Pierre Huygh Wins Hugo Boss Prize 2002


NEW YORK, 19 October 2002 - French artist Pierre Huyghe has been named the recipient of the Hugo Boss Prize 2002. A biennial international award administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Hugo Boss Prize was established in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art. Huyghe, who will receive an award of $50,000, was selected from a group of six short-listed artists by an international jury of museum curators and directors. An exhibition of the artist's work will be on view at the Guggenheim Museum during the winter and spring of 2003."In Huyghe's remarkable work, which involves film, photography, video, sound, computer animation, sculpture, design, and architecture, Huyghe examines the narrative structures of popular culture, investigating the relationships between fiction and reality, and memory and history.", said Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, who announced the prize on Wednesday on behalf of the jury.
The shortlist of six finalists for the Hugo Boss Prize 2002 was announced in January. In addition to Pierre Huyghe, the artists included Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Belgium), Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Denmark), Hachiya Kazuhiko (b.1966, Japan), Koo Jeong-a (b. 1967, Korea), and Anri Sala (b. 1974, Albania). According to its criteria, the Hugo Boss Prize sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, race, nationality, or media, and the nominations included young, emerging artists, as well as established individuals whose public recognition may be long overdue.
Pierre Huyghe was born in 1962 in Paris, where he currently lives and works. The artist graduated form the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1985. Huyghe's work, which has taken the form of video and installations in recent years, often uses film as a departure for his investigations of fiction versus fact. His work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions including shows at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2002); Musée d' Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2001); the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Amsterdam (2001); Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal (2000-2001); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2000); Aarhus Kunstmueum, Denmark (1999); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998).
His work has been represented in notable group exhibitions, including Moving Pictures, currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through 12 January 2003); No Ghost Just a Shell, Kunstahlle Zürich (2002); Documenta 11, Kassel (2002); Animations, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York (2001); Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., and Haus der Kunst, Munich (1999-2000); the Istanbul Biennial (1999); the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1999); the Venice Biennale (1999); Premises, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York (1998); and the second Johannesburg Biennial (1997). Additionally, Huyghe represented France at the Venice Biennale (2001) and received a special award. The Guggenheim has published a catalogue that features the work of all six finalists, including special projects by each artist. The catalogue includes essays by Francesco Bonami, Jörg Heiser, Nico Israel, James Rondeau, and Maria-Christina Villaseñor, with an introduction by Susan Cross. The catalogue is available for $ 20.00.This year marks the fourth presentation of the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum. Since its inception in 1996, the prize has been awarded to American artist Matthew Barney (1996); Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (1998); and Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc (2000). The list of finalists in previous years includes: Laurie Anderson, Janine Antoni, Stan Douglas, Cai Guo Qiang, and Yasumasa Morimura in 1996; Huang Yong Ping, William Kentridge, Lee Bul, Pipilotti Rist, and Lorna Simpson in 1998; Vito Acconci, Maurizio Cattelan, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Tom Friedman, Barry Le Va, and Tunga in 2000.

Leonard Everett Fisher
Leonard Everett Fisher was born in New York City (1924). A World War II veteran, he attended Yale University's School of Art, earned BFA and MFA degrees, and taught Design Theory at Yale as a graduate fellow. He has illustrated some 260 books for young readers since 1954, authoring 90 of these; designed United States postage stamps; executed paintings for the Norwalk (CT) transit District building. He is a recipient of Yale's Winchester Fellowship and John Ferguson Weir Prize, a Pulitzer painting award, the Premio Grafico Fiera Internazionale di Bologna, the University of Southern Missisippi Medallion, the Christopher Medal for Illustration, a National Jewish Book Award, the Catholic Library Association's Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota's Kerlan Award, the American Library Association's Arbuthnot citation, and the New England Booksellers Association Children's Literature Award. He was a delegate to the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services during the Carter Administration; is Dean Emeritus of the Paier College of Art; a members of the Sanford Lowe Illustration Committee of the New Britain Museum of American Art, and the advisory board of the Master of Fine Arts program of Western Connecticut State University. He is a Founding Member of the Westport-Weston Arts Council (which evolved into the Westport Arts Center), and recipient of Westport's Lifetime Achievement Award for the Visual Arts. His art is in the collections of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution (DC), Butler Art Institute (OH), New Britain Museum of Art (CT), Museum of American Illustration (NY), Mt. Holyoke and Union Colleges (MA, NY), the Universities of Connecticut, Brown, Oregon, Minnesota, and Southern Mississippi, the New York and Westport Public Libraries.

Oliver Kamm 5BE Gallery

The World Is YoursCurated by Liz Jonckheer
July 19 – August 17, 2007Opening Reception: Thursday July 19, 6-8pm
Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is pleased to present a group show featuring the work of five artists: Jonathan Allen, David Brooks, Luke Butler, Rä di Martino and KB Jones. The World Is Yours suggests that the world is what you make of it, and points to the artists’ creation of their own language.
Jonathan Allen's paintings and works on paper recycle pop imagery, abstraction, political iconography, and the mundane to evoke his eccentric vision. His surreal dreamscapes often examine the bizarre contradiction, and absurdities, of today's cultural and political climate. Allen weaves together a variety of media and techniques; oil/acrylic paint, pen/ink rendering, pencil, pastel, and collage elements to create seamlessly relevant works of art.
David Brooks’ work considers the relationship between the individual and the built and natural environment. The fact that the world is comprised of countless ecosystems and innumerable autonomous relationships within them inspires Brooks in his attempt to define and map the individual within the “seemingly endless environment of now”. The whole is implied by the parts – and in Brooks’ case, the parts are the medium of his sculptures.
Luke Butler toys with contemporary mythology. To him, “The End” is a classical figure that looms in our consciousness despite our ability to see right through it. As a static image floating in a frame it seems contradictory, absurd, and poignant – an anti-picture. He also suspects that ubiquitous, overpowering figures like the Presidents of the United States must also be little human men, vulnerable characters whose preoccupations could look a lot like his, and maybe even yours.
Rä di Martino is interested in the relationship between our intimate sphere, memory, subconscious and the fictions we create around ourselves. Her most recent film, The Red Shoes, recalls a story and resembles something - a hazy memory or dream - from somewhere – déjà vu, perhaps. The Red Shoes can be read as found footage and a sort of day dream, (the film was shot ‘day for night') and while the title and scene are familiar, the viewing experience is more than what it seems.
KB Jones’ subject matter is drawn from images of her childhood in Africa, and her life today in Brooklyn, and speaks to the powers of association and suggestion. Her paintings manage to be both familiar and enigmatic at the same time. She has developed her own visual vocabulary which subtly communicates itself to the viewer – figures emerge from textures, only to dissolve into the surface of the picture plane, once again.
Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is located at 621 West 27th Street on the ground floor. Gallery hours are Monday - Friday from 11am-6pm. For further information or images please contact the gallery at 212-255-0979 or visit our website at www.oliverkamm.com.

Tricks of the Trade

Tricks of the Trade
I am a collector.’ Ah yes, the magic words around which the entire shaky constellation of the contemporary art world now revolves; a phrase to pump the heartbeat of everyone from dealer to artist to museum director. And yet, there remains something strange, something askew, awkward even, about the rise to prominence and dominance of the ‘c’ word, an underlying malaise as worthy of psychoanalysis as economics. But of the power and prestige of the collector there can be no doubt. Nor can one question their increasing importance throughout every zone of the contemporary art infrastructure, from the humblest alternative gallery to the major international institutions, it seems the ‘c’ has become our ultimate fetish.Last year saw the publication in English of A Passion for Art (Thames & Hudson), a chunky super-glossy tome devoted to delicious photographs by Philippe Chancel of some of the world’s most prominent current collectors, accompanied by a suitably reverential text by Irene Gludowacz and Susanne van Hagen. A library of books on collectors would surely include monographs on the great figures of the past, scholarly and often somewhat critical histories of the Medici family, the Frick and Mellon collections; multi-volume catalogue raisonné put out by collectors themselves, whether Saatchi or Robert Lehman; and racy autobiographies such as Peggy Guggenheim’s Confessions of an Art Addict (André Deutsch). By contrast A Passion for Art is a straightforward homage, if not hagiography, of the most successful, photogenic and obsessively bulimic collectors, presented as ideal role models to the rest of us mere mortals. One of the authors, Susanne van Hagen, is typical of this breed herself: a striking beauty married to a British financier, based in Paris rather than her native Germany, she has a ubiquitous presence at every art fair and biennial around the globe. She is a typical ‘collector’ in so much as the power of that term alone guarantees her automatic respect and entry with no further questions asked. It is true that once you are known as an art collector very few will pause to wonder what you actually own, let alone what you’re worth.What has changed in the last decade is that the really big collectors, such as those worshiped in this book, now operate as public museums with all the puissance of any long-established state cultural institution. For example, the selection process for New York’s ‘International Studio & Curatorial Program’ fully blurs all boundaries between private collections, corporate art holdings and museums, as the jury includes curators from the Rubell and Eileen & Peter Norton collections, the Hirshhorn and Whitney Museums, and the company Neuberger Berman LLC. These collectors now have such wide and important ‘stock’ they are increasingly listed like any other organisation. Thus the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, a not-for-profit institution that commissions artworks in Milan, always list their collaborating artists as being part of ‘the most important public and private collections worldwide’, without any differentiation between the two entities. Here the Guggenheim is listed right next to the Deste Foundation, the Seattle Museum is alongside the Fondation Pinault, the Israel Museum is indistinguishable from the Jumex Collection, and the collections of Elaine Dannheisser or Gilles Fuchs all appear to be the same thing as that of the Castello di Rivoli.In addition, the collector is now presented as a cure for every woe: all a struggling artist needs is the right collectors on their CV, museums must merely find their local millionaire supporter, and each new gallery should immediately obtain their own ‘c’. And whether it is because they are apparently so much richer, or publicly funded institutions are relatively poorer, private collectors are increasingly the major museum donors, to the extent that they determine acquisition policy more than any in-house curator. Thus when Harvey Shipley-Miller of the Judith Rothschild Foundation spent several years and millions of dollars buying drawings by new young artists, and then donated them to MoMA in New York, the museum had to go through the pretence of pondering before gratefully accepting this pre-planned gift. Likewise the two substantial shows of the ‘Leipzig School’ touring American museums are both from private collections (those of the Rubells and Michael Ovitz). The institutional purchasing process is so long and cumbersome there are usually no works left to buy by the time any museum gets lumbering around to deciding something may be of interest. This essentially means that it is individual collectors who now determine the ‘history of art’ rather than official state institutions. If an important enough collector decides to buy a certain artist or movement, they will eventually dictate their taste to the institutions. If all the curators in all the museums of the world were unanimous that, say, the ‘New Leipzig School’ was drab and dreary derivative tosh, it could make no difference to its historical importance matched against those collective collectors’ might.But what is a collector anyway? Merely someone who owns more than one object from a similar series? Then it only takes ownership of two works to qualify. And indeed if you should happen to own just one picture, but it was Picasso’s single most important and famous painting, you would be qualified as a major collector even without any actual collection. Today’s collectors are judged by the number of works they own (a ridiculous criteria comparable to a schoolyard competition), but also the current fame of the artists and hence their financial value. Just about everyone connected to the art world is technically a collector as everybody owns at least two art works of some description. Whether these were received as gifts or bought at a flea market, we can all quite accurately announce ourselves as more or less collectors.But as a collector, your status is dependent on the fluctuating fortunes of those artists you own. A collector with 1,000 works by a totally unfashionable or forgotten artist is not taken as seriously as a collector with just two works by the hottest superstar of the moment. Thus collectors make the market but are also made or broken by it, their importance judged by their stable of bets. Likewise every dealer and every gallerist is also ipso facto a collector, and surprisingly often their long-term wealth and success depends upon one of their artists whom they always had in stock, but could never sell, and who only decades later becomes a valuable commodity. As the old adage goes, it is not what you sell but what you keep that matters, or to put it more bluntly, the longer a dealer keeps a work the less valuable it becomes, the longer a collector keeps it, the more valuable it seems.

Andrew Bae Gallery

Andew Bae Gallery , presents

Andrew Bae Gallery
Chicago,il
presents

July 13 — August 11, 2007Opening reception: Friday July 13, 5 - 8 PM
The Andrew Bae Gallery will proudly present recent work by Korean photo-sculptor, Myungkeun Koh. Koh`s complex constructions of photographic laminates combine sculpture and photography, yet establish an independent medium of their own.
In these wondrous “boxes”, as the artist casually calls, a sense of architectural depth intersects with that of the two-dimensional picture plane. Translucent photographic images repeat, overlap and resonate through the constructed space of variously shaped boxes. These illusionary and illusionistic sculptures dream a dream of surface. Violating but also appropriating the principles of two-dimensional photographic representation as well as the spatial manipulation of sculpture, the surface claims space and the image breathes life. The greater charm of the artist’s luminous boxes is, however, not to be found in his innovative method alone, but in the classicism of the themes the artist has incorporated. Natural elements like water, fire, air and soil; the outer walls of abandoned buildings; old windows and doors, all have been captured by the artist’s camera. This summer, Andrew Bae Gallery especially focuses on the artist’s new theme, the Stone Body. Koh isolates the surface of the human form in stone sculptures from the 5th century B.C. through the 19th century and preserves this surface in high-resolution laminated film gels. The weight of stone is denied and multiple iterations of human form are suspended in pattern. Captured in moments, the fleeting image resembles in its transparency the transience of our vulnerable life and reminds us how beautiful our mortal body is.
Myungkeun Koh was born in 1964 in Korea and educated both at Seoul National University and at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. His works have been shown in Cologne, at the Sorbonne in Paris, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, New York and San Francisco. After his introduction to a Chicago audience at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in 1998, this exhibition is Koh`s first solo show at Andrew Bae gallery. Currently, Myungkeun Koh is a professor at Kookmin University of Fine Art in Seoul.

Slater Bradley

Slater Bradley

Slater Bradley
Slater Bradley's Doppelganger Trilogy (2001–04) conjures up three pop icons from the collective unconscious of our mass-mediated culture. All fallen heroes—two by suicide and one by a protracted descent into disrepute—these figures are perceived through the distancing lens of desire and memory. Each of the three videos is fashioned as a recording of a faux concert performance, using a technique reminiscent of what would have been employed to capture the event when it purportedly took place.Factory Archives imagines Ian Curtis, lead singer of the short-lived punk band Joy Division, through the grainy haze of aging video stock. As if retrieved from the vaults of Factory Records, this fragment depicts an elusive performer just before the dawn of MTV, when the choreographed music video would forever change how culture consumes its rock 'n' roll. Phantom Release rehearses this cultural phenomenon as well as the ubiquitousness of the personal camcorder, offering an ersatz, "amateur" recording of Kurt Cobain playing the guitar. Its studied casualness and raw ambience evoke the countless bootleg videos that can be downloaded from any number of Web sites devoted to all things Nirvana. In Recorded Yesterday Michael Jackson is seen performing his signature dance moves on an otherwise empty stage. The black-and-white, Super-8 film footage of this lone figure appears to be disintegrating as it plays, creating a ghostly, retro atmosphere that reflects the melancholic reality of a once brilliant career spiraling out of control. Each chapter of the trilogy appears worn and overexposed, as if distorted by age. The effect is one of a vaguely remembered image, a dream dimly recalled at the break of day.Bradley's "restagings" of these imagined performances reference specific moments in his own life when he first encountered the work of Joy Division, Nirvana, and Michael Jackson, and through them, the seduction of abandonment, the lure of celebrity, and the erotics of fan worship. His trilogy—and its related photographs and collages—compellingly complicates the autobiographical element by the involvement of the artist's "doppelganger." Since 1999 Bradley has been collaborating with Benjamin Brock, his veritable double, in a series of works that explore the psychologically charged space between one's self and mirror image. In myth and literature, the doppelganger is an apparition that portends one's own death, but its form has mutated over time to include the notion of double identity. In the trilogy Brock performs as Bradley playing the roles of Curtis, Cobain, and Jackson. Transformed by costume and posture, and further masked by the deteriorating stock on which he is seen, the doppelganger is at once everyone and no one. What emerges is a triangulation of reflections, an endless hall of mirrors that leads nowhere but to the recesses of the unconscious mind.

Galeria Trama

Galeria Trama - Madrid,Spain

Galeria Trama
Madrid . Barcelona

http://www.galeriatrama.com/

Galería TRAMA abrió sus puertas en Noviembre de 2002, con la firme intención de promocionar el arte contemporáneo, difundiendo la obra de artistas emergentes, nuevas promesas y figuras consolidadas del panorama español e internacional. Su propósito es el de acercar más el arte contemporáneo a las nuevas generaciones, vivir de cerca la emoción y el placer de las nuevas creaciones artísticas y tejer una relación más intensa entre el coleccionismo y las nuevas tendencias. Se define por la reunión de ideas, estilos y generaciones distintas, reflejando de este modo la variedad y riqueza de las propuestas formales de nuestro tiempo.
Desde el pasado mes de mayo cuenta con un nuevo espacio: TRAMA – ESPACIO II, ubicado en el mismo edificio de la plaza de Alonso Martínez número 3 y con acceso desde la planta baja.
En él se presenta una programación independiente de la que se desarrolla en la galería y muestra tanto la obra de carácter más emergente o experimental, como proyectos específicos a cargo de artistas que la galería ya presenta en su programación habitual.
La promoción de los artistas representados por la Galería se realiza principalmente a través de exposiciones individuales y colectivas en nuestros espacios, en otras galerías, en la participación en Ferias de prestigio como ARCO y en la colaboración con relevantes instituciones, museos y universidades
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Established in 1991, Galeria Trama is dedicated to promoting contemporary art. It is a platform to foster young, emerging and established artists. In November 2002 Trama opens a new gallery in the centre of Madrid, which has lead to the broadening of its activity. Each gallery has its own program of exhibitions that allows to offer some of the best artists living in different Spanish regions.
Trama is defined by the gathering together of different style, ideas and generations. The diversity of languages coming from them has been broadened due to the recent incorporation of new artists working on multidisciplinary proposals. Artists represented by Trama usually have their works periodically exhibited in the gallery premises. Other shows are organized through the gallery collaborations with other Spanish and international galleries as well as institutions, museums and universities.

JOHN CONNELY presents

JOHN CONNELLY presents

www.johnconnellypresents.com


John Connelly presents
Augusto ArbizoTauba AuerbachJeff ElrodKim FisherDana FrankfortDaniel HesidenceAlex KwartlerCarrie MoyerElizabeth NeelRaha RaissniaWendy WhiteMichael Zahn
Late Liberties - on view from July 12 through August 24, 2007 - presents an inclusive survey of recent abstract painting, works on paper, and sculpture by a dozen of artists – including seven women painters – from New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Works in this thematic exhibition include soft and hard-edge paintings, gestural and ‘expressionistic’ abstractions, as well as shaped and chromatically engaged ‘painted’ sculpture. Late Liberties is organized by artist and curator Augusto Arbizo in collaboration with John Connelly.
For a young artist to be making work at this moment in what could be called an abstract or non-representational manner, be it vaguely gestural, lyrical, or geometric in mode, is consciously or not, a highly personal and political act. With few exceptions, the history of the last 15 years has largely shunned modes of abstraction. Much maligned and critiqued – and often used as strategy for conceptually based work – it has been largely banished to the sidelines by an art world enthralled by photography, installation, animation and romantic figuration.
But modes are cyclical and thus a younger generation of artists has found that the more outmoded the approach, the more dangerous – and exciting – a territory it becomes. It is a loaded terrain that offers fissures and openings for freedom and personal manifestation – from the seemingly clinical and sedate to the unabashedly seductive. The works in this exhibition range from computer derived to text and design based to nature inspired, running the gamut from geometric compositions to loosely brushed fields of color. Disparate ideas concerning technology, fashion, art theory, wildlife and science, and pop culture, among others, inform the work. Furthermore, a commitment to the refined and handpainted becomes obvious, whether painstakingly cut, stenciled and ‘constructed’ or intuitively brushed and dripped. All the artists will be creating new work specifically for this exhibition and each one will be given his / her own wall. Looking at abstraction today makes it clear that it is a completely different exercise than it was for earlier generations. Ezra Pound’s famously quoted mandate to ‘make it new’ apparently still fits the bill, but for today’s artists it is a risky, perilous and rousing proposition – offering Late Liberties.

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