Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

 After a two-stage competition, New York-based architecture firm Thomas Phifer and Partners has been selected to design Poland’s forthcoming Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. The company beat out eleven competitors, including Foster + Partners (New York), Henning Larsen (Copenhagen), and UNstudio (Amsterdam). The 161,000-square-foot museum will be located in Warsaw’s Parade Square, one of the largest city squares in the world. The museum, which will feature a large performance space for the TZ Warszawa theater, is expected to significantly boost Poland’s presence in the contemporary art world. 

Phifer and Partners’ proposal included plans for a glass-walled museum that will promote transparency to the public and connectivity to the overall city. In his design, Phifer followed the idea that the institution is “a building that reveals all it has.”

With the stroke of Gov. Deval Patrick’s pen a few weeks ago, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art got the go-ahead to realize the nearly 30-year-old dream of transforming a 19^th century, 26-building, 16-acre factory complex into a destination arts center that would also help revive the economy of North Adams, Mass.

As the art world knows, the road has been a bit bumpy and, along the way, the vision has changed. But Mass MoCA has hit something of a groove of late, giving state officials the confidence to allocate $25.4 million from state coffers for the expansion. Now, under director Joe Thompson — who’s been there for 29 years, from the beginning — it will reclaim almost all of the 600,000 square feet campus. Massachusetts taxpayers’ money will pay for the necessary infrastructure improvements, for fitting out the parts of the factory complex that are not currently in use, to make them ready for more art.

What can seven big circular paintings by Olafur Eliasson, which look rather like giant designer-colored CDs, have to do with Britain's greatest and most visionary painter, William Turner? Eliasson's Turner Color Experiments are the support act for the blockbuster Turner show at Tate Britain in September. The connection between the 19th-century genius and the 47-year-old, one of the most feted artists of his generation, can be summed up in a single word: ephemeral.

Not ephemeral as in our pixellated, fibrillating world of next-up, whatevers, and microsecond stock-market differentials.

Rome’s modern art museum, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, is planning an extension that will display contemporary works on loan from its commercial neighbour Gagosian, La Repubblica reports.

Rome’s urban planning commissioner Giovanni Caudo is working on the development of a new wing in an area that lies between the two buildings on Via Francesco Crispi and was formerly used by AMA, the capital’s waste collection agency. The projected 2265 sq. m expansion will allow the museum to exhibit more of its collection.

A man briefly disrupted the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum this afternoon, splashing red paint against a wall and signing his name. He did not vandalize any artworks.

According to artist Laura Higgins Palmer, who alerted Hyperallergic to the intervention, the man threw red paint against the wall in a gallery on the third floor. Palmer said she was taking a selfie of her reflection in one of Koons’s silver bunnies when she noticed a man walking by with a black bag. When she turned around, he was splashing paint on the wall, in what appears to be a kind of double X shape, although it could also be a human figure with arms and legs spread.

I bought some art the other day — nothing too crazy, nothing too expensive, nothing made by an ex-graffiti artist going legit and now giddily bilking rappers out of their piles of new money. Just something beautiful, something I had an emotional response to, something that I perceived as having value independent of its function or cost of production.

That’s how it begins, right? Not my personal collection, but the idea that value is subjective, open to interpretation and influence. If you look closely, the art I chose will reveal something about me, yes, but not that I’ve been hoodwinked.

I am standing in a private dining room on the seventh floor of the London offices of UBS, the global financial services firm. A table is set for lunch, with a menu promising bresaola with caponata followed by roast lemon sole. Before the powerful guests arrive, though, I am whisked away. As I go, my eye is drawn to some art hanging on the wall: a pair of rare, large watercolors by the contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. These are just two of the 32,000 objects that make up the UBS Art Collection, which includes paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, video works and sculptures from the last 50 years.

Corporate art collections are hardly a new phenomenon. In the late 1950s, the American plutocrat David Rockefeller decided that Chase Manhattan Bank should start acquiring art.

Billionaire Leon Black’s publishing company Phaidon acquired Artspace.com, an Internet startup that sells works by contemporary artists, as investors struggle to figure out how to make money from art online.

Phaidon, a publisher of art and design books, agreed to buy Artspace, the companies said today in a statement without disclosing the price. The deal is the latest in a wave of mergers and partnerships shaking up the Internet art market even as profit in the nascent industry remains elusive.

The Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington, is currently hosting the exhibition “Under Pressure: Contemporary Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation.” The show, which features works by artists such as Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Barbara Kruger, Sol Lewitt, and Andy Warhol, traces printmaking’s rise to prominence in post-war American art. Drawn from real estate mogul Jordan D. Schnitzer’s vast collection, “Under Pressure” includes examples from major movements within contemporary art such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Photorealism, and Minimalism.

During the late 1950s, the art world experienced a groundswell of interest in printmaking. Ignoring the stigma associated with the process, pioneering artists such as Rauschenberg and Johns began experimenting with a variety of techniques, including offset lithography, screen printing, wood-cutting, lino-cutting, and laser-cutting.

Paige Powell remembers the first time she met the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who would later become her boyfriend. Although “The Andy Warhol Diaries” cites Aug. 9, 1983 as the couple’s first date, for Powell, the enduring impression came earlier.

It was 1981, around the time she saw a show of graffiti artist A-One over at Fashion Moda in the South Bronx. Her boyfriend at the time, Jay Shriver, Warhol’s technical assistant, took her to Basquiat’s loft on Crosby Street.