AI WEIWEI | YOUNG ARTIST EXPERIENCE | NY

Ai Weiwei, outside Tompkins Square Park, 1986

Ai Weiwei in New York

Exhibition reveals a young artist’s experience in a changing city

By Helen Stoilas

NEW YORK. An exhibition of early works by Ai Weiwei opened at the Asia Society yesterday. “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993” (until 14 August) includes over 200 images taken by the artist while he lived in the East Village.
“We had been in discussion with Ai Weiwei to bring the show to New York for nearly a year. Then when he was arrested, we didn’t think we could do it,” said the Asia Society’s museum director Melissa Chiu, as the original works were shut up in his studio. They were able to have copies of the photographs printed and just days after they announced the exhibition Ai was freed on bail.NEW YORK. An exhibition of early works by Ai Weiwei opened at the Asia Society yesterday. “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993” (until 14 August) includes over 200 images taken by the artist while he lived in the East Village.

The series, originally shown at the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Beijing in 2009, was personally selected by the artist from a huge archive amassed during his time in New York. “He lived here for a decade and he took about 10,000 photos,” said Chiu. “They capture life in the Lower East Side, particularly in the East Village at a time when that area was really changing.” They also capture the artist as a young man (above, Ai Weiwei, outside Tompkins Square Park, 1986) and his later subversive actions against the Chinese government could be seen to have some roots in his experiences witnessing the Tompkins Square riot, the early days of the Wigstock drag festival, and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry readings.

Speaking the day the news broke that Ai had been freed on bail, Chui said: “There’s a great sense of relief that this has happened and it really bodes well for the art community in China.”

THOMAS STRUTH | PHOTOGRAPHS 1978 - 2010

Press Release

The Düsseldorf-based artist Thomas Struth is among the most important contemporary German photography. Numerous exhibitions over the past 15 years in Europe, the USA, and a number of Asian countries have made Struth – who was born in the Lower Rhine region in 1954 – internationally famous. To date, only individual work series have been presented publicly. Now, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents a representative overview of Struth’s entire oeuvre in Europe for the first time. Organized in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Zürich, this exhibition was supplemented by more than 100 additional works following its initial showing in Switzerland. The emphasis now lies clearly on the creative production of the past decade. The most recent works are being shown in Düsseldorf only. 

Special attention is also being devoted to a number of photographs from the series entitled “Streets ,” none of them previously shown publicly. Together with the jungle pictures of the “Paradise” series, a selection of black-and-white photographs featuring Düsseldorf's streetscapes form an independent presentation in the Grabbehalle of the K20. This expansive image installation – assembled especially by the artist himself – is being shown in Düsseldorf exclusively. 

At a time when we are subjected daily to a flood of imagery, Thomas Struth is one of the outstanding artists who have succeeded in endowing the photographic medium with a new intensity and effectiveness. Struth attended the Düsseldorf Art Academy, initially studying painting with Gerhard Richter, and beginning in 1976, photography with Bernd Becher. As early as 1992, Struth’s work was seen at the documenta IX in Kassel. At the center of his artistic endeavor is precision of vision. Whether the impenetrable undergrowth of the Asian jungle, large-format museum scenes (“Audiences” ), or the recent large-scale images of technical facilities: his image sequences consistently thematize the relationship between beholder and beheld, at the same time posing questions about the individual in society. Struth avoids any overt dramatization of his motifs, concentrating instead entirely on the analysis of perceptual data. The fact that he discovers his motifs on trips through Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and Australia underscores the significance of his creative production in a world that has been shaped so profoundly by globalization.

In conjunction with this exhibition, and in collaboration with guitarist Frank Bungarten, Struth presents “Music” in the “Laboratory,” the exhibition space of the Education Department. This project offers a provocative acoustic contrast to the spectrum of visual impressions confronting visitors throughout the exhibition. Musik allows the works of art in the permanent collection to be experienced in an extended sensory context. Audible is a range of music selected by Struth and Bungarten and drawn from a variety of cultures and genres. A special highlight of this project takes place in May, when a master course is scheduled for the Laboratory, during which high-ranking musicians will give music instruction before the public.  

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 

Grabbeplatz 5 40213 Düsseldorf, Germany,  

29 May 2011

ANISH KAPOOR | LEVIATHAN

Anish Kapoor's Leviathan fills the Grand Palais

Inside the belly of the beast

Anish Kapoor’s installation Leviathan opens at the Grand Palais in Paris

By Cristina Ruiz

PARIS. Anish Kapoor today unveils his largest and most ambitious sculpture to date. Leviathan is a gigantic installation made from 18 tonnes of PVC, which fills the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris and encompasses 13,500 sq. m of space.

The huge biomorphic form consists of four connected orbs supported not by a steel skeleton but with air, which is pumped continuously into the structure.

Visitors to the Grand Palais will first use a revolving door to enter inside the belly of Kapoor’s beast. This is a vast, soaring chamber bathed in red light, which the artist says he hopes has a “cathedral-like quality”.

From here visitors exit to see Leviathan from the outside for the first time. “The exterior appears to bear no relation to the interior yet they co-exist simultaneously. That’s what the work is about,” says Kapoor.

Although the Indian-born British artist is not known for thinking small, he says the challenges of making Leviathan were unprecedented. The first was to cope with the light which floods through the Grand Palais’ glass ceilings. “The light is the killer. It’s almost brighter inside than it is outside. It crushes things. The thing is to try and reverse it.”

To do this, Kapoor chose “a very dark membrane” but he says he didn’t know what this would look like on a giant scale until the work was erected. “We only had one shot to get it right,” says Kapoor, adding that he and his crew took a week to install the work.

A known perfectionist, Kapoor says the work was designed down to the last millimetre. “The tailoring is perfect,” he says. “It has to be. Otherwise there would be wrinkles. There are no wrinkles,” he says adding that the computer design for Leviathan was done in England, the PVC was cut in Germany, it was stitched together in Italy and a Czech crew installed it in Paris.

Although Kapoor used the very latest technology to build Leviathan, he says his intention was to create a form that is “primal” in its appearance. “Part of my inspiration is Stanley Kubrick [the director whose films include ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’],” he says, adding that abstract art is able to find the “expressive force of primary forms”.

Commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture as their annual Monumenta exhibition, the sculpture cost €3m to manufacture.

Kapoor has dedicated Leviathan to the imprisoned artist Ai Weiwei who has not been seen or heard from since he was detained by Chinese authorities in early April. Describing Ai’s imprisonment as “barbaric”, Kapoor said he believes the art world should do more to campaign for his release. “Perhaps all museums and galleries should be closed for a day...some such campaign needs to form itself.”

Leviathan is on display at the Grand Palais until 23 June.

THOMAS EGGERER | DANIEL BUCHHOLZ

Artist: Thomas Eggerer

Venue: Daniel Buchholz, Cologne

Exhibition Title: In der Pyramide

Date: April 13 – June 25, 2011

Images courtesy of Daniel Buchholz, Cologne

Press Release:

As if reflecting upon his own constant simultaneous engagement with the dialectic of abstraction and figuralism, Eggerer here occupies the point where both might begin or end. From the point of view of the focus of the new paintings, the four strokes of the letter M, all answers are defiantly arbitrary. Eggerer, focusing on the material of language as form, penetrates into the uneasy core of a traditional dialectic.

The broad fields of earth colors intersticed with vibrato lines, feature landscape components. Their multiple potential horizons hold a tense ground; the fields the lines presumably define might be contracting and/or expanding. As in outer space, it is potentially non-sensical to distinguish up to down from left to right, foreground from background.

The tenuous lines refer to the body. As if entering the tunnels of a pyramid, we stand on the absurd floor plan of a long-standing erection whose architectural aims are cartoon-like and alien. If not absurd, the lines of elbows and knees bend awkwardly like bones in an uncovered tomb.

What Napoleon saw in the crypt at Giza, what Alexander saw before and what Crowley saw later presumably could not be articulated in ordinary language. It is certain that after a night alone in the crypt of Giza, Bonaparte emerged in the morning a physical wreck. Some days later he abandoned his army in Egypt and returned to Paris to seize the destiny of the Revolution by the most brutal and cynical means. On his death bed, the defeated proponent of the letter N revived. When asked, he appeared ready to tell what he had glimpsed in the Chamber of Kings.

But Napoleon kept silent. What did he see?

From above and below, Eggerer’s pyramid shows a mirrored M. At the congruence of the V’s, at its very solidity, M is the most slippery and tenuous of foundations.

M (ɛm), the thirteenth letter of the modern German and English alphabets, as Ben Jonson put it in 1635 , “is pronounc’d with a kind of humming inward, the lips clos’d. Open, and full in the beginning: obscure in the end: and meanly in the midd’st.”

The letter is never silent, even when it hides in words like mnemonic and anemone. Related to the idea of Mother by spelling and long tradition, it is for many the closest letter to pre-literate expression.

In contemporary physics, M-Theory, the so-called “Mother of all Super-Strings”, purports to explain every event in all the universes via the pure math of super-miniscule string-branes wiggling through the universe’s 11 dimensions. Interestingly, though the theory arose as recently as the 1990’s, there is no consensus as to what exactly the M stands for. Membrane? Magic? Matrix? Mother? Monster? As with the name of 007’s control, we are left in the dark.

“The trail leading to the unified field theory of all reality,” as Dr. Michio Kaku puts it, “is littered with the wreckage of failed expeditions and dreams.” Certainly, from deep in the pyramid, Eggerer’s dreaming glimpses into the letter’s arbitrary mechanics map out no escape from the revolutions of M.

Four collages feature figures engaged in yoga or other physical exercise among sculptures by Antony Caro. These precise and provisional works are the exhibition’s only gesture to ordinary figuralism and abstraction. Here, by reference to Caro, the miscegenation of the separatist purities of form and content is performed as an archaeology of modernism.

Mark von Schlegell

Link: Thomas Eggerer at Daniel Buchholz

LONDON | PHILLIPS DE PURY

Artist records: Ugo Rondinone's "Get Up Girl a Sun Is Running the World", 2006, sold for £541,250 and Beatriz Milhazes's "O Moderno", 2002 sold for £713,250

London's contemporary season gets going at Phillips de Pury

Sale is a healthy starter for this week's auctions

By Melanie Gerlis

LONDON. Phillips de Pury's decision to open, rather than close, the London contemporary auction season this evening, and with bigger ticket works in a new central location, paid off. Its pared-down catalogue (31 lots) sold for £11.2m (est £10m-£14.5m) with a sell-through rate of 87%, which must have been a refreshing turn of events for auctioneer Simon de Pury. The auction house's equivalent sale last year made £4m, well below expectations, and with nearly half the works (47%) unsold.

“It was a very strong sale for them. They've found a great niche in the [auction] market for younger artists and it seems to be working,” said dealer Paolo Vedovi, who had bid on Wade Guyton's three-legged inkjet “X” painting, Untitled, 2007 (this went for £205,250, est £150,000-£250,000). The auction house also had great success in February with Guyton when New York dealer Stellen Holm, bought a 2001 “X” painting for £213,650 (est £50,000-£70,000).

Other sought-after emerging artists did well. An untitled 2009 work by this year's brightest young thing, Jacob Kassay, unsurprisingly went past its £50,000-£70,000 estimate to sell over the telephone for £145,250. Bidding was lively, both via the telephones and in the saleroom, but was less fierce than in the auction house's May evening sale in New York (where another 2009 silver deposit work by Kassay went for $290,500 against an estimate of $60,000-$80,000). Nevertheless, with his work selling for around £15,000-£20,000 in the primary market, the heat has yet to leave Kassay's market at auction.

Phillips' catalogue included bigger-ticket items than in recent sales: works in the low tens of thousands have been common, while tonight the £50,000-£70,000 Kassay was one of the lowest-estimated items. This more confident approach paid off, despite ambitious estimates, and the auction house achieved two significant artist records in its evening sale: for Beatriz Milhazes, whose O Moderno, 2002 went for £713,250 (already estimated to make a record at £650,000-£750,000) and Ugo Rondinone, whose white tree sculpture, Get Up Girl a Sun Is Running the World, 2006, went for £541,250 (est £200,000-£300,000). Both went to telephone bidders.

“It's exactly the sort of work that people want at the moment, to put in a big empty Georgian house that's has been redecorated with white walls and no furniture,” said New York private dealer and collector, David Nisinson, of the Rondinone. He himself bought Cecily Brown's I Will Not Paint Any More Boring Leaves (2), 2004 for £529,250 (est £350,000-£450,000). “I was pleased, I thought it could have gone for more,” he said after the sale.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere never really picked up, and the auction house worked hard for its £11.2m. Despite a state-of-the-art, recently opened saleroom near London's Victoria Station, Phillips has committed to a new “exhibition and retail” space in Claridge's Hotel in Mayfair, where this evening's auction was held. “It's convenient for our clients and worked well,” said de Pury. Furthermore, a high proportion—five of the original 32 lots—were guaranteed by third parties (one of these, Cindy Sherman'sUntitled Film Still #4, 1977, was withdrawn as a similar work had been seen at the Art Basel fair earlier this month, said Phillips). “[Guarantees are] a big part of the strategy for a competitive auction house,” said Michael McGinnis, Phillips' head of contemporary art. A couple of these, including the Milhazes, sold to their guaranteed bid alone. Other works expected to give a buzz to the saleroom fell rather flat, including Damien Hirst's butterfly painting Confession, 2008 (picked up by dealer-collector Jose Mugrabi for £690,850, est £600,000-£800,000) and the sale's headline piece, Jean-Michel Basquiat's bottle-capped Self-portrait, 1985, which sold to its guarantor bid of £1.8m (£2.1m with buyer’s premium, est £2m-£3m). The work had been on the market for some time, and it had sold at Phillips New York in 2003 for $647,500 (then the equivalent of £387,000).

In general dealers felt it was a good start to the week: “It's a strong opening,” said Vedovi. The major sales are at Christie's tomorrow and Sotheby's on Wednesday. Combined the evening sales this week are forecast to make between £140.2m and £197.8m.

LANY | AT PETER BLUM

LANY at Peter Blum

Kevin Appel, Andy Cross, Benjamin Degen, James Melinat, Luisa Rabbia, Daniel Rich and Kara Tanaka.

Peter Blum Chelsea, 526 West 29th Street, New York.

An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, June 8th from 6 – 8 pm.