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Tie ADAA Up With a Bowtie
The old guard (and even a few young'uns) turned up for the gala opening of the 2010 ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue armory, the most exclusive flea market in town. All of the sterling galleries were there, showing their best wares in the forms of Andy Warhols, Pablo Picassos and Henry Moores. Nostalgia seeped through the stalls for a time when one put on their best pearls for a visit to your dealer, who welcomed you into his space on 57th Street with a private viewing of their best modern paintings—and, if the time was right, a single malt scotch on the rocks. Read More
The Reliable Controvery of ARCOmadrid
Arco, Madrid's 29-year-old contemporary art fair opened its doors to the public February 18, amidst the uncertainty provoked by Spain's dismal economy and debates about the quality of participating exhibitors. Galleries like Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, and Sao Paulo-based Luisa Strina, one-time regular exhibitors at the fair, all absented this year's edition. The Spanish art fair retained the dubious title of "world's most crowded art fair," with 150,000 visitors in just five days. Reliable controversy might be the podium on which that laurel stands.Read More
Let Them Have Art: The Affordable Art Fair
From February 5–8, the second edition of the Affordable Art Fair opened in Brussels, Belgium. Launched in London in 1999 by a former wine merchant, Will Ramsay, the fair claimed to liberate art of its financial and intellectual prices of entry (It only costs 5,000 Euros to rent a booth). Today, the fair is an international phenomenon with a presence in 10 countries; it prides itself on being the most visited of all fairs with 120,000 attendees in 2009 (twice as many as Frieze, and more than both Basels combined).
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Sturtevant's Matchy-Matchy Retrospective
It is 10 AM at Paris' Musée d'Art Moderne, and severe-looking journalists are pouring in. The main exhibition is filled with suspiciously familiar pieces: a urinal, coal bags, a projection of a nude descending a staircase. It's not the ghost of Duchamp guiding the group (or even an advocate of the estate), but a tiny ageless woman in silver sneakers with fluorescent orange nails. Elaine Sturtevant, rumored to have been born in 1930 although her age remains mysteriously unconfirmed, has (ironically) made a name for herself by creating replicas, identical in size, technique, material to instantly recognizable works by artists like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Marcel Duchamp.
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Sterling Ruby's Evening Trap
PaceWildenstein, the rapidly expanding temple to post-war American art, added Sterling Ruby, an artist with what some would call new blood, to its roster in 2009. With the opening of his first solo exhibition, 2Traps, at the 22nd Street space on Thursday night, the gallery laid claim to the young artist's legacy, one that increasingly focuses on theories of entrapment. Pace icons like Chuck Close and Alex Katz mingled in the space between the two installations in the exhibition, Pig Pen and Bus. Created using a public transportation vehicle painted black and splattered with graffiti, the interior of Bus is outfitted with solitary confinement chambers and sub woofers, making it both a metaphorical space of imprisonment and an apocalyptic version of a rap star's tour bus. Pig Pen exposes the metal cells of Bus and stacks them on top of one another, creating a rectangle that is reinforced by green, pink and orange lines that divide the piece into smaller geometric spaces. The effect of the installation was best summed up by Corban Walker, who said, "It feels quite intimidating. But I like Ruby's color."Read More
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Butt Johnson's "Untitled Floral Pastiche" series consists of four drawings, each of which is organized around a different flower. Johnsons had long co
