The Brooklyn Museum currently has a show of works by Hernan Bass from the Rubell Family Collection. I got to see this same body of work while visiting the Rubell Collection during Art Basel Miami in 2007. It was a truly "artpup" style of discovery.Going in to the show, I did not know who he was, and what to expect, but came out pleasantly surprised and inspired.
The Miami show was aptly named "Dandies, Pansies and Prudes", that included paintings, sculpture, installation and video, with gay themes that connected historical and literary influences to his personal experience in a contemporary context.
Some of the work had allegorical references to the sea, including tortoise shells and mermaids, most likely to be influenced by his native Miami.
I really enjoyed his work because it was very personal. I got a good glimpse into his world without knowing him. He shared his innermost feelings, his fantasies, desires, fears and his longings in a melancholic style that made it easy to relate to.
Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati is the current stop for the NY-based artist Tara Donovan's retrospective that got started at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. I had seen a couple of the installations shown in this exhibit back in 2007 at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. Here are a few images from that show.
In this installation Donovan created a structure that resembled a moonscape. It looked like an outcropping of organic material that spread across the gallery floor. The material in reality was hardly organic. It was mylar.
Donovan frequently uses every day materials to create immersive environments that inspire awe in the viewer. We kept surveying these "structures" that glimmered with their reflective surfaces.
The second installation in this small exhibit was a wall-based sculpture that resembled a map.
Upon close view the materials revealed themselves as loops of metallic tape. It was unexpected to discover the material, since it defied the overall effect of the installation.
Doug Aitken had a recent exhibition in 2 distinct gallery spaces by 303 in Chelsea. The common theme of the show was the space, or habitat, we live in and our interaction with it.
The first piece was a video installation, called Migration, projected on three billboard size screens that showed wild animals outside of their natural habitat, filmed in roadside motel rooms. The video below is an excerpt from this installation that shows a fox entering a motel room and interacting with the space. Other segments (not shown) were filmed with a buffalo, a tiger, an eagle, a sable (in the bathtub), among others.
It is interesting to watch the animals try to adapt to their surroundings. You feel their frustration and helplessness having been taken out of their natural habitat and being trapped in small quarters. The spare, non-descript furnishings add to the feeling of desolation of the animals that are used to roam the wilderness.
The gallery's other exhibit space nearby had a white circular room with Aitken's futuristic watercolor paintings. The abstract depictions of streetscapes contrasted with the minimal room for an interesting sensory effect.
In the back of the exhibit space there was an illuminated photograph of an urban landscape (LA?) that made up the word "Star". The night time city scape could also be taken for space with distant stars and planets.
This is a mural of a rat painted on the side of a building at Broadway and Howard streets in Soho, NYC. A rat running away with cash, with blood on his hands. A reminder of Wall Street greed that is the cause of the economic collapse. The image is attributed to the famous street graffiti artist Banksy.
I'm reaching into "the archives" to show an exhibit from November 2007,Mexican artist Carlos Morales' show Black Cloud at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Chelsea, New York. The show had an installation of paper moths cut out from black paper covering the gallery walls and ceiling.
It was captivating. The piece plays with dark fantasy and optimism, butterflies taking over your surroundings and leaving you haunted. It is both unsettling and comforting at the same time.
A close-up of the moths is below.
There was also a spooky video, a segment of which i was able to capture on my camera.
Guggenheim Museum in New York had a blockbuster show this Winter/Spring. "I Want to Believe" was a retrospective of Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese artist known for his gun powder paintings. The show had a lot of buzz with reports of long lines that spanned 2 blocks. Much of the hype was because of the installation in the lobby of cars suspended from the museum's ceiling.
The image below depicts Head On, an installation of a pack of wolves leaping through the air in a unified arc towards a glass wall. They collide head on to the wall, which when first exhibited at the Berlin Guggenheim, represented the Berlin Wall, built to the same height and thickness. The installation addresses the tendency of humans that blindly follow an ideology which may lead to their collective downfall.
Click on image to enlarge
If you look closely at the bottom of the image you will notice a couple of tigers that are leaping though the space in pain from an onslaght of arrows. This installation, called Inopportune, is inspired by an old Chinese folk tale in which a hero saves a village by killing a man-eating tiger. The work is more about the tragedy of the tiger, as a victim of violence than the celebration of a heroic feat by a human.
And finally, Reflection, a Gift from Iwaki, is an installation with the wreck of a fishing boat, which was pulled from the water off the coast of Iwoki, in Japan. Cai worked with volunteers to pull boat out of the water and install it. It is filled with broken pieces of white porcelain statuettes of a Buddhist deity.
The images are not as clear and focused as I would have liked them to be. I was dodging museum guards to get good shots. Click on the images for a larger view.
One of the paintings in the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Art Museum (see last post) came from his exhibit in Spring 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in uptown New York. It had a rather long name: Tranquility of the Heart, Torment of the Flesh - Open Wide the Eye of the Heart and Nothing is Invisible.
This exhibit was surprising since the art was not as light-hearted as his previous work. Murakami had several portraits of Daruma, the founder of Zen Buddhism. According to legend, Daruma sat in meditation for nine years, without ever blinking his eyes. During the process his arms and legs lost blood, rotted and fell off. His resilience and determination is of cultural significance in Japan. Here Murakami interprets the legend of Daruma in his own style, fusing tradition with a contemporary sensibility.
The gold background gives the pieces weight and a super sleek effect at the same time. The paintings are rendered in a very refined technique. Note the signature on the upper left corner of the portrait evoking traditional Japanese paintings.
The Gagosian exhibit had the cartoonish smiling lotus flowers, but there was another version painted in the more traditional Japanese technique. Murakami stays on course by mixing high art and popular culture, tradition and contemporary culture, Eastern philosophy with a Western interpretation.
