Displaying items by tag: conceptual art

The Hammer Museum announced on Wednesday exhibition plans for winter and spring that include the first L.A. solo show for Mexican artist Pedro Reyes and the first American show for the London-based Heatherwick architecture studio.

Another first: "Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989," which comes to the Hammer from the Studio Museum in Harlem, and opens Feb. 7. It represents the first comprehensive survey of the prominent conceptual artist's work while he lived and taught in Fresno, before he came to Los Angeles.

Hans Haacke, a father of Conceptual art and one of its chief political firebrands, has often made works incorporating lists, visually unlovely but highly effective ways to show how the world works. If you were to borrow the technique to show the unusual position Mr. Haacke has occupied in the art world for more than 50 years, the list might look something like this:

1. He has resisted allowing his face to be photographed, because he says that artists are too often fetishized as personalities.

2. He does not allow his work to be shown in art fairs and has attended only one, in Germany in the late 1960s, which so disgusted him that he flew back home to New York the next day. (“It was held in a circus tent, if you can believe that,” he said.)

The Fine Art Society – established in 1876 – will on Friday open a show paying tribute to one of the most influential artists of all time, Marcel Duchamp.

The exhibition features 50 artists showing works under the title "What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me." Kate Bryan, the society’s director of contemporary art, said art historians and critics always talked about the legacy of Duchamp, but far less was heard from artists.

“To be honest, the more you study Duchamp, the less you know – he was so full of contradictions – so I thought the best thing to do was ask the artists.”

The Texas Department of Transportation has reached an agreement with the foundation Ballroom Marfa to preserve Elmgreen & Dragset’s iconic conceptual installation “Prada Marfa.” Ballroom Marfa, a non-profit organization that doubles as a contemporary cultural arts space, has been battling to preserve the sculpture for nearly a year. The government threatened to shut down the life-size replica of a Prada store, which stands on a deserted stretch of West Texas highway, because it could be considered an illegal roadside advertisement under state law.

To resolve the problem, Ballroom Marfa decided to lease the land underneath “Prada Marfa” and register the site as an art museum. Elmgreen & Dragset’s building will be the museum’s sole art exhibit.

Photographer Louise Lawler will be the next artist to fill the billboard located at the base of the High Line -- New York’s elevated, linear park. The image, which depicts a room at Sotheby’s that contains works by Minimalist and Conceptual art icons Frank Stella, Sol Lewitt, and Donald Judd, is the 15th installation in the High Line’s billboard series. Other artists who have participated in the public art project include the Conceptual artist John Baldessari, photographer Robert Adams, and the British artist David Shrigley.

In the early 1970s, Lawler began looking critically at the ways in which art was displayed outside of the artist’s studio. She began photographing other artists’ works on view in collectors’ homes, in storage spaces, and on view at auction houses, challenging the viewer to think about the context in which works of art are displayed and documented.

The building at 421 E. 6th Street looks unassuming enough. It’s still got the facade of the Con Ed substation that it was in the 1920s, and chances are, if you’re strolling by on the way to Tompkins Square Park, you probably wouldn’t stop and stare.

But inside, the gigantic space is filled with the minimalist installations of Walter De Maria, who purchased the lot in 1980 and turned it into his studio and home that he occupied and built upon until his death last year. He transformed the building into a work of art itself, perhaps the encapsulation of his entire career and life.

The legendary art dealer Marian Goodman will open a London outpost this fall. Located in an 11,000-square-foot Victorian warehouse on Golden Square in Soho, the Marian Goodman Gallery will join a number of U.S.-based galleries in the neighborhood, including Gagosian Gallery, David Zwirner Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery. Goodman, who has well-established galleries in New York and Paris, represents a bevvy of influential artists, including conceptual artists John Baldessari, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner; photographers Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, and Thomas Struth; installation artists Annette Messager and Danh Vō; and painters Julie Mehretu and Gerhard Richter.

The London-based architect David Adjaye has helmed the renovation of the gallery space. Adjaye, who designed Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for African American History and Culture, which is currently under construction, is known for his ingenious use of materials and his ability to showcase light.

On June 30, Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing #370: Ten Geometric Figures (including right triangle, cross, X, diamond) with three-inch parallel bands of lines in two directions” (1982) will go on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The linear, black-and-white drawing will take five drafters four weeks to install.

LeWitt, a founder of both Conceptualism and Minimalism, made his first wall drawing in 1968. The process involved creating guidelines or diagrams so that the two-dimensional works could be drawn directly on a wall using everything from graphite and crayon to India ink and acrylic paint. LeWitt’s wall drawings were designed for limited duration and maximum flexibility within a broad range of architectural settings. Painstakingly executed by drafters, most of LeWitt’s wall drawings were eventually destroyed. “Wall Drawing #370” will be painted over when the exhibition ends on September 7, 2015.

n a piece for the New Yorker in 2000, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl asked: “Why does everybody love Sol LeWitt?” It’s a question that’s also at the heart of a new documentary about the artist that’s opening at Film Forum on May 7. LeWitt may be the chilliest member of a group of ice-cold artists associated with the male dominated first wave of minimalism, who rejected strict interpretation of their work and whose contradictions were expertly critiqued in Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, “The Flamethrowers”:

“Minimalism is a language, and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself,” the main character says of her boyfriend’s work. “I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse […] and if you didn’t know the discourse, you couldn’t take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused.”

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is working with the Park Hyatt luxury brand on a collaboration that will mutually benefit guests and members of both global organizations. The collaboration coincides with MoMA’s Sigmar Polke retrospective, “Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010,” which was sponsored by Park Hyatt.

The Hyatt recently purchased “Siberian Meteorites,” an original work by the postwar German artist and it will be displayed at Park Hyatt Chicago later this year. The work will eventually replace Robert Rauschenberg’s “Tropicana/Channel,” which currently hangs in the hotel’s lobby. The Rauschenberg work is on loan from Hyatt’s Executive Chairman Tom Pritzker.