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The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made art-world news in February, 2010, when his 1961 bronze Walking Man 1 sold at Sotheby’s in London for $104.3 million U.S. Experts had estimated it would go for between $20 and $30 million, but ten bidders sent the price skyrocketing—a surprising result given that the sculpture was produced in an edition of six. The subject of interest for numerous critics and intellectuals, including the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Giacometti’s insistently figurative art linked modernist reductivism to the European tradition of humanist sculpture. This remarkable volume establishes a context for Giacometti’s work with some family art history. Alberto’s father, Giovanni, is now recognized as an important early modern Swiss painter; another relative, Augusto, was also an adventurous painter. Giacometti’s brother Diego, a frequent model and muse for the sculptor, was a furniture designer. The reproductions are faultless throughout the book and lend a visceral presence to sculptures and paintings alike. An in-depth illustrated chronology furnishes a rich social background for an artist who is now famous for expertly rendering modern alienation.
These people walking up and down the street were unconscious automatons…like ants; everyone went his own way, by himself, entirely alone, in a direction none of the others knew…Except they would turn towards a woman. A motionless woman, and four men walking…it occurred to me that I had always made a woman standing still, and a man always walking. All of my women stand there, and all of my men walk by.
—Alberto Giacometti, 1961
In a series of recent exhibitions, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery director Michèle Thériault and the curator Vincent Bonin have been hard at work reassessing the fundamental value of archives in reconstructing a key point in contemporary Canadian art, namely the period that saw the initial rise of artist-run culture and its subsequent implosion under differing ideological and administrative points of view. This hefty volume follows up with plentiful primary sources and new critical interpretations that argue for the pros and cons of these “partially realized utopias.”
More appreciative overview than critical examination, this book traces artistic activity in the Middle Eastern region over the last half century. Organized according to a themes-plus-key-works structure, it includes more than 200 artists, only a handful of whom (such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat and Walid Raad) will be familiar to Western audiences; artworks by Wafa Hourani, Nedim Kufi and Parviz Tanavoli are highlights among the lesser-known names. While the overall quality of the included work is uneven, the book is eye-opening in several senses: it establishes the central role that calligraphy and poetry continue to play in much art from the Middle East region and allows us to witness a contemporary- art tradition that comes out of a clearly sacred rather than secular lineage.
Like the artists’ videos featured within it, this catalogue to a group exhibition curated by Hladki is infused with a direct, DIY aesthetic and clear, accessible prose. Making a case for the “nervy tinderbox vehemence” of works by Maureen Bradley, Dana Claxton, Allyson Mitchell and b. h. Yael, the book includes carefully considered essays by the likes of Lisa Steele and Richard Fung that attest to the lasting influence of Canadian feminist practices.
Every few years, Phaidon’s Cream series has ten curators fashioning an overview of new voices on the international scene. This entry begins with a conversation among the curators about how and if 2008’s global recession has affected new art-making. Geoffrey Farmer, Janice Kerbel, Ron Terada and Althea Thauberger make the roster, thanks to the presence of the Canadian curator Kitty Scott among the gatekeepers. This crop of 100 gravitates toward performative, ephemeral practices, as well as complicated intellectual and/or material infrastructures for their art. The format is questionable, however: while there is visual punch to seeing the art-world “news” presented on old-fashioned broadsheets, the resulting broken-up columns of tiny type make reading the book’s thoughtful entries on the latest and greatest an eye-straining struggle.
This “recipe” book, produced as a textual extension of Western Front’s 2008 group show “Kits for an Encounter,” collects instruction-based projects from 16 artists and groups, including Vahida Ramujkic, Kristina Lee Podesva and The Center for Tactical Magic. While appealingly openended, the projects’ Fluxus-inspired, pragmatic approach to creating communion and antagonism is often at odds with the editors’ densely theoretical introduction.
If Marina Abramović’s spring retrospective at MOMA set out to canonize the self-styled “grandmother of performance art,” this intimate yet decidedly non-hagiographic biography, written by a former assistant to the artist, offers a compelling subtext to Abramović’s extraordinary life and career, including her largely undocumented early years in Yugoslavia. Westcott elegantly pieces together rare, illuminating photos from Abramović’s private archive and adds testimonies from more than 60 of the artist’s colleagues to paint a human portrait of a living legend.
For Abramović, performance was a means of initiating herself—again and again— into a sharpened state of consciousness...constructed traumas that served as rehearsals for death.
—James Westcott in When Marina Abramović Dies
Like Kapoor’s work itself, this giant volume, the most comprehensive on the Bombay-born British sculptor to date, is at once beautiful, imposing and inviting. The book covers Kapoor’s beginnings in performance art, Eva Hesse–like assemblage and the bright, delicate pigment works that won him acclaim in the 1980s, then moves on to document the seemingly endless array of sculptures he has produced in a wide range of materials (fibreglass, stone, stainless steel and PVC, to name a few) since then. These works are often reflective and shaped simply and sensuously; while undeniably visceral and on occasion truly monumental, many feature enigmatic voids that have given rise to a critical discourse of absence and the sublime around his work: rather than taking up space, they seem paradoxically to open up the space around them, to possibility, self-reflection and a place for the viewer. Despite its obvious grandeur and drama, Kapoor’s work is shot through with humour, grace and intimacy; his recent works in wax add an energetic, unexpected element of deconstructed messiness to a polished, distinguished oeuvre.
I think I am a painter who is a sculptor. My view is that sculpture has always been about presence in the world... What I have been engaged in...is to deal with an illusory presence in the world; one that isn’t necessarily here...I am making physical things that are all about somewhere else.
— Anish Kapoor
Lover of the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio and immortalized by painters such as Giovanni Boldini and Augustus John, Luisa Casati was one of the most notorious celebrities of the early 20th century and an inspiration for artists ranging from Man Ray to Jean Cocteau. Now the iconoclastic beauty is the subject of a new book by the Casati archivists Ryersson and Yaccarino. With more than 200 pictures, including private family photos, this visually lavish publication chronicles the rise and fall of a heroine who, despite her tragically destitute end, transformed herself into a work of art. With a preface by Diane von Furstenberg and an afterword by Lady Moorea Black, Casati’s granddaughter, it encapsulates the haunting legacy of an unmatched muse.
It’s difficult to pin down the work of the British artist Liam Gillick. From writings on neo-utopian idealism to gallery-filling sculptural scenarios on social dynamics, his practice defies categorization and exists instead in the rich, critical middle ground between art and life. The approach has earned Gillick a wide following among prominent international curators and critics, a fact that is reflected in the impressive list of contributors to this reader. The Rotterdam-based Canadian writer Monika Szewczyk has put together a volume that abounds with the complexities of Gillick’s work and offers insights into its participatory strategies.
Full talks and tours schedule, Douglas Coupland conversation info, and magazine launch details posted for free day of activities
Applications due May 9 for $55,000 in prizes
Free art tours for high-school students to take place in April and May
New writers on contemporary art encouraged to apply by June 1
Dates already set for next year’s Toronto festival
Applications for this $7,000 student award are due April 6
Event to feature a conversation with Douglas Coupland, gallery tours, a magazine launch and more
Films on Shary Boyle, Elmgreen & Dragset, Michel de Broin and Jon Gnarr set to open the festival on March 22
Opening-night celebration and art-industry talks highlight fifth year of fair
Don’t miss the North American premieres of films on Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, happening February 23
The 85-year-old artist Arnaud Maggs nudged out Fred Herzog and Alain Paiement as winner of the second annual Scotiabank Photography Award, announced last night in Toronto. This $50,000 win follows the opening of a major Maggs survey at the National Gallery of Canada.
As one of the primary exhibitions for Contact 2012, “Public: Collective Identity | Occupied Spaces” is ambitious. Charlene K. Lau observes that the two-venue show mirrors the fractures of contemporary life: public and private, visible and invisible, place and non-place.
In this review, writer and artist Joni Murphy considers Abbas Akhavan’s current solo show in Montreal, which activates a variety of themes—war and art, destruction and nation building, human and animal—with a distinctively light touch.
Melding William Morris-style ornamentation with more contemporary concerns, artist Luke Painter detours around dry academicism for something more vibrant and visceral. Mariam Nader reviews his current Toronto show at LE Gallery, finding depth in decoration.
Frieze opened its first New York edition last week with some surprising highlights: sculptures that were free for public viewing outside the big commercial tent. Canadian Art art director Barbara Solowan was there, and brought back this slideshow.
