Wide White Space Wins 2012 Art Cologne Prize
02.03.12
The Antwerp gallery Wide White Space is the winner of the 2012 Art Cologne Prize, according to e-flux. The award, worth $13,000, will be given to Anny De Decker, who operated the gallery with Bernd Lohaus from 1966 to 1976, during which time they featured works by artists including Carl André, Marcel Broodthaers, Piero Manzoni, Victor Vasarely, and Andy Warhol. Wide White Space also worked closely with Joseph Beuys and served as the site for his action Eurasienstab—one of his first exhibitions outside Germay. Previous prize winners include Ileana Sonnabend, Denise René, Rudolf Springer, Otto van de Loo, René Block, and Michael Werner.
Gianfranco Pardi (1933–2012)
02.03.12
Italian artist Gianfranco Pardi passed away in his home yesterday afternoon. His work, much of which he designated as “Architecture”—betrayed a career-long fascination with geometric variation, material, and form. Pardi exhibited in the 1986 Venice Biennale while also that same year showing work in the Milan Triennale and the Quadrennial of Rome. He was affiliated with Gió Marconi Gallery in Milan and later with Galleria Fumagalli in Bergamo. His works are held in numerous private and public collections in Italy and abroad.
Steven Holl to Design New Building for Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
02.03.12
According to Everett Evans in the Houston Chronicle, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has engaged Steven Holl Architects to design its new building for post-1900 art. Evans notes that the new building will be a central hub linking the Audrey Jones Beck and Caroline Wiess Law buildings, the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen sculpture garden, and the Glassell School of Art. Expected to be completed in five to seven years, the new facility will also include educational spaces, a library and resource center, lecture halls, a theater, and a restaurant. Steven Holl Architects won the 2012 AIA gold medal award, and has designed museums including the Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
Henry Urbach Named Director of Glass House
02.02.12
Curator Henry Urbach has been named as the director of the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. He will be replacing Rena Zurofsky, who has served as the interim director. Urbach previously worked at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as the curator of architecture and design until 2011. He holds a degree in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University, a Masters in architecture, planning, and preservation from Columbia, and a Masters of Arts in history and theory of architecture from Princeton. Urbach says, “I can hardly imagine a place more full of potential than the Glass House. It has long contributed to culture by bringing together art, architecture, landscape, and people in significant and inventive ways. That is exactly what I hope to foster.”
Mike Kelley (1954–2012)
02.01.12
Artist Mike Kelley has passed away, according to Dan Duray in the New York Observer. Gagosian Gallery has confirmed the news. Born in Detroit in 1954, Kelley spent his early years in the midst of the city’s music scene, playing in a noise band called Destroy All Monsters. After receiving his BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, he went on to an art career that included collaborations with Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and Sonic Youth. His work took on varied forms, whether he was filling Gagosian Gallery’s space with disco lights and a fifteen-foot missile in “Day is Done,” 2005, or accompanying Michael Smith’s Baby Ikki character to Burning Man several years later, or releasing, more recently, a compilation of his portrayals of Kandor, a city from the comic-book world of Superman.
The Los Angeles–based Kelley has had solo exhibitions at venues including the Whitney Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Tate Liverpool; the Pompidou Center in Paris; and Basel’s Kunsthalle, among others. He also served on the faculty of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. As a writer, Kelley published extensively, including a two-volume compilation of writing on his own work for MIT Press in 2004. He was represented by Metro Pictures and later Gagosian Gallery in New York.
Discussing Kelley’s importance in a feature article from the October 2004 issue of Artforum, Robert Storr wrote, “There is science to his scrappy, underdog approach, and he is aware of the strength of his rooting section, which is nationwide. In Pop-oriented work made west of the Hudson, rock-bottom commercial and vernacular sources largely replaced brand names: Car culture, gas stations, roadside attractions, rec-room and garage projects, and rural or backyard follies provided iconographic and technical models for legions of artists . . . Kelley has zeroed in on just this zone in his attentiveness to the most rudimentary, if not trashiest, forms of graphic design . . . By comparison even Warhol’s trusses, nose jobs, sex pictures, and holy-roller handout paintings seem not only opaque but fastidious.”
Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012)
02.01.12
Andrew Russeth reports in the New York Observer that the painter, poet, and ballet-set designer Dorothea Tanning passed away yesterday, according to her publisher, Graywolf Press. Born in Chicago, Tanning moved to New York in 1935 at the age of twenty-two, before then setting sail for Paris in 1939. There, she joined the Julian Levy gallery and, in the following two decades, created the Surrealist paintings that arguably became her best-known work. Tanning also branched out to other media, experimenting with sculpture and weaving and even creating sets and costumes for George Balanchine. In the 1980s, she began focusing on writing, publishing two memoirs and a number of poems. The Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden; the Drawing Center in New York; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art have all staged retrospectives of her work.
Lewis Biggs to Curate 2014 Folkestone Triennial
02.01.12
Art Review notes that Lewis Biggs has been named the next curator of the 2014 Folkestone Triennial. Biggs stepped down as the chief executive and artistic director of the Liverpool Biennial last July after ten years. From 1990–2000, he was director of Tate Liverpool, and is currently a visiting professor in contemporary art at Liverpool John Moores and Shanghai Universities, as well as honorary professor at Glasgow University. Biggs is also curating the 2013 Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan.
Prado Finds Earliest Copy of Mona Lisa
02.01.12
The Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey reports that the Prado Museum in Madrid has found what is now believed to be the earliest copy of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. This replica originally lacked a landscape background and was therefore thought to have been made after Leonardo’s death; it had never even merited an entry in the Prado’s collection catalogues. But recently, beneath the work’s black overpaint, curators discovered a record of changes made as Leonardo developed his original composition.
What is most exciting about the copy, notes Bailey in the Art Newspaper, is that it preserves some of the masterpiece’s details better than the Louvre’s version, with more details in “the spindles of the chair, the frill on the edge of the fabric on Lisa’s chest, and the semitransparent veil around her left shoulder, arm, and elbow.”
Bruno Mottin, the head conservator at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, proposes that the most likely painter of the Prado replica was one of Leonardo’s two favorite pupils: either Andrea Salai, who began at Leonardo’s studio in 1490, or Francesco Melzi, who joined around 1506.
Massimiliano Gioni Named Curator of the 55th Venice Biennale
01.31.12
Massimiliano Gioni is set to curate the 55th Venice Biennale, having today being named director of the visual arts sector. Gioni is currently associate director of the New Museum and artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. The Biennale’s board of directors also appointed composer Ivan Fedele as director of the music sector for a four-year term and confirmed that Àlex Rigola, who served as director of the theater sector for 2010 and 2011, will continue with his role for the next two years. Ismael Ivo, director of the dance sector since 2005, has been confirmed for the year 2012.
Paolo Baratta, chair of the board of directors, noted in a press release that “the Biennale is moving in the direction of pluralism and continuity . . . . In the visual arts, after acknowledging the success of Bice Curiger’s edition, the board has chosen to appoint the new director far in advance, and among the possible solutions in the international field, has selected Massimiliano Gioni as a young personality who has already accumulated a number of important appointments, which he has honored so well as to win the esteem of artists and critics around the world.”