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Punk: An Aesthetic
22 Oct 2012
SATURDAY, SEPTEM
Agent Provocateur Johan Kugelberg Explores the Anti-Movement’s Style
From Debbie Harry oozing sex appeal to Johnny Rotten in a plane over Sweden, seminal New York curator, gallerist and writer Johan Kugelberg teams up with music historian Jon Savage to collate a series of iconic images from the heyday of punk. Intended as a visual companion to Savage’s acclaimed 1991 tome England's Dreaming, their forthcoming Rizzoli bookPunk: An Aesthetic presents an unrivaled collection of rare punk art and ephemera drawn from private and public archives from around the world alongside essays from cyberpunk novelist William Gibson and artist Linder Sterling. “Punk is important because it makes us get on with it. It makes us ‘do it yourself,’” explains Kugelberg. “It doesn’t matter if you’re eight years old or 80, it’s all city, all country, everywhere.” The pair have co-curated an accompanying exhibition called Some Day All the Adults Will Die! Punk Graphics 1971–1984, which opens at the Hayward Gallery next Friday and offers unprecedented access to the artifacts on show, with banks of fanzines, record covers and posters that visitors can engage with. “We didn’t want to preach from the pulpit,” explains Kugelberg of the exhibition. “We wanted to do something different, for there to be a real connection to the history. To experience it.”
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Antonio Lopez: Disco Fashion
18 Oct 2012
The Warholian Illustrator’s Flamboyant Life and Works Celebrated in New Show
From charcoal sketches of the swinging 60s, to sensuous watercolor illustrations and personality portraits, today’s series remembers New York’s irreverent wild child Antonio Lopez. A vibrant figure among Studio 54 circles, the Puerto Rican-born Bronx-raised Lopez first garnered attention with camped-up photographs of emerging artists and screen sirens including Jerry Hall, Grace Jones and Jessica Lange. Cultivating a surrealist, free-flowing drawing style, Lopez began making illustrations for master-couturist Charles James and advertising campaigns that appeared in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New York Times displaying vivid silhouettes, Pop Art references and a bold eroticism. Antonio’s World just opened at Suzanne Geiss Company gallery in New York, presenting three decades of the iconoclast’s fine art and photography and the first comprehensive survey of his work. “I have been a fan of Antonio's work since I was a teenager and followed fashion," explains Geiss. “He drew freely from contemporary culture and art history, but at the same time forged a unique body of work.” A forthcoming monograph from Rizzoli, Antonio Lopez: Fashion, Art, Sex, and Disco, featuring unfinished sketches, Instamatic photos and contributions from close friend Bill Cunningham, and a MAC cosmetics collection paying homage to Lopez’s salacious use of color, signal the artist’s continuing relevance today.
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Wolfgang Tillmans: New World
15 Oct 2012
The Turner Prize-Winner Goes Digital to Capture Instant Encounters on Far-flung Travels
From the stars above Kilimanjaro to Shanghai’s neon-lit cityscape, preeminent photographer Wolfgang Tillmans unveils his first impressions of the furthest reaches of the globe. Taking the viewer on a frenetic journey between London, Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, Saudi Arabia and beyond, Tillmans’ latest monograph Neue Welt creates a hyperactive and graphically juxtaposed image bank that conveys the sheer density of information available in contemporary culture. Edited and designed by Tillmans, the Taschen release marks a turning point away from his abstract investigations of the photographic form to a more outward-looking figurative exploration of the world and the camera’s ability to record modern-day experience. “Neue Welt is a very inspirational document,” says gallerist Maureen Paley, who has represented Tillmans for over a decade. “It flows from micro to macro observations from all over the world with enormous ease, as only Wolfgang can with his generosity of spirit and innate curiosity for all things visual.” Staying only fleetingly at each place he visited so as to retain his instant reactions, Tillmans switched to a digital camera for the project and refused to retouch his images in order to capture an authentic vision.
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Warhol Remix
11 Oct 2012
An Homage to the Artist's Cult Moments Marks a New Met Retrospective
Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles and fragmented celebrity appear in photographer Leon Chew’s Warhol-inspired still life series, in advance of an epic exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exploring the pop artist’s legacy. Featuring 150 works from some of the biggest artists of the past half-century, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years seeks to explore whether the silver-haired provocateur is the most important artist of his time. Engaging with Warhol’s own themes of consumer culture, mass-production and appropriation, curators Mark Rosenthal and Marla Prather have paired his works with conceptual heirs such as John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst and Ai Weiwei (whose branded neolithic urns sit as a celebration of Warhol’s Brillo boxes). “We wanted to juxtapose Warhol with other artists to observe and understand how his example was amplified upon, altered and changed,” says Rosenthal. Working with set designer Robert Storey, Chew riffed on Warhol’s own still life photography by referencing key people, subjects or works associated with the Factory. “They’re ubiquitous objects that speak of life, death, sex and power,” explains Storey. “The objects represent pop culture, which is ultimately timeless and accessible to any generation.”
Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years runs from September 18 to December 31, 2012, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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Melinda Gibson: Unseen
8 Oct 2012
- Cut-Out Collages Using Wolfgang Tillmans and Nan Goldin Debut at Amsterdam’s New Photo Fair
Dismembered photographs by luminaries such as Cindy Sherman, Corinne Day and Juergen Teller feature in rising photo-artist Melinda Gibson’s new series of visual remixes. Sourcing her material from curator Charlotte Cotton’s book The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Gibson cut up and rearranged images from some of photography's greatest figures into multilayered compositions to explore the circulation and canonization of iconic images. “When working with such profound imagery, cutting into them isn’t any easy task,” admits Gibson, who has been commissioned by Yohji Yamamoto to create a series remixing its entire archive for the 40th anniversary of Y's. “But what you gain is a greater understanding of how these images were composed and why they have become so prominent.” In collaboration with design studio Kummer & Herrman, Gibson has turned the project into a conceptual book project. Uniquely, the series of collages and their accompanying text have been printed as stickers, which Gibson then fixes into the book by hand. Each of the editions takes the artist around three hours to complete, and is numbered with the exact time and date of completion. The first edition of Amsterdam’s much-anticipated Unseen Photo Fair will play host to a performance-led launch of the new book with Gibson laying bare the painstaking process by constructing one live.
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