Tim Steiner, the "human work of art" by Wim Delvoye!!

Good morning contemporary art lovers!
I am very glad to introduce you to Tim Steiner whom the story is simply unbelievable... Have you seen the french-italian movie "Le Tatoue" (The Tattoed One) produced in 1968? The story is about a french soldier whom the back was tattooed by Modigliani. Or did you read the book entitled "When I was a work of art" written by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt? The story is about a desperate man who wants to kill himself and is "saved" by a megalomaniac artist who convinces him to become one of his works of art, as a property. As far as I know, Tim Steiner is the only "human work of art" in the world. He has his back tattooed by Wim Delvoye, a Belgium artist, and sold for 150.000 euros to Rik Reinking, a collector, curator and art historian, in September 2008. The tattoo represents a Madonna with a skull above her head and it took 35 hours of work.
As Tim told me "If I were still in school, Wim would be my most loved teacher and Rik my best friend".

Could you please explain us how all the story began? How did you meet Wim and which one of you got the idea of this incredible tattoo?

"In 2006, my girlfriend Stephanie Schleiffer was working for the de Pury & Luxembourg gallery in Zurich. She was responsible for the upcoming spring show titled 'Take a Walk on the Wild Side' which was a group show where Wim was taking part. He wanted to set up his Tattoo Studio with two pigskins. He told Stephanie that for some time he had been looking for a human canvas that he could have tattooed and sold. He hadn't found anyone and he asked her if she knew anyone who wanted to be a 'human tattooed pig' and she gave me a call. I had tattoos already and she asked if I knew anyone who would be interested. She told me the story and I wanted to do it myself immediately. I met Wim in Zurich with my friend and tattoo artist Matt Powers. The design is more or less the same as on the pig Sybille. Matt changed it to fit my back and so it all began."

Your back is a work of art, but it's a part of your body. How do you feel about that? Do you have sometimes the impression to be a work of art and to lose your own identity as a human being; as if you were the canvas, Wim and "your owner" the frame?

"I feel like the frame and the canvas. I am the thing that carries the artpiece. Where the art goes, I go. Art is the master and I am the slave. But only as long as I want to be. I'm a free slave. When my back is exhibited I have no identity. When I have a shirt on, the art no longer exists."

Could you tell us what was your impression during your first exhibition as a piece of art and how does it work? Do you still have a right on your body and how many times a year are you "exposed"?

"Being exhibited is a very bizarre experience. I face a wall for many hours (with breaks), listen to loud music and can only sense those around me. Sometimes I interact with people, but I prefer just sitting there. It's a very personal experience which is amazing, peaceful, nerve-wrecking and terrible all in one. I am exhibited as many times as I am asked to and I agree. All the rights are with me. I can quit anytime. But then the money goes back too..."

I saw many pictures of you posing with pigs, playing with them in the mud or taking a shower in their pens. Is it like a performance for you? As a human being, how do you feel in the middle of animals, treated like them?

"The session with the pigs in China was one of the most remarkable experience in my life. It was a blessing. Being accepted by these majestic animals for a few hours was extraordinary. It felt like a performance on another plateau. I am forever thankful to Wim, Stephanie and all those involved in the China project for that experience."

There is the question about the temporality of the work of art. Your tattoo can change because of the elasticity of your skin and also because the skin is made of living cells. What do you expect for the future? How do you imagine yourself in 40 years?

"It will decay over time. The more time passes, the more ugly it will look. I hope that I will be a canvas on show for all my life. 'TIM' will be really interesting in 40 or 50 years. A decomposing art piece with decades of stories. The only difference being that this canvas can share these stories with everyone."

Dear Tim, thank you so much for having done this interview. It was a pleasure to write about your story which is amazing! I am thinking about having more tattoos but I couldn't hold a candle to you!
For those who may want to know more about Tim, check his website...


All images Courtesy Wim Delvoye - Tim Steiner

Fausto Melotti at Gladstone

Good morning contemporary art lovers!
I Magnifici Sette (the magnificent seven), by Fausto Melotti, an Italian artist who studied both music and science and who is known for his sculptures made in brass, wire and other metals. He is a contemporary of Calder and a fellow student of Lucio Fontana. There is an amazing monumental sculpture exhibited at the Galdstone gallery...

Made in brass and stainless steel, this sculptures is structured, elegant, poetic and makes us thinking about sheets music. Those seven like-window forms, which are rhythmic, abstracts and geometric, represent the seven disciplines thought by the Greeks (the liberal arts) to define a rational understanding of the world. The light which is reflected on the brass and steel gives a little bit of magic and sensibility to this musical and poetic sculpture.

This beautiful and impressive exhibition is worth seeing until June!!

"Walk to Walk" by Kate Gilmore, Bryant Park

Good evening contemporary art lovers!
For those who work at Bryant Park or in the area, there is a funny piece of art being staged during office hours: "Walk to Walk" by Kate Gilmore. She's an American artist who explores themes of displacement, struggle and female identity.

Can you imagine yourself wandering in a park and suddenly seeing seven women walking on the top of a big yellow base?? Sponsored by the Public Art Fund, this performance consists in seven women in bright smiley-face-yellow dresses (pink sweater when it's cold) walking relentlessly. They remind me the New Yorkers, walking through the streets of New York City, collide each other... This piece is an ephemeral monument to the city workers and urban energy.

This courageous move which is basically the symbol of a busy intersection in a big city is visible until friday...

A must see Upper East Side...

Good afternoon contemporary art lovers!
For those who cannot maybe afford buying a work like the "purple Warhol" or the Rothko that were sold yesterday at Sothebys, here are some beautiful exhibitions where you can probably find something for the walls of your home!

L&M Arts gallery, upper east side, hosts an amazing show which shows us works made by two of the most important artists of the 20th century: Yves Tanguy and Alexander Calder: "Tanguy Clader between Surrealism and Abstraction". One of the most beautiful exhibition of Calder's mobiles that I have ever seen! The one on the ground floor at the entrance is particularly amazing! So ethereal and aerial... This exhibition has been created to continue the gesture of Peggy Guggenheim who wore one earring made by Tanguy and one earring made by Calder during the opening of Art of this Century in 1942. The purpose was for her to show her impartiality between Surrealism and abstraction.

A few meters from the L&M Arts gallery, there is the Acquavella gallery that hosts a very beautiful exhibition: "Robert and Ethel Scull:Portrait of a Collection". Forty-four paintings, drawings, sculptures made by twenty-tree artists. The Scull were the pioneers collectors of Pop Art. They are known as the Pop and the Mom of the Pop Art!! Constantly present on the New York social scene, they began assembling their collection by buying works of art made by artists such as Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. But their favorite one was Jasper Johns...

The first major exhibition of Tatiana Trouve's works in the US is...at the Gagosian gallery, on Madison. Deemed as a virtual artist, she lives and works in Paris and her recent works unite her interest in sculpture, architecture and drawing in site-specific situations. Exhibition takes place on the fifth floor of the gallery which has been turned into interrelated zones of transformation and interconnection.
For those who are not very familiar with her work, you will see in the same time an exhibition of new paintings and related newsprint collages by Richard Prince, a controversial American painter and photograph well-known for his photographs of the famous cowboy (A copy, the photograph, of a copy, an advertising for cigarettes, of a myth, the cowboy). Paintings that are exposed, the Tiffany paintings, are the reflection of his continuing attentiveness of patterns and potential of advertising. Paintings are almost abstract, monochrome and considered by Capote as a turning point in his career...

Have a nice and wonderful afternoon, and for those who are not going shopping at Sothebys this afternoon, you know what to do!

Mark Di Suvero at the Paula Cooper Gallery

Good afternoon contemporary art lovers!
Here is a new exhibition that shows us several sculptures- one is really amazing - made by Di Suvero, an American artist who grew up in Shanghai to Italian expatriates and then in California. He is known for his large outdoor pieces made of railroad ties, tires, scrap metal and structural steel. His assemblages of steel and wood are exposed in museums and privates collections around the world and he had his first retrospective exhibition in 1975 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This monumental sculpture, 24-feet high, is made of steel and redwood logs and stands right in the middle of the room. He built it using drift wood logs which were found on the California beaches, the same ones Captain Francis Drake (an English sea captain, privateer, pirate, politician and... Elizabethan naval commander) explored in 1579... The sculpture is named after the Drake's landing somewhere in California: Nova Albion means "New Britain". The exact location of Nova Albion is still a source of controversy because we don't have any information; Queen Elizabeth wanted to keep the Northwest Passage secret from the Spaniards...

Does it make you want to go to the beach? Hamptons summer session is opening soon...

Claude Monet and Roy Lichtenstein at Gagosian

Good evening contemporary art lovers!
There are so many exhibitions and events right now in NY. I know many of you are probably very busy because of the sales (by the way, have you heard about the "Picasso" which has been sold at Christies? Simply amazing, crisis is definitely behind us!) but don't forget to go to see the galleries...
Here are two exhibitions that must be seen. Both are fantastic and shows us works whom the beauty and the quality are rare.

"Claude Monet: Late work". Thanks to the generosity of private collectors, institutions, museums... this beautiful exhibition has been made possible. We get into a huge space whom the atmosphere is very intimate and hushed. Works of art are set up in a perfect way; right height for the eyes and good lighting. This show is focused on the most important late subjects of his long and prodigious career such as Nympheas, Le Pont Japonais or L'Allee de Rosiers. This gathering of Monet's paintings (a French leading landscape painter who produced more than 2 000 paintings along his prolific career) is the most impressive and significant for the past thirty years and some of them were never exhibited during the artist's lifetime...

A few blocks away, a new exhibition, "Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes" just opened. Most known for the works that he made during the "Pop Years" and his particular method inspired by popular cartoons and commercial images, he also created works of art which were inspired by a lot of different motifs (fruits, flowers or vases) and themes. As the Monet exhibition, many collectors and museums lent their works of art to make this exhibition possible. Throughout your visit of this amazing show, you'll see paintings, sculptures and also drawings each more beautiful than the others, many of the drawings being precise sketches for the paintings and the sculptures...

Enjoy the end of your week. I hope you saved money for bidding during the contemporary art sales next week!!

Outdoor New York City (part II)

Good afternoon contemporary art lovers!
Today is a beautiful and sunny day, the perfect day for a little promenade! So if by any chance you decided to go out this afternoon, I would like to advice you and give you some nice spots to discover. Here we go, this is the second part of "Outdoor New York City".

Start your promenade in Midtown East and go directly to the United Nations Headquarters. You will see this enormous bronze of a 45-calibre gun whose the barrel is tied. This twisted gun is exposed on display of the United Nations sculpture garden, next to the Visitors's Plaza. Made by Karl Fredrik Reutersward and given by the Government of Luxembourg, this sculpture, which symbolizes the nonviolence, is a part of the UN Human 2000 Peace Initiative.  

In 1996, Italy gave such a beautiful gift to the United Nations: "Sphere within Sphere", a bronze sculpture of a diameter of 3.30 meters made by Arnaldo Pomodoro, an Italian sculptor specialized in the casting of gigantic volumes. This sculpture represents  a reflexion about the difficulties of the modern world and it symbolized by the fractured surface of the outer sphere which reveals the inner one. There are several versions of this sculpture: in the Vatican Museums, Trinity College in Dulin, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. ...

In the same area, on Park Avenue Malls between 52nd and 53th streets, you can see several sculptures made by Mia Westerlund Roosen, an American artist who explores voluminous curves, palpable surfaces and the sensual body. She used lead, encaustic, and textiles to study genre identity until her practice matured. Concrete stucco is now her favorite medium, it allows her to create molded pieces that retain a sense of vulnerability despite their significant corporal mass. Unfortunately her sculptures will be exposed until the end of august.

End of the cultural part, it's time to drink a little glass of wine... Go to Benoit, a French restaurant, on 55th street between 5th and 6th!

The Dia Art Foundation

Good evening contemporary art lovers!
As you may noticed summer is coming. Wanna do something cool and educational? Go to the Dia Art Foundation. It's definitely more interesting than wandering at Central Park...

Founded in 1974, the Dia Art Foundation is a nonprofit institution which is renowned for imitating, supporting, presenting and preserving contemporary art projects. Dia:Beacon is named in honor of Louise and Leonard Riggio and presents one of the world's most distinguished collections of contemporary art. Works of art presented in the museum have been made by a focused group of the most significant artists in the last half century such as Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Fred Sandback, John Chamberlain, Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Dan Flavin...

I personally was so impressed by works made by Fred Sandback who was a minimalist conceptual-based artist sculptor best known for his yarn sculptures - which you can see here at the foundation. His works define edges of virtual shapes whom the rest of the form has to be perceived by the viewer's brain. Installations made by Robert Smithson are also amazing. Best known for his provocative earthwork The Spiral Jetty, this american artist is also known for the major role taken by mirrors in his works. As he said: "Mirror in a sense is both the physical mirror and the reflection" it is "a concept and an abstraction"... a displacement "of properties".

Have a nice, funny and cultural week end...  

Xxxx

Philippe Perrin, artist

Good evening contemporary art lovers!
I am very glad to introduce to you Philippe Perrin who is a fantastic French artist, most known for his sculptures of monumental scale weapons, handcuffs, knifes, razorblades, American punches... Expanding everyday objects gives them a new meaning, another interpretation and it's even stronger when it comes to weapons. His references are provided by the gangsta aesthetic but also by the classic literature and romantic poetry. He perfectly knows how to be provocative, cynical, and manipulative while remaining charming and seductive.

Dear Philippe, the MEP (European House of Photography) is going to host a retrospective of your works. Could you please tell us about this exhibition and explain to us how you have wanted organize it?

First, it's not a retrospective but rather a synthesis - an inventory on photography in my work since 1986. A retrospective would freeze in time a life still full of excitement. Moreover, it would have taken all the surrounding neighborhood if we had wanted to install my sculptures retrospectively.
Remember that it's the European House of Photography, which as its name suggests is focused on that medium. This exhibition is a path between objects, sculptures, drawings, soundtracks and video; a selection that is built around a selection of photographs from 1986 to today.

This exhibiton is entitled "Haut et Court" ("High and Short")? Is it a direct reference to the installation that you made in 1997?

Yes but it's also a reference to the Western films dear to our childhood, a tribute to Louis Mandrin (a French highway robber pre-revolutionary), to thugs and other infamous criminals that make up my personal pantheon, from Caravaggio to Francois Villon, Arthur Cravan or Jacques Mesrine. And then in the French art scene, in which one attempts to hang out people who, like me, stand out from the group, metaphor was obvious.

Expending weapons gives them weight; they are bigger than humans. Weapons refer to war, violence, cruelty... but ultimately they are the reflection of our society, aren't they? 

It's both a seductive object and an infant image, and in the same time what we see everyday on the TV or in the streets. The artist is just the mirror that reflects his own vision of life and society in which he lives. That's, in any case, my only possible definition of art. Art reflects filtered or selected images to give people something to think or offer them another vision. I am just a distorting mirror that magnifies reality to unveil it to the others.

You are a polymorphic artist whose work is particularly characteristic. Is there any movement to which one you feel connected by the approach, the subject, the creative process?

I don't belong to any group and I don't have any label. I am not in any too-easily-identifiable category. I have friends who are artists and very different from each others such as Wim Delvoye and Jacques Villegle, people for whom I have some respect like Robert Longo. The list is important: musicians from everywhere, movies directors, gangsters, etc. But I don't belong to any group. It's not even a choice. It's like that.

Your first pieces of art are deployed around Arthur Cravan, poet and boxer (so do you), nephew of Oscar Wilde. He was a dandy and that's what one says about you. How could you define a post-modern dandy and do you consider yourself as one of them?

Definition of a dandy is a man who takes care of his manners, his presentation and who has wit. I take care of my bad manners, my presentation is just what I give to be seen by others and my wit is twisted. A kind of dandyism, probably, but I feel so far from all those who wander in boulevard Saint Germain in Paris and for whom appearance is the only goal and who give so much trouble to take care of their manners without having any wit. The word "dandy" has been stolen, it has become almost pejorative.
A dandy? A highwayman? A highway"dandy"?

Only when one is on the precipice can we ask the basics questions: Who am I? Where am I? What should I do? Am I being sincere and honest? Yes. Definitely yes. At least I try to be like that. Especially, I try to be a man... to become a man. We must lead ourselves, force ourselves not to feel dizzy, stay between the attraction/abstraction of the vacuum and the relation to the matter, become a North America Indian and climb barefoot on the steel girders of the New York sky-scrapers. I voluntarily walk on the razor's edge, like a drunken tightrope walker, facing the abyss, especially without a net, above all, without cheating. This is my way of being and my only way of thinking, transmitting. I do it for myself, I do it for the others... Each exhibition is like a little death, each work of art is a new birth...

Dear Philippe, thank you so much!! I am so sad I missed the opening! I wish you all the best and for those who are in Paris: you must visit his show...

Marina Abramovic at the MoMa

Good afternoon contemporary art lovers!
This exhibition is fantastic!! For those who haven't seen this show, you know what to do next week. And for those who aren't in NY, I feel sorry because you're going to miss one of the most impressive exhibition that I've ever seen... For the first time in my life I don't know what to think about an exhibition. The Marina Abramovic exhibition makes you cry, makes you happy, makes you uncomfortable, makes you laugh, makes you sad... For those who may don't know her, she is a New York based Serbian and Yougoslavian performance artist. She is an avant-garde artist whose work explores the limits of the body and the possibilities of the mind. The interest of her work is also the interaction and the relationship between the public and the artist.

The following picture shows us the first performance that you can see at the MoMa. Marina Abramovic is sitting at a table and waits for someone from the public to come up and sit in front of her. They aren't allowed to speak, to eat, to drink, to move... They have to stay one in front of the other and look themselves in the eyes. That's extremely  perturbing because you feel the tension between both and you wonder what they are thinking about...  Here she pushes the physical limits of her body since she doesn't move, she doesn't eat, she doesn't drink... but also the mental ones because she looks a stranger in the eyes for a while or for a few hours, the stranger is the one who decides the length of its passage.

The exhibition continues on the sixth floor and traces her prolific career by showing us approximately fifty works made during the past four decades. This retrospective is as sonorous as visual: videos of her performances, as well as photographs, are shown. In the first room is presented a reminiscence of one of her most impressive performance that she made in 1974. She was standing at a table on which one you could see 72 objects from our daily life such as a candle, a spoon, a perfume but also a gun, a scalpel, a box of razorblades... And one could use at her as desired. The table is shown here, with all the pictures related to the performance!

The other room is more about her collaboration with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen), a German performance artist. Their collaboration was based on the exploration of the ego and the artistic identity. They acted like twins, they completely trusted each other and they formed their own collective being called "The Other", a two-headed body. The main subject of most of their performances are the physical resistance of the body but also the mental one. "Relation in Time" is a performance during which one they were tied together by their hair, not moving for 16 hours! The performance titled "Point of Contact" consists in the fact that they were standing in front of each other, looking into each other's eyes and pointing at each other, avoiding touching...

Considered as the grandmother of the performance art, she is undoubtedly one of the greatest artist of our century. While some of her performances have been stopped by the police because they were judged too disturbing they are now totally allowed and well known.
And who has never dreamed to move from a room to another one between two naked people?!...
https://www.artsy.net/artist/marina-abramovic-1

Hermaphroditism and transsexualism

Good afternoon contemporary art lovers!

Hermaphroditism and transsexualism in the arts; what interesting subjects... There are two different types of hermaphroditism: physical and psychic. Extremely rare in humans, a simultaneous hermaphrodite is an adult organism that has both male and female sexual organs. Incompatible with the biological gender binary, he/she usually can later change into the alternate sex. "Hermaphroditic" has been replaced by "Intersexual" in medicine. A psychic hermaphrodite is someone who feels both male and female but who only has the genitals of one sex. Most often a psychic hermaphrodite goes to the surgery...

Regarding the origins of the greek myth, Hermaphroditus, a remarkably handsome boy, was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. The Naiad Salmacis fell in love with him and tried to seduce him but she was rejected. She surprised him when he thought she was gone, kissed him, held him in her arms and asked the gods never separate them. Her wish had been granted and he had been transformed into an androgynous deity by union with her. The most famous example of "its" representation has been made in marble by Borghese and is shown at the Louvre in Paris.

If there is an artist that we could be describe as a psychic hermaphrodite, this is Pierre Molinier, a French artist who lived in the first part of the 20th century. Andre Breton and the Surrealists were interested by all of his paintings which were very sensual, erotic and matched with their idea of a "convulsive beauty". But when Molinier has started creating his own photomontages, much more erotic and esoteric, the Surrealists didn't followed him anymore. When he imagined himself as a hermaphroditic shaman he animated groups of young androgynous people. Most often his photographs were self-portraits of himself as a woman. On this picture, he represented himself as "the" shaman with fake boobs, high heels, mask and his erect penis. Focusing on using his body as a model, we can say that he is a precursor of body art and has probably inspired many artists such as Cindy Sherman.

As for those who have been operated on, they are magnificently represented by the photographs made by Nan Goldin, an American artist. She started her first solo show by showing her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual communities. Through her pictures, she shows us another side of the transsexual communities. Most of the time, they are photographed in their own place, in intimate situations. Most often presented in the form a slide show, her pictures are a kind of personal diary which would be public. But the icon of transsexuals is still Amanda Lepore whom real name is Armand and who was diagnosed as transgender. She is an amazing model, fashion icon, performer and one of David Lachapelle's muses...

Love, sexuality, eroticism, mixture of genders...will always be a source of inspiration for artists.
Especially with the video and the digital photograph since they can give free rein to their imagination...
Even if sometimes we just don't get it!!

Banks Violette at the Gladstone gallery

Good morning contemporary art lovers!
Even if the exhibition is almost ended, I wanted to write about Banks Violette's work!
Based in New York, he has taken as starting points death metal, ritual murder and teenage suicide and his work is often related to the New Gothic Art movement. From graphite drawings to sculptural installations, he plumbs the simultaneous degradation and accretion of meaning.

Most of the time he uses, as you can see on this picture, glossy black and ghostly white materials. He gives to his installations a dramatical, theatrical aspect: black wall seems to melt against the reflection of the light made by this impressive chandelier composed of multiple fluorescent tubes which make us thinking about Dan Flavin.

Wake up it's time to go, galleries just opened!

Robert Goff, art dealer

Good evening contemporary art lovers!
I am very glad and proud to introduce to you Robert Goff who is a contemporary art dealer and whose the gallery is located on the 23rd street in Chelsea. He is one of the first person that I really have met in New York working in the art market and he is the one who has given me a chance to work with...

Dear Robert, could you please introduce yourself and explain us how you got into the art market. Was your family working on or not? What studies did you do?...

"My name is Robert Goff and I own a gallery in Chelsea of the same name. I grew up in Minneapolis in the early 1970s going frequently to museums like the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. My father was interested in art and my parents collected a bit. And I liked to draw and attempt to make art myself so I was always interested in anything visual. I tried to buy my first work of art when I was ten years old but my parents thankfully said no. I ended up studying literature and when I got my first job in New York it was as a journalist for Forbes Magazine. When the position opened to write about art collecting and the auction market I jumped at it. After that I worked for some internet companies related to the art world and eventually started my own gallery with a partner about seven years ago. At the end of the day I really am interested in the art object and the conversation that can happen around it."

For those who may don't know, could you explain what are the differences between the first and the second market and what is the place taken by the gallery?

"The "primary" market is what a gallery like mine does. I represent 12 artists and sell their work to collectors and museums. This initial sale of a piece from a gallery to it's first buyer is the "primary"sale. A secondary sale occurs when the piece is resold - even if a work is resold 20 times it's called a secondary sale. The "secondary" market refers to all works that are resold over time - obviously this includes Picassos and Warhols but also some very young artists as well. Secondary market sales are conducted by galleries, individual dealers and collectors and auction houses."

Are you specialized in any particular movement and who are the artists whom you exposed?

"In my dealings as a primary gallery I am focused on international significant emerging artists who have a very strong grounding in technique and skill - whether that's painting, drawing, photography or filmmaking. I am less interested in artists that make work that looks shoody, whether they claim that's deliberate or not. Kevin Francis Gray reimagines classical sculpture through a contemporary lens, Melanie Manchot makes subtle photo and video portraits of individuals as they relate to larger groups and society, Simon English makes exquisitely perverse drawings that dance out of his subconscious, Ahmed Alsoudani's visceral paintings slam the viewer with images of a world in wartime agony, Isca Greenfield-Sanders makes quiet but deeply felt paintings about the American experience, Oliver Pietsch makes brilliant montages from the history of film that draw out universal themes of love, betrayal, dreams  and nightmares and despair, Scott Hunt's perfectly rendered charcoal drawings are dark, humorous explorations of the myths and traditions of American society, Iona Rozeal-Brown has created a new cosmology of characters in her paintings that reimagines hip hop, Japanese and African-American culture, Titus Kaphar's paintings really undoes both physical and historical traditions of painting, Suzanne Kuhn makes and solves complicated problems presented by painting on canvas, Type A is a collective of two New York males who explore the truths and excesses of masculinity and competition through sculpture, installation, performance and photography and Ain Cocke makes some of the most technically gorgeous portraits anywhere today."

What did you think about the art fairs and what is your opinion about the evolution of the market?

"Art fairs are important but to be indulged in with moderation. At their best fairs will introduce you to new collectors and curators and enable sales and at the worst they're an expensive waste of time. I am personally really excited by really high quality fairs that are in new and emerging regions of the world. We had a great time doing Art Dubai last year and I'm excited to participate in Art Hong Kong in May. THese are both places in the world where collecting contemporary art is relatively new and people are excited about it - conditions which make it both fun and good for business."

What kind of advice would you give to a young art dealer?

"First, be totally honest in all your dealings. Second, when you make a sale pay your artists before you pay yourself. Third, look before you leap-test out the waters with artists before you sign them, really evaluate a fair before you sign up for it and don't follow the herd."

Thank you, Robert, having answering to those questions!! Good luck for the Hong Kong fair...
To those who frequently wander in Chelsea, stop by Robert's gallery!

Sterling Ruby: 2TRAPS

Good night contemporary art lovers!
For those who may don't really know about contemporary art, this kind of work can be disturbing!
For his first solo exhibition at the Pace Wildenstein gallery, Sterling Ruby has transformed a public transportation bus into a ready-made titled "BUS" with a series of interior confinement cages, speakers, sub-woofers, chrome fixtures and exterior security doors. The other sculpture, "Pig Ben" is a massive rectangular grid configured from a series of smaller custom-built rectangular blocks.

As Max Weber had written, our society has become rational, reasonable, progressive... and those sculptures are the symbol of the iron cage of modernity. To Sterling Ruby, they are places of confinement, stagnation and they are the allegory of the powerful traps that human beings construct for themselves.

One often says about his work that it's a new way to express underlying systems and social power structures. He works in the tradition of graffiti and street art et is inspired by urban gangs, marginalized societies, modernist architecture...

To those who are wandering in Europe!!

Good morning contemporary art lovers!
For those who may missed ArtParis, one of the most famous art fair in Paris, here are some very good exhibitions to see... And some other in Europe! I didn't had time to stop by Chelsea and it was raining, so I definitely stayed at home and I was trying to check what is happening in Europe!

"Paris mon Amour"... (Even if my hometown is New York now!). An amazing exhibition of Lucian Freud's works of art is hosted at the Centre Pompidou. Grandson of Sigmund Freud, this artist is probably one of the most famous living artist. The exhibition is organized by the theme of his workshop, the laboratory of the artist; inside which you find the foundation of his work (he used to paint only models who were in that room according to one particular scene-setting).
To seeing also: Tsuruko Yamazaki (leading founder of Gutai, group of avant-garde artists who were searching a new visual language) at Almine Rech gallery; Au Dela du Reel (group exhibition that shows works of art made by Valerie Belin, George Condo, Fabrice Hyber, David Mach and Bettina Rheims. They bring us beyond our real world) at Jerome de Noirmont gallery; and of course don't forget to go to the "Palais de Tokyo"!!

"From Paris to Berlin"... Who didn't heard about the exchange of Parisian and Berliner galleries? An interesting collaboration which allows the interaction of both French and German culture.
What are the exhibitions I would love to see?? Marc Brandenburg and Leigh Bowery at the CFA (Contemporary Fine Arts); Annelies Strba at Eigen + Art gallery; Le Prix Marcel Duchamp: Saadane Afif, Claude Closky, Mathieu Mercier and Peter Roehr at Mehdi Chouakri gallery...
Opening soon: Michael Craig-Martin at Haas und Fuchs gallery!!

"London Calling"... Please forget about the rain, the cold, the foggy weather, the typical Victorian streets where Jack the Ripper could attack you. London is quite fun!! And instead of drinking beer or eating a fish-n-chips in a pub, go to the galleries... A new exhibition of Ron Arad, Restless, is hosted by the Barbican Art gallery. According to the critics, it could be the first major survey of Arad's work in the UK. Then one waits for him in Paris, Larry Gagosian organized an exhibition of Arshile Gorky in his gallery from London. But who knows, maybe parisian will be able to see it soon! Also in London, the Irving Penn Portraits, exhibition hosted by the National Portrait Gallery and that includes over than 120 prints from his seven-decade career...

"Comic Strip, french fries, mussels and Art"... Who said that Belgian were only good at making chocolate?? (Any way Swiss are the best!!). At the Aeroplastics gallery you will see a beautiful exhibition about a young emerging African artist: Frances Goodman whose work consists in an objective study of the human condition. Argos, one of the leading art galleries in Brussels, gained the status of the most renowned centre for art and media. Here you will find several interesting works made by Ralo Mayer and Rinko Kawauchi. Stretched Territories, the new Frank Van Der Salm's exhibition is hosted by the Crown gallery, one of the respected art institutions in Brussels...

And I am not gonna tell you everything! I will let you discover those towns and organize your trip by yourself...

Outdoor New York City

Good afternoon contemporary art lovers!
What a perfect day to go on a promenade on the streets of New York City! And there are so many sculptures to see on your way... Let me show you some examples of those sculptures and I hope I will give you the envy to go out and having a look on it!! Wear your sunglasses and let's go out...

This massive 35-foot sculpture has been made by Damien Hirst and is exposed on Park Avenue between 53rd and 54th streets. Titled "The Virgin Mother", the sculpture depicts a pregnant woman however the different layers of her skin are removed on one side to expose the foetus, muscle and tissues layers, the skull... "The Virgin Mother" was bought by Aby Rosen, a real estate magnate who wanted to exhibit his new purchase on the courtyard of one of his properties, the Lever House. A second copy has been made for installation at the Royal Academy or Arts in London.

Stay in Midtown West and go further on the corner of 55th street and 6th avenue, you will find the amazing and famous red "Love", a twelve-foot Cor-ten steel sculpture, made by Robert Indiana, an american artist. Originally designed for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art, the first exhibition of this image as a sculpture was in New York City in 1970. The "Love" sculpture has been reproduced in a variety of formas and there are several versions of this sculpture: in Tapei, Taiwan or also in Shinjuku, Japan.

On your way to go the West Village, you will see this beautiful sculpture, "Gay Liberation", which has been made in 1979 by George Segal, an american artist, to celebrate the gay and lesbian rights movement and commemorate the beginning the gay liberation. The sculpture, made in bronze and painted in white, depicts four figures: a standing male couple and a seating female couple, in the middle of the Christopher Park. It was commissioned by the Mildred Andrews Fund which is a private Cleveland-based foundation that supports public art.

Now you are in the West Village, it's 5pm on thuesday afternoon, you ended up your promenade and it's time to have a glass of wine on a pretty terrasse!

NYC Arts Week

Good afternoon contemporary art lovers!
Such a crazy week was it! So many art fairs, exhibitions, dinners, parties... What did you think about the Armory Show this year?? And what about the other fairs and exhibitions?

I was really impressed by the positive vibes that we could feel this year at the Armory Show. So many galleries came from all over the world and they seemed to be confident. Usually, works of art made by the same artist are exhibited in several galleries. This year many many artists have been represented. Of course you don't have to like all of those works but at least it's different which is interesting. I went several times at the Armory and I realized that a lot of works of art which were hung on the wall have been changed. Which is good because it means that dealers sold! This year I wasn't really impressed by paintings whose are exhibited. I have definitely prefered the sculptures: the "Degas' dancer" reinterpreted by Richard Jackson exhibited at the Vallois gallery, "(Casse toi alors) pauvre C[anard]" which is a political reference to the French President, made by Sven't Jolle and showed at the Laurent Godin gallery and of course some other beautiful sculptures made by Nari Ward at the Lehmann Maupin or Anselm Reyle and Jim Lambie at the Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd... But it was so crowded! Even at the opening which is supposed to be only for collectors and professional. And in my opinion, it wasn't the most interesting art fair, regarding the quality of the works of art...

ADAA (Art Dealer Association of America's Art Show) was the Armory Show competitor. First of all, the fair took place at the Armory on Park Avenue what is confusing. Then several galleries and dealers were showed at both fairs: Pace Wildenstein, David Zwirner, Peter Blum, Acqualvella Galleries... My favorite artist: Fred Wilson exhibited at the Pace Wildenstein gallery. It was a very beautiful art fair,  more modern than contemporary. And if you want start your own art collection, have a look on their website you will find a very interesting and helpful "Collector's Guide".

According to me, Pulse was the most interesting art fair regarding the quality of the young emerging artists' works. My two favorites: Markus Linnenbrink whose work is exhibited at the Ftc gallery and Martin Denker at the M+B gallery. Their works are very different: Markus works with resin, paint and he makes paintings and sculptures; Martin is a photographer who uses all the details that he sees in his daily life. But both create beautiful works of art, very colorful, positive...They put you in a good mood which is not negligible in this time!!

The Independent Art Fair wasn't my favorite. Interesting but definitely intriguing and too crowded, stairs were too narrow (this fair was the only one whose the entrance was free even at the opening)!!
The exhibition curated by Jeff Koons at the New Museum, "Skin Fruit", was amazing. Jeff Koons has selected over 100 works of art which belong to the Dakis Joannou Collection based in Athens and which are showed for the first time in the United States. It was probably very difficult to choose the appropriate place for each work of art because rooms aren't very big and we are too close to appreciate the largest sculptures. You may be shocked by some pieces because they are very provocative and innovative but maybe it's only the reflect of our society...

Even if the arts week is ended up there still are so many exhibitions to see as the one curated by Shaquille O'Neal!! You didn't know?! He isn't only a basket player...