was for the 1976 P.S.1 exhibition he first adopted his unique unstylized practice, and he has not deviated from this methodology since.

David Amico was born in Rochester, New York in 1951. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Link: Ace Gallery

 And of course, while there, I checked out his latest show, which is simply, amazing………..

Entering the main room, I was immediately drawn to this portrait of Kara Walker.

In fact, it was my favorite in the entire show.

the details are superb…

to the right was Laurie Anderson

turning another 45 degrees…

and another 45 degrees to complete the circle, encountered the face of Zhang Huan, another one of my favorite artists.

leaving the main gallery, entering a smaller room….

In another room…

In the final room, were two tapestries. I liked this one the best.

 This was definitely a show to remember.

Copy + Paste of Blum and Poe’s Press Release:

Blum & Poe is very pleased to present new paintings, prints, and tapestries by Chuck Close. This landmark exhibition is Close’s first one-person show with Blum & Poe and represents the most significant body of work assembled in Los Angeles in sixteen years. Featured will be new large-scale oil paintings of artists Kara Walker, Laurie Anderson, and Zhang Huan; works from Close’s ongoing self-portrait series; intimately scaled portraits of musician Paul Simon and arts patron Agnes Gund; a collection of prints; and immaculately crafted Belgian Jacquard tapestries. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity for viewers to experience Close’s stylistic range and technical capacity, while providing a deeper understanding of the human portrait.

Close’s nearly 50-year exploration of the human portrait is staggering in its breadth and level of dedication. Rather than landscapes or everyday urban scenes, Close has focused on his own image and those of his peers, differentiating his practice from photorealistic painters. His early paintings were predominantly large-scale and executed in acrylic on canvas. He has since evolved a process whereby these portraits begin as photographs, which are enlarged, transferred, and gridded on the canvas, allowing Close to work with his brush meticulously inch by inch.

Close moves freely between painting, photography (both analog and digital), numerous modes of printmaking and drawing, and most recently the art of Belgian Jacquard tapestry weaving. In an effort to capture his subject’s essence, Close has become fluent in myriad techniques, both traditional and exploratory. In 1972, his artistic practice extended beyond the canvas with an introduction to printmaking at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press. Following that collaboration, Close endeavored to expand his contribution to portraiture through the mastery of such varied drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor, conté crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as Mezzotint, etching, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage, Polaroid photographs, Daguerreotypes, and Jacquard tapestries. His astonishing proficiency in a diverse range of media has firmly defined each new body of work as unique and progressive for its time.

Chuck Close (b. 1940, Monroe, WA) lives and works in New York. He received his B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle and his B.F.A and M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art and Architecture. Throughout his distinguished career, he has been the recipient of many honors, such as the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Art (1991), election to Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), and the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton (2000). He has been honored with numerous retrospectives, including Close Portraits, held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1980-81), which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Retrospektive, at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1994), later presented at the Lenbauchhaus Stadtische Galerie, Munich; and most importantly Chuck Close, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989-99), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Seattle Art Museum, and Hayward Gallery, London. Close’s work is in the permanent collection of over 70 public institutions worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, amongst many others.

Link: Blum & Poe

I like it; I’m going to try to track down a poster of it.

Copy + Paste from Christie’s catalogue….

Like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915, which to some degree this painting resembles, Roy Lichtenstein’s I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! is a singular and iconic work that encapsulates a sense of its creator’s entire oeuvre and serves as a foundation stone upon which much of it was built. Painted in the summer of 1961, this deceptively simple yet deeply significant and celebrated painting is one of the very first of Lichtenstein’s pictures to draw solely on cartoon imagery for its subject-matter and to invoke what is perhaps the central theme of his work as a whole: the complex relationship between art and perception.

With its stark minimalist image of a monochrome black canvas suddenly punctured by the startling and illuminated presence of a cartoon male figure opening and looking through a peephole, I Can See the Whole Room is a spirited work that appears to visually disrupt the nature of both what a painting is and what it can be. It also serves as a pictorial symbol of the dramatic transition from abstraction to cartoon figuration that had suddenly taken place in Lichtenstein’s own art in 1961. An exemplar example of the artist’s highly intellectual approach to painting, I Can See the Whole Room is an undeniable early masterpiece of Lichtenstein’s pioneering and “Pop”-defining vision that was eagerly recognised as such by Emily and Burton Tremaine, who acquired it for their collection very soon after it was painted.

Considered consummate collectors of their age, Emily and Burton Tremaine were also the most prescient: among the first to understand and appreciate “Pop” art, they came to play an important supporting role during the early years of its genesis in America, even facilitating introductions between some of its leading members. As Emily Tremaine remembered, “about 1961, a comet flashed across this dark scene with a blazing light and we saw objects we really had not seen before. We were too busy looking within, but now we looked out and saw a ‘Yankee Doodle’ world of pop bottles, trading stamps, and comic strips. This was ‘Pop Art’, and it painted the wonderful, vulgar, jazzy, free, and crazy New York. It was not like Dada: the artists did not know one another; no-one was angry; there was no manifesto. They were just aware of the same images, but they used them differently…. We made several visits to Andy (Warhol’s) studio; we saw Jimmy Dine’s and Tom Wesselmann’s and James Rosenquist’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s. Once or twice we invited these boys to our apartment and in several instances they had not yet met one another. I remember in particular that Rosenquist met Lichtenstein for the first time here. So it seemed to me quite clear that this was not a group movement with members influencing each other, but a general sensitivity that was occurring simultaneously. Each artist was commenting on our environment in his own individual way, but with no great popular approval as far as I could see” (E. Tremaine quoted in The Tremaine Collection 20th Century Masters, exh. cat., Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, pp. 21 and 29).

With its simple but paradoxical sense of both looking toward and being looked at, I Can See the Whole Room is also a work that, like Pop art in general, opens up an entirely new world of conceptual possibilities for painting. And in this respect it is a work that emphatically anticipates the direction in which not only Lichtenstein’s art would develop over the ensuing years, but also that of many of his contemporaries in the 1960s. As Jeff Koons has recently noted of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, there is a pervasive sense running through it “that he is really interested in you as a viewer,” and also in you “sharing this experience” (J. Koons, quoted in “Dorothy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons, Florent Restaurant, Gansvoort Street, New York, April 11, 2008,” in Lichtenstein Girls, exh. cat., Gagosian, New York, 2008, p. 11). With its deliberate undermining of conventional notions of looking and seeing and its Bruce Nauman-like title emblazoned over its surface in a bold and unashamed text invading the picture-plane, I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! is a work of “Pop” art that also articulates and epitomizes, both in style and content, many of the concerns and inquiries of the Minimalist and Conceptual developments of the 1960s.

At four by four feet wide, it is a comparatively large and imposing picture, whose overt painterly surface texture, hand-drawn text, graphic markings, and underlying pencil script, reveal much of the pictorial craft that surprisingly, perhaps, lies at the very center of Lichtenstein’s cartoon paintings. In his later pictures, Lichtenstein often sought to mask the craft, the design, and the carefully considered alterations he put into translating a cartoon image into a successful oil painting by attempting to conceal it all behind a pristine and seemingly cold, mechanically-produced surface. But, in 1961, and as this work shows, Lichtenstein was still clearly fascinated with the extraordinary painterly dialogue between abstraction and mechanically-produced figurative cartoon imagery that had been established by his appropriation of such media.

Like its subject matter–a graphic contrast of a cartoon figure with an abstract black monochrome field–I Can See the Whole Room is a painting that visually appears to play on the edge of both abstract and figurative cartoon styles. Despite its often clinical appearance in reproduction, the flat monochrome black surface of this painting betrays a clear sense of its own making through a sequence of smooth, sweeping brushstrokes, whose autonomy and plasticity has been allowed to remain visible. These are overt painterly qualities that reflect Lichtenstein’s enjoyment in the process of creating the work and that in some respects can be seen as sly nods to the black paintings of contemporary “abstract” painters like Ad Reinhardt or even Franz Kline. Similarly, the flesh tones of the cartoon male figure have been attained with the subtle use of a grey wash, laid down before a regularized pattern of little flecks of red has been added. This deft and painterly simulation of the mechanical techniques of cartoon imagery would soon evolve into the more sterile mechanized discs of Lichtenstein’s trademark Benday Dot circles. Lichtenstein’s application of the yellow light of the background in the present work has been put down in two coats, whose differences have been deliberately left visible in order to advertise the working practice involved in the creation of the image. The first, a warmer, duller color, has subsequently been corrected and heightened with a thicker layer of extreme acid yellow that gives the apparent surprise of the cartoon image its full bite. In an extremely rare move, too, symptomatic only of these early canvases, Lichtenstein has added his monogram signature in red in the lower right hand corner of the work.

These are all comparatively traditional features of the painter’s art and of a consideration of the picture as a hand-crafted image that reflect to some extent how conventional Lichtenstein’s painterly practice was despite the radical, unorthodox, and, in the early 1960s, shocking, nature of his appropriation of cheap, mass-media imagery as the subject matter of his art. Reflective of a pure painter’s concern with his work, these features are ones that distinguish Lichtenstein’s early paintings from his later works, while also overtly illustrating how intensely Lichtenstein was deconstructing the conventions of picture making. As Donald Judd was among the first to point out at this time, “Lichtenstein is representing representation–which is very different from simply representing an object or a view. The main quality of the work comes from the contrast between the comic panel, apparently copied, and the art, nevertheless present” (D. Judd, “A critical review of the 1963 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery,” Arts Magazine, New York, November 1963).

It was, in fact, precisely the surprise and shock of the extraordinary visual power of such a crude, simple, and artificial mode of representation as that of a cartoon, when seen in direct comparison with his own more “arty” explorations of abstract pictorial form that had led to Lichtenstein’s adoption of cartoon imagery in the first place. By 1961, Lichtenstein had been painting for more than fifteen years and, for the last five of those years, primarily abstractions, before he introduced comic-book imagery into his work. Following in the footsteps of an artist such as Willem de Kooning–who would absent-mindedly sketch from all types of media representation, even the television screen, in his search to establish what he called a “slipping glimpse” of life through a single strong graphic line or dynamic pictorial motif–Lichtenstein at first sought to derive a similar kind of inspiration from cartoon imagery. He was attracted by the simple mechanics of cartoon representation, by the abstract strength of line in the way a cartoon artist would draw an eyebrow, for example, and ultimately sought in the strong linearity of cartoon draughtsmanship a prompt or spur for his own Abstract Expressionist style. “I was sort of immersed in Abstract Expressionism,” Lichtenstein recalled; “It was a kind of Abstract Expressionism with cartoons within the expressionist image. It’s too hard to picture, I think, and the paintings themselves weren’t very successful. I’ve got rid of most of them, in fact all of them. They encompassed about six months. I did abstract paintings of sort of striped brushstrokes and within these in a kind of scribbly way were images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. In doing these paintings I had, of course, the original strip cartoons to look at, and the idea of doing one without apparent alteration just occurred to me. I first discussed it and thought about it for a little bit, and I did one really almost half seriously to get an idea of what it might look like. And as I was painting this painting, I kind of got interested in organizing it as a painting and brought it to some kind of conclusion as an aesthetic statement, which I hadn’t really intended to do to begin with. And then I really went back to my other way of painting, which was pretty abstract. Or tried to. But I had this cartoon painting in my studio, and it was a little too formidable. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, and it sort of prevented me from painting any other way, and then I decided this stuff was really serious. I had sort of decided that as I was working on it, but at first the change was a little bit too strong for me. Having been more or less schooled as an Abstract Expressionist, it was quite difficult psychologically to do anything else” (R. Lichtenstein “BBC Interview with David Sylvester,” recorded in New York, January 1966, and reproduced in Some Kind of Reality: Roy Lichtenstein exh. cat., Anthony D’Offay, London, 1997, p. 7).

Soon Lichtenstein realized that a painterly truth lay within these clichd, mechanically-produced cartoon images–images which, because of the simplistic mechanics of their construction, were fascinating, both figuratively and abstractly. Maturing in an era in America in which painting was dominated by either the gestural or the non-gestural abstract color-field painting of the New York School, and in which any “return” to figuration was still widely frowned upon, despite the recent developments of such artists as Rauschenberg and Johns, Lichtenstein’s choice of cartoon imagery as a subject matter was, for a long time, considered scandalous. Something of this sense of scandal, shock, but also of cartoon imagery’s dynamic impact on the abstract realm, is undoubtedly both contained and expressed in the simple cartoon disruption of the abstract picture plane in I Can see the Whole Room

The imagery of the painting derives from a 1961 William Overgard drawing for a Steve Roper cartoon story (August 6) that depicts Roper’s war-time buddy and part-time accomplice in crime-solving, “Mike Nomad” looking through a peephole. Lichtenstein has cropped the image from its original rectangular format to form a square and then completely redesigned the speech balloon so that it extends across almost the entire top edge of the painting. He has also simplified the drawing of Nomad’s face significantly, reducing it to bare essentials, while the sharp yellow background is clearly his own invention. Originally intended in a milder tone more reflective of the source image, it is the addition of an acidic supermarket yellow here that ultimately provides the painting with its garish Pop art sense of impact. “Each color had a certain character to me,” Lichtenstein pointed out. “The yellow was acid…. I got some of these colours from supermarket packaging. I would look at package labels to see what colours had the most impact on one another” (R. Lichtenstein, “Interview with Diane Waldman,” in Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., New York, 1971, p. 26).

Lichtenstein’s long-time fascination with the science and psychology of perception is clearly reflected in these works as is the paradoxical idea, first established in I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It!, of engaging the viewer in a game of looking with its subject matter. Part of the deconstructive nature of Lichtenstein’s painterly investigation of the cartoon archetype was clearly aimed at what he described as “shaking up” people’s confidence in their own vision, and even more importantly perhaps, disrupting his own acquired conventions of seeing and perceiving. Inspired greatly in this by his teacher and mentor at Ohio State University, Hoyt L. Sherman, with whom he studied and later taught in the early 1950s, Lichtenstein’s adoption of abstraction, as with his later use of strip-cartoon imagery, was prompted by a desire to continually develop ever-new ways of seeing. Sherman’s “ideas on perception were my earliest important influence and still affect my ideas of visual unity,” Lichtenstein told Gene Swenson in 1963. (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in G. R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers for Eight Painters Part 1,” Art News 62 no. 7, November 1963, p. 25).

Foremost among these, and with particular relevance to I Can See the Whole Room…, was the “Flash Room” that Sherman built in Ohio as a means of re-training his students’ perceptual habits and instilling in them an almost camera-like ability to record their visual impressions in an immediate an instinctive way, uncorrupted by the intervention of cognitive thought or emotional response. As Lichtenstein recalled, Sherman’s “Flash Room” was “a darkened room where images would be flashed on a screen for very brief intervals-about a tenth of a second. Something very simple to start, maybe just a few marks. And you would have a pile of paper, and you’d try to draw it. You’d get a very strong afterimage, a total impression, and then you’d draw it in the dark-the point being that you’d have to sense where the parts were in relation to the whole. The images became progressively more complex, and eventually you would go out and try to work the same way elsewhere-would try to bring home the same kind of sensing to your drawing without the mechanical aid of a flash room” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Art of Roy Lichtenstein: Mural with Blue Brushstroke, New York, 1987, p. 14).

Lichtenstein evidently practiced this technique himself and clearly brought something of the sense of “visual unity”–or “perceptual organization” as he referred to it–that it instilled, into his later paintings of cartoons. The minimalist-looking image of a sudden circular flash of yellow light and a figure peering through an aperture-like hole amidst an otherwise monochrome field of black in I Can See the Whole Room would certainly have reminded Lichtenstein of Sherman’s “Flash Room” and the practice of sitting in a darkened void occasionally receiving the visual flash of an image. With its partial eclipse-like circles of intense color and light set at the center of a black void, this object-like picture also presents a mesmerizing and seemingly mechanical image, whose pictorial form both appears to echo and indeed function like that of the inside of a camera, a retina, or a projector. In exuding these mechanical qualities, the painting emphasizes the automated or mechanical nature of seeing and opens up once again the question of the nature of seeing; for here in this work, a mechanically-produced cartoon figure is shown doing all the looking. And, as if to compound this, the playful pictorial fantasy or fiction suggested by the painting’s cartoon imagery is extended still further by the caption accompanying it that refers to the fact that the illustrated figure is looking and can see a whole room, but no viewer.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you.” In I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! Lichtenstein seems to be humorously suggesting that a similar condition applies to the nature of looking at art. Like his later paintings of mirrors for example–object-like paintings that seem to reflect both the reality and fiction of the cartoon world–the overt falseness of image-making (or of his own art) is brilliantly summarized in a simple act of mimesis that anticipates the later conceptually-orientated work on the same subject by artists Giulio Paolini or Joseph Kosuth.

Such eloquence and simplicity, so central to the extraordinary and enduring power of this painting, has, in fact, been painstakingly arrived at in this picture through a subtle but involved process of re-arranging, recomposing, redrawing, and reducing the forms of the source image until each is at its most minimal, but still representational-a crystallized “archetype” of itself. Most notable in this respect, as the critic Albert Boime first wrote in 1970, is the speech bubble, which Lichtenstein has carefully restructured and arranged along the top edge of the picture in such a way that its elegant and lilting curves are echoed by the curves and the outlines of the man’s face and fingers. It is through such masterly refinement that the painting becomes more clearly and more simply an engineered artifice or construction of elegantly abstracted forms coalescing, seemingly arbitrarily, on the overtly flat surface into a unitary image. In this way, the picture becomes in every detail, from its subject matter and text to its pictorial and painterly content, a work that actively questions the viewer’s own belief in what it is they are seeing. Ultimately, it coerces them into a recognition of their own mimetic status in relation to the figure that this painting purports to depict-forcing them to understand that, despite what their eyes might be telling them, they too can see the whole picture and there’s nobody in it.

Link: Christie’s

Upon entering her space, I was immediately drawn to her circle paintings, specifically, that green one – I was staring at that one for quite some time. I really liked the scale of them, and the color was also very calming…  and kind of made me crave matcha. Anyways, the circle paintings all featured a large, inner circle with two surrounding halos in varying gradients. She spoke a bit about experimenting with the viscosity of the paints to get her desired effect. I wish I paid more attention to her talk; I was too focused on appreciating those halos, or I was probably texting someone =)

If I had the wall space, I’d definitely pick one up.

Anyways, here’s a Copy + Paste of an excerpt of her artist bio….

Her work is included in many corporate and private collections.

Exhibitions include the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Eli Broad Foundation of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (Barnsdall), Huntington Beach Art Center, Torrance Art Museum, the Toomey-Tourell Gallery (represented) in San Francisco, Acuna-Hansen Gallery, and Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles.

International exhibitions include the Lidovy Gallery in Prague and Galerie Califia in Horazdovice, Czech Republic, the Palace Ducale in Gubbio, Italy, the East China University in Shanghai, China, Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus, Zirrat Bankasi Gallery, Ankara, Turkey, Giacomo Projects, Venice, Italy, and the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom.

Arrowsmith was born in San Francisco and received her B.F.A. from California State University Fullerton, and her M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate University. She lives and maintains her studio in Los Angeles.

Not only was it cool to see where he creates his monstrous sculptures, but it was really worthwhile to listen to him reminisce about his past shows at Honor Fraser, The Happy Lion, and the Wexner Center. I particularly appreciated learning about his process and inspirations for his art. It was fun to hear that he engages his kids in his art also.

Gustavo brought out a mold he used to cast his concrete sculptures.

………. telling us about his past shows

work in progress…

He had a lot of books and recommended to us Pictures of Nothing by Kirk Varnedoe. It’s about appreciating abstract art. His enthusiasm for the book really got me interested, and I’m considering picking it up after I finish the 10 books I’m currently reading.

 more works out on display…

made from invitation cards.

i particularly liked this one.

this piece was exhibited at The Happy Lion in Chinatown, and at The Gagosian in Beverly Hills.

A shelf with cool-looking sculptures…

close-up of the bottom left one..

close up of the bottom right one.

 C’est tout.

Corner of Warhols, particularly liked the Liz, Lot 402 (est. $25-30K), and the Mick Jagger, Lot 404 (est. $20-30K)

Jeff Koons x Supreme Skateboards – Monkey Train, Lot 324 (est. $1.5-2K).

John Baldessari’s Blue, From Stonehenge (With Two Persons). Lot 250 (est. $6-8K).

..and David Hockney’s Bora Bora, which also happened to grace the cover of the catalog. Lot 313 (est. $7-9K).

Link: Bonhams

Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Larry Bell, who is a featured artist of Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, reminisce about his days at the Ferus Gallery in the 1960s, and even talk up his latest show at Frank Lloyd Gallery, which is exhibiting early works that preceded his famous cubes.

 Here are pictures of what I thought was most interesting….

After the Vernissage party, Madame and I both agreed that there was way too much to take in. So, a couple of days later, we took a tour, led by this New York-based art consultant. It was cool to get her perspective on interesting art at the fair.

The first piece she showed us was this installation by Ai Wei Wei, courtesy of the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. It is titled Snake Bag because, well, it’s in the shape of a snake that spans 55 feet and was made out of 360 children backpacks. It was created in 2008, to commemorate the Sichuan earthquake that took the lives of many school children due to faulty school construction, as a result of local corruption. This was definitely an eye-catching piece with substance.

Next, we were taken to the Leila Heller Gallery‘s booth, where we were introduced to Rachel Lee Hovnian. This was one of my favorite booths of the entire fair. All of the artwork was pretty humorous. I especially liked this piece, which is basically a mirror embedded with bottles of Botox and Narcissus flower blooms.

At London-based Seventeen Gallery‘s booth, we became familiar with Susan Collis, who basically creates ordinary-looking things with luxurious materials, like this pile of crap….there’s platinum in there somewhere.

What I liked more was this piece. Looking like an ordinary screw, it is made of white gold, a diamond, and emerald. Madame said something about wanting to wear it as an earring.

Another spectacular booth at the show belonged to Haunch of Venison, which brought artist Chiharu Shiota to do this insane installation.

Later, we broke away from the tour group and did our own exploration. One of the first things we encountered on our own was this awesome grenade-shaped dresser in Pan American Art Project‘s booth. It was created by this collective that goes by Los Carpinteros.

The Franco/Ramirez video installation was interesting………….. actually, it was pretty freaking boring. hahaha.

….Hermes by Shelter Serra…. Birkins cast in resin.

..more Shelter Serra Hermes….

One of madame’s friends, Devin Troy Strother, had this piece titled Keep that Shit Flowin. I loved it. It was another of my favorites from the fair.

Friend Michael Haight had this piece, titled Sequence #1, at Cirrus Gallery‘s booth. He’s a conceptual type of guy. One day, I’ll have him explain to me why there’s a microphone.

Liked the details.

One of the perks of that nifty VIP card was gaining access to a lounge furnished by Poliform.

..where complimentary Intelligentsia coffee was served!

There were a bunch of after parties thrown over the weekend. Sadly, I was too exhausted to go to any of them. Oh well, next year!

Link: Art Platform – Los Angeles

Anyways, JL was on the Steve Turner’s Artist map, and despite being situated on skid row, received a number of visitors, like this guy who came to do an interview.

For those that missed it….

..visitors, upon entering the building, were greeted with hot pink signage…

and lots of tape to lead the way…

..and if they weren’t smart enough to figure it out….

ah, haven’t seen this in a while…

…brand new works…

..but before we get to them….

another diamond-shaped painting similar to the one she sold at Steve Turner Contemporary some time back…

great texture.

..now, close-ups of the new, smaller rectangular  paintings…. in this series, JL revisits old themes, as well as experiments with both minimalism and saturation….

down the hall, there was another diamond shaped painting, but presented as a regular square.

Entering the studio…

… encounter earlier works…

… i particularly liked the orange one..

works in progress… and a cool Dyson fan….

refreshments for guests…

work apron…

cool shoes, of course…

..c’est tout.

Tip: JL’s studio hours are by appointment only.

Link: IlliteJ

Link: Art Platform

MH, aka Token Blanche, apparently had a piece on the second floor.

 …….seriously. hahaha.

he tells me he did the sign for the gallery as well. kind of cool.

I got to meet the owner Jean Milant, cool guy.

Link:
Cirrus Gallery
Once Emerging Now Emerging 

The whole experience took about 2 hours. It was pretty fun. Here are some of the highlights…….

We started on the ground floor, where we met a curator who gave us a very informative tour. I especially liked hearing the back stories of the selected paintings.

Surrounded by works by Christopher Wool.

I liked this one for the humor.

from here, we took an elevator to a floor that had a lot of creepy shit, like this video installation.

..then we went to the rooftop to check out sculptures and the awesome Venice beach view. it was a nice day, so a group photo was taken.

..then we descended to my favorite floor, or the German room.. I really liked this work, Abstand by Albert Oehlen.

Many people gravitated towards Anselm Kiefer’s Laßt tausend Blumen blühen (Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom). It was impressive. I really liked the textures.

From here, we went to another floor of familiar works, like Jenny Saville’s Stare, which was used on the cover of Manic Street Preacher’s Journal for Plague Lovers album.

Finally, we went to a floor featuring new works like Richard Prince’s Another Girl, aka “the porn painting”

The other really strong work on this floor was Elliot Hundley’s Dionysus..

However, to really appreciate it, I had to get close….so many pins sticking out of it.

And there was this humorous box…

Friskies Human Flavor!

….and that’s all the photos that I found in my iphone.

Copy + Paste from Sotheby’s Catalogue:

‘I just can’t help thinking that [medical] science is the new religion for many people … there [are] four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. At their best, they’re all just tools to help you find a path through the darkness. None of them really work that well, but they help. Of them all, science seems to be the one right now. Like religion, it provides the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end… I want… people to think about the combination of science and religion, basically. People tend to think of them as two very separate things, one cold and clinical, the other emotional and loving and warm. I want to leap over those boundaries and give you something that looks clinical and cold but has all the religious, metaphysical connotations too’ (Quoted in Damien Hirst: New Religion, exhibition catalogue, Paul Stolper, London 2005, p.V.).

Damien Hirst’s evocation of science and religion as the guiding lights for the human condition finds eloquent expression in the majestic equine form of Legend. This monumental winged horse stands atop its plinth as an icon of Hirst’s new modern mythologizing art. Pegasus was the legendary beast that Bellerophon rode to defeat the Chimera. The Chimera was another hybrid creature, representing the ferocity found in the animal kingdom, whilst Pegasus embodied the freedom and nobility of nature. This monumental sculpture is thus rendered in pure white, a towering beacon of strength and virtue. However, Hirst’s Legend has come under the scrutiny of the scientist/vivisectionist. One flank has been surgically flayed, exposing its muscles and bare bones, showing the secrets of this mythological animal in a colourful symphony of reds and yellows creating a dramatic contrast to the untouched sanctity of the other perfect white side.

The elegant counter-part to Legend, Myth embodies the fabled Unicorn, the shimmering white horse bearing a single twisted horn, a tusk that was considered an elixir of fertility and health and a symbol of universal power. The Unicorn is one of the most potent mythological symbols in western culture. The clerics and philosophers of the middle ages endowed it with a wealth of theological properties. The common lore of the period perpetuated an allegorical account of a unicorn being hunted until stilled by the presence of a virgin, who took the head of the beast upon her lap, where it slept. The wild beast had been tempered and tamed by the purity of the maiden. This story has inspired some of the most outstanding works of European art, including the majestic millefleur tapestry Maiden with Unicorn in the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The tale entered into the meta-history of the Virgin Mary, where the Unicorn became a symbol of Christ’s Passion, an elegiac symbol of his divine suffering and absolute purity. Hirst has frequently taken on the challenge of religion in his work. Indeed Myth can be situated amongst the most visually arresting of the artist’s sculptural oeuvre, including the similarly flayed Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain and Hymn in bronze, The Anatomy of an Angel in marble, and his iconic masterpiece preserved in formaldehyde, The Golden Calf.

Myth eloquently references the pseudo-sciences of the past, and our enduring fascination with the healing properties of religion and science, and for the role of Art in representing the acquisition of knowledge. One flank of the Unicorn lays bare the internal structure of the myth and our folly in the pursuit of anatomising our belief. By revealing the mortal flesh of the animal within, Hirst has cleverly inverted the purpose of such a study. The myth explored here is only deepened by the tantalising corporeality of this sculpture

Excerpt from the Press Release

Wilson continues to translate color and light into luminous and flawlessly calibrated abstractions. Wilson’s technique is straightforward – using drywall blades, rollers and masking tape he moves color around in controlled areas. The resulting compositions are elaborately layered squares, rectangles and lines of stunning color and radiance. Alternating between surfaces where the paint has been rolled on and where translucent layers are being pulled repeatedly over the surface, Wilson crates a spectacle of great beauty, in which the painting alternately offers resistance to the eye or pulls the viewer into glowing fields of brilliant depth. 

Link:
Susanne Vielmetter

 the big dissected companion sculpture in black was my favorite, of course.

Copy + Paste of the Press Release:

Honor Fraser is pleased to present Hold The Line, KAWS’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In a new group of paintings and sculpture, Brooklyn-based artist KAWS delivers stylized adaptations of visual icons in American animation.

Along with the existential emotive and psychotropic narrative avenues KAWS opens up for his altered versions of iconic animated characters, the artist’s works also provide the viewer with a richly rewarding and expansive formal consideration. Non-naturalistic color takes on new meaning in the case where there is no living, breathing, original referent for characters born of cell animation (such as SpongeBob SquarePants). Nevertheless, the unconventional palette in KAWS’s paintings–from high impact contrasts to monochromatic use of fluorescents, primaries, and darker tones–simultaneously defamiliarizes the ubiquitous characters while accentuating the reductive geometric play that abounds in their volumes and surfaces. In recent paintings, figures seem buoyed in the zero-gravity aftermath of a cartoon explosion, entangled in a dynamic composition of unmoored planks, bricks, or tentacles of color. In Hold The Line, a large group of tondo paintings feature extreme close-ups of the face of KAWSBob, a recurring subject in the works on canvas. The circular edges of the picture plane resonate with cartoonish facial features: the scaled-up, concisely-painted, hard-edged curves of eyelids, undulating nose, and blocky, rectangular teeth are zoomed and cropped to an extent that offers the face as a kind of color field. 

The artist adopts and upends conventions taken from popular animation. KAWS’s figures have long borne distinctive “x x” marks over their eyes–as if intoxicated, poisoned, or pushing daisies. Most characters, upon entering the KAWS lexicon, find their heads transformed into a puffy skull-and-crossbones. These visual reformulations can be found in what is perhaps KAWS’s signature figure, Companion, a Mickey Mouse-esque character that first appeared in a toy-edition in 1999, but which has since been produced in nearly every medium in which the wide-reaching artist works. At larger-than-human-scale, two new Companion sculptures refer to the artist’s recent work in monumental sculpture. Here, the figures project a vivacity, posture, and presence befitting a “look inside” the flawless toy-like surface of one of the artist’s most iconic characters.

The strong graphic identity fueling his practice enables the artist to extend his cadre of characters–Accomplice, Chum, Companion, KAWSBob, Kimpsons, Kurfs, and others–across boundless cultural platforms, from gallery and museum shows of his paintings and sculpture, to a broad range of collaborative engagements creating graphics and designs for magazines, products, apparel, and recording artists (such as Levi’s, Comme des Garçons, and Kanye West), to independently developing and distributing toy lines and other products in the dedicated KAWS boutique, OriginalFake, in Tokyo. 

Born in 1974 in New Jersey, KAWS graduated with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has recently had solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Museum, Galerie Perrotin in Paris, and Galeria Javier Lopez in Madrid. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Torrrance Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco, and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. KAWS has upcoming solo exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the High Museum in Atlanta. He has had four monographs published about his work, the most recent in 2010 by Skira/Rizzoli.

Links:
Honor Fraser
KAWS

Copy + Paste from MOCA:

Cy Twombly (b. 1928, Lexington, Virginia; d. 2011, Rome) was one of the masters of postwar painting, and his work has played a critical role in the international development of contemporary art. This exhibition, featuring works from the Broad Collection, spans the six decades of his career, tracing the evolution of his unique and highly personal visual language. When Twombly began painting in the early 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was the dominant aesthetic. Interested in cultivating the legacy of that movement, unlike contemporaries such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he pursued a style that combined elements of abstraction, drawing, and writing and privileged the physical gesture of the artist’s hand over the representation of objects. “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history,” said the artist. “It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization.”

Twombly came to New York in 1950 to study at the Art Students League, where he met Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to attend the small progressive art school Black Mountain College. Twombly enrolled there in 1952, working alongside artists including Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell as he continued to cultivate his expressive “handwriting” style. He began to integrate chalk, pencil, and crayon into his works, blurring the line between drawing and painting. Twombly was also employed by the United States Army as a cryptologist during the mid-1950s, and his interest in codes and symbols is evident in the development of his mark-making, which is often calligraphic, at times resembling an accumulation of graffiti.

In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he resided for most of his life. There, his work began to bridge literary and painterly sensibilities, linking contemporary art to a rich cultural past of antiquity and Romanticism. Paintings of the 1960s, such as Untitled (Rome) (1961), made after the birth of his son, and Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) [Part I] (1964), are suffused with references to poetry, Mediterranean history, and mythology. In 1971, Nini Pirandello, the wife of Twombly’s Roman gallerist Plinio De Martiis, died suddenly. In tribute, Twombly painted the elegiac Nini’s Painting. Over the last decade, Twombly began revisiting the heroic scale of his 1950s works, making a body of paintings, including Untitled (from Blooming, A Scattering of Blossoms & Other Things) (2007) (the exhibition’s title references this work), which is among the most gestural, immersive, and explosively colorful in his career.

Link: MOCA

Her Artist Statement:

The face in the street reminds me of our connections with humanity, inspiring me to push the bounderies of portraiture with the aid of painterly contrasts. My compositions evolve through a personal quest to discover and understand colour. Striving to celebrate and flaunt the possibilities of paint, being the entity that engulfs the subject allowing for a free-flow of ideas to transpire uninhibited. Greatly influenced by Frank Auerbauch I rework my subject to gain a better possibility of producing the spontaneous mark. 

Link: Jenny Chisholm

]]> http://www.thekickitspot.com/2011/08/artist-talk-jane-lee-at-steve-turner-contemporary-wet-paint-3/feed/ 0 http://www.thekickitspot.com/2011/08/jane-lee-shows-at-wet-paint-3-at-steve-turner-contemporary-art/ http://www.thekickitspot.com/2011/08/jane-lee-shows-at-wet-paint-3-at-steve-turner-contemporary-art/#comments Sun, 21 Aug 2011 23:12:00 +0000 admin http://www.thekickitspot.com/?p=4152 Attended the opening for Madame J’s show at Steve Turner Contemporary Art.

Of the few paintings she exhibited, this one, titled Thread Count,  is my favorite. It is the next evolution to the Drip Paintings series that she’s been pretty obsessed with for the past couple of years. Inspired by the world of fashion, design, and current trends,  Madame J has crafted works of art that embody her inimitable style.

Entering the gallery space, the art piece immediately commands attention. And at first glance, two things stand out –  its shape and the colors.

The art work evokes memories of high school Geometry and learning about parallelograms. Geometry is a polarizing subject and most everyone feels one way or the other about rhomboids and quadrilaterals. And however trite the reference, the intellectual trigger is powerful.

The vibrant colors reflects Madame’s subjects of interest, the world of fashion and the palette of the season. In addition, the multitude of colors serve well to highlight the meticulous process that went in to creating this work of art. On numerous occasions, I’ve heard passersby question aloud how the artist was able to apply the paint just so. Hint, a cooking utensil and gravity.

The texture is amazing. So fresh and so clean.

chilling.

candid moments. ha!

Links:

Steve Turner Contemporary Art
IlliteJ

…. working on some canvases for her next show.

There was a lot of amazing art up on the walls. Lazarides has a great eye for talent. One of my most favorites of the bunch is Antony Micallef, and prominently displayed in the middle of the main room were 3 of his sculptures. This one is titled, Weapon Face, part of the Idol Kids of Today series. It seems to be a smaller version of the larger, 12-ft one that was displayed at the Royal Academy in London.

Screenprint of Micallef’s Head. MSRP 1000USD….. Not bad.

Links:
Antony Micallef
Post No Bills 

JR.

JR and Faile took over the exterior of popular eatery, Gjelina.

Faile.

Vhils. This was actually created to highlight the “European Bailout” show.

Very Cool.

By the way, you’re not supposed to take photos of this exhibit (oops, I didn’t see the sign).

All 32 soup can canvases lined up and available for viewing in Los Angeles. The last time they were displayed in such a fashion was 49 years ago, at Irving Blum’s now-defunct Ferus Gallery on La Cienega! It was Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition.

Now, to really appreciate the soup cans and the context does require some art history knowledge…..

and Wikipedia says it best (what’s bold is what I find interesting):

Warhol, a commercial illustrator who became a successful author, publisher, painter, and film director, showed the work on July 9, 1962 in his first one-man gallery exhibition as a fine artist.in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles, California. The exhibition marked the West Coast debut of pop art. The combination of the semi-mechanized process, the non-painterly style, and the commercial subject initially caused offense, as the work’s blatantly mundane commercialism represented a direct affront to the technique and philosophy of abstract expressionism. In the United States the abstract expressionism art movement was dominant during the post-war period, and it held not only to “fine art” values and aesthetics but also to a mystical inclination. This controversy led to a great deal of debate about the merits and ethics of such work. Warhol’s motives as an artist were questioned, and they continue to be topical to this day. The large public commotion helped transform Warhol from being an accomplished 1950s commercial illustrator to a notable fine artist, and it helped distinguish him from other rising pop artists. Although commercial demand for his paintings was not immediate, Warhol’s association with the subject led to his name becoming synonymous with the Campbell’s Soup can paintings.

Note written on the MOCA exhibition wall.

 Andy Warhol’s (b. 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; d. 1987, New York) Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) is perhaps the most emblematic representation of his work and also of American pop art. Pop artists were interested in taking objects and images abundantly present in everyday life as their subjects, integrating popular culture into fine art. Making use of mechanical reproduction techniques and repetition, Warhol’s approach has been seen as cool and dispassionate. In the Campbell’s Soup Cans series, the works are also celebratory and nostalgic. Warhol reproduced the industrial look of the thirty-two soup-can labels by hand, although the fleur-de-lis motifs were mechanically printed and retain a quality that suggests mass production—an appearance seemingly at odds with the traditional notion of an artwork as a unique expression of the individual artist.

This presentation marks the first time Campbell’s Soup Cans has been shown in Los Angeles since its historic exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in July 1962, Warhol’s first solo show. In addition to celebrating one of the most influential exhibitions in the history of contemporary art, this project honors the legendary dealer Irving Blum, director of the Ferus Gallery, who gave Warhol his first solo exhibition. Blum has told the story that Warhol was reluctant to have his first exhibition in Los Angles rather than New York, and encouraged Warhol by telling him that “movie stars come to the gallery.” In fact, there was only a small Hollywood contingent that was part of the Los Angeles art world, including Dennis Hopper and a few of his friends, but Warhol was eventually convinced.

Blum sold several of the paintings for $100 each, but as the show was coming down, he realized that it was essential that all of the works be kept together. He asked the buyers whether they would consider canceling their purchases, and they agreed. Blum kept all thirtytwo Campbell’s Soup Cans in his collection until 1996, when they were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art as partial gift and purchase.

Entrance to the exhibit

As an aside, there has been much debate on what inspired Warhol to pick Campbell’s soup cans as the object of his foray into fine art. Some of the more amusing stories include the one being pitched by MoMA – that Warhol ate the stuff daily for 20 years. Yea, Warhol was an eccentric, but really?

It is refreshing then, to read art critic Christopher Knight’s theory – that Warhol was inspired by Willem de Kooning:

I have a different answer to the question “Why soup?” — one that I don’t believe has been proposed before now. It takes some explaining. But the short answer is this: Soup was essential studio slang, the conversational lingo among New York School painters when they talked about their work.

Specifically, soup was the metaphor used by Willem de Kooning — the most successful artist of the era — to characterize his robust Abstract Expressionism. If soup worked for him, why not for Warhol?

“Everything is already in art,” the painter [De Kooning] gently demurs. “Like a big bowl of soup. Everything is in there already, and you stick your hand in and you find something for you.”…

At 56, De Kooning stood at the pinnacle of New York’s art heap. Famously handsome, he was a bona fide artist-celebrity. In the words of his friend, the playwright and essayist Lionel Abel, walking with him through Greenwich Village was like “being with a movie star.” Heads turned and strangers stopped him in the street. It’s no surprise that Warhol, a wildly successful commercial artist in the 1950s who really wanted a fine art career, would soon decide that he should paint soup too. He set his considerable advertising skills to the task.

De Kooning’s influence on Warhol is seldom acknowledged, but his exalted stature would surely have been envied by the celebrity-obsessed younger artist, then 32. Such public eminence for a Modern American painter was virtually unprecedented. Warhol, employing a logic difficult to debate, soon chose soup’s most famous brand to sanctify in paint on canvas.

Anyways, back to the program……

There’s a large poster advertising the current exhibit. I think that it’s cool that it is very similar to the one that was displayed at the Ferrus Gallery. I hope they make smaller versions.

 Sure, the soup cans are ubiquitous in pop art (but that’s the point), and have become fodder for those inciting how “silly” art is. But again, to understand these works of art require an appreciation for art history, or just history in general. And if that’s not your thing, well then… you’re not very cool and can’t be my friend… kidding, kind of… not really.

Whether what was on displayed was art is debatable. I don’t think so, but I’ll save that discussion for another time.

For the true Tim Burton fan, I may recommend the show, but for the slightly curious or the art snobs, I’d point you to press pictures taken by The Fox is Black, Hypebeast, or Hi-fructose. You’ll get the gist of the show.

Nevertheless, one thing that I found impressive was that even though the show is one and a half-months in, it continues to draw a large crowd. Outside the pavilion, mid-afternoon, there were long lines of people snaking around the south and south east sides, waiting to get in. Fortunately, being a museum member allowed my friends and I to bypass the queue. If I had to wait, I’m sure my okay experience would instead have been pretty shitty.

Though I did take pictures with my phone, the museum policy is that there is no picture-taking allowed, which I’m sure is mainly due for crowd control.

….made me realize that I needed a haircut. ha!

The show featured numerous sculptures made of old bricks. The featured piece, Pagoda, standing at 22-ft, had many guessing how on earth did they install this massive sculpture in that room. In the center was a stuffed pig.

According to the gallery notes (copy+paste):

Pagoda serves partly as a tribute to Zhu Gangqiang, or the “Cast-Iron Pig”, now famous for having survived 49 days in rubble, following China’s historic 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Upon hearing its story of survival, Zhang negotiated the pig’s purchase and has subsequently adopted him into his studio, employing a full-time caretaker and making his likeness a central part of his artistic practice. The number “49″ (from which the show takes its title) is dually significant, both for its relationship to Zhu Gangqiang’s story and for its connection to Buddhist thought, as the Buddhists believe 49 days is the amount of time ones soul remains on earth between death and reincarnation

There were many other sculptures, like these gigantic skulls, scattered throughout the gallery.

The exhibit is definitely worth a look!

Link: Blum and Poe

However, before and while waiting for the tour to start…. we do what we do best………..

so… we stuck around with the tour for about  half hour before going off on our own…..  to enjoy and interact with the art.

…. living in the moment…….

Lastly, I got Deitch to sign my book!

Woohoo! Planning to go back again this weekend.

Colors in the work function as the composition. The black and white gessoed surfaces function as the symbolic color of intellectuality, and an idea of formality. The saturated colors of paint are a vital part of these paintings by disrupting surface. Paint is poured across the upper spine of the canvas, directly from the bottle. Gravitational force slowly draws the color down the length of the surface, leaving behind vertical lines of varying densities and widths.

….

Of the ten, these three were my favorite, and are a good representation of this latest collection.

during the show, it was funny how many commented that all of madame’s friends were so stylish….

..fresh from Miami…

in town visiting from Paris……

..leaving for Harvard.

soon to be Master…

monster on the loose…

after her talk, madame had a costume change……

..played around with the computer…

… when the last visitors left… the real fun began…

c’est tout.

me.. “Going apeshit over KAWS”………. was searching for the Black one..

The Italian in los angeles.

the day they actually allowed photo taking on the 3rd level….my camera’s battery died… last photo.

took a few snaps with the iphone, but the pictures came out all blurry………bleh.

Carlos Cruz Diez

Julio Le Parc

Copy + Paste from MOCA:

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space, is the first museum exhibition to situate pioneering Latin American artists among the international canon of those working with light and space. The exhibition presents Latin America as the source of new ideas about the nature and function of art through the re-creation of important large scale installations by five highly regarded and influential artists: Carlos Cruz Diez, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, and Jesús Rafael Soto. The exhibition aims to illuminate the field by expanding the dialogue surrounding light-and-space practices in contemporary visual art beyond the California tradition of the late ’60s and ’70s, to include pivotal Latin American impulses expressed more than a decade earlier.

The five large-scale environments on view in Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space exemplify the artists’ embrace of light, color, and space as art materials as well as their interest in forging a new object-viewer relationship. Conceiving works that require the active participation of the viewer, each sought to engender a sensory experience of art that goes beyond the aesthetic. This immersive encounter, which Oiticica described as “suprasensorial,” was intended to shift the viewer’s position vis-a-vis the artwork, bridging the distance between spectator and object, demystifying art by making it part of everyday life. The viewer no longer need stand in front of an artwork, as with painting, or walk around it, in the case of sculpture, but should enter it, becoming fully engaged in a kind of “sensorial exaltation.” Insisting on the viewer’s presence as necessary for the completion of the work, each of the artists in Suprasensorial makes him/her an indispensable part of the art-making process.

Link: MOCA

Link: Chris Anthony

Copy + Paste from the Catalogue:

Acquired prior to the breakthrough travelling exhibition in 1965 and executed at the very height of Francis Bacon’s phenomenal career, Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud serves as testament to one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the Twentieth Century. In the 1950s and 1960s Bacon and Freud, then widely recognised as Britain’s pre-eminent painters, met incessantly and were considered inseparable. From 1961 Bacon employed this fourteen by twelve inches canvas size exclusively for an epic portraiture cycle that depicted a coterie of close friends in a project that occupied him until the end of his life. While his friend Frank Auerbach has likened these fantastic portrayals to “risen spirits” John Russell has commented that “Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them” (John Russell, Francis Bacon , London 1993, p. 99 and p. 152). Among these phenomenal character investigations, the brilliant colour, dramatic brushstrokes and analysis of facial landscape across the three canvases of the present work are truly exceptional. Highlights converge and dissemble to describe passages of light across the three versions of Freud’s visage: just as our eye is attracted to the seeming organisation of one area it immediately shoots to the apparent dissolution of another.

Lucian Freud had first learned about Francis Bacon from Graham Sutherland towards the end of the Second World War, and the pair thereafter became close friends, even seeing each other on a daily basis for a time. Freud painted his extraordinary portrait Francis Bacon in oil on copper in 1952, conjuring an intangible air of distracted distance in the face of his friend which so perfectly narrates the dimensions of their unconventional friendship. Two years later in 1954 the pair represented Britain, together with Ben Nicholson, at the Venice Biennale, firmly cementing their reputations at the vanguard of contemporary painting. Having started with the large Portrait of Lucian Freud in 1951, Bacon created paintings that included Freud in their titles for over twenty years, and the shadow of his unnamed presence long after that. However, the present work contains an intensity and intimacy that is rarely seen elsewhere, together with the paint handling that defines Bacon’s inimitable masterworks. It is archetypal of Bacon’s seminal cycle of triptych portrait heads, capturing an intense presence in mid-movement. This is Bacon’s detached yet doting depiction of one of his closest friends and a true artistic companion, and it confirms David Sylvester’s description that “Bacon had something of Picasso’s genius for transforming his autobiography into images with a mythic allure and weight” (David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon , London 2000, p. 186).

Overlapping matrices of paint hatching, partly imprinted with Bacon’s idiosyncratic use of corduroy material, describe the modulations of texture across the subject’s faces, while Freud’s stylishly dishevelled hair is variously presented with dragged streaks of dry pigment. Bacon’s extraordinary aptitude to shift through different modes of execution, from exactitude to expressivity, from the diagrammatic to the painterly, is here exhibited at its instinctive best. Bacon’s portraiture is critically-defined and world-renowned for achieving uncanny likeness via a seemingly chaotic assault of violent brushstrokes. Between the rich paint strata here he has buried a deep affection for Freud, which slowly reveals itself together with the gradual appearance of the sitter’s character on the surface of the canvas.

The portrait is loaded with physicality, both literally with the weight of oil paint and as the material record of the artist’s own brutal assault. Out of a flurry of swipes and blows Freud’s unmistakable presence emerges: with each loaded stroke on the three canvases this most focused of portraits unravels the sitter’s psychological and emotional kernel across the surfaces. It is almost as if Bacon has attempted to hide this face and to camouflage it in paint, yet suffers the burden of knowing it too well to conceal its true identity. It is often noted that Bacon’s portraits reveal their sitter’s inner essence because he painted people he knew closely, and at this time Lucian Freud was perhaps the closest that Francis Bacon ever had to a likeminded artistic equal.

The variegated textures of the surfaces recount the story of this work’s creation: the artist has brushed, smeared, flicked, lifted and thrown paint in his drive to define likeness; scraping, reworking, and layering to impregnate the painting with both painterly and psychological depth. While the powerful scarlet reds introduce a radical charge of colour, the sinuous sweeps of highly viscous strokes define the topography of Freud’s physiognomy in a rhythmic pattern of textural variety. All this is set against a backdrop of depthless black, coarsely woven canvas that results in the sculptural character of bitumen. Bacon’s rich hues have been soaked into the absorbent unprimed canvas, which contrasts brilliantly with the explosive plasticity of the impasto.

While the renowned critic and Bacon’s great friend Michel Leiris describes the artist’s portraits in strictly corporeal terms; “his work carries the signs of his actions rather as a person’s flesh bears the scars of an accident or an attack” (Michel Leiris in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, p. 17), William Feaver appraises them as figures of speech: “Here we have the slap round the chops. Then a good seeing-to, followed by a succession of abrupt images; gobsmacked, browbeaten, dumped on, coldshouldered” (William Feaver in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon 1909-1992: Small Portrait Studies, 1993, n.p.). Because we see several aspects and angles of Freud’s head all at once we are confronted by his character as a whole, rather than one specific snapshot. The representation is like an over-exposed photograph, or even some constantly adjusting oil-based hologram acting as a psychosomatic X-ray. Left on the canvas is the residue of the artist’s impulsive action, simultaneously trapping different facets of facial expression and a sense of movement. However, rather than merely the few moments of a time-delayed photo, Bacon has caught Freud’s character as he observed him over years, and thus the painting holds within it time, experience and the shadows of memory itself.

The celebrated Czech writer Milan Kundera has commented that “Bacon’s portraits are the interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved being still remain a beloved being?” (Milan Kundera, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London 1996, p. 12). Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud is an outstanding example of Bacon reaching that critical threshold between recognition and dissolution. He has navigated the precise point at which this head reveals both the character of Lucian Freud and the raw and seemingly arbitrary convergence of paint and brushstrokes. Indeed, within its extraordinary layers of execution lies the key to Bacon’s portraiture project, as he defined to Hugh Davies in 1973: “In trying to paint a portrait I would like it to be all likeness – I would like it to be a universal image as well as a specific fact” (the artist interviewed by Hugh Davies, 7 th August 1973, cited in: Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 45).

Showed up too late. Got kicked out of the museum. hahahaha.

- Rapha Winter Jersey, $230. Can also wear it as a light jacket.
- The Quants by Scott Patterson, $17.82 at Amazon.
- Framed Print of Untitled (Red and Black), 1955 by Mark Rothko, $200 at MoMA.
- Sidi Dragon 2 SRS Carbon Mountain Bike Shoes in Red, $372.50 at Chainreactioncycles. Retails for $465.
- Paddle Shifting Steering Wheel for my car, $2,095 at Suncoast. Retails for $2615.
- Decoded by Jay-Z, $18.88 at Amazon.
- Vision Racer VR3 Racing Simulator, $1295. The best way to play Gran Turismo.
- Rapha 3/4 Bib shorts, $225. I’m a sucker for that white stripe.

Cheers!

Top Row:
> Kartell Tati Table Lamp. Retails for $798. Found it on Amazon.com for cheaper, $765 (that includes shipping and no tax).
> Flos Gun Lamp designed by Philippe Starck. $948 at unicahome (free shipping and no tax).
> Marilyn Monroe 1 Print by Andy Warhol. Retails for $750 at Opus Art. Use ANDYW2 coupon code for 25% off.

Middle Row:
> Herman Miller Eames Lounge Chair (LCW) in Ebony. Retails for $818. Amazon has it for $551 (free shipping and no tax).
> All Cone Bracelet by Eddie Borgo. Retails on the official site for $450.
> Bodum Chambord Coffee Press – 32oz. Amazon sells it for the cheapest, for $35.89 (free shipping and no tax).
> Converse Chuck Taylor by Cody Hudson. Aloha Rag is selling these shoes for $75.

Bottom Row:
> Alexander McQueen Skull Black Cushion by The Rug Company. Sells direct for $675.
> Martin Margiela Leather Traveling Bag. On sale at Aloha Rag for $995.
> The Selby Is In Your Place by Todd Selby. Amazon has it for $23.10

the piece is titled, Symbol of Wealth

Bonus. Checked out her workspace. Like Studio 54, but way cooler.

I was immediately drawn to the piece on the right, and guess what? She said I can have it. SCORE!!!!

my favorite part was discovering that a spider had a Han Solo stuck in carbonite moment.

cool floor, huh?

Cheers!

Executed in 1985, it’s a good size at 78.25 x 58.25 inches.

Copy + Paste from Sotheby’s:

In the catalogue to the spectacular retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1985, the museum’s renowned director Alan Bowness described the art of Francis Bacon thus: “His own work sets the standard for our time, for he is surely the greatest living painter; no artist in our century has presented the human predicament with such insight and feeling….for Bacon, the virtues of truth and honesty transcend the tasteful. They give to his paintings a terrible beauty that has placed them among the most memorable images in the entire history of art” (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1985, p. 7). Executed in this very year, Figure in Movement represents physical testament to this acclamation. Exhibiting the most striking composition, a magnificent array of brushwork
and a supremely arresting palette, this is a formidable portrayal of the human animal that epitomises the full gamut of Bacon’s artistic genius. Indeed, the inimitable traits of his method, specifically the intense combination of brilliant cadmium orange with depthless black, directly compare with the masterpieces Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Britain, London) and Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York).

Gifted by the artist to his physician Dr. Paul Brass, who followed his father Dr. Stanley Brass as Bacon’s personal doctor and with whom Bacon maintained a close bond until his death in 1992, Figure in Movement possesses an exceptional provenance. The terms of its ownership vividly reflect its importance to Bacon: not only was Dr. Brass a most trusted friend, but when he was first offered a choice of painting and initially suggested another work, the artist instead recommended Figure in Movement, assuring his doctor that it was a superior painting. Eminently regarded through its distinguished exhibition history in major shows in Moscow, Paris, London and The Hague, as well as its long-term loan to the Tate; this marks the historic occasion of its first appearance to market.

Foremost among Bacon’s innermost clique in 1985 was John Edwards, a handsome East-Ender and the artist’s closest companion at this time. Edwards wrote, “it was a perfect relationship. I was never Francis’ lover, but I loved him as the best friend a man could have. He was fond of me like a son” (Exh. Cat., New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1998, p. 7) and Dr. Brass has also stated: “I never heard Francis say a bad word about John. He said to me…’I think of John like a son. He’s a son to me really’” (interviewed for Bacon’s Arena, directed by Adam Low, produced by Anthony Wall, BBC Arena and The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2005). The parity between Edwards and the present physiognomy is clear: the long jaw-line, the geometries of the eye, nose and mouth and the jet-black hairline. However, Bacon never painted his friend from life and the naked torso of this body is adapted from photos of other models, notably the infamous shots of George Dyer in his underwear taken 20 years earlier. Thus, Figure in Movement conflates two of the most important figures in the artist’s life. Significantly, Bacon inserts this being, an amalgamation of that which he held most dear, onto an exposed dais that is a crucible of existential isolation: the natural environment of his extraordinary artistic and philosophical innovation.

While the figure twists and writhes as if to struggle free of the canvas, it is contained within indications of rigid cricket pads. The sport was a subject of fascination for the artist’s later career. A photograph of source material littering his studio floor reveals the intriguing arrangement of a copy of Physique Pictorial lying on top of England cricketer David Gower’s book With Time to Spare, so that the legs of a brooding male bodybuilder join up with the cricket pads of a batsman underneath. This fusion of diametrically opposed images is archetypal of Bacon’s ability to meld starkly eclectic themes to portray the chaos of human existence, and provides apt parallel with Figure
in Movement. Bacon draws on his knowledge of art historical precedent, such as the incomparable figural studies of Michelangelo. He accelerates the effects of light and shadow, plunging form in and out of darkness so that several passages of light flow in simultaneous chorus. Chiaroscuro rhythms of anatomic gesture negotiate between
material and void, while the figure’s left leg dissolves in the black ether of the platform.

More than any other artist of the 20th Century, Bacon held a mirror to the nature of the Human Condition, and Figure in Movement provides the perfect reflection of what he saw. He was fascinated by the postwar works of the French existentialists Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, and their themes of alienation, imprisonment and the absurd. The most important actors of Bacon’s canon, typified by this figure, crystallise this entire philosophical enquiry, as they let go of the sureties of the past and stand on the threshold of an unknowable future.

It was fun.

Lots of people dressed up for Halloween. I wasn’t one of them.

Unfortunately, because a lot of the pieces were on loan, we were not allowed to take pictures of the items in the exhibit. At least I got to take a photo of this amazing Rothko, which is from the permanent collection.

Another cool thing is that I got to see the MOCA Director, Jeffrey Deitch in the flesh at the Geffen Contemporary branch.

Copy+Paste from MOCA:

The Artist’s Museum showcases works by 146 artists who have helped shape the artistic dialogue in Los Angeles since the founding of MOCA over 30 years ago. Based on MOCA’s world-renowned permanent collection, supplemented by key loans from local collectors and artists, this special presentation features over 250 works, including a number of new projects made especially for this occasion. Representing the diversity and uniqueness of the Los Angeles community, the exhibition highlights important works from legendary L.A. artists who remain vital and influential alongside those emerging from renowned local art schools, visionary artists associated with various street cultures and subcultures, and crossover artists connected to performance, music, and film.

Link: MOCA

Some close-ups.

Feedback Loop 2. I love how he is able to blend the colors.

Spaceboy. one of my favorites.

Embedded – the show’s namesake.

yea, they’re pretty big.

From Ace Gallery’s Press Release:

Justin Bower’s portraits combine succulent impasto brushwork with a Neo-Baroque sensibility folded into the aesthetic of the pixilated computer screen. Exuding jarring anxious energy, his vivid, large-scale, oil on canvas paintings are full frontal close-up, anonymized faces, based on one hijacked image from a social networking website such as Facebook or MySpace. Interested in the instability and turbulent nature of subjectivity today, particularly mediated through computer screens, he paints oil on canvas permutations of one specific photographic image, affected and infected with the tropes of our contemporary reproduction technologies. His paintings reflect subjectivity today: mediated, indefinite, and in a perpetual state of boundless flux and transformation.

Through the use of a hyper-saturated color palette Bower weaves synthetic colors into the organic body, retaining a naturalness of flesh while suggesting an artificial origin, fusing the object and subject, wary that our own images have become objects of manipulation. He conflates the function of skin and flesh as a boundary between biological interiority and externalized technologies. In these paintings, there is a consistent breaching between the borders of physicality in the figurative, and abstraction: conscious of Francis Bacon’s legacy and of Jenny Saville’s voluptuous flesh, with oil paint, a substitute for the sensual human form. Bower’s intent is to show that subjectivity today plays with the boundaries that separate the organic/synthetic, human/non-human, interiority/exteriority, self/other and finally between abstraction and the figurative. One of the artist’s aims is to create the ecstasy coupled with the dread/terror that accompanied the historical sublime’s overwhelming landscape, inverting this paradox to the overwhelming ‘internal body-scape.’

Choosing an anonymous as well as androgynous face found on the internet, Bower reinterprets the image in each of his paintings, distorting any individual identity; the multiplicity and endless variation of the distorted facial image confuses an authentic origin, reaffirming the tension between the digital image and actual subject (real world counterpoint). But at the same time, his ‘intervention’ frees the connection and enables the artist to see the image as a free-floating signifier. Bower focuses upon two distinct areas of subject formation and de-formation. The first is a specific digital reference, the code through which these subjects emerge, are infected by, disintegrate and finally rest in their identity flux. Through the paintings, The Instability of Infinite Origin (2010), Spaceboy (2010) and Holographic Interjections (2010), the artist considers the inevitable reductionist instinct that occurs when any code, be it digital, genomic, anthropological, is applied to the human subject. This, according to Bower, is coupled with the anxiety of the possible infinite expressions of this code. The second area flows from the first, but the subject is interpreted in terms of contextual feedback loops.

These paintings interpret the subject through invasive linear abstractions into the face, particularly the sensory organs, i.e. exaggerated mouth and teeth. These feedback loops intimated in his accretion and build-up of paint marks (upon a structured armature) treat the subject as a weak operator formed and deformed by the institutional systems of knowledge folding back into the subject, echoing cybernetics’ theory of feedback loop consciousness. In Spaceboy, Bower was conscious of the paintings of Caravaggio, re-conceived and filtered through the digital glowing interface of computer screens. Through the medium of painting, he links the image to some alternate future, conveying a desire to understand the cultural and biological changes in subjectivity and identity.

Holographic Introjection is another exercise in the digital Baroque and its hallucinatory glowing color where the artist sought to give a sense of mitosis (cellular division). In Architecture of Infection, the paint leaks: disturbing, covering, and revealing. It is within the sensory organs (eyes, mouth, nose) that the distortion is most exaggerated, violating the humanist locus of a singular sensory operator. Grids snap into power and digital pixels erode the flesh forcing the subject into a state of flux, as it prepares to dissolve or become whole in some new form. In The Geometry in Violence, Bower wanted to convey the dangers and potential violation to the individual, subjected to standardized, monotonous, institutionalized systems and rules.

All of these paintings are contradictory, unstable, and in an un-fixed position (optically and conceptually) creating tension between rupture and rigidity in the construction of the painting. Bower uses the doubling of certain features on the face to optically play with this instability. Addressing androgyny, Bower postulates that figuratively, body boundaries are fluid (if not “leaking”), putting into question the stability of subjectivity, gender and sexuality. The regenerative traits and human codings of biotechnologies, paranoia about DNA and genetic engineering, are suggested in his paintings through the grafting of superfluous body parts. An image without an original seen through a pixilated interface situates the subject’s context into an endless mise en abyme. The anxiety in the perceived ‘loss’ of self, generated by critical theorists, the reduction of all matter to ‘code’, and the tendencies of the biotech world to hyperbolize the redemption of the future is exemplified in the status of his subjects to function as existing as in-between states.

Link: Ace Gallery

Link:
After Modern Art 1945-2000

Joshua Nathansan – Over Here, Check Out His Shoes, 2010. Acrylic on wood panel, 26 x 30 inches.

Jesse Mockrin - No Ordinary Sleep (rapids), 2010. Oil and photograph on canvas, 26 x 36 inches.

cool kids congregate.

Link: Steve Turner Contemporary

close-up…

MOCA members were given easy entrance, but still had to wait in line to see the exhibition. Killing time in line.

View from the line….

See? Crowded.

Art Highlights… Dennis Hopper had an eclectic body of work…

this is what my friends and I usually do when we come to these things… become each other’s paparazzi.

….and that was the show.

After-show shenanigans.

Late dinner at Koraku..

Cheers!

Close up of one of Vhils’ pieces.

Connor Harrington has a way with the spray can.

Antony Micallef’s work, however morbid and dark, is amazing to look at.

and of course, there’s JR, who I’ve featured on my blog many times before..

Really have had to be in the space to appreciate the artistry..

Cheers!

Copy + Paste from Lazarides

Immortalizing the individual in monumental proportions is what these exciting artists do best. Using the overlooked, misunderstood and mundane elements of our everyday, each artist captures our attention with their distinctive style and alternative approach. Sharing a vested interest in their individual and collective surroundings and society, they poetically express a desire for universal appreciation.

Sheila in deep contemplation. 

Baldessari’s Tips For Artists Who Want To Sell

My Tribute to Baldessari.

The dots served two functions in Baldessari’s work; they allowed him to “obliterate” the identifies of people in his found images and also to render them anonymous so they could be seen more as generic types (such as an art curator or an art hustler) rather than specific individuals. But the dots also represented Baldessari’s overall strategy aimed at deflecting the viewer’s gaze from the habitual way of seeing – prompting viewers to look

Sooj and Madame.

Links:
LACMA
John Baldessari

Here are some of the pieces that caught my eye:

Dane Goodman’s Untitled (Black Mesa Series) was featured on the show’s post card.

Robert Murray makes these incredible frames with a bajillion screws.

Rose Kelly’s Peacefulness in a Cup of Tea, which was created following an inspirational trip to Bhutan. 

My favorite was Eugenie Spirito’s Kissing Fish.

Link:
PYO Gallery LA
Estrada Fine Arts

Link:
Jose Parla
Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

Contemporary artist and graffiti legend Steve Powers talks about his creative journey and the process and thinking behind Love Letter – arguably the longest love story ever written: a 20 block long grafitti ballad painted across West Philadelphia’s rooftops and walls.

Here, I attempt to tell the story, quick and dirty, at the same time, highlighting the main characters in their new LA Opera costumes.

The End.

Link: LA Opera

Choe is one of my favorite artists. I don’t know him personally, but I get that he’s a pretty straight up, no bullshit kind of guy, living life on his terms.

Here are some of the highlights of the show…

I will take all my love all my hate all my pain all my rage, all my suffering and all my skills and experience I’ve collected over the years everything I’ve learned in every medium from watercolors to oils to spray paint I’m gonna express everything I feel about this city and what it is to live and die and be born again in the city of angels….
                                                                                               – David Choe, 2010

320 N. Beverly Dr., Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Links:
David Choe
Lazarides Gallery

Here’s a time-lapsed video of Mark Ryden painting the above work, Incarnation. Spectacular.

Links:
Paul Kasmin Gallery
Mark Ryden

I always wondered what happened to the film, Life Remote Control. I’ve been waiting for it. Now I know. =)

By the way, the caprese sandwich at Arclight is pretty good.

Link: Banksy Film

…

Here are some close-ups….

Dots, Dots, Dots Galore

Between us and them

Untitled

Dots, Splatter, Blob

Chanel…meet Paint.

H Painting

T Blue

=)

This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era.

The artist responsible is known to have created a substantial body of work across South East of England under the moniker Banksymus Maximus but little else is known about him.

Most art of this type has unfortunately not survived. The majority is destroyed by zealous municipal officials who fail to recognise the artistic merit and historical value of daubing on walls.

It was originally unveiled to the public in 2005 at the British Museum. You can read about it >>here<<. LOL. 

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS celebrates the spirit behind one of the most influential cultural moments of a generation

In the early 1990′s a loose-knit group of likeminded outsiders found common ground at a little NYC storefront gallery. Rooted in the DIY (do-it-yourself) subcultures of skateboarding, surf, punk, hip hop & graffiti, they made art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Developing their craft with almost no influence from the “establishment” art world, this group, and the subcultures they sprang from, have now become a movement that has been transforming pop culture.

Starring a selection of artists who are considered leaders within this culture, Beautiful Losers focuses on the telling of personal stories. It speaks to themes of what happens when the outside becomes “in” as it explores the creative ethos connecting these artists and today’s youth.

Click Continue to see the rest…

Link: Beautiful Losers

She writes…

My painting technique pushes the boundaries of perception, compressing 3D space into a 2D plane, effectively blurring the lines between art and life. The living paintings series is my spin on reality. By wrapping my subject in a mask of paint, I skew the way that the core of the subject is perceived.

Typically, when you look at a painting, you’re looking at an artist’s interpretation of the subject painted on canvas. In my artistic interpretation of the subject, I paint directly on top of the subject I am referencing rather than using canvas. Essentially, my art imitates life – on top of life.

Link: Alexa Meade

JR expo Paris de Women are Heroes from La Boite Concept on Vimeo.

Here are a few of the standouts…

Copy + Paste from LeBasse Projects:

Legendary artist Yoshitaka Amano will make a rare U.S. appearance with his newest exhibit, DEVA LOKA, created especially for a U.S exhibition and named for the ancient Indian land of God. As an ode to his childhood love for American comics, culture and automobiles, Amanoʼs latest breathtaking and vibrant pieces are boldly coated with auto paint and metallic glitter.

Amano is widely acclaimed for his work in animation and video games. He is renowned for designing the characters for the hit video game, Final Fantasy, as well as for anime films includingVampire Hunter D, Guin Saga, Final Fantasy, and Front Mission.

“Between the late 60ʼs and the 70ʼs, and during my early years in the art world, I was greatly influenced by American comic books and pop culture. Iʼd like to show my gratitude for the inspiration America gave me with this exhibit. With the theme of DEVA LOKA, all of my concepts and influences are able to come together, centered in one place. I hope everyone enjoys my show.” Deva Loka will be Amanoʼs first major exhibition in Los Angeles.

It’s worth checking out.

Links:
Yoshitaka Amano
LeBasse Projects

… where one of the featured artists was Yoskay Yamamoto, who first caught my eye a couple of years ago with Koibito. Without going too much into it, I attended the opening reception expecting similar works of art. Instead, Yamamoto presented something cooler. 

….in one room, a bunch of multi-colored raindrops hung from the ceiling. Installed in such a way that, with a little imagination (and maybe some LSD), could briefly transport attendees into a world where nature speaks to you and goa trance is playing in the background…. may be worthwhile experiencing.

Anyways, cool kids kicking it in the Yoksay room….

SH double-fisting beer and wine. i like that. hahaha.

Sooj not pleased?

Madame dropping some art knowledge.

The outside wall was lined with these resin heads. The black astro boy-looking one was my favorite.

It was a small show, but solid in presentation.

Cheers!

Links:
Yoskay Yamamoto
LeBasse Gallery

About the exhibition – Copy + Paste:

In 1984 Steve Powers started climbing rooftops in his neighborhood and painting his alias ESPO as a dues paying member of the ICY graffiti club. 25 years later he returned home to Philadelphia in the summer of 2009 to write a love letter across the same rooftops facing the Market-Frankford line. The letter, meant for one, with meaning for all, encompasses 50 walls on a 20 block stretch of market street. Drawing input, inspiration, and work from the community Powers created a letter to and from west Philly. This unprecedented public art project was a collaboration of Powers, The Mural Arts Program, and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. It required 1200 cans of spray paint, 800 gallons of bucket paint, and the skilled hands of 20 of the finest spray painters in America, who Powers put into the legendary ICY club.

A Love Letter For You from Megawords Magazine on Vimeo.

Might remember that this time last year, he dropped a similarly-themed print for his fans.

Link: A Love Letter For You

Pick Up Sticks

This was another one of my favorites.

There were a lot of paintings in this series. I posted only a fraction of them. All were really good.

 Copy + Paste from Ace Gallery:

Several years ago while in Paris, John Millei viewed a painting titled Portrait de femme (Dora Maar), 1938, by Pablo Picasso in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. He bought a postcard of the painting, which has been pinned on the wall of his studio since. In the Spring of 2008 he began small studies from it, and eventually used it as inspiration for a new series of paintings titled Woman in a Chair. In a similar manner, the premise for his 2006 series the Procession paintings, was based on his encounter with Giotto’s Procession of the Nuptial Virgin. Also referencing Giorgio Morandi, the series came after Millei visited Giotto’s original Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, Italy.

Picasso used the model of the woman in a chair as a theme throughout his long career and various stylistic periods. Millei’s attraction to Portrait de femme (Dora Maar) proved to be an apt historical model from a most fertile period around Picasso’s painting of Guernica. After extensive studies in watercolor and with small sized canvases, Millei gravitated toward 9ft high canvases utilizing oil and flashe. In Millei’s new work, the paintings reveal a singular approach to the abstract figure, considerably altered in each using stylistic tropes from previous series within his own career; in one, reappearing as thick impasto flower ‘hands’ or stenciled dots for ‘eyes.’ The paintings are individually titled rather than numbered, to break sequence, i.e. Woman in a Chair (Blinkers), with only one painting which actually references Picasso in its title: Woman in a Chair (after Picasso). Millei’s work here mirrors Picasso’s approach in that for each, the subject becomes an armature for their own sets of painterly concerns. These ‘after-images’ are neither about Dora as a subject nor deconstructing Picasso, but the Woman in a Chair as a template, abstract idea and framework, using received and known culture to reinforce Millei’s individual statements. Many artists have engaged their predecessors work as departure points for their own. In Millei’s paintings after painting, the territory is redefined again.

Link: Ace Gallery

..amazed.

Copy + Paste from Ace Gallery:

Totems have pan-cultural associations throughout diverse cultures around the world, and these vertical forms have been used over the course of history as tribal talismans representative of genealogies, ancestors and documenting societies. Herb Alpert, in his Black Totem series, has focused on this totemic language of sculpture for the past 20 years.

Alpert’s process for creating these sculptures is very hands on. He works with wet clay first molding it into vertical forms ranging from 8 to 36 inches tall. From these he selects the ones he will make into larger sculptures, that will range from 12 to 20 feet in height. These larger works are also hand formed with the wet clay. When completed, molds are made and then the sculptures are cast in bronze and patinaed black. Alpert’s totems read abstractly yet suggestions of recognizable forms appear; an eagle form seemly emerging from the top of one, or human shapes surfacing. That their forms evolved naturally, organically, and are formed by the artist without carving tools that further convey their biomorphic qualities.

Alpert was, for the most part, inspired by the totems unique to the Pacific Northwest of North America such as those of the Haida, Tlingit and Kwakiutl tribes, whose totem poles were made of single pieces of cedar, some up to forty feet in height. For the Haida tribe, these ancestral totems are, and have been for hundreds of years, the essence of family and tribal identity and sometimes were used to mark entranceways to their lodgings. The totems of the Pacific Northwest function as crests of families or chiefs commemorating major events or occasions, represented by hierarchies of different creatures, animals or various supernatural beings (each signifying different human attributes). In Native American tradition, a totem is an entity or symbol that watches over or ‘assists’ a family, clan or tribe. Totemism, derived from the Ojibwe language, refers to that which is kinship-related, and it is also a belief system that is frequently associated with shamanistic religions. Totems act as ‘familiars’ or guides accompanying one through life, both in the physical and spiritual worlds. Alpert’s totems subliminally engage these theories and histories.

Alpert’s attraction to this sculptural form is understandable as it contains an enormous history. The black patina of his totems is evocative of ancient primal forms and the contemporary material belies an ancient prehistory. The pan-cultural consciousness invested into these dark sculptural forms also relate back in time to Egyptian obelisks as much as they evoke the Modernist sculpture of Constantin Brancusi – specifically Brancusi’s Endless Column (1937), Alberto Giacometti’s extended figures and early Louise Bourgeois sculpture. Alpert’s work shares with Bourgeois’ sculpture an affinity to Animistic entities or guardians. Bourgeois’ first major body of sculpture were slender wooden sculptures – reminiscent of pillars or tribal effigies (she travelled to Africa in the late 1940s), which later developed into totemic constructions – a fusion of architecture with the body, its substitution for the body, or phallic surrogates. Alpert’s biomorphic totems are composed within the gallery space, yet while each is singular, they gain intensity as a group, amplified with Alpert’s use of black for the totems.

Totemism was also a key element of study in the development of 19th and early 20th century theories of religions, especially for philosophers such as Émile Durkheim, who concentrated his studies on indigenous societies. Drawing on the identification of social groups with spiritual totems in Australian aboriginal tribes, Durkheim theorized how human religious expression was intrinsically founded in the relationship to a group. Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo first published in 1913, employed the application of psychoanalysis to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. Given a revisionist post-Colonial perception of tribal and indigenous cultures these perspectives now seem curiously Eurocentric. Author Edward Saïd’s Orientalism has been one of the most influential texts readdressing Eurocentric perspectives which has further generated a globalized dialectic. The structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss posited in his text Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (Totemism Today), that totems are chosen arbitrarily for the purpose of making the physical world a comprehensive and coherent classificatory system, but also recognized that the concept of totemism is an artifact of western thinking imposed by anthropology.

For Alpert, these towering spires are like frozen smoke, or akin to the ineffable notes of music captured and held still as interminable forms. These abstract, yet formal structures and their process of creation are fluid in a way that jazz is, making intangible compositions physical. Alpert who is also a musician and composer, would not deny that there is a focused fluidity in the making of these sculptures consistent with the intuitive, harmonious and spontaneous moves and swings embodied in his approach to his music.

Herb Alpert was born in 1935 and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Link:
Ace Gallery
Herb Alpert

Personally paying for the cost of the prints, David Choe has requested that all proceeds go to Yele Haiti, a foundation created by Wyclef Jean. This print measures 18″x24″ inches and is a Giclee print on archival paper. Limited to 50 editions, the print is hand-signed by David Choe.

..to benefit Yéle Haiti. Buy >>HERE<<

Of the piece, Gupta said…

… “Very Hungry God”, was made in 2006 for the Nuit Blanche annual all-night festival in Paris. My work was conceived to be shown in a church in Barbes on the outskirts of Paris which is largely inhabited by an immigrant population.

I made the work in response to the stories I read in the news about how soup kitchens in Paris were serving food with pork so that Muslims would not eat it. It was a strange and twisted form of charity that did not continue for long but raised conflicting ideas of giving and the way we have become now.

Outside the church I served vegetarian daal soup as a form of “prasad” (in India when you go to a temple or a guduwara you are offered food with the blessing). I liked the mix of the Catholic church and my intervention using a symbol that many artists have used before – the skull – and its many connotations.

‘Very Hungry God’ is like a vanity, but also the idea of food and the utensils is very much part of my language dealing with ideas of the everyday and turning them into iconic symbols.

Link: Subodh Gupta

Link: Angles Gallery

Here are some of the highlights:

Damien Hirst

One of the basic primary forms of painting is the self-portrait. With a long and distinguished history the self-portrait has told us about people, their times and their attitudes. They tell us of scrutiny, of desire, of ego and of the passage of time too, but they can also seem like a whispered secret sometimes, that winks knowingly to us of shared knowledge and experiences and has the added frisson for us of knowing that this is the artist ‘talking’ directly to us through time and geography. A great self-portrait tells you something of the artist but of ourselves too.

Justin Bower …. and we meet again. A pretty stunning piece I had to a chance to see at the artist’s studio a while back.

Chuck Close … gigantic tapestry.

KAWS

Link: The Torrance Art Museum

So, here then, is a list of things I will be picking up after Christmas, when 2 or none of the items pictured here will be on sale.

• Thermos Nissan 14 oz leak-proof tumbler
• Woodlore Cedar Shoe Trees for the additional shoes I purchased this last year
• KidRobot Krunk-a-Klaus 3″ Dunny designed by TADO
• Matcha Green Tea
• Tom Ford criss cross aviators
• Porsche key USB memory stick
• John W. Nordstrom cashmere-lined, black leather gloves
• Art of Shaving Power Razor and Stand for Gilette Fusion
• Kiehl’s Creme de Corps – KAWS limited, special edition bottle
• Top Gear Season 10 on DVD

This is December 2009, as a humorous reminder to those celebrating year-end company parties.

.. which is pretty similar to the one from December 2008. LOL! If anyone knows how I can grab one of these for my wall at home, let me know!

Link: Tokyo Metro

Without knowing anything about the artist, I see Chuck Close hyper-realism with Francis Bacon sensibilities from the perspective of Johnny Mnemonic, kind of like Connor Harrington and Chloe Early on shrooms. AWESOME. 

This guy has talent like I haven’t seen in a while.

This is the piece facing the green one. Good stuff.

Link: Justin Bower Unofficial Site

In August of 2008, as part of his Women project, JR went to Morro da Providêcia, one of the most dangerous favelas (shantytown) in Rio de Janeiro, and posted huge photos of faces and eyes of 20 women all over on the outside of 40 houses.

This series of works pay tribute to “those who play an essential role in society, but who are the primary victims of war, crime, rape or political and religious fanaticism.”

Recently, JR exhibited a selection of his Women Are Heroes work around Île Saint-Louis, in Paris, France. I told EM about it, since she’s there now for school. I’ll have to ask if she got the chance to visit. 

Link: Women Are Heroes

Madame J exhibited. However subtle it may be, everything here has a meaning. It’s up to the viewer to figure it out. That’s the game.

Up close and personal.

pretty, pretty ponies.

vroom vroom.

…. I wonder how many times she glued her finger tips together while making this.

For me, the process is as important as, if not more so than, the final product.

BONUS:

Glimpse inside Madame J’s studio.

She always wears cool shoes. Balmain Bling Bling.

She wasn’t kidding when she said we would be painting also.

she prepared a bunch of mini square canvases for all of her friends to paint on. it’s all part of her master plan.

my contribution =)

artist at work.

empty paint cans.

C’est tout!

The message is clear: Regardless of religious and political affiliation, we are all the same. 

 Copy + Paste:

When we met in 2005, we decided to go together in the Middle-East to figure out why Palestinians and Israelis couldn’t find a way to get along together.

We then traveled across the Israeli and Palestinian cities without speaking much. Just looking to this world with amazement.

This holy place for Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
This tiny area where you can see mountains, sea, deserts and lakes, love and hate, hope and despair embedded together.

After a week, we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families.

A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher, has his twin brother in front of him. And he his endlessly fighting with him.

It’s obvious, but they don’t see that.

We must put them face to face. They will realize.

We want that, at last, everyone laughs and thinks when he sees the portrait of the other and his own portrait.

The Face2Face project is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides.

In a very sensitive context, we need to be clear.
We are in favor of a solution for which two countries, Israel and Palestine would live peacefully within safe and internationally recognized borders.

All the bilateral peace projects (Clinton/Taba, Ayalon/Nussibeh, Geneva Accords) are converging in the same direction. We can be optimistic.

We hope that this project will contribute to a better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Today, “Face to face” is necessary.
Within a few years, we will come back for “Hand in hand”.

amazing stuff.

Links:
JR’s website
Face2Face Project

Pretty cool, huh?

Link:
Nanospore

This series, made between 2006-2008, are notable not for subject matter (rather, predictable), but for actually being made by the artist.

Link: The Wallace Collection

Buy Here: Limited Edition KAWS Creme de Corps

Up for bid at Sotheby’s October 16th, 2009 Contemporary Art Auction is another attractive piece from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fuego Flores (Lot 153). It is an acrylic and oilstick on canvas, measuring 168cm by 152cm, executed in 1983.

Here is copy+paste of the catalogue notes:

Beating with raw visual power, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sensational canvas Fuego Flores was executed at the very height of his brief and brilliant artistic existence. Created in just his twentythird year and perfectly exhibiting his already legendary repertoire of loaded iconography, painterly immediacy and stunning colouristic expressivity, this work is simply astounding in its authorial assuredness and charisma. Indeed, Fuego Flores is unrestrained by convention and stands as a concrete eulogy to a young and luminous spirit that breathed life back into the art of painting.

At the centre of the canvas a fiercely expressive stark black figure stares fixedly out of the picture plane, the tonal drama of its silhouette seizing our attention and launching out against the backdrop of beautifully mediated pastel hues. Surmounting the figure is a heavily delineated head that is exactly representative of Basquiat’s most powerful motif. Whether palpitating as selfportrait, rattling as vanitas skull, or overseeing as totemic symbol of the oppressed, the imagery of heads underpins his entire career. The daubed, scrawled and scratched example here is mystifying and intriguing with its simultaneous yet competing emotions of rage, sadness and  confusion. Its expression is testament to the psycho-somatic complexity that this young artistcould conjure so viscerally amidst his assault of mark-making.

Dominated by glaring cut-out eyes and a cavernous red mouth filled with dislocated peg teeth, the highly stylised physiognomy evokes both the primitive scribbles of a child and the elaborate iconographies of ancient cultures, especially African reliquary masks in the way it announces an almost spiritual, Shaman-like figure. These were seminal influences on Basquiat who, like his hero Picasso before him, assessed long-forgotten artistic traditions to interpret contemporary visual culture from a completely new perspective. Born to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents and growing up in the cultural crucible of Brooklyn, Basquiat was fascinated by his heritage and its artistic legacy. Furthermore, the tonal polarisation of the figure and head is reminiscent of x-rays and anatomical drawings of bone structures. This recalls Basquiat’s enthusiasm for anatomy that was sparked when his mother gave him a copy of the famous textbook Gray’s Anatomy when, as a seven-year-old, he was recovering from being hit by a car.

Sitting at the top of the composition, towards the left-hand side, is an area of text that is instantly recognizable as the idiosyncratic writing of Basquiat, the sometime poet and graffiti artist. Having worked under the alias and tag ‘SAMO’, an abbreviation for ‘Same Ol’ Shit’, Basquiat had forged his artistic self on the streets of Brooklyn, the alleys of Lower Manhattan and the vast urban tableaux offered up by the subway D train. Text, word-play and his unique poetry were paramount constituents to his street art, and his innovative and brilliant use of language adorns his most highly regarded paintings. Fuego Flores indicates the zeitgeist dialect of 1980s New York urban subculture, and also summates Basquiat’s groundbreaking questioning of established semiotic sign systems. In both lines of Basquiat’s text, “FLOWER FLOWERS, FLORES” and “FIRE – FIRE(S), FUEGO”, an English singular noun is followed by the English plural and a Spanish translation. With “fire” there are parentheses around the “s” of the plural version, because linguistically “fire” behaves both singularly and pluralistically: for example “there is a fire” and “there is fire”. Basquiat has chosen to translate the singular version of “fire” into “fuego”, rather than the plural “fuegos”, whereas “flowers” has been translated in the plural. This interrogation of language and its various interpretations lies at the absolute heart of Basquiat’s project to query and deconstruct conventional semiotic sign systems consisting of quotidian signifier and referent relationships.

In addition, the words “Fuego Flores” themselves are wonderfully alliterative and the phrase “Fire Flowers”, rich in connotation and imagistic metaphor, is exactly typical of Basquiat’s lyrically abstract use of language. However, as ever, Basquiat’s use of text works in concert with his use of iconography, colour and the sheer residue of physical technique to form a complete artwork. Thus immediately beneath the text are remnants of golden yellow and oranges flames poking out from behind serene layers of muted pastels that have been lathered over to dampen their burning pigments. The stark grid and overlaid red linear schema recall both road-markings and the curved symmetry of Nature, while the red, white and blue throughout the entire painting evokes the colour schemes of both the US and Haitian national flags. This schematic background with interlocking blocks of deep indigo, red, orange, yellow, pinks and whites is laid down with intense, gestural brushwork that evokes the abstract compositions of Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning and the combines of Robert Rauschenberg.

There is no calm moment within the painting it is pure, raw, nervous energy with the background an extension of the psyche of the figure and, by implication, the artist himself. Basquiat often painted himself and the present work shares many of the attributes found in works openly designated as self-portraits. The concoction of imagery and graffiti implies a catalogue of sign and referent equations but, rather than some secret cipher Fuego Flores is ultimately a visceral celebration of vitality and this artist’s unrelenting creativity.

Link: Sotheby’s

.. you can see it installed under the stair case at the recently opened Gagosian Store in New York.

…close up.. kind of…

mini quiche.

dessert sampler..

assorted canapés..

on the way out, introduced her to KAWS.

See you later. Cheers!

Link: Royal/T

Based on these artists and the many other experiences in his eventful and always independent life as a designer, actor, and author, Wolfgang Joop has developed a type of fashion drawing completely his own, in which “pose and personal demeanor become one.”

For him, art and fashion are most impressive when the objects have the spark of an old master, whom
he studied extensively, and possess “an aura of unintentionalness; or the intention to be completely
self-satisfied.”

The French call this l’art pour l’art. Wolfgang Joop’s sketches are art for art’s sake.

“My sketches should look as though they emerged effortlessly. They explain my sense of time, my concept of beauty, with the most minimalist and yet self-assuredly effective means.”

Chloe Early aims “to reveal something about the gulf between the way we live and dream about living.”

Early’s latest series of work utilizes vibrant oils on canvas – although she is known for her progressive use of oil on alumnium as well – to layer contemporary subjects with transfressive states of reality, examining the myths of eternal illusiveness that blur the line between authenticity and prototype. Frequently, her characters gaze away from the viewer, creating a shift of perspective to provide a glimpse into the surrounding, fantastical landscape as if through someone else’s eyes. These figures – whether lone divers, herds of zebras or couples on holiday – always carry an air of oblivion while nevertheless hinting at conflicting themes of apocalypse and redemption. Evoking the glamour and escapism of a Fitzgerald novel, adds Early, “the characters seem to languish in a forgotten dream world of innocence, excess and desire haunted only by the possibility or knowledge that their dream will fragment.”

I can identify with that.

 Link: Chloe Early