Jeff Koons + BMW

By Editor in Art on April 27th, 2010 | No Comments »

You know we loves us some Jeff Koons! Via NY Times Magazine

Winning is not supposed to be everything but that’s just what we say to a losing team. To the victors go all the spoils. For some, they include a new BMW. For BMW, the prize is art — or rather artists. It helps if they are famous enough to be their own brands — a Warhol, Lichtenstein or Haring — and a big enough sport to paint a race car headed for Le Mans. For this June’s grand prix, the artist is Jeff Koons.

At a press conference with BMW executives this week, Koons unveiled his design for the company’s next “Art Car.” It’s the 17th in a series that began in 1975 with a custom paint job by Alexander Calder, the man who invented the “mobile” in sculpture. His car was in the room. It was a primary-colored patchwork of Calder boomerangs and looked pretty cute. Koons’s model was there too, a plain white M3 GT2 to be driven by Andy Priaulx. This car can get to 100 miles per hour in three seconds. Koons will give it an added boost with a finish he says will express “the aesthetics of winning.”

Read the full piece on the NY Times site.

Gardar Eide Einarsson | Another Modern Moment Completed

By Editor in Art on April 26th, 2010 | No Comments »

We almost forgot: on the 22nd of April, Team opened a show entitled Another Modern Moment Completed by New York artist Gardar Eide Einarsson that we cannot wait to check out. It’s all black and white paintings, which is something we cannot get enough of these days.

Reproduction as theft, and authorship as failed claim are the central conceits in this exhibition by Gardar Eide Einarsson. His concurrent fascinations with criminality and appropriation come together in an installation that appears to mark the jettisoning of his overt approach to political subject matter in favor of a formalist’s engagement with the legacy of modernism. Using the history of abstraction and pop as a ready-made, Einarsson here distills a poetics of disruption, shifting between drippy hard edge abstraction, graphic renderings from mainstream sources, and the occasional deployment of the ben-day dot.

Read more on Team‘s site, where you’ll also find images of works in the show. If you’re in New York, stop by and check them out in person. Photos rarely do artwork justice.

Another Modern Moment Completed
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Team Gallery (New York)
Through 05.22.10

Serena Mitnik-Miller + Arkitip No. 0054

By Editor in Art on April 21st, 2010 | No Comments »

Arkitip‘s latest issue — No. 0054 – is out and features the work of SF artist Serena Mitnik-Miller, whose painting and photography we like.

Serena Mitnik-Miller executes her painting with watercolor on paper, employing transparent, all over repetitive shapes in vivid colors that reference nature specific to the sea. Mitnik-Miller associates these colors and geometries with organic vocabulary and palette, most importantly its complex dynamic. The paintings become increasingly disorienting with layered internal space and vortex like sensibility shifting the image beyond the paper.

In her photographic work Mitnik-Miller both seduces and alienates the viewer employing graphic and abstract approach to her images. Experiential qualities of light abound within the images, embracing the films grain to create a watercolor-like effect when printed on natural matte paper.

Serena currently lives and works near the ocean in San Francisco, where she helps to run the Mollusk Surf Shop Gallery and her own new venture, General Store. Check out Arkitip‘s site for more info.

Catherine Opie | Twelve Minutes to the Horizon

By Editor in Art on April 20th, 2010 | No Comments »

If you’re in LA, stop by Regen Projects starting 04.24.10 to see Catherine Opie‘s Twelve Minutes to the Horizon.

Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Catherine Opie. The exhibition will present a suite of new photographs that further the artist’s investigation into ideas of landscape. With the ocean as her backdrop, Opie explores the shifting mise en scène of light, color, movement, and the tension between boundaries and limitlessness.

In the summer of 2009, Opie traveled aboard a container ship en route from Korea to Long Beach. She documented the voyage in a series of time-based photographs that captured each sunrise and sunset for the ten-day duration of the trip. The works are composed with equal registers of water and sky, broken by a thin center horizon line.

Read more on Regen Projectssite.

Twelve Minutes to the Horizon
Catherine Opie
Regen Projects (LA)
04.24 – 05.22.10

Maya Lin’s What is Missing + At 44 1/2

By Editor in Art on April 15th, 2010 | No Comments »

Looks like Creative Time is stepping it up with their At 44 1/2 project in Times Square.

From April 15–30, Creative Time will present multidisciplinary artist Maya Lin‘s What is Missing?, a series of four videos about mass extinction precipitated by the degradation of natural habitats At 44 1/2. There will be a special, expanded schedule of screenings on April 22 for Earth Day. Maya Lin is a participant in the Creative Time Global Residency Program, for which she has traveled to diverse parts of the world to connect with disappearing species for the What Is Missing project.

The four videos presented At 44 1⁄2 are part of an expansive project of the same name that is an urgent call to action intended to build awareness about disappearing species. What is Missing?, which Lin calls her “last memorial,” consists of site-specific media installations, traveling art exhibitions, a printed and digital book, and other forms, linked through the project’s website (whatismissing.net).

Read more on Creative Time‘s site and do yourself a favor: go to Times Square and check the videos out! Having “real” art in the middle of the most commercial place on Earth is the hottest thing ever.