Left: Calvin Klein creative director Francisco Costa with Penelope Cruz. (Photo: Andreas Branch/Patrick McMullan) Right: Artist Ruby Neri, dealer David Kordansky, and artist Kathryn Andrews.
LOOMING OVER SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD like a slab of radioactive ice, the Pacific Design Center—with its ambient elevator music, dropped ceilings, and corporate-kitsch design—is a bewildering environment for displaying art. The complex principally houses high-end home-furnishings vendors, but with many tenants sucked down the housing-market drain, the (presumably affordable) vacant real estate hosted Art Los Angeles Contemporary last weekend. (One darkened showroom was locked and filled, conspicuously, with rolled-up rugs.) Fifty-five galleries, more than half from Los Angeles but several from Europe, tried to make the best of the weirdly gleaming bazaar. Exhibiting dealer Gavin Brown called it a “recession art fair.” We’ve tried piers, tents, hotels, and convention centers—why not this?
While I never imagined I’d see a Picabia for sale in a shopping mall (as I did at Patrick Painter), the Thursday-night preview proved pleasant enough. People were relaxed, at ease—maybe a little bored. Although the initially sparse and mostly local crowd—“old California collectors,” by most accounts—got busier (and, to the annoyance of most dealers, drunker) as the night progressed, nobody was buying much, but nobody expected anyone to. “It’s low pressure,” Peres Projects’ Richard Lidinsky said. “Not like a real art fair.” The scene at 1301PE was as congenial as a backyard barbecue: Artist Mungo Thompson, his month-old son Emit strapped to his chest in a Baby Björn, made small talk among friends near diagrammatic crayon drawings by his wife, Kerry Tribe. At David Kordansky’s booth, the dealer had another drink and pontificated about the language of criticism. “I’m waiting for something completely new,” he said. Some pieces gained traction from the setting—Gustavo Artigas’s invitation to vote for the demolition of a local building (at LAXART), for example, or Matias Faldbakken’s crinkled and taped abstractions (at Standard (Oslo)) felt fitting amid the expanse of teal carpet.
Left: Artist Mungo Thompson, Emit, and artist Kerry Tribe. Right: LAND cofounder Shamim Momin.
Art Los Angeles Contemporary is a new fair directed by Tim Fleming, who defected from Michael Cohen’s five-year-old—now “resting”—Art LA. Some gallery higher-ups hoped the fair’s novelty would generate a positive buzz (that would, presumably, expand beyond buzz into sales), but many others didn’t quite get the point. By the vernissage’s end, Art LA Contemporary’s unique angle, its hook for the global art-fair circuit, still seemed unclear.
At around 9 PM, however, a raison d’être of sorts began surfacing across the street at a reception for the Calvin Klein Collection and Shamim Momin’s Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), a classy if over-the-top affair that promised, and delivered, fame: As Penelope Cruz and Kate Bosworth (and Neville Wakefield) walked a red carpet to the glare of paparazzi flash, one glimpsed—at least for a moment—the worlds of celebrity, fashion, and art intersecting with smooth, choreographed precision. Marx Foxx’s Rodney Hill pointed out Bosworth by the bar. I spoke with dealer Mihai Nicodim about Cluj. Trash cans overflowed with empty bottles of Veuve Clicquot, and the festivities continued on the venue’s Astroturf-covered rooftop parking lot, where women in ball gowns waited in Porta-Potty lines. Under the clear sky, I chatted with LAXART director Lauri Firstenberg, artists Kamrooz Aram and Mark Verabioff, and the New Museum’s Benjamin Godsill, while marveling at the luster in the cool desert night.
Left: Artist Jennifer West and dealer Marc Foxx. Right: A view of Anthony Pearson's house.
The following evening, after a day at Hollywood galleries and a restaging of works at the old Ferus gallery space (the crowded room saw Anjelica Huston; curator Paul Schimmel; and artists Larry Bell, Ed Moses, and a bronzed Llyn Foulkes out for the occasion) the evening’s parties began—and ended—in houses designed by Austrian modernist Rudolph Schindler. The first at the architect’s sleek, diminutive, and newly renovated 1936 Leland-Fitzpatrick house, where José León Cerrillo staged a “situation” to “activate the space” (a staid cocktail party). Eighth Veil’s Kane Austin and Nicole Katz and artist Stanya Kahn were there. Artist Piero Golia told me about his problems with Le Corbusier—“so I have a real problem with Schindler,” he went on, his drink threatening the pristine carpet as it teetered in his cup. The final party of the night took place at the architect’s much larger 1934 Buck House for Country Club Projects, where a performance by Gabriel Loebell—for which the guests were corralled outside to watch a bathrobe-clad man read J. D. Salinger through the window—had already ended and wine was freely spilled.
In the interim, I attended a small gathering at artist Anthony Pearson’s home (designed by Escher GuneWardena Architects, the firm responsible for Blum & Poe’s gargantuan new space), bringing a moment of calm. Located on a nondescript suburban street, the house’s unassuming postwar-bungalow facade belies the dramatic interior—a gradually expanding space that terminates in a vast open aperture roughly the scale and proportions of a cinema screen. The iridescent Los Angeles grid appeared like an image, while guests (dealers Eivind Furnesvik and Lisa Cooley and writer Kate Wolf, among others) talked quietly in the dark, mesmerizing room.
Back at the Pacific Design Center the next afternoon, X-TRA’s “1 IMAGE 1 MINUTE” event drew a dense, lively crowd to watch some fifty critics, curators, and artists each discuss an image of their choosing for sixty seconds. Approaches were all over the map, with one eloquent and devastating entry by artist Kianga Ford—in which she talked about discovering a news image of the earthquake that depicted her dead cousin—casting a pall over the others, even Orange County Museum of Art director Karen Moss’s brilliant rhyming-and-snapping exposition of a Martin Kersels photograph.
That evening I managed to miss both the Hammer’s Rachel Whiteread opening and gallerist-collector Shirley Morales’s house party honoring curator Franklin Sirmans’s LACMA appointment. But I did run into Morales later at Dinner House M, where a late-night/early-morning party for Klosterfelde and Redling Fine Art had packed the seedy after-hours disco. She was joined by artists Johan Grimonprez and Aaron GM, as well as Kalup Linzy, who had performed one of his popular drag-in-dishabille numbers at her fete. Among the wispy guests lounging on black leather couches, I saw artists Walead Beshty and Leigh Ledare, and the ubiquitous Momin (in a reflective dress) framed by the walls of ivy, mirror, and stone veneer. A few times the venue’s eccentric, spiky-haired hostess cut the audio and instructed everyone to leave, but that was surely just a ruse to clear out the room, as the music kept starting up again.
— Lloyd Wise
Left: Dealer Larry Gagosian and Jessye Norman. Right: Artists Rob Pruitt and Richard Serra. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
THE RECESSION has spurred the mainstream media to produce more stories about the rich. First there were reports that people with money were spending more furtively. Then came word that they had thrown off their shame and were back to buying––art, in particular. This was reassuring. If the rich had to suffer like the rest of us, who would buy us the drinks in which to drown our sorrows? As long as the haves have discretionary income, it can trickle down to the have-nots.
On Friday night in Chelsea, more than two million dollars of it did. The liberated money came through the doors of the Gagosian Gallery on West Twenty-first Street, as it so often does. Only this time, as Sotheby’s chief auctioneer Tobias Meyer put it, there was no house commission. The four hundred swells gathered for the evening were bidding on artworks donated to benefit the Partnership for the Homeless, an idea generated by longtime supporters Richard and Clara Serra.
Serra did not just cochair the event. By personal letter or phone call, he solicited work from eighty-two artists, including the estates of Willem de Kooning and Roy Lichtenstein. The money was to go to the partnership’s Family Resource Center, a children’s shelter in East New York. “It seemed like a good idea,” said Serra, who has done his share for worthy causes before but never as a social butterfly. “When Richard called, we talked for an hour and a half,” artist Ellen Phelan exclaimed. “So chatty! I was shocked, I have to say.” Serra was still on point. “Just look where the country is at right now, and look around here,” he said, glancing over a room that included Agnes Gund and Dorothy Lichtenstein (both honorary chairs), Jo Carole Lauder, Peter Brant, Henry Buhl, Lisa de Kooning, and the evening’s host, Larry Gagosian. “We live in a very privileged community.”
Left: John McEnroe and Bono. Right: Dorothy Lichtenstein.
So we do. But could dark times bring a streak of altruism to a river of self-involvement? Certainly an air of goodwill prevailed during cocktails, attended by a number of the artists involved: Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Joel Shapiro, Seton Smith, Richard Artschwager, and Malcolm Morley, to name a few. All were attracted to the event as much by Serra’s commitment as the business at hand: to raise money for kids without a tether.
On the whole, the evening’s silent auction had some pretty fine shit, as we used to say about other compelling substances. Drawing the most handwritten bids was a small and rather beautiful new lead joke painting by Richard Prince. “Wow,” said Gagosian, cruising by while checking over the lists. “This one is hot!” Alberto Mugrabi agreed. “I have to have it,” he said, keeping an eye out for any competition. (Late in the game, when he wasn’t looking, someone else won the piece with a $30,000 pledge.)
Just before the live auction, Serra made an appeal to “bid and buy.” For some extra motivation, soprano Jessye Norman, national spokesperson for the partnership, took the stage to lead a performance of four standards from the American songbook, beginning with that old inspirational saw “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Norman called it the organization’s “mission statement.” In her magnificent voice, it sounded quite sophisticated. Tenor Steven Cole and pianist Mark Markham performed other tunes by Irving Berlin and Duke Ellington, when Norman returned with baritone Lawrence Hamilton for a duet with a song from Ragtime. It was very upper crust.
Left: Larry Gagosian with artist Damien Hirst. Right: Incoming LA MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch with actor James Franco.
Meyer began the sale with a happy birthday for Lisa de Kooning, who had donated a 1970s charcoal drawing by her father (winning bid, $28,000), and set a brisk pace through lots that included a Cecily Brown ($130,000), an Elizabeth Peyton ($48,000), and a Takashi Murakami ($320,000). “Come on,” Meyer said, when bidding started to slow. “Homeless children!” It worked. Gund forked over $22,000 for a small Ed Ruscha painting, and Serra himself jumped in when a Morley watercolor came up, staying with it until Gagosian offered the winning $310,000.
Good to know we can still party like it’s 2008. Damien Hirst’s latest exhibition, “End of an Era,” opened Saturday night at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location. Charity wasn’t on tap there. Rather, it was Hirst’s own myth that was up for grabs. The title work, a preserved bull’s head with golden horns, was perched on a weighty marble pedestal at the center of the gallery. It wasn’t nearly as distracting as an enormous gold painting festooned with multiple rows of sparkling zirconia, a spread of wealth that looked a little like a Jasper Johns flag executed by the hand of Mammon, which reflected everyone present in its glory.
Surrounding the head were iconlike paintings of solitary diamonds on black and gray backgrounds. Downstairs, a veritable mini-retrospective of butterfly, spin, pill, and dot paintings had more authority. Most of it was sold, though collectors were less in evidence than gallery artists like Takashi Murakami, John Currin, and Richard Phillips, as well as Hirst pals Bono, John McEnroe, Mick Jagger, and style goddess Daphne Guinness, who stepped through the crowd in a pair of heel-less platforms that turned so many heads even the poor bull seemed jealous.
Left: Artists Rachel Feinstein and John Currin. Right: Artist Takashi Murakami.
Gossip Girl actor Matthew Settle, attending with his producer/director Joe Lazarov (brother of gallery director Melissa Lazorov), wanted to know how the art world had changed since the early ’90s, the last time he had checked into it. “It’s not the same,” Phillips told him. Settle promised to come around more often.
He better. His face was nearly lost in the crowd of artists and models streaming into Gagosian’s party for Hirst at the gilded Boom Boom Room, atop the Standard hotel. Despite its overtly heterosexual makeup––hard to achieve in today’s art world—it only gathered steam as Terry Richardson, Philip Taaffe, Francesco Bonami, Nicola Vassel, Tom Sachs, Gregory Crewdson, Will and Rose Cotton, Josephine Meckseper, Cary Leitzes, Jeffrey Deitch, and all the rest arrived, and conversation around a bar stocked with art advisers like Todd Levin and Sandy Heller deepened. Looking like innocents abroad, curators Massimiliano Gioni and Cecilia Alemani seemed fixed to the spot.
While Hirst, who arrived late, took a power banquette with Bono, Christopher Wool, and McEnroe, Tony Shafrazi grew demonstrably affectionate with Prince and Peter Brant. “Why not?” he said, giving the abashed Prince a buss on the cheek. “I love these guys!” Indeed love was in the air. Love of art, success, class, and New York, which sparkled in the clear, cold night outside. It didn’t feel much like the end of an era, but a giddy welcome to a future of retro glamour and ease where artists are the center of the universe. “That’s the great thing about Larry,” Currin said of the convivial Gagosian. “There’s always business going on, but it never really feels like it.”
Left: Gossip Girl actor Matthew Settle with producer/director Joe Lazarov. Right: Artist Richard Prince with dealer Tony Shafrazi and collector Peter Brant.
— Linda Yablonsky
Left: Artist Jaiko Suzuki and Gelitin's Ali Janka. Right: Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector with artist Tino Sehgal. (All photos: David Velasco)
HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED that the Guggenheim’s floor is patterned with circles? It had never occurred to me to examine it, but at the preview of Tino Sehgal’s exhibition last Thursday, down was the first place I looked when prompted to fill in an empty signifier. “What is progress?” asked Kyla, the diminutive, wide-eyed interpreter of Sehgal’s This Progress who approached me as I began to ascend the ramp. Maybe I was also compelled to drop my gaze because of the puritanical embarrassment I felt over the proximity of Kyla and her peers—all born, it seemed, this century—to Kiss, the necking duet in the rotunda’s center. How much time did these children spend watching that languid performance of foreplay between turns of accosting visitors? “Oh, the ramp’s wall is too tall for them to see over,” a kisser later assured me.
Curator Nancy Spector argued that Sehgal’s show, which lacks any objects, was the perfect way to spotlight the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, in celebration of its fiftieth anniversary. She added that Sehgal’s work fit with the jubilee theme of “art, architecture, and innovation.” But innovation is the very value you’re asked to doubt as you spiral upward, and the four interpreters—after the child, there’s a teen, an adult, and a senior citizen—engage you in conversation about the Internet’s effect on reading, the place of colonial history in France’s national curriculum, manatees and agriculture, or whatever else is on their mind. If reaching the building's apex at the end of This Progress imparts a feeling of transcendence, it’s soon erased by the need to go back down, a voyage that includes the unsettling sight of a nook full of old people, waiting for someone to talk to.
Left: Dealer Carol Greene with artist Craig Kalpakjian in the crowd at the Gelitin performance. Right: Performa founder and director RoseLee Goldberg with CCA Wattis director Jens Hoffmann.
Gelitin’s exhibition at Greene Naftali opened that night, too. Another process work, it was as cluttered as Sehgal’s was spare, autistic where his was social. From the plywood bleachers of a makeshift arena, we watched the artists erect floppy towers from their choice stash of poles, spools, toys, and power tools; it was like being spectators at a match of Chutes and Ladders. Gelitin members Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban, and Wolfgang Gantner all wore blindfolds. But as befits the emphasis on hands over head, sensation over discernment, the blindfolds were the least conspicuous part of their costumes. Gantner’s tighty-whiteys peeked out the hem of his baby-doll dress, and Janka wore flimsy sweatpants with a hole through the seat. (“I can’t stop staring at his butt crack,” a woman behind me blabbed.)
The garb of their “assistants”—on this night Cecily Brown, Lucy Dodd Indiana, Amy Sillman, and Jaiko Suzuki—was drabber, suited to the matronly duty of making sure the boys didn’t draw blood as they screwed plush cats to broomsticks. Brown engaged Urban in a lengthy discussion of the relative merits of pigments to be poured on chunks of Styrofoam. Sillman was content to be a gopher. “They’d just say, ‘Get me a saw,’” she said.
The scene at Gelitin's Blind Sculpture.
Throughout the evening, Gelitin fueled themselves with mixtures of champagne, whiskey, and Coke—so even they expressed surprise that they were still lucid on arriving at Santos Party House to continue the festivities. Impressively, they didn’t peek at the fruits of their labor before leaving the gallery. Urban vowed that he’d wait until their week in the gallery was up. “I never want to look at it,” Janka said. At Santos, Diana Picasso, P.S. 1 director Klaus Biesenbach, collector Julia Stoschek, choreographer Maria Hassabi, and artists Cory Arcangel and Mika Rottenberg were among those who showed up to fete Gelitin and catch a set by leftist rapper Tara Delong. But for most the real excitement was the presence of “actual” celebrities Beyonce and M.I.A. Greene Naftali director Jay Sanders was quick to note that the gallery was piggybacking on the party that the pop stars were there for, not the other way around. That would explain why said celebs declined to mingle, instead remaining largely invisible behind ropes, bouncers, and the club’s dense darkness, to be talked about but not seen or photographed, as elusive and valued as a work by Tino Sehgal.
— Brian Droitcour
Left: View of Christian Boltanski's installation for Monumenta. Right: Artists Annette Messager and Christian Boltanski. (Photos: Didier Plowy)
THE ANNUAL MONUMENTA EXHIBITION at Paris’s Grand Palais is the opportunity, on today’s international scene, for singular artistic exercises of unfettered, state-funded grandiosity within walls. Given the proportions of the venue (Cathedral of Industry, etc.), getting up to scale is the a priori challenge here. For Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra, the first two Monumentalists, this particular defi was catnip. Never mind that whole sections of French highway had to be closed off for the perilous transport of unprecedented lengths of uncut steel (Serra), or that Bill Katz, an architect-designer of near-mythic sensitivity to artists, was enlisted to build discrete buildings-within-the building in order to subdue the daunting space (Kiefer). At their openings, you could almost hear purring in the vaulted nave, and their dealer-sponsored opening parties—a full-tilt, celebrity-studded bacchanalia in a huge, ramshackle club under a bridge and along a quay of the Seine for Kiefer; a big corporate-style dinner at a dull and fancy restaurant for Serra—were victory, or takeover, celebrations.
Christian Boltanski, the current Monumentalist, is a different sort of cat. He is first of all un chat—indeed the next occupant, as was recently announced, of the French pavilion at the fifty-fourth Venice Biennale, in 2011—and the opening of his epic installation, “Personnes,” was therefore catnip for French bureau-cats and museum officials, who were out in force on a frigorifique January night, to be counted and, most adamantly, to eat—but more about food in a moment.
First, the weather: To complain about the current, frigid season in Paris would be not only bad form but redundant. It is always cold in the Grand Palais, which anyone who has attended FIAC (the annual art fair held there in October), or who has experienced the previous Monumenta exhibitions (both in spring), will confirm. That Boltanski, who surely knows this, insisted on deep winter for this show, tells you something right off the bat. His familiar gestaltkunstwerk—a Holocaust-evoking message of life, death, memory, dispossession, identity, and the subliminal whiff of humankind—reveals itself here as a series of big, steamy exhalations, in his potent and limited visual syntax of unidentified photo-portraits, uninhabited clothing, unlabeled rusting biscuit tins, and low-tech lights.
Left: Artist Giuseppe Penone, Marian Goodman Gallery's Agnès Fierobe, and collector Sylvie Winckler. Right: A view of the dinner for Christian Boltanski's opening for Monumenta. (Photos: Didier Plowy)
A wall of the biscuit tins, impeccably stacked, is the first installation element the visitor comes on when entering, and it functions as a curtain does within a proscenium. In the theater of personnes, which translates as both “persons” and “nobodies,” the clothing has the upper hand. The work comprises sixty-nine neatly rectangular “plots” of strewn garments, measuring three by five meters each and arrayed three-deep, framed by rigged lighting posts. The effect is eerily hydroponic, as if the clothes were meant to grow people. And perhaps to inspire hope for this unlikely outcome, there is the ubiquitous, reverberant thump-thump, thump-thump of sixty-nine individual recorded human heartbeats, part of the artist’s ongoing global project, Archives du Coeur, which as of July will have a home in Japan, on the interior-sea island of Teshima, in a development managed by the Benesse Art Site Naoshima. (You can visit a sound booth at the Grand Palais—also at MAC/VAL, the contemporary art museum in Vitry, just outside Paris, where “Après,” the Halloween-ish coda to “Personnes,” is on view through March 28—and add your own cardio thump to the archive; blank CDs may be purchased on-site for take-home copies.)
Beyond the “germinating” allotments, a big but not quite big enough pyramidal clothing heap looms within an apse, near some of the building’s spectacular structural flourishes, holding its overall shape despite the continuous munching and tossing motions of a towering, brontosaurus-like digger crane.
Mood-busting though it was, the crane proved a trustworthy harbinger of dinner, or more precisely the dinners of parallel worlds in the Palais de la Découverte, around the corner. The cocktail dinatoire honoring “Personnes,” in that building’s rotunda lobby, was the (alas) rather typical French more or less official affair: At once hectic and desultory; no toasts, no sense of occasion, no real conviviality; just pretty good food (risotto and ragout for the wintry night) and pretty good drink, along with the sight of the bureauchats elbowing heedlessly and hunkering down with their cronies and their plates. We chatted for a while with a fellow outsider, Anthony McCall, the New York–based British graphic designer and conceptual light artist, who was in town for a group show at the Martine Aboucaya gallery. He was headed for London and meetings about his project in Liverpool, scheduled for the 2012 Summer Olympics. McCall introduced us to Jean-Hubert Martin, the original as well as independent curator (1989’s “Magiciens de la terre” and last year’s “Une Image peut en cacher une autre” at the Grand Palais)—and French-pavilion commissioner for the next Venice Biennale.
Left: A dinosaur. (Photo: Lisa Liebmann) Right: Dealer Marian Goodman and artist James Coleman. (Photo: Didier Plowy)
But mostly it was us and the dinosaurs—literally. The current attraction at the Palais de la Découverte, concerning the diets of some of the better-known dinos, and involving a goodly number of fetching automatons, as well as an international committee of paleontologists, had been kept open during the Boltanski event. One could even walk around these Cretaceous zones champagne glass in hand. The Bistrot de la Jurassique was the entertaining conceit of the display, and only somewhat figuratively speaking, we sat down at a red-checkered table for two, to relax for a moment and experience our own winter-weary thump-thump.
— Lisa Liebmann
Left: Artist Peter Doig. Right: Artist Jeremy Deller and writer Nancy Durrant. (All photos: Gareth Harris)
TWO ISSUES dominated the Chris Ofili private view at Tate Britain on Tuesday. The first involved headgear, or rather, the abundance of outlandish hats worn by art-world figures at the wintery Millbank bash––from Peter Doig’s brown and yellow bobbled creation to Jeremy Deller’s lurid green and pink combination. The other pressing concern was Ofili’s latest works, on view in the last two rooms of his midcareer survey, which prompted wildly diverse opinions from the party floor. The electric colors and expressive figurative forms of these denuded works, stripped of elephant dung and jewels, reflect the spirituality of Trinidad. “Are these meant to be ‘transitional’?” one caustic commentator asked. Others were quick to praise paintings such as the Death & the Roses, 2009, and The Healer, 2008, an opaque portrait of a nocturnal figure eating poui flowers.
Artist Grayson Perry, dressed like a provincial primary school headmistress in unusually somber (for him) garb, was particularly effusive. Standing transfixed before Mono Rojo, 1999–2002, in the museum’s shrinelike Upper Room, Perry declared Ofili the best colorist. “It’s like a musician having perfect pitch,” he said. Further accolades were forthcoming from musician Peter Adjaye. “I want to live in here,” he confessed dreamily, adding that he’s working on a sound installation for “Urban Africa,” a forthcoming geocultural survey of fifty-three African countries at London’s Design Museum, curated by his brother David (who, coincidentally, designed the Upper Room). The headline-hitting architect himself just happened to be around the corner and confirmed that the continental African tour had indeed kept him on his toes.
Left: Architect David Adjaye. Right: Tate Liverpool director Christoph Grunenberg and Stephen Snoddy, director of the New Art Gallery Walsall.
Just then, art critic Ben Lewis strolled past, proclaiming Ofili “the Gustav Klimt of the twenty-first century.” Ofili’s dealers Victoria Miro and David Zwirner were within earshot and no doubt lapped up the double-edged assessment. As the crowd thinned, artists Marlene Dumas, Mark Wallinger, and Isaac Julien circled the meager bowls of macadamia nuts. Yinka Shonibare, meanwhile, remained tight-lipped about his forthcoming fourth-plinth commission in Trafalgar Square, a scale replica of Nelson’s ship, HMS Victory, in a giant glass bottle. “It’s challenging,” he finally conceded. Ofili himself was similarly shy, though his Trinidad-based compatriot Doig was happy to impart that fifteen Trinidadians had made the trip over to London, including “artists, writers, and social workers,” adding: “Ofili’s work gets better and better.”
A convoy of black cabs laden with the Tate glitterati then sped across town for the afterparty in the plush surroundings of the Bloomsbury Ballroom. On arrival, hungry partygoers eagerly quaffed the cocktails and sniffed around for hints of canapés. Food failed to appear, but there were still plenty of encomiums in the air (all for Ofili, fortunately). The opinionated British actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah was on hand in a fetching black porkpie hat, waxing lyrical. “Am I a fan of Ofili’s work?” he hollered. “I’m an addict. He speaks for my generation.” Just over his shoulder, I spotted Francis Outred, Christie’s contemporary art supremo, and the Texan collector Kenny Goss, who was sure to plug his new ten-thousand-square-foot Goss-Michael (as in George Michael, Goss’s partner) Foundation space in Dallas, set to open autumn 2011. The new gallery will house the couple’s impressive Brit art collection with works by more than thirty UK artists (Ofili, of course, included). And what will be the inaugural show? “Probably a greatest-hits display,” he pondered.
— Gareth Harris
Left: ArtBerloga's Mike Ovcharenko and artist Sergey Bratkov. Right: Galleria Continua's Lorenzo Fiaschi, Hauser & Wirth's Marc Payot and artist Subodh Gupta. (Photos: Kate Sutton)
ABUNDANT ICE AND A –25°C CHILL pretty much precluded stilettos, but it didn’t stop a crowd of nearly five thousand fur-clad visitors from descending on last Friday’s opening of concurrent solo shows (Sergey Bratkov and Subodh Gupta) at the PinchukArtCentre. When asked to explain the connection between the artists, collector Victor Pinchuk noted a “spiritual synonymity” between the respective exhibition titles: “Ukraine” (Bratkov) and “Faith Matters” (Gupta).
An unofficial retrospective, Bratkov’s exhibition culminates a three-year process that began when the artist was tapped for the PAC-administrated Ukrainian pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. (Incidentally, Bratkov represented Russia four years prior, in the fiftieth Biennale.) Bratkov—born in Kharkov, but long since relocated to Moscow—is frequently caught between dueling claims on his nationality. When Pinchuk asked the artist whether he considers himself Russian or Ukrainian, Bratkov simply shrugged: “Me? I’m Jewish.”
The show might not answer any more questions, but that’s not to say it’s shy. It opens with a self-portrait of the artist, his mournful eyes staring out from a face covered in shaving cream. The photograph is placed at an angle that mischievously corresponds to an image of a girl reclining on a rock with her skirt hiked. In keeping with Bratkov’s gentle, sexually soaked humor, the attention seems less directed at the girl’s impressive grooming and more at the large black fly perched nonchalantly on her labia. A sweet sadness permeates even his most provocative work, including the 2000 series “Kids,” with its images of a forlorn eight-year-old boy in an elaborate women’s one-piece or a sultry seven-year-old, legs spread, cigarette in hand.
Left: Hauser & Wirth's Gregor Muir with in situ's Fabienne LeClerc. (Photo: Kate Sutton) Right: Dealers Iwan Wirth and Vladimir Ovcharenko. (Photo: Sergei Illin)
“Faith Matters” is more reserved, contained to a relatively spare selection of five sculptures and twelve new paintings. Thanks to the record lows outside, the center’s exhibition spaces were at least 10 degrees colder than usual, making Gupta’s assemblages of metal pots and pans seem even chillier and more pristine (and not entirely unlike one of the magnificent ice formations sheeting the city sidewalks and waterspouts). Visitors stayed bundled in their coats as they circled Faith Matters, the conveyor-belt metropolis—built from towers of cookware set atop revolving sushi platters—which gave the exhibition its title, or as they perused a suite of paintings depicting falling pots as slick puddles of silver and beige.
Gupta makes a dramatic departure from the pots and pans with the startling Cosmic Battle, a large sculpture of a victorious Hindu goddess bearing down on a demon, her ten arms wielding a bevy of weapons limned in light. The goddess’s flickering neon would have been a great addition to the center’s top-floor SkyArtCafe, where a DJ booth and flavored vodkas attracted a mainly younger crowd, including curator Kateryna Taylor and artist Janna Kadyrova, as well as Katya Bochavar and Vladimir Troitsky, directors of Gogolfest, the annual alternative performance festival, which promises to be the city’s premier cultural event in September.
Left: Dealers Peter Nagy and June Y. Gwak. Right: Peter Doroshenko with a guest. (Photos: Sergei Illin)
The opening was followed by a quiet dinner at the new restaurant behind the PAC, which boasted works by Pinchuk favorites Masha Shubina and Ilya Chichkan, as well as a view of the plaza once home to Damien Hirst’s shark tanks (now an ice-skating rink). The tiny tables and revolving plates of finger food made for an intimate vibe, encouraging good-natured couch hopping among the fifty guests. Critic Katya Degot and curators Teresa Mavica, Olga Sviblova, and Julie Sylvester sipped wine by the piano, while Bratkov threw back vodka shots at the bar with PAC curator Alexander Soloviev and the artist’s longtime friend and dealer Vladimir Ovcharenko. Dealers June Y. Gwak, Fabienne LeClerc, and Lorenzo Fiaschi traded artist tips over (and sometimes in exchange for) appetizers, while across the room, dealer Peter Nagy held court with the Hauser & Wirth contingent. At the same table, Gupta sat hunched over in a fit of artistic inspiration, as he sketched an ad hoc portrait of the impossibly vivacious collector Mimi Dusselier on his dinner napkin.
Even after the wine stopped flowing, there was still plenty of vodka, the drink of choice when bracing oneself for a bad decision—quite possibly the only kind of decision available in a city where the sole postmidnight entertainment option is a casino. Well, there were a few other options. Discouraged by the $700 per-head cash deposit at the Premiere casino, an ardent few pushed onward and upward to another establishment, where for the more modest $25 entry fee one could enjoy bottles of champagne (starting price: $350) and the talents of what had to be the world’s most melancholic erotic dancers.
The majority of the group made a polite show of ignoring the entertainment, turning their backs to the stage and forcing conversation about upcoming art fairs. Not to be deterred, one dancer––surprisingly lithe on nine-inch platforms––made a determined effort to catch a dealer’s attention. He smiled gamely, “Darling, you have the wrong man here. But I love your shoes!” As the girl sulked off, another dealer flashed me a nervous look and reached for his champagne glass. Suffice to say, the next day’s roundtable discussion was full of knowing smiles and conspicuous absences.
— Kate Sutton
Left: Curator Kateryna Taylor. Right: Collectors Bernard Soens and Mimi Dusselier with Peter Doroshenko. (Photos: Kate Sutton)