798 District Blog

Installation view of Daan van Golden’s Apperception at WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels.

BRUSSELS.- WIELS presents the first retrospective of Dutch artist Daan van Golden (b. 1936, works and lives in Schiedam) in Belgium. The exhibition Apperception presents the various facets of his work, through a selection of major works and others which have never yet been exhibited, and illustrate the singularity of this visionary artist. Although he has worked since the early 60s, Daan van Golden has produced a limited body of work, resulting from his ‘meditative’ painting process which favors slowness and concentration. Van Golden’s work has gone through several phases since the 1960s, phases that might seem to bear resemblances to the concerns of contemporaneous artistic movements such as pop art, conceptual art, postmodernism, or appropriation art. However, van Golden’s art should not be interpreted as having espoused each of these various art-historical trends in succession. His works contain elements of each of these movements, reflecting a practice that essentially questions painting, everyday imagery, perception, and the beauty that is inherent to the world around us.

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Golden pheasant rank badge, 2nd rank civil servant, silk tapestry with painted details. China , Qing Dynasty, late 18th – early 19th century. Denver Art Museum ; Neusteter Textile Collection: Gift of James P. Grant & Betty Grant Austin.

The Denver Art Museum announced today a $3 million gift from the Avenir Foundation that will transform the institution’s textile art program. In addition to expanding the current textile art gallery space to more than six times its current square footage, the gift will allow for the development of scientific and educational spaces, a staging area for exhibition preparation and conservation and storage of the more than 5,000 textile objects in the DAM’s collection.

“This gift will help us tell the story of textiles as triggers of cultural exchange and creative expression from around the world,” said DAM’s Frederick and Jan Mayer Director Christoph Heinrich. “It reinforces our commitment to textile art and allows greater public access to this wonderful collection.”

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HONG KONG— In a packed Sotheby’s auction room in Hong Kong on Monday night, Zhang Xiaogang was once again proven to be the ultimate blue-chip name in Chinese contemporary art when his brooding 1992 masterpiece “Chapter of a New Century — Birth of the People’s Republic of China II” was hammered down for HK$46 million ($5.9 million), bringing in twice the painting’s high estimate in a buzzing sale that moved a total of HK$205 million ($26.4 million) in art.

The room was hushed as the price for Zhang’s work climbed slowly, by million-dollar increments, in a battle between a telephone bidder and two paddles in the room. When the gavel finally fell, boisterous applause broke out. The price is just short of the HK$47.4 million ($6.1 million) paid in April 2008 for Zhang’s “Bloodline: The Big Family No. 3,” which at the time set a record for a painting by a living Asian artist.

Zhang’s work was the headlining lot of Sotheby’s fall contemporary Asian art sale, but it was not the only one to generate excitement when changing hands. Immediately after Zhang’s piece was carried from the hall, a key work from early in Fang Lijun’s career came to the block: an untitled 1989 painting featuring a group of bald-headed youths whose averted gaze and alienated appearance, typical of Fang’s early imagery, led him to become the leading exponent of what critics dubbed Cynical Realism. The piece went for HK$9.5 million ($1.2 million), more than three times its high estimate of HK$3 million ($390,000).

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BERLIN—Organizers for the Berlin Biennale, the biannual contemporary art exhibition that has established itself as a proving ground for emerging curatorial talent, has announced that Polish artist Artur Żmijewski will curate the next edition of the event, which opens in 2012.

Żmijewski is known for wildly controversial video art, which often involves the participation of people in extreme or outrageous situations, and that often represents historical traumas and catastrophes. He has, for instance, filmed World War II concentration-camp survivors having their numbers re-tattooed onto their arms, and a group of men and women playing tag, naked, in an abandoned basement.

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HONG KONG.- Sotheby’s Hong Kong will hold its Contemporary Asian Art Autumn Sale 2010 on 4 October at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, bringing forward a total of 217 lots estimated at over HK$150 million / US$19 million. The sale highlights an important work of contemporary Chinese art – Zhang Xiaogang’s 1992 masterpiece, Chapter of a New Century – Birth of the People’s Republic of China II (Est. HK$21 – 23 million / US$2.69 – 2.94 million). This season we are also honoured to present Property from an Important European Collection, which encompasses 38 lots with a total estimate of over HK$30 million / US$3.8 million (please refer to separate press release for details).

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People look at a series of paintings entitled ‘paint a little color, paint a little red, paint a little blue, sorrow’ by Chinese artist Ye Yongqing, hanging on a wall behind an installation by Qiu Zhijie entitled ‘The horse distant after the revolution,’ during a group exhibit entitled ‘The Constructed Dimension’ at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, 20 August 2010. The exhibit showcases the works of twenty Chinese artists, and will run until 02 September 2010.

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People visit a painting exhibition named “Artistic Beauty of Taipei County” at the Zhejiang Art Gallery in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, Aug. 18, 2010. The 12-day painting exhibition opening on Wednesday displayed 82 works by eight artists of Taipei County in southeast China’s Taiwan.

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Artists in Foshan, a city in Guangdong province that bills itself as the home of Chinese kungfu, are creating a 30-meter-tall sculpture of Bruce Lee which they hope will one day become a landmark on the scale of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

The red-painted ceramic statue depicts an eight-legged Bruce Lee, known as Li Xiaolong in Chinese, balancing world famous monuments on each foot. These include The Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower, and the Bird’s Nest, or National Olympic Stadium, in Beijing.

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The largest solo mainland show of works by Ju Ming, arguably Taiwan’s most influential sculptor, is currently running at the National Art Museum of China. On view are 150 larger-than-life pieces of his Living World series, works Ju has produced over the past 30 years in a wide range of media, including wood, stone, ceramics, bronze, sponge, styrofoam and stainless steel.

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The Art Auction, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MCA) Chicago’s most important fundraiser, is being held for the first time ever in the galleries of the museum. This year, the auction features works by the most recognized contemporary artists working today, including Olafur Eliasson, Louise Nevelson, Ed Ruscha, Mark Bradford, Kiki Smith, Lari Pittman, Julie Mehretu, Luc Tuymans, William Wegman, Lorna Simpson, and Christopher Wool, along with works by promising emerging artists. The event is co-chaired by Leslie Bluhm and David Helfand, and Liz and Eric Lefkofsky. The event takes place at 6:30 pm on Saturday, October 30, 2010.

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