Archive for November, 2010
Friday, November 26th, 2010
Nieves Launches App
We are huge fans Nieves. Since 2001 the independent Swiss publisher has collaborated with an eclectic mix of talent, releasing a consistently interesting and high quality array of limited artist zines and books. Now, Nieves goes mobile with the launch of an iPhone/iPad app. Though initially excited over the potential to have on-the-go access to their entire back catalog and out of print publications, we were quickly disillusioned. While the application itself is free to download, digital zines wil run you .99¢ a pop, making this pretty worthless unless you plan on shelling out enough money to build up a useful archive. It also seems to run contrary to the very aesthetic and mission Nieves has been championing for the past decade. Oh well. We still love you Nieves.
Friday, November 26th, 2010
Flying High :: Murakami in Macy’s Parade / Settles Lawsuit
(Image via NYClovesNYC)
Happy Thanksgiving!
With the 84th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade complete, Takashi Murakami becomes the latest artist to contribute balloon designs to the iconic holiday celebration, following previous collaborations with the Estate of Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Tom Otterness. Giant renditions of his signature characters Kaikai and Kiki floated through Manhattan accompanied by Murakami himself, who was adorned in a furry dragon costume topped off with a headdress featuring his flower design.
In other news, according to a recent KaiKai Kiki press announcement, Murakami and Kaikai Kiki Ltd. have reached a settlement with Cerulean Co., Ltd. regarding the sale of an original work titled Flower Ball Blood (3-D) V. The sale was conditioned on Cerulean not reselling the work for a fixed period of time. However, when the piece was slated to be auctioned by Christie’s in London five months after its purchase, Kaikai Kiki filed its lawsuit demanding immediate return of the painting, along with s compensation for damages. On October 30, 2009, the suit ended in an amicable settlement, resulting in agreement for the return of the work in question.
(Image via sandrasoroka)
(Image via NYClovesNYC)
(Image via sandrasoroka)
Murakami shows off his parade costume (All Artwork including Kaikai and Kiki (c)Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved., via New York Times.)
Concept Illustration. (All Artwork including Kaikai and Kiki (c)Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved., via New York Times)
Murakami works on concept sculptures. (All Artwork including Kaikai and Kiki (c)Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved., via New York Times.)
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
Time Before Time – Matt Leines in Italy
Our friend Matt Leines is set to open his first solo gallery show in Italy, at Galerie Patricia Armocida, Milan. Matt he has been largely absent from public view lately, having taken time off to regroup and hone his practice. Though Time Before Time includes many pieces that have appeared in previous exhibits, the show is a welcome introduction for a new audience and serves as dialogue between old and new,. Presenting earlier illustrations from the past few years along side more recent works, Leines offers us an honest and self-critical personal statement of a young artist striving to improve his craft and reflecting on his growth.
Matt Leines – Time Before Time
Nov. 25 – Feb. 14
Galerie Patricia Armocida
via Bazzini 17, 20131 Milano – IT
Monday, November 8th, 2010
Scott Campbell’s on Fire
Tattoo artist to the stars Scott Campbell just had a show of new works open in Mexico City at a gallery sponsored by Vice magazine. Don’t expect to see it even if you live nearby. As this email to Purple magazine founder Oliver Zahm suggests, apparently the artist dumped his work on the sidewalk and lit it all on fire after disagreements with the gallery’s owner.
Purple via TWBE / Wicked Wink
Friday, November 5th, 2010
Progress in the Face of Disaster :: Josh Keyes @ David B. Smith
Emergence, 2010 (All images via David B. Smith Gallery, text © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors)
I’ve been an admirer of Josh Keyes since first seeing his work in 2007. Yet, though his drafting and painting skills have grown increasingly impressive from a steady schedule of two solo shows a year, the delicate subtlety of his messages has largely disappeared. It’s a shame really. With Keyes, less has always been more, and his move towards increasingly overt imagery has actually simplified his art.
Collision (on view now at David B. Smith, Denver) signals a promising progression for an talent whose lightning paced success may have temporarily stunted his artistic growth. Within a single painting Keyes concurrently blends his blatantly apparent messages with ones more clandestinely cloaked, making this new series his most successful in some time. And, while this new body of work continues to include easy to digest post-apocalyptic environmental themes, the most successful ones are covertly suggestive and intertwined in history.
The show also marks a new and ambitious direction for Keyes, in that the ten paintings on view form a chronological storyline. Based on a a set of allegorical images of regicide and resurrection that Keyes found in a sixteenth-century set of engravings, this exhibit promises to be the first installment in a trilogy of works depicting the fall, disintegration, and reemergence of Keyes’ protagonist in the face man’s destruction of the planet and a post apocalyptic world.
Josh Keyes – Collision
Nov 5 – Dec. 11
Opening Reception: Nov 4, 7-10pm
David B. Smith Gallery
1543 A Wazee Street
Denver, CO 80202
Friday, November 5th, 2010
Get Your Gemeos & McGinness for a Penny
Iconoclast Editions has just released this Os Gemeos poster, available for just 1¢ plus shipping. The photo comes from a mural the twins’ painted this past summer in conjunction with the Viva La Revolucion exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Also available for a penny is the below Ryan McGinness poster, released on the occasion of the commission of Art History Is Not Linear to the permanent collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Friday, November 5th, 2010
KAWS @ Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris / Spongebob Print Release
(All gallery images via Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin)
KAWS‘ Paris outing offers the opportunity to witness his latest fixation with large-scale sculpture. After the debut of the giant black Accomplice at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, here we note the side-by-side accompaniment of a gargantuan pink Accomplice (both in an edition of 3, plus 1 Artist Proof). Aside from the massive dissected Companion at the artist’s Tokyo store Original Fake, Galerie Perrotin is the stage for an uber-scale brown 5 Years Later Companion (ed. 3 +1 AP). What truly marks this show is the ultimate evolution of brilliant colossal sculptural works, leaving the paintings in relative shadow. For the first time, KAWS has produced multiple immense sculptures for a solo gallery exhibition – an impressive offering indeed.
Together with the monumental 5YL Companion currently on display in Hong Kong, as well as the edition of life-size Chums, this exhibition clearly signals the direction KAWS is taking towards titanic renditions.
UPDATE: Just a few short hours before doors opened to the preview of the Editions|Artist’s Book Fair in New York last night, the Aldrich Museum announced the release of a new KAWS print at their booth. Priced at $800 the 20″x20″ edition of 100 depicts the artist’s rendition of the Spongebob character (image below) and is KAWS’ first print since his 2007 Dissected Companion edition. After the fair’s end, twenty remaining prints will become available via Art + Culture Editions.
KAWS – Kawsbob, 2010 print released by Aldrich Editions. (Image © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors)
KAWS, Pay the Debt to Nature
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin
76 rue de turenne 75003, Paris
11/6/10-12/23/10
Thursday, November 4th, 2010
NYC Openings
The above Barbara Kruger print will be released at the Editions|Artist’s Book Fair in an edition of 200, priced at $200.
Here’s our picks for this week’s art openings in NYC.
Thursday, Nov 4
Robert Lazzarini – friendly-hostile-friendly, Paul Kasmin Gallery, 511 W 27 St., 6-8pm
FAILE – Bedtime Stories, Perry Rubenstein 527 W. 23 St., 6-8pm
Dzine – Voodoo, Leo Koenig Projekte, 541 W. 23 St., 6-8pm
Editions|Artist’s Book Fair, 548 W. 22 St., preview 6-9pm ($20), Free Fri-Sun
John Currin – New Paintings, Gagosian, 980 Madison Ave., 6-8pm
Jenny Holzer – Retro, Skarstedt, 20 E. 79 St., 6-8pm
Friday, Nov. 5
Hiroshi Sugimoto – The Day After, Pace Gallery, 545 W. 22 St., 6-8pm
Matthew Monahan – Anton Kern, 532 W. 20 St., 6-8pm
Andy Warhol – Warhol’s Andys, Ronald Feldman, 31 Mercer St., 6-8pm
NY Art Book Fair – PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Preview 6-9pm, through Sunday
Saturday, Nov. 6
Raymond Pettibon –Hard in the Paint, David Zwirner, 525 W. 19 St., 6-8pm
Luc Tuymans – Corporate, David Zwirner, 525 W. 19 St., 6-8pm
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010
Shepard Fairey Pow(er) Print Release
Shepard Fairey is releasing the above print tomorrow, Nov. 4, in a signed and numbered edition of 450. The POW(ER) image was created initially created to accompany Carlo McCormick’s essay on the evolution of visual culture, appearing in Paper Magazine’s upcoming art issue, guest edited by Fairey. As the artist expalains, “the image is an homage to influential Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein…I discovered an image he had made of a woman holding a can of spray paint or hairspray. The image looked familiar to me, because a few years ago I re-illustrated the same piece of clip art that Lichtenstein referenced for his spray paint/hair spray painting. The connection was was too serendipitous to ignore.” At $45 these are bound to go fast. Be on the lookout here.
Monday, November 1st, 2010
On the Move with a Still Life :: TAC Visits Erik Parker in the Studio
(All images and text © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors)
Life for Erik Parker is far from still. Last year the artist broke from the text and icon based glyph-like paintings that had guided him through successful solo shows in NY, Europe and Japan, unveiling new works with Paul Kasmin Gallery that were at once reminiscent of the dazzling colored psychedelia of Rick Griffin and portraiture somewhere between the twisted faces of Francis Bacon and the surreal-like heads of 16th century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Now on the verge of his first museum exhibition, the Brooklyn based artist tackles yet another stylistic departure with a Los Angeles gallery show that is once again bound to surprise those familiar with his work. Earlier this month I paid Erik a visit in the studio to chat as he was putting the finishing touches on his newest paintings.
JN: Your upcoming exhibit reaches back to some of your work from several years ago, while also exploring new ground with still life paintings. Do you actively think about your next move professionally and where you are headed artistically, or take more of a Taosit approach and let the current take you where it may?
EP: That’s a good question! With the new body of work the idea was to make paintings that were “pretty” and speak not of the grotesque but the good looking shit in life, so I looked to the still life.
JN: Interesting. I was wondering if any of them were specific references to other know works, but I think you said mostly they were from random, unknown Google searches?
EP: Yea, I did get some of the images from Googling but I also looked to Rousseau and Braque.
JN: For me the still life paintings were a surprising departure in content, while unmistakably still your own. It made me think back to some painters who all tackled this motif at points in their careers. Lichtenstein and Leger were the first to come to mind. Were you thinking about this dialogue at all?
EP: For sure man, absolutely!
JN: Did you get a chance to check out that massive Lichtenstein still life show that Gagosian had this past year?
EP: That Lichtenstein show was mind blowing. I love how his still lifes are his style but really honest too. I think he wanted them to be pretty on his own terms and that’s where i am coming from too.
JN: With the majority of the show focused on new material, My Inventory is more reminiscent of your work on paper from a few years back.
EP: Word! My Inventory is the first of it’s kind on canvas. I just wanted to see if that type of work could be carried over onto canvas. It was sort of a personal challenge. That body of work and working that way is always fun and rigorous, so I do a few ever year and push them into diferent directions over a long period of time. The one on canvas had killer results. It became more graphic and illuminated in a post-pop kind of way.
JN: From the new paintings, it also struck me as the most personal piece.
EP: Right! But they are all a bit personal at the end of the day. There is no way out of that with me.
JN: Well, not to get too personal, but great record collection. It’s nice to see a fellow vinyl addict! What have you been listening to in the studio lately?
EP: Glad you asked man! I have been into heavy stuff for the last couple years. Off the top of my head, the Melvins, Sleep, Pissed Jeans, Hawkwind, Fela, Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Orange Goblin, Radio Moscow, Ghostface, and Children have been on a lot.
JN: So you grew up in San Antonio and went to college in Austin at the University of Texas, right? Were you in with the punk and indie scene down there?
EP: I think being Texan and being exposed to all that music and that kind of “fuck you, we’re from Texas” attitude had a big impact on me. That mixed with studying with Peter Saul definitely help me find my own voice as an artist.
JN: Right on! On that note, you’re about to have a bit of a homecoming with your first solo museum show. What’s the deal with that?
EP: I met the curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through my gallerist Honor Fraser in L.A. and we hit it off right away. I’m stoked to being doing a show there!
Erik Parker – Endless Anytime runs through December 18 at Honor Fraser, Los Angeles. Focus: Erik Parker opens at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on December 5 and runs through February 6, 2011.
(All images and text © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors)