Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld, McLean, Virginia, December 1978 from American Prospects.

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011 | 5 April - 1 May 2011

 

 Roe Ethridge, Pumpkin, 2010.

 Jim Goldberg, Open See, 2009.

 Thomas Demand, Haltestelle, 2009.

 Elad Lassry, Skunk, 2009.

Wangechi Mutu

 Death by Mariposa, 2006

Ink, acrylic, collage and contact paper on Mylar; 17" x 25 1/4", 20 3/8" x 38" framed

 Cactus Green Nips, 2009

Mixed media on Mylar; 46" x 53", 52 1/2" x 58 1/2" framed

 

Before Punk Came Funk, 2010 

Mixed Media ink, paint, collage on Mylar; 54" x 51"

Spanning a wide range of media, Mutu employs interventionist methods of collage and assemblage to inventively critique the institutions of power and representation that regulate both the aesthetic and symbolic status of the gendered and racialized body. Mining such diverse sources as fashion magazines, pornography, and documentary photographs, Mutu's striking combination of the surreal, grotesque, and seductive reflects the underlying currents of violence and psycho-sexual tension embedded within the legacy of colonial discourse and the American subconscious at large.

Mutu's variegated surfaces move decisively between dense layers of spliced images, glitter, paint, and beads to the swirling calligraphic markings of snakes and hair that give voice to these dystopic scenes of desire, horror, and excess. Mutu’s formal methods of collage and montage allow for a mixing of photographic genres and styles culled from the mass media—a representational strategy that not only resists binary determinations but complicates and disrupts the very terms upon which we read images. Through the often jarring incongruities between her collaged elements, from the performative sexuality of pornographic poses to the ethno-centric bodies captured under the anthropological gaze of National Geographic, Mutu plays with the effects of displacement by constructing images that are always already dysfunctional, disordered and destabilizing. What Mutu brilliantly establishes in her charged environments and fantastical tableau is a framework that challenges the question of difference and its attending modes of address, suggesting that resolving these issues is, to borrow the words of the theorist Barbara Johnson, “always a function of a specific interlocutionary situation—and the answers, matters of strategy rather than truth."

Gladstone Gallery

Sidney Lumet | Dog Day Afternoon

Louise Glück

Gabriel Orozco | Sand on Table 1992-93

Sand on Table, 1992–93, Gabriel Orozco
Silver dye bleach print

12 1/2 x 18 3/4 in. (31.8 x 47.6 cm)

© Gabriel Orozco, Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Orozco works in sculpture and photography in a style that is elegant, minimal, and antimonumental. His sculptures are often ephemeral—in this case, a table on a beach topped with a pyramid of sand—and his photograph of it gives the constructed situation a longer life. This work encourages an awareness of the temporal fragility of our accomplishments as well as of the richness of the resources available if we would but use the ordinary in poetic ways.

Robert Smithson | Proposal for a Monument on the Red Sea 1966

PROPOSAL FOR A MONUMENT ON THE RED SEA
(formally known as Cube in Seascape), 1966

Paper on gelatin silver print

Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York

Tara Donovan at Pace Editions 2009

Tara Donovan

 Haze, 2003 

Stacked Clear Plastic Drinking Straws 

12' 7"(H) x 42' 2"(W) 7 3_4"(D) 

Ace Gallery New York

 Lure, 2004 

Fishing Line

2 1_2"(H) x 10'6"(W) x 26'(D) 

UCLA Hammer Museum

 Moire, 1999 

Adding Machine Paper 

2' 8"(H) x 29'(W) x 24' 6 1_2"(D) 

Ace Gallery Los Angeles, 2005

Bluffs, 2005 

Buttons, Glue 

3 1_2'(H) x 5'(W) x 12'(D)

Ace Gallery Los Angeles

Tara Donovan | The Pace Gallery, February 12th - March 19th 2011

 A detail of one of her works made entirely from dressmaker pins.

 The artist Tara Donovan, and family, with one of her new mylar works.

Donovan in front of a work from her latest series “Drawings (Pins),” currently up at Pace Gallery.

In the art world, Tara Donovan has become the belle of the banal. She employs everyday objects such as drinking straws, buttons or No. 2 pencils to create large-scale sculptures and prints that take on a life (and light) of their own. She allows the shape of the chosen material to determine the form of the piece until it becomes magically other (think vast moonscape in Styrofoam cups), managing to transcend both materiality and gimmickry in a culture that celebrates both.

 

In her latest series, ‘‘Drawings (Pins),’’ on view this month at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, shimmering metallic ‘‘canvases’’ are composed of dressmaker pins — tens of thousands of them. The cumulative effect is almost painterly. While these works are two-dimensional, they deal with the same issues as her ‘‘site-responsive’’ sculptures, as she calls them: ‘‘It’s all about perceiving this material from a distance and close up and how the light interacts with it,’’ Donovan recently explained, citing how Scotch tape, stuck to itself in biomorphic swirls, takes on a ‘‘fugitive color’’ when hit by the sun. ‘‘I’m constantly looking for this kind of phenomenological experience.’’

Picasso: Guitars 1912 - 1914

Pablo Picasso. Still life with Guitar. 

Variant state. Paris, assembled before November 15, 1913. Subsequently preserved by the artist. 

Paperboard, paper, string, and painted wire installed with cut cardboard box

Overall: 30 x 20 1/2 x 7 3/4" (76.2 x 52.1 x 19.7cm). 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gift of the artist

Sometime between October and December 1912, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) made a guitar. Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued, Picasso’s silent instrument resembled no sculpture ever seen before. In 1914 the artist reiterated his fragile papery construction in a more fixed and durable sheet metal form. These two Guitars, both gifts from the artist to MoMA, bracket an incandescent period of material and structural experimentation in Picasso’s work. Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 explores this breakthrough moment in 20th-century art, and the Guitars’ place within it. Bringing together some 70 closely connected collages, constructions, drawings, mixed-media paintings, and photographs assembled from over 30 public and private collections worldwide, this exhibition offers fresh insight into Picasso’s cross-disciplinary process in the years immediately preceding World War I.

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 is on view from February 13th to June 6 at the Museum of Modern Art;  moma.org.

When Picasso Changed his Tune New York Times Review