artblog international
artblog international internationally artblogging
How To Launch An Art Fair
Back in September, I was solicited over the Internet to exhibit at the Select Art Fair at Miami’s Catalina Hotel. I was, according to the e-vite, the kind of artist that should take advantage of a unique art fair opportunity during Art Basel’s annual Miami art orgy (December 5 – 9, 2012). The pitch: For only $4,800 I would be able to show my work in a hotel room – one of only about 60 – right around the corner from Art Basel Miami. The founders proposed the curious idea that I could sleep in my gallery space! I wrote ... More » »
FIAC 2012 in Paris – art outdoors and the party inside
Like Birnam Wood the FIAC is approaching my door. Thanks to offsite/outdoor installations it is possibe to experience the FIAC further and further afield from the Grand Palais, the pit of a giant art fruit that falls onto Paris and ripens and burst every October. ( I have to wonder, sometimes, if God didn’t ask Adam & Eve not to look at something way back when in the Garden of Eden?). The Parisian outdoors are recolonised as the gardens of Paris become galleries and squares become stages. We aren’t looking at Land Art ( No artist has yet to dig ... More » »
Art in China, Part 2 – Hidden galleries in Hong Kong, factory-produced paintings in Shenzhen and mega-education center in Guangzhou
By Virginia Maksymowicz and Blaise Tobia After ten days in Beijing, we flew to Hong Kong, which we absolutely loved. In many respects—including scale, sheer beauty, wonderful public transportation, fabulous and varied food—it may be the greatest city in the world. But unfortunately, these superlatives don’t apply to its contemporary art scene, which is extremely underdeveloped in view of the city’s financial and mercantile power. Although galleries exist, it was hard to find them. The gallery guide we picked up on the mainland didn’t include Hong Kong and the gallery map we snagged at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre ... More » »
Art in China Part 1 – A visit to galleries and artist studios in Beijing
By Virginia Maksymowicz and Blaise Tobia This trip to China was different in many respects from our first, in 2008: One of us was participating in an exhibition; our travels were entirely self- directed; and half of our trip took place in the huge Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou urban continuum that is home to about 120 million people. (Read Blaise and Virginia’s 2008 post.) The exhibition in which Blaise participated was a show of nine studio faculty members of Drexel’s Art & Art History Department, aptly titled 9 (partly because arabic numbers need no translation in China). It took place at the ... More » »
Letter From London – Soap Tricks, Shark Attacks and Weeping Women
My summer’s last hurrah took place over a long 5-day Eurostar Chunnel weekend in London dotted with a few blockbuster exhibitions, a talk with Patrick Lears, artist and Whitechapel Gallery deputy gallery manager, a touch of urban archeology, and a walk in the park – all washed down with cool pints of British bitter. My itinerary was random: I gravitated towards noisy (Damien Hirst) and whispery (Edvard Munch) exhibitions at The Tate Modern, and the unexpected – The Saatchi Gallery’s New Korean Eye show; a dash of traditional – a day in Kensington Gardens – where Lady Diana lived – ... More » »
Letter From London – An interview with Gloria Zein, on dancing chickens and German art
In 1998 I met the German artist Gloria Zein in Paris. We were on the street near my house in the 14th arrondissement. She handed me a postcard. It was a cross between a BYOA (Bring Your Own Artwork) and dinner at her house in Paris: one had to cut a circle out of her card and insert a “sign of our existence” into it – an assignment with tape, staples or whatever was handy. Since then I have been following Gloria’s career with wonder. In 2002 she asked her male friends to send her photographs from the Internet of their ... More » »
Art in the Dark part 2 – Janice Kerbel’s Kill the Workers! at Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Project Arts Centre, Dublin, is better known as a performance venue than as a visual arts space (I’m doing my best to change this), but this summer, for the first time, the art moved beyond the gallery to occupy the entire building. The exhibition Conjuring for Beginners (through August 12, 2012) includes eight artists, three of whom inhabited Project’s black box performance space which on this occasion required no house lights. I was particularly taken with Janice Kerbel’s Kill the Workers!; for the many of us unfamiliar with theater jargon, her title is the expression used by lighting crews as ... More » »
Art in the Dark part 1: Tino Sehgal’s This Variation at Documenta XIII
There have always been artists who are challenged by working at the edge of visibility. For painters that originally meant night scenes, which are famously difficult, but wonderful when they work. Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings are a twentieth-century example; a more recent one is Martin Creed’s Work No. 227, The Lights Going On And Off (2000), which I loved because it emphasized the essential, but often ignored, necessity of light for all vision. My thoughts on the phenomenon are prompted by work in two different locations that take place in the dark – take place, because both are performative: Tino Sehgal’s ... More » »
documenta 13: On War and Memories
The commissioner of documenta XIII, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, treated the entire ground floor of Kassel’s Fridericianum (a Neoclassical building from 1779, designed as one of the earliest public museums) as her introductory statement to the 300 plus-artist exhibition centered in Kassel, with outposts in Kabul, Alexandria and Banff. When I reached the phrase in the first label …, suggesting a particular mode of proximity by way of the spacially diffused aggregation of elements that also maintain their own singularities, I realized that the reading, at least, would be hard going. To the right, the large but sparely-installed gallery contained three small, bronze ... More » »
Dust Do It – Laurence De Leersnyder at Galerie Laurent Mueller in Paris
Walk into Laurence De Leersnyder’s studio in Saint Denis, the teeming suburb north of Paris, and you’ll think that you have stumbled onto a missile silo workshop. The “missiles” are encased in half-open boxes. Some are lying horizontally while others are upright. They appear to be made of dirt. Though asymmetric and rough surfaced the partially concealed cones are redolent with menace. De Leersnyder has hit a nerve. The French state used to test submarine engines on the site of her studio. About three years ago in these columns I reviewed a female Columbian artist Juliana Cerqueira Leite who had ... More » »
« Previous Page — Next Page »
