798 District Blog

Edward Horsford’s high-speed photography freezes the spherical innards of water balloons — just as the balloon skins break open, and just before they splash to the floor. He works at night in his garden in London, using flashes to light the action. Amazingly, he works alone. So how does he do it? And doesn’t he get soaked?

“My camera is really the least important part of the shots,” Horsford writes in an e-mail. The trick seems to be in the timing of the flash. He sets a timer on his camera to take a long exposure of 1 to 2 seconds, and if the flash fires within that time, he gets an image. He uses a special gizmo with a microphone that triggers the flashes when it picks up a certain level of sound (i.e., the pop of a balloon).

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MOSCOW — From the Jean-Michel Basquiat show opening on Friday at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, to the street art retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in April, highbrow institutions in the West are opening their doors to graffiti art. Now Moscow is promoting the urban art form as well. The city is increasingly becoming a stage for local and international graffiti artists — creating a dialogue within the community, and highlighting the difficulties of surviving as a street artist in contemporary Russia.

“It is especially tough to be a graffiti artist in Russia,” said Oxana Bondarenko, a curator who specializes in street art and lives in Paris and Moscow. “The state invests millions of rubles in hunting down graffiti artists and painting over the works.”

According to Sergey Glandin, a lawyer in Moscow, there is no law specifically regulating street art, but those caught making graffiti can be penalized under the criminal code. In most cases, this means an arrest and a warning.

Those seeking to make art and not to vandalize, however, are starting to find more outlets for their creative energy. “It’s about time we respect the value of their work,” Ms. Bondarenko said.

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HONG KONG— One of the biggest names in Western art history is poised to headline not just one, but three separate sales in Hong Kong this fall. Seven works by Picasso will be featured in an exhibition and private sale at Sotheby’s in late November, and two of the city’s top galleries are offering an additional 33 works by the Spanish modern between them. Offering assured market power as an international center of finance, Hong Kong also provides a chance to test the Asian market’s burgeoning interest in Western art — and what could be better for the job than Picasso, with his ironically askew portraits and lascivious nudes?

Sotheby’s sale — which also includes pieces by Chagall, Monet, Degas, and Renoir — will cover the Picasso’s Blue Period, as well as his Cubist works and later Expressionist paintings from after 1960. The works will first be shown in Beijing from October 22 to 25 before being exhibited in Hong Kong from November 26 to 28. With prices ranging from $2 million to $25 million, the works on view will include the standout “Jeune Fille aux Cheveux Noirs (Dora Maar),” a celebrated 1939 portrait of the artist’s most famous lover and muse.

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NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s autumn Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York on 2 November 2010 will present a superb offering of works across the period. From an early painting by Eugène Boudin from 1868 to a Pablo Picasso canvas from the 1970s, the sale features classic Impressionist paintings, key Modern works, tremendous sculpture and powerful German Expressionist canvases. Highlights will include important works by Modigliani, Matisse, Monet, Rodin and Picasso, among many others. Prior to the auction, works from both the Evening and Day Sales will be exhibited at Sotheby’s New York galleries beginning 29 October. Highlights will also be exhibited at Sotheby’s London from 11 –15 October.

The cover lot of the Evening Sale catalogue is Nu assis sur un divan (La Belle Romaine), the finest painting by Amedeo Modigliani to appear on the market in years (est. in excess of $40 million)*. The work belongs to the artist’s most important series of nudes, all painted in 1917. While Modigliani began painting nudes in 1908, it was not until he abandoned his pursuit of sculpture in 1914 that he developed the unique style exemplified by La Belle Romaine. Modigliani evokes a voluptuous sensuality through his palette of amber and crimson tones, the model’s pose and the intimate setting. The work and artist both have a distinguished history at Sotheby’s. La Belle Romaine last appeared on the market in 1999, when it sold at Sotheby’s New York for $16.8 million, a world record price for any work by Modigliani at the time. More recently, Sotheby’s set the current record for a painting by Modigliani in 2004 with our sale of Jeanne Hébuterne (devant une porte) for $31.4 million.
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LONDON— This week, the Louise Blouin Foundation in London is opening a major survey of contemporary Chinese painting. Curated by professor Lü Peng from Hangzhou’s China Art Academy, “Pure Views: New Painting From China” gathers more than 80 pieces by both established and emerging artists from the country. All the works are available for sale and a percentage of the profit will be donated to the Louise Blouin Foundation to contribute to the foundation’s promotion of cultural dialogue. Just off the plane, Peng spoke with ARTINFO UK about recent developments in Chinese art, as well as the importance of global exchange.

The exhibition borrows its title from an artwork by painter Xia Gui. What is this piece about and how does it encapsulate some of the artistic concerns or tendencies present in the show?

I borrowed the title “Pure Views” from an artwork by Song Dynasty painter Xia Gui to suggest that Chinese contemporary art should pay more attention to Chinese traditional civilization. In the past three decades, when the use of Chinese history and traditional resources needed to be balanced, we witnessed a new phenomenon among many Chinese artists. While Western modernism inspired those born in the 1980s, and Western postmodernism inspired those born in the 1990s, there appeared artists who favored the traditional Chinese art concepts and styles. After the turn of the new millennium, we could accept this transitional period as a time marked by artists starting to master their historical resources. We gradually became aware that a new contemporary Chinese art was coming about through the combination of resources extracted from traditional art and the artists’ perceptions of contemporary society.

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LONDON.- Sotheby’s announced the sale of Francis Bacon’s Figure In Movement, the most significant painting by the British artist to appear at auction in several seasons, in its Evening Sale of Contemporary Art on 9 November 2010 in New York. The 1985 portrait of a man twisting and writhing, demonstrates the artist’s genius in painting the human figure in motion, and epitomizes the full spectrum of his legendary artistic technique. The monumental canvas was given by Bacon to his doctor the same year it was executed and has remained in the same collection ever since. Figure In Movement returns to New York two years after it was featured in the 2008 landmark exhibition Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which began at Tate Britain and was also shown at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. The painting, which has been on extended loan to Tate Britain for the past decade, is estimated to sell for $7/10 million*. It will be shown at Sotheby’s London from 11-15 October 2010.

Figure in Movement was Bacon’s gift to his doctor Dr. Paul Brass, who, following on from his father Dr. Stanley Brass, was Bacon’s personal physician and with whose family Bacon maintained extremely close ties until the end of the artist’s life. Bacon offered Dr. Brass a choice of paintings but when he chose a different work, the artist steered him towards Figure in Movement assuring his doctor that it was a superior painting. This is the second time that Sotheby’s has been entrusted to sell on behalf of Dr. Brass having sold a major Bacon painting in 1994. Figure in Movement was on extended loan to Tate Britain and, in addition to the Centenary Retrospective, has appeared in shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hayward Gallery in London and Gemeentemuseum in the Hague as well as a British Council organized exhibition in Moscow.
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LONDON.- Christie’s will host an exciting series of public exhibitions, events and auctions from today until 18 October in London coinciding with the Frieze Art Fair. The leading highlights of the public exhibition are celebrated masterpieces by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Gerhard Richter, none of which has been seen before in the UK. These works will be offered at the evening auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York on 10 November 2010 and have a combined value in excess of $80 million.

The Post-War & Contemporary Evening Auction and The Italian Sale on 14 October at 6.30pm will offer 51 and 45 lots accordingly and will include an extremely strong section of photography, and the most important work by Damien Hirst to be offered at auction since September 2008 (estimate: £2.5 million to £3.5 million).

Francis Outred, Head of Post-War & Contemporary art, Christie’s Europe : “This week in London is one of the most important and vibrant in the global art calendar. We will be showing a truly exceptional public exhibition at Christie’s which includes three hugely important works never before seen in this country; Andy Warhol’s ‘Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable)’; Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Ohhh…Alright…’; and Gerhard Richter’s ‘Zwei Kerzen‘, together with the auction preview for Thursday’s auction. We look forward to opening our doors and welcoming art lovers to Christie’s in London.”

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LONDON.- Tate and Unilever today presented Chinese artist Ai Weiwei´s commission in The Unilever Series for the Turbine Hall at (12 October 2010 – 25 April 2011). He is the first artist living and working in the Asia-Pacific region to be commissioned for the series.

Born in Beijing in 1957, Ai Weiwei is one of the most prominent and influential figures in Chinese art today. In his many roles as conceptual artist, curator, critic, designer and architect, his work encompasses a wide range of challenging and often provocative activity. Ai has played a key role in the development of contemporary Chinese art over the last two decades, from his role in the radical avant-garde ‘Stars Group’ in 1979, to his collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron in designing the national ‘Bird’s Nest’ stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

After living in the United States from 1981 to 1993, Ai returned to his native Beijing and created the seminal work Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn 1995. This photo-triptych depicted the artist dropping an ancient ceramic vase, which smashed on the floor at his feet. This work not only began the artist’s continuing reuse of antique readymade objects, it also demonstrated his questioning attitude towards cultural values and social history. For Fairytale 2007 Ai invited 1001 Chinese citizens to ‘colonise’ Kassel in Germany for the Documenta 12 exhibition and distributed 1001 Qing and Ming Dynasty chairs in venues across the city. For Template 2007 he used more ancient readymades, in the form of 1001 wooden doors and windows from destroyed Chinese buildings. These were installed as a huge sculpture that collapsed in a storm soon after completion, creating a twisted, crumpled structure that the artist chose to preserve.

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HONG KONG— In a sign of the continuing strength of the Asian market, Sotheby’s series of October sales in Hong Kong netted a record-shattering $HK3.08 billion ($400 million) as serious competition for rare, museum-quality Chinese objects sent the auction tallies soaring. Buyers from China’s mainland dominated the salesrooms to such an extent that some wondered whether there was enough supply to meet the spiking demand for historic Asian objects. Western art offered to test the market’s embraciveness, however, was largely overlooked. 

On Wednesday, a Qianlong imperial white jade “Xintian Zhuren” seal featuring a pair of dragons set a world record for white jade when it fetched HK$121.6 million ($16 million), over four times its high estimate of HK$30 million. Then Thursday’s sale saw its own new record for the most expensive Chinese art object ever sold at auction: a Qianlong yellow-ground famille-rose double-gourd vase from an English collection that sold for HK$253 million ($32.4 million), achieving over five times its high estimate of HK$50 million. It was purchased by Hong Kong collector Alice Cheng, who said that “as long you like something, even if it’s expensive, it’s worth it.”

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HONG KONG (REUTERS).- A Chinese Qing dynasty vase sold for HK$253 million (20.2 million pounds) in a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong on Thursday, a world record at auction for any Chinese porcelain.

“This is definitely a milestone,” Nicolas Chow, the Deputy Chairman of Sotheby’s Asia told Reuters. “Chinese works of art took their place on the world auction stage today.”

While segments of the Chinese art market cooled substantially during the financial crisis, especially once white-hot Chinese contemporary art, older paintings and imperial antiques continued to generate solid demand and prices, though fewer quality works surfaced as sellers stayed away on still fragile sentiment.

In Sotheby’s current autumn sales, however, a selection of rare works from four major private collections and a flood of free-spending Chinese millionaires, contributed to what many called one of the best sales of Chinese ceramics in recent years.

In a packed auction hall filled with applauding mainland Chinese buyers, a bidding war saw the rare Qing vase finally go to Alice Cheng, a Hong Kong collector and sister of renowned octogenarian Chinese art collector and dealer Robert Chang.

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