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David Zwirner inaugurates new London venue with Luc Tuymans


Luc Tuymans, Allo!, 2012. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

David Zwirner opens his new gallery in London today inaugurating with Luc Tuymans exhibition Allo!.

The exhibition comprises a series of paintings entitled Allo! initially inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), but in the end drawing more visual references from the final scene in the 1942 film The Moon and Sixpence, itself an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s eponymous novel from 1919. Tuymans’s convoluted interest on the topic enacts a general negation of modernism and Hollywood’s longstanding idealization of the artist as a romantic savage. This will be Tuymans’ ninth solo show since joining David Zwirner in 1994.
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Newslinks

Toronto’s Power Plant is currently presenting Continuous Coverage, an exhibition by Berlin based Israeli artist Omer Fast showing three of his most significant projects spanning the last decade: CNN Concatenated (2002), 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) and Continuity (2012). Canadian Art mag talked to the artist during his visit in Toronto.
 

David Roberts Art Foundation – one of London’s top private collection-based foundations – relocated from the increasingly buzzing area of Fitzrovia to more spacious accommodations in Mornington Crescent, Camden inaugurating with the exhibition The House of Leaves. Lorena Muõz-Alonso asks the curator Vincent Honoré (part 1 & 2) about DRAF’s new move and future vision.
 

Hugues Charbonneau, former front man of Galerie Division in Montreal has opened his own space in the Belgo gallery complex building (Espace 308, 372 Ste-Catherine, Montreal) with its inaugurating show by painter Jean-Paul Pouliot. huguescharbonneau.com
 
 
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Newslinks

Art market
One of four versions of Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream, (pastel, 1895) fetched $119,9M (Sale price $107M + the buyer’s premium) at Sotheby’s New York on 2 May, a record for auction history. The sale was dominated by two telephone bidders, over a tense ten minutes period. Sotherby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer was caught exclaiming “I love you!” to one phone bidder when prices soared up to $106M. You can watch an excerpt here. We are all curious to know who won the bidding match for the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. Petter Olsen, the seller of the painting personally hoped the bidding winner to be MoMA NY…
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Review: Michelle Deignan- Journey to an absolute vantage point

Michelle Deignan: Posing as a Subject Amongst Subjects
at Maria Stenfors, London
16 July – 29 October 2011


Michelle Deignan “Microphone” (2008) Unique lambda print. Courtesy of the artist and Maria Stenfors.

Michelle Deignan’s London solo exhibition at Maria Stenfors Gallery entitled “Posing as a Subject Amongst Subjects” incorporates video installation, 16 mm film projection and photography. The installation occupies most of the exhibition space, Journey to an Absolute Vantage Point (2011) fits a two-channel video work onto a double-sided screen projection, the back-to-back videos playing off each other in treatment and in form. One side proffers a black-and-white violin, cello and piano trio performing the soundtrack of Deignan’s installation, while the other projection presents a postcard-like color shot of Berlin’s Schloss Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg Palace) and its surroundings, the scene of the story unfolding herein.
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Interview: Raster, accelerator of contemporary art and culture from Warsaw


Michal Kaczynsk (left) and Łukasz Gorczyca (right) at Raster’s booth at Frieze Art Fair 2011

Raster is an independent art space based in Warsaw, Poland, founded by art critics Łukasz Gorczyca and Michal Kaczynsk. Originally started as a magazine, Raster has since evolved into a gallery space and is generally seen as a provider of contemporary art culture, not only for the local Warsaw scene in Poland, but also internationally. Their project “Villa Raster” for example, provides an innovative platform for sharing cultural experiences and exchanging ideas. M-KOS interviewed Gorczyca and Kaczynsk at this year’s Frieze Art Fair.

M-KOS [MK]: How did you start Raster?

Raster [R]: The name Raster originally came from the magazine, a kind of informal magazine we used to publish when we were art history students at University of Warsaw. The idea of the magazine was to promote young generations of artists and writers. So we started doing the magazine to understand how the contemporary art scene works and how to promote new generations and new ways of understanding art in Poland. So the magazine was pretty much focusing on the questions of language, how we could develop the language of criticism to be understandable for the wider and younger audience.
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Interview: Karl England & Ben Street, the duo behind Sluice art fair


Karl England (left) and Ben Street (right) in front of a painting by Chris Baker presented by George + Jorgen at Sluice. Photo: M-KOS

Sluice Art Fair is a new initiative organized jointly by artist Karl England and Ben Street, curator and art historian. Inaugurated this year in London and launched on the same week as Frieze, M-KOS interviewed England and Street about their project, proposed as an alternative to the alternative art fair.

M-KOS [MK]: How did Sluice come about originally?

Ben Street [BS]: Karl and I met through Twitter. Social networking has been very useful for us. We started just having conversations about art and networking people. Then, last year I was curating an exhibition for an old chapel in the cemetery of North West London. I looked at Karl’s recent work online, I liked it so much I went strait to his studio and decided to put his work in my show. We stayed in touch. Then much later Karl contacted me and said there was a space he was able to use where he had already shown before, and asked me if I was interested in collaborating on something with him during Frieze. The space is only 15 minutes away from the art fair, where so many people come to see art.

Karl England [KE]: Also, we had this space in Mayfair for only three days, that was perfect timing for an art fair but it’s too short for organizing an exhibition.

MK: How did you decide to name it Sluice?

BS: Sluice is a reference to an underground river, called the Tyburn, that runs beneath both Sluice and – coincidentally – Frieze.
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Art Marathon: Frieze Week pt4 – Sunday

Sunday Art Fair

Sometimes not knowing what to expect out of a certain experience will heighten our level of satisfaction more so than anything predictable. The Sunday Art Fair was one such experience, held at Ambica P3, a massive 14,000 square foot open space just a stone’s throw from Frieze. Three galleries jointly organised Sunday Art Fair: Croy Nielsen (Berlin), Limoncello (London) and Tulips & Roses (Brussels). It launched last year in the guise of replacement for the sadly missed Zoo Art Fair, both being, incidentally, sponsored by the Zabludowicz Collection. Refreshingly, a total of 20 international galleries each presented one or two artists and separated their own area simply by marking white lines on the floor, to give visitors a wonderful sense of openness and freedom to move around and enjoy the venue’s architecture. For this reason and because of the high quality of the work presented, Sunday Art Fair demonstrated a strong challenge to Frieze’s hegemony of London art fairs this year.

Christian Jankowski at Proyectos Monclova (Mexico City)


Messages in a bottle – “Review” (2011)
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