[FIRST LOOK] LINDSAY LOHAN - A RICHARD PHILLIPS FILM

Gagosian Gallery announces Lindsay Lohan, Richard Phillips' first short film. In his 90-second motion portrait of Lindsay Lohan, Phillips draws on the conventions of his painting that explore the legacies of classical portraiture in relation to the mediated representations of contemporary popular culture. Richard Phillips' Lindsay Lohan will be included in "Commercial Break," presented by the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Venice, Italy, June 1 - 5, 2011, concurrent with the 54th international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

RICHARD PRINCE, first solo exhibition in Asia

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Since the late 1970s, Prince has been mining images from mass media, advertising, and entertainment. Working in the tear-sheet department at TIME/LIFE in New York, he took magazine ads for jewelry, furniture, fashion, and cigarettes, and gave them new potency by cropping, removing ad copy from the images, reshooting black and white images on color film, and configuring them in generic groups. With these “rephotographs”, he redefined the artistic act and its related concepts of authorship, ownership, and the aura of the image. Applying his understanding of the complex transactions of representation to the making of art, he has crafted a unique signature filled with echoes of other signatures but that is unquestionably his own.

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An exhibition, that opened yesterday at the Gagosian gallery in Hong Kong, explores the role and representation of women in the male imaginary and in American culture, a principal theme in Prince’s oeuvre since the outset of his career and one that is charged with ambiguity and provocation. By locating, appropriating, and manipulating popular depictions of feminine types – from the aloof fashion model and the glamorous celebrity to the fetishistic nurse and the bold biker girlfriend - Prince explores how visual definitions of gender form in popular culture through repetition and reiteration. Gleaned from a variety of highbrow, lowbrow, and subcultural sources, Prince’s women abound with a diversity of stereotyped erotic appeal.

On view until July 16, 2011 www.gagosian.com

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The Erotic World of Harri Peccinotti

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Harri Peccinotti, who is nearly eighty years old and looks almost exactly like a wizard, is most well known for his erotic images of women–often cropped and close up focusing in on the delicious details, instead of giving away the whole picture. Peccinotti also has the distinction of shooting the Pirelli calendar two years in a row and is oft credited with upping its raunch factor to the level it stands today. This June 14 marks the opening of an exhibit at the Tethys gallery in Florence, Italy–the exhibition will run until July 4 2011. www.tethysgallery.com

[Blood Bath] The Art of Hermann Nitsch

In the Denver-MCA  through the end of May are the “relicts” (relics) of one of Nitsch’s abreactive performances, enacted to liberate the repressive drives in himself and participants in his “aktions.” Instead of film, however, these are Schuttbilder paintings (poured) composed of animal blood and pigment, capturing the gestures and off-body splatters of the original performance.

Part Artaud’s idea of psychoanalytical cure through certain abject formations of theatre, part Golden Bough-type worship and slaughtering of Dionysius, Nitsch’s work is about the trace of an event, not the finished painting. Drips, clots, spatters and smears all attest to a “relic” of a non-repeatable memory or aktion. But the frenzy of the performance is always dictated by the frame: the Nietzschean reintegration of primal and social. This is repeated again in the museum’s display: in the center are a number of Catholic vestments perfectly pressed and placed upon vestibules. But on the walls is the bloodwork, surrounding the repressed pagaentry of transubstantiation, recalling the pagan roots of Christianity, when the blood was never reduced to wine.

Bloodlines: Paintings by Hermann Nitsch is on view at the MCA in Denver until May 29. www.mcadenver.org

Text by Dreux Moreland for Pas Un Autre

[Craft, Utility and Luxury] Serum Versus Venom

Serum Versus Venom (SVSV), which was created in 2003, as a "interconnectedness of craft, utility and luxury" is re-launching after several years in hiatus. SVSV is built on a philosophy called Futurecraft - an "ideological framework for creating high and sustainable value in an over-saturated consumer landscape by colliding elements of hype modernity with traditional product development philosophies, techniques and values." www.serumvenom.com

[OPENING] Nancy Grossman: Heads

"They speak to the malice and subservience of both psychology and worldly conflict. Though the works are often rendered blind and mute, they still allude to the role of the silent witness amid cruelty and disorder." MoMA PS1 in New York presents Nancy Grossman: Heads, a solo exhibition that focuses on the artist's evocative head sculptures. On view May 22, 2011 - August 15 www.ps1.org

Marc Swanson: The Second Story

Marc Swanson, Untitled Boxer, 2010

Marc Swanson constructs sculptures out of found iconographic sources, from taxidermy to tattoos, fabricating them from culturally-loaded materials so that the resulting sculptures in both form and content reveal the conspicuous constructedness of our personas in the modern mediated world. For example, taxidermy forms relating to his own father’s fantasy of an outdoorsy hunter’s life—one his dad never really lived but simulated—are overlaid with the glittered mirrored surfaces associated with the demimonde of the after-midnight nightclub world the artist inhabited for many years.

Marc Swanson, Untitled Black Fighting Bucks, 2009

Swanson’s allusions often refer simultaneously to both the austere, rarefied, and serious history of minimal art and the legacy of cheesy metal and self-consciously decadent glam rock bands. In stating the equal importance of both in his work, Swanson makes viewers aware of the complex negotiations between high and low culture in everyone’s lives. An exhibition, curated by Bill Arning, Director, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston opens this July. Marc Swanson: The Second Story–July 2 to October 9, 2011, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston–www.carmh.org

Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want

Love Is What You Want

"People like you should fuck people like me," reads one her famous neon sign installations.  "Good smile, Great come," reads another.  Tracey Emin, a celebrated contemporary English artist, who has a retrospective of sorts opening today in London, is labeled a "wild child" of the art world with no chance of taming.  Her neon scribbles are honest and personal, and speak of the post modern human condition on a profound level.  Emin has had her fair share of hard knocks–growing up poor, raped at 13, and an abortion of twins at 18–so now, with her trademark lopsided smile and sexy glint in her eyes, she's appropriately getting back at this fucked up mess we call a world–in a beautiful way.

Good Smile Great Come

Emin's rise to prominence culminated with a special exhibit at the Tate Gallery in 1999, in which she presented her unmade bed in the museum exactly as it was in her home–after spending countless suicidal days in it following a fight in relationship.  Yellowed sheets, cigarette butts, stained underwear, and condoms strewn about the bed was a shocking, visceral site to behold–a strange reminder of the fragile, intricacies of the human psyche.  A famous photograph, a self-portrait of the artist herself, from a gallery show I've Got it All Now (2000) - displays Emin clutching bank notes and coins into her crotch - an analytical critique for man's unquenchable desire for money.

"Oh Christ, I Just Wanted You to Fuck Me, And Then I Became Greedy, I Wanted You To Love Me."  from a Tracey Emin Installation

The exhibition, Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want, opens today at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in london and features painting, drawing, photography, textiles, video and sculpture, in works that are "by turns tough, romantic, desperate, angry, funny and full of longing." Seldom-seen early works and recent large-scale installations are shown together with a new series of outdoor sculptures created especially for the Hayward Gallery.

On view at the Hayward Gallery May 18 to August 29, 2011 - find tickets here.

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Eduardo Chillida's Rebellion Against Gravity

The limbs of Eduardo Chillida's (1924-2002) sculptures were monolithic gangplanks to nothingness - fingers that never touch - concrete testaments to humanities eternal, unrequited connectivity. His metal and stone sculptures, for which the Basque sculptor and former soccer player is most famous for, are like beautiful ruins, much like the labyrinthian formation of air-ducts after a building is blown away by a hurricane.

"My work is a rebellion against gravity."

Chillida had a romance with Space - nothingness wasn't really nothingness at all, but a disassembled puzzle waiting to be put together. Eduardo Chillida in the early 1960's engaged in a dialogue with the German Philosopher Martin Heidegger. When the two men met, they discovered that from different angles, they were "working" with Space in the same way. Heidegger wrote: "We would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places and do not merely belong to a place," and that sculpture is thereby...the embodiment of places." This June marks the beginning of a large retrospective of Chillida's works at the Maeght Foundation in France. Almost 140 works are on display: 80 sculptures and 60 works on paper that include some Chillida's brilliant multi-media collages and drawings. On view June 26 to November 13 at the Maeght Foundation - www.fondation-maeght.com

The New Woman International

Germaine Krull by Eli Lotar

Images of flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky—all embodiments of the dashing New Woman—symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (University of Michigan Press) is the first book to examine modern femininity's ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most influential new media: photography and film. You can find the book here.

Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams

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Victor Brauner, Romania/France 1903–66, Loup-table (Wolf-table) 1939, 1947, Wood and taxidermied fox

This June marks the beginning of a unique, expansive exhibit of surrealist artwork in Queensland, Australia. The Gallery of Modern art in Queensland, a land far from the birth of surrealism, is borrowing "the core" of one of the finest and largest collections held at the The Musée national d’art moderne in at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Its a rare occasion in that the collection rarely leaves Paris.  The exhibition presents more than 180 artworks by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’, films, photographs, drawings and collages. Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams is on view June 11 to October 2 at the The Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland - www.qag.qld.gov.au.

PAUL THEK: Diver, A Retrospective

Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective is the first retrospective in the U.S. devoted to the legendary American artist Paul Thek (1933–1988). A sculptor, painter, and one of the earliest artists to create environments or installations, Thek was first recognized when he showed his sculpture in New York galleries in the 1960s. These early works, which he began making in 1964 and called “meat pieces,” resembled flesh and were encased in Plexiglas boxes that recall minimal sculptures. With his frequent use of highly perishable materials, Thek accepted the ephemeral nature of his works—and was aware, as writer Gary Indiana has noted, of “a sense of our own transience and that of everything around us.” With loans of work never before seen in the U.S., this exhibition is intended to introduce Thek to a broader American audience. On view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles - May 22 to August 28 - website.

Warhol Worship: Aloof Self Portrait Goes for $38.4 Million

In 1963 Andy Warhol was on the cusp of fame when patron of the arts Florence Barron commissioned a painting that would become a seminal work of art in a nascent pop art movement. Barron purchased the self portrait, in which Warhol photographed himself in a photobooth and silkscreened the image onto a four panel canvas, for $1,600 - in installments. After a heated 16-minute bidding war the self portrait was ultimately won by an unnamed European collector who agreed to pay the $38.4 million.

Paris: Life & Luxury

Francois Boucher "Lady Fastening Her Garter" of "La Toilette" 1742

An exhibition at the Getty in Los Angeles, entitled Paris: Life & Luxury,  "evokes the rich material ambiance of Paris during the mid-18th century. It brings together a wide variety of objects—from candlesticks and firedogs, to furniture and clocks, dressing gowns and jewelry, musical instruments and games—all from elite society in Paris, the fashion and cultural epicenter of Europe at the time." On view until August 7. www.getty.edu

David Bowie, Artist

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This summer, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York presents David Bowie, Artist, a multi-platform retrospective re-framing Bowie’s daring, multi-discipline career as that of an artist working primarily in performance. From his roots in such performance-based practices as cabaret, mime, and avant-garde theater, to Ziggy Stardust, his revolutionary tour that synthesized theater, music, and contemporary art into a rock spectacle, as well as his innovative video collaborations, and his work in cinema and theater, David Bowie, Artist presents Bowie as one of the most iconoclastic cultural producers of the 20th century. On view until July 15th - www.mademuseum.org

Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde

American expatriates in bohemian Paris when the 20th century was young, the Steins — writer Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife, Sarah — were among the first to recognize the talents of avant-garde painters like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Through their friendship and patronage, they helped spark an artistic revolution. This landmark exhibition draws on collections around the world to reunite the Steins' unparalleled holdings of modern art, bringing together, for the first time in a generation, dozens of works by Matisse, Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and many others. Artworks on view include Matisse's Blue Nude (Baltimore Museum of Art )and Self-Portrait (Statens Museum, Copenhagen), and Picasso's famous portrait Gertrude Stein (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from May 21 to September 6. www.sfmoca.org

 

Houdini: Art & Magic

Magician, escape artist, and showman extraordinaire Harry Houdini (1874–1926) has remained an object of fascination for generations. Combining biographical and historical artifacts with contemporary art inspired by his physical audacity and celebrity, Houdini: Art and Magic explores Houdini as an individual and an enduring cultural phenomenon, documenting the period in American history when the young Jewish immigrant helped shape the cultural landscape and became an acknowledged mass-market star. Featuring more than 150 objects—including film clips, stunning period posters, dramatic theater ephemera, rare photographs, original props (including a straitjacket, milk can, and Metamorphosis Trunk used by Houdini), and the work of select avant-garde artists—the exhibition reveals Houdini’s legacy as an iconic figure, both in his time and in ours, who has inspired artists today to reconsider his role as a daring persona. On view at the Skirball Center in  Los Angeles until September 4. www.skirball.org

The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy

The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy features thirty-seven sculptures from the tomb of John the Fearless (1342–1404), the second duke of Burgundy. His elaborate tomb, once housed at a monastery on the outskirts of Dijon, is now one of the centerpieces of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon. On view until July 31 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. www.lacma.org