Dan Graham at MOCA

Dan Graham on Los Angeles from MOCA LA on Vimeo.

Dan Graham: Beyond is the first North American retrospective of the art of Dan Graham (b.1942, Urbana, Illinois), examining his entire body of work in a focused selection of photographs, film and video, architectural models, indoor and outdoor pavilions, conceptual projects for magazine pages, drawings and prints, and writings. Graham has been a central figure in the development of contemporary art since the 1960s—from the rise of minimalism, conceptual art, and video and performance art, to explorations of architecture and the public sphere and collaborations with musicians and the culture of rock and roll. This exhibition traces the evolution of his practice across each of its major stages, while asserting ongoing themes, most notably, the changing relationship of the individual to society as filtered through American mass media and architecture at the end of the 20th century. Dan Graham: Beyond is co-curated by Bennett Simpson, MOCA associate curator, and Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Following its presentation in Los Angeles, the exhibition will tour nationally to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Dan Graham: Beyond will be accompanied by a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue.

Khalif Kelly - First museum show

Recent Yale M.F.A. graduate Khalif Kelly will have his first museum exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art this month. Entitled Khalif Kelly: Electronicon, the work will be displayed in Project Room 1 of the Museum from May 16 - August 22, 2009.

Kelly's work, brightly colored paintings, resonate with images of cartoon-like children in various states of play. Heavily drawing upon artists like Jacob Lawrence and early video games and animation, Kelly "creates scenes that on closer inspection reveal a mixture of personal archetypes and classic racial stereotypes."

Khalif Kelly was born in 1980 in Texas. He received a B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art, and lives and works in New Haven, CT and New York. He shows with Thierry Goldberg Projects in New York. He is a participant in the Artist Pension Trust.

press release

JJ Peet's first NYC solo show

JJ Peet, The TV Show
On Stellar Rays
133 Orchard Street
April 5 - May 10, 2009

Anne Wehr reviews the show for Frieze:

Few exhibitions reward careful scrutiny and repeat visits as much as JJ PEET’s ‘The TV Show’ at On Stellar Rays does, where the dozen sculptures that occupy the main gallery are just the tip of the iceberg. His smallish assemblages of found items and repurposed materials resemble an apocalyptic strain of folk art, and are constructed in a provisional manner, stacked or held together with rubber bands or caulking as if to assure maximum flexibility for future disassembly and reuse. Many bear anthropomorphic touches, like Luxury Leader Voodoo Doll (2009), a meager little character with a crudely drawn pair of glasses for a face and a withered carrot for a body, attached with a black shoestring to a scrap of wood.

To see the entire review click here.

Lascaux cave paintings

Located in southwestern France, Lascaux is the site of several cave paintings widely regarded to be some of the earliest artworks discovered to date. The works were accidentally discovered in teh 1940s by teenage boys. After hundreds of visitors a day partially destroyed the works by simply exhaling their carbon dioxide, the caves were closed so that the paintings could be restored to their previous glory.

The majority of the paintings are of animal figures, and the site has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Full of mysticism and black mold, the caves have continued to be a constant source for speculation, and restricted access.

Picasso and Hirst's Firsts

Picasso's first Cubist work, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)




Damien Hirst's first major dead animal work, A Thousand Years, 1990

First retrospective of the photographer Liselotte Grschebina

Woman with a Camera: Liselotte Grschebina
April 5 to June 28, 2009
Martin-Gropius-Bau

The Martin-Gropius-Bau presents the first retrospective of the avante-garde photographer Liselotte Grschebina (1908–1994). The exhibition features 100 photos taken by the relatively obscure artist in Germany and Palestine between 1929 and the 1940s.

Grschebina’s life was similar to other artists at the time who were living in Weimar Germany and trying to create work under the impending Nazi regime. Her work exemplifies the energizing spirit of cultural innovation during the time of the Weimar Republic, as well as the golden age of photography when artists were just beginning to see the potential with the medium.

Born in Germany, the artist was forced to leave her home in 1934 when she immigrated to Palestine and opened a studio in Tel-Aviv. Grschebina’s talent developed without major recognition until after her death, when a hidden body of work was discovered by her son in his apartment. In 2000, he gave the entire archive – including some 1,800 photographs – to the Israel Museum.

The current retrospective at the Martin-Gropius-Bau reveals the art of a young woman who in the period of the Weimar Republic was inspired by the New Sobriety (Neue Sachlichkeit). The Neue Sachlichkeit was distinguished by clarity of form and structure and the beauty of simple things. At the same time it had a documentary character, which concentrated on the essence of an object. Grschebina developed this style further in her new home in Palestine and integrated her work with that of the influential group of German photographers, who came with the fifth wave of immigration and settled mainly in Tel Aviv.

Pop Artist James Rosenquist's First Break

Photo of James Rosenquist in his Aripeka, Florida studio, 1988. Photo by Russ Blaise

The American painter James Rosenquist is one of the protagonists of the pop-art movement. It's interesting to trace his past as a billboard painter and events leading up to his first one-man show in 1962 at Richard Bellamy's Green Gallery.

The following article by Alexi Worth was published in Artforum in 2002.

JAMES ROSENQUIST, a headstrong twenty-two-year-old from Minneapolis, arrived in New York in 1955. After a year at the Art Students League his money ran out, so he took a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy couple who provided room and board, along with a studio where he could make his smeary impastoed abstractions. It was a comfortable situation-no expenses, plenty of time to paint--and it's easy to imagine a young artist settling into it. But Rosenquist was restless. In Minnesota he had worked summers painting billboards; now he applied to Local 230 of the International Sign and Pictorial Painters Union and got his first assignment, painting a Hebrew National Salami ad on Flatbush Avenue.

For the next three years he worked all over the city. In a union dominated by middle-aged Italians, he was an oddball. Glaringly young, blond, and disproportionately talented, he rose quickly to become head painter. Surviving photographs of Rosenquist on scaffolding have a Tom Sawyerish glamour, but in fact the work was repetitive and dangerous. In 1959, after two painters fell to their death, Rosenquist quit and rented a studio in Coenties Slip, on a now all but vanished three-block strip that has been called Manhattan's Bateau-Lavoir.

Sign painting had given him skills that no other young artist had. The other Coenties artists--among them Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Jack Youngerman, and Robert Indiana (Rauschenberg and Johns lived a couple of blocks away, on Pearl Street)-reinforced Rosenquist's growing impatience with the prevailing AbEx aesthetic. In the new studio, he began collecting magazine images and stapling them to the wall, making small photocolages. Enlarging those fragments to billboard scale re-created a sensation that Rosenquist had first had while working on his commercial jobs: of being suspended in the middle of an image, in effect immersed in it, so that a commonplace visual texture-hair or skin or fabric--became unrecognizable, Brobdingnagian, mysterious.

The first dealer to see the "soft, closeup imagery" of these first half-dozen Pop paintings was the Upper East Side gallerist Allan Stone, who dropped by in mid-1961. It was the only false start of Rosenquist's career. As the artist remembers it, Stone was positive, but vague. "He was reading the newspaper and kind of halfway glancing at the pictures. He said, 'I'd-like to hang one of those in my office ... in about a year or so.'" Ileana Sonnabend, who came along with Stone, was more enthusiastic, but she didn't yet have a gallery. The same was true of Ivan Karp (soon to be named director of Leo Castelli), who visited the Coenties studio shortly afterward. At this point, things get muddy: Did Karp bring Richard Bellamy--another gallery director with a famously sharp eye--on a subsequent visit? Or did Bellamy come on his own initiative? Either way, Bellamy showed up. A week later he came back with the collector Robert Scull. As Rosenquist remembers it, "Scull came in and says, 'Oh, fantastic! Wonderful! A gre at American spirit,' and he walked out the door." Rosenquist didn't know it, but this odd, almost furtive appearance was pivotal. With Scull, Bellamy's financial backer, on board, Rosenquist's career was on the move.

The next week, Bellamy said he'd like to bring some more collectors, Burton and Emily Tremaine. "So they came down, and this old lady wearing Lolita glasses said, 'I'd like to buy ... that one.' And Dick says, 'I'm sorry, it's already sold to Bob Scull.'" Rosenquist was taken aback, and not just because he hadn't been told about the Scull sale. "I took Dick aside and said 'I don't want to sell them.'" Bellamy, the least mercantile of art dealers, had to persuade the wary young artist that selling paintings was a good idea. "Think it over," he concluded. A few months later, in February 1962, Rosenquist's first solo opened at Bellamy's Green Gallery, with all but one of the paintings already spoken for. Looming ahead were the now mythic group exhibitions--beginning the same year with "The New Realists" at Sidney Janis and, in 1963, "Sixteen Americans" at MOMA and "Six Painters and the Object" at the Guggenheim--which would provide a context for the coolly flamboyant aesthetic that Rosenquist had pioneered in hi s Coenties studio. But that afternoon, none of this was apparent. The future looked promising, but blank. Rosenquist and his friend Ray Donarski set up a whiskey-only bar for the opening. And then the two of them sat down on the gallery floor, waiting, "wondering if anybody would show up."

In this monthly column, Artforum talks with renowned artists about the incident or encounter that first brought them public recognition.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.