Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2015 i ARTnews

Recently the Lebanese businessman Tony Salamé bought a large artwork by John Armleder, creating a problem for himself, or rather, for his curator. If the ten-meter-long painting were to go on view in the inaugural exhibition in Salamé’s new private museum in Beirut, it would use up an awful lot of available wall space. Well, maybe not that much. In late October, Salamé, who, along with his wife, Elham, is a new addition to the ARTnews Top 200, will open a 40,000-square-foot exhibition space for his Aïshti Foundation in Jal el-Dib, a short drive up the Mediterranean coast from downtown Beirut. There he will show a portion of his vast art collection, kicking things off with a show curated by New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni. In a city that…

“Jerusalem is so loaded,” said Itay Mautner, artistic director of the Jerusalem Season of Culture, a multidisciplinary program of events spanning visual arts, music, performance, new media, and food that unfolds across the city each summer—this year from July 27 to September 4. “Here you never just throw a party—it becomes a declaration of the right of the non-religious people to dance on Shabbat night. Anything you see in Jerusalem always has other connotations to it. It’s a burden sometimes. But I feel in my bones that really meaningful and maybe life-changing cultural experiences can happen in Jerusalem.” Since it launched in 2010, the Jerusalem Season of Culture has directly engaged the city as a place of complexity and diversity, beauty and contention. Featuring close to 1,000 artistic happenings at…

A succinct selection of 15 works, this exhibition encapsulated the core issues of Joan Semmel’s painting practice from 1964 to 2014. As feminist art was undergoing waves of change during this period, Semmel’s vibrant and incisive paintings were always ahead of the curve. She has consistently focused on her own body throughout her career, but rather than coming off as narcissistic, her brave works are open to multiple interpretations. As this exhibition made clear, Semmel is, at her core, a painter who has tested the limits of blending abstraction with figuration. In the midst of the sexual revolution, she made her “Sex Paintings,” here represented by a 1971 canvas suggesting the intimacy of oral sex, juxtaposing loose brushwork with dead-accurate perspective. But her true innovation was to shift the entire…

Along with such exhibitions as “Seductive Subversion” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2010 to 2011 and “The World Goes Pop” opening at Tate Modern this fall, “International Pop” aims to expand the canonical definition of Pop as a largely male, largely English and American art movement. Employing a dazzling selection of art from around the world, the show traces the spread of this 1960s highart/mass-culture movement to Japan, Latin America, and Eastern and Western Europe. The exhibition is most successful in rooms devoted to individual nations, where the assembled works evoke regional art-historical moments. A defining text for Brazilian artists from the ’60s and ’70s was Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago” (Cannibalist Manifesto), which advocated the appropriation and repurposing of European culture as a way to…

At first sight, the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini in Venice appears to be in mourning. Dark flags hang at the front of the Mussolini-era structure, right below a tall neon sign that reads, “blues blood bruise.” They are the works, respectively, of Oscar Murillo and Glenn Ligon, and they firmly establish the chastening concerns, and tone, of the 56th Venice Biennale’s central exhibition, “All the World’s Futures.” The Biennale, which opened in May and runs through November 22, was curated by Okwui Enwezor, the serious-minded director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Enwezor, true to form, has organized a show that unflinchingly examines violence and conflict—pain, in a word. Its artworks, by about 140 artists and groups, focus on political and economic struggles, war, and the heavy psychic,…

Past, present, and parallel time coexisted in this group exhibition, which touched on still moments in hurried lives. Curated by Christina Li, the show presented contemplative works in a range of mediums by nine international artists. In Job Koelewijn’s installation piece Relief 2: 25 March 2009–6 Jan 2012 (2012), tape recordings of the artist reading aloud (an activity to which he devotes exactly 45 minutes each day) are stacked on copies of the corresponding books. For their sitespecific performance project, Elmgreen & Dragset invited five local artists to compose a daily Hong Kong diary. Jewyo Rhii’s Cooling System (2010–13), a fan blowing air onto a slowly melting block of ice, memorializes a long, hot summer working in an un-air-conditioned Itaewon studio. And Moyra Davey’s Subway Writers (2011), 25 photographs that…

TARA DONOVAN PARRISH ART MUSEUM, WATER MILL, NEW YORK JULY 4 - OCTOBER 18 As part of the museum’s Platform program, which invites a single artist per year to install a long-term project on the grounds of the Parrish, Tara Donovan will present some of her large-scale sculptures. These are often made from found materials, like straws and index cards, as well as the occasional Slinky. What better way to celebrate American independence? “SOUNDSCAPES” NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON JULY 8 - SEPTEMBER 6 This show invites musicians and artists to pick a work from the National Gallery collection and compose a new piece of music about it. There are some pretty serious people involved, ranging from composer Nico Muhly, pop star Jamie xx, and sound-art duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures…

We go to press on the 25th anniversary edition of our “200 Top Collectors” feature at a historic moment in the art market, marked by the unprecedented sale of Picasso’s 1955 painting Les Femmes d’Alger for $179 million in Christie’s May auction “Looking Forward to the Past.” It is the single most expensive artwork ever to sell at auction. Notably, over the course of just two weeks of sales in New York in May, Christie’s and Sotheby’s brought in a staggering $2.5 billion. A surge in demand has pushed the art market into uncharted territory. Chinese collectors are increasingly formidable, with Wang Zhongjun (a new addition to the Top 200) picking up a Picasso for $30 million and Wang Jianlin (also on the list) buying a Monet for $20.4 million.…

In 1959, Frank Stella’s The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II, widely regarded today as one of the most important of his “Black Paintings,” was acquired for the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. The artist was only 23 years old. That same year, the painting had been included in MoMA’s “Sixteen Americans” exhibition, organized by Dorothy Miller, Alfred Barr’s assistant curator and one of the museum’s most forwardthinking minds. (Owing to Barr’s own foresight, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, had been purchased for the museum in the late 1930s.) Stella’s famous statement, “What you see is what you see,” may likely be traced to this major debut, because what most critics saw at the time was not much at all. Stella’s paintings were referred to as “unspeakably boring,”…

Joyce Kozloff—early feminist Pattern and Decoration pioneer and postmodern cartographer —continues to push her two-pronged style to its limits, coming full circle in works that are as personal as they are political, referring to her travels and her ancestry. In these two shows, she took her vibrant geometric patterning to hallucinatory levels and her map-works to serendipitous political ends. “Maps + Patterns,” at DC Moore, included a series of intensely decorated, textured, and collaged paintings, extending Kozloff ’s well-known subversions of the modern grid to the point of horror vacui, stressing everything modernists once abhorred. If I Were a Botanist: The Journey (2014), a multipanel work some 30 feet wide, is a dizzying kaleidoscopic retinal circus of interlocking mathematical designs that relate to quilting patterns (log cabin, pinwheel, crazy quilt),…

“The mediocrity of beauty” seems an unlikely subject for Luis Camnitzer, a German-born Uruguayan pioneer of Conceptual art. His practice has always been oriented toward the social, political, and educational aspects of art, and also toward words and the language of “a political art oblivious to propaganda.” The works in this show, dating from 1968 to 2015, argued for elegance versus beauty. A room-size cage of black vinyl tape trapped viewers with its words: “All lines are prisons.” “Please look away, you are invading my territory.” Visitors could escape the cage and confront a composite digital video titled Jane Doe (2012/15), which fuses photographs of women culled from police, legal, and newspaper reports into a blankly beautiful symmetrical face, or peruse the graphic work Seven Virtues (2014), with the cardinal…

Each object in this appealing, understated rebus of a show, “I Am No Longer Obsessed with Winning,” was part of Italian-born artist Carlo Ferraris’s exploration of a New York state of mind. Seen from a European slant, including an exhibition title that un-Americanly renounces winning, the pieces demonstrated Ferraris’s particular brand of reverberant sly humor and critique. There was an upright slowly spinning tire going nowhere, with the word “chump” painted on it— not exactly, it would seem, celebrating the road trip, that national rite of passage. A clear glass dome enshrining scattered cutouts of the word “hallelujah” in optimistic sky blue made an ironic relic out of joy, while another transparent dome housed a pencil with a tip honed to a lethal mightier-than-a-sword point. Suspended in the middle of…

For his first solo exhibition in the United States in ten years, Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles took on socioeconomic issues in the most poetic fashion, making works that were intended to be experienced as much as seen. Amerikkka (1991/2013) looks at gun violence on both sides of the border between North and South America by literally sandwiching participants between 31,695 hollow golden bullets and 20,050 white wooden eggs. Audiences were invited to remove their shoes and step on the carpet of eggs, only to be confronted by the canopy of bullets hanging from the ceiling at a 45-degree angle. The effect was visceral, like “walking on eggshells.” Likewise, Aquaurum (2015) addresses a specific social problem using modest means. Two glasses sit on a pedestal, one filled with liquid gold,…

On Valentine’s Day of this year, the NSA’s official Twitter account sent out the Orwellian love note, “No, we don’t listen to your pillow talk.” The inference being, of course, that they do listen to other things. In this show of new work, Trevor Paglen drew attention to the ways in which governments eavesdrop on their citizens. Paglen has made a name for himself revealing the mechanisms of state-sponsored surveillance; he recently contributed footage to Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s 2014 documentary about former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden. Here the artist—who holds a Ph.D. in geography—focused on the real-world places and things behind such abstract terms as “cyberspace.” In the diptych NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Mastic Beach, New York, United States (2014), for example, Paglen exposes the physical…

Over the course of five decades, the American artist Channa Horwitz (1932–2013) produced a body of primarily graphic work that evades stylistic categories. While employing the seriality and repetition associated with Minimalism, her drawings are, at the same time, lush, intimate, and idiosyncratic. Trained as a painter at Cal State Northridge, Horwitz dropped out of school in the mid-1960s. It was then that she devised her first mathematically based compositions, working on index cards before adopting graph paper as her primary support. This became the ground for the systematized arrangements of geometric shapes that would occupy her for the rest of her career. “Counting in Eight, Moving by Color,” the most comprehensive retrospective of Horwitz’s art to date, presented the gamut of her production, from early diagrams of the fictional…

In 1975, Elaine de Kooning bought a modest house at 55 Alewive Brook Road in East Hampton, New York. The town had long served as an artist colony; Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner produced some of their bestknown works there and it was a productive retreat for artists including Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning, Elaine’s husband. The house is a classic example of mid-century architecture—polygonal, glass-window plated, retro-futuristic—set in a woodsy area. The nearby town boasts both quaint, peeling little general stores and a Lilly Pulitzer outpost. “There’s nothing that compares to the light here, because there’s water on both sides,” said Chris Byrne, owner and cofounder of the Dallas Art Fair, who bought the Elaine de Kooning house in 2010. “I think that’s why the postwar…

A handful of collectors have been on the ARTnews Top 200 from the very beginning, in 1990. They are, as one dealer likes to put it, the “hardy perennials,” the ones that keep sprouting up year after year to acquire works, even—you might say, especially—in the depths of a recession. Billionaire financier and philanthropist Eli Broad is one of these. There he was at Sotheby’s in the dismal fall of 2008, snapping up pieces by Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, and Robert Rauschenberg, dropping $8 million in total and telling Carol Vogel of the New York Times he thought of the auction as a “half-price sale.” When Broad, 81, appeared on our very first list, he had already been collecting for around 15 years. He had started his art…

Those who follow the art world and the art market tend to have a set picture of a collector: he or she is someone established in his or her career, with enough interest in the plastic arts (or their performance as an alternative asset class) that he or she is willing to shell out ungodly sums of money for art by whoever is of the moment. But there is another category of collector: artists themselves. This group is largely immune to trends, acquires objects for less money than you’d expect, and, most importantly, has unrivaled enthusiasm for the work. The most common way for artists to collect is through trades. Almost all artists, even those who don’t engage more seriously in collecting, take part in trades, which involve two artists…

This exhibition not only showed the cinematographer’s essential role in capturing and executing a director’s vision, but also, in the case of Gabriel Figueroa, revealed the cinematographer as an artist in his own right—one who was able to translate the work of the greats of post-revolutionary Mexico into scenes and images accessible to the masses within as well as outside of Mexico. Equally important, it showed how Figueroa was able to inspire other artists. It was in this regard that the exhibition excelled; it examined the exchange of ideas between the visual and cinematic arts—and Figueroa’s role in it—that helped create and define Mexico’s national identity at a crucial time. The show began in a gallery where six projectors played highlights from Figueroa’s career in a presentation that mirrored the…

Meticulously crafted clouds bursting with vintage rabbit heads and piles of handblown pink-glass lemons worked to convey Erica Rosenfeld’s concept of memory and how we use it to make up stories about our past and future. The show, “Like Remembering a Dream the Day After…,” included several installations of imposing clouds constructed from enameled eggshell-like pieces of glass hinged together with pins. The works generated a feeling of uneasiness, with vaguely familiar images that tugged at our own associations, lodged in the back of our minds. Rabbit Cloud (2014), created from blown and carved black glass of various sizes, spread across two walls and exuded the foreboding air of a thunderstorm about to let loose. But instead of rain, it was the artist’s collection of tiny paper rabbit heads that…

With enough vulgarity and explicitness to make a graffiti artist blush, Judith Bernstein lays out the weapons in the war between the sexes. Over the past four decades, Bernstein has developed an iconography of sexual organs, which she affectionately calls “cunts” and “cocks.” She turns these graphic images into characters, playing out the eternal conflict between winners (the cunts) and losers (the pricks). The largest painting here, Birth of the Universe/Cuntface (2015), was a ferocious composition with expressionistic strokes of maroon and orange against a backdrop of fluorescent yellow. An enormous vagina, with eyes and teeth, screams out at a crouching limp penis. In an unambiguous example of sexual role reversal, it is the female character that is strongest, with the male a cowering wimp. Bernstein defies assumptions about gender-based…

It is hard to imagine a better setting for the plainspoken work of the African American painter Horace Pippin (1888–1946) than the Brandywine River Museum’s converted 19th-century mill building, located only eight miles from Pippin’s birthplace in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Many of the paintings in this retrospective exhibition—which presented 60-plus canvases, over half of the artist’s total output—are scenes of life there. The show’s title, “The Way I See It,” derives from a statement Pippin once made about his work: “I paint it exactly the way it is and exactly the way I see it.” A selftaught artist, Pippin began painting as a way to exorcise the horrors of WWI, in which he fought and was wounded (he worked by holding his crippled right arm steady with his left). The…