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Sprüeth Magers Gallery in London presents a retrospective of Barbara Kruger’s early works, now on display through January 23rd.  In this rare opportunity to see this portion of her collection, one will note the raw and less yielded approach in these pieces than in her later more refined works.

Kruger’s haunting and exposed imagery is juxtaposed with blaring statements of text relative to the political injustice of the world. All wording shows her simplistically fantastic use of Futura type. They note her distaste for consumerism and mass media with such phrases as “Our Prices are Insane!” and “Who is Beyond the Law?” speaking to us in clichés but saying much more.

Another central theme to her works is the question of power and the identity of those who dictate justice. As seen in “Untitled (You Are a Very Special Person)” the bejeweled crown symbolizes authority while the words speak of subordinate mockery. To quote Kruger, “I’m an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.” 

link: Art Observed

 

Mats Gustafson’s Landscapes and Swans

 

Since the late 1970s, Mats Gustafson’s fashion illustrations have decorated the pages of magazines such as Interview, The New Yorker, and Vogue, among others. But by 1997, the artist began shifting his focus to the natural world, starting a series of pastel landscape studies. A couple of years later, Gustafson began drawing swans in the same minimalist style that had defined his work in the fashion industry. “It’d been an ongoing switch in my career—focusing on nature—but it was funny, because I picked the most fashionable parts of nature,” Gustafson said. “The swan is very much the supermodel among birds, and they’re very elegant. I was still looking for beautiful lines, but just in the natural world.”

The gallery John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, in New York City, is now showing “Mats Gustafson: Swan,” a collection of the illustrator’s early landscape and swan studies, as well as recent pieces and a digital wall installation. “I wanted to reduce, simplify, and get to the essence of things,” Gustafson said of the stark but romantic works. Herewith, some images from the exhibition, which is on display until January 23. 

via: Vanity Fair

 

"Patti Smith: Dream of Life"

"Collection of Collections"

From the moment you step into Partners & Spade’s shop you’ll know that you’re not in the typical retail environment. The space is as much to see as it is to buy, combining aspects of both a gallery and store. Though the idea of art and commerce isn’t especially new, Partners & Spade has successfully executed something fresh in the highly competitive field of Manhattan retail.

Every detail of the store is an opportunity for an unexpected touch of humor, including a comical cluster of security cameras that greets you at the door, or the impulse items only reachable by a 10 foot ladder. 

The shop is also a collection of collections that invites gallery owners, designers, artists, and creatives to share their work and collections, giving them a space to showcase items that they otherwise would not have an opportunity for. Several of our favorites include Mike Mills and Maira Kalman’s contributions to the store. Mills based his collection on memories, in particular 1971. A year in which he believes is the first year of his real memories. Stringing together magazine cut outs as well as illustrations of people and items from that year. Pieces from his collection can be bought as well as bartered. You’ll need to talk to the staff to find out which ones those are. Maira Kalman invited Rivka Schoenfeld an artist who’s contributed to M&Co in the past. Schoenfeld hand made a limited edition of wool hats all accompanied with a tote with each individually numbered. The hats are beautiful as well as endearing given that they are all hand made.

Partners & Spade will include a rotating list of contributors from the high and low. Elevating the mundane with objects as simple as a stapler and beautifying it to showcasing rare books and photographs that would sit comfortably behind a glass case at the Met. We can’t divulge everything here you’ll need to go and experience the shop yourself. 

via: The Scout

"Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008"

Italian artists may be credited with such accomplishments as linear perspective (via Brunelleschi), chiaroscuro (via Caravaggio), and, pretty much every other formal tool comprising Western art. But their more recent creative triumphs have received notably less fanfare, so to speak—an oversight that Italian curator Francesco Bonami seeks to correct with his new exhibition, Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008.

Italics debuted this summer at the Venice Biennale to much criticism from the locals, and the show recently mounted its first and only U.S. stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it will remain on view through February 14, 2010.

via: The New Italian Renaissance -The Daily Beast

Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Letters

 Van Gogh's letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs ("Starry Night"), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.

Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest.

via: guardian.co.uk

 

Small Oils on Panel 1969-1973 by Philip Guston

 

Although the Mckee Gallery has mounted many Guston shows over the last 35 years, it has never exhibited the small oil panels together as a group. The early figurative acrylic panels were begun in 1968, but the date of the first smaller oils is undetermined. The dated oil panels begin in 1969 and the last ones in 1973. Many are undated. 

These small oils, ranging in size from 9 x 10 to 12 x 16 inches, have always been special. Their diminutive size does not diminish their pictorial strength, whether as complex compositions of hooded figures in conversation, studio interiors, still-lifes or as paintings of single objects, such as a green shade, a cup, a nail or an umbrella. They are not studies or fragments of larger works. Guston painted these small oils for a period of 5 years, while going through the first hooded figure series and the Roma period, and then he stopped. They have a unity to them that belies the span of time during which they were done. The panels are all very painterly, not flat, and exude a care and intensity of focus that convey the painter’s passion in making them.

via: nyartbeat 

 

Hockney's iPhone Drawings

Lawrence Weschler, whose piece "David Hockney's iPhone Passion" appears in the New York Review of Books October 22, 2009 issue, discusses the new drawings that David Hockney has been making with the Brushes application on his iPhone. In a related podcast, Weschler talks about Hockney's other recent work—including a series of large-scale paintings that will be on view at Pace Wildenstein this fall—and his relationship to technology. 

 
 

One Piece Turns Three!

 

 

“I alter material by organizing it unchanged. Each work is an organized area of identical elements. Neither successive nor additive, there is no result or sum.” – Peter Roehr

 

When the Frankfurt artist Peter Roehr died in 1968 at the young age of 23, he left behind several hundreds of works in which he pursued exclusively the idea of serial repetition. From found commonplace materials he created ever new montages of photographs, text, typography, objects, sound, and film probing the concept of redundancy. 

Roehr abstained from both making a statement and sticking to an individual style. His formal repertory is deliberately reduced to the selection of an object, the definition of the number of its repetitions, and their arrangement. The element used is still recognizable, although it becomes absorbed in the series, so that the original form and color scheme are subjected to a potentiating effect.

 Last year, the Städelsche Museums-Verein was able to acquire the artist’s ten Schwarze Tafeln (Black Panels) for the museum, a central work in which the method of a non-narrative serial arrangement of identical objects culminates.

Now that four decades have lapsed, the commonplace nature of Roehr’s works pushes to the fore even more vehemently. They become amazingly enhanced and turn into narrative formulations oscillating between ready-made and seriality, pop and minimal art, everyday life and abstraction. 

The exhibition Peter Roehr illustrates that Roehr’s strict formalism is much more complex and eloquent than it seems to be at first glance.

link: Städel Museum