The fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, "More Light", brings together works of artists from 40 countries and over 70 artists.

One of the largest installations is called "Waste Not" by Chinese artist, Song Dong and comprises items collected by his mother over the course of 50 years.

Song Dong, explains: "'Waste Not' was my mother's generation's idea for the daily life. They said, 'We should waste not, because if you waste a lot, in the future you haven't anything to waste'. So I think now for the modern life - we waste a lot."

A continuous graphic pattern on the glass wall of a conference room, took artist Gosia Wlodarczak more than 200 hours to create.

The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art runs for one month.

SYDNEY — Judging by the final attendance figures alone, the inaugural edition of the Sydney Contemporary art fair was a big success. Over the four days a total of 28,810 people attended Sydney Contemporary  which is a significant number considering that the 2013 edition of the much larger Art Stage Singapore fair reported attendance figures of 40,500.

Strong attendance figures are a good sign but the real evidence of a successful art fair is in the sales figures – and Sydney Contemporary produced plenty of sales for the participating galleries. Works by young and innovative Australian artists attracted the most attention from collectors, as one would expect, with unique and quirky sculptural objects, large-scale photographs, and unique video works proving particularly popular.

Below, we digest the sales (note: at press time, one Australian dollar was 1.07 Australian dollars):

— Anna Schwartz has a permanent gallery space at Carriageworks so it was no surprise that her presentation was one of the most impressive. Schwartz sold London-based artist Angela De La Cruz’s “Clutter Bag (cracked white) II,” 2004 to the renowned Chartwell Collection in New Zealand which is held on long term loan at the Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland.

— Jan Minchin, director of Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, sold four sculptures by Benjamin Armstrong ranging from AU$8,800 to AU$18,000 as well as eleven photographs from Rosemary Laing's new series “The Paper,” 2013 ranging in price from AU$10,500 to AU$22,500. Minchin also revealed that a museum has put a reserve on Rosemary Laing’s “The Paper, Wednesday” (AU$22,500) and that she received two commissions for sculptures by Benjamin Armstrong (AU$36,000).

— Michael Reid sold more than AU$250,000 worth of art at Sydney Contemporary. As well as selling a major Danie Mellor painting to a German client, Reid also sold a large-scale photo by contemporary Aboriginal artist Christian Thompson for AU$7,700, Singapore-based photographer Joseph McGlennon’s “Thylacine study no. 3,” 2013, for AU$8,800, as well as a Joan Ross video piece.

— Brisbane-based Ryan Renshaw Gallery achieved sales totaling AU$100,000 including two works by Yvonne Todd which were sold to the National Gallery of Victoria and another which was put on reserve by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The gallery also sold all editions of Yvonne Todd's first ever video work “Smoke Emitters” as well as five large and three small works by the artist. Renshaw exhibited Sarah Ryan on Saturday and Sunday, completely selling out all editions of two of her pieces.

— One of the most popular artists of the opening night was Perth-based Muslim artist Abdul Abdullah. Fehily Contemporary of Melbourne sold five of the edition of seven of Abdullah’s photograph “It Doesn’t Matter How I Feel,” 2013, for AU$4,250 each and a large-scale painting by the artist for AU$7,250. “It Doesn’t Matter How I Feel” was shortlisted for the Monash Gallery of Art‘s 2013 Bowness Prize.

— Sydney-based artist Lara Marrett proved extremely popular for Jan Murphy Gallery which sold a number of the artist’s works including the painting “Lost Days” for AU$12,500. The gallery also sold a number of major works by Indigenous artist Danie Mellor, including one piece for AU$44,000, as well as a small marble sculpture by Alex Seton for AU$5,500.

— Melbourne-based Sophie Gannon Gallery sold two works by the celebrated young Australian realist painter Michael Zavros, one for AU$55,000 and another for AU$18,000, as well as a major work by Cressida Campbell for $55,000.

— Another Melbourne gallery, MARS (Melbourne Art Rooms), sold an entire series of incredibly complex cardboard sculptures displayed beautifully under glass domes by Melbourne-based artist Daniel Agdag for AU$4,000 each.

— Sydney-based dealer Martin Browne had a good start to the fair selling a sculpture by the innovative and highly regarded Australian artist Linda Ivimey for AU$20,000, a work by Troy Emery for AU$3,500, and a work by Sue Brown for AU$5,000.

— Sydney-based gallery Sullivan + Strumpf sold 15 works at the fair including pieces by Judy Millar (AU $13,000), Sam Leach (AU $16,500), Kate Shaw (two at AU $2,500 each), Laith McGregor (bronze sculpture AU $5,000), and a number of works on paper by 80-year-old senior Australian abstract painter Sydney Ball (ranging from AU$3,500 to AU$9,900). Sullivan + Strumpf also received strong interest in the upcoming “Sydney Ball” exhibition which will feature 8 very large “Stain” series paintings.

— Melbourne’s Beam Contemporary sold 12 works from an edition of photographs titled “Interact” by Melbourne-based artist Clare Rae. The gallery sold five framed photographs for AU$1,250 and seven unframed for $990 with the fourth work in the edition selling out a short time after the fair opened.

— By the second day of the fair Michelle Paterson from Sydney gallery .M Contemporary had already sold a number of works by South African artist Lyndi Sales including the large work “Vesica Piscus” for $9,900 and a number of smaller works totaling AU$21,000, ranging in price from AU$900-1,400 each.

— Sydney-based gallery Art Atrium had a very successful fair selling a total of 10 paintings. Eight of the works sold by Art Atrium were by Australian landscape painter Brett Bailey and ranged in price from AU$550 to AU$6,500, while the other two works, priced at AU$3,280 and AU$3,050, were by Japanese artist Taro Yamamoto.

— Neon Parc sold several needlepoint works by controversial artist Paul Yore including the artist’s work “White Trash.” Janet Beckhouse’s exquisite and intricate sculptural ceramic vessels also proved  popular for Neon Parc with several of the artist's works heading for new homes. The national government art rental company Artbank was revealed as the buyer of Yore’s needlepoint “The Glorious Dawn.”

— New Zealand gallery Gow Langsford sold Hye Rim Lee’s “Suck My Tit, glossy white black,” 2010, for AU$11,500, Michael Hight’s oil on canvas “Hunterville,” 2013, for AU$16,000, and the Dale Frank varnish on canvas painting “Chad Michael Murray 3,” 2012 for AU$30,000.

— De Sarthe Gallery of Hong Kong sold a fantastic installation of five neon-lit basketball hoops by Chinese artist Zhou Wendou.

— Sundaram Tagore Galleries, another powerhouse Asia-Pacific gallery, sold “Drunken-Royal Copenhagen” by Kim Joon for AU$17,000 and “Untitled” by Sohan Qadri for AU$71,000.

— Singapore-based Art Plural Gallery sold a painting by the renowned French contemporary painter Fabienne Verdier for AU$70,000 and a work by French-Argentinian artist Pablo Reinoso for AU $46,000.

— Japanese gallery COHJU contemporary art sold five works by Saburo Ota.

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Hundreds of people wound their way from gallery to gallery on two art walks through Chelsea Thursday night.  The walks sponsored by BLOUIN ARTINFO and Hendricks’s Gin entitled “The CURIOUSLY Inspired CHELSEA ART TREK” each hit four galleries with exceptional exhibitions. Clues were given at each gallery in each walk and the answers became the invitation to a reception that followed at the Hotel Americano.

The first walk, called “The Exquisite Spatial Adventure”, brought participants to the Driscoll Babcock Gallery where Jenny Morgan is showing her figurative paintings entitled “How to Find a Ghost”.

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is showing paintings by Eric Blum. “Foreign Parts” is a series of poetic interpretations of uncertain spaces.

The Mixed Greens exhibition is showing “Unauthorized Biographies”, paintings by Brad Greenwood.  Residing somewhere between abstraction and figurative work, the works are modestly dramatic and very personal.

The fourth gallery on the walk, C24 Gallery is showing paintings by New Orleans-based artist Regina Scully. Entitled “Entrance”, the works are labyrinth-like and suggestive of architectural or urban spaces. All four exhibitions on the path of “The Exquisite Spatial Adventure” have an uncanny relation to each other through the explorations of subjective space by four young artists.

The second walk was called “The Journey Through History and Time”. The DC Moore Gallery has an exhibition by the well-known artist Mary Frank. Her “Elemental Expression” title refers to her unorthodox use of clay accompanied by paintings and photographs which complement her innovative sculptural works. A catalogue by the well-known critic John Yau accompanies the exhibition.

At Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Varujan Boghosian riffs on the legend and history of Marcel Duchamp in a series of collages and humorous constructions.

At Fischbach Gallery, Jeff Gola is exhibiting is first New York solo exhibition of exquisite egg tempera paintings of luminous and mysterious landscapes in a show  entitled “Unspoken Beauty”.

At Leila Heller Gallery, “FAKE: Idyllic Life”, new, complex, works by Shoja Azari are shown with both paintings and video works melded. The works are innovative in creating slow-moving narratives on paintings through video. Persian miniatures are the basis of new images, quickened by the video images with which they overlap.

The eight shows included in the Chelsea Art Trek are staying up for varying lengths of time. Check gallery websites for more information.

To watch more videos in our ARTINFO series "Gallery Night", click HERE. 

The Kunstmuseum Luzerne’s landmark 1974 exhibition of transvestism and queer imagery is to be recreated at Richard Saltoun Gallery this December. Marking the fortieth anniversary of the original show, “Transformer: Aspects of Travesty” will explore the aesthetics of sexuality in 1970s subcultures, and how they have come to be viewed today.

The show took its name from a 1972 album by the late Lou Reed, frontman of the Velvet Underground. Many of the artists are from Switzerland, such as Urs Lüthi and Walter Pfeiffer, although the exhibition will also include work by British artist Tony Morgan, and Andy Warhol.

In 1974 “Transformer: Aspekte der Travestie” received almost no press in the UK; however, it proved seminal in the study of gender and queer theories. Over the course of this year exhibitions such as “David Bowie is” at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the ICA’s off-site show “A Journey Through Subculture: 1980s to Now” have seen these once transgressive ideas gain clout within major British establishments. The show's curator Giulia Casalini told ARTINFO UK: “there has absolutely been an institutionalisation of queer theories and practices.” Citing Tate Liverpool’s recent show “Glam! The Performance of Style,” she explained that this is a good thing: “I have seen myself that over the past year institutions, the Tate for example, have been making a huge effort to show queer and feminist practices to the mainstream culture.”

The show at Richard Saltoun is not going to be an exact recreation of the original, but many of the exhibits will be the same. Where they are not, similar works by the same artists and from the same time period will be shown instead. The gallery is also going to host a series of film screenings, performances and talks that will run concurrently.  

“Transformer: Aspects of Travesty,” December 13 2013 until February 14 2014, Richard Saltoun Gallery

Lada Gaga has announced the launch of a pop-up ARTPOP Gallery Exhibition in Australia in 2014, to celebrate the launch her latest album of the same name.

The Australian ARTPOP Gallery will be the first international art exhibition inspired by Gaga and will feature a digital display of Gaga-inspired fan art created by her “Little Monsters.”

The organizers of the ARTPOP Gallery have confirmed that Lady Gaga will make the trip to Australia to celebrate the launch of her first live gallery exhibition.

Gaga fans can submit their artworks for the digital gallery via the ARTPOP Gallery website. A select few entrants will be given the chance to show Lady Gaga their artwork in person at the opening of the gallery.

“You are the ARTPOP generation and this is the beginning of our revolution,” says Lady Gaga in a video message to Australia. “Your ideas and your creativity are what keep me excited about making music every year.”

“Soon I am coming to Australia where we will be creating our very our very own ARTPOP Gallery to showcase all of your amazing creations. This is really what ARTPOP is all about. It is time for you shine,” she said.

For more information on the Australian ARTPOP Gallery visit the Gallery website here.

Watch Gaga's message to her fans below.

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Buyers and viewers have been flocking to Sotheby’s for the private selling exhibition “Les Lalanne: The Poetry of Sculpture,” which opened late last month and runs through this Friday (November 22). The exhibition, which was curated by avid Lalanne collector Michael Shvo working with New York dealer Paul Kasmin, features a broad sampling of married artist duo Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne’s whimsical, iconic animal and flora sculptures, including sheep, bears, bunnies, apples and a never-before exhibited bronze ram “Mouflon de Ram Island (grand),” (1999) and “Vache Bien Etablie,” the latter of which is a bronze cow-turned-table.

Nearly half of the 36 works were sold within days of the October 31 opening (prices range from $20,000 to $1.5 million), and a higher-than-average level of over 3,000 visitors have come to the show at Sotheby’s, a spokesperson confirmed, which was held under the auspices of its S|2 private sale and gallery arm. Further enticing viewers was the transformation of the exhibition space into a “midnight garden,” with deep blue walls and ample greenery at a cost of more than $120,000, according to Shvo. “The setting is magical,” said Shvo, who helped source the hard-to-find works from private collections. “We were determined to create something spectacular,” he added. “My feeling is that if you do something you go all the way or you don’t do it all.”

Shvo, a real estate developer, explained that the show was timed to take advantage of the traffic Sotheby’s typically generates during its fall auction season, “when every big collector is in New York with their minds focused on art.” The plan was successful, in part, because it “introduced Lalanne to a group that didn’t necessarily know this body of work,” Shvo pointed out — and further, who wouldn’t necessarily make a trip to a gallery to see it.

François-Xavier gained renown for his oversize animals that often contain secret compartments or double as functional furniture, while Claude was recognized for flora-inspired sculptures such “L’Homme à Tete de Chou,” (a man with the head of a cabbage) that was featured on French artist Serge Gainsbourg’s 1976 album of the same name.

The S|2 show comes on the heels of Shvo’s already wildly popular “Sheep Station,” public art exhibition, in which he and Kasmin placed more than two dozen sheep sculptures by François-Xavier in a Getty gas station-turned-grass station in West Chelsea, complete with sloping hills on which the sheep are perched. (Shvo has purchased the property, which sits under the High Line park, and plans to turn the site into luxury residences.)

Though the Getty exhibition is non-commercial, Shvo said that it “clearly brought the sheep to the public in a very large way, and it quickly went viral.” He added that visitors from around the world — ranging from Ecuador to Russia to Paris to London — have turned out to see it, and that heavy usage of social media along with traditional media has resulted in worldwide distribution of images from the show.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

NORFOLK, UK — Modesty wasn’t on the agenda when Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister, commissioned the building of Houghton Hall in the 1720s. Intended to reflect his considerable status, the design was devised by architects James Gibbs and Colen Campbell, with interiors by William Kent, and took into consideration the fact that Walpole was also a considerable art collector too.

The likes of Rembrandt, Velazquez, Poussin and Van Dyck adorned the bespoke walls of the house, forming one of most famous art collections of its time. That was until after Walpole’s death, when the extent of the debt that his Old Masters habit had caused was revealed. And so, in 1799 the collection was sold to Catherine the Great, who whisked the paintings away to be re-housed at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

Now, 200 years later, the collection has found its way back to Norfolk for “Houghton Revisited”, for which the works have been re-hung by curator Thierry Morel and Lord Cholmondeley (Houghton’s current owner and a direct descendent of Walpole) according to the original plans. Blouin ARTINFO took a trip to the countryside to see this remarkable collection in its sumptuous surroundings, talking to Lord Cholmondeley about the history and future of Houghton Hall. 

“Houghton Revisited” will be on display in Norfolk through November 24. 

A buzz of activity greeted me when I entered Shoja Azari’s vast second-floor studio, located above SoHo’s bustling Canal Street, on a late-summer afternoon. The Iranian-born artist was helping Shahram Karimi—his childhood friend turned collaborator and studio mate—move a canvas in progress. Acclaimed film and video artist Shirin Neshat, the studio’s third resident and Azari’s partner, emerged from her half
 of the space to say hello. The couple’s dog circled. Such ties speak to the throughline of Azari’s work, grounded in collective practice and concerned with shared experiences of colonialism, trauma, and revolution.

Azari’s collaborations with Neshat have achieved iconic status. Soon after meeting the fellow Iranian in 1997, he helped with production on and played the male singer in Neshat’s 1998 two-channel video Turbulent; the project catalyzed 
their relationship. Since then, he has shared directing and writing credits on all her film projects, including their 2009 collaboration Women Without Men. And over the past few years, his solo artistic output and “video paintings” produced with Karimi have garnered steady attention. On the day of my visit, Azari and Karimi were preparing two upcoming exhibitions. Their joint effort “Magic of Light” opened at Jersey City’s massive arts complex, Mana Contemporary, in September, and this month Leila Heller Gallery in New York presents Azari’s solo show “The King of Black.”

Raised in the town of Shiraz, Azari trained as a filmmaker in New York from 1977 until he felt compelled to return home during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. After engaging in underground collective political activity, he relocated permanently to New York in 1983. Azari takes the long view of history in a cinematic and political sense. His films, such as Windows, 2005, have relied on long, sustained, often painterly views, as opposed to the quick-cut aesthetic of television and news media. Recently, his film works have taken a palimpsestic turn. He and Karimi have invented the technique of video painting. Azari films short sequences of images — trees swaying in the fall breeze, for example — which are looped and projected onto a canvas that Karimi has painted to closely resemble a still from the video. The layering of subtly shifting video footage over painting gives the impression of almost hallucinatory movement.

The artist has focused his desire to “fuse the past and present” in works that take Eastern imagery as a point of departure. Often, Azari layers traditional scenes with contemporary images as a critical gesture. For his “Icons” series from 2010, Azari animated a series of images of martyred Shiite imams — a kind of “religious pop kitsch” you find in every Iranian household, the artist explains. Azari filmed the tear-filled eyes of several Persian women and collaged this video footage over the male imams’ eyes. An indirect response to the death of Neda Agha-Soltan (the female victim whose murder by police during the 2009 Iranian election protests ignited mass political consciousness), the works function as a “subversion of religious patriarchy,” the artist says. An image of Mohammad Modabber’s storyboard-like 19th-century Qajar “coffee house painting” forms the background of The Day of the Last Judgment (Coffee House Painting), 2009. Azari projects contemporary video over Modabber’s composition depicting vignettes of hell and paradise. Each segment of the scene, in turn, is animated by equally hellish sequences sourced from YouTube. These include footage of American soldiers wreaking havoc in Iraq, the 2009 demonstrations in Iran, testimony from the 2005 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse and torture trials, and an epistle from a female suicide bomber.

Azari and Karimi’s new series of four video paintings, “Forsaken,” traces the passage of seasons and the dissolution of a nuclear family in the small, economically depressed mining town of Port Henry, New York. These slices of life, featuring a mother, father, and two children, dramatize the dark underbelly of Western capitalism. Azari would eventually like to produce a film with local actors on this theme.

“The King of Black” will center on Azari’s 24-minute film of the same title. The work premiered in “Love Me, Love
 Me Not,” an exhibition at the Arsenale Nord at this past summer’s Venice Biennale. The King of Black recounts the first chapter of Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi’s 12th-century epic The Seven Beauties. In this Zoroastrian myth, a man comes to know the world through his relationships with seven women, representing seven planets. The live-action 
film takes place in an animated background composited from images of hundreds of Persian miniatures. Structured with intertitles, like a silent film, the work narrates a king’s search for discovery, leading him from a land of sorrows to a paradise populated by unearthly virgin beauties (styled, ironically, according to conventions of Western Orientalist harem scenes). When the king shows his impatience to bed the Queen of
the Virgins, she expels him from paradise to become king of the miserable. Nizami’s proto-postmodern “deconstruction
of Islamic paradise,” Azari says, as well as the original myth’s celebration of female knowledge, attracted him to the story.

The work will join a video painting entitled Idyllic Life, 2012, based on a 16th-century Persian miniature, and an installation
of paintings produced by a hired master painter. In these canvases, contemporary stereotypical signifiers of Middle Eastern “terrorists” will be inserted into traditional Orientalist scenes. For example, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer, circa 1870—the painting that graces the front cover of cultural theorist Edward Said’s 1978 postcolonial groundbreaker Orientalism— will be transformed by the addition of modern weaponry. “The pornographic gaze of today is a continuation of the odalisque first produced by Orientalist painters” of the 18th and 19th centuries, Azari notes. Additional Pop-inspired paintings that emphasize Western erotic tropes underscore this formal connection.

Azari is quick to say that biography — his past political engagements in Iran, his relationship with Neshat — should not overshadow the reading of his work. And indeed, his output stands as more than the distillation of personal details. But these very facts are indissoluble from his artistic position. His personal experience of revolution, marginalization, and consciousness, as much as any abstraction, drives his excavations of history’s grand narratives for connections to our collective present.

This article is published in December 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

Jonathan Schipper’s latest show at Pierogi Gallery’s massive satellite space in Williamsburg, the Boiler, features a hand-built sculpture-making machine,
a giant room filled with 12 tons of salt, and a hot tub open for visitors to watch the installation in action. Over the course of the exhibition, Schipper’s apparatus continues to build tiny white sculptures within the gallery space resulting in a topographical installation that functions as a tongue-in-cheek meditation on impermanence and decay — longtime themes in the artist’s work.

See it before it closes this Sunday.

Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff out into the art world, charged with reviewing the shows they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)

“Brancusi in New York 1913-2013,” at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Closing January 11, 2014.

Kasmin’s 100-year Constantin Brancusi show, an attempt to keep up with the big boys’ historical shows, not only falls flat, but comes off as exceedingly corny with the artist’s Modernist quotes adorning the walls (“what is real is not the external form, but the essence of things”). — Ashton Cooper (Watch video HERE)

Marc Dennis, “An Artist, A Curator, and A Rabbi Walk Into a Bar...” at Hasted Kraeutler. Closing January 4, 2014.

Trompe l’oeil painting gets a decidedly modern twist in Marc Dennis’s masterfully executed, frequently hilarious, hyperreal mashups of art historical references ladden with issues of voyeurism and art world navel-gazing, including a very correctly costumed Dallas Cowboys cheerleader (with pom poms) contemplating Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and uberdealer Larry Gagosian depicted in an Old Master-style portrait with a “vanitas” theme — dressed in all black with a ruffled white collar and holding a skull. — Eileen Kinsella

“The Encyclopedic Palace,” at the 55th Venice Biennale. Closing November 24.

Rich with outsider artists and delightfully obsessive weirdos but dragged down in places by the inclusion of way too many off-theme gallery stars — including what, in a just world, would be a career-ending calamity of an installation by Paweł Althamer — the main show of this year’s Venice Biennale is nevertheless an incredible curatorial achievement, and if it were a nations-based competition its grand champions would be the Japanese artists. — Benjamin Sutton

Julie Evans, “Mylar Constructions,” at Winkleman Gallery. Closing November 27.

Julie Evans’s stunningly executed and delicate constructions of bleeding, brilliant green, pink, brown, grey, and orange paints on mylar and paper, cut-up and pieced together to mimic the forms of ancient or alien vegetation, may seem simplistic at first glance, but will mesmerize and seduce you if you give them the chance — particularly the series mounted directly to the gallery wall. — Alanna Martinez

In a bedroom studio in Bushwick, a young man is making guns. The process is labor-intensive and complex, sourced from parts that he’s found on the Internet. The young man, Tabor Robak, 27, has also been Googling pipe bombs, lumpy things built of sponges and nails. He’s thoughtful and soft-spoken, this young man; he plays a lot of video games. To be fair, the weaponry is purely imaginary—electronic fodder for an exhibition opening later this month at New York’s Team Gallery. The guns are being assembled in the 3-D modeling program Unity Pro, which the artist has taught himself to use over the past few years. They’ll end up in a seven-video monitor installation called Xenix, which depicts and fictionalizes the creation of the virtual guns themselves through the lens of imaginary computer operating systems, all of it interwoven with bizarre television programming schedules, an oblique domestic narrative, and maps that could depict either “Santa’s plan to distribute toys or video games” or “the CIA shipping weapons around the world,” Robak says. Like most of his work, it’s high-tech, high-concept, and thoroughly strange.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Robak is a member of a generation that grew up with computers as companions, and he has 
found a certain beauty in their sprawling aesthetic, from first-person shooter video games to clip art to smartphone games.
He studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland before relocating to New York, where he supported himself with corporate projects for the likes of AT&T and Nike, using many of the same techniques that he applies to his art projects. As a result, many of those works have a notably professional sheen. Screen Peeking, 2012, a multichannel piece that was shown at this summer’s “Expo 1” at MOMA PS1, a marvel of technological prowess, featuring four distinctive built environments: a sort of warrior’s cabin filled with meat and other bounty; a model of Lawsons, a fully stocked Japanese convenience store; a pristine, Food channel–worthy studio in which the camera ogles invented riffs on the molecular-gastronomy canon; and a biomorphic space populated by cellular doughnuts and other oddities. As with most of his pieces, Robak expects the viewer to experience it like a painting: “You stand there and look at it, you enter and leave whenever you want.” What we see on-screen is the artist’s recorded journey through the 3-D environment he has built; collectors who purchase the works are given access to the virtual environment itself, allowing them to explore on their own.

"Free- to-Play," 2013 (detail) / Courtesy the Artist and Team Gallery

Occasionally, Robak’s work is more low-tech, as with a new piece, Free-to-Play (all works 2013), which he constructed using a $200 mega-package of icons that he whittled down to his 7,000 favorites. The icons form a moving wallpaper that scrolls downward across four stacked monitors; the artist compares it to “slicing a skyscraper and looking at the DNA of what’s going on in the building.” (Even the relatively mundane icons can get Robak rhapsodizing: He’s fond of “that layer of gloss on them” that is “both a heavenly glow that product photography has, but also kind of like the slime that comes on a newborn baby.”) The visual concept is based on Match 3 games, popular time-waster apps. “They’re mesmerizing,” Robak says. “It’s easy to completely forget yourself when you’re playing one of those games—you totally become a robot.” In Free-to-Play, the falling progression of the icons is set in motion by rules that Robak has put in place, with the final result out of his hands. “A lot of my new work has a random element, where I set up these really elaborate systems,” he says. “I’ve determined how the image is going to look, but there are details that I let the computer control. For me, that’s really rewarding—at the end of the day, I can have a little distance from the piece.”

A similar randomization process informs Algos, a virtual roller-coaster ride through interior and exterior spaces whose imagery Robak has culled from creative commons photographs. When he shows me the in-progress version, he’s still tinkering with the fluctuation in speed as the virtual camera progresses along the looping track. The title, he says, refers to Wall Street trading programs. Money of a different sort will also be present once Robak adds in a succession of coins alongside the track modeled after the ones from the Super Mario Bros. video game. He imagines the roller coaster as a form of electrical wiring traveling through the interconnected spaces.

"20XX," 2013 (detail) / Courtesy the Artist and Team Gallery

The centerpiece of Robak’s show at Team is 20XX—adating convention, he explains, used in sci-fi and anime to refer to 
“a not too distant future”—a landscape of gleaming skyscrapers, all of them bearing advertisements for various video-game companies. Envisioned by the artist as a melding of Times Square and Las Vegas, it’s both beautiful and horrifying, an alien topology shimmering with purple neon, awash in marketing. “Brand and logo appropriation is an idea that has gained traction among many artists,” Robak reflects. “I wanted to think about that in this piece. It’s like a cyberpunk city: Everyone is being oppressed or consumed by these companies. But a big part of cyberpunk is being oppressed but loving it, which is of course pretty problematic.”

When Robak asks me if I play video games myself, I have to admit that I haven’t, not in years—and that part of the reason 
is the eerie feeling of being at home, alone, traversing an unpopulated environment. It’s weird, and lonely. One gets a similar sensation while inhabiting his artworks, which, up until this point, have never included any virtual humans. “I’ve always found that figures communicate too much, or they can look melodramatic very easily,” he says. “It hasn’t been something I’ve been ready to use.” That might change soon: Robak has been exploring options offered by Mixamo, which sells preprogrammed 3-D characters—humans, monsters, animals— performing various physical actions. For a few thousand dollars, a user can purchase access to the entirety of Mixamo’s output thus far. Robak is brainstorming a virtual mall that would play host to all of these digitized souls, from the Zombie Girl Scout to Business Dan, jostling and fighting and randomly perambulating through a space that he has created. He scrolls through the site’s offerings, and for a while we watch a dead-eyed German shepherd loping in place. “I’ve fantasized about making a zoo before,” Robak notes. He pulls up a young 3-D female enacting a slow-motion, rave-inflected dance. “Maybe,” he says, “I’ll make a Burning Man.”

This article is published in the November 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama contemplates life and death in her sprawling debut exhibition at David Zwirnerin New York. The 84-year-old artist has stated that death is merely around the corner. The epic exhibition spans the gallery’s three consecutive locations on West 19th Street. Vivid in color, it features twenty-seven new, large-scale paintings, alongside a poetic video installation and two mirrored infinity rooms, one of which was specially made for the Zwirner show. Blouin ARTINFO spent some time with Kusama when she visited last month for the opening, on leave from the Japanese psychiatric hospital where she spends her days.

Yayoi Kusama’s “I Who Have Arrived in Heaven” is on view at David Zwirner’s 19th Street gallery until December 21. 

The late French artist César Baldaccini’s work is being explored in a sprawling retrospective at New York’s Luxembourg & Dayan. “César” is the artist’s first solo show in the United States in more than half a century. It fills the entirety of the gallery’s Upper East Side townhouse. Featuring 24 rare objects from the artist’s estate, major museums, and important private collections. The show focuses in particular on works from the 1960s and 70s and coincides with the 60th anniversary of the artist’s first one-man exhibition, which took place at the Galerie Lucien Durand in Paris.  César was a founding member of the Nouveaux Réalistes in 1960, working alongside contemporaries like Yves Klein, Christo and Martial Raysse. The exhibition is the result of a years-long collaboration between the gallery and Stéphanie Busuttil-Janssen, head of Foundation César and the artist's former companion. Blouin ARTINFO spoke with Busuttil-Janssen about the show.

César is on view at Luxembourg & Dayan at 64 East 77th Street in New York until January 18, 2014.

Alex Prager seems not to be having any trouble standing out in a crowd. The photographer and filmmaker has become an artistic force of nature despite having picked up a camera only in her mid-20s, after being inspired by William Eggleston. In 2010 she was tapped for the Museum of Modern Art’s influential “New Photography” series; her work is now in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and SFMOMA, and she’s a regular contributor to publications like W and Vogue. Prager currently has a major exhibition on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., through March 9, featuring works from a new series, “Face in the Crowd.” Some of those same images will be shown next month at Lehmann Maupin, the artist’s new gallery in New York. Julie Baumgardner caught up with Prager, known for her distinctively cinematic style, and discovered how deeply ingrained the silver screen is in her blood.

Why the switch to Lehmann Maupin?

I think they can help with getting my work out to a broader audience, as well as have it seen in a different context. The films have always been important to me, but it has become more important to be seen as a photographer. Lehmann Maupin represents artists who do film but who also make sculpture and painting. There is more room and freedom to experiment.

You’re a self-taught artist. How did you start making films, and how did those films translate to your vision as a photographer?

It came naturally—I didn’t even plan to get into film. I was exhibiting in London, my “Big Valley” series, in 2008 or so. That show was interesting because a lot of people came up to me at the opening and asked me what was happening in the photos in the moments before and after;
 people were just automatically 
turning the still moments into full scenes. They told me what their ideas were, what was happening to these women in the photos. A producer came up to me at the end of the opening and said, “Hey, if you ever want to make a short film, let me know.”
At the time, I was starting to get bored with photography. 
(That happens after almost 
every show I do: I get bored for 
a little while, and then suddenly 
I’m like, “I need it!” and I go back into it.) But at that moment, I didn’t know if I wanted to continue taking still photos. So I threw myself into moving images. There are so many new challenges in the medium; coming out of that, I suddenly craved still photography again. And I was able to approach both in a different way.

For the Corcoran show, you created
 an entire new body of work. Can you tell me a bit about it?

I had just finished showing my “Compulsion” series when Kaitlin Booher,
 a curator at the Corcoran, asked me if I would be interested in doing a show with them.
 She said that she’d love for me to make a couple of new pictures. And I already knew what my next series should be: I wanted to do “Face in the Crowd.” There are so many different ways to feel in a crowd. You can feel really alone and lost. There have been times when I just wander, staring at faces, especially in New York, where there are so many interesting characters. You look around at each person and wonder what their story is and where they are going. In L.A. we don’t have that city center full of crowds. I’ve always been interested in really unique faces and unique characters, like in Fellini or Woody Allen films. I wanted to bring light to all of that.

"Crowd #3 (Pelican Beach)," 2013 / Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin, NY and Hong Kong, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY and M+B Gallery, LA

Are movies a huge influence on your work in general?

I wouldn’t say that they are a direct influence, even though people always mention Hitchcock. It’s interesting—I haven’t really seen that many Hitchcock films.

And are you interested in other photographers? When I think of crowds, I think of Andreas Gursky. But also, in regard to your work, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia comes to mind.

I definitely love those two, and other photography that uses staged ideas. But I have to say my main influence has always been street photographers—gritty, unexpected street photography that’s shot really artfully. When I need inspiration, I’ll just go through all my street-photography books and find interesting characters with strange outfits that make you think, Wow, I can’t believe that person actually put that on that day and thought it was a good idea.

Growing up, did you have creative ambitions?

I wanted to be an actress, a singer, a dancer. I was just one of those annoying kids. I lived in Los Feliz. I didn’t even go to high school. When I was 14 or so, I met this girl from Switzerland whose grandmother owned a knife shop. And I was just starting to get into a little bit of trouble; as a 13-year-old, I started dating a guy who was really bad news. Because we didn’t have money, my parents basically had two options: send me to public school in Los Angeles, which is kind of a scary thought, or send me to Switzerland to work in the knife shop. So I went to Switzerland. I stayed there for about five months with my friend, and then I traveled around Europe—that was my education—just traveling. To have had a formal education, to go through the whole system and then decide that you are going to risk everything, teach yourself to be an artist, fuck all the rules and go out and do it—that would have taken so much more courage than I have. Had I gone through the system a normal way, I don’t think I would have been brave enough to do it.

You might have seen Alexander Calder’s (1898- 1976) kinetic universe of oscillating metal sculptures in the light of the Guggenheim or the Whitney Museum, but wait until you see them at Venus Over Manhattan — practically in the dark.

Organized by Adam Lindemann of Venus Over Manhattan in collaboration with The Calder Foundation, “Calder Shadows” presents a dozen rare mobiles and stabiles by the Philadelphia-born artist with their shadows cast around the Upper East Side gallery space.

“It’s an engagement of your space,” said Alexander (Sandy) Rower, Calder’s grandson, who also heads The Calder Foundation. “He didn’t really think you should project a light on the sculpture; although he wouldn’t have objected to it. It’s really cool.”

According to Rower, the exhibition is an in-depth exploration of Calder’s idea of activation of space. The silhouettes and reflections projected by these moving models create ever-changing volumes, thus enhancing the viewer’s interaction within the space.

Among these sculptures created between 1929 to 1974, visitors can view the “Little Black Flower (c.1944),” a work privately held that has not been exhibited since 1940s. The sculpture is composed of a small black tulip-shaped flower held by a wire ‘stem’, surrounded by red metals and wires that seem to mimic a vine of moving leaves with its shadows dancing in the background.

“It’s really a surprise,” said Rower. “I’ve lived with these sculptures all my life and to see something almost organic is exciting.”

The exhibition is on view now through December 21 at Venus Over Manhattan.

Another exhibit, “Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic” also is open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from now until July 6, 2014.

Resurrecting a group of 
works that, with a few key exceptions, haven’t been seen much at all outside Poland, this exhibition makes the case for the late Zielinski’s (1943–80) relevancy in the 21st century. The suite of oil paintings, made between 1968 and 1977, are simple, strange things: boldly graphic, populated
 by demons, hummingbirds, and human lips. While press materials stress the influence of communist political aesthetics on Zielinski’s output, the canvases also recall the oddball surrealism of Eastern European film posters from the same era.

Nothing is quite right in Zielinski’s world: Highways lead straight into the mouths of goblins, a man burns in hellfire, and tongues are pierced by nails—quite literally, in the case of Bez Bentu (Without Rebellion), 1970, which features a stuffed pillow dangling from the canvas’s surface and onto the floor. The paintings’ large scale is surprising given the subject matter, and there’s
a case to be made that Zielinski’s vision has more impact when executed in 
a smaller field, as it is in Cena Cywilizacji (The Price of Civilization), 1971—notable 
as well for breaking with the artist’s fairly strict red/green/blue/white range and allowing a mustard tint to take over the background.

Like dreams, Zielinski’s paintings—personal, hermetic, and often tinged with lusty innuendo—are hard to crack. (In Smak Namietnosci [Taste 
of Passion], 1971, a red hummingbird dips its beak into the crevice of an intensely vaginal fruit-or-flower, which happens to be dripping blood.) While most of these works
are figurative, Zielinski steps into interesting territory with Dlatego Wciqz Zyiq (This Is Why They Are Still Alive), 1969, in which raw pink shapes stand in for bodies. This convocation of fleshy nothings proves the artist’s capacity 
to conjure complex images with the barest of tools.

"Jerzy 'Jurry' Zielinski: Paintings 1968-1977" is on view at at Luxembourg & Dayan, London, from October 15-December  14.

This review is published in the January 2014 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

A New York gallerist for nearly three decades, Jack Shainman has a finger firmly on the pulse of the thriving art scene in which he's made his name. Shainman's namesake gallery was founded in Washington D. C. in 1984 and has called various spaces home in New York since moving operations shortly after.

“What’s exciting about having the gallery in New York is that anything can happen. People come in from all over the world,” he says. “The most exciting thing is working with artists and seeing the artists develop.”   

With no signs of slowing down, Shainman, earlier this year announced that the gallery was adding 32,000 feet of new exhibition space in addition to its flagship location at West 20th Street. A second—2,400-square-foot—Chelsea location opened in March.  Shainman also revealed plans for a 30,000-square-foot upstate space tentatively title the School in Kinderhook.

Blouin ARTINFO spoke with Shainman at his gallery on 20th Street where he is currently showing the work of sculptor Susana Solano. 

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