Read All About It: Roitfeld Shows Text Art at ‘Merci Mercy’
Kyle DeWoody does not have a favorite word, but she does have one she always uses for 20 Questions. (Hint: It’s smaller than a breadbox.) “Merkin!” she revealed with a grin. Read More
Openings
Tickets to Public Art Fund’s ‘Tatzu Nishi: Discovering Columbus’ Now Available
The Public Art Fund announced today that free tickets to “Tatzu Nishi: Discovering Columbus” are now available for reservation on their website. The exhibition opens on Sept. 20, so visit the site and get going. Read More
Driscoll Babcock Galleries Moves to Chelsea, Opens Thursday
Babcock Galleries, the oldest gallery in New York, has moved to Chelsea. This Thursday the gallery, which was founded 160 years ago and was formerly located on Fifth Avenue near 57th Street, will celebrate its move with a soft opening, inaugurating its new space with a survey of roughly 250 years of American art. “This is How We Do It” will present 25 artists from Thomas Eakins and John Singleton Copley to Jules Olitski and Andy Warhol, as well as contemporary artists Margaret Bowland, Marylyn Dintenfass and Jenny Morgan, among others. Read More
Andy Valmorbida Gives Futura an Ad-Lib Moment at the Opening of ‘Future-Shock’
Alberto Mugrabi, China Chow, Dustin Yellin and Russell Simmons were out of sight when graffiti artist Futura dropped to the floor and began drawing swiftly in a fan’s book last night at a huge warehouse at 560 Washington Avenue. It was the opening of the artist’s solo show “Future-Shock,” organized by Andy Valmorbida, on the first night of New York Fashion Week. Music producers, models and socialites were there, but at this moment, at a back corner of the cavernous room in front of two of his canvases, the artist seemed to be having a quiet moment to himself. He seemed to like it that way. Read More
Things Got a Little Meta at the Mark Flood Opening at Zach Feuer Last Night
Here is a picture of Artforum‘s publisher, the always-colorful Knight Landesman, standing beneath a Mark Flood work, Artforum Ad Fantasy, hanging behind the desk at Zach Feuer Gallery (photo is courtesy of Zach Feuer). Pretty much speaks for itself. Read More
Japanther to Perform in Conjunction with Gelitin’s Greene Naftali Opening in September
Gallerist hears that Japanther, the band and performance art project started by Matt Reilly and Ian Vanek while students at Pratt, will be performing in conjunction with the opening of Gelitin’s show at Greene Naftali on Sept. 13. Japanther’s performance, which will take place at a location as of yet TBA, should be a delightfully rowdy welcome for the Austrian art collective, whose last show at the gallery involved them creating a messy colorful sculpture installation while blindfolded and half-naked. Read More
Haunch of Venison Hosts Walter Robinson–Curated Show, Artnet Magazine ‘Wake’
Last Thursday evening, as the New York art world prepared for its annual August hibernation, people spilled in and out of the Haunch of Venison gallery on West 21st Street, a few feet from the West Side Highway, for one of the season’s last group shows. The opening reception for “Claxons,” an exhibition organized by Walter Robinson, the editor of Artnet magazine until last month, was underway. Read More
There’s Something About Mark Flood: Cameron Diaz Turns Up for ‘Hateful Years’
Barry Manilow and David Lee Roth—present in the form of grotesquely distorted photo collages—weren’t the only celebrities at the opening of artist Mark Flood’s career survey, “The Hateful Years,” at Upper East Side gallery Luxembourg & Dayan the other night. Cameron Diaz was on hand, and paused to pose for photographer Mary Barone (remember her people pics from the sadly now-defunct Artnet magazine?) along with Mr. Flood and the artist Dan Colen. Read More
Hardly Working: Nicolas Guagnini Presents Paintings in Seven Parts
Save for a single painting, Balice Hertling & Lewis’s small fourth-floor space in Hell’s Kitchen was pretty much empty when we arrived at 7 p.m. sharp on the last Thursday of June for the opening of Nicolas Guagnini’s “Sequence 4: Seven.” Perhaps everyone was at the Miguel Abreu opening of Mr. Guagnini’s “Sequence 4: Seven,” which started an hour earlier. The two galleries have teamed up to present the show, displaying just one of the seven paintings in the series every week for four weeks. Read More
Joe Deutch, Artist Who Presented Russian Roulette at UCLA, Hits Marlborough Chelsea
“I’m not really like a gun person,” artist Joe Deutch told Gallerist at Marlborough Chelsea last night. He was standing in front of an open metal briefcase that displayed a gun. “But there was no way for us to legally get it here and show it.”
The gun in the briefcase was fake, part of Mr. Deutch’s new exhibition, which opened last night. (He pronounces his name “deech.”) It presents video documentation, photographs, sculpture and ephemera from the performance work that Mr. Deutch has engaged in over the last eight years, the lynchpin of which was a notorious performance that he did in 2004 while a graduate student at UCLA. For that work he went before his classmates dressed in a suit and tie, removed a gun from a paper bag and held it in one hand, while with the other he held up a bullet and showed it to the class (and the camera: he was recording it). Then he loaded the bullet into the chamber with the flick of his hand and placed the gun up to his head. Then he pulled the trigger, which clicked, and lowered the gun, unhurt. He then walked into an adjacent hall, out of sight and set off a fire-cracker, which made the sound of a shot. Read More
