Cai Guo-Qiang's Gunpowder Covered Hands

In the upcoming week, more than 100 volunteers will join artist Cai Guo-Qiang to create three gunpowder drawings in preparation for his exhibition, Cai Guo Qiang: Sky Ladder, which opens on April 8 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. On Saturday, Cai and his studio set up camp at the museum to meet their volunteers and run tests of the gunpowder. Since this is the first time that Cai’s has made gunpowder drawings in Los Angeles, the artist needed to find out how the gunpowder would react to the local climate, particularly inside the galleries at the Geffen. The chemical composition, color, and shade (once it has been burned) of gunpowder vary slightly depending on the manufacturer and the region in which it is produced, and Cai wanted to know how the powders supplied by the fireworks company Pyro Spectaculars by Souza would fare.

Me Myself & I

“What do I see in Picasso that makes him Picasso?” wondered Edward Quinn, who took a large number of pictures of the Andalusian artist. Besides Quinn, many other photographers – some of whom were great names in the history of photography – Man Ray, Brassaï, Robert Doisneau, Dora Maar, Irving Penn, Edward Quinn, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Michel Sima, Richard Avedon and André Villers – also shot portraits of the famous artist, offering their own angle on his work and personality. The result is a profusion of portraits of Pablo Picasso that have become part of our collective imagery and which have contributed to building up a myth around the artist, his life and his work. MemyselfandI, Photographic Portraits of Picasso has been jointly organized by Museo Picasso Málaga and Museum Ludwig, Cologne and will be on view until May 10. After its run at MPM, it will travel to Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, where it will be on display from 2nd August to 28th October 2012.

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2012

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Charles Atlas (b. 1949). Still from Turning (live mix) with Antony and the Johnsons, 2004. Image courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London

Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—will fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial. With a roster of artists at all points in their careers the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded.

David Lynch Exhibition in New York

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David Lynch and Isabella Rosellini by Helmut Newton

David Lynch's first solo show in New York with be on view starting March 6 at the Tilton Gallery. The show will feature gold-framed paintings with gold frames à la Francis Bacon, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and a 42-second film. Tilton Gallery is located at 8 East 76 Street.

Gilbert & George New Dark Show in Hong Kong

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White Cube Gallery Hong Kong's inaugural exhibition London Pictures is a disturbing examination of sex, violence, power and death through the medium of Britain's tabloid billboards, collected over six years from newsstands near the artists' home in East London.  For five decades, to international acclaim, Gilbert & George have been making art that is visionary, shocking, relentless, moral and richly atmospheric. London Pictures is on view March 2 to March 5, 2012.

AESTHETICSEXAMERICA

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Deana Lawson, Dash Snow, and Al Steiner are all three part of a group of  contemporary New York artists who express themselves through photographs and videos inspired by their way of life: punk, rock, sex, drugs, hip hop. The Hélène Bailly gallery in Paris will introduce these artists in an exhibition, AestheticSexAmerica from March 16 to April 14, 2012.

Richard Prince & Picasso

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Artist Richard Prince stands in front of one his paintings at the Museo Picasso Málaga for an exhibition entitled Prince/Picasso.  No other contemporary artist could reinterpret Picasso in this particular way. Prince "approaches Picasso by using a tactic of radical cannibalisation of the artist, causing the spectator to feel alienated. By distancing us in this way, we are warned to revise our perceptions and conventional views on sexuality, eroticism and desire." Price/Picasso is on view at the Museo Picasso Málaga until May 27, Palacio de Buenavista San Agustín,8  29015 Málaga, Spain

Vanity Disorder

Charles Bank Gallery presents its first solo show with Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardottir aka Shoplifter. Entitled Vanity Disorder, the exhibition is comprised of sculpture and wall installations fashioned from both synthetic and human hair. Visitors of the exhibition enter an extraordinary world of hairy comets and braided planets, fuzzy faces, and imaginary friends. Vanity Disorder is on view until March 11, 2012, Charles Bank Gallery 196 Bowery, New York.

Pete Doherty Blood Paintings on View in London

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Musician Pete Doherty presents paintings created with his own blood, using a unique method of syringes, is on view at the Cob Gallery in London. The exhibition, entitled On Blood: A Portrait of the Artist, is Doherty's first exhibition in the UK. On  view until March 4 2012 – Cob Gallery, 205 Royal College Street, London

Ménage à Trois

Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente art part of an exhibition presenting their work together entitled Ménage à Trois at the  Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany. Ménage à trois: Warhol, Basquiat, Clemente, on view until May 20,  Bundeskunsthalle, Museumsmeile Bonn, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4, 53113 Bonn.

Cindy Sherman Retrospective

Untitled Film Still #25, 1978

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. A retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, on view starting February 26, brings together more than 170 photographs and traces the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present.

Teenage Hallucination

Director/writer team Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper have been collaborating as a pair on theater projects since 2004 and are now presenting their 2011 series, entitled This Is How You Will Disappear, of haunting productions, puppets and portraits at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of the Nouveau Festival – a mind-blowing survey of contemporary creation. The exhibition for Pompidou, called Teenage Hallucination, will be on view February 22 to March 12, 2012.

Warhol 15 Minutes Eternal

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Its been 25 years today since Andy Warhol died in a New York hospital and he still permeates popular culture.  This year we will see an explosion of Warhol related exhibitions and retrospective due to the anniversary of his death. On view now the MMK in Frankfurt, Warhol: Headlines, is the first exhibition to cover this type of subject in his oeuvre. Starting in March Affirmation Arts in New York will presentConfections and Confessions, which will include over 50 rare and unique photographs of the artist.  And also starting in March a massive retrospective exhibition of Andy Warhol's artwork will tour five Asian cities over the next three years – Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal will open in Singapore first and then to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing in 2013 and Tokyo in 2014.

Castles in the Air

German artist Hans Haacke poses next to his artwork entitled Helmsboro Country, on the opening day of his retrospective exhibition, 'Castles in the Air', at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, Spain. Hans Haacke (Cologne, 1936) is considered a pioneer of what has come to be known as institutional critique, a branch of conceptual art that emerged at the end of the 1960s. He received his training and resides in the United States. His art moves from pure conceptualism at the beginning of his career towards a more critical discourse in later years. Haacke's pieces question the mechanisms and functions of cultural, political and economic institutions, which serve as active tools in the construction and transmission of identitary and ideological values that bolster the discourse and the expansion of globalisation. He constructs systems of relations using literal elements taken from daily life, the critical meanings of which become apparent upon the symbolic collision that occurs when they are juxtaposed. The underlying intention is to reveal, more than to denounce, the relationship that exists between art and social behavior. Castles in the Air is on view at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid until July 23, 2012 Santa Isabel, 52 28012

Bruce LaBruce's Obscenity Show Hugely Controversial

With a priest's face suggestively covered in semen, actress Rosy DePalm biting down on a rosary, and naked nuns, Bruce LaBruce's new show at LaFresh Gallery in Madrid is inciting immense fury among Catholics and conservatives who are calling the exhibition of 50 photographs blasphemous and depraved. See photos from the show and protesters after the jump. "Obscenity" will be on view until April 4, 2012 at LaFresh Gallery in Madrid, Conde de Aranda, 5 28001.

Nick Haymes' Unflinching Portrait of Teenage Angst

Selections from the book - email correspondence between Gabe Nevins and Harmony Korine

Nick Haymes first met Gabe Nevins on an editorial assignment in the summer of 2007. Gabe had just wrapped up his lead role in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, in which he had played a teenage skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard. Gabe had never acted prior to starring in the film; he had heard about Van Sant's casting call from a skateboard store and initially auditioned as an extra. Meeting the teenager, Haymes recalls: "Initially, Gabe was fairly shy, but it quickly transpired that he had seen some of my skateboarding images online and an instant friendship was struck. When the assignment was over, I approached Gabe about the possibility of working on more photographs as there was something entirely captivating about him and his energy." A new volume, published by Damiani Editore, tracks the highs and lows of Gabe's teen years, from stardom to emotional breakdown and homelessness. On Wednesday, March 1st, from 6.00 to 8.00 pm, Haymes will be signing the volume at Dashwood Books in NYC.