Johanna Unzueta, 21 Faucets, 2010, Felt and thread, 150 cm x 300 cm, Courtesy Vogt Gallery, New York

PINTA Art Fair opens this week in London. Although a relatively new fair with six previous editions, PINTA offers a concentration and breadth of Latin American art without rival in London.

This year promises to attract a particularly large crowd as it falls between the Queen’s celebrations and Art Basel Switzerland. Artcards London will be at the fair and keep you updated on the most interesting events.

For the full schedule visit pintaart.com.

Loren Connors, Julien Langendorff, Jim Jarmusch, Hiraku Suzuki (photo: Louie Metzner. courtesy of Opalnest)

Hiraku Suzuki (photo: Louie Metzner)

Photo: Amy Mitten

Hiraku Suzuki (photo: Amy Mitten)

Loren Connors (photo: Amy Mitten)

Julien Langendorff (photo: Amy Mitten)

Hiraku Suzuki (photo: Amy Mitten)

(photo: Amy Mitten)

Helen Homan Wu (Opalnest), Jim Jarmusch, Jozef van Wissum (photo: Amy Mitten)

Printed Matter (photo: Amy Mitten)

Printed Matter (photo: Louie Metzner)

Loren Connors, Helen Homan Wu, Julien Langendorff, Hiraku Suzuki (photo: Amy Mitten)

All photos courtesy of Opalnest

Event date: Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Location: Netil House, 1 Westgate Street, London E8 3RL
Time: 7:00pm – midnight
Organizers:
Sonel Breslav, Editor, Artcards London
Tom Trevatt, Editor, Incognitum Hactenus
Admission: BYOB, £2 suggested donation

The programme includes:
INCOGNITUM HACTENUS presents:
Lions
Simon Clark
Gandt
a/tt(a)c
and a screening of Re-Animator, 1985, dir. Stuart Gordon – based on a ‘Herbert West, Re-Animator’ a short story by H.P. Lovecraft

Incognitum Hactenus is a new quarterly journal featuring writing on art, horror, and philosophy. Conceived as an ongoing investigation into each sphere and its crossovers, the journal publishes new work by leading international scholars, artists, filmmakers, curators, musicians, and designers. With a focused interest in that which finds an affiliation with horrific contemporaneity and the exposure to radical thought, Incognitum Hactenum reveals the twisting of contingency (that which comes from outside) as it produces new monstrosities. We aim to tear asunder the fleshy belly of the established and expected. Editors: Caryn Coleman and Tom Trevatt.

THIS IS TOMORROW
Online Magazine and comprehensive archive of contemporary art based in London. International contributors review exhibitions in London, New York, Venice, Berlin, Paris, LA, and Vienna.

LIME HEADED DOG

ALASDAIR DUNCAN

LAURIE INNES
Spoken/sung monologue from his work in progress; ‘Alan Turing Did Not Die In Vain

Tracey Emin, Artist, London
Jerry Gorovoy, Louise Bourgeois’s longtime assistant, New York
Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Moderator | Ulf Küster, Curator, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

Enjoying the undercover street vibe of the Pheonix Hotel, we headed into the imaginative re-purposing of this Miami-esque hotel to report back on the ArtPadSF experience.

Pool installation

First off, let’s consider the location: the Pheonix hotel was a “pay by the hour” location that was bought by Joie de Vivre Hotels and renovated into a boutique hotel. Made famous for hosting raucous parties and rockstars, this is not the first time a hotel has functioned as an art fair (numerous references were made by visitors to ArtPad’s more extravagant and humid counterpart in Miami), not is it the first time this particular space has presented such an event.  The Pheonix hosted an art fair in 1996, organized by celebrated ex-San Francisco gallerist, Jack Hanley, that included many top-tier and critically exciting galleries. This version lacks it’s predecessors global and critical reach.

Hanley was one of only two galleries based outside the Bay Area to present at this fair, begging the question for locals of whether or not an art fair can be useful if they generally present what was already on offer here. However, the fair does give locals a forum to discover or re-acquaint themselves with a selection of local galleries that often work with emerging artists. Visitors to the preview opening were also made aware of a certain problem in the Bay Area considering the role, funding and circulation of “art”. The event was billed as a benefit for the Black Rock Arts Foundation, the organizer of the annual dust covered ritual of excess and expenditure, Burning Man. Though one must also remember that BRAF funds public projects outside the single week of their main event, such “benefits” (that are ubiquitous throughout the Bay Area) often exist only to raise money for self-professed “eccentrics” and rich hangers-on to party and decorate. This attempt to bridge two of the Bay Area’s art scenes that often compete for attention and public funds  demonstrates that both forms are not fully serving publics outside their own, are not only not in dialogue, but diametrically opposed, and each operate under certain myths of their usefulness.

People’s Gallery

Pushed by the organizers to use the spaces thoughtfully and not present overloaded liquidation sales, few of the exhibitors did so, and even fewer used the systems of display of the hotel itself to determine their choices. Many of the exhibitors treated their room like any other kiosk, a fact made most apparent by a portfolio of photographic prints that presented in situ images of more prominent art fair exhibitor’s displays.

Erin Riley and Ben Baumgartner

There were a few exceptions, however, where the gallerists and artists teased the context of the hotel. Guerrero Gallery, for instance, turned the anonymous hotel suite into almost a teenager’s dorm room: juxtaposing Erin Riley’s woven tapestries of internet-derived pornographic and party-heavy images with a bed outfitted with quilted Heavy Metal comforter and pillows by Ben Baumgartner. Other galleries filled their bathrooms with abject installations, Another notable use of the space was Jack Hanley’s bathroom.

Jack Hanley Gallery

Overall, ArtPad succeeded in slowing the art fair shuffle and allowing for more contact between the viewers and their surroundings. The gallerists themselves were more available creating a enjoyable atmosphere despite the close quarters of the hotel rooms.

Rachel Kaye at Triple Base Gallery

Dina Pugh of Triple Base Gallery and René de Guzman of the Oakalnd Museum of California

Mission and Oakland galleries seemed to be taking advantage of Artpad to show their wares including: Johansson Projects, Krowswork, and Swarm Gallery from Oakland and Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Galeria de le Raza, Triple Base among others from the Mission.

Daniel Tierney at Steven Wolf  Fine Arts

More Steven Wolf Fine Arts

Kimberly Johansson and Matthew Draving of Johansson Projects

Last but not least, the smaller and even Tenderloin and outer Market based (where the Pheonix Hotel resides) galleries made their presence known, like Ever Gold, Park Life, and Unspeakable Projects.

Ever Gold Gallery

Unspeakable Projects

This post was written by Emma Spertus and Post Brothers.

Guy Dill

Popular criticism of art fairs is hardly new, the supermarket like conditions and the favoring of blue chip, easy to sell work over experimental emerging artists. SF Fine Art Fair is no exception.   The exhibition space was adorned with all of the requisite  Picasso, Miro, Lichenstein, Warhol, Stella, and Calder. The environment was for the most part quite conservative. However, there were some gems for the dedicated viewer.

For instance, Cain Schulte Gallery presented the work of Midwestern drawer and printmaker, Justin Quinn, whose drawings recalled the work of conceptual artist, Hanne Darboven.  Quinn’s develops his drawings  by distilling the letter e from passages of Moby Dick, treating the English language’s most ubiquitous letter as a white whale that haunts his image. What results are strings of the single letter arranged in swirling waves that are at once funny and poetic, creating a stream that function as both graphological inscription and phonetic intonation.

Justin Quinn

Another opportunity came toward the end of Fort Mason’s pier from an excerpt of Cream from the Top, originally presented at Performance Art Institute this winter, this selection was a standout to the typical art fair drudgery.  The exhibition highlighted graduates from the Bay Area’s MFA programs, including CCA, SFAI, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, SF State, etc.

Favorites include Dana Hemenway’s Artificial Rocks: A Multimedia Slideshow, a banal slideshow featuring hundreds of artificial rocks, complete with a musical soundtrack by Yanni, which echoed beautifully across the stand from Wafaa Yasin’s work. Wafaa Yasin’s performance featured a bodily conversation between the artist and a rock, invoking both ritual and labor. The artist balanced herself upon the rock, stepped cautiously around it without looking, picked it up, and sat, cradling it. As she performed this series of gestures, a speech and slideshow played considering the Museum of Tolerance in Jeruselum, a controversial museum that has been approved to be built on former Muslim cemetery grounds, containing the graves of many important Islamic saints and scholars. Her deliberation on this topic, where rocks embedded with history are displaced and archoitectural and ideological projections are overlayed nto the body.

Wafaa Yasin

Hilary Wiedemann’s Brightest Light from the Darkest Day played out the shifting relationship of reality and fiction by presenting a solar powered music box powered by the projection of documentary photographs of the sunrise.

Hilary Wiedemann

Since it was preview night for all 3 fairs, we rushed over to artMRKT and the scene shift was palatable.

Charles Linder Gallery

From the noise and periodic glimpses of Bay at the SF Fine Art Fair at Fort Mason, to the quieter more intimate feeling artMRKT in the Concourse Exhibition Center, thanks to the dark-toned carpet that engulfed the space. From a quick read on the room, the crowd seemed hipper and in the know. However, the galleries still walked the line between old and obscure, yet in this second Fair of the night, there seemed more art to chew on.

Eleanor Harwood Gallery had a interesting presence with several younger painters, including the above painting, maybe by Paul Wackers.

This piece caught the eye in its incredible depth, perhaps the most 3-D painting ever.

Mel Blockner

On our way out, I passed Paulson Bott Press, with a lovely grid of Mel Blockner flower prints, which left a sweet note on an otherwise less then underwhelming preview. We made it to SF ArtPAd, but the description will have to await the next post.

This post was written by Emma Spertus and Post Brothers.

Simon Linke Warhol, 2004. Courtesy Mireille Mosler Ltd.

(from the press release)  No one seems to be sure what the decline of modernism’s cultural influence, beginning sometime in the 1950’s and 60’s, has led to. The return of narrative and ornament in the art and architecture of the 1970’s suggested an effort to break with the immediate past, but the privileging of rationalism as a guiding social order evident in the idea of markets finding their perfect equilibrium continues to dominate economic discourse, despite the occasionally irrational results. While architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas seemed to have represented “a new way forward,” the prevalence of a creeping re-modernism found in the ubiquitous Corbusier-like, double-height urban lofts sheathed in glass and filled with mid-century modern furniture confirms the continued appeal of modernism’s aesthetic essentialism.

Simon Linke Urs Fischer, 2008. Courtesy Mireille Mosler Ltd.

In art, the early-modern conflict between non-objective painting and representation reached its peak and waned, as the eventual embrace of pluralism paralleled the development of a global, unregulated, free-market economic system. As pluralism was seen to have trumped ideology, the problem of content became increasingly slippery. With the historical determinism of the modernist project now suspect, its inherent iconoclasm began to look puritanical in the context of mass culture’s iconophilia. The series of reactions to modernist orthodoxy (Conceptualism, Minimal Art, Pop Art, Appropriation, etc.) broke free of the aesthetic cul-de-sac of formalism, but certain aspects of modernist thinking (the primacy of authorship, novelty, the “white cube”) have either lingered on or reasserted themselves within the arts.

Acknowledging the confines of discourse while highlighting its means of representation, PICTURE NO PICTURE hopes to raise questions concerning what can be “said,” within the context of visual art. While the reductive aesthetic of the modernist art object proposed a set of limits to insure its autonomy and purity, much of the work in this exhibition employs a spare aesthetic that highlights the phenomenological experience of the gallery setting, underlining the significance of the art object’s context to its reception.

As consumerism continues to expand, the endless manufacture of image and text produces a kind of baroque static, provoking restlessness rather than comprehension. Connecting through the abstraction of expanding personalized technologies has begun to take precedence over face-to-face exchange, encouraging the development of the subject into what Gordon Matta Clark once referred to as the “passive isolated consumer.” In an era of increased physical disorientation afforded by technological short cuts which alter logical sequencing in time and space, the works in PICTURE NO PICTURE reflect on the limits and conditions of the exhibition space (both literally and metaphorically), while underlying the viewer’s self-awareness as a key aspect in shaping their experience of a work of art.

PICTURE NO PICTURE
April 28 – May 29, 2011

Carriage Trade
62 Walker Street
New York, NY 10013
www.carriagetrade.org

Ann Marshall, Beige, 2011. Courtesy Subliminal Projects

The classical figure has been admired throughout history and mastering the depiction of the human figure has long been considered the cornerstone of artistic practice. To perfect their representation of human anatomy, musculature, and proportion, artists throughout the ages turned to ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. By imitating ancient precedents, the Old Masters of art developed a classical figural type that remained the predominant mode of representation for centuries. Following, the 16th and 17th centuries of the Renaissance took the classical figure to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques. In the present day, these leading contemporary artists have a heightened ability to understand and interpret their subject, while emphasizing the mind-set and methodologies that have guided artists for over five hundred years. Their figures are influenced by characteristics of today- feelings, surroundings, beliefs, and relationships, incorporated with new techniques and mediums, while still holding true the fundamentals of the classical form, thus becoming the New Masters.

The New Masters exhibition focuses on today’s leading contemporary artists and their approach to the classical figure with works by Mary Jane Ansell, Sean Cheetham, Ron English, Benjamin Bryce Kelley, Miles ‘Mac’ MacGregor, Ann Marshall, Stephen Wright, and Jonathan Yeo.

“New Masters” On view May 7, through June 4, 2011

Subliminal Projects

Updates on Ai Wei Wei’s situation on http://freeaiweiwei.org