News
Last year Swine flu threatened to rain on Art HK's parade. This year a cloud of Icelandic volcanic ash hangs over Art Cologne as organisers monitor reports of cancelled flights and airport closures and pray for a change of weather to reverse the southward drift of the cloud across northern Europe.
We are delighted to announce that Shanghai-based artist Jin Jiangbo will be showing with Starkwhite. This development follows the presentation of his exhibition Shanghai Ye! Shanghai at Starkwhite in February/March 2010.
Plans have been unveiled for Britain's biggest piece of public art designed by Anish Kapoor and structural engineer Cecil Balmond for the 2012 Olympic Park in Stratford East London. It will follow another large-scale work by Kapoor commissioned by Alan Gibbs for The Farm on the Kaipara, NZ.
The images above are of Alicia Frankovich's installation Medea, one of seven new works commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne for its NEW010 exhibition, which runs to 23 May 2010. You can read an article on Medea here.
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Starkwhite at Art Beijing
The photographs above show installation views of our booth at Art Beijing (29 April to 2 May 2010) featuring works by Whitney Bedford, Jin Jiangbo and John Reynolds. Reynolds made his work in Beijing through a residency programme administered by the organisers of the fair.
Coming up at Starkwhite
Gavin Hipkins' exhibition Bible Studies (New Testament) will open at Starkwhite on Saturday 15 May and run to 12 June 2010.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, Loaded Haze, from the Bible Studies (New Testament) series, 2008-2009, C-type photograph, 1200 x 1400mm
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Designed by Peter Zumthor in collaboration with Rainer Weitschies, Kolumba the Art Museum of the Archbishopric of Cologne is another must-see museum for visitors to the city. The building, which has developed in smooth transition from the remains of the late-Gothic ruins of St Kolumba, includes a suite of elegant spaces, many flooded with natural light, that are used for exhibitions combining religious artefacts with contemporary art across a range of media.
The current exhibition, Bequest, documents the traces of human existence that have been recorded in documents, everyday objects and in works of art. At the same time the exhibition makes a theme of the value of remembrance and our responsibility in dealing with our historical legacy. This is illustrated in one of the most striking displays in the exhibition that combines Jannis Kounellis' Tragedia civile (Civil tragedy) with wedding photographs of the 19th and 20th century and two 15th century Copes.
Images: Jannis Kounellis, Tragedia civile (1975), gold-leaf wall, coat-stand, hat,coat, oil lamp; 189 Wedding Photographs of the 19th and 20th century; and Two Copes, 15th century flat stitch embroidery on a gold ground, original blue velvet from Genoa with pomegranate pattern
Gallery Weekend Berlin
Gallery Weekend Berlin features 40 galleries, 40 opening over 3 days and nights from 30 April to 2 May 2010. The lineup of exhibitions includes Measuring Potentials, a group show curated by Marc Gloede and featuring work by Dane Mitchell.
Unnerved: The New Zealand Project
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Curated by Maud Page, Unnerved: The New Zealand Project is the second of GoMA's country- specific exhibitions focusing on the Brisbane art museum's contemporary collections. The exhibition “explores a particularly rich dark vein that recurs in New Zealand Contemporary art and cinema. Psychological unease pervades many of the works in the exhibition with humour, parody and poetic subtlety among the strategies used by artist across generations and genres.” From the GoMA website
Unnerved includes Gavin Hipkins' The Homely, which has been described as a post-colonial gothic novel. Through a cinematic run of 80 images, which are often slightly blurry and filled with the colours of a dreamscape, Hipkins re-presents monuments and memorials of Australia and New Zealand nationalism with fragmented glimpses of domestic interiors and museum dioramas. He also says: “Although New Zealand has an international reputation for being clean, green and beautiful (a mythology that New Zealanders often call on to represent ourselves) it is the treatment and conquest of nature as an adventure playground that interests me with this project”.
Images: images from Gavin Hipkins' series The Homely
Kunst-Station St Peter, Cologne
Founded in 1987 by Friedheim Mennekes, the Kunst-Station at Cologne's Jesuit Church of St Peter has been a haven for contemporary art installations by artists such as Christian Boltanski, James Lee Byars, Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Kruger, David Salle, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel. The current project at the Kunst-Station is by Motoi Yamamoto.
Images (from the top): Cologne's Jesuit Church of St Peter, Motoi Yamamoto installing his work, and previous installations by Barbara Kruger (detail) and Martin Creed.
When in Cologne
Created for the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral, Gerhard Richter's stained glass window is a must-see work for visitors to Cologne. The original window was destroyed during World War II and had been replaced with plain glass. Inspired by Richter's 1974 painting 4096 Farben, the window consists of 11,500 hand-blown glass squares in 72 different colours. Echoing the colours of surrounding windows, Richter's illuminated abstraction blends a modernist aesthetic with the Gothic ecclesiastical architecture of the cathedral.
Images: Gerhard Richter's window (details) in the Cologne Cathedral
Phantom limb construction sites: final week
Boris Dornbusch's exhibition Phantom limb construction sites closes on Saturday 1 May 2010.
Sign of the times
The homepage for Art Brussels features the following message: Art Brussels will take place as programmed. In spite of the ash cloud only 6% of the galleries may have problems to reach Brussels in time.
Deitch on keepers v sellers
Long time dealer and art world dealmaker Jeffrey Deitch (soon to become director of LAMoCA) has spoken out on art speculators, at the same time putting a spin on the role of art dealers saying their job is to place art with good collectors – ie high-profile collectors who hold onto work, often gifting it to art museums. He says: “People laugh at this whole notion of us saying that we 'place' work instead of selling it. But in fact that's what we try to do. We want the work to go to people who are as serious about the works as we are.”
Deitch's comments come in the wake of an $8m federal lawsuit filed by Craig Robins, a Miami collector claiming compensatory and punitive damages from David Zwirner. Robins says he is on a blacklist because the artist whose work he sold under a so-called confidential agreement with Zwirner now views him as a speculator. You can read more about the Robins/Zwirner lawsuit here.
Image: Jeffrey Deitch
Art Cologne vernissage
Art Cologne was launched yesterday with a preview followed by the vernissage. While the closure of Europe's airports put an end to the travel plans of many US collectors, there was a big turnout of European collectors. Director Daniel Hug's plan to “return Art Cologne to its former glory” appears to be on track, despite the eruption of the Eyjfallajokul volcano.
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Galleries completed their installations today in readiness for the Art Cologne preview and vernissage tomorrow. Our next post will be installation views of our solo pesentation by Dane Mitchell.
Behind the scenes at Art Cologne
As a giant cloud of volcanic ash blankets Europe, forcing countries to impose the biggest airspace closure since 9/11, it's business as usual at Art Cologne – at least behind the scenes. The installation and fitout of booths and visitor facilities is almost complete and galleries are beginning to install. In the Art Cologne office, however, staff must be thinking wistfully about the good old days when organising a fair was a relatively straightforward exercise. Over the past twelve months, art fair organisers have run into Swine flu, a global recession and now an Icelandic volcano spewing ash into Europe's air space.
Images: behind the scenes at Art Cologne, April 2010
Art Cologne on standby
Last year Swine flu threatened to rain on Art HK's parade. This year a cloud of Icelandic volcanic ash hangs over Art Cologne as organisers monitor reports of cancelled flights and airport closures and pray for a change of weather to reverse the southward drift of the cloud across northern Europe.
Images: Art Cologne on standby
Back on the art fair trail
We are Germany for a couple of weeks to present a solo exhibition by Dane Mitchell at Art Cologne. Next week we'll be posting photographs of the preview and vernissage, along with shots of our stand and others at the fair.
Breaking with convention
In May we'll be heading to Sydney to participate in Momentum: Sydney, a new art fair focusing on video, new media and performance. Co-founding directors Charles Merewether, Johann Nowak and Rachel Rits-Volloch say: “The aim of Momentum is to create a worldwide network of practitioners, influential decision makers and theorists to address on an annual basis across different locations, the evolving concerns of commonly marginalised art practices. Momentum will be globally-based, developing sites of engagement across Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas”.
Featuring 20 invited galleries from around the world, along with collectors, curators, artists, writers, experts and innovators there “to generate a participatory environment”, the first edition of Momentum is scheduled for 12 – 15 May 2010. It will take place in a Sydney industrial space, transformed by Ai Weiwei into an immersive space for the presentation and viewing of video art and performance, and for the professional dialogue which the organisers say is integral to this forum. The event also coincides with the opening week of the Biennale of Sydney.
Image: Carriageworks, a centre for visual culture in Sydney and venue for Momentum
Upstairs at Starkwhite
While Boris Dornbusch's exhibition Phantom limb construction sites runs downstairs, we are showing works by other represented artists in our upstairs spaces.
Images: Seung Yul Oh, Globglob (2010), fibreglass and two-pot automotive paint, and Jin Jiangbo, C-photos from his Shanghai Ye! Shanghai (2009) series
Jin Jiangbo to show with Starkwhite
We are delighted to announce that Shanghai-based artist Jin Jiangbo will be showing with Starkwhite. This development follows the presentation of his exhibition Shanghai Ye! Shanghai at Starkwhite in February/March 2010.
Jin Jiangbo is one of China's new generation of media artists. He visited New Zealand last year as the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's International Artist in Residence and to exhibit his work in China in Four Seasons, a year long project at the GBAG comprising four residencies and exhibitions of selected artists working in China today.
One of the artist's earlier multi-media works (shown above) is currently showing in Timelapse in Switzerland and he is currently completing Haibo is Coming, a vast multi-media pantomime commissioned for Expo 2010 Shanghai China. He is also one of the artists we will be presenting this year at Art Beijing and ART HK.
Images: Jin Jiangbo, God, go ahead with chatting (2008), Timelapse, Switzerland China Media Art Exhibition
Bigger than Ben Hur
Plans have been unveiled for Britain's biggest piece of public art designed by Anish Kapoor and structural engineer Cecil Balmond for the 2012 Olympic Park in Stratford East London. It will follow another large-scale work by Kapoor commissioned by Alan Gibbs for The Farm on the Kaipara, NZ.
This link takes you to an article on Kapoor's Olympic Park sculpture posted on the Frieze Editors Blog.
Images: Kapoor's work for Britain's Olympic Games Park, and his recently completed work situated at The Farm, Kaipara, NZ
Alicia Frankovich at ACCA: installation views
The images above are of Alicia Frankovich's installation Medea, one of seven new works commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne for its NEW010 exhibition, which runs to 23 May 2010. You can read an article on Medea here.
Images: Alicia Frankovich, Medea, 2010, plastic carabenas, dirt, coconut fibre, newspaper, water tank, water pump, poly piping, nylon webbing, gaffer, sash, steel, basil, kiwifruit vines, tuscan kale, broccoli, flat leaf parsley, curly leaf parsley, long snake beans, purple kings, greens, tomatoes: black krims, black russians, tigerella, red fig dwarf, peach dreams, chillies: hellfire mix, jalapeno reds, capsicum: mini yellow, mini red, long yellow, mini chocolate, long green, bronze fennel, succulents, eggplants: heirloom mix, long jacks, red oakleaf lettuce.Exhibited in NEW010, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne. Images courtesy of the artist and ACCA
Review of Plastic Life
This link takes you to a review of Plastic Life at The San Jose Museum of Art which includes Hye Rim Lee's video Crystal City Spun. The exhibition runs to 19 September 2010.
Image: Hye Rim Lee, Crystal City Spun, video, 3 min 15 sec
Urban Divas
Living Room 2010 will be launched on Friday 9 April at 6.15pm at the Auckland waterfront (Pier 3 Quay Street) with programmed performances including Urban Divas, a collaborative work by artist Phil Dadson and choreographer Carol Brown. In this piece a roving chorus inhabits a series of civic spaces within the central business district of Auckland through body movement, voice and sonic props. Arriving unannounced at pre-determined times and places, they will perform short choreographic interventions and loud, sonic interjections that resonate through the public sites.
Urban Diva places/times:
Friday 9 April, Living Room launch 6.15pm, from Pier 3, Quay Street
Saturday 10 April, 2.00pm from Pier 3, Quay Street
Tuesday 13 April, 12.30 from Freyberg Place
Thursday 15 April, 2.00pm, from Pier 3, Quay Street
Saturday 17 April, 12.30pm, from Freyberg Place
And on Saturday 10 April at 11.00am Phil Dadson presents an artist's talk at Art Station on Ponsonby Road.
This link takes you to the full Living Room 2010 programme.
Image: courtesy Phil Dadson
Living Room 2010: A Week of Goodness
This year's edition of Living Room runs on the streets of Auckland's CBD from Friday 9 – Saturday 17 April 2010. The programme of live performance art and moving image that brings together local and international artists and choreographers has been curated by Pontus Kyander around the theme “A Week of Goodness”.
This year's lineup includes artist Phil Dadson working with choreographer Carol Brown and artists et al. working with choreographer Sean Curham. We'll post further information on event times and locations later in the week.
Another Asia/Pacific fair
The former director of Art Basel, ShContemporary and creator of ArtParis+Guests, Lorenzo Rudolf, has launched a new art fair in the Asia/Pacific Region. The first edition of ART STAGE SINGAPORE takes place from 12 – 16 January 2011.
Hou Hanru conference
Contemporary art museums from around the world will participate in a conference on the issues surrounding institutional collections of Asian contemporary art this September at ShContemporary 2010. Titled Collecting Asian Contemporary Art: What, When and How?, the conference is being organised by Hou Hanru, the Chinese born curator and critic currently based in San Francisco. His latest curatorial projects include the 10th Biennale de Lyon and the 10th Instanbul Biennial.
Image: Hou Hanru, organiser of Collecting Asian Contemporary Art: What, When and How?, ShContemporary, 9 September 2010
We farewell Christoph Muecher
Today Christoph Muecher steps down as Director of the Goethe-Institut in Wellington to return to Germany where he will take up a new position as Head of the Communications Division of the Goethe-Institut's Head Office in Munich. Christoph has been an exceptional arts and cultural emissary forging relationships with artists, critics, curators, writers and the directors of public and dealer galleries. He leaves with a reputation for being engaged in our art scene, not just as a funder of projects and events. We wish him all the best with his new position.
Image: Christoph Muecher (left) in full flight at an exhibition opening
Exhibition opening
The opening for Boris Dornbusch's exhibition Phantom limb construction sites takes place tomorrow (Wednesday 31 March 2010) from 5.30pm onwards.
Don Peebles 1922 – 2010
“Artists don't just give us things to look at but also ways to look at things, and my favourite works of Don's are models of how we might, in our own ideal moments, respond to the world around us – with curiosity and alertness and openness to what is given.” Justin Paton, curator