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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

 

"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

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. 

 
 

Vintage Posting

Original Pekarek's Tee

Valentin Zietara

 link: International Poster Center 

"Precious"

The movie Precious is the story of an overweight and abused Harlem single mother fighting to survive. The film came out of the Sundance Film Festival this year with the Audience and Grand Jury prizes, as well as Oprah Winfrey as a supporter.

Director Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer, The Woodsman, Monster's Ball) talks us through his journey.

Daniels reveals what attracted him to Precious, his preference for difficult subject matter, feeling an outsider in Hollywood and his conviction that there is a little bit of Precious in all of us. 

He also discusses lead actress Gabourey Sidibe, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey's involvement in the film, the role of music, how the film's fantasy, humor and soundtrack help balance the harrowing elements, and his desire that African Americans not to be afraid of this film.

Listen here: The Treatment

 Poster by Ignition.

Get a Move On

 If you want to be moved and you're visiting or live in New York, I suggest you spend some kinetic time tomorrow at "Moving Pictures: A Symposium of Illustration and Motion." Moderator and organizer Lauren Redniss reveals a history of blind spots; Jody Rosen unveils “The Knowledge” of London taxi drivers (the "it" that every London cabbie must know); Joel Smith, a Saul Steinberg scholar, maps the artist's mind; NYPL artist-in-residence Richard McGuire screens the film Fear(s) of the Dark .

The event is FREE and open to the public at The New School Jazz Performance Space Arnhold Hall. It's tomorrow, November 11, 2009, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., at 55 West 13th Street, 5th floor, New York City. 

via: The Daily Heller

"Adventures of Prince Achmed"

If you ask the average person what the first feature-length animated film was, just about everyone will answer Walt Disney's "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs". But Disney's film wasn't the first animated feature by a longshot. Arguably, that honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed". 

In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project... a feature length silhouette puppet film based on "The One Thousand and One Nights". She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s. 

On Nov. 11 and 15 the artist Kara Walker will introduce one of the earliest feature-length animated films, Lotte Reiniger’s “Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1926), as restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum.

"New York by Line: From Broadway to the Battery"

In 1967, a German illustrator going by the single name Robinson published a collection of pen-and-ink drawings called New York. Like so many non-natives before and after him—Hart Crane, E.B. White, Tom Wolfe—Robinson, whose given name was Werner Kruse, was able to see the city with uncommon clarity, and a single page of his book contains more detail than most of us process in a day.

Revealed in a new edition from Universe Publishing—New York: Line by Line, From Broadway to the Battery—the drawings most obviously evoke Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker work, particularly when Robinson’s whimsical skeins of pedestrians march across our streets. But Steinberg was a fabulist, creating a city of swooping giant calligraphies and anthropomorphic traffic. Robinson, by contrast, was giving us an ultracrisp experience of the overwhelming muchness of New York. His buildings are scrupulously accurate, down to the tiny tripartite cornices on the brownstones. The zigzaggy edges of the city mass and pile up until they practically spring out of the binding.

via: "Drawn to New York", New York Magazine

"Fascist Fascination"

"Fashion at the Time of Fascism," out later this month from Damiani, struck me right away. Its pages are a collage of women framed in soft focus, elegantly attired and wistfully posed, all cigarettes and silhouettes. The refined furs and extravagant draperies are enough to make the glancing reader nostalgic for the reign of Mussolini. 

via: "The Book Bench" The New Yorker Magazine