Anish Kapoor

March 16-October 12, 2010
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents a major solo exhibition devoted to the art of Anish Kapoor, one of the most influential sculptors working today. The exhibition, which opened to enormous acclaim at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in fall 2009, is the first large-scale survey of Kapoor's work to be seen in Spain.

Anish Kapoor rose to prominence in the early 1908s with his explorations of abstract sculptural forms and the use of volume, scale, color, and materiality. Best known for his explorations into the concept of the void, his sculptures, monumental installations, and outdoor public-art projects have expanded the language of Post-Minimalist art. This show features several series that the artist has developed since 1979 using tactile or highly reflective materials: bright, pure pigment, blood-red wax; painted fiberglass; stone; polished stainless steel; and most recently, cement. While materiality and process are central to Kapoor's works, he uses both as a means to go beyond the solidness of what you see to experience a perceptual and symbolic depth beyond. "Material somehow always leads onto something immaterial," the artist states.
    
The exhibition has been organized in close collaboration with the artist, who envisions each gallery as a single experience devoted to one series (the pigment works, the void works, polished stainless steel works, the entropic cement forms), or one large-scale installation. Diverse in material and form, each presentation demonstrates Kapoor's interest in the principle of the "auto-generated"--objects that originate without a trace of the artist's hand, seemingly natural and without preconceived thought. A recent and spectacular installation, Shooting into the Corner (2008-09) presents a canon, triggered by an attendant, that shoots enormous wedges of red wax across the gallery space, transforming the museum into a site of violent explosion and its dramatic accumulations. 

Moet & Chandon sponsored a great show by fashion & celebrity photographer Tom Munro.  Needless to say their very exquisite champagne was flowing like crazy all night long.    Tom's first book, a collection of iconic portraits has partial proceeds going to Raising Malawi and M.E.A.K.

When I saw Malawi I Madonna popped into my head.. and Yes, Madonna was there to show her love.  Justin Timberlake, Dustin Hoffman and a lot of really gorgeous women were in the room.   It was a very nice soiree.   The work is gorgeous, shot on film so u can see the grain and tonality, the duo-tones provocative and the framing superb.  Here is a shot of the lovely and talented Mr. Tom Munro.

Notable and controversial.  Photographer Nobuyoshi Araki is one of Japan's National treasures. His show is up at PRSIM on Sunset (gorgeous space) until May 9. 
  I attended the preview and was treated to a great selection of his nudes much of it shots of his wife, YOKO and other gorgeous muses.   One of my favorite parts of the installation was a wall of chromes from his earlier work.   (see pic)  Araki's work has become synonymous with his signature bondage style poses.   You can always spot an Araki.   This series is called "YOKO, my love". 
Erotic and beautiful, he started doing these in the 50's when no one had the balls to show it.    On a side note, even with the rainy weather there was a great crowd.     Liz Goldwyn, Marisa Tomei and Maria Bello all looked stunning.

Photographer and artist Jack Pierson opens his show  at Regen Projects on March 12.  Pierson has made a name for himself with a body of work that includes photographs, collages, word sculptures, installations, drawings and artists books. He has shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and his works are collected by major museums worldwide.   oh, and he's a cult hero.   
(Regen Press release) Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by New York artist Jack Pierson. Pierson's oeuvre is extraordinary: photography, sculpture, installation, painting, bookmaking and drawing. His subject matter and iconography deals with themes of loss, longing, faded glamour and nostalgia. Working with narratives that are both familiar and removed, Pierson constructs fiction to explore memory. Desire drives the work in whatever shape it takes and that desire is inextricably linked to beauty, conventional or unexpected. Beauty in his work often has a darker side, showing the most intimate moments where beauty becomes tragedy and decadence becomes decay.

I'm totally loving Dutch photographer Jan Dibbets.  His work is up at Gladstone for another week. If you get a chance, check it out.

(press release about his work) Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce our third exhibition with Jan Dibbets. Born in the Netherlands in 1941, Dibbets trained to be a painter, but turned to the photographic medium in the late 1960s. Harnessing the potential of photography to elucidate the conceptual variables of optics, his witty yet rigorous investigations of the elastic synthesis between object and space resulted in acute queries of vision and reality. Dibbets' practice often resulted in richly paradoxical photographs such as his "Perspective Correction" series in which trapezoids drawn on his studio wall became perfect squares through the camera's transformation of three-dimensional space into two-dimensional images. Challenging the myth that the photograph never lies, Dibbets fills the assumed paltriness of the reproduced image with a sense of intellectual wonder assumed to be absent from the unequivocality of both the photographic eye and reality.

For this new body of work entitled "New Horizons," Dibbets returns to the optical structure that has become his hallmark. As Erik Verhagen says in his recent study of Dibbets' oeuvre, "The horizon is not a subject like other subjects, for it exists only through and in relation to our sense of sight." It is objective and subjective, circular and rectilinear, static and mobile. In these photographs, which conjoin different photographs of a landscape and seascape along the line of the horizon, Dibbets channels it as structuring principle, not only determining space and point of view, but also--in a very painterly way--the composition itself. By subordinating the mobility of the camera to the standardization of a straight line, these panoramas create a subtle tension between the seamlessness of the horizon line and the disjunction of land and sea, only further accentuated by the resulting asymmetrical compositions. The new works in this exhibition continue Dibbets' sentiment when he said "In the whole world what is more beautiful than a straight line? And the horizon is a straight line in three dimensions: it's an almost incredible phenomenon."

Jan Dibbets lives and works in Amsterdam. He has had solo exhibitions at Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kunsthalle, Bern; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit; and Fundacion Espai Poblenau, Barcelona; DePont Stichting voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Tilburg; among others. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions worldwide, including "In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art 1960-1976" which was on view this past summer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In February, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris will present a complete retrospective of Dibbets' "Horizon" series from the1970s until today.

"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things." --Jean Cocteau

Some large scale abstracts I'm currently working on.

Went to see Manifest Equality last night.  A terrific event and amazing art show.  Manifest Equality  Up until March 7-Saturday.   ABOUT:  Throughout history artists have lent their creative expression to the ideas and issues that shape life in our communities, our country and our world. The MANIFESTEQUALITY

Gallery gathers together a diverse array of hundreds of the nation's most talented visual artists under one roof to celebrate that role and join with our gay (LGBT) friends, family members and co-workers to demand full and equal rights for all Americans.

The MANIFESTEQUALITY Gallery, issues an inspiring, visual call-to-action, with hundreds of artists motivating public energy toward true reform on a local, state and national level.

MANIFESTEQUALITY will be open to the public, Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 through Sunday, March 7th, 2010 between the hours of 10:00



Photos: Rebecca McQuigg, Jared Harris, Apple Via, Reggie Casagrande

Called The BASE.   This gives new meaning to bringing bums together.    

THE artist Spencer Tunick put out the call - and Sydney answered. More than 5000 volunteers began arriving from 4am, queueing from the Opera House forecourt round to the Museum of Contemporary Art to be part of the American's nude art installation; a crowd so big it spilled on to the Royal Botanic Gardens.  From Sydney Morning Herald

They were willing to risk being late for work, being filmed by television cameras - and worst of all, being spotted by someone they knew - for the honour of being the 2000th buttock cheeks from the left in a Tunick photograph. (photo Nick Mohr)

Following the success of his first book Naked City Arthur Fellig (aka WEEGEE) published his second book  called Weegee's People.  One of my all time favorite photographers.

Leaving the police radio and death scenes behind, Weegee set out to photograph New Yorkers from all walks of life.   Maintaining his in your face flash nocturnal style, he trolls the streets of NYC from high society to park bench habitues.    His subtle eye presents a timeless portrait of the city during the 1940's.  Beaumont Newhall called him a "pictorial satirist of society, both high and low.   When he satirizes it is in the spirit of social criticism. " Incredible images.  Weegee's People was first published in 1946.   This book is now out of print.