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

Notice that no one is looking at the prismatic sculpture, not even the Ace employee standing to guard it. Curatorial fail.

Perhaps it’s because Super Bowl buzz is in the air, but while looking at the sculpture, I fantasized that a burly, football player would enter the space and run directly towards the column, knocking over the Ace gallery attendant and also sending the art object crashing over…. that would have been AWESOME!

Copy + Paste from Ace Gallery:

“The column was an indication of my wanting to get out and treat the environment itself, I don’t mean in the sense of building buildings or being an architect, but rather of dealing with the quality of a particular space in terms of its weight, its temperature, its tactileness, its density, its feel – all those semi-intangible things that we don’t normally deal with.”
- Robert Irwin1

In 1970, Robert Irwin simplified his Venice, California studio, transforming it into a pristine space where he installed one work: a twelve-foot, clear acrylic column near the center of the room. With all distractions removed, Irwin’s spacious studio and solitary sculpture presented a viewer with a visual silence, a pure situational experience.
ACE Gallery Beverly Hills installs a similar yet taller column, over 19 feet in height, in its main exhibition space, once again the only artwork in the space. Irwin’s experiments in light and space have dominated his artistic practice since he switched to a more proto-installation type of art. Irwin’s investigations go beyond the properties of light and space and into the intrapersonal, a psychological examination on the part of the viewer into what it means to be present. The viewer’s experience is paramount; beyond creating an environment, Irwin invites the individual to confront his or her perceptions on space. As MOMA’s former chief curator Kirk Varnedoe referenced in his lectures on abstract art: “Irwin has controlled and composed the act of perception itself.”2 Irwin is regarded as one of the preeminent pioneers of California Minimalism and the Los Angeles Light and Space movement, yet also his attention to location and viewer’s affect establishes him as a forefather of site-specificity and relational aesthetics.

Irwin’s Untitled (1970) column is simultaneously present yet seemingly absent. The sculpture is so limpid that even while looking directly at it, the column or anything behind it could disappear with one movement of the visitor. Irwin has accomplished a monumental feat with his column by creating an object that could perceivably exist one moment and not the next. Yves Klein’s piece The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void (April 1958), and John Cage’s musical composition 4’33″ (1952) presented their audiences with a setting to experience art but gave nothing concrete to focus on but the immediate surround. Irwin employs the same gesture in a very different manner by creating a “whole room situation,” where the perceptual phenomenological experience is activated by the position of the viewer in relation to the sculpture.3 To look at the piece is to look through the piece and thus at the architecture and other viewers in the space with the column. Where one viewer has a singular experience with the sculpture, additional individuals compound the experience further. Not only is the prismatic column reflective and transparent, but also refractive, ultimately splitting the individual(s) and surrounding architecture into fragmented planes, creating an ever-changing situational experience. Not intended as the focal point of any room, the column can sit off center, or in the periphery. The artwork acts as a structure from which the viewer may build upon his or her own presumptions about optics and what it means to view objects and spaces.

Later in 1970, Irwin took his spatial studies further with an exhibition at ACE Gallery in Westwood, California entitled Experimental Situation (1970), where he emptied the gallery entirely and made daily visits for a period of a month filling the space only with his artistic contemplation. The process of Irwin’s creative thought became the final product; this conceptual and spiritual gesture became almost palpable. The following year he created a work where ACEÕs exhibition space was distorted slightly with the use of a sheer scrim in almost a ghostly fashion. Of separate historical note, that same year Irwin ceased making artworks in the studio and shifted his focus to site-specific installations, at which point ACE Gallery moved its location to what became Irwin’s former studio in Venice, California.

Robert Irwin is one of California’s most pivotal and influential artists from the post-war era, who contributed immensely to put Los Angeles on the map at a time when New York dominated the global art scene. At a time when West Coast Light and Space artists were exploring the facets of light, space, and finish – three things distinct to the sprawling, sunshine-filled, and car heavy Los Angeles – a group of artists on the East Coast were reducing the languages of sculpture and painting to their most basic elements creating Minimalism. Irwin has had numerous international museum exhibitions as well as two major site-specific commissions of note: The Central Garden, an artwork in the form of a garden at the Getty Museum, and The Palm Garden at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Born in 1928 in Long Beach, California, Robert Irwin currently lives and works in San Diego, CA.
1 Lawrence Weschler and Robert Irwin. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: a Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin. Berkeley: University of California, 1982. 114.
2 Varnedoe, Kirk. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts). Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.
3 Weschler and Irwin. 112.

I create modern-organic, sculptural designs, interweaving function and fine art. Combing equal parts western and eastern sensibilities with delicacy and meticulous technique.

A similar table can be bought here.

Link: Michael Wilson Designs

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

From Sotheby’s:

Gautier modelled this extraordinary figure of Mephistopheles in the early 1850′s and sent it for display at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Its idiosyncratic design proved a success and soon after the firm of Duplan et Salles began to cast the model in bronze. Busquet, a critic for the journal L’Artiste was moved to write ‘They have edited this strange Mephistopheles with a long and grimacing profile which one can see, not without some surprise, in the showrooms of the principal stores in Paris’. One customer was the Duchess of Alba, who acquired a cast for the cabinet of Napoleon III.

I’m thinking about going back and buying nine more, painting them all matte black, and then, stacking them in one of the corners of my play room….evoking the eeriness of the Catacombs of Paris…or not.

..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

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

Copy + Paste:

CATALOGUE NOTE

An undisputed masterpiece of Giacometti’s sculpture, L’Homme qui marche I is also one of the most iconic images of Modern art. It represents the pinnacle of Giacometti’s experimentation with the human form, combining a monumental, imposing size with a rich rendering of the surface. Capturing a transient moment in the figure’s movement, Giacometti created both a humble image of an ordinary man, and a potent symbol of humanity.

The present work is the first of two versions of L’Homme qui marche, executed in 1960, at the highpoint of Giacometti’s mature period. By this time, the image of a standing or walking human figure was established as pivotal to the artist’s iconography. Between 1947 and 1950 Giacometti made several sculptures on the subject of the walking man, alone or in a small group positioned on a platform suggestive of a city square. Never before, however, had he tackled this image on a monumental scale. Giacometti’s lean, wiry figures reached their ultimate form during this period. No longer interested in recreating physical likenesses in his sculptures, the artist began working from memory, seeking to capture his figures beyond the physical reality of the human form. In the years after the Second World War his figures were reduced to their bare essential form, displaying an austerity that embodied the artist’s existentialist concerns, and reflecting the lonely and vulnerable human condition.

The sculpture originated as part of the public project that Giacometti was commissioned to do for the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, which, when completed, was to be the first modernist outdoor project in the city’s financial district. While the installation was never completed, L’Homme qui marche I became an iconic work in its own right. A committee consisting of curators and major figures from principal public museums in New York and Boston selected Giacometti over Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi for the project. Given Giacometti’s fascination with the theme of city squares, as well as his high international acclaim, he was perhaps the obvious choice for this commission. According to James Lord, the artist ‘was immediately responsive to the American proposal. It is true that he felt a keen nostalgia for the idea of executing a sculpture to be placed in a city square, and that the theme of people seen either singly or in groups in urban environments had long been important to him. [...] Alberto wrote to his mother of the project. It interested him passionately, he said’ (J. Lord, Giacometti. A Biography, New York, 1983, pp. 377-378).

Christian Klemm explained the genesis of this project: ‘In 1956 Gordon Bunshaft, the architect of the headquarters of the Chase Manhattan Bank, invited Giacometti to design a group of sculpted figures for the plaza on Pine Street in New York City. His suggestion that the Three Walking Men of 1949 could be enlarged to a height of nearly sixty feet was hardly likely to find favour with an artist for whom questions of dimension were a central issue. But after lengthy deliberations Giacometti proposed a group of larger-than-life-size sculptures: a standing woman, a walking man, and a head on a pedestal, representing the three major themes that almost exclusively occupied him in his mature sculptural work. He made tiny models and started, in his cramped studio, to work on a number of variants for the large figures. In 1960 a head, four different women, and two variants of the Walking Men were cast, albeit without ever arriving at their ultimate destination’ (C. Klemm in Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York & Kunsthaus, Zurich, 2001-02, p. 232).

In preparation for the Chase Manhattan project, Giacometti executed a number of sculptures, among which, according to the sculptor, were at least forty versions of the walking man. However Giacometti destroyed most of them, and only seems to have been satisfied with the two versions that remain today – L’Homme qui marche I and II. He struggled with the project as a whole, claiming later: ‘I had practically no feelings about how they should be grouped’ (A. Giacometti in David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, London, 1994, p. 228). Realising that it would take him many years to complete, Giacometti eventually abandoned the project, however he was evidently satisfied with the individual figures, which he had cast in bronze and exhibited. A cast of L’Homme qui marche I was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1962.

Giacometti paid significant attention to the modelling of his works, and L’Homme qui marche I exhibits a vibrancy and vitality unique to his sculpture. The rich treatment of the bronze, its deep recesses and moulds, create a dynamic surface, and invite a play of light and shadow in such a way that they become a part of the work itself. As Valerie J. Fletcher observed: ‘Although the sculpture’s eyes are almost on the viewer’s level, the figure remains essentially remote, staring out at an unseen goal. With its gnarled, devastated surfaces, Walking Man I stands as a symbol of humanity always striving, ever seeking, never at peace. The roughly modeled surfaces shimmer under different light conditions, as if indicating the transient nature of reality, and the figure’s nervous energy activates the surrounding space’ (V. J. Fletcher, Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. & San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1988-89, p. 218).

Other casts of L’Homme qui marche I are now in major public collections, such as the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondation Maeght, St. Paul-de-Vence and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Casts of L’Homme qui marche II are in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; Fondation Beyeler, Basel (fig. 2); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and Fondation Maeght, St. Paul-de-Vence.

Link:
Sotheby’s, Lot 8, Sale L10002.

Lot Notes

Founded in 1832 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Skull and Bones is thought by many to be one of the oldest and most prestigious secret societies in the United States. The symbolism of the skull and cross bones is synonymous with this group as its name is derived from the symbol itself. The present lot, with hinged flap on top of the skull was said to have been used as a ballot box during society meetings or displayed in the Society’s headquarters at 64 High Street in New Haven. The inscription on the right cross bone Thor could be a name which would have been assigned to a member upon induction. Accompanied by approximately 50 photographs of society members and a small black book inscribed with names (which were published until 1971), the present lot provides a rare glimpse into the society which has been linked to many influential figures and leaders at Yale University and in this country.

Link: Christies, Lot 157, Sale 2287

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

Handmade Norse God mask with headdress made of faux fur, ostrich feather, coque feathers and gold leafed horns.

Handmade Aretus Pewter mask with beak and horns.

Handmade Etherial Dreams gold mask with large black feathers.

 Amazing Craftsmanship. I wouldn’t wear any of these; I’d like them to hang on one of my walls. 

Link:
Gilt (Sign up and get $25 off first order)
Claudia Hapeman Masks

My new skull ring. It came out of Ron Bryant’s workshop, One Too Many. It is a relatively new ring he just carved. When I first saw images of it, I knew I had to have one.

Under his own label since 2005, he makes some heirloom-quality stuff. Just look at the details in the picture.

Made to order.

On the inner side of the band, it is engraved with the date I ordered it, as well as the number in the series (not pictured) and my initials (not pictured). Because I was one of the earlier orders, he let me have my pick of what number I wanted; I picked my favorite number, 3.

The engravings really give it a personal flavor, and is one of the reasons I got this instead of another Chrome Hearts or Gaboratory ring.

Wait time was about a month and half, but definitely worth it.

POW!

Link: One Too ManyDesign

Pretty inspirational if you ask me.

Links:
Fast Boy Cycles
Swipelife’s interview with Ezra

In May 2006 he gained international recognition for creating the world’s first underwater sculpture park in Grenada, West Indies. His underwater sculptures, designed to create artificial reefs for marine life to colonise and inhabit, embrace the transformations wrought by ecological processes. The works engage with a vision of the possibilities of a sustainable future, portraying human intervention as positive and affirmative. Drawing on the tradition of figurative imagery, the aim of Jason de Caires Taylor’s work is to address a wide-ranging audience crucial for highlighting environmental issues beyond the confines of the art world. However, fundamental to understanding his work is that it embodies the hope and optimism of a regenerative, transformative Nature.

Links:
Artist a Day
Jason de Caires Taylor

Initially, I thought cool…. then, with the recent hype of KAWS and growing fan base (all well-deserved), I had to prepare for dissapointment =T. Purchasing items the day of a new release on KAWS’ retail site is always a toss up for me. So many factors come into play – the speed of my internet connection, how quickly I can click my mouse button, controlling my nerves as 9am arrives, having patience as the website lags, ability to input my info, and mental toughness to stick with it…

Fortunately, these days, the website loads a lot faster and does not “time out,” like when the original dissected companions were released (I failed all three times in getting those – still sad about that).

When the website finally loaded around 9:01 AM (california time), I instinctively clicked the “set.” The website took another minute or so to load. Woohoo! Not sold out yet. Keeping my mental fingers crossed, as quickly as I could, I added the set of 400% and 100% bearbricks and went to checkout. I did hesitate for a second, thinking whether I should go back to get the 1000% as well. At around 9:05 AM, I figured it was not worth the risk of losing out on the set.

I input all of my info with lightning quickness, submitted my order, and was delighted to see the confirmation page. Success!

As I write this, the set is already sold out (it did around 9:20 or so). This will undoubtedly be the highlight of my week =)

Here are some turnaround pics of the KAWS dissected bearbrick:

Close-up of the guts:

 CHEERS!!!

 Link: KAWS

Entering the main room…

Floating the Rumors 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 86 inches (my favorite):

…eyes moving from left to right…

Chum (Black) 2009, Painted bronze, Series of 6 unique colors, Edition of 3 +1AP, 20 1/2 x 13 x 6 inches:

Gatekeepers 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 86 x 136 inches:

..just taking all of the magnificence in…

..the jolly figure kind of intimidates…

Chum (Yellow) 2009, Painted fiberglass, Series of 6 unique colors, 90 x 54 x 30 inches:

 Ruled Out 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 86 inches:

Without an Agreement 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 inches : 

..pausing to study the purposeful placement of one of the pieces on the floor…

PERMANENT THIRTY-THREE (246) 2008, Painted bronze, Series of 33 unique colors, 11 x 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches:

PERMANENT THIRTY-THREE (Flashe Orange) 2008, Painted bronze, Series of 33 unique colors, 11 x 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches:

PERMANENT THIRTY-THREE (193) 2008, Painted bronze, Series of 33 unique colors, 11 x 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches:

..continuing with the tour…

Eleven Bones 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches:

The Long Way Home 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 96 inches:

…then.. if only briefly.. turning around to reflect and process… what has been seen so far..

…entering the next room..

Kurf (Tangle) 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches:

..drawn to the smaller paintings..

Kurf (Swing) 2009, Acrylic on canvas in plastic packaging, 18 x 15 x 3 inches:

Kurfette (Bushes) 2009, Acrylic on canvas in plastic packaging, 18 x 15 x 3 inches:

Kurf (Pink Stuff) 2009, Acrylic on canvas in plastic packaging, 18 x 15 x 3 inches:

Kurf (Mud Drip) 2009, Acrylic on canvas in plastic packaging, 18 x 15 x 3 inches:

Kurf (Clutch) 2009, Acrylic on canvas in plastic packaging, 18 x 15 x 3 inches:

..turning around..

Kurf (Spilt Milk) 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 inches:

Kurf (Shhh…) 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 inches:

Kurf (Hot Dog) 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 inches:

… Here are some other pieces that were part of the show..

KAWSBOB (Open Mouth) 2009, Acrylic on canvas in plastic packaging, 18 x 15 x 3 inches:

KAWSBOB (Closed Mouth) 2009, Acrylic on canvas in plastic packaging, 18 x 15 x 3 inches:

KAWSBOB (Open Mouth with Tongue) 2009, Acrylic on canvas in plastic packaging, 18 x 15 x 3 inches:

Chum (Blue) 2009, Painted bronze, Series of 6 colors, Edition of 3 +1AP, 20 1/2 x 13 x 6 inches:

Chum (Orange) 2009, Painted bronze, Series of 6 colors, Edition of 3 +1AP, 20 1/2 x 13 x 6 inches:

Chum (White) 2009, Painted bronze, Series of 6 colors, Edition of 3 +1AP, 20 1/2 x 13 x 6 inches:

Chum (Pink) 2009, Painted bronze, Series of 6 colors, Edition of 3 +1AP, 20 1/2 x 13 x 6 inches:

Chum (Yellow) 2009, Painted bronze, Series of 6 colors, Edition of 3 +1AP, 20 1/2 x 13 x 6 inches:

 …. c’est tout.

Gallery Press Release:

Honor Fraser is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by KAWS.

The Brooklyn-based artist will be presenting new painting and sculptural work in his first solo show in Los Angeles. KAWS’ technique acts as a sieve of modern culture, filtering and re-contextualizing the images and information that he comes in contact with daily. His process is all encompassing, embracing popular culture and the visual landscape of the familiar. The work can be thought of as an overarching brand; however it is also immediate and organic. This energetic immediacy can be felt in the selection of works that he is presenting.

New large paintings included in the exhibition feature his usual cross-section of familiar cultural icons painted with precise execution. The resulting pieces feature the trademark graphic quality inherent in his work. A large life-size Chum acts as a sentry in the space, watching over the works while also playing with scale and proportion.

KAWS roots began as a graffiti artist in the early 1990s, and since then he has built an identity that had its genesis in guerilla imagery added to billboards and bus shelters. He converts familiar visuals into affronting works of art. Through his company OriginalFake he has released limited edition works. He has also collaborated on design projects with Commes Des Garcons, Marc Jacobs, and A Bathing Ape. Most recently he has worked with Kanye West to create the cover art for Kanye’s current album. This reworking of popular culture has grown KAWS into a multi-faceted, multi-pronged endeavor that has ventured into the realm of contemporary art. KAWS situates himself at the crossroads of media and art; a vanguard in the new frontier of the 21st century artistic discourse.

Born in 1974 in New Jersey, KAWS graduated with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has recently had a number of solo shows of his artwork, including exhibitions at Gering and López in New York, NY and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Miami, FL. His work has also appeared in many group exhibitions; most recently Everything Else at Franklin Parrrasch Gallery in New York, NY and the critically acclaimed traveling exhibition Beautiful Losers, curated by Aaron Rose and Christian Strike, that opened at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 2004 and has made stops at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Orange County Museum of Art among national and international destinations. KAWS was the winner of the 1998 Pernod Liquid Art Award and has had three monographs published about his work.

Tag, this artist is definitely it

By Chris Lee

February 21, 2009

Over the course of a career that has variously infuriated anti-graffiti task force officers and enthralled Japanese street couture collectors — meaning winning props from hip-hop superstars Kanye West and Pharrell Williams — the pop artist KAWS has carved a unique niche for himself. The soft-spoken 34-year-old Jersey City native, born Brian Donnelly, created a new business model that bridges the high-low culture divide in ways that would have made steam come out of Andy Warhol’s ears.

By parlaying vandalism into a brand identity as a purveyor of mass-produced collectible toys, KAWS became a bona fide subculture celebrity with a recognizable presence in street fashion.

But now, KAWS is at a career turning point. In spite of his renown in subcultural circles (which galleristas and museum directors have historically snobbed), he is now being mentioned in the same breath as pop art luminaries, such as Takashi Murakami, Keith Haring and Jeff Koons. And while KAWS has proven himself perfectly capable of trafficking his own pop offerings — on skateboard decks, stickers, T-shirts and sneakers — KAWS has infiltrated the rarefied world of institutional art after being held at arm’s distance from it for much of his career. Pretty fly for a graf guy.

“When I grew up, I never thought I could enter a gallery,” KAWS said over lunch at Chateau Marmont this week. “I looked at them as these pretentious places that did not welcome me.”

On the heels of two exhibitions of his work at the Gering & Lopez Gallery in New York and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Miami last year, an exhibition of KAWS’ paintings and sculptures is set to open at Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City tonight. “I Can’t Feel My Face,” a group show the artist curated, opens at the Royal/T gallery, also in Culver City, on Sunday. Later this year, KAWS’ art will be included in a group show called “Plastic Culture” at London’s Harris Museum and Art Gallery. And KAWS is scheduled to show new works in a solo show at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut in December 2010.

“Brian made the realization there’s no distinction between the making of the art and placing it in the wider culture,” said Harry Philbrick, director of the Aldrich. “It fits within a long tradition in the art world: Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, artists who wanted to take art outside the confines of the museum and engage with the wider culture. Sometimes in commercial ways, sometimes in subversive ways.”

Unlike Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat, who were never accepted in the fraternity of hard-core graffiti artists, KAWS is an unreconstructed graffiti “writer” whose aerosol handiwork defaced billboards, freight trains and water towers.

But that changed in 1996 when one of his graffiti peers — Barry McGee, a.k.a. Twist, another graf guy turned successful pop artist — gave KAWS a skeleton key that opened up the glass advertising boxes on the sides of phone booths and bus kiosks. Concurrent with studying design and illustration at New York’s School of Visual Arts, KAWS stopped writing his name on walls and began altering ads. He would steal ad posters and paint over them with a visual shorthand of symbols — cartoon skulls with X-ed out eyes and serpentine spermatazoan shapes in pastel colors. Then he would carefully replace them.

That focus baffled his graffiti buddies but impressed the media, and KAWS’ magazine clip file began to grow. Seeing no future in the ads, however, KAWS traveled to Tokyo in the late ’90s. There, his underground renown resulted in a streetwear company offering him an opportunity to design a vinyl toy: Companion, a pop art-y send-up of Mickey Mouse with Xs for eyes. Saleswise, the toy took off. So KAWS went into business, paying manufacturing costs and selling the toys on his own website, kawsone.com. A lucrative cottage industry that cemented his reputation among hipster cognoscenti was born.

Around 2001, KAWS was brought into the sphere of Tomoaki “Nigo” Nagao, the visionary pop cultural maven behind the streetwear brand A Bathing Apekawsone.com. After Nigo helped create packaging for an exhibition of KAWS’ “Simpsons”-inspired paintings, KAWS and the designer collaborated on three seasons of BAPE (as A Bathing Ape is alternately known) clothing and shoes. And their wares began taking off in the hip-hop world. Circa 2004, Jay-Z, Jermaine Dupri and hit-making producer Pharrell Williams, among others, began appearing in videos and photo shoots wearing the candy-colored, limited edition street couture that Nigo and KAWS put out. Supply quickly outstripped demand, resulting in a glut of bootleg BAPE on EBay and circulating in sneakerhead communities.

Nigo has become one of the foremost collectors of the artist’s work but also a close friend. “It was the best match of a creator with our brand of all the collaborations we’ve done,” Nigo said in an e-mail. “I think it really helped that Brian already understood our brand before we started the collaboration — he already belonged in our world.”

Hip-hop’s embrace of BAPE as a fashion flavor also injected KAWS’ artwork into the culture. Suddenly, his most famous patrons became influencers like Williams, who owns dozens of pieces by the artist. Last year, the artist opened his up his collection to the Condé Nast advertising supplement Fashion Rocks. Pointing out KAWS’ paintings inspired by SpongeBob SquarePants (with X-ed out eyes, naturally), Williams summed up the childlike appeal of much of the artist’s work. “What I love about SpongeBob,” Williams told the magazine, “is that he’s basically a 6-year-old.”

As well, Kanye West frequently bigs up KAWS on his blog. Last year, the hip-hop superstar commissioned him to customize a special edition of the album cover for his “808s & Heartbreak”; a billboard version wound up in New York’s Times Square late last year, featuring pastel-hued KAWS serpents, skulls and squiggles enveloping the multi-platinum rapper-producer.

And the Virginia rap duo Clipse give the artist a shout-out on two songs they recorded for a recent mix-tape: “Now, X marks the spot on my graffitied walls / Statuettes’ X eyes on those graffiti dolls / . . . / Say it’s just be-KAWS.”

Whitney Museum Council member Susan Hancock, a collector who owns several works by KAWS and operates the art space Royal/T, places his work in context of Murakami, a Tokyo-born pop savant whose work is inspired by Japanese manga comics.

“I consider KAWS the U.S. Murakami equivalent,” Hancock said. “He is mimicking what is popular in today’s world: SpongeBob, Smurfs, Simpsons, much like Murakami took off from the world of Japanese contemporary culture.”

For his part, KAWS seems reluctant to characterize his emerging presence in the “art world” as a career reboot; he simply was ready to bring his paintings to an audience behind the sneakerheads and toy aficionados, he said. But he acknowledges that his new work appearing at Honor Fraser Gallery — where pieces are priced between $10,000 and $85,000 — represents a significant departure.

“This show is the first time there’s nothing identifiable with my aesthetic except the palette and the way it’s painted,” KAWS said. “There’s no X eyes. I feel like I’m at a point where I don’t have to signal back to past works.”

Then there are the heads in the show: three life-size, lifelike replicas of KAWS’ noggin in his ubiquitous baseball cap, rendered in bronze and coated by Skittle-colored hues of auto body paint.

Was the aim to turn himself into one of his toys? “I wanted to put a personal part of myself into an object world,” he said. “It’s a severed head. You look under the neck and it’s totally chopped. It’s kind of like an offering.”

chris.lee@latimes.com

I went to the pre-show party for the exhibition of Susan Hancock’s latest acquisitions, I Can’t Feel My Face, at Royal-T in Culver City.

It was pretty cool. I saw Susan Hancock and a bunch of other art world people in the flesh. However, the highlight of the event was meeting Brian Donelly aka KAWS himself. The event was also sponsored by a few alcohol companies, which meant free booze! hehehe..

So, how about some art?

Featured prominently in the store front window was the Pink Chum, one of KAWS’ iconic characters and one of my favorite sculptures. It is a play off of the Michelin Man. This first caught my eye when it traveled with the Beautiful Losers exhibition.

I Can’t Feel My Face. Yep, this is the painting where the show got its name from.

It was fun.

Actual Show Notes:

Royal/T, Culver City’s Japanese inspired shop/café/exhibition space, is pleased to welcome KAWS, New York based artist and designer, as the curator of their spring group exhibition, I Can’t Feel My Face. Selected from Susan Hancock’s collection and on view at Royal/T from February 22 through September 7, I Can’t Feel My Face features works by over 25 contemporary artists.

I Can’t Feel My Face shares its title with a painting by KAWS and is a centerpiece of the exhibition, which explores the theme of contemporary portraiture as a vehicle of inherent emotive expression. The faces and figures in the works evoke a range of feelings and offer a view into the fractured imagery and energy of the creative mind. Faces are transposed and contorted, abstracted and obliterated, highly detailed or conversely stripped down to the simplest of lines. Like a human face, the images are each individual, at once recognizable but also unique. Andre Ethier’s one-eyed painting, “The Bitch is Back,” unnerves and unsettles in its lush directness. In a multiplication of stick-figure forms, the vibrating energy in the cigarette paper collage by Oliver Payne and Nick Relph has an immediate electric pull.

I Can’t Feel My Face, includes works by Olaf Breuning, Carol Dunham, Andre Ethier, Tom Friedman, Misaki Kawai, Hideaki Kawashima, KAWS, Mike Kelley, Ted Mineo, Takashi Murakami, Mr., Yoshimoto Nara, Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, Richard Prince, William Sasnal, David Shrigley, Jim Torok and Yan Pei-Ming.

i picked this up as a souvenir….

Link:
Royal-T
KAWS