Tag Archives: george condo

IN CONVERSATION: GEORGE CONDO AND MASSIMILIANO GIONI

George Condo, Internal Riot, acrylic, pigment stick, and metallic paint on linen, 2020 (© George Condo / photo by Thomas Barratt)

Who: George Condo, Massimiliano Gioni
What: Livestreamed webinar
Where: Hauser & Wirth Zoom
When: Monday, November 9, free with advance RSVP, 1:00
Why: This past spring, Hauser & Wirth presented the online program “Distanced Figures: George Condo,” in which the New Hampshire-born, New York-based artist discussed his virtual exhibition, “Drawings for Distanced Figures,” and took attendees inside his Hamptons studio to share his working methods during quarantine. “I love to draw, and in the usual context of privacy, one doesn’t think of the term isolation or forced separation; rather, it’s a space to create without being watched,” he noted about the show. On November 9 at 1:00, the purveyor of “physiognomical abstraction” will talk about his new exhibit, “Internal Riot,” which continues in-person at Hauser & Wirth’s 542 West 22nd St. gallery, speaking with New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni; admission is free with advance RSVP. You can reserve free timed tickets see the exhibition, which Condo describes as consisting of “composites of various psychological states,” here. (You will also have access to “Jack Whitten: I Am the Object.”)

THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING

Jeff Koons is one of numerous artists who discuss their relationship with money in Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything

THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING (Nathaniel Kahn, 2018)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, October 19
212-255-2243
www.thepriceofeverything.com
quadcinema.com

On October 4, a framed painting titled “Girl with Balloon” by British street artist and provocateur Banksy began shredding itself upon being sold for $1.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction, shocking and delighting the art world. Was Banksy, whose very name evokes cold, hard cash, making a sly comment on the art market, on auctions, on the intrinsic value of a work of art? In the immediate aftermath, there was general confusion about just what the buyer had purchased and whether she had to keep it at all. In many ways that stunt exemplifies what Nathaniel Kahn’s highly artistic documentary, The Price of Everything, is all about. Kahn, who was nominated for Oscars for his 2003 film, My Architect: A Son’s Journey, which explored the legacy of his father, Louis Kahn, and his 2006 short, Two Hands, about pianist Leon Fleisher, this time trains his camera on the volatile global art market. “Art and money have always gone hand in hand,” superstar auctioneer Simon de Pury says. “It’s very important for good art to be expensive. You only protect things that are valuable. If something has no financial value, people don’t care. They will not give it the necessary protection. The only way to make sure that cultural artifacts survive is for them to have a commercial value.”

Traveling to art fairs, galleries, museums, and studios, Kahn gets a wide range of opinions on the subject, from such art-world denizens as Amy Cappellazzo of Sotheby’s, who savors the chase and the deal and has her own definition of “money shot”; collectors Inga Rubenstein, Holly Peterson, and, primarily, husband-and-wife Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, with Edlis getting a lot of screen time showing off his vast collection and discussing various pieces and artists in detail (“There are a lot of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Edlis says. “The art world is capricious.”); curators Paul Schimmel and Connie Butler; art historians Alexander Nemerov, who talks about the “pricelessness” of Old Master paintings at the Frick, and Barbara Rose, who compares art on the auction block to pieces of meat; gallerists Mary Boone, Jeffrey Deitch, and Gavin Brown (who sees art and money as Siamese twins); and ever-philosophical and acerbic New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, who laments the prospect of great works of art being sold to private collectors, perhaps never again to be seen by the public.

Octogenarian Larry Poons shuns the global art market in The Price of Everything

Kahn also speaks with numerous artists who give their own views on what constitutes value, including Jeff Koons, who is in his busy studio, where his large team is creating his Gazing Ball series, intricate copies of classic canvases, each adorned with a reflective blue ball; octogenarian Larry Poons, who is working on dazzling paintings at his home in the woods of Upstate New York; Gerhard Richter at the opening of his exquisite 2016 painting and drawing show at Marian Goodman Gallery, explaining, “Money is dirty”; Njideka Akunyili Crosby, the rising Nigerian-born, LA-based artist who works in photo-collage and reaching new levels of success; critical and popular favorite George Condo, who exuberantly puts the finishing touches on a painting; and photorealist painter Marilyn Minter, known for her glittery pieces.

Stefan Edlis shows off his collection and his unique approach to buying and selling art in The Price of Everything

Kahn is building up to the hotly anticipated Sotheby’s auction “The Triumph of Painting: The Steven & Ann Ames Collection,” where each of the above artists has a work for sale, although they will not be profiting from it since they don’t own the pieces. There’s terrific archival footage of the 1973 Scull auction, which changed the art world forever, where Robert Rauschenberg approaches Robert Scull after a work of his just sold for an exorbitant price and Scull embraces the artist, claiming that it was good for both of them, even though Scull is the one who pockets the cash. Kahn is ever-present in the documentary, never seen but often heard asking questions, trying to get to the bottom of the beguiling relationship between art and money in the twenty-first century, concluding with a beautiful Michael Snow–like shot that in many ways sums it all up. An HBO Documentary Films presentation, The Price of Everything opens at the Quad on October 19, with Q&As and introductions featuring Kahn, producers Jennifer Stockman, Debi Wisch, and Carla Solomon, and editor Sabine Krayenbühl taking place at select screenings through October 25. Let’s leave it to Poons to have the last word: “There are no rules about what is going to be good and what is gonna be bad. Art doesn’t give a shit. It never has.”

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE NEW NOW? 40 ARTISTS IN DIALOGUE

Allen Ruppersberg, Who’s Afraid of the New Now?, from the series Preview Suite, 1988. Lithograph, image: 21 3/8 × 13 1/4 in (54.1 × 33.5 cm), sheet: 22 × 13 7/8 in (56 × 35.1 cm). Edition of thirty. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

Allen Ruppersberg, “Who’s Afraid of the New Now?” from the series Preview Suite, lithograph, 1988 (courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Saturday, December 2, and Sunday, December 3, $5 per conversation, 10:00 am – 8:00 pm
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

The New Museum continues its fortieth anniversary celebration with “Who’s Afraid of the New Now? 40 Artists in Dialogue,” two days of free admission to the downtown institution and a fab series of five-dollar artist conversations that require advance purchase here. On Saturday beginning at ten o’clock, every hour on the hour (except for the two o’clock lunch break), you can catch Judith Bernstein and Linda Montano, Paweł Althamer and Cally Spooner, Ragnar Kjartansson and Carolee Schneemann, Hans Haacke and Carsten Höller, Donald Moffett and Nari Ward, George Condo and Jeff Koons, Paul Chan and Carroll Dunham, Thomas Bayrle and Kerstin Brätsch, Raymond Pettibon and Kaari Upson, and Simone Leigh and Lorraine O’Grady. Sunday’s lineup features Cheryl Donegan and Mary Heilmann, Jeremy Deller and Martha Rosler, Paul McCarthy and Andra Ursuta, Elizabeth Peyton and Allen Ruppersberg, Nicole Eisenman and Neil Jenney, Howardena Pindell and Dorothea Rockburne, Bouchra Khalili and Doris Salcedo, Camille Henrot and Anri Sala, Sharon Hayes and Faith Ringgold, and Carol Bove and Joan Jonas. It’s a crazy-good roster of artists who have shown at the museum, which was founded in 1976 by Marcia Tucker and opened at C Space in 1977 before moving to the New School and then 583 Broadway before its grand reopening at 235 Bowery on December 1, 2007. Currently on view are “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” “Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play,” “Petrit Halilaj: RU,” “Helen Johnson: Ends,” “Alex Da Corte: Harvest Moon,” and “Pursuing the Unpredictable: The New Museum 1977–2017” in addition to a special window reinstallation of Bruce Nauman’s 1987 video No, No, New Museum from his Clown Torture series.

CINDY SHERMAN / SANJA IVEKOVIĆ

Giant Cindy Shermans watch over entrance to stunning MoMA retrospective (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
“Cindy Sherman” through June 11, Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor
“Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence” through March 26, Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium and Special Exhibition Galleries, third floor
Wednesday – Monday, $25 (includes same-day film screenings)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

MoMA is currently home to two solo shows by women who take very different approaches to explorations of gender, identity, sexual freedom, empowerment, and representation. “Cindy Sherman” is an appropriate title for the revelatory career survey of American artist Cindy Sherman, who has been photographing herself in ever-evolving series for thirty-five years. Sherman’s oeuvre is not a celebration of herself but an examination of how women are depicted and treated in society. Working alone, Sherman, who is most often associated with the Pictures Generation, dresses up in an endless array of costumes and makeup, becoming a sexy chanteuse, an elderly aristocrat, a centerfold model, a fashion icon, a clown, a Renaissance virgin, a tattooed punk rebel, and a murder victim. Each photograph, most of which were taken in her studio, is untitled, allowing viewers to experience it for themselves, bringing their own biases to it without being prodded. Her “Untitled Film Stills” are not based on actual movies, allowing the viewer to create their own story around the carefully choreographed pictures. In such series as “Centerfolds,” “Fashion,” “Fairy Tales and Disasters,” and “History Portraits,” she re-creates herself in ways that make the story about who she portrays, not who she is. “Time and time again, writers have asked, Who is the real Cindy Sherman?” exhibition organizer Eva Respini writes in the show’s catalog. “It is Sherman’s very anonymity that distinguishes her work. Rather than explorations of inner psychology, her pictures are about the projection of personas and stereotypes that are deepseated in our shared cultural imagination.” In representing the fascinating work of one of contemporary art’s most important figures, “Cindy Sherman” is a spectacular success. (On March 26, such artists as George Condo, Kalup Linzy, Elizabeth Peyton, and Collier Schorr will participate in the panel discussion “Cindy Sherman: Circle of Influence,” moderated by Respini. In addition, Sherman has curated the film series “Carte Blanche,” which runs April 2-10 and includes such films as Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, David Lynch’s Inland Empire, John Cassavetes’s Shadows, John Waters’s Desperate Living, and Sherman’s own Doll Clothes and Office Killer.)

Sanja Iveković’s “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg” rises high in MoMA’s Marron Atrium (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As “Cindy Sherman” settles in to MoMA, continuing through June 11, “Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence” prepares to move out, ending March 26. The first museum retrospective of the Croatian multimedia artist and activist born five years before Sherman, the show consists of photography, sculpture, drawing, video, and collage that tackle such issues as politics, female identity, and gender roles in war-torn East Central Europe. Like Sherman, Iveković, who is part of the Nova Umjetnička Praksa (New Art Practice) generation, often puts herself in her work, but she is much more direct and far less subtle. In “Tragedy of a Venus,” Iveković pairs older, existing pictures of herself with shots of Marilyn Monroe, while in “Double Life” she is seen alongside magazine advertisements for beauty products. In the short video “Personal Cuts,” Iveković films herself using scissors to slice off parts of a dark stocking that covers her face, intercut with historical footage of the post-Tito history of the former Yugoslavia. And in “Practice Makes a Master,” Iveković wears a white sheet over her head as the continually falls to the ground as if having been executed, while Monroe sings a song from Bus Stop. Other series include “Paper Women,” in which Iveković rips, scratches, and tears actual magazine ads with female models; “Sweet Violence,” in which she places bars on a television monitor showing a Zagreb economic propaganda program; and “Women’s House (Sunglasses),” large-scale prints of fashion models on which details of beaten and abused women are superimposed. The show’s centerpiece is “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg,” Iveković’s public art project that involved the re-creation of a war monument in which she made the statue of Nike into a pregnant woman and replaced the names of the fallen soldiers with such words as “Kitsch,” “Madonna,” “Virgin,” “Resistance,” “Justice,” and “Whore.” Seen together, “Cindy Sherman” and “Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence” offer two very different perspectives on very similar themes, from two women artists from two very different cultures.

GEORGE CONDO / LYNDA BENGLIS / FESTIVAL OF IDEAS FOR THE NEW CITY

George Condo, “Red Antipodular Portrait,” oil on canvas, 1996

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Festival of Ideas for the New City: May 4-8
“George Condo: Mental States” through May 8
“Lynda Benglis”: through June 19
Wednesday – Sunday, $12 (Thursdays free 7:00 – 9:00)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
www.festivalofideasnyc.com

If you’ve been experiencing difficulty with your mental state these days — and who hasn’t — you can find relief at the New Museum, where “George Condo: Mental States” continues through Sunday. The engaging work of the influential East Village painter is spread across two floors, from the “fake old masters” of his 1980s heyday to lush, large-scale acrylic, charcoal, and pastel on linen pieces that dazzle the mind. Condo displays his expert skill in mimicking, mocking, melding, and honoring myriad styles, whether it’s creating creepy, comic-book-like characters in his Pathos (“The Janitor’s Wife”) and Mania (“Nude Homeless Drinker”) series or a collection of stirring Abstractions (“Nothing Is Important,” “Dancing to Miles”). But the really head-spinning part of the show is on the fourth floor, where dozens of portraits are arranged on one wall in a dizzying array of colors and styles, one after another, serving as a kind of art history course all its own, part Name That Influence, part, well, whatever is going on inside Condo’s brain at the time. If you stare at it long enough, it is sure to blow your mind.

Lynda Benglis, “Phantom,” detail, polyurethane foam with phosphorescent pigments, five elements, 1971 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lynda Benglis takes visitors on a different kind of head trip with an exciting retrospective — surprisingly, her first in New York — on the New Museum’s second floor and in the lobby gallery, comprising some fifty works, including photography, video, sculpture, and various ephemera. Be careful where you walk, because many of Benglis’s abstract creations, composed of such materials as wax, wood, glitter, latex, paper, cotton bunting, wire, plaster, polyurethane foam, aluminum, lead, and bronze, jut out from the walls and lie across the floor, forming a delicate maze closely watched by guards who will definitely let you know when you get too close. Be on the lookout for “Untitled (VW),” a pigmented polyurethane foam piece that is cut away, giving an inside look at Benglis’s creative process. There are a number of her delightful “fallen paintings,” but the highlight of the show, which runs through June 19, is 1971’s “Phantom,” which consists of five large polyurethane foam abstract works with phosphorescent pigments that glow in the dark when the lights go down.

“After Hours: Murals on the Bowery” is part of Festival of Ideas for the New City

The New Museum is also one of the hosts of this week’s Festival of Ideas for the New City, which begins today with a series of lectures and panel discussions at NYU and the Cooper Union, with such participants as Rem Koolhaas, Vito Acconci, Elizabeth Diller, David Byrne, Kurt Andersen, Jonathan Bowles, Suketu Mehta, Jonathan F. P. Rose, Sergio Fajardo, Antanas Mockus, and Pedro Reyes examining such topics as “The Heterogeneous City,” “The Networked City,” “The Sustainable City,” “Built Environment,” and “Downtown NYC Policy Issues.” On Saturday and Sunday, there will be special projects at locations all over the Lower East Side and the East Village, featuring live performances, film screenings, workshops and demonstrations, site-specific installations, and more. At the New Museum, OMA/Rem Koolhaas’s “Cronocaos” opens May 7, examining the past, present, and future of preservation, construction, and urbanism, while Maya Lin reimagines the Hudson River system in “Pin River-Hudson.” The New Museum is a central part of Saturday’s StreetFest: The institution has collaborated with the Rockwell Group to create “Imagination Playground,” a special area for family activities; teenagers from City-as-School will serve as roving reporters covering the festival; “Let Us Make Cake” will feature video interactions with scale models of the New Museum by such artists as Acconci Studio, Mia Pearlman, Dustin Yellin, Jon Kessler, and Marilyn Minter, projected onto the building’s facade; and, in conjunction with the Art Production Fund, “After Hours: Murals on the Bowery” will be unveiled, in which artists such as Matthew Brannon, Ellen Gallagher, Amy Granat, Mary Heilmann, Barry McGee, Sterling Ruby, Glenn Ligon, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Lawrence Weiner have created murals on roll-down security shutters along Bowery.