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    in Exhibitions

    See the Luminous Paintings Monet Made During His Many Trips to the French Riviera, Now on View at a Show in Monaco

    A new exhibition with nearly 100 paintings by Claude Monet spotlights the artist’s trips to the French Riviera beginning with the first visit with his friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1883.
    The show, titled “Monet in Full Light,” was curated by Marianne Mathieu and is on view at Grimaldi Forum Monaco, a conference center in the sovereign city state along the French Riviera. Three years in the making with the support of the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, it coincides with the 140th anniversary of Monet’s first visit to Monte Carlo and the Riviera.
    Monet, then middle-aged, began traveling extensively after death of his first wife, Camille, in 1879. He was invited by Renoir on a trip to the Riviera in December 1883. Their first stop after visiting Paul Cezanne in L’Estaque was Monaco, a place Monet called “the most beautiful spot on the entire Riviera.” The Impressionist painter made two pieces during this first visit that he never exhibited in Paris, as he was then without renown, Mathieu told the news outlet Monaco Life.
    Monet returned alone in 1884 and in 1888, visiting Monte-Carlo, Roquebrune, Bordighera and Antibes. He made his famous paintings showing views of the fort in Antibes in all seasons from Salis Beach during his final visit.
    Around 60 little-seen works Monet made during this era were shown at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1997.
    This is seemingly the first time such a volume of these works has been shown near where he painted them and 23 of them are being exhibited for the first time, according to a news release.
    “Monet’s work is very coherent. From his youth in Le Havre, to the last paintings in Giverny, the painter does not try to paint a motif, but rather a moment. Monet does not paint a landscape, but an atmosphere,” Matthieu said in a statement.
    The exhibition also reveals new understandings about Monet during this era, including precisely where he put his easels and on which visit his paintings were painted.
    Mathieu said Monet painted with “maturity” in his Riviera series, made between 1883 and 1888.
    “Monet discovers himself as the painter of the series,” she said, adding, “Let’s not ask what Monet paints but rather when he paints it. Let’s not look for a motif but for a moment.”
    See more images from the exhibition below.
    Claude Monet, The Rowing Boat (1887). Photo courtesy of Grimaldi Forum Monaco/Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
    Installation view of “Monet in Full Light.” Photo courtesy of Grimaldi Forum Monaco.
    Installation view of “Monet in Full Light.” Photo courtesy of Grimaldi Forum Monaco.
    Installation view of “Monet in Full Light.” Photo courtesy of Grimaldi Forum Monaco.
    Installation view. Claude Monet, Villas at Bordighera (1884). Photo courtesy of Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt.
    Claude Monet, Agapanthes (1914-1917). Photo courtesy of Grimaldi Forum Monaco/Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
    “Monet In Full Light” is on view at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco, 10 Av. Princesse Grace, Monaco, through September 3.
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    in Exhibitions

    See Inside Artist Derrick Adams’s Powerful Touring Exhibition That Unpacks the Difficulties Faced by Black Travelers in America

    Derrick Adams’s long-running traveling show “Sanctuary”—first exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City in 2018—has opened at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan.
    The body of work, on view through September 10, began with Adams wanting to create a tribute to Victor Hugo Green, a New York mailman, and his wife Alma Duke for their accomplishments in creating the annual The Negro Motorist Green Book. The annual travel guide, published from 1936 to 1966 during the Jim Crow era, provided Black travelers with a list of businesses across the country that served Black patrons.
    Adams praised Green for “connecting patrons with Black business owners” around the country during the Jim Crow era with “innovation and problem-solving.”
    “It was very important to see someone who took an initiative in a tumultuous time in history when violence and oppression were existing all around Black Americans,” Adams said while discussing his two years of research into the topic before his body of work was completed.
    “Mr. Green and his wife Alma decided to create possibility through a publication that will connect people as a counter-response to the conditions of society at the time. For me as an artist, I was excited about responding to that history.”
    Installation view of “Derrick Adams: Sanctuary” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 2023. Photo courtesy of the Wright Museum.
    The works in “Sanctuary” include large-scale sculptures as well as mixed-media collages and assemblages on wood panels. The collages use pages from the Green Book and other documents, while some pieces feature visual recreations of the locations listed in the travel guide, which served as refuges for Black Americans.
    The artist also studied Black migration from the South to the North over time and particularly was inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series “and the mapping around that.” Adams said his work was inspired by Jacobs’ formal aesthetic and color palette, as well as the visual culture at the time.
    “The issue of Black travel is something that is continuous because it is something that is still challenging depending on what part of the country you go to,” Adams said. “The exhibition was really acknowledging the Black traveler, centering them as a primary subject in the work.”
    At the exhibition’s wrap at the Wright, Adams will be debuting new work at “Come As You Are,” his first show with Gagosian, on September 14. The exhibition will feature his new portraits and vignettes centered on the Black figure, whether real or imagined, and incorporating materials such as textiles.
    According to Adams, this new body of work synthesizes ideas previously explored in his practice “in a way that is more seamless and layered formally and conceptually” than in the past.
    “I think this particular body of work, beyond all others, fully utilized various color palettes spread across that are uniquely executed for individual works versus the series overall,” he said. “This particular body of work is my best work to date. I am excited to have it exhibited with Gagosian and I am looking forward to my new relationship with the gallery.”
    See more images from “Sanctuary” below.
    Derrick Adams. Upscale and or Lowbrow. Photo courtesy of Derrick Adams Studio LLC
    Derrick Adams. There’s More Than One Beauty School.. Photo courtesy of Derrick Adams Studio LLC
    Installation view of “Derrick Adams: Sanctuary” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 2023. Photo courtesy of the Wright Museum.
    Installation view of “Derrick Adams: Sanctuary” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 2023. Photo courtesy of the Wright Museum.
    Installation view of “Derrick Adams: Sanctuary” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 2023. Photo courtesy of the Wright Museum.
    Installation view of “Derrick Adams: Sanctuary” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 2023. Photo courtesy of the Wright Museum.
    Installation view of “Derrick Adams: Sanctuary” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 2023. Photo courtesy of the Wright Museum.
    “Derrick Adams: Sanctuary” is on view at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 315 E Warren Ave, Detroit, through September 10.

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    in Exhibitions

    See South Korean Rising Star Mire Lee’s Gutsy Debut of Squelching Kinetic Sculptures at the New Museum

    The South Korean artist Mire Lee has been made a name for herself in recent years due to her penchant for making audiences squirm. At the Venice Biennale last year, she appeared in the main exhibition with Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022), a monumental installation in which ceramics in the shape of entangled entrails were strewn across a frame of scaffolding and routinely doused in a thick red glaze. The work was strangely gory and, whether viewers liked it or not, they couldn’t look away.
    The Seoul-born, Amsterdam-based 34-year-old has now opened her first institutional solo show in the U.S. at the New Museum in Manhattan. With walls made of torn fabric drenched in liquid clay and the air thickened by a steam machine, she has turned the 4th floor gallery into a dank, mud-colored stage for a series of new kinetic sculptures. These strange contraptions blend mechanical elements—pumps, motors, steel rods, and hoses—with fabric and cement forms that appear messily organic but are somehow too bizarre to not be manmade.
    In one annexed corner, a crudely formed fountain flows with murky water that is pumped in at the side before swirling around a cement basin and draining away. Suspended from the ceiling is a grotesque bundle of bulging masses held together with ropes in a style vaguely reminiscent of shibari. Together, these rattling, animatronic beings create an unsettling, ever-changing immersive realm. Visitors are invited to have peculiar, bodily experience, that is, if they can stomach it.
    Check out views of the exhibition below.
    Exhibition view of “Mire Lee: Black Sun” at the New Museum until September 17, 2023. Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy New Museum.
    Exhibition view of “Mire Lee: Black Sun” at the New Museum until September 17, 2023. Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy New Museum.
    Exhibition view of “Mire Lee: Black Sun” at the New Museum until September 17, 2023. Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy New Museum.
    Exhibition view of “Mire Lee: Black Sun” at the New Museum until September 17, 2023. Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy New Museum.
    Exhibition view of “Mire Lee: Black Sun” at the New Museum until September 17, 2023. Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy New Museum.
    Exhibition view of “Mire Lee: Black Sun” at the New Museum until September 17, 2023. Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy New Museum.
    “Mire Lee: Black Sun” is on view at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, through September 17.
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    in Exhibitions

    20 Japanese Artists Have Reinterpreted Fans’ Favorite Pokémon Characters as Artisanal Objects, Now on View in Los Angeles

    After the U.S. Navy forced Japan to forgo two-and-a-half centuries of relative isolation in 1853, porcelain, lacquerware, and woodblock prints began flooding westward, launching the Japonisme aesthetic movement. In the 20th century, another Japanese export seized the global imagination: Pokémon, a wildly disparate collection of pocket creatures that spawned a multibillion-dollar empire.
    An exhibition at Japan House Los Angeles merges these cultural phenomena, colliding traditional and modern, kitsch and refined. “Pokémon X Kogei,” which runs through early 2024, presents interpretations of the fantastical creatures by 20 Japanese artists spanning pottery, metalwork, textiles, and mixed media.
    The show, which debuted at Japan’s National Crafts Museum in Ishikawa this spring, offers a poetic rather than a historical explanation for comingling the two worlds. The elements into which the Pokémon are organized, such as fire, water, ground, and electric (there are 18 in total), are reflected in the processes of art making. A vase, for instance, is formed from ground and water, and then fired in an electric kiln. Japan House also likens the endeavor of Pokémon trainers in rearing their digital pets to the process of artisans learning their craft.
    Sadamasa Imai, Venusaur (2022). Photo: Taku Saiki
    “Pokémon X Kogei” is organized into three sections, each of which represents a different artistic approach to playing with the Pokémon universe.
    In Appearance, artists turn the digital physical, recreating the form and personality of Pokémon with attention paid to their skin, fur, and movement. Sadamasa Imai’s cranky-looking Venusaur, for instance, hones in on the rugged texture of its skin and the heaviness of its gait.
    With Stories, the artists inhabit the world of the Pokémon, offering a more abstract take on their lives and journeys. One offering comes from textile designer Reiko Sudo, who explores the franchise’s most iconic creature, Pikachu, dangling from an amber forest of lace that plays with traditional paper-cutting.
    Taiichiro Yoshida, Jolteon (2022). Photo: Taku Saiki.
    The final section, Life, brings Pokémon into the everyday objects—something that may already be a reality for many of the visitors. The works here, admittedly, are rather more elevated than a mug plastered with Squirtle. Keiko Masumoto, for example, used a wood-fired kiln, the likes of which originate from the 12th century, to create a range of fire element Pokémon including Charizard and Vulpix.
    “We’re excited to present this unique collaboration between one of the biggest entertainment properties originating in Japan and some of the country’s most talented craft artists,” Japan House Los Angeles’ president Yuko Kaifu said. “It will art enthusiasts and gamers alike.”
    For a franchise born in the 1990s and now successfully embraced by a new generation, chances are Kaifu’s right.
    “Pokémon X Kogei” is on view at Japan House Los Angeles, 6801 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, from July 25, 2023 to January 7, 2024.

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    in Street Art

    ‘Started Again’ – Dilk Print Drop

    Started Again is Bio Editions debut print release by Nottingham based graffiti artist, Dilk. Three editions of the print will be available to purchase at 3pm BST on Thursday 3rd August via their online store.Adapted from his ‘True Love’ canvas exhibited as part of the permanent collection at STRAAT Museum Amsterdam, each 87 x 67cm print celebrates this monumental 3.5 x 5m original artwork in a new form.Notts lad Steven Dilks began his long-standing career in graffiti as a writer in the 1980’s, prolifically producing work on the streets from a young age. Taking early old school graffiti influences and turning them into an ever-evolving contemporary art style – combined with his hunger for travelling and new connections – has established Dilk as an important part of the UK’s graffiti history.Today his recognisable abstract style situates his work in leading urban contemporary museums as it takes a contemporary twist on traditional graffiti lettering. Combining bold marks and colours with intricate finer details, each new piece maps an ever-changing amalgamation of abstracts, dreamlike colour pallets, sharp lines and drip work. Cop one today while you can. More

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    in Exhibitions

    David Hockney Has Painted a Striking Portrait of Harry Styles, Set to Be Unveiled at the U.K.’s National Portrait Gallery

    A portrait of Harry Styles by the artist David Hockney has been unveiled ahead of a major exhibition of new paintings by the British artist opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London this fall.
    The pop star is recognizably himself in the work, with his hair swept back, donning a red-and-yellow striped cardigan and a string of pearls around his neck. The portrait was started in May 2022, when Styles visited David Hockney at his studio in Normandy, France.
    “David Hockney has been reinventing the way we look at the world for decades,” Styles told Vogue. “It was a complete privilege to be painted by him.”
    David Hockney, Harry Styles, May 31st 2022. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.
    Styles’s likeness of is one of more than 33 new works that were completed between 2021 and 2022, and will appear in the upcoming Hockney exhibition, which opens on November 2. Titled “David Hockney: Drawing from Life,” the show is an updated version of an earlier presentation of portraits by Hockney that opened at the National Portrait Gallery just weeks before lockdown in 2020. This show included drawings in a range of media, from pencil and ink to watercolor and the iPad, which Hockney famously pioneered as a new tool for making art.
    Since then, the National Portrait Gallery has undergone a major refurbishment and rehang, and the moment has finally arrived to give David Hockney his due. Unlike the 20-day run of the ill-fated original show, the restaged, expanded show will remain open until January 21, 2024. Tickets went on sale today.
    David Hockney, Self Portrait, 22nd November 2021. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.
    With the latest additions from 2021 and 2022, the bumper exhibition now boasts around 160 works, both new and old. Visitors attracted by the star appeal of Styles will also be moved by Hockney’s intimate portrayals of friends, like the textile designer Celia Birtwell, family members, including the artist’s mother and his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, and a new self-portrait of Hockney himself in a flat cap and tweed suit.
    Other highlights include pencil drawings made in Paris in the early 1970s, a selection of self-portraits from the 1980s, and My Parents and Myself, a 1975 group portrait that Hockney abandoned, greatly upsetting his parents. He later produced another version, My Parents (1977), which belongs to the Tate, but the lesser known, rejected work remained in hiding until it was debuted to the public for the first time during the exhibition’s original 2020 run.

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    Artist Urs Fischer’s Towering Cube at Gagosian Beverly Hills Plays a Chaotic Loop of Deconstructed TV Ads, Curated by A.I.

    Smack in the middle of Gagosian Beverly Hills right now is a 12-foot cube, its front-facing sides looping snippets upon snippets of moving images. It’s a relentless yet riveting parade of pictures; one moment, we get shots of summer—blue skies, kids by pools—and the next, various images of cats. They speak to a shared human consciousness, containing as they do familiar scenes, and having been pulled from a common source: television commercials. 
    Titled Denominator, the work is the latest from Urs Fischer, the Swiss artist whose profound fascination with objects and artifacts has been well-exercised across his practice. His new piece, he said, emerged from his enduring interest in TV advertising and how it has shaped our perceptions. 
    “In a way, commercials replace the entire imagery we have,” Fischer told Artnet News. “They create this giant vocabulary. It’s not even our imagery anymore. Our brains are filled with images and memories that are not ours.” 
    Installation view of Urs Fischer, Denominator (2023). © Urs Fischer. Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy Gagosian.
    If that sounds slightly bleak, Fischer is not bothered. Denominator is less concerned about passing comment on cultural or mass consumption than capturing what the artist called the “experience of being exposed to these non-images.” 
    Work on the cube began in 2020, when Fischer and his team of collaborators started sourcing TV commercials around the world (notably via YouTube), gathering them manually as there is no library or archive that collects these ads. The heavy lifting of sorting and making sense of this aggregated content, though, was left to a machine-learning model, the same one Fischer used for his 2018 work, PLAY. 
    The A.I. was trained to deconstruct these commercials, grouping and sequencing their discrete shots by color and motif (like burgers, say, or cars). These visuals are then displayed in dynamic layers, based on preset variables, across LED screens installed on the sides of Fischer’s towering cube.
    As expected with machine intelligence, the resulting “motion patterns,” in the artist’s words, offered some interesting constellations of images, but also drew some inexplicable connections.
    Installation view of Urs Fischer, Denominator (2023). © Urs Fischer. Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy Gagosian.
    “With everything you create, some of it is good, some of it is not so good—it just keeps on churning,” he said of the A.I., further likening the model to an “alien landing on the planet and trying to understand the structure that underlays whatever it’s exposed to.” 
    In some ways, Denominator presents a spiritual successor to Fischer’s “CHAOƧ” series (2021) of digital sculptures, which juxtaposed miscellaneous objects, from eggs to chairs to parkas, in surprising ways. His new work travels down a similar path in attempting to locate humanity in the artifacts it’s produced and will ultimately leave behind.  
    “It’s pretty crazy,” he noted, “the amount of technology and invention that goes into the simplest things.” 
    For the viewers of Denominator—his “visual experience essay”—Fischer is hoping to offer new, sweeping ways of gazing into our collective media and human landscape. It won’t always make for the most serene of experiences, however.  
    “What’s interesting is most people are used to seeing edited content, so they might come in and say, ‘What am I seeing now? Why are you showing me such a mess?’” Fischer said.
    “But,” he added, “I don’t mind this chaotic part.” 
    “Urs Fischer: Denominator” is on view at Gagosian, 456 N. Camden Dr, Beverly Hills, through September 16.

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    The Company Behind the Wildly Popular ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ Experience Has Filed for Bankruptcy

    In 2021, as the world slowly emerged from pandemic lockdown, perhaps the biggest cultural phenomena to rise from the ashes of COVID-19 was the craze for digitally animated projected light shows based on masterpieces by art-historical greats such as Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet, and, of course, Vincent van Gogh.
    Now, Lighthouse Immersive Inc., the Toronto-based company behind the best-known exhibition in the genre—”Immersive Van Gogh” of Emily in Paris-fame—has filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in Delaware, Bloomberg reports. The July 28 filing is a strategy to protect the company’s U.S. assets during insolvency proceedings in Ontario.
    “Immersive Van Gogh” touched down in New York in June 2021 after runs in Paris, Chicago, and Toronto. Originally designed by Massimiliano Siccardi with an original score from Italian composer Luca Longobardi, the New York production also brought on Broadway producer David Korins, who staged the original Hamilton, to add some extra sparkle to the Starry Night.
    Its impressive production values and successful marketing campaign (including weed nights) saw it sell 250,000 advance tickets as exhibitions proliferated across the U.S. and overseas. A contestant on The Bachelor even called a visit to the Los Angeles location “the most romantic moment of my life.”
    “Immersive Van Gogh” in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Lighthouse Immersive.
    By May 2022, there were over five million tickets sold—or one for every 90 Americans. Today, there are permanent Lighthouse Art Space venues in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Nashville, San Antonio, and Toronto.
    The success of “Immersive Van Gogh” spawned many, many imitators eager to stage easily replicable exhibitions with low insurance premiums compared to traditional art shows physically including high-value canvases.
    With at least five competing Van Gogh outfits, the New York Better Business Bureau even went so far as to issue a warning to consumers that Fever’s “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” was not the “Immersive Van Gogh” light show featured on the popular Netflix series starring Lily Collins.
    In a scene from episode five, season one of Emily In Paris, (left to right) Lily Collins as Emily and Lucas Bravo as Gabriel visit “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Stephanie Branch Netflix © 2020
    And then there were the knock-offs for other artists—including living master David Hockney, whose immersive animated light show “Bigger and Closer” got mixed reviews when it opened in February. Lighthouse alone has also staged productions of “Immersive Frida Kahlo” (with the artist’s family’s blessing), “Immersive Monet and the Impressionists,” “Immersive Vatican,” and “Immersive Shevchenko,” featuring Ukrainian artist Taras Shevchenko.
    Lighthouse’s website boasts sales of over seven million tickets in 21 North American cities. But over the last two years, demand for so-called “immersive” digital projections of beloved artworks seems to have waned, perhaps due to an over-saturation of the market.
    “Immersive Van Gogh” is still on view in Vegas (through January 7, 2024), Detroit (through October 1), Toronto (through October 29), and Chicago, where it is part of a two-for-one showing with “Mozart Immersive” (through September 4). There are currently no sold-out dates at any of the venues. The company’s only other current offering is “Immersive Disney Animation,” now on view in 12 cities.
    A credit for Lighthouse Immersive, the company behind “Immersive Van Gogh,” within the experience. Photo by Ben Davis.
    There also also plenty of tickets available to the immersive Van Gogh show that reopened July 1 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Galleries at Newfields. In 2020, the institution announced controversial plans to replace its contemporary art floor with a permanent immersive digital art gallery called the Lume. It launched, of course, with the company’s homage to the famous Dutch Postimpressionist, the touring version of which is called “Van Gogh Alive.”
    While there aren’t any Van Gogh immersive experiences on view in New York City, “Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” opened in Westbury, Long Island, in March, and is on view through September 4. (Once again, there appears to be no shortage of available tickets at the moment.)
    Tickets to Lighthouse Immersive exhibitions, reports ARTnews, started at $22 to $37.
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