Art

Hany Armanious, Lion Eyes, 2004-7 (detail view)

A bilingual announcement of a show in Paris arrived in my inbox last night from Foxy Production. The English section is reproduced below.

Castillo/Corrales and Galerie Balice inaugurate their guest program with “Lion Eyes”, a project by Hany Armanious, organized by Foxy Production (New York).

Lion Eyes comprises a mechanized spiral vortex, known as a “trizonal space warper”, and a copy of “Crying Boy”, from the mythologized and widely reproduced series of paintings attributed to Bragolin, a Spanish artist also known by many other names. Armanious invites one to gaze at the “space warper”, which after ten seconds confuses the brain, creating an hallucinatory undulating effect. When one then turns to the “Crying Boy”, the space between it and the viewer seems to collapse as it billows out into three dimensions.

Using disparate materials and motifs, Armanious interweaves materiality and opticality to draw attention to widely overlooked or specious cultural phenomena. He produces installations and sculptural forms that are irreverent, critical, and anarchic.

Hany Armanious (Cairo, Egypt, 1962) holds a BA in Visual Arts from the City Art Institute, Sydney, Australia. He was included in the Aperto section of the 1993 Venice Biennale, the 1994 Sydney Biennale, and the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale. In 1998 he was awarded the Möet and Chandon Fellowship. In 2001 his major installation work Selflok was showcased at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He currently has a solo exhibition at Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand. A new monograph on Armanious’ work will be produced in partnership with IMA, Brisbane.

Foxy Production is a contemporary art gallery based in New York with a diverse program, whose mission is to foster distinctive artists that challenge both aesthetically and conceptually.

Galerie Balice will open this September in the near proximity of castillo/corrales.

castillo/corrales is a gallery run by a group of artists, curators and writers, based on the principle of French hospitality.

For further information or high resolution images contact Chelsea Goodchild: t: +1 212 239 2758

Related: James wrote about Hany Armanious’s work that Foxy showed at The Armory Show.

Tom Sanford, Beckhams diptych [found on his blog]

I’m so happy that they’ve announced the opening date for their inaugural show on Ludlow Street: No New Tale To Tell.

Tom Sanford has more details.

Jacques tells me there will be more performances on July 6 and 7 at SUNDAY. See the previous blog post for more information on what to expect.

I’ve uploaded a flickr set from Jacques’s opening on Friday. The show is titled “Wood Folks is Good Folks,” and here is a video of part of the performance in which Jacques is helping transform people into the highest plane of being — wood people. That’s Jacques in the “house hat.”

Click To Play

Joe Ovelman just wrote to tell us about the eBay celebrity camera auction benefiting the MIX Festival. There are five days left.

His camera is here and the entire list is here. It’s a pretty interesting list. Mary Birdsong of downtown performance and Reno 911 fame is even included!

Sarah Peters Séance 2005 pen, pencil and charcoal on paper 18” × 24”

On Friday, James and I attended the opening of the Sarah Peters show at Winkleman Gallery. We loved it so much that we did something we’ve rarely done lately — bought a new piece for the collection. We also made it a “top pick” on ArtCal. I titled this post “Full disclosure” as I don’t want people thinking we secretly set things to top picks to influence the market. We’re not in the business of selling our art, and so far have never de-accessioned a piece.

Update: James has a post on the show now, and supplied the image above.

Entrance of Pocket Utopia, with a salon poster intervention by Jonathan VanDyke

The page on ArtCal formerly know as “Williamsburg / Greenpoint” is now Williamsburg / Greenpoint / Bushwick, as the relentless march of gentrification means that many of the galleries that are interesting to James and me are increasingly distant from the Bedford and Lorimer stops. This doesn’t mean we don’t still have some favorites near those stops.

Here is an example: Brooklyn Fireproof now has an additional space in Bushwick called Temporary Storage that has a very interesting-looking show opening June 23rd.