Art

Currently running at Jack the Pelican Presents through February 9. From the press release:

Have a cup of tea, sit back on the couch and escape into the spectacular musings of the quaintly naughty Mr. Benn. The timely anachronism of Richard Wilson’s mechanistic renderings of super-tech ideas points to Britain in an era when unassuming people lived in modest circumstances. …It’s a remarkably different world than our own. …Or is it?

Visit Wikipedia for more on Mr. Benn.

You’ve read about Andy’s work on both of our blogs, so now is your chance to see the paintings in person.

English Kills Art Gallery (Bushwick)
January 10 – February 15, 2009
Opening: Saturday, January 10, 6 – 9PM

Pocket Utopia, not far from there, also has an opening.

[image from gallery web site]

Judith Bernstein
11 × 14 inches, 2008
charcoal on paper, 11 × 14 inches

This was my favorite image from the sexy show How To Cook A Wolf: Part One at Dinter Fine Art. I’m embarassed to say I didn’t really know Judith Bernstein’s work before, but now I will watch for her! Check out her entry in the Brooklyn Museum’s Feminist Art Base.

Eyal Danieli, Some of My Best Friends, 2008
Silkscreen and watercolor on Yupo plastic sheeting or Rives BFK paper
19.5 × 23 inches
Edition of 16 unique prints

For those that read James’s post on Eyal Danieli’s show at Elizabeth Harris Gallery and would like to have one of his works at a reasonable price, here is a chance. Element Editions has released an edition of 16 unique prints by the artist for $450. Go get one before they’re all gone.

Baldridge, Glen
Dead as Dreams, 2008
lithograph
10 × 8 1/2 inches

 

Deasy, Elizabeth
Security Blanket, 2008
lithograph with hand watercoloring
10 × 8 1/2 inches

 

Dodge, Alex
A New Day, 2008
lithograph with hand watercoloring
10 × 8 1/2 inches

 

Johnson, Butt
Study for Untitled (Eh Feck), 2008
lithograph
11 × 6 1/2 inches

 

Sanders, Phil
Checkmate, 2008
lithograph with chine collé
10 × 8 1/2 inches

 

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery has a beautiful show of new prints by Forth Estate. The main works of the show, by artists Glen Baldridge, Ian Cooper, Alex Dodge, Angela Dufresne, Matt Keegan, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Joseph Hart, Paul Pope, Phil Sanders, Molly Smith, Will Yackulic, and Kevin Zucker, range in price from $250-2000. In addition, there are five lithographs printed by Phil Sanders, some with hand watercoloring, for only $100 each. The edition size is 10. I’ve put images above of those five. The show is up until December 21.

Wall at Galeria Berenice Arvani booth including works by Leon Ferrari, Arnaldo Ferrari, and Hermelindo Fiamminghi

James and I attended the press preview and VIP reception tonight for PINTA, the modern / contemporary Latin American art fair.. Yes, they let press stay into the VIP period.

For someone like me who admires the modernism and geometric abstraction of Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a lot of great work from that period. I’ve put up an image above of a wall from the booth of Galeria Berenice Arvani, a São Paulo gallery. Unfortunately their website does not seem to be loading tonight.

On the contemporary front, a new discovery tonight was the work of Matías Duville. Here is a detail of the giant acrylic on particle board work in the booth of Galeria Alberto Sendros. It’s related to this piece on the artist’s website.

Matías Duville (detail)

The artist creates works on unusual media and then distresses them in some way. The booth across the aisle from Galeria Alberto Sendros was a Madrid gallery named Distrito Cu4tro which had some works with ink on silk, where the artist had pulled the threads of the silk after drawing on the surface to distort his images.

Distrito Cu4tro also had some great work by Venezuelan artist Alexander Apóstol who now lives and works in Madrid. In addition to large digital photographs of tall buildings in Venezuela with windows removed and graffiti added, there was a digital collage of personal ads from young Latin men (gay or otherwise) seeking American or European male “clients” to bring them to those richer continents. There was also a video titled “AV. libertador” of transvestites talking to the camera claiming to be important Venezuelan artists such as Gego or Armando Reverón.

Alexander Apóstol
AV. libertador, 2006
DVD, sound (Still)

Finally, Poligrafa from Barcelona had a beautiful set of untitled etchings by Argentine artist Fabian Marcaccio based on an attempted coup in (I think) the 1990s. Here is one small image from the gallery’s website.

Fabián Marcaccio
Sin título 2, 2007
Etching
71.0 × 86.0cm

Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley
invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s
Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way.
Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes
ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a
seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more… 

Street
View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the
scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping
platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View
made its debut on the web in November of 2008.

An incredible
cast of real-life characters contributed their time, energy and talents
to creating pseudo-street life on Sampsonia Way. Please check out the scene breakdown, the participant page and the video documentation to learn more about the artists, groups and participants that made Street With A View possible.

Don’t miss the photos on the website.

Via FAD.