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ART HK 2011 launched
ART HK opened last night with a lively vernissage. Predictably, the direction the fair will take under its new owners was the subject of many conversations. The early signs are promising for those hoping the fair will retain its distinctive point of difference. Speaking by telephone from Switzerland, Art Basel co-director Marc Spiegler said: “We are not interested in copying and pasting the same fair on three locations. Along with the greater interest in China, we are looking at many rising markets from Australia and New Zealand, to Singapore and Indonesia. The Asian market is developing so quickly, it's hard to say what it will look like in five years.” Read more…
Review of Matt Henry's Vernacular Painting
“Henry with these (and earlier) works is combining a contrived invisibility with cultivated exhibitionism. Intro- and extra- version seamlessly blended.” Read more…
Image: Matt Henry, Vernacular Painting, installation view, Starkwhite, 2011; 2050 x 843 Signal Yellow 2011, acrylic and lacquer, installed in door frame, 2050 x 843 mm
This week at Starkwhite
We'll be in Hong Kong this week for ART HK, but Starkwhite will be open Monday to Friday from 11am to 5pm and 11am to 4pm on Saturday. Our exhibitions are: Group Show (downstairs), Matt Henry's Vernacular Painting (upstairs) and Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up, which is on display in the foyer and reception areas of Minter Ellison's Auckland offices.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, The Opposite of Backwards (2009), c-type photograph, 700 x 1050 mm, Starkwhite Group Show, May 2011
Art Gallery of New South Wales opens new John Kaldor Family Gallery
Today the Art Gallery of New South Wales unveils a new floor for contemporary art, a development catalysed by the gift of the John Kaldor Family Collection – the largest donation of art to a public art gallery in Australia's history. The Collection includes over 200 works by artists of our time and features in-depth representations of Robert Rauschenberg, Christo, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Bill Viola, Thomas Demand, Francis Alys and Ugo Rondinone.
Image: The new John Kaldor Family Gallery with Sol LeWitt's “Wall Drawing #1091: arcs, circles and bands (room),” 2003
Mercedes Vicente talks to Dane Mitchell in the latest issue of Flash Art
In the May/June 2011 issue of Flash Art, Mercedes Vicente talks to Dane Mitchell about his recent work and how it engages with the notion of the 'vapourous' — teetering on the edge of the invisible, making the intangible tangible.
Image: cover images of the May/June issue of Flash Art, by Thomas Hirschhorn and Lygia Clark
SPEECH MATTERS: The Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
For the 54th Venice Biennale, the Danish Pavilion will host an international group exhibition, curated by Katerina Gregos, which will explore the timely and complex issue of freedom of speech. SPEECH MATTERS will feature 18 international artists of different generations from 12 countries. 13 new installations have been commissioned especially for the exhibition. Read more…
Image: Jan Svankmajer, The Garden, 1968, 35 mm film, 16'
2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Portugese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura is the jury's choice for the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize. It is the second time in the history of the prize that a Portugese architect has been chosen. The first was in 1992 when Alvaro Siza was selected.
You can see selected works by Eduarod Souto de Moura here.
Image: Eduardo Souto de Moura's Municipal Stadium, Braga, Portugal
Alicia Frankovich at Salon Populaire, Berlin
Alicia Frankovich will present an evening with two live performance acts, two video pieces and a sculptural activation at Salon Populaire, Berlin on 18 May at 8pm.
Image: Salon Populaire, Berlin
curated by_vienna 2011
Now in its third year, this year's curated by_vienna takes as its starting point the importance and relevance of Vienna for Eastern and Southeastern European contemporary art and artists. 21 international curators, including Rene Block, Magda Kardasz and Nicolaus Schafhausen, were invited to develop special exhibitions for 21 galleries. The exhibitions run to 18 June.
The project includes a panel programme examining topical issues facing art and society in East and South East Europe, including the Baltic States, Russia, former-Yugoslavia and Turkey. The panels will be moderated by Simon Rees, the curatorial coordinator of curated by_vienna 2011.
This link takes you to the curated by_vienna 2011 website.
A Way of Calling at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts
A Way of Calling opens tonight at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne. The exhibition highlights six practices (Dane Mitchell and Ann Shelton are in the lineup) that evoke, activate or engage mysterious forces, energies or sensations. This link takes you to the exhibition page on the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts website.
Image: Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, St Kilda, Melbourne
NEA brings video games in from the cold
The National Endowment for the Arts has embraced video games as an art form. Following on the heels of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's release for its upcoming The Art of Video Games exhibition, the NEA has renamed and rebranded its Arts on Radio and Television Grants, which will now be called Arts Media Grants. “We'll continue to support television and radio”, NEA director of media arts Alyce Myatt explains in a video about the change, “but we're also going to fund content development for the Web, for theatrical release, for mobile phones, content to be distributed via satellite, and even content for game platforms.”
Image: from Cory Archangel's tribute to Super Mario's clouds
Artists voyage to the Kermadec Islands
This week a group of artists from the South Pacific region, including Phil Dadson and John Reynolds, travel on HMNZS Otago to a place rarely explored – the Kermadec Islands.
The Kermadecs are the most remote part of New Zealand. Despite their historical, as well as mythological significance, public awareness of the islands and surrounding waters is slight. The voyage aims to change that by documenting an imaginatively-charged encounter with one of the least known natural wilderness areas on the planet.
Later in the year the Tauranga Art Gallery will present an exhibition of works produced by the artists. The Gallery was selected as the exhibition venue because the Kermadec Ridge (the undersea formation which includes Raoul Island where the artists will spend two days) is geologically linked with the Tauranga area.
The project is an initiative of the Pew Environment Group's Global Ocean Legacy programme, which promotes the designation of large, highly-protected marine reserves.
Image: NASA photograph of Raoul Island, the Kermadecs
Tender is the Night opens at Wellington's City Gallery
The City Gallery (Wellington) has opened Tender is the Night, an exhibition curated by Heather Galbraith that “brings together a selection of art works which explore the complex and intense nature of desire, love and the loss of a loved one.” You can read more about the exhibition and lineup of artists (they include Phil Dadson and Derrick Cherrie) at the City Gallery website.
Image: Phil Dadson, Breath 1976 (a statement about birth and death), b/w video for two monitors, 16'30″
Ai Weiwei's Zodiac sculpture unveiled in New York
Ai Weiwei's public art project Circle of Animals: Zodiac Heads has been unveiled at the foot of New York's Pulitzer Fountain. The work consists of 12 bronze animal heads representing different phases of the Chinese calendar installed in a semi-circle in the shallow, stepped pools of the fountain.
The bronzes are scaled up versions of heads that originally adorned a Chinese imperial the water-clock in the Garden of Perfect Brightness in Beijing, which was looted by Anglo-French forces during the second Opium War in the 1850s. The repatriation of the heads has become cultural priority and in 2009 the Chinese Government launched a PR offensive against Christie's when the auction house attempted to sell two of the imperial bronzes as part of its Yves St Laurent / Pierre Berge auction. Berge taunted that he would give the heads for free if China vowed to “observe human rights and give liberty to the Tibetan people and welcome the Dalai Lama.” Eventually at the sale, Cai Mingchao, the Chinese bidder who offered $14m for each head, refused to pay for them and described his sabotage of the auction as a patriotic act.
In an interview with filmmaker Alison Klayman, Ai Weiwei said he was playing with the idea of real and fake, and of national symbolism. “It's a new interpretation”, he said. “My work is always dealing with real or fake, authenticity, what value is, and how value relates to the current political and social understandings and misunderstandings.”
Image: Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals: Zodiac Heads (detail), Pulitzer Fountain, New York
Curator finds his art in the slow, contemplative lane
This link takes you to a short article in the Sydney Morning Herald on Justin Paton's UNGUIDED TOURS exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Image: Justin Paton, curator of the UNGUIDED TOURS exhibition, in front of Ian Burns' From orbit
ART HK and Art Basel join forces
Asian Art Fairs Ltd has announced a new development for ART HK – Hong Kong International Art Fair. MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Ltd, the organiser of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, will take a majority ownership in Asian Art Fairs Ltd.
Following ART HK later this month, next year's edition will take place from February 2 to 5 so that its timing fits better with the dates of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. Next year's edition will remain under the show's current ART HK name, with Magnus Renfrew remaining as director. In the mid-term ART HK is to be integrated into the Art Basel brand as the third platform for the international art show.
Tate announces 2011 Turner Prize nominees
The Tate has announced the nominees for the 2011 Turner Prize. Karla Black, Martin Boyce, Hilary Lloyd and George Shaw have been shortlisted for the award, which laureates a British artist under 50 “for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding.” The winner will be announced on 5 December 2011.
Image: Hilary Lloyd's Crane (2010)
Leigh Davis Flag Poems in Time, Text & Echoes
Image: Leigh Davis, Hau, flag poem presented in the JAR exhibition Time, Text & Echoes (2010-2011), a sequence of ten-day hoists over 300 days, New North Road, Kingsland, Auckland, NZ
Unguided Tours: Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts
The Anne Landa Award exhibition opened last night at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Selected by Christchurch-based curator and author Justin Paton, the artists in the Unguided Tours exhibition lineup (and contenders for the video and new media award of AUD25,000) include Auckland-based artist Jae Hoon Lee.
Here is a short introduction to the show from the AGNSW website:
'Where to'? From a plane halfway round the globe, to a poetic walk through suburban backstreets, to a virtual voyage through a digitally constricted world, the 2011 Anne Landa Award offers a series of 'unguided tours' through some rich imaginative territory. Using video, computer animation, kinetic sculpture and even an immersive game environment, the seven contemporary artists in Unguided Tours explore the lure of other places, the anxieties and pleasures of travel, and the unexpected rewards of getting lost.
Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Becoming (2002), archival pigment ink on Ilford paper
Starkwhite group show
Currently we are presenting a group show in our ground floor gallery with works by Billy Apple, Martin Basher, Alicia Frankovich, Hye Rim Lee, Jae Hoon Lee and Seung Yul Oh. The exhibitions runs concurrently with Matt Henry's Vernacular Painting on the first floor and Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up at the Auckland offices of Minter Ellison Rudd Watts. The group show runs to 28 May 2011.
Image: Martin Basher, HALO OF JOY 2011, oil and acrylic on canvas, 1350 x 2140 mm
A response to T J McNamara's review of Matt Henry's Vernacular Painting
On Saturday T J McNamara reviewed Matt Henry's Vernacular Painting exhibition in his weekly column in the Auckland Herald's Arts Section. It's a short piece that serves no useful purpose other than allowing him to say in a few willfully dismissive lines that he didn't think much of the show. But it begs the question: what purpose does this sort of content-impoverished writing serve for the Herald's readers? None as far as we can see, but then we believe the job of the arts commentator is to add to the constellation of ideas that circulate around contemporary art.
McNamara's approach on this occasion – in and out in 136 words and parting with a low blow – stands in marked contrast to approaches taken by other arts commentators over the weekend with programmes aired on New Zealand's National Radio.
On Composer of the Week Matthew Crawford talked to pioneering intermedia artist Phil Dadson about his life and work and Kim Hill talked to Dane Mitchell on her Saturday Morning programme about his current work and Radiant Matter, a three-part exhibition being staged at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, followed by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and finally at Auckland's Artspace.
Crawford and Hill opened up conversations with the artists that were informative and illuminating, offering fresh insights into their practices and current projects. When faced with an artist's work that was “challenging”, Hill weighed in with questions aimed at demystifying it for her listeners.
Rather than simply saying we don't care for T J McNamara's review of Matt Henry's exhibition, we have decided to re-present it alongside the sort of content-rich commentary we look for: Michael Wilson's review of Matt Henry's first exhibition at Starkwhite, showing how much you can say in two well-written paragraphs, and the conversations with Dadson and Mitchell aired on National Radio over the weekend, which can be accessed at Composer of the Week and Saturday Morning with Kim Hill.
Here is what T J McNamara had to say about Matt Henry's Vernacular Painting exhibition, followed by Michael Wilson's earlier review.
T J McNamara, New Zealand Herald Arts
At Starkwhite, an exhibition by Matt Henry contains one ordinary truth: position changes paintings. In the brilliant white of the upstairs rooms he has a plain painting set near the floor. It looks like a red radiator. Another room has a partition wall that is a doubled-sided painting. Elsewhere paintings masquerade as television sets. Art is made ordinary.
There is one special experience. A stepladder allows you to climb out on to the verandah roof, walk a few steps and climb through the other window where a little white painting might be a light fitting of some sort. [Correction: the “little white painting” is in the space T J McNamara left, not the one he arrived at.]
The trip along the verandah is the real experience of the show, which is called Vernacular Painting. From the roof last week you could see painters doing their own version of a vernacular painting on the building opposite.
Michael Wilson, artforum.com / critics' picks
Making elegant use of two adjacent mirror-image rooms, Matt Henry's Doppelgänger presents a tidy cluster of new paintings and objects that riff on the visual similarity of contemporary high-tech product design and Judd-era sculptural Minimalism. In his first solo exhibition at the K Road gallery staple, the native New Zealander blurs function into form, abstracting home-cinema gear to produce a set of mute postmodern totems with the hermetic gleam of John McCracken slabs. Placing three small MDF and Formica-veneer boxes on the floor of one room and a larger black block in the other, the young artist completes this kowingly spare installation with a pair of monochrome canvases, one nearly black and tinted with zinc white, the other a high-key electric green, glazed and framed in dark wood.
In his 2007 outing at the Fishbowl in New Plymouth, Henry exploited that gallery's architectural peculiarity (originally a garage, it was converted into a sealed storefront via the addition of a street-facing glass wall) to amplify his project's blend of bold geometry with wry domestic references. At Starkwhite he exercises a similar strategy, responding to the interior's polished serenity with a tongue-in-cheek homage to the culture of high-def surround sound. Doppelgänger sees the artist poke subtle fun at consumerist status anxiety by aligning high-street commodities with more rarified goods. He also contributes a minor but engaging – and seamlessly realised – subset to the history of aesthetic cross-pollination between the formal and the functional, further teasing us with the fact that we can't always tell one from the other.
Image: Matt Henry, Vernacular Painting installation view. In the foreground Untitled (Titanium White) 2011, acrylic and lacquer on linen and masonite, 210 x 210 x 45 mm; in the background 2050 x 843 (Signal Yellow) 2011, acrylic and lacquer on linen installed in doorframe, 2050 x 843 mm
Artists on air: Phil Dadson and Dane Mitchell
Over the weekend Radio New Zealand aired conversations with Phil Dadson on Composer of the Week and Dane Mitchell on Saturday Morning with Kim Hill.
Images: Phil Dadson in performance (photograph courtesy of the artist) and Dane Mitchell, Radiant Matter Part 1, installation view, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2011 (photograph by Bryan James)
Tintoretto at the Venice Biennale
Three Tintoretto masterpieces will be included in this year's ILLUMinations exhibition at the Venice Biennale. They are The Stealing of the Dead Body of St Mark, the Creation of the Animals and the Last Supper.
Tintoretto's work has been acknowledged source of inspiration for the exhibition since its theme was first announced in October. Curator Bice Curiger sees commonalities between the Venetian master's quest and a lot of contemporary art practice that tilts against convention. “Tintoretto too was worried about overturning the conventions of his time, through the near reckless approach to composition that overturns the well-defined classical order of the Renaissance”, she says.
In return for the loan of the paintings, the biennale foundation will fund the restoration of the three works.
Image: Tintoretto's The Stealing of the Dead Body of St Mark
Review of Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up
This month we present three exhibitions – two at Starkwhite and one in Auckland's Central Business District. We have a group show in our ground floor gallery and Matt Henry's Vernacular Painting in the first floor galleries. Our third show, Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up, is on display in the foyer and reception areas of Minter Ellison's Auckland offices. You can read an eyeContact review of the exhibition here.
Image: Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up, installation view, Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, Auckland
frieze d/e: a global-local perspective on contemporary art
Published in German and English, frieze d/e is a new fully bilingual magazine that offers in-depth coverage of contemporary art through Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The first issue engages with the question of what it means to produce a geographically specific publication and to be provincial in the art world. You can read more about the new magazine here.
Censored Algerian artist talks about his part in the Sharjah Biennial controversy
Recently, Jack Persekian, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, an umbrella organisation overseeing the biennial, was sacked by Sharjah ruler Sheik Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qasimi. The reason, according to the Foundation, was a “public outcry” caused by the inclusion of an artwork by Algerian artist and writer Mustapaha Benfodil, an installation consisting of mannequins in soccer uniforms emblazoned with Arabic phrases that were deemed blasphemous.
The art world has been quick to gather around Persekian. An online petition is currently circulating to show support for the administrator and condemn the censorship. Persekian, however, disavows the the petition. “I have not authorised the online petition that has been launched in my name by certain people associated with the Sharjah Art Foundation,” he said. “I am not an advocate of boycotting any institutions to effect changes in the Middle East art scene. I have always believed in the benefits of respectful dialogue and routine interactions to effect change. Those personal beliefs still apply today and going forward into the future for the Sharjah Art Foundation and its artists.”
So far, the media focus has been on the act of censorship and firing of Persekian. However, ART INFO UK caught up with the artist in London to discuss his work and hear his version of the story. You can read the interview here.
Image Mustapha Benfodil's Maportaliche/It Has No Importance 2011, before it was removed from the Sharjah Biennial
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Vernacular Painting runs in our upstairs galleries to 14 April 2011. You can read our exhibition release here.
Images: Matt Henry, Vernacular Painting, installation view, Starkwhite, 2011; Untitled (Cadmium Red) 2011, acrylic and lacquer on linen, 565 x 665 x 60 mm; Untitled Dyad (Signal Yellow/Grey) 2011, acrylic and lacquer on linen, 1600 x 1800 x 72 mm; Signal Yellow (Letterbox) from the 16:9 series 2011, acrylic and lacquer on linen, frame, acrylic glazing, 618 x 1001 x 69 mm; Achromatic Grey (Letterbox) from the series 16:9 2011, acrylic and lacquer on linen, frame and acrylic glazing, 618 x 1001 x 69 mm; 2050 x 843 Signal Yellow 2011, acrylic and lacquer, installed in door frame, 2050 x 843 mm; Untitled (Titanium White) 2011, acrylic and lacquer on linen, 210 x 210 x 45; 2050 x 843 (Signal Yellow) 2011, installed in door frame
Leigh Davis Flag Poems in Time, Text & Echoes
Image: Leigh Davis, Te Rongopai and Where is Arikirangi, flag poems presented in the JAR exhibition Time, Text & Echoes (2010-2011), a sequence of ten-day hoists over 300 days, New North Road, Kingsland, Auckland, NZ
Jae Hoon Lee project goes online at SCREENS
SCREENS is presenting a new work by Jae Hoon Lee in collaboration with Jeff Nusz. Wanderer digitally weaves together satellite imagery along with environmental sound to form a series of new terrains, familiar yet wholly other. Users drift along macro views of cracked roads and grassy berms, stitching together their own narratives and non-places together based on the fluctuating juxtaposition of image and sound.
Founded and curated by Luke Munn and Jeff Nusz, SCREENS is series of commissioned online works by artists seeking to redefine the artgame/interactive field with pieces that create new relationships, deal with untouched themes, and utilise on and offline media.
Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Wanderer (still), 2011, SCREENS
Russia launches a new art investment fund
Last week the Moscow stock exchange listed Sobranie.Photoeffect, an art fund established by the Russian Management firm Agana. Valued at $467 million, the fund deals exclusively with photographs and holds over 290,000 works.
Sobranie.Photoeffect has a point of difference from other art funds. Instead of raising money from investors to buy art, it has obtained its works from a group of anonymous Russian collectors. The fund will sell 5-10% of its stock at auction every year, paying its final dividends after 15 years and then ceasing to exist. Agana's deputy director-general Ekaterina Aleksandrova told the Financial Times that the fund expects to provide annual returns of about 12-14%.
Image: Sobranie.Photoeffect includes work by Alexander Rodchenko
Russian youth organisation protests Voina's art award
Nationalist youth organisation Rossiya Molodaya (Young Russia) picketed Russia's ministry of culture on 15 April in protest over the awarding of a contemporary art prize to the controversial art collective Voina, demanding that the ministry stop allocating funds for the prize and “return by any lawful means funds spent on a prize for extremists and provocateurs”.
Voina was awarded the Rb400,000 ($14,000) prize for Dick Captured by FSB!, a 65 x 27m spray painting of the outline of a penis on a bridge opposite St Petersburg's Federal Security Service (FSB) office. The collective will distribute the winnings to orphans and inmates.
Voina did not attend the awards ceremony. Spokesperson Leonid Nikolayev told Russian News Service radio: The prize is secondary and insignificant. Our country has its own prize for artists who deal with social and political issues. We were nominated for a state prize in the form of a criminal case that could land us up to seven years in jail.”
Nikolayev and collective artist Oleg Vorotnikov were jailed after overturning police cars in another performance in St Petersburg last September. They were bailed out by Banksy in February, but are not allowed to leave St Petersburg while they await trial.
Image: Voina Collective's graffiti penis on a drawbridge in Moscow.
Serrano's Piss Christ attacked by Christian fundamentalists
Controversy has followed Andres Serrano's Piss Christ ever since he plunged a plastic crucifix into a glass of his own urine and photographed it, but it reached an unprecedented peak on Palm Sunday when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an “anti blasphemy” campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the city of Avignon, The Guardian reports that the violent slashing of the picture, and another Serrano photograph of a meditating nun, has plunged France into soul-searching about Christian Fundamentalism and Nicolas Sarkozy's use of religious populism in his bid for re-election next year. Read more…
Image: Andres Serrano, Piss Christ (1989)
The Andy Monument, Union Square NY
A new public art work has appeared in New York's Union Square. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, Rob Pruitt's The Andy Monument (2011) is a statue of Andy Warhol made from chromed, glass-fibre-reinforced polyester resin and stood atop a concrete plinth. His Warhol shares the square with monuments to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Mohandas Gandhi, and is the Warhol of the 1970s and 80s: big glasses, shirt, tie and casual blazer, a Bloomingdale 'medium brown bag' in his right hand and a Polaroid camera slung around his neck. Read more…
Image: Rob Pruitt's The Andy Monument (2011) commissioned by the Public Art Fund, NY
Starkwhite opening tonight
Matt Henry's exhibition Vernacular Painting opens tonight at 5.30pm.
Image: Matt Henry, Signal Yellow (Pillarbox) from the series, 16:9 2011, acrylic on linen, frame, acrylic glazing, 618 x 1001 x 69 mm
Showing that philanthropy can work, even when times are tough
The UK's biggest art charity has announced plans to increase funding to museums and galleries to buy and show art by over 50% by 2014. The Art Fund is committing £7m a year to their funding programme, up from £4.5 million. They also launched the National Art Pass giving special access to art all over the UK.
Demonstrating that philanthropy can continue even when times are tough, the Art Fund is taking steps to support the delivery of art around the UK and to help people to experience great art at first hand. They include:
- Making more money directly available for the purchase of important works of art
- Running more public fundraising campaigns
- Supporting curatorial development
- Supporting the collecting of international contemporary art
- Celebrating, advocating and supporting the museums and galleries sector through the art fund prize for museums and art galleries
- Campaigning for ways to make it easier for institutions to acquire art
- Helping people make the most of art through the introduction of the National Art Pass
All funding for the art charity is raised from donations, public appeals, trusts and foundations and through its 80,000 supporters
Image: artist Grayson Perry at a National Art Pass launch
Turner Contemporary aims to revitalise the town of Margate
Locals in Margate are hoping the new Turner Contemporary gallery will help to revitalise a town where a declining tourist trade has left buildings empty and high levels of unemployment. They are hoping that the new art gallery and its links with 19th century artist JWT Turner will transform Margate in the way the Tate gallery turned a sleepy seaside St Ives in soutwest England into an artistic mecca, or the way the Guggenheim revived Spain's industrial city of Bilbao.
The “art effect” is already having an impact. Anticipating a cultural resurgence, entrepreneurs have begun moving into Margate's quaint but rundown Old Town, opening galleries, cafes and vintage boutiques. Some 40 new businesses have opened since last year. Others hope to re-open the old Dreamland amusement park and preserve its antique rides which include Britain's oldest roller coaster as part of a raft of visitor attractions that could once again draw vacationing families to the beach resort.
Image: the new Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate, England
A new addition to Billy Apple's transaction series
In 2005 Minter Ellison Rudd Watts advanced Billy Apple $100,000 credit for legal services for an artwork staged as a site-specific wall painting in the firm's reception area. Five years and one Top Up later the project has evolved into the exhibition Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up, a new addition to the artist's list of transactions dating back to Art For Sale, 1981. You can read the release for this Starkwhite exhibition presented in the foyer and reception areas of Minter Ellison's Auckland offices here.
Image: Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up, installation views of the Starkwhite exhibition at the Auckland offices of Minter Ellison Rudd Watts
Coming up at Starkwhite
Matt Henry's exhibition Vernacular Painting, opens in our upstairs galleries on Wednesday 18 May. You can read the exhibition release here.
Image: Matt Henry, Untitled (Titanium Dioxide) 2011, acrylic and lacquer on linen, pine stretcher and masonite panel, 210 x 210 x 45 mm
Challenging the notion of the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale
In the first of a series of interviews with art-world figures operating outside the Venice Biennale's official channels, ARTINFO spoke recently with Georges Rabbath, who is planning a Lebanese project in Venice titled Lebanon as a State of Mind, about the pitfalls – and benefits – of working on the margins of the official national pavilion system, and how it is appropriate for the Arab world today. Read more…
Image: curator Georges Rabbath