Lucy Mitchell-Innes, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
‘This continues to be by far the best international fair in the world. I found the quality to be stronger this year. Galleries really seemed to be trying to make thoughtful presentations of their program and aesthetics. The attendance for this year’s show seems much broader, and we have experienced sales to buyers from all over the globe.’
Iwan Wirth, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London, New York
‘This year has been exceptional, with a tremendous response to the works on show, especially Paul McCarthy, leading up to our major show in both the London and New York galleries this November. The buying has been intelligent, vibrant and inspired. This may well be our best Art Basel ever.’
David Zwirner, Gallery David Zwirner, New York
‘Collector confidence was definitely back this year, and there was a lot of positive energy all around. In addition to seeing our dedicated clients from Europe, we were excited to see that a number of the new collectors we met during recent travels to Asia also made their way to Basel. And we were especially grateful that our presentations at Art Unlimited for Jason Rhoades and Fred Sandback were so enthusiastically received.’
Alex Logsdail, Lisson Gallery. London
‘The fair this year has been a great success in terms of both volume of sales and the diversity of artists that we have sold. By the end of the first day there were only five works left unsold on the stand. People seem to have enormous confidence in the future of both established and emerging artists, which is highly encouraging. Over all, another great year in Basel.’
Friedrich Petzel, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
‘Art 42 Basel has again been proven to our most successful fair. This year, more contacts and sales were made to newer collections and institutions. Art Basel is constantly improving, as the audience is changing.’
Ciléne Andréhn, Andréhn-Sciptjenko, Stockholm
‘The opening day was very intense. The solo show of Matts Leiderstam’s works, well-known by many but new to others, has received extremely positive feedback from collectors and curators alike resulting in sales to Europe, Asia and the US.’
Nils Staerk, Staerk Gallery, Copenhagen
‘We had an excellent opening, with sales to both public and private collectors. The piece ‘I Copy Therefore I Am’ by Superflex was a huge magnet to the booth, and two out of three editions sold to private collectors, in Europe and Latin America.’
Alison Jacques, Alison Jacques Gallery, London
‘Our solo presentation of Lygia Clark has been an unqualified success. Art Basel is the perfect context to show and promote this work. It has been extremely gratifying to see top level collectors and, importantly, key international curators and museum directors responding so enthusiastically to the work.’
Ola Gustafsson, Elastic Gallery, Stockholm
‘Taking the step from Liste and selling out the booth in the first hour of the preview – then recieving positive feedback from the most prominent museums, collectors and curators is what Art Basel can deliver like no other fair.’
Jörg Maass, Kunsthandel Maass, Berlin
‘We are thrilled about the show and recorded a strong demand for works by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger from Europe and the United States. If the quality is right, the exchange rate doesn’t matter.’
Art Unlimited spotlighted 62 ambitious works and once again drew a huge audience. Many of the exhibited pieces were created especially for Art 42 Basel. Highlights included major works by legendary artists Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Daniel Buren, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Dan Flavin, Mona Hatoum, Anish Kapoor, Robert Rauschenberg, Thomas Schütte, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Cerith Wyn Evans, joined by pieces from younger and emerging stars such as Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Jacob Kassay, Robert Kusmirowski, Mark Leckey and Sarah Morris.
With its 27 single-artist projects from young galleries and artists from around the globe, this year’s Art Statements had very strong presentations. The two Baloise Art Prizes of CHF 30,000 per artist were awarded to Alejandro Cesarco and Ben Rivers. The Baloise Group will also acquire works by both artists and once again donate them to the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the MUMOK Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation in Vienna.
The second edition of the Art Feature sector was of extraordinary quality and showed a vibrant mix of carefully curated exhibitions. The sector evolved very well, featuring solo shows by artists Giorgio Morandi, Lygia Clark, Alighiero Boetti, Jimmie Durham and Rirkrit Tiravanija among others.
Many art lovers crossed the Rhine to experience Art Parcours, where site-specific artworks and performances by the artists Ai Weiwei, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Anne Chu, Federico Herrero, Chris Johanson, Joan Jonas, Kris Martin, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Gabriel Sierra transformed a variety of locations throughout the historic St. Alban Tal of Basel, including fishing houses along the river, a large cargo ship, sections of the old city wall, the St. Alban church, an old water reservoir, as well as various public sites throughout the area. This array of high-caliber pieces was curated by San Francisco-based curator Jens Hoffmann, Director of the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. A true Highlight of the week was the Art Parcours Night, which featured Chris Johanson’s band ‘Sun Foot’ and was attended by 1700 people.
The Art Basel Conversations series again brought together prominent members of the international art scene, including Allen Ruppersberg, Chris Dercon, Martin Roth, Nancy Spector, Tariq Al Jaidah, Dana Farouki, Abdullah Al Turki, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Luc Deleu, Anri Sala, Stephen Willats, Momoyo Kaijima, Julieta Aranda, Stefan Kalmár, Marta Kuzma and Anton Vidokle. Additionally, a daily program of artist conversations, book signings, and discussion forums took place in the Art Salon forum every afternoon, offering a total of 28 presentations.
Once again the Art Film program featured outstanding films, screened at the Stadtkino Basel. Curator Marc Glöde’s thematic program presented short films by artists while film connoisseur This Brunner selected “A Cave of Forgotten Dreams” by Werner Herzog. Other highlights were the Swiss premiere of Lawrence Weiner’s film ‘Dirty Eyes’ (2010) and the European premiere of ‘Hallucinations/Paradise’ by Sam Samore.
On the weekend of June 16 to June 19, 2011, Art 42 Basel celebrated the Art Basel Weekend, highlighting special activities (solo shows, performances, book signings etc.) at the booths of 28 participating galleries. The museums and institutions in Basel also featured special events such as guided tours, performances and talks.
Shortly before the show, our visitors could download the Art Basel Smartphone app. Using your iPad, iPhone, Blackberry or other smartphone, you can still explore Art 42 Basel’s galleries, artists and exhibition sectors. The app’s interactive 3D-map allows you to virtually navigate through the halls, access information and images of artworks that our galleries brought to the show, organize them as favourites, and forward them to your friends and colleagues.
Elliot
June 29, 2011
LONDON. The city’s contemporary art fair Frieze will launch an old masters to modern fair running at the same time as the ninth edition of its renowned contemporary event, slated for 11-14 October 2012, say dealers who have been approached to exhibit.
The fair, expected to be called Frieze Masters, will be held in a nearby tent, north of Frieze’s regular slot in London’s Regent’s Park. Further details of the event—such as the number of galleries who will participate and the additional fair’s selection and vetting committee—are yet to be announced, but further details could be released as early as next week. Co-director Matthew Slotover declined to comment.
Frieze’s launch of a fair for older art in London comes hot on the heels of Masterpiece, which opened to great success in the capital last June and has secured a larger venue at the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea for its second edition (30 June-5 July). The combination of Frieze plus Frieze Masters would also put it in competition with Tefaf Maastricht, the March fair which in 2012 celebrates its 25th edition, although Frieze attracts the coveted audience for more cutting edge art.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/
Elliot Lee
July 6, 2011
DOHA. The small but energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar is the world’s biggest buyer in the art market—by value, at any rate—and is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art deals over the past six years, The Art Newspaper can reveal.
Working through a number of advisors, as well as buying directly from dealers and at auction, Qatar is reliably believed to be building up a top-class collection of modern and contemporary art. Last month, Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani—the 27-year-old daughter of the Emir of Qatar and a driving force behind the country’s art buying—announced that Christie’s chairman, Edward Dolman, will become executive director of her office. Dolman will also join the board of trustees of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), which oversees museums and cultural initiatives in the country and which the Sheikha chairs.
Sheikha Al Mayassa is not the only art collector in the family: her relative Sheikh Saud Bin Muhammad Bin Ali Al-Thani has always been a passionate art buyer, and was recently named as one of the world’s top ten collectors by Artnews.
Dolman will be working on art acquisitions for the growing network of museums, which are directed by the art historian and former head of the Rhode Island School of Design, Roger Mandle. According to Dolman: “Qatar is looking to deliver a series of exciting cultural projects in time for the World Cup in 2022.”
Because of the existence of confidentiality agreements, dealers and auctioneers are not prepared to go on the record about the deals that Qatar has made, but we have spoken to many well-placed sources in a position to know.
A key figure is the French agent Philippe Ségalot, whose partnership Giraud, Pissarro, Ségalot (GPS) is based in Paris and New York. Ségalot is believed to have negotiated many of the sales of modern art to Qatar. In the contemporary field, Qatar has already commissioned a major project from Richard Serra, is planning a Jeff Koons exhibition and funded the Takashi Murakami exhibition in Versailles last year, which is due to be shown in Doha in 2012. Mandle is understood to be responsible for commissioning contemporary works.
Among the purchases Qatar is believed to have made are:
• The “Merkin Rothkos”: A $310m deal saw 11 Rothkos sold by court order to an “unidentified buyer” in 2009. They came from the collection of financier J. Ezra Merkin, who is being sued in New York over his role as provider of funds to convicted Ponzi-scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff; the collection was the largest private holding of Rothkos in the world. They were subsequently exhibited at the Garage Centre in Moscow, leading to rumours that they had been bought by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, which was strenuously denied. Two very well placed sources maintain that they have gone to Qatar.
• The Sonnabend estate: $400m worth of art from the estate of the famous art dealer, comprising major works by Lichtenstein and Koons. The deal was negotiated privately in 2007-08, going to GPS; multiple sources identified its client as Qatar. Ségalot told us that “the group was sold to more than one client”
• The Claude Berri dation: A group of nine works by Ryman, Reinhardt, Morandi, Serra and Fontana was promised to the Pompidou Centre in Paris in lieu of tax. But the heirs of the film director finally sold them through Ségalot for about €50m to Qatar; he did not deny this but said “the reality was less exotic than the French press said at the time”.
• Andy Warhol’s The Men in Her Life, 1962, which sold for $63.4m at Phillips de Pury in New York in November 2010, in a sale orchestrated by Philippe Ségalot. He insists that the work was acquired by a US buyer. But a source who bought regularly from Ségalot said that sales often went through his US company, so while the buyer was technically American, the end owner could be of any nationality.
US statistics indicate that cultural exports to Qatar totalled $428,162,894 in the period 2005 to April 2011, with a spike of $250.5m in 2007, the year Qatar bought the “Rockefeller” Rothko, White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), 1950, for $72.8m. From 2005 to 2011 (first four months), Qatar imported £128,237,671 worth of paintings and antiques over 100 years old from the UK (over £21m for paintings and over £87.1m for antiques), according to trade statistics. Qatar bought Damien Hirst’s Lullaby Spring, 2002, for £9.2m at auction in London in 2007.
As well as these major acquisitions, Qatar has been buying widely at lower levels and in other fields. It spent £555,000 on William Hoare of Bath’s Portrait of Diallo, 1733, (export denied from the UK; on loan to the National Portrait Gallery, London), and $2.3m on Mahmoud Said’s Les Chadoufs, 1934 (now in Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha). Official Qatari sources declined to comment on our findings.
Additional research by Riah Prior
http://www.theartnewspaper.com
Elliot Lee
July 8, 2011
Cy Twombly, whose spare childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died in Rome Tuesday. He was 83.
The cause was not immediately known, although Mr. Twombly had suffered from cancer. His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Cy Twombly in 2005.In a career that slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop Art and anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the start. The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.” The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.”
Mr. Twombly’s decision to settle permanently in southern Italy in 1957 as the art world shifted decisively in the other direction, from Europe to New York, was only the most symbolic of his idiosyncrasies. He avoided publicity throughout his life and mostly ignored his critics, who questioned constantly whether his work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th-century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there. It didn’t help that his paintings, because of their surface complexity and whirlwinds of tiny detail – scratches, erasures, drips, penciled fragments of Italian and classical verse amid scrawled phalluses and buttocks – lost much of their power in reproduction.
But Mr. Twombly, a tall, rangy Virginian who once practiced drawing in the dark to make his lines less purposeful, steadfastly followed his own program and looked to his own muses: often literary ones like Catullus, Rumi, Pound and Rilke. He seemed to welcome the privacy that came with unpopularity.
“I had my freedom and that was nice,” he said in a rare interview, with Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, before a 2008 survey of his career at the Tate Modern.
The critical low point probably came after a 1964 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York that was widely panned. The artist and writer Donald Judd, who was hostile toward painting in general, was especially damning even so, calling the show a fiasco. “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review. “There isn’t anything to these paintings.”
But by the 1980s, with the rise of neo-Expressionism, a generation of younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat found inspiration in Mr. Twombly’s skittery bathroom-graffiti scrawl. Coupled with rising interest in European artists whose work shared unexpected ground with Mr. Twombly’s, like that of Joseph Beuys, the new-found attention brought him a kind of critical favor he had never enjoyed. And by the next decade he was highly sought after not only by European museums and collectors, who had discovered his work early on, but also by those back in his homeland who had not known what to make of him two decades before.
In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, “Fifty Days at Iliam,” based on Alexander Pope’s translation of the “Iliad.” (Mr. Twombly said that he had purposely misspelled “Ilium,” a Latin name for Troy, with an “a,” to refer to Achilles.) That same year, Mr. Twombly’s work passed the million-dollar mark at auction. In 1995 the Menil Collection in Houston opened a new gallery dedicated to his work, designed by Renzo Piano after a plan by Mr. Twombly himself. Despite this growing acceptance, Mr. Varnedoe still felt it necessary to include an essay in the Modern’s newsletter at the time of the retrospective, titled “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly.”
In the only written statement that Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.” The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed and he barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days.”
By Randy Kennedy
http://www.nytimes.com
Elliot Lee
July 16, 2011
Versailles gets knitted.
The Palace of Versailles’s ambitious, and at times controversial, contemporary programme continues apace with an exhibition of works by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos scheduled for spring 2012. Vasconcelos is known for her elaborate, large-scale sculptures and installations that incorporate found objects, handmade crochet and knitted fabrics. Vasconcelos’s Contamination (2011), a patchwork sprawl of brightly coloured materials, is currently on show at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (“The World Belongs To You”, until 31 December).
http://www.theartnewspaper.com