News
We are heading to LA in a few weeks for Art Los Angeles Contemporary. We'll post images from the fair which runs from 28 – 31 January 2010, but in the meantime this link takes you to the ALAC website.
Artist Eugenie Scrase has won BBC Two's School of Saatchi show with her tree trunk impaled on a length of fence. The 20 year old beat five finalists to win a place in super collector Charles Saatchi's exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now at the Hermitage and studio space for three years.
Situated alongside an Auckland motorway feeder road and opposite the entrance to Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Gavin Hipkins' billboard project runs to 7 March 2010.
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Oh so playful
Seung Yul Oh's Bogle Bogle opens today at The New Dowse. It is the first in a series of five artists' projects commissioned by the art museum for its 2010 programme. You can read the Bogle Bogle media release here.
Image: Seung Yul Oh, Bogle Bogle (detail), The New Dowse, Lower Hutt, NZ
Ai Weiwei on censorship
Ai Weiwei has spoken out in support of US internet giant Google in its standoff with Beijing. In a commentary in The Wall Street Journal the artist said Google had set an important example for the Chinese people by challenging state censorship at the risk of sacrificing its place in the world's largest online market. Last month Google threatened to abandon its Chinese search engine and possibly leave the country altogether over alleged China-based cyberattacks. The company also said it would no longer obey censorship rules.
You can read Ai Weiwei's commentary here.
All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art
This link takes you to an interview with Jorg Heiser, co-editor of frieze and author of All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art.
Image: Book cover courtesy Sternberg Press, Berlin
Comics and climate change
Is there anything comics and graphic novels can't do? This is the question Guardian writer Jonathan Jones faced after reading Logicomix, a gripping account of the lives and ideas of logicans at the beginning of the 20th century, and with global warming uppermost on his mind.
He asks: “Could a graphic novel do justice to the current controversy in climate science? As leaked emails and errors embarrass the science on which an entire politics is based, could a comic depict both the pathos of scientists driven by conviction to possibly suppress or distort data, and the larger picture that overwhelmingly demands urgent action to save the climate? Could it dramatise the motivations of sceptics and eco-warriors?”
You can read Jones' article here.
Image: Beijing smog
Boris Dornbusch at DNA, Berlin
Boris Dornbusch is represented in REFLECTION, a group show at DNA Berlin, which runs from 9 February to 14 March 2010. Also in the lineup is Mariana Vassileva who featured in our 2009 programme. You can see installation views of her Starkwhite exhibition here.
Dornbusch returned to Auckland recently to prepare his first solo exhibition at Starkwhite, scheduled for 29 March – 1 May 2010.
Image: Boris Dornbusch, Bulb, 2008, DVD-Pal, edition of 8
Colin Chinnery on the future of ShContemporary
This link takes you to an interview with Colin Chinnery on the future of ShContemporary. He talks about rethinking the art fair in a post-recession climate, the emerging Chinese art market, mixing up the regional art DNA and the moves he is making with ShContemporary such as the Discoveries section featuring challenging work not necessarily suitable for the market. He says his goal is not to make ShContemporary different from other fairs, but rather to be looking at what is necessary at this point in time for an art fair in China, and to address those issues.
For instance his new Collectors Development Programme (introduced in 2009) aims to help new Chinese collectors find their way into the market without being taken advantage of. It's described as a three-step approach beginning with the “Knowledge” stage which involves classes and seminars where people are introduced to the basics of art, art history and the art market. The second step is to get them “Inspired” through contact with artists, gallerists and experienced collectors. The third step focuses on “Practice”, which gives budding collectors various ways of entering the market through art fairs, galleries and auctions.
Chinnery brings a novel background to his directorship of Shanghai's international art fair. He worked as chief curator and deputy director of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing and he is also an artist and a founding member of the artist collective Complete Art Experience Project, which includes high-profile artists such as Qiu Zhijie and Liu Wei.
The next edition of ShContemporary the Asia Pacific Art Fair takes place from 9 – 12 September 2010.
Image: Colin Chinnery, director of ShContemporary the Asia Pacific Art Fair
Art Los Angeles Contemporary Report Card
Reports are beginning to circulate on the inaugural edition of Art Los Angeles Contemporary staged in the Pacific Design Centre at the end of January. ARTINFO describes it as “a new cutting edge expo that debuted over the weekend as a 50,000 square-foot melting pot for 55 blue-chip and emerging galleries from Los Angeles and around the globe…(one that) stood apart from last month's bigger Los Angeles Art Show as a juried event with a selection committee comprised of taste-making LA galleries 1301PE, David Kordansky Gallery, Peres Projects and Susanne Vielmetter.”
The Pacific Design Centre was an unusual setting for an art fair with gallery booths set in spaces enclosed by floor-to-ceiling glass walls and accessed off corridors of glass. Some liked the mall-like, storefront attributes of venue while others found them less satisfactory. Our space had good sight lines and easy access off the corridor so it worked well for us. Next time, however, we'll view the venue as a mall rather than an open space in a mall-like setting with conventional booths set in a grid, and we'll develop our installation plan with its storefront attributes in mind. But we'll be back in LA in 2011.
You can read the ARTINFO article here.
Images: Pacific Design Centre and Art Los Angeles Contemporary vernissage
Coming up: Jin Jiangbo's Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai
We begin our 2010 programme in the downstairs gallery with Jin Jiangbo's Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai, one of a recent series of projects that investigate the past 20 years of economic, social and cultural upheaval that has taken place in China since 1989. Leaving his familiar mode of new media technologies and taking up the historic process of analogue photography, images are shot using a medium format panoramic camera and then digitally manipulated into large format panoramas that offer a response to the socialist economic landscape of China as it negotiates within the wider frames of globalisation, integration and the recent global recession.
The exhibition is scheduled to run from 16 February to 20 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.
Image:
上海呀,上海;引擎计划;浦东陆家嘴金融中心建设现场
Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai: Engine Plan; the construction of the Pudong Lujiazui Financial Centre, 2009, C-type photograph, 3000 x 750mm, edition of 8
Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Residency
Alicia Frankovich has been awarded the 2010/11 Creative New Zealand Berlin Visual Arts Residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien beginning in August. Kunstlerhaus Bethanien director Christoph Tannert says she was selected on the strength of her “outstanding work in the field of performance and installation”.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, The Opposite of Backwards, 2008, C-print, 700 x 1050mm, edition of 5
Art Los Angeles Contemporary: Critic's Notebook
This link takes you to Christopher Knight's article on Art Los Angeles Contemporary published in the Critic's Notebook section of the Los Angeles Times.
Image: Art Los Angeles Contemporary vernissage
Art Los Angeles Contemporary vernissage
Art Los Angeles Contemporary opened last night with a lively vernissage at the Pacific Design Centre.
Art Los Angeles Contemporary
Over the next couple of days we'll be setting up our booth at Art Los Angeles Contemporary. We'll resume our posts on Friday with photographs of the vernissage.
Image: Pacific Design Centre, West Hollywood, venue for Art Los Angeles Contemporary
New fairgrounds
In the Fairs section of the 2010 artasiapacific Almanac the editors report that “as the US and UK struggle to rebuild their tattered economies, art dealers from New York, London and mainland Europe are testing the young, relatively debt-free markets in regions that are quickly emerging from recession: the Middle East and Asia. The two more resilient fairs are Art Dubai and Hong Kong's ART HK.”
They say the three-year-old ART HK continues to demonstrate its staying power with dealers arriving with low expectations and leaving with declarations that they couldn't wait to come back. After a successful first foray in 2009, Starkwhite is one of the galleries returning to ART HK in 2010.
However, we are less interested in which fair proves to be the fairest of them all and more interested in how many great fairs emerge in the Asia/Pacific region. And the signs are good as Art Los Angeles Contemporary and ShContemporary also have the potential to become must-see events on the international art fair calendar.
Image: ART HK masthead
Asia/Pacific/Middle East roundup
The 2010 artasiapacific Almanac is on the newsstands. Artists and Starkwhite exhibitions mentioned in the New Zealand section include: et al. no free gift!; Martin Basher, Free Spirit No Interest; and Dane Mitchell, Bending Light. Mitchell also gets a mention in the controversy section for his prize-winning work in the Waikato National Art Award. This link takes you to artasiapacific's website and more information on the current issue.
LA bound
John Reynolds is the third artist in our lineup for Art Los Angeles Contemporary. He will present One Man Show, an installation of 758 text works each measuring 100 x 40 x 40 mm.
Image: John Reynolds, One Man Show (detail), 2010, studio shot, silver marker on acrylic on canvas, each block 100 x 40 x 40 mm, installation dimensions variable
LA bound
Sydney/LA-based artist Grant Stevens is also in our lineup for Art Los Angeles Contemporary with a selection of video works including Crushing.
Image: Grant Stevens, Crushing, 2009, digital video, 4 min 13 sec, edition of 9
LA bound
This is one of the works we'll be presenting at Art Los Angeles Contemporary which opens next Thursday. As usual we'll be posting reports and photographs from the fair so watch this space for daily updates.
Image: Peter Stichbury, Self Portrait as Tom Wade, 2010, acrylic on linen, 505 x 605 mm
Image: Peter Stichbury, Self Portrait as Tom Wade, 2010, acrylic on linen, 505 x 605 mm
From the studio
John Reynolds is hard at work in his studio producing 1001 Nights which we will present at The Armory Show, 4 – 7 March 2010. If you would like to know more about our art fair programme for 2010 please contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz
Image: John Reynolds, 1001 Nights (detail) 2009-2010, oil paint marker on acrylic on canvas, installation dimensions variable
Critics Picks
This is not recent news, but we think it is worth mentioning. Genevieve Allison (currently living and working on Berlin) is writing for ARTFORUM's Critics Picks. You can read her first review of Isa Genzken at Galerie Daniel Buchholz here.
Featured work: Layla Rudneva-Mackay
This work was first shown in Layla Rudneva-Mackay's exhibition Tell yourself you're ok [Starkwhite 2008].
In a review of the exhibition published in ARTFORUM in September 2008 Jon Bywater said: “Cinematic' suggests too great a distance from the everyday to characterize accurately the kinds of simple tableaux photographed by Layla Rudneva-Mackay. That her scenarios–portraits of people whose faces we cannot see, for example–are directed constructs is evident though. Many of the large C-prints in the Auckland-based artist's new exhibition, Tell yourself you're ok, display gestures, but without showing us the people who make them. Most actors are hidden behind cloth, emphasizing something not simply conventional but still general in their poses. In this way, the images communicate an unusual sensitivity to form and its connotations. The nonverbal cues to which we might respond from the figure and their positioning suggest a level of intuition that evokes the unspoken sense of a situation.”
If you would like more information on this artwork, or others by the artist, please contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz
Image: Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Yellow Curtain, 2008, C-Print
2010 art fair circuit begins
We are heading to LA in a few weeks for Art Los Angeles Contemporary. We'll post images from the fair which runs from 28 – 31 January 2010, but in the meantime this link takes you to the ALAC website.
Images: ALAC logo and the Pacific Design Centre, venue for Art Los Angeles Contemporary
Starkwhite hours over the holiday period
The gallery is closed over the Christmas/New Year period, open by appointment from 4 January and reopening Monday 18 January 2010. Leave a message on our answer phone (+64 9 3070703) or email us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz and we'll get back to you.
Image: Jim Speers, Crystal Spirit, installation view, Starkwhite 2009. The exhibition runs to 18 January 2010
Blog time out
The gallery is closed over the Christmas period and we will resume our posts again on 1 January, albeit intermittently for the first two weeks.
Season's Greetings
Season's Greetings! We decided to post this image of Tacita Dean with her Tate Christmas tree because she says (and we agree) the work holds onto something of the purity and magic of Christmas, despite commercial pressures.
Image: Tacita Dean with Weihnachtsbaum (2009), this year's Tate Britain Christmas tree
Jury out on Copenhagen summit
The jury is out on whether the Copenhagen summit was a step forwards or backwards. The so-called Copenhagen Agreement recognises the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C, but does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal. As the post-summit discussion gears up on whether it was an important first step or a profound disappointment here is the BBC's Climate Change: Copenhagen in Graphics published on the eve of the summit. Along with the exhibition EARTH Art of a Changing World, the BBC graphs provide a timely reminder of the need for a new model of global politics – one that delivers a legally binding treaty on emissions cuts required to beat global warming.
Images: Mona Hatoum's Hotspot (2006) in the exhibition EARTH Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy of Arts (image from the exhibition website); two graphs from the BBC NEWS website
Another Power 100
This link takes you to the ART+AUCTION Power 100 list.
Image: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gearing up for her role as the artistic director of Documenta 13 in 2012, image from the ARTINFO / ART+AUCTION website.
Upstairs at Starkwhite
In our upstairs spaces we showing works by Andrew Barber/John Reynolds, Whitney Bedford, Derrick Cherrie, Boris Dornbusch, Matt Henry, Gavin Hipkins, Seung Yul Oh, Jae Hoon Lee, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Jim Speers, et al.
Image: Whitney Bedford, Pink Iceberg (2009), oil on board, 18″ x 22″
Christmas spirit
Each year Tate Britain asks an artist to create a Christmas tree for the gallery. This year Tacita Dean has decorated a Nordmann Fir with specially-made beeswax candles. Each afternoon at 16:00, as the sun sets and light fades from the gallery, the candles will be lit. They are designed to burn out as the gallery closes a1 18:00.
“This work chimes with the traditional idea of what a Christmas tree should look like. The candle-light evokes a sense of magic and wonder, and the act of lighting the tree is at once simple and theatrical, evoking the rituals of Christmas celebrations.” Tate Britain website
Image: lighting the candles on Tacita Dean's Christmas tree, titled Weihnachtsbaum, 2009. Photo credit: Geoff Pugh
ART COLOGNE
We'll be presenting a solo project by Dane Mitchell at Art Cologne, which takes place shortly after he completes his one-year residency in the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm DAAD. This link takes you to installation views of his recent exhibition Minor Optics at the daadgalerie, Berlin.
Our art fair programme for the first half of 2010 is: Art Los Angeles Contemporary (28-31 January), The Armory Show, NY (4-7 March), Art Cologne (21-25 April) and ART HK (27-30 May).
Future Generation Art Prize
Ukrainian billionaire and art collector Victor Pinchuk has launched a new $100,000 award for artists under the age of 35. The Future Generation Art Prize will be given every two years and is open to any young artist who applies on line. A team of professionals will also be asked to nominate candidates producing exceptional work.
Under the aegis of his foundation, Pinchuk has assembled an international board that marries up patronage, money, glamour and star power – Los Angeles financier and collector Eli Broad, who also runs a foundation; Miuccia Prada the fashion designer and collector with her own art foundation in Milan; Elton John (Pinchuk rates his photography collection as one of the best in the world); and museum directors Richard Armstrong from the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation and Museum and Glenn D. Lowry from the Museum of Modern Art.
Pinchuk is endeavouring to give his prize a point of difference over others like the Turner Prize and Hugo Boss Prize. With this in mind he has enlisted several established artists – Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky and Jeff Koons, artists whose work he collects – to serve as mentors for the finalists and winner.
Applications can be submitted from 18 January to 18 April 2010 at the Future Generation Art Prize website.
Image: Victor Pinchuk
School of Saatchi
Artist Eugenie Scrase has won BBC Two's School of Saatchi show with her tree trunk impaled on a length of fence. The 20 year old beat five finalists to win a place in super collector Charles Saatchi's exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now at the Hermitage and studio space for three years.
In School of Saatchi, a four part BBC Two talent contest, the collector (like the invisible boss in Charlie's Angels) never appeared on the show, which was fronted by a panel of four – artist Tracey Emin, critic Matthew Collings, Art Collector Frank Cohen, and Head of Art Gallery at the Barbican Kate Bush. Of the 3000 people who applied to get on the programme, 12 were left by the start of the first episode and they were whittled down to six finalists chosen for their potential to develop over a ten week period. In the manner of reality TV they were given tasks to perform, including being asked to make a life drawing of a nude woman, produce an outdoor installation for the beach at Hastings in southern England, and create a work to be displayed inside Sudley Castle. The six finalists were also given the task of creating an exhibition for one night only at London's Saatchi Gallery.
Although described as “reclusive” and “camera shy” Saatchi certainly knows how to do 'look at me' as he goes about the business of buying and selling art and scouting new talent.
Images: Eugenie Scrace's winning work and the School of Saatchi judges Matthew Collings, Tracey Emin, Frank Cohen and Kate Bush
Picturing the Studio
Alicia Frankovich is one of the featured artists in Picturing the Studio which shows at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to 13 February 2010. A companion volume to the exhibition The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner will be published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2010.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, Fly/Lose, video 14.22 seconds duration (looped), 2008
Drive-by art
Situated alongside an Auckland motorway feeder road and opposite the entrance to Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Gavin Hipkins' billboard project runs to 7 March 2010.
“Hipkins is known for his use of digitally scanned embroidered patches that alter the way his images are received by both concealing portions of the pictures and inserting new messages and quotes within them. This exhibition marks a new transition for the artist as he abandons images altogether and instead imbeds these patches within fields of retro linear patterns. Maintaining an interest in transcendental traditions, the patches together form a quote from William Blake's Proverbs of Hell, playing off the roadway site of the billboards and the hellish daily commute of local residents.” Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts website
Images: Billboard project by Gavin Hipkins (2009), courtesy the artist and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Pakuranga, NZ
EARTH: Art of a Changing World
Timed to coincide with the Copenhagen conference, this exhibition looks at climate change through the work of artists such as Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Spencer Finch, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum and Mariele Neudecker. EARTH: Art of a Changing World runs at the Royal Academy of Arts until 31 January 2010. You can read more on the exhibition here.
Image: 400 Thousand Generations (2009) by Mariele Neudecker, courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm, from the Royal Academy exhibition website
McCahon Residency artists announced
Martin Basher and Jim Speers have been awarded places in the 2010 McCahon House Residency Programme. Speers' exhibition Crystal Spirit is currently showing in our downstairs space.
Images: McCahon House, Titirangi, designed by Pete Bossley; Martin Basher, Free Spirit No Interest, installation view, Starkwhite (2009); Jim Speers, Crystal Spirit, installation view, Starkwhite, (2009)
Climate and Culture
The latest issue of M/C Journal is dedicated to the climate-culture nexus in the light of change threats.
“Climate is, presently, a heatedly discussed topic. Concerns about the environmental, economic, political and social consequences of climate change are of central interest in academic and popular debates. As such climate change is a 'hot' cultural discourse and a media issue. Moreover, there has recently been a 'cultural turn' in climate change science and politics, with some scholars arguing that climate change research and action has been hindered because it has not fully accommodated cultural values that give everyday meaning to climate, and consequently urging for greater attention to the cultural dimensions of climate change.” Andrew Gorman-Murray and Gordon Waitt, Climate and Culture, M/C Journal, Vol. 12 No.4 2009
This link takes you to M/C Journal and articles published in the climate edition.
Image: NASA satellite image of the dust storm that enveloped the East Coast of Australia on 23 September 2009