Hareng Saur: Ensor and Contemporary Art

James Ensor (Oostende, 1860-1949), Skeletons Fighting over a Smoked Herring, 1891, Oil on panel,

The S.M.A.K. and the Museum of Fine Arts are holding a joint exhibition that examines the relationship between James Ensor (1860-1949) and the work of contemporary artists. James Ensor can without any doubt be considered as one on of the ground-breaking artists of the 20th century. The recent retrospective exhibitions of his work in New York (Museum of Modern Art) and Paris (Quai d'Orsay) demonstrate clearly that he is internationally acclaimed as a pioneering artist. His importance in the development of modern art (e.g. Expressionism) is demonstrated by the many visits made by artists (Kandinsky, Nolde, Pechstein et al.) to his home in Ostend during his lifetime....The exhibition Hareng Saur | Ensor and Contemporary Art focuses on the manifold links and associations which can be made between the work of this master and the artistic practices of a wide range of contemporary artists. James Ensor's subjects and attitude are of particular interest at the beginning of the 21st century. Themes such as the mask, the grotesque, social criticism, the self-portrait (and the identification with Christ) and death are all subjects dealt with by many outstanding international contemporary artists. The exhibition reveals some of the connections between different kinds of works and approaches Ensor as a contemporary artist amongst his colleagues and peers. Hareng Saur: Ensor and Contemporary Art is on view until Feb. 27, in Belgium at Gent www.kunstaspekte.de

The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch

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Paul Gauguin, Manao tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch), 1892, oil on burlap mounted on canvas

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Paul Gaugin, La Perte du Pucelage (The Loss of Virginity) 1890-91

Washington, DC—Paul Gauguin's (1848–1903) sumptuous, colorful images of Brittany and the islands of the South Seas, some of the most beloved in modern art, are among 100 works by the artist in the first major exhibition of his career in the United States in some 20 years. On view from February 27 through June 5, 2011, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington—the sole U.S. venue—the exhibition Gauguin: Maker of Myth, along with its accompanying catalogue, examines the role that myth-making played in Gauguin's art, shedding new light on his life and career.

Guns For Hire: The Art of James Georgopoulos

“Enforcer” Unique silver gelatin print w/ acrylic polymer and resin on aluminum and wood panel 2010 48 x 84 x 2 inches

“The Manchurian Canidate” Unique silver gelatin print w/acrylic polymer & resin on aluminum & wood panel 2010 48 x 84 X 2 inches

He has worked with NASA, Oliver Stone, and Al Gore - which makes him immediately cool, and next to his resin coated, original photographs of iconic guns used in films, that are subsequently slathered with multiple coats of shiny resin, Los Angeles based artist James Georgopolous is a total badass.  Most of James' photographs have notes that illustrate the history of each firearm.  The gun in the bottom photograph: "[a] .Walther P38 used by Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey in the 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate" and the top photograph: "The weapon pictured here is the actual screen-used gun used by Inspector Harry Callahan's (Clint Eastwood)  ".44 Magnum", Smith & Wesson Model 29 n 6 1/2" barrel." Fucking awesome. James will be exhibiting at the Red Dot Art Fair in New York City this coming March. www.jamesgeorgopoulos.org

Ré Soupault: Artist at the Center of the Avant-Garde

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The Kunsthalle Mannheim is the first museum in the world to be honoring the oeuvre of one of the key female figures in the European avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s with the extensive retrospective Ré Soupault—Künstlerin im Zentrum der Avantgarde (Ré Soupault—Artist at the Center of the Avant-Garde) from February 13 to May 8, 2011. “While in the late 1980s Ré Soupault’s rediscovery as a photographer was considered a sensation, we are now happy to be presenting the entire spectrum of her oeuvre for the first time,” writes Dr. Inge Herold, who is curating the exhibition in collaboration with Manfred Metzner, the trustee of Ré Soupault’s estate. Ré Soupault (1901–1996) was a photographer, fashion designer, journalist, filmmaker, author, and translator at the heart of the most modern art trends in Germany and France. www.kunsthalle-mannheim.eu

Totally Bananas: The Footwear Creations of Kobi Levi

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Kobi Levi's heels are "wearable sculptures" that verge on fetishistic with an ironic, seemingly dadaist, wit. If Roger Vivier, 20th century French fashion designer credited with revolutionizing the stiletto heel, is considered the "Fragonard of the shoe," than you might call Kobi Levi the the "R. Mutt of the shoe." R. Mutt is of course the name signed on Dada artist Marcel Duchamp's iconic and ridiculous 1917 ready-made sculpture entitled "the fountain" - which was simply a found urinal. Is it genius or asinine? Levi, like Duchamp, is certainly making a statement. Levi's pieces are "...humoristic with a unique point of view about footwear." Throughout the history of civilization, women's fashion has taken turns as bondage and liberation.  Levi's constructions might be both, or the handiwork work of a batty sculptor with a foot fetish.  From semi-blatant sexual innuendo to slingshots to banana peels, Levi's shoes are cartoonish, bombastic, and in their magical kitschyness there is a beautiful complex brilliance which makes them insanely cool. www.kobilevidesign.blogspot.com

Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster

Vija Celmins - Man With Gun Vija Celmins - Burning Man

Painter Vija Celmins, born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, has lived and worked primarily in New York since 1981. She immigrated to the United States at the age of ten with her family, settling in Indiana. After attending the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Celmins completed her MFA at the UCLA in 1965.

With a palette focused on the gradations between black and gray, Celmins has been known as a painter of refined representational images of night skies, ocean waves and spider webs. But her first subjects were war planes, smoking guns, and other images of death and disaster. In all of her work, the precisely rendered paintings suggest the importance of patience – the artist’s, in making a precisely rendered painting, and ours, in viewing it.

Organized by the Menil Collection and consisting of approximately 20 paintings and two small sculptures, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster will be the first exhibition to concentrate on a specific time (1964-1966) and subject matter – including violence in America, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and the news media. While several early images derive from the artist’s own interest in common objects from the studio, such as a television set or a lamp, this exhibition also concentrates on images of war – and televised images of conflict. Celmins’s work from this pivotal time reflects on the moment when the printed image began to give way to the television screen.

This exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art March 13–June 5, 2011. www.menil.com

Kawa = Flow: The Images of YAMAMOTO MASAO

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Artist Yamamoto Masao describes is work, albeit obscurely and poeticly, with these words: "Kawa = Flow is about the world where we are and the world where we go in the future. Although we seem to be connected continually there is a rupture between us in the present and those that went before us or that come next." "Kawa" means river or more precisely flow.  Masao's photographs are like microscopic imagery of the cellular structure of enlightenment; tiny snapshots of those beautiful moments where everything rushes too close and spills over the edge of the mind into pure ecstasy - and everything is crystal clear, if only for a tenth of a millisecond. Oblivion = Eternity. You can see some of Masao's work at the Maerz Gallery in Leipzig February 26th. www.maerzgallerie.com + www.yamamotomasao.com

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture

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Romaine Brookes "Natalie Barney" 1920

This is the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture. “Hide/Seek” considers such themes as the role of sexual difference in depicting modern America; how artists explored the fluidity of sexuality and gender; how major themes in modern art—especially abstraction—were influenced by social marginalization; and how art reflected society’s evolving and changing attitudes toward sexuality, desire, and romantic attachment. This is the last weekend to view Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Museum in Washinton D.C. www.npg.si.edu

Art and Prostitution: Mark Morrisroe

Art is oft born from tragic circumstances. Mark Morrisroe was born in Boston to a drug-addicted mother and left home at  age 15. Morrisroe would turn to prostitution to support himself. When he was 17 years old, an unsatisfied John shot him in the back, leaving him with a bullet lodged next to his spine for the rest of his life. The experience had a profound influence on Morrisroe's art, which often incorporated images of young prostitutes and X-rays of his injured chest.  Grappling with his identity as a homosexual through photography and performance art, Morrisroe become a seminal figure in the punk scene of Boston during the 1970s and 80s. Mark Morrisroe died in 1980 from complications from AIDS - he was 30 years old. More than twenty years after Mark Morrisroe’s early death, Fotomuseum Winterthur is presenting the first comprehensive survey exhibition on his work. Mark Morrisroe is on view until Feb. 13. www.fotomuseum.ch

Flower Myth

Left: Klee in 1911, by Alexander Eliasberg Right: Flower Myth (1918), Watercolor on pastel foundation on fabric & newsprint mounted on board

Paul Klee in His Studio

"I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For I reside just as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough." Paul Klee

Artist: Devendra Banhart

Artist Devendra Banhart picks up where native cave painters left off 20,000 years ago.  There is a shamanistic catharsis in the pure forms, lines, and colors against stark simple backgrounds that give Banhart's art an almost talismanic quality.  I should also say that there is a common misconception that cave art is primitive - the Lascaux cave drawings, for instance, (which were discovered in 1940 by four teenagers and their dog in southwestern France), upon closer observation, are actually incredibly complex.  For example, they have found evidence of mathematical star charts, dimensional perspective not seen in art for centuries and  intricate spiritual iconography.  Inside Banhart's art one can find the same cosmic complexity. Banhart's art is a return to the id - as if there was ever a magic tab to dissolve on your tongue to return you there. Banhart has been more widely recognized in other mediums, but his art has touched hallowed museum walls.  In 2004 Banhart exhibited exclusively next to the art of Paul Klee, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  Banhart has also had many solo shows in galleries around the world. The newest revelation is that Banhart has bought some tattoo supplies and has started tattooing his friends and family. Banhart's tattoos are brilliant little mementos that don't stray too far from the style of his artwork.  They hover moderately within the confines of traditional tattooing - albeit, with a lot less shading.  His tattoos are currently an altruistic enterprise, and he has graciously offered to give me one the next time I stop through his neck of the woods.  Coming up in March Banhart will be having a show in Milano along with Adam Tullie of Cavern Collection and bonkers conceptual artist Keegan McHargue.  More info about the show here.

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre

If You Don’t like the Picture, Blame the Ass

Tijuana Donkey Show

For over a century, millions of Americans have put on sombreros and posed for tourist photographs on top of donkeys in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. For almost as long, one of the greatest urban legends in all of California history has been the Tijuana donkey show, the much-rumored, often-referenced, but never proven south of the border sex show that is perpetually re-invented in American high school locker rooms. The Donkey Show explores the border’s intersection of myth and reality through a blend of over 200 rare tourist photographs, vintage nightlife ephemera, and pop songs born of American myths of Tijuana. The exhibition is guest curated by cultural anthropologist and graphic design historian Jim Heimann and author and music critic Josh Kun.  On view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art until April 16th, 2011. www.smmoa.org

Our Future is in the Air

Adolph de Meyer 'Dance Study' 1912 - Alfred Steiglitz Collection

Adolph de Meyer - who would become Vogue magazine's first official fashion photographer, 1913 - photographed the dancer Ninjinsky and other members of Sergei Diaghilev's troupe when l'Apres Midi d'Un Faune was presented in Paris in 1912. It has been suggested that the above photograph, the only nude by de Meyer, has some connection to the Russian ballet, but if so, remains mysterious.

It has been commonly remarked that the 20th century didn't really begin until 1910. The above photograph and a selection of other  incredible photographs from the 1910s are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the exhibit "Our Future Is In The Air": Photographs from the 1910s. On view till April 10, 2011.

Lure of Images: John Strezaker

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John Strezaker 'Mask XXXV' 2007

British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty. This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning. John Stezaker is organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Mudam, Luxembourg - on view till March 18, 2011.

Objet d'Art: Cupid's Lie

DAMIEN HIRST, Cupid's Lie, Gold

To inaugurate the Hong Kong exhibition space, Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “Forgotten Promises,” an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Damien Hirst. Forgotten Promises - Jan 18 - Mar. 19, 2011 at the Gasgosian Gallery, Hong Kong.

Exotic Regrets by Aoi Kotsuhiroi

I received an image over the weekend of the fascinating first chapter of sartorial sculptor, poet, and conjurer Aoi Kotsuhiroi's new collection entitled Exotic Regrets. As in past collections, Kotsuhiroi, based in the South of France, releases imagery of her new collections in chapter's to express gravity and anticipation. www.aoikotsuhiroi.com