All the latest news from the art world, as well as what's happening here at Gallereo. If you've built a gallery at Gallereo, let us know about your experience and you and your site could feature in our blog in the coming weeks.
Every year, Tate Britain in London invites an artist to create a Christmas tree for the gallery and this year, Tate has commissioned conceptual artist Giorgio Sadotti to do the honours.
Sadotti was born in Manchester in 1955 and currently lives and works in London. As a conceptual artist, his work includes instances of sculpture, sound, performance, collage and photography, with his work having been exhibited around the world at institutions such as Tate Modern in London, PS1 MoMA in New York, Kunsthalle in Vienna and The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
The work created at Tate Britain this winter is entitled Flower Ssnake, which consists of a Norwegian Spruce displayed in the gallery's neoclassical rotunda, without decoration. At the bottom of the plain tree lies a bull whip, coiled up under the branches.
The tree will remain naked in the gallery until the twelfth night of Christmas, when a one off performance will illuminate the tree to celebrate the end of the festive period. The performance will take place on the 5th of January at 7pm.
The Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture in Moscow
The world's eye is on Russia at the moment as they take the glory for being named the host nation for the World Cup in 2012, but in art terms, the world has been keeping a close eye on Russia for sometime. Some of the biggest names in collecting in recent years have come from Russia and there is no doubt as to the massive influence that Russia has had on the art market as a whole.
If you happen to be a fan of both football and art, then you might be familiar with the name Roman Abramovich - Russian billionaire and owner of Chelsea football club. You might also be familiar with his wife Daria Zhukova who is named as the founder of The Garage - a centre for contemporary art based in Moscow.
The Garage opened in 2008, as a non-profit organisation for the promotion and development of contemporary art and culture in Russia. Housed in an old bus garage designed in 1926 by Constructivists Konstantin Melnikov and Vladimir Shukhov, making it an icon of early 20th-century Russian architecture. The 8,500 square meter space was designed in a parallelogram shape to accommodate an innovative parking system for the buses, but now stands host to a range of international contemporary art exhibitions and events.
In 2011 the gallery is looking to really expand, opening a space in St Petersburg and it is rumoured that Abramovich has bough an island (New Holland) to fit in with further expansion plans for the gallery, and his art collection. Yes, an island. He is not alone in making such plans, there is already an island off the coast of Japan, called Naoshima, dedicated to art installations by artists such as Richard Long, WAlter De Maria, James Turrell and Cai Guo-Qiang. It was also rumoured that billionaire art collector Anita Zabludowicz also had plans for an art island in Scandinavia.
In a quote at ArtDaily.org Zhukova said "I am excited about this next stage of The Garage's development and the possibility of expanding to the cultural landscape of St Petersburg. We will release more details of our plans for New Holland once they are finalised in the coming year."
Already, 2011 looks to be an exciting year for art in Russia. Watch this space for more information.
Posted on December 11th 2010 on 11:14am
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I came across an amusing blog post today on Thoughts from a Sneaky Little Fox about rejection therapy. The blog is penned by the Sneaky Fox, or Craig Bush of BigBadWolfMedia as he is otherwise know.
The Sneaky Fox is currently undertaking a course of rejection therapy. As described in his blog post about rejection therapy and why you would want to partake in such an activity; rejection therapy is the process if finding ways to be rejected over a period of time in order to "reduce the fear and pain felt around rejection, encouraging more open and 'risky' social interactions and reap the many rewards that this comes with."
In order to become part-immune to the effects of rejection and to open himself up to the infinite possibilities that come with 'putting yourself out there', the Sneaky Fox has embarked on a program of rejection under various guises.
Yesterday's post talked about trying to be rejected via a Street Portrait Project. The Sneaky Fox offers to take photographic portraits of people in the street, both with the mission of getting some great portrait shots, which can be seen on his Flickr page, but also in the hope that someone might reject him. Unfortunately, people were pretty open to having their portrait taken. Rejection fail.
The Sneaky Fox then moved onto other methods of fishing for rejection, including saying hello to random people in the street, which as you can imagine, worked! Rejection success.
The same evening the Sneaky Fox attended a gig where the aim of the game was to raise money for a degree show for City of Birmingham Fine Art students - there was no game plan for rejection here - and by chance, one of the people who street portraits he had taken that morning was of one of the students who was raising money. Very small world. The Sneaky Fox was able to have a chat with Abi, and grab an invite to the final art show.
The moral of this amusing post is that you really never know what can happen when you put yourself out there and that photography projects performed in the street are not as unwelcome as you might think.
Posted on December 10th 2010 on 12:11pm
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Bird watching is not necessarily considered to be a glamorous topic, depending on who you are asking of course, but that hasn't stopped James Audubon's classic book; Birds of America, pulling in glamourous prices at auction.
James Audubon was a French-American ornithologist, naturalist and painter who was born in 1785. He famously depicted, catalogued and described the birds of North America in a way that had not previously been known. His work was detailed and comprehensive, yet equally emotive in how he depicted the various birds; attempting to capture their character as well as their physical features.
Audubon took his portfolio of over 300 works to England in 1826 where he gained a lot of attention and was able to raise enough money to publish his works as a book. The book itself it enormous, containing 435 hand coloured prints of 497 species of bird found in North America. The birds were engraved onto copper plates and then printed on sheets of paper measuring approximately 39 x 26 inches.
There are thought to only be 100 copies of the book that remain, and one of those copies was sold at Sotheby's this Tuesday for £7.3 million ($11.5 million). This truly stunning amount makes Audubon's Birds of America the most expensive printed work sold at auction. The last time that the book set the same record was ten years ago when Sheik Saud al-Thani of Quatar purchased the book at Christie's for $8.8 million.
For those of us who are unlikely to get our hands on the genuine article, you can pick up a sizable replica of the book, which was reprinted by the Abbeville Press. Birds of America is a great book, with some truly stunning images.
Posted on December 09th 2010 on 09:37pm
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Respected New York Art critic Jerry Saltz has revealed the Top 10 Art Shows of 2010 in the New York Magazine. In his run down of exhibitions, the Guggenheim certainly has something to celebrate this year, with the top two positions being filled with exhibitions of their making.
Here's what Saltz had to say on the New York art scene for 2010.
1. "Chaos and Classicism" at the Guggenheim, New York
Curated by guest curator, and art history icon, Kenneth Silver, this exhibition is on at the Guggenheim at the moment, and runs through until the 9th January. The exhibition looks at art from France, Itally and Germany between 1918 and 1936. A period buried in the horrors of World War I and in which society is trying to get to grips with what art should be about and how society can moved forward after such atrocities.
Saltz comments that "Thanks to [Kenneth Silvers] show, we have a clearer, less formalist idea of what was going on across Europe between the wars. As we've long suspected, art didn't simply march forward from Cubism in the teens, through Dada and Surrealism in the twenties and thirties; it made some strange pit stops along the way, into an often disturbing realism."
View the introductory video for the exhibition, voiced by Kenneth Silver himself:
2. "This is Progress" by Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim
In complete contrast to the Chaos and Classicism exhibition, This is Progress relied on the gallery environment, gesture and the subtlety of the lived experience for its impact, rather than on any physical objects. You would be accompanied by an actor, for a walk up parts of the ramp at the Guggenheim and able to interact in conversation with them.
What Saltz loved; "That Sehgal's creation - as real as the Mona Lisa - offered such an expansive and moving (emotional and physical) definition of art"
3. "Heat Waves in a Swamp" at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Curated by Robert Gober, this exhibition re-exposed the audience to the American visionary Charles Burchfield. In his primary subject matter of landscapes, Burchfield leads us on a unique and often mystical tour of the things that surrounded him in his life. As Saltz puts it "[Burchfield turned ordinary things into errie...utterly original, even magical art."
Charles Burchfield, An April Mood, 1946–55. Watercolor and charcoal on joined paper, 40 × 54 in. (101.6 × 137.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with partial funds from Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman 55.39.
4. Sarah Sze at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Sarah Sze is always an interesting character, with her immense creations compiled out of found and everyday objects. You never quite know whether her structures are to serve some purpose or meet a desired goal. Whatever form they take, they are endlessly captivating.
In September / October this year, Sze exhibited across two storey's of this gallery, leaving little space left unexplored or "transformed into the abstract machine" that is typical of Sze's oeuvre.
Sarah Sze, The Uncountables (Encyclopedia), 2010. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
With 6 more shows making it onto Saltz top 10 list, head over to the New York Magazine website to read about the rest and find out what Saltz had to say.
Also, why not let us know what you favourite shows of 2010 were, and why.
Posted on December 07th 2010 on 06:19pm
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Drawings by esteemed British artist David Bomberg will go on show next week at the London Jewish Museum of Art, in the Ben Uri Gallery, The works were purchased from Christie's back in July with help from the Art Fund. The Art Fund is a national charity in the UK that raises money to help museums and galleries to purchase works of art in order to enrich the range and quality of art in the UK.
The Art Fund helped towards the cost of Bomberg drawings, which sold at auction for £7,115 and will now be shown for the first time at the gallery.
David Bomber was born in Birmingham in 1890, to Polish-Jewish parents. His family moved to Whitechapel in East London in 1895, and growing up in the East End he was able to build close relationships with many of the Jewish artists and writers in the area. In 1913, Bomberg made an important trip to Paris with sculptor Jacob Epstein, where he met Pablo Picasso, Andre Derain and Amedeo Modiglioni.
With a great many connections and important influences, Bomberg developed a style of working and an oeuvre that ensures that he is listed amongst the most original and exciting painters of his generation.
The drawings that will go on show are entitled The Family, Ghetto Theatre; Ghetto Theatre and Sappers under Hill 60. The first two works are depictions of life in the East End, showing scenes of the Jewish Theatre audience. Having been created in 1919, the drawing have a dar lingering sense of depression following the atrocities of the First World War. The third drawing is a war time artwork looking at the men who built tunnels and trenches; a task that Bomberg himself was familiar with after he joined the Royal Engineers in 1915. During the Second World War, Bomberg was made an official war artist, but only managed to complete one commission during that time which was Bomb Store of 1942.
The drawings will go on show on the 8th December at the Ben Uri Gallery at The London Jewish Museum of Art
Posted on December 03rd 2010 on 11:32am
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The Front/Back cover of David Drebin's latest book, The Morning After
One word that you often hear around the work of Canadian photographer David Drebin is cinematic. Having moved to New York to attend the Parsons The New School for Design, graduating in 1996, has has become well known for his sexy and dramatically posed images of both celebrities and non-celebrities alike.
Drebin has some impressive commercial projects on his resume, including campaigns for AMerican Express and Davidoff, as well as contributing to leading magazines like GQ, Vanity Fair, Elle and Rolling Stone.
In Europe, you are most likely to come across Drebin's work through the Camera Work gallery in Berlin, who are responsible for representing him on the Continent. As a business Camera Work AG owns one of the worlds most comprehensive collections of photography and photographic books, from photographers such as Richard Avedon, Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand, Man Ray, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. The gallery itself presents an ever changing array of exhibitions, participates in art fairs globally and works closely with museums and collectors to encourage the acquisition of photographic works.
Camera Work is currently hosting an exhibition of Drebin's work, entitled "The Morning After", which coincides with the release of his latest photo book of the same name. His works are credited with the ability to pull the viewer from reality and to allow them to delve into the mystery and illusion of these cinematic scenes that he creates. Famed perhaps for his night shots of brightly lit cities like Hong Kong and New York, Drebin has a talent for inserting drama and intrigue into his urban settings.
This latest exhibition at Camera Work will run until the 15th January 2011.
Kurt Kranz: Programming of Beauty is the latest exhibition to be held at Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. The exhibition is set to mark the 100th birthday of Kranz who, inspired by a lecture by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, joined the Bauhaus in April 1930.
The Bauhau was a design school that was active between 1919 and 1933, and despite its short lifespan, is has left a lasting mark on the history of architecture, design, art and even 20th century culture as a whole. The Bauhaus was a melting pot for artists, architects and designers to come together in a place that promoted creation and debate about the relationship between modern living and cultural productions.
Founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus encouraged its teachers and students to consider how craft and design are integral to industrial production and that all aspects of art and design, and how they are used to construct objects and spaces, will be central to the development of society.
In 1923 the focus of the Bauhaus became every more industrial. The first Bauhaus exhibition, which opened in 1923, saw a unification of art and technology, covering the whole range of Bauhaus modes of production, from art and photography, right up to full scale building design.
The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1924 due to strict funding cuts, and it is there that many of the great works of art and design that we associate with the Bauhaus were created. Walter Gropuis resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1928, due to the constant struggles that were necessary to keep the school alive and thriving under conditions in Germany at the time. He was succeeded by Swiss architect, Hannes Meyer, who held key Bauhaus concepts close at heart however, his Marxist sympathies saw him removed from the post in 1930, given the political turbulence in Germany in that period.
Famed architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took charge from 1930 to 1933, changing the focus of the Bauhaus to concentrate more on architecture. As the Nazi party began to really take hold in Germany, the Bauhaus was first forced to move away from Dessau in 1932, before finally closing down in 1933 under increasing pressures from the Nazis.
Kurt Kranz can be counted amongst the many great artists, architects and designers that proudly attended the Bauhaus school of design, and although he joined in 1930; just three years before its closure, the things that he learned at the Bauhaus would stand him in good stead for the rest of his creative career.
Kranz took a class in photography under Walter Peterhan, learning how to experiment with the medium. Kranz went on to produce striking abstract works based on the repetition of an image or theme. As well as celebrating these abstract photographic works that were produced during the Bauhaus years, the exhibition also takes a look at Kranz's later work as an advertising graphic designer and how his earlier experiments informed his later career.
The exhibition will run until the 27th March 2011 at the Bauhaus Building in Dessau. For more information, please visit the Bauhaus website.
Posted on November 27th 2010 on 01:05pm
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If you are going to set about creating a photography project, why not make it fun, a bit quirky, and a little bit of a challenge. That's certainly what the folks over at Downtown From Behind did.
This cropped up on the It's Nice That blog and I was instantly captivated playing the game of 'guess the street' (without looking at the name of course!) As the blurb on the website will tell you, Downtown From Behind is a photography project wherein the aim of the game is to capture subjects riding their bikes, from behind, on every single street, avenue and lane below 14th Street in Manhattan, New York.
That is over 200 locations, 200 people, 200 bikes. We have put some of our favorite images further down, and as you'll see from the selection, the challenge isn't just in the volume of scenes that there are to capture, but there's also the issue of capturing just the right moment, the one before the yellow cab mows down the subject of the photograph.
The subjects chosen for the projects are unique and noteworthy in themselves. Photographs to date include artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, academics and restauranteurs. The projects draws attention to some of the most interesting and understated characters of the downtown area.
Alongside their focus on figures worth celebrating through photography, there is also a green angle to the project; a big hats off to sustainability and a support of the environment. In a city crammed to the max with people and traffic, it certainly gives the project a sense of gravity and purpose. Revenue produced by the project goes towards Little Ambitious, a philanthropic initiative that supports young designers and inventors in their pursuit of green endeavours. Definitely a worthy cause.
Here are some of our favourite photographs, and just a taste of what the project has to offer. To find out where they were taken, and who the subject is, please visit the Downtown From Behind website:
We are probably more familiar with Steve Martin as a comedian and actor, pursuing roles in films such as The Jerk, The Pink Panther remakes, The Man with Two Brains and Father of the Bride. What he is marginally less known for are his pursuits as a novelist.
Martin has just released An Object of Beauty, a new novel that attempts to capture the zeitgeist of the New York art world through a female protagonist named Lacey Yeager. During the course of the book, Yeager makes her way up from the basement of Sotheby's to running her own show in Chelsea, but not necessarily on the straight and narrow.
The book is told from the point of view of an art writer and admirer of Yeager, Daniel Chester French. The book talks of the rich and famous of the New York art scene and pitches in a mystery artist, named Pilot Mouse, who, it has been suggested, is based on British artist Banksy.
The intriguing book has done enough to create a stir in New York, suggesting that Martin knows more than an odd thing or two about the way the New York art world works. Not one for the jargon laden writings of the academic art world, Martin puts his views across with an ease and fluidity that suggests he really takes a great amount of pleasure in art, and the fun and games of the market.
Every year, Tate Britain in London invites an artist to create a Christmas tree for the gallery and this year, Tate has commissioned conceptual artist Giorgio Sadotti to do the honours. 
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