Make Your Own Artist Stamps: Michel Hosszù

Michel Hosszù, the French artist known the world over for his stamps – Marquis de Sade, Coluche, Famous People, Warhol, Van Gogh's Self Portraits and thousands of other editions for individual artists – will print your own designs as stamps. Individual stamps, small sheets and large format sheets permit artists to create limited editions of varying kinds.

Michel Hosszù has long practiced mail art with a focus on stamps. Several works from the 1980s feature the red Marianne French postage stamp covering entire canvases. The artist says: "I used to work in a factory where my job was to get rid of mailed envelopes, so I peeled off thousands of these canceled stamps." Other strange and wonderful objects have sailed in and out of his Bastille studio over the decades.

Michel has also helped me produce my limited edition, Rubens Rounding Third, an ode to baseball, art and the sexy gaze of an amorous public and player.

Artists, photographers, designers and others have the opportunity now to produce their own stamps using whatever image and text they desire. Formats vary, so it's best to take a good look at how to organize an edition using these design grids.

Cost is relatively minor compared to the impact of these great little works of art. My guess is they'll also make interesting gifts for people who want to immortalize a friend or a pet or even, hey! an idea on a stamp.

Contact: Michel Hosszù in Paris.

EYEHOLE ART

Eyehole Paintings with Adam West from Adam West

Landscape in America: Howard Rose

Reproducing the landscape on canvas, whether an abandoned beach or a busy city street, a sun-bleached roof or a snow-caked tree, has been the obsessed province of painters since forever.

The great outdoors in America became a high art with the works of the Hudson Valley River painters fueled perhaps by the writings of Henry David Thoreau. In France, Cezanne and Monet, went outdoors and their un-peopled designs of nature crushed in pigment magnified through the prism of the eye changed both the way we see the world and structure of painting itself. In the process of describing the world in paint, the medium itself became a subject: A swath of sunlight rendered in a longish patch of cadmium yellow modified with titanium white.  You could almost eat it. Thick and lustrous, paint depicted the natural world, and the painting itself then became an object for the man-made one.

Howard Rose does just that in his massive catalog of landscape works. Producing larger format and miniature canvases, the Long Island-based artist (and teacher), has mapped out the glowing corners of the soft and worn world around him.

In the last 100 years most every artist beginning at a very young age has painted the tree they first climbed, the house they grew up in, or the horizon that met them as they pondered the damn meaning of it all. The real world – the familiar – is the basis for art: Broken down barns, their colors wilting in the summer sun or brooks eking out a dribble of water under a blanket of snow, or waves transparent and curling, cresting on an empty beach. The impulse to immortalize a flowering meadow, a patch in the woods, a range of mountains, shadows on a footpath is innately human, it's about mixing memory with desire, creating elaborate traces of what we've seen, and what we see.     

Howard Rose is a hunter-gatherer of these five-senses moments. Using photography as a framing device, or sometimes working directly in nature, the artist restates the world in compelling compositions that are solid but dreamy, sensual and sure. 

It's fair to say that Howard Rose is thrilled by light. And he's mastered the various techniques to give light palpable reality on canvas without tilting over into the photo-realist canon. His transparent foam cresting waves breaking on an Atlantic shore are perfect haikus of action: A poetic fusion of Nature's various verbs. Dune grasses, sun dappled paths, clapboard houses wrapped in the blueish haze of afternoon snow are all fascinations for this artist, and each foray into these subjects yields compositions are both examine the texture of the world and ultimately the mind that seizes it.

A graduate of The School of Visual Arts, in New York City, and post-graduate studies at C.W. Post college, Howard Rose also studied  at the New School of Social Research for Photography.

Howard Rose runs a painting workshop and has written extensively on teaching and technique for publications such as Artist's Magazine and American Artist Magazine, and he leads oil painting workshops throughout the Northeast, including The Hudson Valley Workshops, The Art Barge in East Hampton, and Southampton Oil Painting Workshop as well as The Huntington Art League and C.W. Post College.

Photo: Howard Rose and excited guest at his recent one-man show at Chrysalis Gallery in Southampton, New York.

Visit one of his galleries: Les Bons Amis Locust Valley, NY. Or click here to see more of Howard Rose's work.  His work shop is here.

Your Art Here: Spelling With Scissors

I've entered my full on, wall to wall to wall from ceiling to floor installation work Spelling With Scissors in the H&M contest, Your Art Here.  Take a look, vote (click on the stars), and survey the other artist proposals.  If you're an artist, submit your own entry.  It's free.

MATTHEW ROSE Spelling With Scissors: Your Art Here (Vote).

Roy Lichtenstein: Autumn in New York

“Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968” is on view through Jan. 2 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street;(212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.

“Roy Lichtenstein: Mostly Men”  through Oct. 30 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, 18 East 77th Street, Manhattan;(212) 249-4470.

“Roy Lichtenstein Reflected” through Oct. 30 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 744-7400.

NYT Article by Roberta Smith.

Image above: “Indian” (1951), at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

Credit: Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, Leo Castelli Gallery

Philippe Bonan: Portraits Of The Artists

Prior to the invention of photography we barely knew what artists looked like beyond their enhanced self-portraits, if indeed they painted them. Nowadays, everyone is an artist, and everyone has a camera, so there's no lack of documentaries on the artist at play, the artist at work, the artist drunk, the artist being kissed by the celebrity. In the 21st century, there is little doubt the artist is a celebrity, too, and portraits are much in demand (just ask Timothy Greenfield-Sanders).  The straight up portrait, the official gaze of the artist without props, attempts to read the mind of the creative, focusing on the eyes, the skin texture, this fantastic being of our time.

Philippe Bonan, a French photographer with a voracious appetite for capturing artists on film, has a quest: Produce a massive catalog of living artists wherever they are. But he wants to keep it all very simple, but elegant, and above all real.

During the opening of Anthony Caro's exhibition at Danielle Templon in Paris, Philippe Bonan was visibly angling in the crowd around the sculptor to get off a shot. The French photographer has made a profession out of portraying artists in black and white or color, in their studios or, sometimes in front of their installations. Bonan's catalog of artists is impressive – Keith Haring, Ben Vautier, Daniel Buren, Christian Boltanski, George Baselitz, Arman, Fernando Botero, Valerio Adami – numbering in the hundreds.

Bonan's portraits generally lack props (Arman poses with a parrot in one, however) and steer clear of guise. These portraits are simple and real: only the artist in his or her environment, standing, sitting, aware of the lens but not disturbed by it. Some do, however, act out a mini-fantasy – Ben Vautier (above) scowling with his text work: Je veux rester le seul. (I want to be the only one). Or Icelandic artist Katrin Fridriks in paint-splattered art uniform curled up in her studio. Wearing. Bunny. Ears.

There is virtue in Bonan's great project: Like Vasari, the 16th century Italian painter generally credited with launching art historical writing with his literary sketches of the lives of his contemporaries, seeing artists as they live and work – "as they are" – not only dispels myths but permits those interested in understanding our time to fully grasp the fleeting presence artists have, even while their work carries on. Bonan's passion is real, and his project is, as artist after artist is added to his extensive black and white catalog, valuable both historically and visually.

A 1988 portrait of painter Hans Hartung, shows the artist tired, perhaps even beleaguered, full on in a close up; Hartung's thick black glasses obscure his face; he is revealed, if only for a moment.  Jim Dine is portrayed looking into a mirror; Donald Baechler in his studio in front of an unfinished, giant collage; Fabrice Hybert in sporty shorts and scarf leaning on the door jam to his kitchen. There is little heroicism about any of these images – thankfully – and that fact leads to their great interest.

Fascinating indeed is the ordinary photograph of the young Jasper Johns in his downtown New York loft in the early 1950s, fresh-faced and eager to take on the art world. Or a pale Andy Warhol walking along Madison Avenue on his way to work.  Pollack, bearded, pasty and fat, circa 1955 staring off into an uncertain future, headed for disaster is prescient because the photograph is simply him, the artist cast in the net of his own life.  A young Keith Haring (above), thoughtful, quiet having enjoyed a wild success, but whose days are numbered. Bonan camps around the same fire, and you can see in the eyes his artist subjects return to him, that they too, know they are but just a flicker in the landscape. But the warmth generated from Bonan's activity is genuine.  Take a look: Philippe Bonan.

Photograph of Philippe Bonan by © Didier Gicquel. All other images © Philippe Bonan.

Portrait: Thomas Fougeirol

I recently had the pleasure to visit painter Thomas Rougeirol's studio in Ivry-sur-Seine to talk about some of his new large canvases, his influences and processes.

This studio, one of two the French-born painter maintains (the other is in Bushwick, Brooklyn) is immense by any standard. But there is no sign of anyone else working here. His is a one-person operation, and by a quick calculation, Fougeirol works non-stop, as there are literally thousands of large and medium-sized canvases filling this giant factory space. 

Fougeirol works with positives and negatives, largely in black and white, and manipulates the paint-drenched canvas "brush" to map out the areas he's interested in accenting.  A serious collection of plastic shower curtains allows him to create all-over patterns that are by turn ghostly and photograph.

Thomas paints with his body, that is, he presses oil paint-soaked canvases and other items against his stretched canvases, and traces out a pattern line by line to produce a kind of monotype.  It is hard to produce anything larger than the size of his own body as he works on the floor, but some of his canvases measure 2.5 x 3.5 meters and "just get out the door," he says.

What's key for the 45-year old artist is that he isn't using machines to produce his works, say, in the manner Christopher Wool has recently by creating a mosaic out of an abstract painted pattern, refashioning them in Photoshop and producing a silkscreen. "No, I am the machine," Fougeirol insists.  In a way that Klein used bodies to produce magic works.  Or in a way that skid marks are made on a street: With the application (hard and fast) of the car brakes.  Other works are piled up spiraling custards of black or silver oil paint; several portray chandeliers, but almost all intimate death in an elegant, lush, near monumental fashion.

I mention two great German artists – Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter – and Fougeirol nods, familiar not only with their techniques, mystery and iconography but also with the deeper sense of their investigations – and his:  "The work here focuses on death, its immutability and its evasiveness." Thomas toys with a human skull he uses as a studio prop for paintings.  I look around: There is an enormous energy in these works, a kind of life-affirming activity, and a glowing light emanating from these canvases.

The imagery shifts quickly and easily from giant skulls, beds and armoires to a dark tangle of old branches in black. Some canvases are painted in hot flourescent pink, yellow and silver, and are printed over in a black grid. There is a wild thrill attached to all of these canvases, as if you're looking into the artist's open heart.  

See studio images here.  Gallery website: Praz-Delavallade.

Keith Donovan: Erotic English Armchair

Keith Donovan, a painter based in Le Jouhet, France, recently produced a hand painted erotic English armchair for collector in Switzerland and he's shared this with Store Front Windows.  The chair, originally a family heirloom, was transformed with erotic images this September into a high-end work of art.  One might say this is a perfect love seat, but you'd have to be sitting on someone to fit. Perhaps that's the idea. Hot seat.

Donovan follows a long history of artists who have reworked chairs, tables, even baby cribs as renovated art objects – such as Keith Haring, Claes Oldenburg, Marcel Broothaers among others.

"The image concerns heroic postures, and the memory of gentlemen who roamed the world and sat (later on) to recount the highs and lows.  It's andropausal in a way."

The images hail from 18th century French engravings from five different artists including the widely celebrated erotic Frenchman, Borel.

Check out the web site: Keith Donovan,

Banksy Speaks

"But I can't help feeling it was a bit easier when all I had to compete against was a dustbin down an alley rather than, you know, a Gainsborough or something."

– Banksy on his rising fame, from the article in the The Sun UK.

Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody's Fool At The Asia Society New York City

I met Yoshitomo Nara eight years ago just outside of Paris during an exhibition of his works at the Cneai, for his exhibition "Who snatched the babies?"

That show featured his full on take on snarling little girls wielding guns and knives.  The Cneai was jam packed with works and each one had, it seemed, taken the artist on some personal trip into anger, frustration, solitude and yet a distinct sense of humor and irony about it all.

The paintings and drawings – some of them whipped out fairly quickly – were all lovingly made.

At the time I was writing a piece on superflat Japanese pop art that included a massive group exhibition by Takashi Murakami at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. [That review exists but is no longer on the net; if you'd like to see it I can e mail you the PDFs. Write: Editor SFW.]

Mr. Nara who then spoke a halting English was very relaxed, hanging out with a bunch of his friends both Japanese and French, adorned in rock star sunglasses and enjoying the quiet reception for his work.

The artist was kind enough to sign a catalog for me, and even added a drawing of one of his signature little snarling girls blasting through space in a Jetson-like vessel. Since then, of course, Yoshitomo Nara's career has defied any notion of gravity. He has skyrocketed into the highest echelons of the art world (and art market) with these extremely simple but wildly sophisticated works.  Oddly enough, reaction to Mr. Nara's work is almost always joy and laughter.  At least that's from my informal poll.

He is a generous if slightly tortured artist who, as Roberta Smith writing in The New York Times noted, has seamlessly moved from high to low and all the middle genres in art without missing a step.

The artist now takes on New York with “Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool” on view through Jan. 20 at Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street; (212) 288-6400.  Asia Society Website.

See: Roberta Smith's review in NYT (September 9, 2010).

Martin Wöhrl At Emmanuel Perrotin Paris

Martin Wöhrl, Munich-based sculptor, at his opening in Paris at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, 10 impasse Saint Calude 75003 Paris), in front of one of his sun sculptures.  The pieces, he said, are composed of bits of cut wood that nobody wants.  They are composed using a range of colors from laminated wood and formica, a 1970s expression of home décor.  Other works are square or rectangular and riff off of a number of formalists from Malevich to Albers to Christian Eckhardt.

Photo: Martin Wöhrl in front of one of his works in Paris.

The New Yorker, writing about his debut exhibition in NYC, said of his assemblages "they call to mind shabby-chic artifice."

This is the 37-year old artist's first exhibition in Paris, and the ensemble of the dozen pieces fits perfectly in this chapel-like space.

Wöhrl is represented by Spencer Brownstone in New York.

Pinocchio

Pinocchio is a fictional character that first appeared in 1883, in The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.

Collage by Matthew Rose. 2010.

Max's Kansas City : 1968

From left, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin and Tim Buckley, at Max’s Kansas City, 1968

Courtesy Elliott Landy/Landyvision and Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC

Randy Kennedy article and photos from the NYT.

Cutlog 2010 New Contemporary Art Fair Paris

Cutlog’s next edition will take place at the Bourse du Commerce, october 21-24, 2010. 

Download the registration form for cutlog 2010 here

cutlog is a contemporary art fair in the heart of Paris, situated under the 1000 m2 dome of the Bourse du Commerce, 100 metres from the Cour Carrée du Louvre, between Beaubourg (Centre Pompidou), Concorde (Jeu de Paume museum) and the Grand Palais. 

Both an alternative and a complement to current parisian and international art fairs, cutlog is a vibrant intersection for artists, collectors, gallerists, curators and museum directors worldwide. The 30 to 40 galleries chosen to participate in cutlog 2010 will be selected for their independent or emerging status, or their ongoing support for emerging artists across the globe. cutlog will welcome a large number of private collectors and prestigious institutions, both French and International. cutlog’s jury will award a prize to the fair’s most surprising artist as well as an invitation to exhibit independently at cutlog 2011.

The Art Cure: THE ART CURE's International Artists Call

The Art Cure: THE ART CURE's International Artists Call: "We’ve had very warm responses from non-local artists wishing to donate artwork to The Art Cure project but not fitting the criteria of havin..."

Fluxface in Space: Exhibition Slide Show

Fluxface in Space: Exhibition Slide Show: "Fluxface in Space"

Andy Warhol Receives A Letter From The Campbell Soup Company - 1964

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE & READ.

GAY RIGHTS: SIGNS OF THE TIMES

See original post: http://twitpic.com/2bq5h4

The Unbearable Lightness Of Mercede Johnston

While reading Gail Collins column in today's New York Times, I learned that a subplot in the made-for-television romance, drama, tragedy, comedy that is Sarah Palin and her brood and her brood's made-for-television romance, drama, etc., Mercede Johnston, Levi's sister, has been blogging away up in Wasilla. And she tells all.  Well, she tells as much as she can tell and she gripes away in between photos of herself and Bristol and Levi and stories about four-wheeling up in Alaska.
 
So if you haven't spent an hour of your life reading through the backwoods of the Levi Johnston - Bristol Palin story told from a family member in a free-form diary, enjoy Mercede Johnston.

http://www.mercedejohnston.com/

Shakespeare & Company Paris

The bulletin board at Shakespeare & Company, Paris.  Notes and photomaton shots from visitors in the kids reading corner at the famed Paris bookshop on the Left Bank.

Collage By Cecil Touchon

Dallas artist, Cecil Touchon, takes his work on the road to Santa Fe's Nuart Gallery, in an expansive exhibition from his "Post Dogmatist" series – collage-inspired paintings and collages in all varieties of post dogmatist incarnations.

Touchon's painted works on canvas are based upon his own collage compositions and provide a kind of hyper mirror of the found bits and pieces in carefully produced designs that echo the broken record of visual data found on street walls throughout the world.  Using fragments of torn poster texts and type, the artist has re-imagined visual consciousness as still photos with beguiling, moving parts. Strict color schemes – and sometimes Bauhaus-inspired designs – offer a visual fluency of not only modernist tendencies, but contemporary ones.  The results are rich and well-wrought visual poems stripped down to their barest of bones.

(Pictured above: Post Dogmatist Painting 287, acrylic on birch panel, 40 x 30 inches).

Touchon's The Art of Collage runs through July 4, 2010.  Click to see installation shots.

Details: The Art of Collage/Cecil Touchon. The Nuart Gallery 670 Canyon Road  Santa Fe, NM 87501 Telephone: 505.988.3888

Wordpapering The World: Neolipic By John M. Bennett

Just out, Neolipic by John M. Bennett is a linguistic masterpiece.  And it's a free eBook from lulu.com.

About Neolipic: 158 poems (or barely constrained outbursts) written in the Spring of 2009 in which John M. Bennett tries to reformat the world with a swarm of linguistic distortions and formal jiggling, bursting out of the thin shirt of consciousness to reveal what's out there and also what's in there. The poems are textual, visual, aural, multi-lingual (English, Spanish - or their simulacra - and bits of French and Globbolalia). Unlike anything else written. 

Here is what others have said about John Bennett and his Neolipic:

"A bypassing into the region, a crossing over the border and a controlled/violent journey into the genius that is John M. Bennett. A living legend that in so many ways serves us that geography that we so richly need." – Chris Mansel

 

"Not merely a poet, John M. Bennett is almost a species unto himself. Every utterance becomes poetry, from the sweetest lines to the raw animal grunts that initially designated something new was happening on the planet. And new is what you get with Neolipic. It's the new word, the new way to allow words to happen, to allow the senses to reconfigure around what the mouth is doing. It's all charted here in Bennet's unbridled eruptions in which the past is erased and the future is impossible. To read this book is like bleeding for joy. A master at work. Don't be a sap. Download it!" –  Jake Berry

Click here to go to Neolipic's download site from lulu.com. 

Rob White's The Art Hole

UK artist, Rob White has just relaunched his online art shop THE ARTHOLE.

The irreverent British artist is selling original drawings, paintings and prints.  The A3-sized prints are produced on Hahnemuhle Torchon 285gsm acid free archival paper, which has a bright white parchment-like surface.

The twelve colour digital print technology guarantees high definition reproduction with UV safe pigments. Each print is limited edition and signed by the artist.

To go shopping: www.thearthole.co.uk/shop

Marc Quinn At White Cube London

Marc Quinn, Buck & Allanah, 2009.

Orbital sanded and flap wheeled lacquered bronze
65 3/4 x 41 5/16 x 17 11/16 in. (167 x 105 x 45 cm). © The artist; Courtesy White Cube.

Photo: Roger Wooldridge.

See the full article by Giovanni Aloi  from Whitehot Magazine.

Mark's Interiors of Boca Raton, Florida

SFW's loves consignment shops of all flavors. These small and intimate stores peek into the recent and distant past culling out for display (and sale) some of the more interesting pieces of our lives – for sale!

Mark's Interiors of Boca Raton, Florida is the kind of place where you find the rare and unusual item whether it's a 1940s Waterford cut glass pitcher or a pop art style pair of bar chairs, a cool cigarette stand, 1950s brass lamp or turn-of-the-century etchings.  The shop is packed with pre-owned furniture, all excellent quality, at prices that simply astonish. 

Located on 67 South Federal Highway, Boca Raton, Florida (Tel: 561.391.1052), Mark's shop is nestled in an entire block of high-end consignment shops.

Mark has been in business for nearly 20 years.  If you have estate furniture and household furnishings, he will come to your house and inventory everything, and once in the store, every item is tagged and computerized.

Web site: http://www.marksconsignment.com/

Public memorial in honor of Nancy Spero

Public memorial in honor of Nancy Spero
Sunday, April 18, 3:00pm

The Great Hall at Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street
New York, NY 10003 

Photo © Abe Frajndlich, 1987

Galerie Lelong, the Nancy Spero & Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts, and Paul, Philip and Steven Golub are pleased to announce a public memorial in honor of Nancy Spero on Sunday, April 18th at 3:00pm at The Great Hall at Cooper Union (7 East 7th Street). Speakers will include Robert Storr, Jon Bird, Donna De Salvo, Bartomeu Marí, Benjamin Buchloh, Kiki Smith, Christopher Lyon, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and a musical performance by Nora York. A reception will follow.

Nancy Spero (b.1926), one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, passed away on October 18, 2009 at the age of 83. For over fifty years, Spero made the female experience central to her art's formal and thematic development. Her radical career encompassed many significant visual and cultural movements from Conceptual Art to Post-Modernism to Feminism.

After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and l'École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Spero moved to New York in 1964. In Europe, Spero produced her first significant works, the Black Paintings—somber, figurative works allusive of existential oppositions and emotional turmoil. These works were made at a time when Pop Art and Minimalism were the focuses in the art world, marking Spero's first consistent oppositions to the prevailing conventions in art making. Nancy Spero's return to the U.S. in 1964 coincided with the ongoing Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. In this charged political climate, her passionate engagement with these issues engendered the groundbreaking aesthetic style and the political and feminist themes for which she is now known. The War Series was Spero's first significant body of work on paper, a support she would favor for the majority of her working career. Described by Spero as "broadsides," The War Series depicted women and children as v ictims of war and suffering, a theme that would occupy Spero for the next forty years.

Following The War Series, Spero produced two bodies of work: the Artaud Paintings and the Codex Artaud series, based on the French poet Antonin Artaud, whom Spero described as the "most extreme writer of the 20th Century." In reading Artaud, Spero coined the term "victimage," making a parallel between Artaud's language and her feeling of the "loss of tongue" as a female artist in a male-dominated art world. One of Spero's great inventions was the fracturing of text and image in the Codex Artaud works, which some critics have described as the first works of Post-Modernism. Following the Artaud series, Spero began work on her pioneering and critically lauded scroll series: Hours of the Night, 1974 (collection Whitney Museum of American Art), Notes in Time on Women, 1979 (collection Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Torture of Women, 1976 (collection National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).

In 2005, Spero created Cri du Coeur, her last monumental scroll work on paper, which depicts a continuous band of ancient Egyptian female mourners from the tomb of Ramose of Thebes. The striking images in Cri du Coeur reference women mourning losses in Iraq, Kashmir, and New Orleans, at the time of the making of this work. A similarly important work, Maypole/Take No Prisoners was presented in the entrance hall of the Italian Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Maypole/Take No Prisoners, a thirty-five-foot-tall hanging mobile featured severed heads dangling from red ribbons, commenting on the war in Iraq.

In 2008, the Museu d'art Contemporani Barcelona organized a full-scale retrospective, Nancy Spero: Dissidances, which traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville. The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris will present a retrospective exhibition of her work in 2010.

Nancy Spero was married to the artist Leon Golub (1922–2004) for over fifty years. In 1996, together they received the Hiroshima Art Prize—awarded to contemporary artists for their achievements in promoting world peace—and exhibited at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. Spero is survived by her three sons—Stephen Golub of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania; Philip Golub of Paris; and Paul Golub of Paris—six grandchildren; and sister, Carol Newman of Portland, Oregon.

Tax Form For Freelancers By Sam Potts

Originally published in The New York Times (Link).

John Himmelfarb : Geared Up At Luise Ross Gallery New York City, NY

John Himmelfarb's astonishing new sculptures in bronze and plywood as well as large-scale paintings are on view at the Luise Ross Gallery in New York City through April 17, 2010. 

See the work: John Himmelfarb at Luise Ross Gallery.

Himmelfarb is one of the most innovative artists working today.  His sense of line in everything he produces is absolutely his own.  You can see it in the drawings, prints and now in the sculptures.  His work is collected across the United States and in Europe.  He recently produced the iron gates for the Duncan home (and collection) in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The work pictured here is a new turn in the artist's oeuvre – taking to plywood to create one of his signature trucks.  A large scale (actual truck) was recently produced and a slide show is now on his web site, here: CONVERSION, LINCOLN, NEBRASKA.

Himmelfarb lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.  His most recent book is a compendium of his prints: The Prints of John Himmelfarb : A Catalogue Raisonné 1967 - 2004.  (Hudson Hills Press, Manchester, Vermont).

Surrealestate: Art Call For Mobius

SURREALESTATE is an artist call for works to benefit Mobius, the Boston-based artist run cultural center.

Mobius Fundraiser and art bash for Mobius Artrages 2010 is looking for all sorts of artist-made post cards (4 x 6 inches) to go towards keeping Mobius in business.

DEADLINE: MAY 1, 2010
THEME: SURREALESTATE
ARTBASH/FUNDRAISER: MAY 8, 2010.



SEND WORK TO: Jane Wang
Mobius, Inc.
725 Harrison Ave, Suite One
Boston MA 02118 USA

Performances, installations and art goings on are promised for the evening.  The theme for Artrages 2010: SURREALESTATE was conceived by Mobius' board member, Lou Susi, a performance and visual artist.

Mobius is teetering on bankruptcy and the SURREALESTATE fundraiser a last-ditch effort to raise money/awareness to buy the space Mobius has been renting.

DETAILS ABOUT THE CALL:

A 4x6 postcard with one side containing your artwork and the other side with a handwritten or printed or typed word/sentence/phrase -anything you would like to say - in ANY LANGUAGE - related to Surrealestate.

Your handwritten signature somewhere would be greatly appreciated!

What surrealestate means to you is completely open.

The cards will be exhibited and then sold or used as prizes during Mobius Artrages 2010.

All materials will be accepted - the DEADLINE IS MAY 1ST, 2010 to allow a week to organize the cards for the exhibition.  No materials will be returned, the works will be considered 100% donations to Mobius, Inc.

In lieu of a blog, this public facebook page has been set up for all the cards submitted.

If you are a facebook member, please upload a photo of your work (just the artwork side) and tag your name and feel free to add any comments/links about yourself and your work - however again please to not reveal what it says on the "hidden" side of your card. This will be revealed at Mobius Artrages 2010.

If YOU ARE NOT A FACEBOOK member, please email a jpeg file of your work to

Jane@mobius.org
Subject: 4x6 SURREALESTATE Photo

and your photo will be posted.

PLEASE SEND YOUR POSTCARD (physical work of art) TO:

ATTN: Jane Wang
Mobius, Inc.
725 Harrison Ave, Suite One
Boston MA 02118 USA

QUESTIONS:
E-mail Jane@mobius.org or via FaceBook directly if you wish with 4x6 Surrealestate in the subject line if you can.

AND FINALLY: Please post this call on your own websites and invite any artists you know who might be interested in this call.

Artybuzz.com : Artists' Web Window

Sometimes we at Storefrontwindows promote other store front windows, and this month, we're shining a light on Artybuzz.com, created by Richard Wilde. Here anyone the ability to upload images of their artwork which can then be sold as prints, canvases, t shirts, etc.

Image: Shaun Crump's BIG FOOT.


Here is what Richard told us about the site/community:

Artybuzz.com is free to join and gives every member their own dedicated online space to showcase and sell their work from. The website is based around a community ethos, and gives members the ability to join and create their own groups, advertise their exhibitions and events, interact with other creatives and gain feedback on their work through a comments system.

“Artybuzz provides a hassle free way for creatives to get their work noticed and sold," said Richard. "All people have to do is set their price, upload images of their work and choose the products they want to sell on. When artworks are purchased, we manufacture and distribute orders on behalf of our members and then send them their earnings.” Artybuzz takes no commission from sales and takes no subscription fee.

"Artybuzz.com operates internationally and prides itself on setting no restrictions on who can join its online community. Richard Wilde said, “at Artybuzz, we provide an indiscriminate place where creatives of all ages, abilities, styles and backgrounds can show and gain recognition for their work.” The website has a diverse range of art covering areas including, painting, sculpture, illustration, photography, design and more.

"The products that are made from the images members upload on Artybuzz are manufactured to the highest quality. Using top grade raw materials and the latest giclee printing processes means that Artybuzz can provide high quality goods consistently to all its customers. This ensures that its members artworks are reproduced to a standard that does the utmost justice to each piece.

Artists, photographers and designers who sell their work through Artybuzz retain all copyright over their images and are fully credited for everything they produce. They are also under no obligation to show their work exclusively on Artybuzz.com. Anyone interested in joining or adding their work just needs to go to www.artybuzz.com and create a free profile.”

Shepard Fairey Does Venice, Silvio

Shepard Fairey, who rose to fame and made his mark with his wildly successful and now controversial Obama campaign poster, has left his mark here in Venice as well. During the June international art orgy known as the Venice Biennale, Fairey was brought to a tiny bar in the San Polo quarter near the Rialto Bridge by two Biennale hostesses, according to Guiliano, the bartender at Boteri Cafe.  Photo: Matthew Rose.

"He was a little drunk, but very nice," says the barman. The Boteri, also known as Al Genovesi (San Polo 1701 Venezia) on the Calle Del Botteri, is a tiny little art hangout covered with Keith Haring inspired drawings. Fairey must have thought the café was ripe for some more American graffiti and so he returned the next day with a fat portfolio of his Obey propaganda and asked the owner if he could paper the back room with his designs. "No problem," said the owner, eager to have some live art to go with the Haring installation and create a wall-sized souvenir from a clandestine Venice Biennale.

Shepard Fairey goes up against a Keith Haring knock-off in the Boteri Cafe, Venice, Italy. (Below).  Below, stylized little girl and big fascist eyes offer Fairey fans a touch of Futurismo with their apero.

The posters fit nearly perfectly and, while not a shrine for Fairey fans, it does give a contemporary glow to the place which is crowded at apero hour with older locals and crowded til one am with students and bohos.

I asked if there were any give-aways, but nothing was left, not even the stickers affixed to doors signaling that Shepard Fairey was here. Sort of retail friendly graffiti that is probably now on its way to eBay and auction sites the world over.  However, you can pick up a new piece on your local newstand...

Fairey's trying to climb back on the sweet roll since his confession about the Obama poster mishagas. His latest foray into political scandal is an Italian love-hate story. The cover of The Rolling Stone featuring the recently clobbered-with-a-small souvenir model of the Milan Cathedral, Italian Premier, Silvio Berlusconi. [See it here].

Meanwhile, on Christmas Eve the Basilica San Marco was both mobbed by Venetian believers and flooded Noah-style from the ever-rising rushing acqua alta. So enjoy these pictures of the Venetian Lagoon waters running rampant over yet another Italian institution and art piece – floods get in your eyes.

The Sedentary Ramblers : Trio Extraordinaire

Once in a generation, a band comes along that is unlike any that has come before it, and unlike any that will follow. A band so revolutionary, so innovative, it forever alters our musical landscape, even the course of life on earth. A band that makes its predecessors seem paltry and pedestrian, and leaves its successors hopeless in the face of a bar that has been set impossibly high.

"We are not that band," is the note on the home page of The Sedentary Ramblers. "But we are 3 guys who really like getting together to pick guitars and banjos, saw on fiddles, and bang around on washboards and spoons."

One music reviewer wrote: “That may be the second best version of ‘molly sniffed a possum toe’ I ever heard.” Another intoned: “Didn’t you guys play that one already?” But don't listen to them! The Sedentary Ramblers are rolling big time.

The Sedentary Ramblers are a trio of good ole boys from Georgia and beyond who have been bothering their friends for years, playing through floods and fires and bar room brawls, perfecting a sweet and joyful, sometimes mellow and soulful collection of classic songs with their own twist. The Sedentary Ramblers’ debut album was recorded live at Wolf Creek Cabin in Fannin County, GA. And : The CD is out now. Check out the sample sounds and bounce around with your own pair of spoons. Buy a copy for only $9.99 plus 2 bucks shipping and handling.

Special Features : Kickstarter Project

QUOI D'NEUF?

 From The Paris Blog.  The iconic Beaujolais Nouveau, France's high end version of the "new Coke" is celebrated every Third Thursday in November throughout the country.  The country parties till 3 am and wakes up on Friday only to call into work sick. 

Hervé Villemade is one of the prime vintners in France's new organic/natural wine wave and his "primeur" is QUOI D'NEUF, a wine named and labeled by Paris-based American artist Matthew Rose. Often available at LA CAVE DES PAPILLES and other like-minded cavists in Paris.

Paris : Double Trouble !!

An exhibition of new collage works by Matthew Rose and photographs by Bernard Matussière Private Bits & Autres Choses, is a one-day affair held in the historic quarters of Montparnasse. Double Trouble pairs the hapless with the happening and the mad with the magical.  The public is invited to attend the show on Saturday, December 5, 2009 at the studio of Bernard Matussière, 37 Rue Froidevaux 75014 Paris (near the Montparnasse Cemetery), beginning at 2pm. Studio Matussière has also invited artists Sarah de Teliga and Max Mulhern to participate.

Bernard Matussière is well known for his work in fashion, art and journalism.  His campaign for Aubade, the lingerie brand, Les Leçons du Désir, was posted throughout Paris some years ago and the images in black and white so sexy they were said to cause a number of auto accidents as drivers inadvertently hit the brakes.  While Matussière has worked on hundreds of advertising campaigns, he is also acclaimed for his nudes.  His book, Female Nudes, brings together some 100 images of women from his travels and studio work.  The photographer has also travelled widely and his work in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Japan and Africa has been published all over the world.  "This little exhibition is a way for me to show some new works," said Matussière, "and meet some new faces here in Paris."

Matthew Rose, long-time cut and paste collagist.  His massive installations have created a stir with their surreal and complex wall-to-wall-to-ceiling-to floor displays of 1000 pieces.  The artist, a New Yorker who has lived and worked in Paris since 1992, will exhibit new works on canvas and board, including works to be included in Masters: Collage, a compendium of the state of the art of collage due out by Lark Books in May 2010.  Matthew Rose's most recent work was the global collaborative A Book About Death, which opened in New York City in September and has since moved across the planet in a half-dozen re-exhibitions. Rose will also debut his prize-winning stamp sheet, Rubens Rounding Third. The piece earned a first place award from the MUFI Stamp Museum in Mexico this past October. This A3-sized work features a baseball player stopped dead in his tracks by a looming black and white image of a Rubens nude; the artist produced 1000 stampsheets, each with a gummed back, perforations, dated, signed and numbered.

Sarah de Teliga is a Paris-based Australian artist who exhibits both in London and Sydney.  Her most recent show at the Helen Stephens Gallery in Sydney featured works on bus and car smashed beer cans and oil landscapes that mixed the serene with the odd strange detail.  That show sold out. In London, Sarah exhibits with England & Company, and is extremely busy on private commissions for corporations and private collectors. De Teliga is currently launching a new series of works on flattened metal pieces and considering shooting a short film about her aesthetic processes.

Max Mulhern is an American sculptor working in a range of materials from wood to bronze to a combination of both.  The artist has exhibited in in Europe (Paris, London), focusing on "nautical innovations."  His sculptures in bronze are often complex erotic abstractions while his large and small scale works in painted wood unpack forms and reinvent the pedestal.  In fact, Mulhern's most recent innovation is a series of pedestals made out of cut wood, all arranged to fit in a "boîte en valise," a Duchampian gesture that points to the complexities of the Frenchman's art in box. Mulhern also writes regularly for the Art Blog.
Date: December 5, 2009 Time: 2pm

Adress:  Studio Matussière, 37 Rue Froidevaux, 75014 Paris (near the Montparnasse Cemetary)

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin (1933-1996) seminal minimalist artist of the 1960s used industrially-based florescent lights to create his non-nonsense light works.

This exhibition at David Zwirner in New York City is combined with a guided tour by Johannes Vogt, doctoral candidate in the University of Berlin's Art History department.