ARTLOCAL

On Saturday July 26th, NEW INC hosted the inaugural cohort's day for orientation and to meet and greet the participating teams!

The day began with an ice breaker game called Autograph Bingo. You had to collect signatures from different NEW INC members who fitted certain descriptions. For instance, who has a cracked iPhone, who knows how to change a tire, or who has a subscription to Art Forum that they rarely open? It was a fun way to meet everyone! There was a contest to be the first team to get a full row of signatures and the ARTLOCAL team won! Steve won the prized mug.

Following this, we began presentations. Each team performed a three minute presentation, comprising of three slides outlining who they were and what they were doing. This was especially interesting, since we learned all about the NEW INC members and how we could potentially collaborate with them. Presentations lasted three hours, a time span broken up by group activities that helped us get better acquainted with everyone.

We all ate lunch on the New Museum rooftop which has one of the best views of the city. The New Museum is located on Bowery in the Lower East Side, in New York.

Already, there are a couple teams that we are looking to work with and we are super excited about that!

Scottish Artist, Robert Montgomery

ARTLOCAL is very excited to announce that we have been accepted into the New Museum's incubator for art, technology and design! The incubator, NEW INC., is an unprecedented feat for the museum field, with an initiative to "challenge the boundaries and expand the relevance of museum practice in the twenty-first century."

ARTLOCAL was selected into the incubator by a committee and it's director, Julia Kaganskiy. NEW INC. is a not-for-profit initiative that will provide both an educational and professional workspace. NEW INC. calls the centre a community, comprised of more than sixty start-up and creative entrepreneurs working at the intersection of the arts and technology. It's also a special opportunity for collaboration amongst artists, thought leaders or engineers with special guest residencies.

The incubator, NEW INC., is located in the Museum's adjacent building at 231 Bowery, in New York.

EXOBIOTANICA −BOTANICAL SPACE FLIGHT, by Japanese artist Azuma Makoto

"He came to Tokyo in 1997 to make his debut in a rock band with four members. While engaged in the band activities, he started to work as a trader in Ota Market, one of the biggest markets of flowers and ornamental plants in Japan. Becoming increasingly attracted by flowers, he took charge of a flower shop in a supermarket in Azabu-juban in 1999. In 2001, he opened an haute-couture flower shop named JARDINS des FLEURS at GINZA KOMATSU with Shunsuke Shiinoki. After that, 'JARDINS des FLEURS' have moved to Minami Aoyama.

New York artist, Larry Clark. they thought i were but i aren't anymore... at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea. 

"Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Larry Clark that will span his career from 1961 to the present, starting with his earliest portrait of his friend Johnny Bridges. Made with a Rolleiflex camera borrowed from his mother, the portrait is emblematic of all of the work that Clark would go on to make. 

Known primarily for his significant photographic and filmic works, Clark has also created collages for many years and has recently expanded his creative production to the mediums of sculpture and painting. As a fervent collector, he continually mines from his vast accumulation of snapshots, printed material, as well as detritus from his life to form and inform his work, most directly manifest in his collages and sculptures. Throughout the varied executions of his work, the focus has been to describe a character and tell a story. His interests is in kids on the brink of becoming men and women, recording the myriad of beautiful, fucked up, charming, clumsy, dirty things involved in this transition. His work sheds light on these people and shows us how beautiful they are. This exhibition brings together portraits of some of these individuals, executed in all of these different kinds of media and it will be the first time the artist will show his painting to the public. 

Clark’s work has been exhibited and collected by institutions around the world including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst, Germany, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland. A retrospective of Clark's work, Kiss the past hello, was held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the fall of 2010 and Larry Clark a survey exhibition was on view at C/O Berlin in the summer of 2012; this summer the FOAM in Amsterdam will exhibit the complete Tulsa and Teenage Lust series. Also this summer, Clark’s newest feature film The Smell of Us, is set to premiere in Paris in the fall. 

Jeff Koons, Split-Rocker, 2000, stainless steel, soil, geotextile fabric, live flowering plants. Photo by Tom Powel Imaging. At the Rockefeller Centre, New York. June 2014. Presented by Gagosian Gallery. Organized by Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer.

"This summer, Jeff Koons's Split-Rocker makes its New York City debut at Rockefeller Center, to coincide with the opening of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Presented by Gagosian Gallery and organized by Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer, Split-Rocker is a spectacular planted form that towers over 37 feet high and features over 50,000 flowering plants. It was first exhibited at Palais des Papes, Avignon in 2000; and subsequently at Château de Versailles (2008) and Fondation Beyeler (2012). It is also in the collection of the Glenstone private museum in Potomac, Maryland, where it has been on view since June of 2013.

Consistent with Koons’s persistent fascination with dichotomy and the in-between, the inspiration for Split-Rocker came when he decided to split and combine two similar but different toy rockers, a pony belonging to his son and a dinosaur (“Dino”). The slippage or “split” between the different halves of the heads gives an almost Cubist aspect to the composition. As the model was enlarged to the scale of a small house, the split became an opening, a profile, and a light shaft. In contrast to his legendary Puppy of 1992, which was presented by Public Art Fund at Rockefeller Center in the summer of 2000, Split-Rocker suggests the idea of a fantasy shelter. Whereas the singular form of Puppy is closed and sculptural, the combined form of Split-Rocker is architectural and hollow.

"We could not be more excited to bring Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker to Rockefeller Center,” said Tishman Speyer Co-Chief Executive Officers Jerry Speyer and Rob Speyer. “Jeff Koons always dazzles, and we know that Split-Rocker, similar to Puppy, will be remembered for years to come. We are delighted to again work with the Public Art Fund to make world-class art accessible to all New Yorkers and visitors.” “Splitting and recombining two variations on the basic idea of a rocking horse, Jeff’s Split-Rocker connects us to the imaginative playfulness of childhood. At the same time, it allows him to create a formally dynamic and painterly sculpture, using topiary as his medium,” said Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator Nicholas Baume. “The two irregular profiles joined together offer a continuously shifting perspective as we move around the sculpture, which continues to change as its plants flower and grow according to their own cycle of life. Jeff’s Whitney Museum retrospective is the perfect occasion on which to bring this extraordinary public sculpture to New York City and Rockefeller Center.”

"We are thrilled to share Split-Rocker with New York City this summer," said Larry Gagosian. "The presentation of this monumental sculpture at Rockefeller Center, combined with the Whitney Museum retrospective, represents a special moment for Jeff. We could not be happier for him." Split-Rocker evokes a piece of classical topiary work, yet its technical construction is the result of a twentieth century invention, inspired by the small-scale floral sculptures found in certain vernacular festivals. The steel is hidden from sight other than where the disparate sides of the head join, while its vast surfaces are “painted” with many thousands of live flowering plants—begonias, geraniums, petunias, fuchsias, and many more. Its internal structure also supports an extensive irrigation system.

Jeff Koons comments, "I love the dialogue with nature in creating a piece that needs so much control—How many plants should be planted? How will these plants survive?—while at the same time giving up the control. It’s in nature’s hands, even though you try to plan everything to make the plants survive. This sense of giving up control is very beautiful. The balance between control and giving up control reminds us of the polarity of existence.” “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective” opens to the public at the Whitney Museum on June 27 and runs until October 19, 2014.

British artist Bridget Riley, at David Zwirner, organized in collaboration with Karsten Schubert. 

"Featuring paintings and studies selected from all periods of her career, from 1961 to 2014, the show will be installed throughout the three floors of the gallery, making it the artist’s first major survey in London since her 2003 retrospective at Tate Britain.

  “Bridget Riley is undoubtedly one of the world’s most significant artists working today and her influence on present and future generations cannot be underestimated,” says David Zwirner. “I am honoured to be able to show such a definitive selection of her stripe work in my London gallery.”

  Riley’s dedication to the interaction of form and colour has led to a continued exploration of perception. From the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares to create visual experiences that actively engage the viewer, at times triggering optical sensations of vibration and movement. Focusing on her recurrent use of stripes over the past fifty years, the exhibition demonstrates the visual variety she achieves by changes in colour, weight, rhythm, and density. Opening with an iconic black-and-white, horizontal stripe painting from 1961, the show includes her first stripe works in colour from later that decade, as well as a large two-panel diagonal stripe painting, Prairie (2003/1971), and vertical stripe works from the 1980s that demonstrate her “Egyptian” palette. The survey finishes with the artist’s newest body of horizontal stripes, including several paintings that have never been exhibited before. Works on paper related to the paintings are also on view.

  The show presents a select and illuminating overview of Riley’s practice, which first achieved widespread international acclaim with the 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Riley has returned to stripes at crucial moments in her career, demonstrating their significance for her overall engagement with form, colour, and perception. As shown at the gallery, their varied palettes, tempos, and sizes further testify to the importance of nature in the artist’s work, which she understands as “the dynamism of visual forces—an event rather than an appearance”. Inspired by painters of the past including Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse, Riley’s abstract innovations offer a groundbreaking way of looking.

  The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by David Zwirner, which will feature new scholarship by art historian Richard Shiff, an interview from 1978 with Robert Kudielka—one of her foremost critics—and an essay on the artist’s wall paintings by Paul Moorhouse, 20th Century Curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Additionally, the book features archival imagery of Riley and her work since the 1960s, as well as illustrations of her 1987 and 2014 commissions for St Mary’s Hospital in West London.

  Born in London in 1931, Bridget Riley attended Goldsmiths College from 1949 to 1952 and the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. In 1974, she was made a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) and in 1999, appointed the Companion of Honour. In 1968, she won the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. In 2003, the artist was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo. She received the Kaiser Ring of the City of Goslar, Germany in 2009 and the Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen, Germany in 2012.

  Recent exhibitions include Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work (2010-2011), on view at the Sunley Room at the National Gallery, London, featuring recent paintings by the artist alongside Old Master and Impressionist works. Also in London in 2010, the National Portrait Gallery presented Bridget Riley: From Life, an exhibition of Riley’s little-known sketches drawn from life. Other recent international museum shows include Bridget Riley: Flashback, which first went on view at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 2009; Bridget Riley: Rétrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in Paris in 2008; Bridget Riley: Paintings and Drawings 1961-2004 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2004-2005; Bridget Riley: New Work at the Museum Haus Esters and Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany in 2002; and Bridget Riley: Reconnaissance at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York from 2000-2001. Riley’s visual vocabulary is complemented by her numerous books and essays in which she explores concepts pertaining to her own practice as well as the works of several other artists. Riley has also co-curated exhibitions on Paul Klee (Hayward Gallery, 2002) and Piet Mondrian (Tate Gallery, 1996).

PIERRE DORION, at Jack Shainman Gallery, 524 West 24th Street  (June 5 – July 25, 2014)

"Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Pierre Dorion. The show includes works which mark Dorion’s continued engagement with, and exploration of, architectural spaces, especially those of galleries and museums. From a Nicaraguan storefront in the afternoon sun to the shut gate of an art gallery, these paintings play with the tension between representation and abstraction.

  Dorion’s process begins by photographing a myriad of exterior and interior architectural elements that fascinate him. He then selects photos to translate into paintings, and through the use of light and the elimination of detail, creates highly minimal, and frequently monochromatic compositions. In a 2013 Artdaily.orginterview, Dorion explains his recent work as follows: “In the last few years, I’ve worked extensively from photographs that I’ve taken in galleries or museums on various trips and that consequently include certain works or fragments of works. My preference is for formally spare, very minimalist works, in which the boundaries between architecture and the artwork fade away in the painting.” Dorion’s paintings are imbued with an uncanny emptiness that distills fragments of reality, drawing influences from the history of the medium to engage in a conversation on Minimalism and abstraction.

  Dorion’s exploration of Minimalism in this exhibition of new paintings is twofold as he both depicts works by well-known Minimalist artists and renders architectural spaces using the Minimalist tropes of non-expressivity, expansive color fields and gradients, and stark geometry. In his larger works, such as Untitled (BG), 2013,and Dusk IV, 2014, Dorion extracts details from architectural spaces which he has photographed in order to strip them of any particularity. These details become abstracted to such a degree that their ambiguity challenges representation; Untitled (BG) abstracts the doors of a freight elevator into a study in gray color fields. His smaller works depict installations of purely Minimalist work. Untitled (FS), 2014, shows an exhibition space with works by Fred Sandback. More than a mere illustration these paintings blend the architectural minimalism of the exhibition spaces with the Minimalist artworks on display. This creates a composition in which figure-ground distinctions are flattened resulting in a melancholic mysteriousness. By breaking down the boundaries between art and architecture and quoting Minimalist tropes, Dorion’s paintings create a tension between what is apparent at first sight and what is obscured, and between the surface and depth of the work itself.

“Without Hesitation”, Tokyo Japan, 2012.

New York artist, Steve Miller, has teamed up with Brazilian fashion company, Osklen. Together, they have created limited edition pieces for Osklen’s Art Series, a new collaborative design project with Oskar Metsavaht and Eduardo Varela. Images from Miller’s Health of the Planet series have been printed on various t-shirts, sneakers, shorts, and surfboards. Miller's pieces are the first of the Osklen Art Series. These exclusive and limited pieces were introduced in South America in Rio and Sao Paulo, Brazil, last summer, and have now arrived at Osklen’s New York and Miami stores.

Miller’s artistic career is directly tied to science. Miller became particularly fascinated with technology during the birth of the computer age in the 1980’s. During the 1990’s, he discovered how to create art through the computer, and became a pioneer of scientific-based art. Following 1993, Miller adopted photography and used the x-ray machine as a new artistic medium. Today, Miller is creatively combining art, science and fashion.

Miller became fond of Osklen after having been to Brazil in 2007 to photograph his Health of the Planet series, which portrays Amazonian life. Some animals were photographed dead (the school of piranha and stingrays), and some alive, (the snake, birds, turtles and alligator). Miller worked directly with a veterinarian and other professionals to aid him in his endeavour.

The main goal of Miller's series is to imbue a commercial product with a dialogue about the environment and sustainability. By taking photos of the plants and animals that inhabited the rainforest, Miller gave the Amazon a “medical check up” through the apparatus of an X-ray. Miller emphasizes that the Amazon has been made ill through the encroachment of humans on its natural landscape. While some of the animals that Miller photographed could be considered dangerous, they are far more threatened by human destruction of the Amazon. Miller’s goal was to make people aware that “the forests of the Amazon are the lungs of our planet”, and that they are sick due to mass deforestation and pollution. 

Marina Abramović's Diary Series: June 26, 512 Hours, The Serpetine Gallery, London

“In a unique work created for the Serpentine, the internationally acclaimed artist Marina Abramović will perform in the Gallery for the duration of her exhibition:  10am to 6pm, 6 days a week. Creating the simplest of environments in the Gallery spaces, Abramović’s only materials will be herself, the audience and a selection of props that she may or may not use. On arrival, visitors will both literally and metaphorically leave their baggage behind in order to enter the exhibition: bags, jackets, electronic equipment, watches and cameras may not accompany them. The public will become the performing body, participating in the delivery of an unprecedented moment in the history of performance art.

The pared-down nature of this exhibition corresponds to Abramovic´’s interest in the historically well established relationship between art and ‘nothingness’; visual artists including Robert Barry, John Cage, Mary Ellen Carroll, Robert Irwin, Yves Klein, Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono (to name only a very few) have all explored the notion of material absence within their practice. The idea of emptiness – of minimalism, reduction and simplicity – plays an intrinsic role in Abramovic´ ’s own work, and has increasingly led to ‘more and more of less and less’, a longstanding aim that she recorded in her Artist’s Life manifesto of 2009. It is this journey towards immateriality that has led her to this unique moment in her work, where she will commit to an unscripted and improvised performance in the gallery space.

At the end of each day of her performance 512 Hours, Marina Abramović closes the door to visitors and records a summary of the past eight hours. Spoken directly to camera, this eloquent and moving record is a testament to “one of the most difficult things she has ever done.” The short daily films will trace the fluctuations and developments of her performance piece, which begins with an empty space and unlimited possibilities. 

Marina at Midnight launched on Friday 13 June with The Space, a new creative online platform dedicated to new digital art. Daily diaries are released at midnight each night, from until 25 August on www.thespace.org; www.serpentinegalleries.org; www.illy.com;www.mai-hudson.org. The diaries will be available to watch again on all platforms.”

About Abramović: 

Gustavo Ortiz, a London based, Argentinian born artist