You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2010.
Nozkowski installation (Photo: Pace Gallery)
Over the centuries painters have used drawing to prepare for committing their ideas to posterity on canvas. Paper has been a material for sketching, planning and trying out a composition in advance of the main event.
But for an exhibition at the Pace Gallery at 510 West 25th Street in Chelsea that opened this month, the veteran abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski took a different approach. He used drawing as a cool-down exercise rather than a warm-up. The show features 19 pairs of works, each one a painting and a smaller, corresponding work on paper in ink, pencil and gouache.
The drawings are still studies of a kind, but they all reflect back on a just-finished major canvas filled with the artist’s signature squares, triangles and rounded biomorphic forms.
Ted Loos
New York Times
A guard outside the Assembly Building of Chandigarh (Photo: NARINDER NANU/ AFP/GETTY)
When Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned the French architect Le Corbusier to build the city Chandigarh he proclaimed it as the embodiment of a newly independent India “unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future”.
The resulting feat of urban planning has been proclaimed as Corbusier’s masterpiece – a city built from scratch in the plains of Punjab from the street layout to the public buildings. Crucially, such was the attention to detail of the Swiss-born maestro that he also insisted on being responsible for the furniture inside his buildings, commissioning his cousin Pierre Jeanneret to design thousands of pieces of equipment to sit inside their monuments of 1950s minimalist design.
Such is the enduring appeal of Corbusier and everything he touched that Chandigarh, which now has India’s highest per capita income, has become a symbol for a less glamorous feature of the nation it was designed to symbolise. Amid India’s high-speed transformation into a world power, the purpose-built furniture that once filled the city’s chic public spaces is being systematically sold off in the auction rooms of London, New York and Paris.
Cahal Milmo and Andrew Buncombe
The Independent
Basquiat’s untitled mixed-media work, owned by Dennis Hopper. (Christie’s / October 24, 2010)
This year, Los Angeles has lost three of its leading art collectors, as actor Dennis Hopper, gallery director Robert Shapazian and computer pioneer Max Palevsky all died within two months of each other. Now, the city is poised to lose the bulk of their collections as well, as Christie’s is selling some 350 artworks from their estates starting this week.
Expected to bring close to $100 million, these artworks are sure to be dispersed to buyers across the country and beyond. Some of the most prized pieces, slated for Christie’s big contemporary sale Nov. 10, include a 1987 Basquiat painting owned by Hopper, which the auction house estimated will sell for $5 million to $7 million; Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 “Girl in Mirror” from Palevsky, estimated at $3 million to $4 million; and Andy Warhol’s 1962 “Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato)” from Shapazian, estimated at $6 million to $8 million.
In the trade, these kinds of historically important works are called museum pieces. But they have not been bequeathed to Los Angeles museums, which depend heavily on such gifts for their growth.
Jori Finkel
Los Angeles Times
The orange-red bark of a madrone evergreen tree, found on the west coast of North America, peels away on mature wood. Beneath is a smooth, green layer. Cedric Pollet/cedric-pollet.com
Photographer Cedric Pollet travels the world, barking up trees for a living.
Claire O’Neill
NPR
Design for the ‘Cheesegrater’ in City of London. Photograph: PR
Decisions taken by property developers to go ahead with the “Cheesegrater” and the “Walkie Talkie” towers in the City will see London’s skyline transformed in the next few years. The buildings, due to open in 2014, will be among the tallest and the most striking skyscrapers in the capital since Swiss Re’s Gherkin opened in 2004.
British Land, run by former Barclays banker Chris Grigg, said today that it had teamed up with Canada’s Oxford Properties to build the 47-storey Leadenhall Building, nicknamed the Cheesegrater because of its wedge-shaped profile.
It is the second major project in the Square Mile to be given the go-ahead within a week, a sign that confidence is returning to the City property market. Last week rival Land Securities, Britain’s biggest property developer, said it would restart work on a 37-storey building dubbed the Walkie Talkie, reflecting its shape and sloping sides, in nearby Fenchurch Street after signing a £500m deal with Canary Wharf Group. Both towers were put on hold during the credit crunch when the market ground to a halt as banks slashed jobs and cancelled office relocations.
Julia Kollewe
Guardian
A U.S. art studio called Lead Pencil Studio has created a sculpture on the border between the United States and Canada that consists of a blank space in the shape of a billboard, surrounded by tangled metal.
Titled Non-Sign II, the piece was commissioned by the U.S. government. The artists behind it are Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, who’ve won numerous awards for their work over the last decade. The pair carefully twisted metal to give the appearance of a ghost of one of the billboards that populate the area.
Han and Mihalyo told The Stranger that they hope the sculpture will add a bit of awareness to the signage landscape in the border zone, as it flies past the inhabitants of passing cars. It’s located close to Blaine, Washington, if you happen to be in the area and want to investigate further.
The work was funded by the U.S. government’s Art in Architecture program.
Peering into the void: Fiennes inside Kiefer’s complex in 2008
Sophie Fiennes’ documentary on Anselm Kiefer, “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow”, is released in UK cinemas this month after a showcase at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The director spent more than two years filming the artist at work in his complex at Barjac near Avignon in the south of France. Kiefer had invited Fiennes to document his final days at the immense studio-cum-installation, as he prepared to finally abandon the site before moving back to Paris. The title is borrowed from the Biblical story of Lilith, an interest of Kiefer’s, and refers to the fact that the site is now semi-derelict.
Iain Millar
The Art newspaper
“Half Houses” by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, of the firm Elemental. It is one of eleven building projects that transform poor communities in “Small Scale, Big Change,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Photographer: Cristobal Palma/Museum of Modern Art via Bloomberg
In one of Africa’s most remote places, a three-room school rises from a hot, dry plain. The metal roof arches over spidery steel rods and mud-brick walls. It’s stark, gorgeous, simple.
We are looking at hope in the tiny village of Gando, Burkina Faso, West Africa, one of the exhibits in “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement” at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art.
After making good as an architect, the designer returned to build the school his poor village so desperately needed.
At another school in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, fabrics in vibrant blue, red and lavender flutter from the doorways and cover the ceiling. Inspired by local adobe traditions, Bavarian architect Anna Heringer used thick walls to deflect the searing sun. Local residents framed an upper level in lightweight bamboo poles lashed together.
The result is an environment in which any kid would be happy to learn.
James S. Russell
Bloomberg
The artists Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans with the new window.(Kate Milford/Museum at Eldridge Street, Via Associated Press)
Earlier this month the Museum at Eldridge Street unveiled a new stained-glass window designed by the artist Kiki Smith and the architect Deborah Gans for its 1887 synagogue, which re-opened in 2007 after a 20-year restoration.
New York Times
Driving ambition … Norman Foster and his Dymaxion. Photograph: Nigel Young
Richard Buckminster Fuller had a lot of nerve. In the 1930s, the great US inventor secured the first $1,000 he needed to build a giant futuristic car, called the Dymaxion. The socialite who gave him the cash was told: “If I want to use it all to buy ice cream cones, that will be that – and there will be no questions asked.”
Fuller, born in 1895, is best known for his geodesic domes, but his ultimate hope was that the three-wheeled Dymaxion – which looked like a VW camper van crossed with a pinball flipper – would fly, allowing Americans to leave the highway vertically and touch down at lightweight aluminium homes, scattered wherever they fancied by a fleet of Zeppelins.
The Dymaxion was meant to be phase one of a social revolution, fuelled by the latest technology, but only three were ever built. No 1 caught fire and No 3 was turned into scrap; only No 2 survived. It now sits in the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada – or it did until 18 months ago, when the architect Norman Foster decided he wanted to fulfil a dream, and build Dymaxion No 4. So he borrowed No 2 for inspiration.
Jonathan Glancey
Guardian
