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    ‘I’m Not Giving People What They’re Used To:’ Awol Erizku on the Challenges Inherent in Remixing His Own Work

    For his latest exhibition, Awol Erizku has transformed the white cube at Ben Brown Fine Arts into a Black space. 
    Even if you think the artist’s decision to literally paint the walls black is a bit on the nose, the actual content of the exhibition is certainly less heavy-handed than his last outing with the gallery in 2017, which included a graffiti-laden door emblazoned with Trump’s name and a swastika. In “Cosmic Drill,” on view through April 6, Erizku revisits many of the same issues evoked in that earlier show, albeit with a little more trust in the viewer to do the work of unpacking them.
    Anchoring the exhibition is a series of artworks that merge photography, painting, and sculpture. On first viewing they’re cool-looking backboards for a series of colorful basketball hoops. Photographs of space, sourced from NASA and printed on aluminium panels, are overlaid with hand-painted patches of buffed-out graffiti markings.
    A large-scale marble sculpture of three stacked dice in the colors of the pan-African flag, titled Head Crack [Stack or Starve], monumentalizes cee-lo, a popular dice game often played in inner city parks, including those in the South Bronx, where the Ethiopian-American artist was raised. Erizku has also produced a conceptual mix-tape to score the exhibition, featuring drill music—a subgenre of nihilism-imbued hiphop reminiscent of trap but slower (and, if you can imagine it, more blunt).
    Installation view, “Awol Erizku: Cosmic Drill” at Ben Brown Fine Arts London, 2023. ©Ben Brown Fine Arts. Photo by Tom Carter.
    In the seven-odd years since he was buffeted to fame after shooting a pregnant Beyoncé, the Los Angeles-based artist’s practice has matured. He has distinguished himself as a multidisciplinary artist while maintaining his profile as an important name in photography. In 2021, he photographed poet laureate Amanda Gorman for Time magazine’s “Black Renaissance” issue, even as he himself is also considered part of that renaissance, a generation of ascendant Black artists gaining recognition across the cultural landscape. His art world bona-fides have continued to sprout. Last March, Antwaun Sargent curated an Erizku solo exhibition at Gagosian in New York and, in September, the artist gained representation in the city from Sean Kelly.
    The works on view at Ben Brown were made in Erizku’s L.A. studio, where he decamped from New York four years ago, finding the less entrenched art scene to be more conducive to the kind of slippery work he was making. “It felt like a lawless place. I think there’s a kind of freedom there that I didn’t experience or feel in New York,” Erizku told me when I visited him at the gallery. “I felt like because of New York’s rich institutions that uphold a lot of the formal and traditional values of painting, sculpture, and other mediums, you kind of have to conform and bend to those norms.”
    In this latest body of work, Erizku has revisited his older works but instead of repeating his most popular series such as the “Reclining Venus” or “Hand and Rose” works for which he is well known, he has sampled and re-mixed lesser-appreciated work from his archive, folding in new layers.
    Earlier versions of the basketball hoop sculptures were shown in 2017, executed on plywood and adorned with Black Panther Party motifs and African masks. “I think this time the direct diasporic signifiers are stripped as a way to get to a more universal kind of reading,” Erizku told me about these more subtle manifestations. 
    He has dubbed this process retroactive continuity. He doesn’t mind how it is interpreted, either. “The challenge is that now I’m not giving people what they’re used to,” he said. “But for me, it’s far more rewarding to fail in a big way and learn from that as opposed to succeeding in some small fashion, and then being stuck to being that person who only does X, Y, and Z.”
    Awol Erizku, Kyrie’s Lament (Shawny BinLaden Type Beat) (2022). Courtesy Ben Brown Fine Arts.
    Trying to encapsulate in explicit terms what Erizku is doing would limit the work on view at Ben Brown, which  exists somewhere between the hard edges of pre-ordained categories, like the buffed-out street markings that have inspired it. Erizku sees these as representing a “beautiful and poetic” tug-of-war between the mark maker and the eraser—as both vie for control of the narrative, neither succeeds totally in their aim. “In that erasure process, this other thing sort of emerges and that’s what I’m after,” said the artist.
    That “other thing” has been described in critical discourses surrounding Black artistic production in different ways: in a public conversation Erizku had with visionary curator Ekow Eshun and poet Caleb Femi, they evoked what Toni Morrison referred to as “Black liquidity,” a fugitive entanglement of art forms that can take on an improvisational quality.
    The layered titles of Erizku’s work also resist straightforward readings. Instead, they raise even more cosmic knots. For instance, Kyrie’s Lament (Shawny BinLaden Type Beat) references the competing narratives engulfing NBA star Kyrie Irving after he platformed an anti-semitic documentary film on social media. 
    Erizku himself said that his work is trying to touch upon “the Black imaginary,” making references to his own self-expression as well as the art of David Hammons, or the explosive beats of Shawny BinLadin.
    “I’m just expressing things I have seen and felt. And I can only speak for myself, so it’s not some sort of collective trauma, it’s none of that,” he said. “This is just all very internal and very personal, really.”
    Speaking of his relationship to drill, the violent subject matter of which has become a target of politicians, Erizku said he considers himself a sort of visual “griot”—keepers of oral history in parts of West Africa—who hopes to help preserve the music as an art form by giving it a visual component. “I think there’s rich history in it. I’ve followed it since I can remember, and I see where it’s going,” he said. “At the end of the day it’s an expression, and it’s Black expression, first and foremost.”
    Incorporating references to it in his work is a way of “protecting it and making sure that it’s not looked down upon or it’s not considered low brow, simply because other people don’t understand the depth and the complexity of what’s being said,” he noted.
    When it comes to the wider narratives surrounding the “Black renaissance,” and his place within that particular canon of artists, Erizku was ambivalent. “I don’t know where I fit in that because I feel like I’m just getting started. I just finished my first monograph literally last week. Yes, I’ve been making work for close to 12 years now, professionally, but at the same time, it feels like chapter one for me.” In a way, then, it’s no wonder that the exhibition feels somewhat like an unfinished thought. 
    “Awol Erizku: Cosmic Drill” is on view through April 6 at Ben Brown Fine Arts, London.

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    A New Photography Exhibition at MFA Boston Is Taking Viewers Through the ‘Multiple Realities of War’ in Ukraine

    For far too often in the last 11 months has the sky above Ukraine been scarred by gunfire, shells, and explosions. A new exhibition of Ukrainian war photography at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston takes that same sky as a metaphor—and turns it into a kind of call to action. 
    “Who Holds Up the Sky?”, as the show is called, was organized by a trio of curators from the Wartime Art Archive at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) NGO in Kyiv, and brought to the U.S. through a collaboration with the MFA. It collects the work of Ukrainian artists who have documented the war since Russia’s invasion in February of last year. 
    “Overcoming the darkness of death, shelling, genocide, and blackouts, photography captures the multiple realities of war,” the exhibition’s three MOCA NGO curators—Halyna Hleba, Olga Balashova, and Tetiana Lysun—wrote in the introductory wall text. The show, they explained, was conceived as a tribute to “everyone who is holding up the sky over Ukraine.”
    Installation view of “Who Holds Up the Sky?” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 21 to May 21, 2023. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    On view are shots of missiles being launched from Russia, taken by photographer Vadym Belikov from the window of his own high-rise building, as well as a picture of the destruction that similar missiles have wrought on Ukrainian farmland, captured by war correspondent Efrem Lukatsky. 
    Those two artists’ works are punctuated by several photos from Yana Kononova’s X-Scapes series, which document the physical destruction in Kyiv’s northern regions—twisted sheet metal, cratered housing structures—but are each cropped to the point of abstraction. Gone are direct indications of war, leaving the emotional devastation of the wreckage heightened.
    Pillars in the MFA’s gallery are lined with illustrations from Inga Levi’s ongoing Double Exposure series, which began just days after Russia’s unprovoked invasion. Each entry in the collection depicts two realities: one of everyday life in Ukraine, one of war.  
    Efrem Lukatsky, Bird’s eye view of a crater left by a Russian rocket that hit a farm field 10km from the front line. Despiteshelling, local farmers continue harvesting (2022). Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    Rounding out the show is a video about the “Behind Blue Eyes” project, a charitable effort that provides Ukrainian kids with disposable cameras. They’re asked to carry around their cameras for a week, photographing their daily routines. The goal, according to the view’s label, is to project a “coherent and complex footprint of the war” from the perspective of those whose lives will forever be shaped by it.
    The name of the project comes from the song of the same name by The Who. The curators suggest that the blue of the title is also meant to allude to the sky—a reminder, perhaps, that we’re all united by the firmament above us, even if it looks different.
    See more images from “Who Holds Up the Sky?” below.
    Installation view of “Who Holds Up the Sky?” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 21 to May 21, 2023. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    Kostiantyn Polishchuk, Ukrainian soldiers (2022). © Polishchuk Kostiantyn. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    Installation view of “Who Holds Up the Sky?” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 21 to May 21, 2023. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    Yana Kononova, X‑Scapes #63‑17 (2022). Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    Installation view of “Who Holds Up the Sky?” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 21 to May 21, 2023. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    “Who Holds Up the Sky?” is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston through May 21, 2023.
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    In Pictures: A Henry Taylor Retrospective at MOCA Spotlights the Artist’s Individual Yet Universal Portraiture

    In just about every article, interview, or press release written about Henry Taylor, he is described as “an artist’s artist.” No matter what that term actually means, it’s undoubtedly a compliment, but it cuts out the non-artist’s ability to appreciate and respect the man’s great talent.
    If anything, Taylor is an artist of the people. He paints, sculpts, and draws them furiously, as evidenced by the extraordinary breadth of work on view in the career retrospective “Henry Taylor: B Side” on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles.
    As a chronicler of people from every cross-section of humanity, Taylor’s subjects range from family members, to fellow artists, to the patients at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital where he worked decades ago. In all of his works, there is something both universal and achingly individual, with many of his paintings serving as character studies spliced with social commentary.
    In the exhibition catalogue, curator Bennett Simpson writes of Taylor: “He is also, or maybe foremost, a champion and caretaker of Black experience, suffusing his work with recognition and social commentary alike. In this role, his paintings communicate a deep sense of responsibility—to memory and community, to excellence and contingency.”
    See pictures from the exhibition below.
    “Henry Taylor: B Side” is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, through April 30, 2023. 
    Installation view, “Henry Taylor: B Side” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Jeff McLane.
    Henry Taylor, Screaming Head (1999). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Jeff McLane.
    Henry Taylor, Untitled (2022). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Jeff McLane.
    Henry Taylor, Too Sweet (2016). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Sam Kahn.
    Henry Taylor, Untitled (2021). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Ken Adlard.
    Installation view, “Henry Taylor: B Side” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Jeff McLane.
    Installation view, “Henry Taylor: B Side” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Jeff McLane.
    Henry Taylor, Andrea Bowers (2010). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Robert Bean.
    Installation view, “Henry Taylor: B Side” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Jeff McLane.
    Installation view, “Henry Taylor: B Side” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Jeff McLane.
    Henry Taylor, I Was King, When I Met The Queen – Syllable X’s Rhythm Equals Mumbo Jumbo (2013). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Sam Kahn.
    Henry Taylor, “Watch your back” (2013). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Sam Kahn.
    Installation view, “Henry Taylor: B Side” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Jeff McLane.
    Henry Taylor, Untitled (1991). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Jeff McLane.
    Henry Taylor, Cora (cornbread) (2008). Image and work ©Henry Taylor, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
    Installation view, “Henry Taylor: B Side” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Jeff McLane.
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    Tschabalala Self, Torkwase Dyson, and 9 Other Artists Will Transform the Coachella Valley With Site-Specific Installations for Desert X 2023

    Get your cameras ready. The artist list for the fourth edition of Desert X is here, and it promises to be a stunning show.
    The site-specific international art exhibition runs from March 4 through May 7, 2023, and features a cohort of 11 multigenerational artists hailing from Europe, North America, and South Asia, each of whom will produce an artwork responding to the dramatic landscape of the Coachella Valley in Palm Springs, California.
    Returning this year is artistic director Neville Wakefield and co-curator Diana Campbell, who together selected the artists to create works that both respond to and take cues from their environment.
    “There’s a saying attributed to the Kwakwaka’wakw nation that a place is a story happening many times,” Wakefield said in a statement. “This idea of place as the multiplicity of stories flowing through it is central to Desert X.”
    Campbell describes the works as “artistic interventions that make visible how our energy has a transference far beyond what we see just in front of us in our own localities.”
    The landscape of the Coachella Valley. Photo: Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X.
    The artists are cast in the role of storytellers, bridging the divide between global issues and individual responsibility and experience. Torkwase Dyson’s Liquid a Place engages the dichotomy of the body as a vessel filled with water, and its physicality within an environment like the desert, where water is a rapidly fading memory. Meanwhile, Tschabalala Self takes on the archetypes of the American West, reconstituting the traditional equestrian statue with a work that highlights the Black and Native women who have long been excluded from this history.
    Other projects touch on issues of migration, conspiracy theories rooted in the Western expanse, the proliferation of street vendors, and the notion of invisible labor. Even the image of the mechanical bull and its relationship to masculinity—conceived in projects spanning performance, film, and sculpture—is presented against the dramatic backdrop of the desert.
    More details, including a detailed map of the installations, will be available on March 4. Until then, see the full artist list below.

    Rana Begum, b. 1977, Bangladesh, based in London
    Lauren Bon, b. 1962, USA, based in Los Angeles
    Gerald Clarke, b. 1967, USA, based in Anza, California
    Paloma Contreras Lomas, b. 1991, Mexico, based in Mexico City
    Torkwase Dyson, b. 1973, USA, based in Beacon, New York
    Mario García Torres, b.1975, Mexico, based in Mexico City
    Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin, b. 1987, India, based in London and Delhi and David Soin Tappeser, b.1985, Germany, based in London and Delhi)
    Matt Johnson, b. 1978, USA, based in Los Angeles
    Tschabalala Self, b. 1990, USA, based in New York
    Marina Tabassum, b. 1968, Dhaka, Bangladesh, based in Dhaka
    Héctor Zamora, b.1974, Mexico City, Mexico, based in Mexico City
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    Artists Have Long Held Day Jobs to Make Ends Meet. A New Exhibition Makes the Case That Side Gigs Also Fuel Creativity

    Aspiring artists looking to break into the art world often hear a warning: “Don’t quit your day job.” But a new show at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin proves that even some of the world’s most successful artists have relied on other jobs to make ends meet—and that those day jobs can sometimes prove key to their central practice, rather than distractions from their primary calling.
    Featuring 75 works by major U.S. artists including Mark Bradford, Jeffrey Gibson, Jeff Koons, and Barbara Kruger, “Day Jobs” will be the first major exhibition to address the impact that day jobs have had on art history—demonstrating that while the gig economy might have seemed born of the 2010s, the side hustle is actually nothing new for artists.
    Before he became a pioneering California Light and Space artist, for instance, Larry Bell was a young painter working by day at a commercial framing shop in Venice Beach in the 1960s. Filling customer orders, Bell was one day struck by the beauty of the light hitting a pane of glass in a metal frame. A totally new direction for his work was born, and a burgeoning art movement.
    The jobs represented in the show are many, and wide-ranging. Some have an obvious connection to the art world—Andy Warhol, of course, got his start as a fashion illustrator. Other related careers featured in the show include graphic design, billboard painting, and furniture making.
    Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley (ca. 1956). Collection of the Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut, ©the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York, via Yale University Press.
    But artists have also worked at major companies such as Ford Motors and IKEA, and held demanding jobs such as ICU nurses and high-powered lawyers. Did you know, for instance, that Jeff Koons was once a Wall Street commodities trader? “Day Jobs” also highlights less glamorous careers, with artists who have moonlit as dishwashers, janitors, and nannies.
    Though these roles may appear to have nothing in common, exhibition curators Veronica Roberts (the Blanton’s former curator of Modern and contemporary art, and now director of California’s Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University) and Lynne Maphies (a former curatorial assistant at the Blanton) make the case they all can provide unexpected creative inspiration for the artists who hold them.
    Fred Wilson, Grey Area (Brown version), 1993. Collection of the Brooklyn
 Museum, bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr. and bequest of Richard J. Kempe, by exchange 2008. Photo: ©Fred Wilson, courtesy of Pace Gallery.
    A day job can push artists in new directions as they learn about a new industry, get exposed to new materials or working methods, or even just shift their studio hours—Howardena Pindell was a figurative painter, until a curatorial assistant job at New York’s Museum of Modern Art meant she could no longer make art during daylight hours, prompting her to experiment with hole-punched paper scraps from her desk job, creating unique abstract works.
    Art museums, it turns out, often employ artists—at MoMA alone, Sol LeWitt was a receptionist, Dan Flavin was an elevator operator, and Robert Ryman was a security guard.
    Sara Bennett, TIANA, 25, in the library at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (2019). Photo: ©Sara Bennett, courtesy of the artist.
    Rejecting the myth of the lone genius working alone in the art studio, art springing forth from the studio whenever inspiration strikes, “Day Jobs” looks at the ways that economic pursuits can help fuel the creation of great art. Could it be that quitting the day job to make art full-time isn’t the ultimate goal?
    “Day Jobs” will be on view at the Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard., Austin, Texas, February 19–July 23, 2023.
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    Never-Before-Seen Paul McCartney Photos From the Height of Beatlemania Will Reopen London’s National Portrait Gallery

    Following a three-year closure for renovation, London’s National Portrait Gallery will Get Back this summer—and it’s debuting a series of never-before-seen Paul McCartney photos to mark the occasion. 
    The museum reopens on June 22 with the exhibition “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm.” The show will bring together a series of portraits shot by McCartney on a 35mm camera in London, Liverpool, Miami, New York, Paris, and Washington, D.C. during the early, mop-top days of his band’s rise to global stardom.
    The event “will provide a uniquely personal perspective on what it was like to be a Beatle at the start of Beatlemania,” NPG director Nicholas Cullinan told the Guardian. “At a time when so many camera lenses were on the band, these photographs will share fresh insight into their experiences, all through the eyes of Sir Paul McCartney.”
    Long thought lost, the photos were recently rediscovered by the Let It Be songwriter, and in 2020, he approached the NPG about the possibility of a show. 
    “He said he’d found these photographs that he remembers taking but thought had been lost,” Cullinan recalled. “We sat down with him and began going through them. [It was] extraordinary to see these images—which are unseen—of such a well-documented, famous, and important cultural moment.”
    Paul McCartney, Self-portraits in a mirror. Paris (1964). © Paul McCartney.
    A monograph of the nearly 1,000 photos shot by McCartney will be published alongside the show in June. Both the book and tickets for the exhibition are available for pre-order now. 
    The same year McCartney contacted the NPG, the museum closed its doors for a £35.5 million ($45 million) renovation project. Popular portraits were sent out on loans and tours as the institution overhauled its galleries and redesigned its entrance.
    Now, as it prepares to open again, the museum is promoting several high-profile shows to lure visitors back. In addition to “Eyes of the Storm,” the NPG will open an exhibition of works by Yevonde, a 20th-century British photographer who pioneered the use of color in portraiture. Then, in November, the institution will re-present “David Hockney: Drawing from Life,” which opened for just 20 days in 2020 before increasing Covid-19 cases caused the gallery to close. 
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    ‘It’s a Mad Process’: Design Legend Marc Newson on Revitalizing the Chinese Art of Cloisonné for His New Works at Gagosian Paris

    Marc Newson is one of today’s most prominent designers. His Lockheed Lounge (ca. 1990), primarily made from fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin and aluminum, became the most expensive piece of design when it sold for £2.4 million ($3.7 million) at Phillips London in 2014.
    But the 59-year-old Australian-born, London-based designer is chiefly motivated by problem-solving, setting himself complicated challenges to do with techniques and materials. This trailblazing vision is on view in a new exhibition at Gagosian Paris from January 25–March 18.
    Marc Newson. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, courtesy of Gagosian.
    The intimate show brings together a variety of pieces made over the last few years. Most intriguing are a lounge sculpture and chair made from a cloisonné technique featuring dizzying patterns of small enamel circles. They were created in Beijing where Newson’s team built a factory to revitalize China’s centuries-old cloisonné method.
    Artnet News spoke to Newson at the preview of the exhibition.
    What sparked your interest in the cloisonné process and why did you want to recontextualize it in these new works?
    When I was at art college, I did jewelry and silversmithing, and was always aware of this cloisonné process. Like in a lot of my work, I had ambitious ideas to upscale things, to play with scale, and people would be scratching their heads about how you did it. I had this vision in my head, but we had no idea where and how we were going to do it, and whether the skills still existed.
    Marc Newson, Cloisonné White and Blue Chair (2022). Photo: Paris Tavitian, courtesy of Gagosian.
    Cloisonné was perfected by the Chinese five or six centuries ago in Beijing. But when I went to China, I couldn’t find anyone to do it, ironically. The process was almost dying out. People could do small pieces but not large ones. So we had to find certain individuals who could recruit and retrain people.
    We built this factory and got it up to a point where we could produce these crazy shapes which I don’t think they even could have done five or six centuries ago. There are 30 people executing steps along the way, doing the enamel and stuff. It’s a mad process.
    Marc Newson, Extruded Ribbon Console (2022), carved from a single piece of Azul Macaubas stone. Photo: Paris Tavitian, courtesy of Gagosian.
    Also on view is Extruded Ribbon Console, carved entirely from Azul Macaubas quartzite but resembling machine-molding. Why did you choose this material?
    It’s as much about what you don’t see as about what you do see. The conceit is that it’s as if you’ve taken a completely rigid material and bent it like plasticine which, of course, you can’t do with marble, but people think you can. I like creating the illusion that you can do something with material that you really can’t.
    How do ideas and knowledge gained from your industrial projects bleed into your sculptural projects and vice versa?
    I’ve always done work like this and, at the other end of the spectrum, I’ve always done work in aviation, designing office chairs or products for the luxury sector—luggage for Louis Vuitton, shoes for Nike, perfume bottles, or pens for Montblanc. Each of them teaches me different things [and] the variety is what really helps me to do what I do. For me, design is a problem-solving exercise. I’m a gun for hire.
    Marc Newson, Clear Surfboard (2017), an aluminum board that began as a prototype for surfer Garrett McNamara. Photo: Robert McKeever, courtesy of Gagosian.
    Your best-known piece is Lockheed Lounge. What problems did you want to solve when you made it?
    I did that when I was in my early 20s. I was able to respond to the challenge that I set myself in a very limited way. I had a vision of this amorphous object in a shiny metal, and the only way I could think to do it was to cover it in small panels. I wouldn’t do it like that anymore.
    A video produced by the Hour Glass shows that you own works by Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, who was connected to the Arte Povera movement. What genres do you collect?
    I’m not a huge collector; I have a few pieces. I love Wim’s work, he’s a friend, and I find it really funny and whimsical. I’m a big fan of everything that’s Italian—post-war, Arte Povera, and the design that started coming out of Italy in the 1950s and ’60s. It was an incredibly interesting, fertile moment in time. Alighiero Boetti and Lucio Fontana are among my favorite artists, historically.
    Marc Newson, Blue Glass Chair (2017), solid cast glass of quarter spheres. Photo: Jaroslav Kvíz, courtesy of Gagosian.
    When clients approach you, do you feel pressured to live up to a certain reputation? How does your sculptural work counterbalance that?
    [My sculptural] work allows me to be me and do things at my own cadence, although the pieces are difficult and complex. We do these sort of fun exhibitions in different parts of the world and can cherry-pick the [works] that we think will be appropriate.
    Marc Newson is on view at Gagosian, 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris, January 25–March 18, 2023.
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    Debates About How to Interpret Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Art Are Raging. A New Show Is Proposing a Fresh Way of Reading It

    Last fall, a few astute visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago noticed that the museum had quietly swapped out the wall text for Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 artwork Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Whereas a previous placard alluded to the artist’s late partner, Ross Laycock, who died from an AIDS-related illness the same year the piece was created, the new signage simply describes Untitled’s conceptual framework.
    “The erasure of Ross’s memory and Gonzalez-Torres’s intent in the new description is an unconsciable [sic] and banal evil,” read one Twitter user’s post, which was reshared on the platform thousands of times. Others online soon decried the museum’s supposed act of “erasure,” too, and some even postulated that it was part of a larger effort on the part of Gonzalez-Torres’s foundation to distance the artist’s biography from his work.
    “There’s no obliterating Felix’s biography. [There’s] no desire to, no reason to,” said Andrea Rosen, president of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, when asked about the incident in a recent interview. Near the Art Institute’s label for Untitled, she pointed out, is a QR code that directs viewers to an audio guide describing the work’s connection to Laycock and the context of the AIDS epidemic. 
    Rosen was clearly rankled by the accusations of erasure. That she would feel that way makes sense: A former dealer, Rosen hosted one of Gonzalez-Torres’s first solo shows in 1990, and continued to represent him up to and beyond his death in 1996 from AIDS-related illness. For three decades now, she has been the foremost promoter of his work; their accomplishments are inseparable. (Rosen now co-represents the artist’s estate with David Zwirner.)    
    Still, she managed to find a silver lining. “It is crazy how Felix’s work continues to generate such meaningful and complex dialogue,” Rosen said. “Thank god!” 
    Installation view of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres” at David Zwirner, New York, January 12 – February 25, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Indeed, what the incident at the Art Institute illustrated was the complexities and nuances inherent to Gonzalez-Torres’s work—and the intense personal connection to his story that many feel. 
    Those upset by the eliding of Laycock and AIDS from the museum’s wall label weren’t wrong. That’s the thing about Gonzalez-Torres’s work: It allows, even encourages, different emotional reactions. From his poetic billboards to his piles of candy, no artist was better at generating conceptual prompts that felt both personal and universal, both specific enough to grab you and open-ended enough for myriad points of entry. 
    Now, on the occasion of Gonzalez-Torres’s new exhibition at David Zwirner, where two installations conceived by Gonzalez-Torres have been realized for the first time, Rosen and the rest of her team are again thinking about the unique interpretability of the artist’s output. The show marks the formal introduction of the Foundation’s new Core Tenets—that is, a series of documents that outline the conceptual parameters of Gonzalez-Torres’s artworks. 
    Through Zwirner’s website, gallery-goers are provided with sheets of paper that look, at first glance, like contracts. That is what they are, in a way—contracts that define the rules of works on display, based on language from the artist himself. 
    “Each of the candy works is a unique artwork… The candy works, as with all manifestable works, exist regardless of whether they are physically manifest… The possibility for the work to be manifested with ease is an ongoing intention of the work,” reads some of the bulleted tenets for Gonzalez-Torres’s candy installations, one example of which (“Untitled” (Public Opinion) from 1991) is on view at Zwirner in two different parts of the gallery. 
    A page from the “Core tenets of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works,” an in-process draft fromJanuary 9, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Printed on foundation letterhead, the documents are dry and rather dense. Each catalogues the works to which the stated tenets apply (there are 20 iterations on the “Candy Works” document, including Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)), and boasts a list of postscript annotations long enough to make David Foster Wallace blush. 
    So authoritative are the tenets that they almost feel like a direct response to the Art Institute controversy. Viewed through that lens, it is as if the documents are saying, “No, this is how you read Gonzalez-Torres.”
    But Rosen said that the project, which goes back years, is about doing the exact opposite. The idea, she explained, is to point to “what is stable within Felix’s work,” while also showing how individual installations fit within a broader corpus. 
    It’s a novel solution to the unique challenges of presenting and experiencing this particular artist’s creations. For those that already find Gonzalez-Torres too heady, the tenets may feel like more homework. 
    But then again, who really thinks that about him? The artist’s genius came through his ability to establish a set of conditions to which everyone—from academics to children copping a piece of candy—could relate on their own terms. To its credit, the Tenets project gets that people will bring to Gonzalez-Torres’s work the kind of intense attention that only comes through personal connection.
    Installation view of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres” at David Zwirner, New York, January 12 – February 25, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Rosen echoed this idea too, noting that the project “creates as much responsibility for people to understand the work as it does provide information.” Rosen went on, “It’s a way of becoming a kind of Felix thinker.”
    And it’s not objectivity the foundation is after. In addition to the tenets, Rosen also commissioned a handful of writers and curators to reflect on their own, highly subjective relationships to Gonzalez-Torres’s art in a series of audio essays that are available on Zwirner’s website.
    “The more subjectivity around Felix, the more diverse ideas around Felix—the better,” Rosen said.
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