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    in Street Art

     Avant Arte x Barry McGee: New Time-Limited Print Editions

    Avant Arte, the curated marketplace that makes discovering and owning art radically more accessible, announces its first collaboration with renowned artist Barry McGee. Together, they will release McGee’s first ever time-limited print edition, Untitled, 2023 that will be available to all for €600.00/ approx. $635.00 on avantarte.com from 3:00pm GMT/ 10:00am ET on 9 November 2023.Untitled, 2023 is a UV pigment print with fluorescent pink and highlight silkscreen layersmade by Avant Arte’s master printmakers in London. The work taps into McGee’s long-held interest in printmaking that started with experiments in linoleum block and lithograph printing in community college and went on to become his major at the San Francisco Art Institute where he was awarded a BFA in Printmaking and Painting. Throughout the 1990s, McGee worked in a local letterpress shop in San Francisco where he learned to refine his printing techniques on Mid-Century presses.Untitled, 2023, is based on an original painting by McGee that was montaged together with numerous images and patterns, familiar in his work – the “Everyman” heads, geometric patterns and “DFW” and “IFF” letters.Barry McGee was one of the pioneers of the Mission School movement, an urban-realist art movement that came out of San Francisco in the 1990s-2000s. His artistic career spans his early life as a graffiti writer on the the streets of San Francisco and is also known by his tag, TWIST through to his current studio-based practice in Bay Area, California. His work incorporates drawings, paintings and mixed-media installations and has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and leading art institutions including MoMA, SFMoMA, Walker Art Center and Fondazione Prada.Barry McGee, artist, said: “I like the immediacy of prints and the process of intaglio and silkscreening really captured my imagination. This will be the first print with the time released approach, and hand finished touches. The piece was originally a painting that was montaged together with numerous images and patterns that I’ve been working with over the last year.The letters have become matras of some sort, rather than specific crews, even if they have started that way. The Everyman heads are just that…very pedestrian and become placeholders or punctuation of some sort within the composition of the work. The geometric patterns are areas to rest the eye and contemplate the images presented to the viewer. I hope people enjoy the chance to have one of my works in their home. ” Christian Luiten, Co-founder and Head of Artist Community, Avant Arte, said:“We arehonoured to be working with Barry to create his first ever time-limited print edition. Barry has been a hero of mine from the early days of Avant Arte and I’ve always wanted to work together to bring his work to our community. I visit artists in their studios all the time and they often tell me it is Barry who inspired them either directly or through his work that they could be an artist. He crosses all of the traditional boundaries of the art world, traversing the streets of San Francisco with his tagging alongside exhibiting his work at the Venice Biennale and MoMA. This collaboration has grown out a friendship over time and I’m so proud that Avant Arte is able to be a platform to make Barry’s work accessible to an even greater audience.”The collaboration marks McGee’s first ever time-limited print edition and is offered as part of Avant Arte’s ongoing time-limited edition programme which aims to open up access for art lovers and collectors to acquire the work of leading contemporary artists in a more accessible format. Since commencing the programme in 2021, Avant Arte has supported over 8,000 collectors to acquire art for the first time. Artists from the programme include Ai Weiwei, José Parlá, Nina Chanel Abney, Javier Calleja, Paul Insect, and Parra.To mark this rare occasion and in another first for the artist, McGee will also have an accompanying hand-finished print edition available to collectors during the same 24 hour window. Untitled (Hand-finished), 2023, each print from the edition has been hand-finished by McGeewith a mix of spray paint and gouache. Each of these works will be individually hand-finished by McGee and will cost €3500.00/ $3690.00 inclusive of shipping. From 2 November to 10 November, Untitled, 2023, will also be displayed at locations chosen by Barry McGee around the world including: CLASSIC (Paris), Scooters For Peace (Tokyo), and OALLERY (Amsterdam). Each location has a special resonance with Barry and offers fans the chance to see this new work in real life with a special surprise for any fans that go down to the locations whilst the works are on display.Follow Avant Arte on social media for the latest news and behind-the-scenes insights.About Barry McGeeBarry McGee received his BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and was associated with the Mission School, a movement primarily influenced by urban realism, graffiti, and American folk art, with a focus on social activism. McGee’s works constitute candid and insightful observations of modern society, and his aim of actively contributing to marginalised communities has remained the same throughout his career, from his days as “Twist” (his graffiti moniker) to his current work as a global artist.Whether it be consumerism or social stratification, McGee has given voice to his concerns through his art, taking on different personas, such as Ray Fong, Lydia Fong, P.Kin, Ray Virgil, and B. Vernon. His trademark motif, a male caricature with droopy eyes, references his empathy for those who identify the streets as their home. His conglomeration of experiences has led McGee to create a unique visual language consisting of geometric patterns, recurring symbols, and the use of the “cluster method,” while experimenting with various unconventional media, including glass bottles and other found objects. His recent large-scale murals and his meticulous archive of paintings and drawings examine the notion of public versus private space and the accessibility of art.About Avant ArteAvant Arte is a curated marketplace that makes discovering and owning art radically more accessible for a new generation. From Nina Chanel Abney and Ai Weiwei to Jenny Holzer and FUTURA, Avant Arte collaborates with leading contemporary artists to create limited edition works, from sculpture editions and NFTs to works on paper and hand-finished screenprints.By connecting artists and art lovers, they are building a growing global community of over 3 million people that is open to everyone. Avant Arte was founded by Curtis Penning, Christian Luiten and Mazdak Sanii.Image courtesy of Avant Arte. More

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    in Exhibitions

    How Paris’s Once-in-a-Lifetime Mark Rothko Exhibition Changes the Way We See His Revered Paintings

    Plenty of people can tell you what a Mark Rothko painting looks like. Posters of the Abstract Expressionist’s seductive fields of color are a fixture on dorm room walls. Fewer people can tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a Rothko painting in person. And until now, I’m not sure anyone could tell you what it felt like to be in the presence of 115 Rothkos all at once—but this transcendent experience is open to a whole lot more people after the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened its stunning encyclopedic winter blockbuster in Paris, “Mark Rothko.”
    Most museums would dream of staging a show like this. But these days the massive expenses of shipping, insuring, and loan agreements mean it could only be pulled off by a deep-pocketed private institution. Backed by the billionaire art collector and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, the exhibition includes major groups of works lent from the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Tate in London, as well as private lenders including the artist’s children Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, the Taiwanese collector Pierre Chen, U.S. collectors Adriana and Robert Mnuchin, Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, and the Nahmad family.
    It’s a huge moment for Paris, as the foundation’s curator Suzanne Pagé, who has co-organized this exhibition with Rothko’s son Christopher, can attest.
    “Nobody in four generations has had the possibility to see Rothko in Paris,” Pagé told me. While there are two Rothkos in the Pompidou’s collection, the last time the artist had a retrospective in France was 1999—a show Pagé herself curated at the the Musée d’Art Moderne. “A lot of young people have posters, but it is a great betrayal to enter into the emotional painting of Rothko that way. What is essential in the painting of Rothko are the vibrations, which are totally reduced in a poster,” Pagé explained. “You have to stop, look, and be captive with your body, with your soul, with everything in you, and you are hypnotized.”
    “Mark Rothko” at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris on October 17, 2023 in Paris, France. (Photo by Luc Castel/GettyImages)
    The exhibition offers plenty of discoveries, from Rothko’s early figurative work to a re-evaluation of his later, darker paintings. It does a fair amount of work to undo how the macabre facts of Rothko’s biography—including his death by suicide aged 66—have colored the interpretation of these late works. A popular myth, which the curators deem reductive, has it that Rothko’s late-career turn from his classic, brightly-colored paintings towards a darker palette of rusty reds, purples, and blackish hues reflected his declining mental state.
    “A retrospective by definition needs to tell the whole career. And of course it needs to tell the whole life,” Christopher Rothko told me as we stood in front of some of these murky late works. “I think for me the most important thing is for people to experience the career, see the trajectory of the painting, and not start with the idea of suicide and then view the career backwards—because that’s a distortion. Nobody lives their lives backwards.”
    The show takes a basically chronological approach, beginning in a dimly lit subterranean gallery with Rothko’s early works. Painted in New York in the 1930s, where Rothko settled as an adult after emigrating to the U.S. from Russia as a child, these lonely and claustrophobic figurative paintings convey the spirit of the Depression era. His muted “subway paintings” concentrate on oppressive architectural features, corridors, staircases, and rails. A pair of unsettling, brassy nudes with faraway eyes might surprise those unfamiliar with this early period, as might the artist’s lone self-portrait, a dense painting from 1936, where Rothko cuts an inscrutable figure, his gaze obscured behind dark glasses.
    Left to right : Mark Rothko, Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942), Tiresias (1944), Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944). Installation view, gallery 1, level -1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
    From the beginning of the 1940s, there’s a marked shift in style as Rothko grapples with expressing the barbarism of World War II through his brush, as well as his own childhood memories of religious persecution as a Russian Jew. A set of aesthetically troubling paintings veer from realism and draw instead on both mythology and Surrealist techniques for accessing the unconscious mind.
    This “neo-Surrealist” period where Rothko repeatedly splits, twists, dissects, and reconstructs the human figure comes to a peak in 1946, when we finally get to Rothko’s abstract turn. The next room hits visitors like a blast of wind, intensified by a Mozart opera reverberating through the galleries. In these scrubbed-out, pared-back canvases, we first begin to see the fields of color, amoeba-like, spring forth inside the painter’s mind as he realizes the impossibility of expressing what he sought to through the human figure. These “multi-form” paintings attempt to capture something of inner human realities, grasping into the abyss and tapping into that realm of experience beyond the measurable, the kind of experience that the Romantic poets called “the sublime.”
    A quote on the wall situates you with what was going on in Rothko’s mind: “A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an Experience,” he wrote.
    Left to right : Mark Rothko, No. 8 (1949), Untitled (Blue, Yellow, Green on Red) (1954), No. 7 (1951), No. 11 / No. 20 (1949), No. 21 (Untitled) (1949). Installation view, gallery 2, level -1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
    After that point, the galleries shift gears into the “classic” Rothkos, his best-known rectangular Abstract Expressionist fields of color from the late 1940 and onwards. The largest portion of the exhibition, it includes 70 works, awash with chromatic harmonies of saturated yellows and reds, but also pinks, purples, and blues. Their bright colors have often led observers to misconstrue these ethereal and beautiful works as serene or cheerful. Coming upon them here, having passed through the context of his earlier work, makes palpable how they are just as perforated with existential angst.
    Left to right: Mark Rothko, Ochre and Red on Red (1954), Orange and Red on Red (1957) Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 7, level 1, the “Rothko Room” from the Phillips Collection, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.

    Through that lens, Rothko’s shift toward his darker hued palette from around 1957 does not feel so much like a break as a natural evolution. Among the examples in the exhibition is Tate Modern’s entire Rothko Room—nine deep red paintings donated by the artist in 1959, originally destined for a restaurant at the Seagram building in New York. Working on a public installation prompted Rothko to change his interaction with the viewer. “He’s no longer trying to grab your attention as you walk by in a museum,” Christopher Rothko said. “He knows that you will be with him for an hour or two, or more, so instead of trying to overwhelm you in a moment with color and emotion, he reduces the tone. He reduces the speed of interaction and lets the painting seep into you.”
    After the end of the Seagram commission, Rothko retained this strategy, going even darker for the “black form” paintings, a number of which grace the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. A number of these sonorous works, which at a glance appear monochromatic but hum with just as many colors as the bright paintings, stole the show for me. Rothko was particular about the way he wanted these works to be experienced: not hung like a monument or trophy on the wall, but mounted low, so that you can look at them directly. In the low-lit setting of the gallery, as your eyes adjust to the lighting conditions, the miraculous paintings almost seemed to hover off the walls.
    Left to right: Mark Rothko Untitled (1964). No. 8 (1964) Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 6, level 1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
    Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher knew Rothko while he was alive—the gallery has represented the estate since 1977—and has always been fond of these later, under-appreciated works, devoting a gallery show to them in 2017.
    Speaking over the phone, Glimcher recalled Rothko telling him a story about a “magnificent” dark painting, now in the dealer’s possession. It had been rejected by a collector who had been invited to the studio, but said she would prefer a “happy” painting in the palette for which the painter was most famous. Rothko recounted his reply: “Red, yellow, orange—aren’t those the colors of an inferno?”
    Glimcher credited an introduction by Louise Nevelson—who bonded with Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottleib over their shared refugee experience—for entree into a friendship with the notoriously reclusive painter. His 69th Street studio also just happened to be directly across from Glimcher’s apartment.
    “Mark let me come to his studio quite often,” Glimcher recalled. “Sometimes, in the winter, it got dark and I’d be coming home from work because I lived across the street, and there would be a light on. I would knock on the door and he would let me come in and sit and talk and show me the paintings that he had been working on.”
    Because of those encounters, the dealer has rare insight into the artist’s feelings about some of the later works, including smaller canvasses and works on paper which he made after a heart attack in 1968 meant he needed to work on a less physically strenuous scale. “He liked the feeling of the brush on the paper, how it slid more easily against the paper than against the canvas,” Glimcher said.
    Left to right: Mark Rothko, Untitled (1969-1970), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969). Sculptures : Alberto Giacometti, L’Homme qui marche I (1960), Grande Femme III (1960). Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 10, level 2, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
    As skeptical as I probably should be about a dealer trying to make a market for less in demand works, I am still persuaded by these sepulchral beauties. The exhibition’s final gallery offers up a number of Rothko’s late black and gray paintings alongside sculptures by Giacometti, as Rothko had originally intended for them to be shown in a never realized commission for UNESCO. The curators position these works, so simple but filled with incredibly rich and beautiful brushwork, as a springboard towards Minimalism. You can certainly see how an artist like Brice Marden might have looked at such works and taken inspiration.
    Viewed this way, Rothko’s darker works are rightfully seen as a progression: the artist uses reduced means, and a different chromatic scale, but is still after the same fundamental truths as the earlier works. Through this lens, they could be read as allegorical, with their deepening colors representing Rothko ongoing quest to convey pure human emotion, rather than simply expressing his own feelings. Yet lurking behind the great seduction of the colors in the “classic” Rothko paintings is the same drama: That of the human condition.
    “Rothko was always interested in Greek tragedy, and he felt that was what he was attaining and searching for in his paintings: The edge of perception, and taking us forward to someplace else,” Glimcher told me.
    With everything going on in the world right now, viewers might find catharsis in these paintings. I certainly did.
    “Mark Rothko” is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris through April 2, 2024.
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    in Exhibitions

    A Delayed and Expanded David Hockney Show Opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Harry Styles and All

    A new exhibition of works by David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery in London has been a long time coming. When it opened in February 2020 to mixed but generally favorable reviews, it was cut short after just 20 days by the pandemic. It never had a chance to reopen before the museum closed for a mammoth $52 million renovation and rehang, which opened in June. Opening November 2 in an expanded version, the show boasts 33 new paintings produced between 2021 and 2022 at Hockney’s studio in Normandy, including one much-hyped portrayal of global superstar Harry Styles.
    For Hockney, now 86, portraits have been a constant. He has returned again and again across the decades to the same subjects: himself and his friends, most notably former lover Gregory Evans; fashion designer and muse Celia Birtwell; and Maurice Payne, a printer with whom Hockney often collaborated. Far from feeling needlessly exhaustive, whole rooms dedicated to each sitter present a masterclass in all the ways that one person’s essence can be captured.
    Take the artist himself. His self-portraits from the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was still at art school, evince early attempts at self-fashioning, with prominent glasses and lightly eccentric formalwear. The look, later completed with a flat cap, would become quintessentially Hockney. His always imaginative flair can be found in etchings like A Rake’s Progress (1961-1963), a humorous retelling of Hogarth’s classic tale of downfall and depravity that was partly inspired by a trip to New York where Hockney eagerly explored the gay nightlife.
    David Hockney, Celia Carennac August 1971. Photo: Richard Schmidt Collection, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney.
    Over time, Hockney found increasingly inventive ways to depict himself, as in the case of the cartoonish Man Looking for his Glasses (1986) or Self-Portrait Using Three Mirrors (2003). Famously, in 2012, Hockney trod where few other artists had dared by making paintings on an iPad. One self-portrait is presented as a recording, revealing the digital brush strokes being made as if in real time, so we can see part of this unusual mark-making process.
    Across all the works, Hockney plays with a mix of historical references. Some expressionistic or deconstructed elements are clearly borrowed from the moderns, of which he most reveres Picasso, but elsewhere a three-quarter profile, stately pose, or Rembrandtesque brown ink reveals Hockney’s admiration for Old Masters.
    David Hockney, Self Portrait 26th Sept. (1983). Photo: © David Hockney.
    Hockney’s interest in different stylistic approaches is clear in the contrast between Gregory Reading. Vestrefjord (2003), a colorful watercolor sketch in which the figure is loosely outlined but more detail is given over to the tablecloth, and a 1977 drawing in which Gregory’s face is almost lifelike but the rest of the image slowly melts away. Either way, we eventually get to know Hockney’s subjects. What emerges in every case is not merely how their faces change with age but how life makes these characters harden or evolve.
    Though the exhibition is supposedly all about drawing, this term appears to be used more in the sense of sketching to capture a moment rather than strictly the act of putting pencil to paper. For this reason, the more recent Normandy paintings are a welcome addition. Fitting all 33 into one room allows the museum to show off its new, more stately galleries.
    David Hockney, JP Gonçalves de Lima, 3rd November (2021). Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.
    In these works, the wider cast of characters are, again, mostly friends and acquaintances of the artist, though notable figures (besides the obvious) include music producer Clive Davis, art dealer David Juda, writer and gallerist Jean Frémon, and writer Charlie Scheips, who appears in two portraits. There are also multiple self-portraits and images of Hockney’s partner J.P. Gonçalves de Lima. These paintings are hardly the artist’s best work—the portrait of Harry Styles has been widely acknowledged to be disappointing and most of the sitters are a slightly grotesque shade of pink, with either aggressively furrowed or aggressively shiny foreheads modeled with strips of peeking white ground—but they still never lack Hockney’s reliable character and éclat.
    “David Hockney: Drawing from Life” opens tomorrow and runs through January 21, 2024.
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    in Exhibitions

    An Yvette Mayorga Work Is Unmistakable. A New Survey Explores Her Unique Inspirations, From German Lithographs to ‘Mexican Pink’

    This summer, as Barbie fever took over popular culture, so did the film’s signature brand of pink. Seemingly overnight, the color was everywhere—on runways, red carpets, car insurance commercials, even Burger King buns. The furor ultimately led to a global paint shortage. 
    The Barbie “moment” came up in a recent conversation with Yvette Mayorga, a Mexican-American painter and sculptor whose work is almost always awash in a similar pink hue. This was not the first time she had been asked about it. 
    “I think it’s a good beginner introduction to feminism,” Mayorga said of the film, somewhat equivocally, before clarifying that she was left “wanting more of a complicated narrative.”  
    Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
    The artist, who was speaking on the occasion of her new exhibition “Dreaming of You,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was smart to hedge. For one, Barbie-mania feels, today, less like a marketing campaign built around a movie and more like a movie built around a marketing campaign. (The film’s $150 million marketing budget was indeed bigger than its $145 million production budget.) Barbie may mock the commoditization of gender, but its corporate overlords have exploited it to pull a similar trick. 
    More importantly, Mayorga’s relationship to pink is a deeply personal one forged well before the film and its attendant consumer craze. The color has been a staple of the artist’s work almost since the beginning of her practice, roughly a dozen years ago. She’s always viewed pink as an “underdog”: oft dismissed for its feminine, kitsch associations, but extra potent for the same reason.  
    In her world, colors can’t be reduced to stereotypes. Nor can people. 
    Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
    “Dreaming of You” is not Mayorga’s first museum show, but it is effectively her first survey, bringing together pieces from the last six years of her career. The exhibition does more than showcase individual objects. It puts on display the evolution of her practice during that time—a period that saw the artist extend her candy-coated vision beyond the canvas to sculpture, video, and installation.
    Naturally, pink is all over the show; most of the museum’s walls have been painted with it. One gallery is entirely cloaked in the color, save for a black-and-white checkerboard floor that feels a little Lewis Carroll, a lot David Lynch.
    For Mayorga, pink is a point of entry, luring viewers with its boldness. It’s also a point of departure, evoking the polish of Pop art and the lavishness of the Rococo, as well as the bubblegum, “girl power” aesthetics of her Y2K youth. Her preferred hue is “Mexican pink,” a color with historic cultural roots that has, in more recent times, also become symbolic of the Latinx experience in a divided America.
    Yvette Mayorga, ICE ICE LADY (2017). Courtesy of the artist.
    Reclaiming the labor of craft, Mayorga often applies her pink acrylic paint with bakery-style piping bags. The strategy is an homage to her mother, who worked as a cake decorator in Chicago’s landmark Marshall Field’s department store upon immigrating to the U.S. in the 1970s. It also lends the artist’s creations the appeal of something frosted and delicious. “When people encounter the work for the first time,” Mayorga explained, “they often say, ‘Wow, I want to eat it’ or ‘I want to touch it,’ ‘I’m craving something sweet.’”  
    And yet, while Mayorga’s pink artworks look like confections, they taste more like medicine. At the core of almost everything she makes is a theme that underlies them all: the fallacy of the American Dream.  
    One 2017 painting on view at the Aldrich, for instance, nods to the lavish epicureanism of a Late Baroque masterpiece, but its title conjures an altogether different scene: I Remember Eating Hot Chips when my Dad got Deported, After J.H. Fragonard, “The Swing.” Another work from the same series, called High Maintenance, plays on the dual meanings of the word “ICE,” depicting a woman swimming in a palace while an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent enters at the edge of the frame. 
    “I want people to feel disappointed, in a way,” she said of her works’ bait-and-switch play. “Because not everything is what we think it is.” 
    Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
    Among the standouts in “Dreaming of You” is a suite of three new life-sized portraits of her siblings. These form an extension of a body of work she introduced this time last year in a solo show at The Momentary, a satellite branch of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. 
    The paintings were conceived as a reference to German lithographer Martin Engelbrecht (1684-1756) and his series depicting low- and middle-class laborers. Among Engelbrecht’s subjects are bakers and confectioners, but their jobs, Mayorga pointed out, are “not the defining characteristics of the portraits. You see the people first, then you see these very subtle references to labor.”
    Mayorga’s versions are ovular, shaped like mirrors. They have a lot of mirrors embedded in them too: “I thought it was really important for the viewer to be able to see their reflection in the work.” The idea, she continued, is to remind viewers to “[consider] who the person is before tying them to their labor. That’s a really important conversation to have right now, because of the way that Latinx people are perceived. We are not a monolith.” 
    Yvette Mayorga, Scorpion After Ouvrière en Porcelaine (2023). Courtesy of the artist.
    “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” is on view now through March 17, 2024, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 
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    in Exhibitions

    See Sharon Stone’s New Paintings—Daubed Abstractions That Reflect Her Inner World

    Ever since receiving a paint-by-numbers set during the pandemic, Sharon Stone has been conversing with colors. That, at least, is how the ’90s Hollywood icon describes her all-consuming relationship with painting, one which has seen her spend up to 17 hours a day in a dedicated studio she’s created in her Beverly Hills home.
    Not that wielding a paintbrush is new to Stone. She grew up painting under the tutelage of her aunt and briefly studied art at Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, before dropping out to pursue a career in modeling and acting.
    Four decades on, Stone is seemingly focused on painting full-time. She has built off her Spring show at Los Angeles’ Allouche Gallery with “Welcome to My Garden,” her East Coast debut, now on view at C. Parker Gallery through December 3.
    The show name is taken from one of the 19 paintings on display in Greenwich, Connecticut, and speaks to a collection that teems with trees, flowers, and leaves—albeit ones that are often washed translucent or dashed and sketch-like.
    “This new exhibition offers a never-before-seen panorama into Sharon Stone’s creative prowess,” said gallery director Tiffany Benincasa. “The artist invites viewers on a journey through the vibrant landscapes of her imagination, reflecting her inner world.”
    Sharon Stone, There’s a Breach in the Atmosphere (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    The title is also something of an invitation into Stone’s world view. It turns out she has quite a lot to say. Jerusalem, an abstract work comprised of loose puddles of sandy yellows and grays, reflects on her visit to the Western Wall and her prayers for peace. A State of Affairs is Stone’s commentary on the patriarchy with swirls of black snakes coiled over clouds of pink and blue. There is a Breach in the Atmosphere is one of several works that confronts humanity’s indifference to earth’s environmental catastrophe. All pressing and current causes to be sure, but the titles have more bite than the works themselves.
    It’s easy to be cynical about actors who take a mid-career detour to explore other artistic pursuits. In Stone’s case, it’s worth putting such skepticism aside. The variety of work in “My Garden” seems to show a young artist working through their practice and many boast depth and a strong balance of color.
    In interview, Stone has listed the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Claude Monet as influences, but sometimes these figures weigh a little too heavily. Amelia has the block and curvature of a Kandinsky abstract and Reflections, perhaps consciously, appears like a Monet close-up.
    This doesn’t detract from “My Garden,” but rather shows the flashes of a painter still finding their palette and range. Just don’t call it a hobby.
    See more images from the show below.
    Sharon Stone, Reflections (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone posing alongside her work Bayou (2022). Photo courtesy of C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, Amelia (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, Jerusalem (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, City Lights (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone alongside her canvas Welcome to My Garden (2023). Photo courtesy of C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, Bamboo Forest Fall/Winter. Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, Dreamscape 1. Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, The Lantern (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    Sharon Stone, It’s My Garden, Asshole (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
    “Welcome to My Garden” is on view at C. Parker Gallery, 409 Greenwich Ave, Greenwich, Connecticut, through December 3.

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    in Street Art

    New Mural by PichiAvo in Bayonne, France

    In the city of Bayonne, PichiAvo, the renowned Spanish artistic duo, has once again graced the urban landscape with their latest work of art. This captivating mural, presented as part of the Points de Vue Street Art Festival, pays a heartfelt tribute to Glaucus, the Greek sea god. The mural seamlessly intertwines with Bayonne’s profound connection to water, creating a visual spectacle that encapsulates the city’s spirit.Bayonne, strategically positioned at the confluence of the Adour River and the mighty Atlantic Ocean, has a long history intertwined with the elemental force of water. The city’s development and character have been significantly influenced by its relationship with these aquatic surroundings.The mural is unveiled as part of the Points de Vue urban art festival, a cultural celebration born in 2017. This festival is the result of collaborative efforts between the Basque Country Urban Community, the Bayonne town hall, and the KAXU gallery. Points de Vue stands as a testament to Bayonne’scommitment to urban art and culture.This event is not just a festival; it’s an open-air gallery that extends its reach beyond Bayonne, encompassing the entire region. Attendees can explore the city’s streets, gazing upon monumental frescoes that adorn the walls or embark on a treasure hunt for hidden artistic gems, further emphasizingthe synergy between art and the urban environment.PichiAvo’s tribute to Glaucus, the deity of the sea, beautifully exemplifies this artistic fusion, as the mural not only pays homage to Greek mythology but also resonates with the city’s intrinsic connection to water. It’s a vivid testament to the timeless interplay between nature, art, and culture. The Points de Vue Street Art Festival has created a vibrant platform for such expressions, ensuring that Bayonne continues to be a canvas for artistic inspiration and an ode to the ever present element of water that has shaped its unique character. More

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    in Exhibitions

    More Than 300 Photographs From Elton John’s Legendary Art Collection Are Going on View at the V&A Museum

    The story goes that while sitting beside Cindy Sherman at a New York fundraiser, Sir Elton John complained that her work never came up for auction. Sherman promptly sold him six artist prints from her breakthrough series “Untitled Film Stills.” Her motive? She was in need of a new house.
    The anecdote is indicative of how fame, connections, and no little money, has made John a preeminent collector of photography. He lists it as his second passion, after music, and together with his husband David Furnish, the couple has purchased more than 7,000 photographs that present many of the great photographers, events, and celebrities of the 20th century.
    A selection of more than 300 photographs from this sprawling collection is set to be shown at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from May 18, 2024, to January 5, 2025. It will be the largest photography show the museum has staged to date.
    Malcolm X during his visit to enterprises owned by Black Muslims. Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1962, by Eve Arnold. Photo: courtesy Eve Arnold, Magnum Photos.
    The exhibition, “Fragile Beauty,” spans the 1950s to the present and features the work of 140 photographers spread across eight thematic sections. It explores celebrity in images of Marilyn Monroe and Miles Davis, reportage in stills from the Civil Rights movement, AIDS activism in the 1980s, and the attacks of September 11 (for which John and Furnish hold the world’s largest collection), and the male body through photographs from the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Tyler Mitchell.
    “’Fragile Beauty’ will be a truly epic journey across the recent history of photography,” the show’s curator Duncan Forbes said. “Whether through the elegance of fashion photography, the creativity of musicians and performers, the exploration of desire, or the passage of history as captured by photojournalism, photography reveals something important about the world.”
    John has been collecting photography since getting sober in 1991. In effect, “Fragile Beauty” is the second half of a photographic tour that began in 2016 with “The Radical Eye” in which the Tate Modern staged 150 of John’s photographs from 1920 to 1950 including rare work from Man Ray, André Kertész, and Edward Steichen.
    At the V&A, John and Furnish further a relationship that began with a loan of Horst P. Horst photographs in 2014. In 2019, a significant donation from the couple to the museum’s new photography center saw a gallery named in their honor.
    “Working alongside the V&A again has been a truly memorable experience,” the pair said in a statement. “We look forward to sharing this exhibition with the public.”
    Preview more images from the exhibition below.
    Tyler Mitchell, Simply Fragile (2022). Photo: courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
    Herman Leonard, Chet Baker, New York City, 1956. Photo: Herman Leonard Photography, LLC.
    Ryan McGinley, Dakota Hair (2004). Photo: courtesy Ryan McGinley Studios.
    Herb Ritts, Versace Dress (Back View), El Mirage (1990). Image: Herb Ritts Foundation, Courtesy of Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.

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    in Exhibitions

    How an Intergenerational Cohort of Artists at an Icelandic Biennial Grappled with Notions of Darkness

    Landing in Iceland in a gale as the winter darkness closes in, one has a primeval sense of being at the mercy of the elements. So, it feels somehow fitting that the curators of the artist-run Icelandic biennial “Sequences” selected the title “Can’t See,” for its 11th edition, which is on view at several locations until November 26. Not seeing, and darkness, have played a fundamental role in shaping Icelandic culture, said Sunna Ástþórsdóttir, director of the Living Art Museum, which is a co-founder institution of the biennial. “We have all these stories about mythological creatures, mysterious events, and hidden people, which is all to do with the brutality of living here,” she noted.
    The curators—Marika Agu, Maria Arusoo, Kaarin Kivirähk, and Sten Ojavee—are part of a collective from the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art. They have taken darkness as their starting point, both literally and metaphorically, by thinking about the wealth of life forms that humanity can’t perceive and the urgent issues we blindly refuse to recognize.
    “The title applies to today’s world, with the ungraspable climate catastrophe on its way, but also war in Ukraine and pandemics, so darkness just seems very current,” said Kivirähk. “But it can also be read as the possibility that you might be using your imagination if you can’t see, so the theme embraces both doom and celebration.”
    Edith Karlson, Can’t See (2023). Exhibition view from “Art in the Age of the Anthropocene” at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn. Photo: Joosep Kivimäe
    In pursuit of the imperceptible, the biennial is divided into four chapters: “Subterranean,” “Soil,” “Water,” and “Metaphysical Realm,” with exhibitions dedicated to these themes on show at four Reykjavik institutions, until November 26. The program brings together more than 50 Icelandic and international artists, in a lineup that includes Nigerian-American artists Precious Okoyomon and Dozie Kanu, as well as Edith Karlson, who will represent Estonia at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

    Okoyomon and Kanu have collaborated to create a wind installation in a lighthouse titled Fragmented sky – wind – fly giving presence to wind (2023), while Karlson’s mercreature sculpture, Can’t See (2023) contributed to the biennial’s title. From Iceland there’s a huge diversity of offerings, including Hrund Atladóttir’s Black Whole (2023), a dizzying video and AI portal into nature, and Brák Jónsdóttir’s sculpture of a shiny cyborgian jellyfish, Turritopsis 2.0 (2023), which is inspired by an immortal species and fuses elements of porn and horror.
    What makes “Sequences” distinctive is the bold dialogues set up across generations, between new commissions and works from museum collections. It might seem counterintuitive for a festival looking to push boundaries to incorporate museum loans and deceased or “outsider” artists, but it’s a thrilling aspect of the program and testament to the curators’ thorough research.
    Grotta Lighthouse lit up at night, venue for Precious Okoyomon and Dozie Kanu’s installation, Reykjavik. Courtesy of Sequences XI

    An example is the unlikely pairing of landscape paintings by Iceland’s art grandee Jóhannes Kjarval (1885-1972) with Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir’s multidisciplinary works based around Surtsey, a volcanic island that erupted off Iceland in 1963. These include her cast of what is believed to be the earliest fossilized human footprint on earth.
    “I have loved Kjarval’s paintings since I was a child, but it hadn’t occurred to me that our works would coincide,” said Ólafsdóttir. “I love all the details in his paintings. They somehow resonated with the tiny particles of seaborne waste embedded in the footprint, so it was an unexpected but happy encounter.”

    Installation view of Monika Czyzck’s installation “Can’t See”. Photo by Monika Czyzck

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the artworks in “Sequences” draw inspiration from Iceland’s magical geology and vivid folkloric tradition. In the “Subterranean” section, Finland-based artist Monika Czyżyk covered the windows with symbols and faces relating to creatures she saw in the stones, mountains and rivers, using a variety of earthy clay tones she found in the Icelandic wilderness.
    Czyżyk’s paintings reverberate with Valgerður Briem’s (1914-2002) intricate ink drawings evoking cartographies or perhaps internal bodily landscapes. The common ground, according to Czyżyk, is a vision of the cosmos, earth and its materials as “alive.” The artist explained, “It feels like we are portraying hidden, speculative worlds, inspired by our surroundings, science, ecology and heliobiology.”
    Besides Briem, the curators have given space to several women from the region who were undervalued in their lifetimes. One is Latvian artist Zenta Logina (1908-83), whose astonishingly dynamic depictions of the cosmos are represented in three relief paintings and a tapestry. A particular revelation was Estonian artist Elo-Reet Järv (1939-2018), with her fantastical leather sculptures, Self Portrait as a Dragon and My Insectivorous Totem (both 1995), which appear to engage in a lively conversation with mischievous rock-and-stone creatures by Icelandic artist Gudrun Nielsen (1914-2000).
    Elo-Reet Järv, Self Portrait as a Dragon (1995), installation view at Kling and Bang. Photo Maria Luiga
    “Sequences” offers a rare and welcome glimpse into these regional scenes, which have had relatively little international exposure. “Something the Baltic and Iceland art scenes share is that being on the ‘edge of Europe,’ so far away from the big system of the art world, it feels like they are more self-sufficient,” said curator Maria Arusoo. “We don’t have a strong market, so it doesn’t dictate what’s happening and the artists are quite independent in their ideas.”
    In terms of artists from further afield, the curators paid careful attention to find shared sensibilities with those closer to home.
    In terms of artists from further afield, the curators paid careful attention to find shared sensibilities with those closer to home. These include Hungarian-born American artist Agnes Denes with six prints that challenge scientific notions of the world as fixed and rational; in these she presents the world mapped onto familiar objects like a snail’s shell or a hot dog (from her Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space – Map. Projections series, examples here from 1976-86), alongside her dreamy flying bird-pyramid works from 1994.
    Also on view was Guatemalan artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s lyrical sound piece Songs of Extinct Birds That Were Previously Unknown to Science But Have Been Rediscovered Through Spiritist Sessions No. 1-3 (2015); and U.S. Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson’s zanily brilliant, posthumously produced work When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer (2016–7), which interweaves frog croaks with human frog noises, spoken proverbs and political messages.
    The strong performance program (which culminated on October 22) gives the festival an experimental injection. Among the standouts are Norwegian artist and virtuoso saxophonist Bendik Giske with Icelandic composer Ulfur Hansson, who has created an ethereal sound by activating strings with magnets stretched across a row of desks, effectively turning them into a giant harp.
    Pola Sutryk’s “perpetual soup”, based on medieval recipe. Vikram Pradhan
    Estonian performer and choreographer Johann Rosenberg gave a messy, gruesome Paul McCarthy-esque performance that was supposed to culminate in the release of imported flies, but they didn’t survive the Icelandic cold, to the audience’s relief. Less dramatic, but definitely more nurturing, is Polish chef and artist Pola Sutryk’s contribution of a “perpetual soup” for visitors, which she said was based on a recipe used in medieval inns, where a pot sat on the fire day and night, with new ingredients added. “As the festival progresses and new relationships build up, so the soup’s flavor is also building up,” she said.
    Human connections may have been encouraged among visitors to “Sequences,” but our species is refreshingly absent from most of the artworks. “We tried to limit the human narration and human representation in the exhibition, to allow ourselves to imagine the world around us through the senses of a variety of species,” explained curator Sten Ojavee.
    Stripping humans out of the picture feels natural in Iceland, away from the behemoth galleries and art fair carousel of big art capitals. In this strongly supportive community, the artists seem connected to the landscape in a way most western Europeans might find hard to comprehend. One has the impression of a thriving, self-reliant scene, driven by a sense of playfulness, joy and curiosity, quietly getting on with the business of making art.
    The exhibitions relating to the four chapters of the festival will run until November 26 at the following institutions: Soil at Kling & Bang; Subterranean at The Living Art Museum; Water at The Nordic House; Metaphysical Realm at The National Gallery of Iceland (House of Collections).

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