Thomas Ruff

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Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), known for his deadpan portraits and gorgeous views of the night sky and architecture, is one of Germany's leading contemporary artist/photographers. Among his work is an exploration of the internet, that parallel visual universe teeming with sexuality of every flavor and variety. He gathers from that virtual playground erotic and often pornographic photographs that he subsequently manipulates in his computer, making beautiful--and disturbing--artwork from visual material that, for better or worse, is probably more abundant than any other type of image in our world today. The pictures, which are graphic and abstract at the same time, are accompanied by an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq, whose work is similarly influenced by the sex industry. Reviewing the series in the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz wrote: "Ruff may think these images are analytic or objective, but they're also sweetly, luxuriantly visual...Sex slips into something ravishingly, optically comfortable, and these everyday, off-world images morph into parapaintings from the Planet Love."

Bruce of Los Angeles: Beefcakes and Boundaries

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As part of Pacific Standard Time, Pop tART Gallery in Los Angeles presents Bruce of Los Angeles: Beefcakes and Boundaries. In the same pioneering spirit as many others who have packed their bags and headed west, Photographer Bruce Bellas, or Bruce of Los Angeles as he came to be known, arrived in California in 1946 and immediately began challenging the norms of acceptable society. With post-war conservatism growing, Bruce of Los Angeles photographed Muscle Beach’s most beautiful male bodies and published an extensive body of homoerotic work during a time when institutionalized homophobia was the norm. His pin-up images of the male physique pressed the boundaries between art and obscenity. Having influenced contemporary photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber, and Herb Ritts, Bruce of Los Angeles is regarded as a “creative force in the establishment of the modern American homosexual identity”. This exhibition will showcase original prints of the photographers extensive body of work as well as exhibit the work of contemporary artists who’ve found inspiration in the classic style and boundary breaking approach that mark the contribution Bruce of Los Angeles made to art as we know it today. Bruce of Los Angeles: Beefcakes and Boundaries is on view until December 21

Hollywood Arsenal

For his latest journey, Hollywood Arsenal, artist James Georgopoulos combines unique and extremely large silver gelatin prints with elegant multi-layered fields of acrylic paint. These meticulous and painstakingly produced prints are created in a mural darkroom, and each image often combines many layers of individually toned and processed fiber based prints which are then layered and trimmed to create a unique, seamless, and extraordinarily powerful artistic statement. Georgopoulos has amassed Hollywood’s most notorious arsenal in one location. He has photographed famous cinematic guns along with a selection of motion picture cameras used to record some of the most celebrated film and television shows ever made. Hollywood Arsenal will benefit The Art of Elysium, a non-profit organization. Founded in 1997 by Jennifer Howell, the group encourages actors, artists and musicians to voluntarily dedicate their time and talent to children who are battling serious medical conditions. The Art of Elysium provides artistic workshops in acting, art, comedy, fashion, music, radio, songwriting and creative writing. On view Saturday, November 12, 2011, 7:00pm - 11:00pm – Siren Studios 6063 W. Sunset Blvd. Hollywood, CA.

Melody Nelson

Artnet Auctions announces the sale of nine rare and beautiful works by photographer Tony Frank (French, b.1945) to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the legendary album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, by iconic French singer and artist Serge Gainsbourg. This photographic sale includes the memorable album cover, which contributed to Melody Nelson’s stature in French culture, and will only be on artnet Auctions until November 16, 2011.

Rita's Opening

Rita Lino is an unabashed, self exploratory photographer based in Porto, Portugal. Her work delves deep into the psyche of the feminine in a post-modern landscape where there is no curtain to hide behind.  Rita also makes brilliant short cinematic shorts that bring her photography to life. She just sent over her latest video, entitled Rita's Opening, which is a personal statement of sorts of her art and work.

Nate Lowman: Thirty Million Dollar Smile

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Triple A is a two-year public art project initiated by Francois Ghebaly, Emma Gray, Mandrake Bar and OHWOW gallery. Eight internationally recognized artists will be asked to create a single color image to be painted at large scale on the exterior wall of a former muffler shop that sits at the corner of Venice Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard, just south of the 10 Freeway in Los Angeles California. The wall, situated in the Culver City gallery district, also sits at one of the most heavily trafficked intersections in Los Angeles.This location offers high visibility to both arts professionals and the larger general public. The eight images painted on the wall over the course of the project will also be used to create a suite of eight individual silkscreen prints in an edition of ten. The inaugural project, a wall painting by New York based artist Nate Lowman, is now on view. Lowman's piece, Thirty Million Dollar Smile, is a halftone transfer of a photograph of Julia Roberts originally taken for a Loreal campaign, but later rejected by Roberts because she felt the image was over-photoshopped. The mural is located at 2600 South La Cienega Blvd.

Sweet Violence

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Sweet Violence is the first museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Sanja Iveković (b. 1949, Zagreb) covers four decades of the artist's remarkable career. A feminist, activist, and video pioneer, Iveković came of age in the post-1968 period, when artists broke free from mainstream institutional settings, laying the ground for a form of praxis antipodal to official art. Part of the generation known as the Nova Umjetnička Praska (New Art Practice), Iveković produced works of cross-cultural resonance that range from conceptual photomontages to video and performance. Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence is on view at the MoMA in NYC from December 18 to March 26, 2012.

KC Ortiz & POSE: Whitewash

On Saturday, November 19, graffiti artist POSE and photojournalist KC Ortiz will unveil Whitewash, their second exhibition at Known Gallery in Los Angeles, and their most cohesive to date. For POSE, Whitewash references society’s attempt to eradicate graffiti and stifle human expression. “Shortly after I started writing graffiti, Chicago took an extremely hard-line stance on its eradication, outlawing the sale of spraypaint and implementing Mayor Dayley’s Graffiti Blasters program,” POSE explains. With this exhibition, POSE will recall a time before the buff. “I am digging into my fondest childhood memories of riding the train and seeing all the colors, letters and cartoon characters along the lines. Making these paintings has been an incredibly rich process, and it makes me thankful that no city official can eradicate my memories.” POSE will show 15 new works in the main gallery. For KC, Whitewash is about the people and places he photographs. “Much of the work I do covers those who have been ‘whitewashed,’ so to speak, by history and policy,” KC notes. “Specifically, the work I will be exhibiting is from West Papua and Burma. You won’t find either of those ‘nations’ on the map, as both have been essentially ‘whitewashed’ away. Burma has been renamed Myanmar by its ruling junta in order to establish the fantasy of a unified nation, and West Papua has been occupied by Indonesia since 1963 after a very controversial handover from the Dutch that was orchestrated by the United States.” In the project room, KC will show 12 photographs of West Papua and Burma’s armed struggles. Whitewash will be on view from November 19 to to December 1o at Known Gallery. 

Cinema Sex Sirens

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CINEMA SEX SIRENS, published by Omnibus Press, is a unique collection of photographs of female stars of the '60s and '70s. That period marked a new era of frankness in society and the movie industry lost no time in following suit after some 25 years of censorship and self-imposed regulations. The women who became the new erotic goddesses also became world-famous and defined a generation's view of sexuality. Dave Worrall and Lee Pfeiffer's gallery illustrates a luminous collection of idealized women and offers a fascinating insight into the movies' depiction of female sexuality during the '60s and '70s. From the indisputable legends to actresses whose used their beauty to gain fame in the short-term through exploitation movies, this book provides little-known insights into their lives and careers. Cinema Sex Sirens can be found through Omnibus Press.

MAURIZIO CATTELAN: ALL

Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound. Working in a vein that can be described as hyperrealist, Cattelan creates unsettlingly veristic sculptures that reveal contradictions at the core of today’s society. While bold and irreverent, the work is also deadly serious in its scathing cultural critique. On view starting today at the Guggenheim in New York City, a major retrospective of Maurizio Cattelan is on view – literally hanging in the middle of the museums rotunda. Maurizio Cattelan: All is on view until January 22, 2012.  

EVA & ADELE Part of Survey of Recent Drawing

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EVA & ADELE claim to have to come to the future and say they have invented a new sex. EVA & ADELE are now part of a survey of artists form London and Berlin, entitled LONDON/BERLIN: Anschlüssel, on view until next month at the Center for Recent Drawing. This survey, curated by Andrew Hewish, seeks to present the vibrancy and depth of drawing production in London and Berlin. From recent graduates to the well established, these artists operate from within an understanding of the complexities of drawing values, of Anschlüssel: speculative, connective, playful - unlocking links wherever a line might lead. In bridging the space between these two metropolises, we find similar polyglot populations, artists from all over the world working in these cities, and with a similar breadth of expressive possibilities that reflect the exchange of ideas and forms in a globalized field.

ED WOOD'S SLEAZE PAPERBACKS

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"LET ME DIE IN DRAG!" Ed Wood, cinema auteur of the ultimate b-grade weird in the Hollywood miasma of sleaze and degradation, best known for his films Plan 9 from Outer Space or Glen Or Glenda, was also a writer of dirty books. Next week in New York a collection of Wood's rare X-rated fiction will be on display in New York at the Boo-Hooray gallery in New York City. The antiquarian mystique surrounding Edward Davis Wood Jr.’s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is legend. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, books were published and re-published under different titles, and occasionally under different author names. Multiple authors would share the same pseudonym, and the companies that published the titles weren’t the kind of operations that kept any kind of records, nor paid royalties, nor really existed in the manner that most are to expect of book publishers.  His descent into alcoholism and poverty was mirrored by the publishers that employed him. Towards the end of his life he wrote pornography with decreasing amounts of the strange flourishes of his eccentric personality. He died in 1978 of an alcohol-induced heart attack. His friends say the porn killed him. Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks will be on view at the Boo-Hooray Gallery in NYC from November 2 to December 1.

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

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How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties at the Brooklyn Museum brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords. Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. Youth and Beauty will present 140 works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.  Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties is on view until January 29, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum.