Art in America articles from April 2004

Art in America archives from April 2004

Lodz Biennale launches this fall.(Front Page)(Poland)
April 1, 2004... Poland's inaugural Lodz Biennale, scheduled to run Oct. 2-31, will take place at the new 108,000-square-foot permanent home of the International Artists' Museum (IAM), located in a recently converted 19th-century textile manufacturing complex....

New Serras for Bilbao.(Front Page)(Guggenheim Museum Bilbao commissions work from artist Richard Serra)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... In what is billed as one of the most expensive contemporary art projects ever undertaken, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has commissioned Richard Serra to create a football-field-size installation of his signature curving steel sculptures for its...

Curators laid off: NYC, SF & Detroit.(Front Page)(art museum curators, New York City, San Francisco)
April 1, 2004... In shake-ups at three major art institutions, a number of high-profile curators have been laid off or have resigned to protest changes. At New York's Whitney Museum, Marla Prather was let go in January. She had been on leave caring for a...

Russian tycoon buys Faberge eggs.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... On Apr. 20 and 21, Sotheby's had planned to sell at auction one of the season's biggest treasure troves, a group of nine jewel-encrusted Faberge Imperial Easter Eggs consigned by the Forbes Collection. The celebrated works were expected to...

Record-breaking attendance at ADAA art fair.(Front Page)(Art Dealers Association of America)
April 1, 2004... Each winter in New York some of the country's best art dealers get together to show off their prized possessions at "The Art Show," an exhibition hosted by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). This year's event, held at the Seventh...

Reimagining Goya.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Black Paintings of Goya, by Juan Jose Junquera, London, Scala Publishers, 2003; 96 pages, $19.95 paperback. Goya, by Robert Hughes, New York, Knopf, 2003; 435 pages, $40.00 hardcover. Francisco Goya: A Life, by Evan S. Connell, New...

Absence visible: chosen by a jury from 5,201 submitted proposals, the design for the World Trade Center memorial is both the epitome of tact and a consummate expression of bafflement.(Issues & Commentary)(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2004... Conceived in response to an event with no clear meaning, a mass murder in which neither victims nor perpetrators have been conclusively or comprehensively identified, the World Trade Center memorial is a maddeningly amorphous subject. The...

"Dogville": the American effect: in his latest film, set in a small isolated community during the Depression, Danish director Lars von Trier presents a bleak morality tale that takes a dim view of the U.S.--and of humankind.(Film)(Movie Review)
April 1, 2004... Lars von Trier's film Dogville, a tour de force that opened in the U.S. in late March, almost a year after its debut in Europe, begins and ends with the howling of a chained canine named Moses. Set in a tiny town in the Rocky Mountains during...

Behind the earth movers: the adventurous support of dealer Virginia Dwan allowed earthwork artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson and others to realize their pioneering projects.(Patronage)(Biography)
April 1, 2004... We did an enormous poster for [Michael Heizer's] Double Negative [1969]. I think it must be about 48 or 50 inches, which was in keeping with the mammoth endeavor of this work. It wasn't just giganticism for its own sake; it really did relate to...

An esthetics of masochism? The author wonders if the curators of an Austrian exhibition on masochism in art erred in taking an overly literal approach to their subject.(Report From Graz)(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2004... I suppose it was inevitable. When a friend asked what I was working on and I said, "I'm trying to write about masochism," she replied, "Isn't that tautological?" Masochism is one of those topics that's hard to mention without prompting a joke....

Restoration play: Paul Kos has engaged, over 30 years, the paradoxes in art and community, temporality and faith, by means of playfully diverse installations and objects. This is the first-ever retrospective of the California conceptualist.(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2004... Bay Area Conceptual art of the 1960s and '70s often took its cues from events of the East Coast art world. Yet the West Coast movement could be lighter in tone, more playful and less cerebral, than its relatively austere analogue in New York....

Schad's way: preeminent chronicler of Weimar's icy decadence, diligent pasticheur of art-historical idioms and restless spiritual seeker, Christian Schad was the subject of a retrospective shown in Paris and New York.(Critical Essay)(Biography)
April 1, 2004... Christian Schad is best known as an incisive portraitist of Weimar cafe society. Less well known is the fact that he was also a pioneer in Dadaist cameraless photography. Using old-masterish compositional devices for his modern subjects, he...

"How can I hurt you?" The author revisits two irreverent portraits of physicians by the German Expressionist Otto Dix in order to learn more about the sitters who submitted to the painter's fiercely satirical vision.(Critical Essay)(Biography)
April 1, 2004... Otto Dix was the most feared portraitist in Germany during the 1920s. Sitting for a portrait by Dix required strong nerves, self-confidence and, most importantly, a sturdy sense of humor. He liked to choose his own models and then mercilessly...

Drawing with light: a New York gallery exhibition of Keith Sonnier's work from the late 1960s and early '70s included the U.S. debut of the installation "Fluorescent Room." Meanwhile, the Lever House commissioned a site-specific neon piece for its Lobby gallery.
April 1, 2004... In the late 1960s and early '70s the orthodoxies of the art world were, as usual, being challenged. Greenbergian Color Field painting and welded-metal sculpture, Minimalism and Pop art--all bastions of formal rigor--found themselves being...

From bullets to bridges: Chris Burden's new architecture-inspired works were recently on view at several venues in Los Angeles and New York.
April 1, 2004... After a long absence from the New York and Los Angeles gallery scenes, L.A.-based artist Chris Burden recently presented exhibitions of new work in both cities. The performance- and body-art pioneer, who is better known these days for...

Rudy Burckhardt in town & country: as a recent exhibition and documentary film suggest, this deceptively nonchalant painter-photographer-filmmaker was equally inspired by New York City and rural Maine.
April 1, 2004... Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was an essential formulator of the attitudes and esthetics of the New York School, that amorphous field of painters, poets, composers and choreographers who were and are united by something more than simple proximity...

Anne Chu at 303.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Five large, ungainly mixed-medium marionettes, a wooden dwarf a la Velazquez and a cast-bronze raven mutely greeted visitors to a recent exhibition by Anne Chu, best known for her life-size sculptures in wood or papier-mache of bears and T'ang...

Ken Price at Matthew Marks.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Not that Ken Price's work is unfamiliar, but there's nevertheless something funny about entering a large gallery and discovering a field of pedestals commandeered by sci-fi blob creatures with pendulous pseudopodia. Assertive or demure, they...

Stephen Wolfe at Luhring Augustine.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... There's a gee-whiz factor with trompe l'oeil, of course, but the shock of exactitude to literal scale in representational painting and sculpture can quickly give way to skepticism and even boredom unless it is leavened by a sense of...

Tony Cragg at Marian Goodman.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Tony Cragg continues to explore the possibilities of allusive form. Most of the works included in this show, employing a variety of materials and all but one dated 2003, participate in shared directions. They derive their inspiration from two...

Michael Heizer at Peter Freeman.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Following on the heels of Michael Heizer's remarkable installation at Dia:Beacon [see A.i.A., July '03], this exhibition of three paintings and one sculpture Heizer made in the late 1960s and '70s provided a glimpse into the artist's...

Kimsooja at the project.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... In the beginning, readymades were chosen for their dumb simplicity: a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a shovel. Kimsooja, on the other hand, has chosen an object that is spectacular in its own right. The circular jukebox speaker that appeared...

Jack Pierson at Cheim & Read.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Visitors to Jack Pierson's recent show tripped a motion sensor positioned just inside the entrance to the main gallery. The device activated a brief recording of "Over the Rainbow," the opening bars crackling through hidden speakers. As the...

Danica Phelps at LFL.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... In a cheerful celebration of the quotidian, Danica Phelps makes it her art to itemize and illustrate the business of her life. On Aug. 12, 2003, Phelps wrote that, after seven years of marriage, she's discovered sex in the arms of a woman named...

James Brooks at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Destined, it seems, to be perpetually overshadowed by his colleagues among the Abstract Expressionists, James Brooks (1906-1992) may always be thought of as a good painter among great painters. An early practitioner (innovator, some would...

Fred Mitchell at David Findlay Jr.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... The art of Fred Mitchell is very much a part of the New York School; however, as this show of his work from the 1940s to the 1960s made clear, Mitchell has always developed a feeling for his surroundings, wherever he has lived. In one of the...

Richard Kalina at Lennon, Weinberg.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Surprisingly, Richard Kalina's new medium-sized abstract grid paintings are built up of a great many small, rectangular pieces of rice paper. The process of creating these works involved painting sheets of rice paper in a solid color with thin...

Sarah Morris at Friedrich Petzel.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Sarah Morris creates bold geometric paintings that derive their architectonic structures from specific urban environments. In earlier bodies of work, Morris abstracted the buildings of Midtown Manhattan, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. A recent...

Richard Artschwager at Anthony Grant and Nolan/Eckman.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... When it first appeared on the art scene in the early 1960s, Richard Artschwager's work seemed situated somewhere between Pop and Minimalism. His boxy sculptures celebrated a reductive geometry while retaining a reference to everyday objects...

Shirazeh Houshiary at Lehmann Maupin.(New York)(art exhbition)
April 1, 2004... Last year's exhibition "Between Word and Image" at New York University's Grey Art Gallery revealed calligraphy to be a central motif in modernist art from Iran. Iranian-born, London-based Shirazeh Houshiary does not belong to the older...

Gregor Schneider at Barbara Gladstone.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... West 24th Street between 10th and 11th avenues is known for its blue-chip galleries, but it's also home to garages, a car wash, a ragged Indian takeout joint frequented by taxi drivers, several industrial concerns, office buildings and a...

Richard Serra at Gagosian.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... In his third major exhibition at Gagosian, Richard Serra presented three new monumental works expanding the experience of viewers moving through, around and within the constituent elements, and one work consisting of a single thick sheet of...

Marguerite Van Cook at the Proposition.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Marguerite Van Cook is a New York artist who worked with DC Comics and formerly ran the Lower East Side gallery Ground Zero with her husband, James Romberger. Van Cook began work on the video Funky Shui in New York (2003) with the notion that...

Shizuka Yokomizo at Cohan and Leslie.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... The first thing I noticed upon entering Shizuka Yokomizo's recent New York show wasn't what hung on the walls, but rather the elegiac sounds of a Chopin piano waltz. The music accompanied a DVD projection, Forever (and Again). The two-screen...

Mark Wyse at Wallspace.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... There is a straightforward answer to the question, "Didn't the photography program at Yale University, which awarded master's degrees to Justine Kurland, Malerie Marder and Katy Grannan, among other young women, graduate equally talented men?"...

Roy DeCarava at Ariel Meyerowitz.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Watch the printing of a photograph, and you see an image emerge from darkness into light. Roy DeCarava seems to stop that process earlier than most photographers would dare. Or perhaps he has somehow reversed it. In either case, DeCarava...

Vincent Smith at Alexandre.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... The woodcuts that in some ways introduced this 20-year survey of Vincent Smith's prints and paintings have the gothic clarity that can distinguish the medium, and are coeval with his color-fraught paintings of the troubled year of their making,...

Fred Cress at Robert Steele.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... The allegorical paintings of Australian Fred Cress represent the human condition in its tragicomic frailty, awash in ungovernable tides of hope, dependence, envy, lust and greed. Like his contemporaries in social criticism--Sue Coe and William...

Elise Engler at Art Resources Transfer.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Elise Engler has spent the last several years constructing a sprawling and democratic inventory of art history, lining up thumbnail sketches of masterpieces from the canon on long rolls of paper along with renderings of artworks by her friends...

Jack Smith at Mitchell Algus.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Drawn from the personal collection of the late actress Maria Antoinette and her husband, painter Edwin Ruda, this special assembly of ephemera brought welcome attention to a chapter in the life of the legendary filmmaker, photographer and...

Roger Andersson at Sara Meltzer.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... In "Letters from Mayhem," Roger Andersson's second exhibition at Sara Meltzer Gallery, the 37-year-old Swedish artist renders individual letters of the alphabet in exquisitely articulated blue watercolor. Fine monochromatic brushwork filigrees...

Andrew Jansons at Wooster Art Space.(New York)(art exhibition)(Biography)
April 1, 2004... Wooster Art Space was inaugurated with a series of three exhibitions tracing the career of the painter Andrew Jansons, who died in 1989. Born in Latvia in 1942, Jansons immigrated to the U.S. after the Second World War. His first mature...

Laurie Thomas at Priska C. Juschka.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Laurie Thomas's nine large, deceptively breezy oil-on-linen paintings from 2002-03 and the assortment of small paintings and layered drawings that comprised the exhibition "Chandeliers" are hard-won triumphs of the hand and eye. Derived from...

Arpita Singh at Bose Pacia.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... At first glance, Arpita Singh's world seems timeless, unrushed and serene. But there is trouble in paradise, and the artist's unflinching eye refuses to ignore it. The tranquillity created by earthy colors and balanced compositions is invaded...

Martha Armstrong at Walter Wickiser.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Among the 34 plein-air oil paintings of the Vermont woods in Martha Armstrong's show at Walter Wickiser was a small canvas (9 by 8 inches) of a red maple tree ablaze in autumnal light. The maple's branches splay outward in a few beautifully...

Yu Hong at Goedhuis contemporary.(New York)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... The enjoyable, accessible paintings and pastels of Beijing artist Yu Hong tell the story of life amid China's changes. In an exhibition titled "A Woman's Life" she communicated her engagement with daily existence, treating everyday occurrences...

Joseph Breitenbach at Stephen Daiter.(Chicago)(art exhibition, Illinois)(Biography)
April 1, 2004... Joseph Breitenbach (1896-1984) has only recently gained full recognition for his photography. A centenary retrospective toured Germany in 1996-97, and English and French museums showed his work in 2000-02. In autumn 2003, Stephen Daiter Gallery...

Soo Sunny Park at Laumeier Sculpture Park.(St. Louis)(art exhibition, Missouri)
April 1, 2004... Soo Sunny Park's work is directed by her fascination with unusual building methods and materials. The young St. Louis artist often roams the aisles of building-supply centers in search of ideas. While Park's work emerges from a variety of...

John Rowland at Susanne Hilberry.(Ferndale, Michigan)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... The viewer encountering John Rowland's new work was struck immediately by the luminosity and physical presence of the wall-mounted, steel-and-fiber-glass constructions. The flat panels sitting an inch off the wall and the three-dimensional...

Karen McClanahan at Cordell Taylor.(Denver)(art exhibition, Colorado)
April 1, 2004... Karen McClanahan is an Arizona native who began exhibiting at regional venues while still an undergraduate at Denver's Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. Her second solo exhibition in Denver, titled "Synesthesia," featured 18 acrylic...

Lari Pittman at Regen Projects.(Los Angeles)(art exhibition, California)
April 1, 2004... The oddball, mayhem-filled imagery of Lari Pittman's intricate new paintings captures the zeitgeist. Reflecting today's wartime atmosphere of paranoia, malaise and frustrated entitlement, six large works present abstracted scenes of combat that...

Patrick Nickell at Luckman Gallery, Cal State.(Los Angeles)(art exhibition, California)
April 1, 2004... With refreshing forthrightness, L.A. artist Patrick Nickell puts a new spin on basic tropes of abstract sculpture. His funky forms investigate established formal concepts of solidity, transparency, interiority and symmetry. Titled "Built for...

David Park at Hackett-Freedman.(San Francisco)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... This well-chosen exhibition of 35 works on canvas and paper from 1953 to 1960 spanned the final years of David Park's life and celebrated the well-known story of his return to figure painting in 1950, a turnaround that helped launch the Bay...

Kota Ezawa at Haines.(San Francisco)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Kota Ezawa's animated remakes of modern-day icons remind me of Andy Warhol's portraits. But instead of the latest pop idols and politicians, Ezawa, a young German-Japanese artist based in San Francisco, mines our collective memory for...

Al Payne at SFMOMA Artists Gallery.(San Francisco)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... An inescapable fact of Al Payne's 16 new paintings is that they are all made out of dirt, that is, ordinary backyard topsoil affixed to plywood panels or paper with shellac blended with thinned dark red or dark blue oil paint. This makes for...

Linda Kane at Hawaii Pacific University.(Honolulu)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... The drawings of Linda Kane give us a place to be in nature, a contemplative space in which to think about landscape and what critic Lucy Lippard has called "the lure of the local." Kane, a longtime resident who has taught at the University of...

Eva Koch at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea.(Santiago De Compostela)(art exhibition)
April 1, 2004... Beautifully filmed and meticulously edited, Villar, a six-screen video installation, tells the story of how the artist's own mother, Cristobala Martinez, was separated from her family as a child of six or seven during the Spanish Civil War...

Dieter Balzer at Architekturgalerie.(Berlin)
April 1, 2004... There may be no other exhibition space in Berlin that embodies the concept of the white cube better than Architekturgalerie in the Mitte district. Here, in a pristine and almost square room, Dieter Balzer showed three new and thoroughly complex...

James Dean Diamond at Cheap Art.(Athens)(art exhibition)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... British artist James Dean Diamond (b. 1968) draws his inspiration from theater, film, old-master painting and the Gothic tradition that his compatriots have maintained in one incarnation or another over the past 200 years. In much the same way...

Art services directory.(Directory)(Calendar)
April 1, 2004... ADVERTISING DESIGN PRINTING Dynacolor Graphics Inc. P.O. Box 699037 Miami, FL 33269-9037 800.624.8840 ext. 322 Web: www.dynacolor.com Dynacolor Graphics is one of the fine art industry_s leading printers of full...

Jane Addams Allen Guthrie, 1935-2004.(Artworld)(Obituary)
April 1, 2004... Jane Addams Allen Guthrie, critic, editor and art historian, died of cancer Jan. 31 in Cornwall, England, age 68. From 1971 to '73, in her natal city, Allen wrote criticism for the Chicago Tribune, and from 1982 to '89 she was the art critic...

A grander Uffizi.(Artworld)(Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, home to a treasure trove of medieval and Renaissance art, is inching closer to realizing its long-delayed expansion plans. Roberto Cecchi, the government official in charge of the project, recently told London's...

Croff heads Venice Biennale, after all.(Artworld)(Divide Croff, Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia )(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... After a negative, if nonbinding, vote by the culture committee of the Italian Senate had threatened to derail the appointment of Divide Croff as president of the newly established Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia [see "Front Page," Mar. '04],...

Christie's Latin sales move to Paris.(Artworld)(Christie's International PLC, auctions of Latin American art)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... In a surprising move, Christie's announced in early February that it would cease its New York sales of Latin American art and conduct these auctions at its Paris branch instead. This year, the big-ticket evening sale of Latin American works,...

All-night "psycho".(Artworld)(showing of Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... On Feb. 28, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., threw an all-night party so that intrepid, and presumably caffeinated, viewers could watch Scottish artist Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993). Included in his...

Mona Hatoum is the first visual-arts recipient of the Sonning Prize, to be presented Apr. 23 in Denmark.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Mona Hatoum is the first visual-arts recipient of the Sonning Prize, to be presented Apr. 23 in Denmark. The biannual prize, worth approximately $167,000, is given by the University of Copenhagen to individuals who contribute to the...

ArtTable, the national organization for women in the arts, will honor Art in America editor Elizabeth C. Baker.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... ArtTable, the national organization for women in the arts, will honor Art in America editor Elizabeth C. Baker for distinguished service to the visual arts at a ceremony on Apr. 24

The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.(Awards and Grants)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture has announced the winners of its 2004 awards, to be presented at a ceremony in late April. Artists receiving medals are Lee Bontecou (sculpture), Gregory Crewdson (photography) and Carroll Dunham...

John C. Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.(Awards and Grants)(receives 2004 David Rockefeller Award)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... John C. Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, is the winner of the 2004 David Rockefeller Award, given by the Museum of Modern Art for enlightened generosity and advocacy of cultural and civic endeavors.

Walker Art Center.(Museum News)(receives $10-million gift)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Minneapolis's Walker Art Center recently announced it will receive a $10-million gift from William W. and Nadine M. McGuire. The money will be used to support the museum's performing-arts program, including construction of a new 385-seat...

The Centre Pompidou in Paris recently inaugurated a new exhibition space within its existing building.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... The Centre Pompidou in Paris recently inaugurated a new exhibition space within its existing building. Espace 315 is a gallery dedicated to the exhibition of works by young, cutting-edge artists from around the world. Located on the mezzanine...

The Antwerp Museum of Photography reopened on Mar. 21, after completion of extensive renovation and expansion project designed by architect Georges Baines.(Museum News)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... The Antwerp Museum of Photography reopened on Mar. 21, after an completion of extensive renovation and expansion project designed by architect Georges Baines. A new structure connected to the existing warehouse building brings the museum's...

Brooklyn Museum renovations complete.(Artworld)(Brooklyn Museum of Art)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... The Brooklyn Museum of Art is set to unveil its new front entrance and public plaza on Apr. 17. The $63-million project, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, features a 15,000-square-foot entrance pavilion shingled in green-tinted glass....

Obituaries.(Artworld)(Obituary)
April 1, 2004... Pedro Alvarez, 37, Cuban painter, died Feb. 12 in Tempe, Adz., after a fall from the window of his hotel room. The medical examiner's office ruled his death a suicide. An exhibition of his work had opened on Feb. 7 at the Arizona State...