Love, Life, & Fashion

Two of the most important people in fashion and design today, Ruben and Isabel Toledo have just released a book which "is a rare look into the mind, life, and journey of one of our generation’s most coveted fashion designers, Isabel Toledo. From the nostalgic and permanent in­fluence of her upbringing in Cuba and the serendipitous love that materialized her vision and fueled her conviction, to the timeless mark she continues to make on the fashion industry....." Ruben who translates Isabel's visions into illustration which then bring her designs to life, first laid eyes on each other since they were thirteen, have been collaborating for over two decades and their romance and love has offered an explosion of creativity. The book, entitled Roots of Style: Weaving Together Life, Love, and Fashion is available now.

Clifford Owens Demands Sex from Audience at MoMA PS1

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This is the last weekend to see Clifford Owens first exhibition, entitled Anthology, at a New York museum – MoMA PS1 – which is comprised of photography, video, and live performance. Anthology features performances scores—written or graphical instructions for actions—that Owens solicited from a multigenerational group of African-American artists. Twenty-six major artists have contributed scores, nearly all of whom composed new works specifically for Owens and his project. This weekend will prove especially challenging when he will "demand sex" from the audience/viewer. This Sunday, for his last performance, Kara Walker has written the score: "French kiss an audience member. Force them against a wall and demand Sex. The audience/viewer should be an adult. If they are willing to participate in the forced sex act abruptly turn the tables and you assume the role of victim. Accuse your attacker. Seek help from others, describe your ordeal. Repeat."  Clifford Owen's performance commences at 3 p.m. on the second floor of MoMA PS1 this Sunday, March 12. 

Paradise Lost

Raymond Unger, born in Hamburg, Germany, who comes from a family of well known painters and is well know for his fantastical, palette knife style, stands in front of his painting Paradise Lost which won the 2011 International Lucas Cranach prize. The painting will be on view as part of a group exhibition of the winners of the prize which is awarded every three years. The theme for 2011 was "human images" and dealt with societal satire and surreal alienation. The exhibition will be on view from March 9 to May 13 at the Cranach Foundation in Wittenberg, Germany.  

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.