Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

The banana. The zipper.

Along with his Marilyn Monroe portrait and the Campbell Soup cans, Andy Warhol’s album covers have their own place in the pop-art pantheon.

The Cranbrook Art Museum is kicking off what it says is the most comprehensive exhibition of authenticated Warhol record covers to date — including three recently discovered albums that never before have been shown in such a setting.

“Warhol On Vinyl: The Record Covers, 1949-1987+,” which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through March 15, features 60 unique album covers and nearly 100 in all, including color and size variations.

This October, the UK’s largest ever survey of the contemporary American artist Richard Tuttle will take place in London. It will include a major exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, a large-scale sculptural commission at Tate Modern, and a new publication. The project, titled “I Don’t Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language,” was conceptualized by the artist and focuses on the importance of textiles across his body of work and into the latest developments in his practice.

Tuttle, who came to prominence in the 1960s, has worked in a range of media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and furniture. Using humble, everyday materials such as cloth, paper, rope, and plywood, Tuttle creates subtle, intimate works that elude historical or stylistic categorization. He began experimenting with textiles in 1978 during a residency at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Tuttle employed his interest in the silkscreen printing process and made a series of clothing -- "Shirts" in 1978 and "Pants" in 1979. Functional in nature, the articles of clothing play with line, volume, pattern, and shape -- attributes the artist continues to explore.

The biggest museum fundraising campaign in San Francisco history is nearing its $610 million goal two years before the opening of a new wing that will more than double the space for artworks by Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and David Hockney.

About $570 million, or 94 percent, has been raised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its 235,000-square-foot (21,800-square-meter) expansion and to add $245 million to the museum’s endowment. The $305 million wing designed by the Snohetta architecture firm is rising behind SFMOMA’s current home, opened two decades ago in the technology-heavy South of Market area, or SOMA.

It may come as no surprise that when you ask Americans to choose their favorite artwork, Edward Hopper’s iconic “Nighthawks” sits at the top of the list. For the Art Everywhere US initiative (imported from the UK), online voters picked Hopper’s 1942 noir masterpiece and 57 other works from a curated selection of 100 pieces from the collections of five museums — the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney. Starting August 4, the works will adorn as many as 50,000 billboards and signs across America.

The works to go on view range from patriotic picks like Gilbert Stuart’s 1821 portrait of George Washington and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” to more contemporary choices like photographs from Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman. As part of a special presentation at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, Art Everywhere will present the full list of works.

A public square in Paris’s 13th arrondissement will be named after Jean-Michel Basquiat after the French capital’s City Council approved a proposal from  Jérôme Coumet, the 13th arrondissement’s mayor.

“Basquiat is one of the biggest contemporary artists,” Coumet told Le Figaro. “He defended the cause of African-Americans in the US, and was also a lover of France. He was the artist who blazed the trail for street art, and art in public space.”

If you haven’t wandered in the doors of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago lately, there’s a lot to catch up on. MCA Chicago has bid adieu to Illuminated Things and put away the shovel, but there’s plenty of new and exciting things to see.

"Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo" is a beautifully curated exhibit that speaks to four themes Kahlo herself emphasized in her storied works—gender performance, national identity, the political body, and the “absent” or traumatized body.

This isn’t the MCA’s first encounter with Frida. In 1978, MCA Chicago was the first museum to display Kahlo’s works in a solo exhibition. This goes beyond the body of Kahlo’s work though, past the fame of the artist and her iconic Mexican folk art style and more to what she was trying to say with her work. The exhibition space gives each of the four ideas equal and separate space, but the exhibit never seems disjointed, and flows seamlessly from one idea to another almost conversationally.

While there’s an ongoing mini-exodus of smaller galleries from Chelsea due to rocketing rents, not everyone is leaving the neighborhood. In early 2015, Lisson Gallery — which currently has two locations in London, one in Milan, and a private showroom on the Lower East Side of Manhattan — will open an 8,500-square-foot space at 504 West 24th Street. That address situates them on a block with peers like Gagosian, Luhring Augustine, Andrea Rosen, and Gladstone Gallery.

“Designed by Markus Dochantschi of Studio MDA in collaboration with Studio Christian Wassmann, the gallery will be constructed around the foundational elements of the High Line,” according to press materials

Art Basel, one of the world’s top modern and contemporary art fairs, opened on Tuesday, June 17, with a private preview that saw a number of impressive sales. Described as the “Olympics of the art world,” this year’s show features approximately 300 galleries from across the globe exhibiting the work of more than 4,000 artists, ranging from Modern masters to emerging contemporary artists.  

Welcoming an elite group of collectors, the opening night preview proved that the market for modern and contemporary art shows no signs of slowing down. Andy Warhol’s “Self-Portrait (Fright Wig)” (1986), which was being offered by London’s Skarstedt Gallery and carried an asking price of $32 million, was the most expensive work sold during the fair’s opening day. The silkscreen was snapped up by an American collector during the first 15 minutes of the event.

Fifty years ago, during the summer of 1964, Andy Warhol began working on silkscreen paintings of flowers, a subject that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. When Warhol had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in November 1964 it consisted entirely of Flowers. Best known for his vibrant pop imagery and searing commentary on art and popular culture, Warhol’s flower imagery reveals a softer, more intimate side of the artist. In retrospect, it is also a provocative series, appropriating a powerful symbol later identified with flower-power counterculture of the 1960s, the age of peace, love, and anti-war protest. The Flowers are the only subject that Warhol revisited throughout his entire career and in almost every medium. The artist’s floral imagery is among the quietest, most beautiful, and least studied. The Cheekwood exhibition is a rare occasion when Warhol’s artificial flower images meet the floral abundance of an actual garden. 

This exhibition traces Warhol’s engagement with floral images throughout his career, beginning with a group of his earliest commercial illustrations, drawn in the 1950s, and his creation of the Flowers series in 1964, to photographs, paintings, and screen prints through 1986 before his untimely death the following year. The development of Warhol’s career can be seen in the progression from the delicacy of the early illustrations to the boldness of the 1964 series to the tension between the beauty and banality of the photographs and prints late in his career.

Frieze has announced the participating galleries for Frieze Masters. Following acclaim for the first two editions of the fair, this year sees not only a particularly strong representation of galleries from the UK and US but also an ambitious global reach. Dedicated to art from ancient to modern, Frieze Masters will take place October 15–19, 2014 on Gloucester Green, Regent’s Park, London, and is sponsored by Deutsche Bank.

Described by the Financial Times as ‘Unrivalled among fairs worldwide for its quality, range, seductive displays and scholarly interest’, Frieze Masters is a carefully selected presentation of over 120 of the world’s leading galleries. Taking place at the same time as Frieze London, the two fairs ensure that London is the destination for the broadest international art audience and benefits from a crossover between audiences of contemporary and historical art.