Vancouver's contemporary art scrapbook
Cindy Sherman keeps reinventing her own image. While her portraits are typically of herself in costumes and make-up, on this new series she adds backgrounds shot separately and the images are all of “grand dames” in over-the-top characterizations. From November 15 to December 23 at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York.
After its first exhibition at the V&A earlier this year the retrospective of this extraordinary photographer, model and surrealist muse traveled to the Jeu de Paume where it can be visited until January 4th. Over 150 photographs from the artist’s original files are shown together for the first time together with drawings and magazines.
The 28th edition of the São Paulo Bienal (until December 6th), curated by Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen, has an entire floor of its beautiful modern building completely empty – “The Void”. It’s an atempt to provoke ideas and make a statement about art (or the lack of it). It is also a way of going around the Fundação Bienal lack of resources while discussing the general crisis in art biennials as major fast-forward art shows. Besides the emptyness, the other two floors show interactive artworks and videos meant to raise discussion about the role of biennials in the era of globalization.
Update: Read this from today’s (Nov 19) The Art Newspaper.
Entertaining and insightful, Collecting Contemporary, by Adam Lindeman is the book you should buy to get in tune with how the international art market works. Made entirely of interviews and divided in chapters dedicated to the main actors in play (the Dealer, the Consultant, the Curator, the Critic) the book is full of updated advice for new collectors or for whoever is interested in contemporary art.
I can think of so many references related to her work, and still it stands out as being fresh and original. Tara Donovan amasses enormous quantities of things – styro foam cups, pencils, scotch tape, paper, toothpicks, pins – and gives them a whole new shape and meaning.
The related names I have in my mind are Brian Jungen, Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Sze, Chris Natrop, Richard Long.
A couple of months ago The New York Times published a very good article about her.
Working Model for Draped Reclining Figure by Henry Moore sold for $1,818,500
Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP
Not as good as recent years, but not exactly bad. The inaugural day of the fall auction season had nice surprises like Malevich’s Suprematist Compostion being sold for $60 million, a record for the artist. The total of the night reached $223.8 million. Read the full article in The New York Times.
