20th Century Prints London 4th & 5th December 2008 Andy Warhol (1928-1987) Eva Mudocci (after Munch). unique silkscreen Est. £70,000-90,000 ($100,000-130,000) Fully Illustrated Catalogue Online at www.bloomsburyauctions.com Contact Alexander Hayter: alexander.hayter@bloomsburyauctions.com Bloomsbury House | 24 Maddox Street | London | W1S 1PP | T +44 (0) 20 7495 9494 | F +44 (0) 20 7495 9499 info@bloomsburyauctions.com | www.bloomsburyauctions.com ������� ��������������� ������������ ��� ���� ����� ����� ����������� ���� ������� ������� ��� �������� ����� ����� ��� ���� ����������� ���� �� ��� ����� �� �����������������
CASEY FATCHETT THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL/MIAMI BEACH DAILY EDITION 4 DECEMBER 2008 13 <strong>Art</strong>ists at <strong>Art</strong> Positions José Dávila: cutting-edge container Until recently, the Mexican artist José Dávila, who lives and works in Guadalajara, has found a warmer embrace from the dealers of Europe than those of America. But that changed recently when the Renwick Gallery in New York became his US gallery. After his first solo show there in May, Dávila was accepted for <strong>Art</strong> Positions at <strong>Art</strong> Basel Miami Beach. His work for Renwick (P18) is a shipping container sliced up into a series of equalsized shallow boxes evenly spaced with alternating voids. “I wanted to make a game of proportions and mathematical relationships,” said Dávila, Grab your copy “<strong>The</strong> <strong>Art</strong> <strong>Newspaper</strong> is an invaluable source of information about art and the art world”. PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO, DIRECTOR METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART,NEW YORK who was influenced by Donald Judd’s “Stacks” series. “Like Judd, I wanted ten evenly sized boxes with gaps in between, but my work has blown it up in scale and I have kept the container on its side so that it ‘stacks’ horizontally.” Dávila has transformed the container from a room in which to display works of art to a work of art in its own right. <strong>The</strong> outside has been sprayed with blue car paint, the inside with grey. Although the container is highly visible squeezed between its orangecoloured neighbours, it comes into its own when the Miami sun creates a chiaroscuro of architectural rigour. V.L. Drew Heitzler: tree of a kind <strong>The</strong> palm trees lining the streets of Los Angeles are as evocative of the West Coast as the Hollywood sign. But many of the trees are nearly 100 years old, and their days are numbered. <strong>The</strong> Los Angelesbased artist Drew Heitzler has been moved by their imminent demise to such an extent that he has “brought” one to <strong>Art</strong> Positions. It can be found outside Redling Fine <strong>Art</strong>’s container (P15), painted a funereal black and looking rather forlorn. Heitzler was busy sprucing up Untitled (Mexican Fan Palm), 2008, ($35,000) in the hours before the opening of <strong>Art</strong> Positions. <strong>The</strong> recent bad weather has given the tree quite a battering, so fronds and coconuts had to be re-affixed with heavy-duty tape. <strong>The</strong> artist has used considerable artistic licence to make the arboreal sculpture. Rather than the Canary Island type that is dying off in Los Angeles, the tree is instead a thriving Mexican variety. Moreover, the transplant has come from South Carolina, and not Southern California. J.P. Federico Díaz: winter wonderland A chance encounter on a night flight from Paris to New York changed artist Federico Díaz’s life. He got into a brief conversation with an urbane American, who gave him his business card and told him to call. <strong>The</strong> man was Robert Buck, a former director of the Brooklyn Museum. Fast-forward 18 months and the half-Argentine, half- Czech artist has designed the central floor/bar area at <strong>Art</strong> Charlie Hammond: tradition turned upside down Scottish gallerist Sorcha Dallas is presenting the work of painter Charlie Hammond at her container in <strong>Art</strong> Positions (P1). It is the most traditional work on view—the paintings are framed oils on canvas—but Hammond undermines the pristine surface of the paint by scraping it with paintbrushes strapped to drills. Portrait with a Black Eye, 2006-08, is priced at £4,000. He also chops out wedges of paint to resemble pie charts, a recurring theme in several of his works. <strong>The</strong>se geometric shapes can be read as patterns, figures or faces, and it is significant that Hammond studied at Glasgow School of <strong>Art</strong>, where the figurative tradition was re-born in the “Man aged 45 gunned down by persons unknown, Culiacán, 20 September 2007 at 10.30 hours.” In front of the unsentimental prose of a Mexican police report lies jewellery studded with fake diamonds and shards of glass, the latter the remains of the windscreen of the victim’s pick-up truck. Part of a series entitled “21”, 2008, by the artist Teresa Margolles, which Positions for <strong>Art</strong> Radio International and PS1 Contemporary <strong>Art</strong> Center in New York, the MoMA affiliate that is headed up by Alanna Heiss, who happens to be a friend of Mr Buck. From his Prague studio Díaz has created what at first sight looks like a winter wonderland but is actually a high-tech, multi-platform installation that represents vibrations and radio early 1980s with the “New Glasgow Boys” group of artists such as Peter Howson and Ken Currie. Hammond renders the human figure down to basic geometric elements and cites his greatest influences as the artist Jean Dubuffet and the situationists of the 1960s. Sorcha Dallas is also showing Hammond’s plaster and ceramic works. <strong>The</strong> artist’s humour comes through in the crumpled, ceramic bottles that recall a Cézanne still-life, which are scattered around the floor. “This is a joke about art show opening nights,” says Dallas. “<strong>The</strong>y <strong>start</strong> off so formal but often end up completely debauched.” V.L. frequencies in direct reference to Díaz’s <strong>Art</strong> Radio collaborators. <strong>The</strong> white floor has amoebic black contour lines throughout and glacierlike mounds of polystyrene rise from it in layers. Some of these are studded with fragmented black rubber tubes that, when viewed from above, join up and foreshorten to mimic the floor’s contour lines. <strong>The</strong>re are evening light Teresa Margolles: CSI Mexico is meant to express her outrage at the ongoing slaughter caused by gang warfare, the bracelet is presented in an elegant vitrine as if in an upmarket jewellery shop. Within Galería Salvador Díaz’s (P14) container there are ten showcases (priced at €20,000 each), representing ten police bulletins, displaying 21 memento mori of lives cut short, all NEWS, EVENTS, POLITICS, BUSINESS, ART, MONTHLY Unique in its conception and scope, each issue provides over 70 pages of news, interviews, features and debate.Reporting on everything from old masters to conceptualism, each month THE ART NEWSPAPER brings you the important stories from around the globe. WWW.THEARTNEWSPAPER.COM ADVERTISING: +44 20 7735 3331 SUBSCRIPTION: +44 1795 414 863 shows throughout the week, with music streaming from the DJ’s booth through speakers implanted in the mounds, and psychedelic 1960s films projected overhead. An interactive light projection evades, chases and captures visitors’ every move. A collector would need to cover production costs of $300,000 to re-install the work at home. Viv Lawes encrusted with shattered glass collected from the crime scene by Margolles’ family and friends. <strong>The</strong> artist, who was born in Culiacán and lives in Mexico City, then takes the broken crystals to a local jeweller, whose best customers are often ironically the hit men themselves. <strong>The</strong> result is conceptual bling as mourning jewellery. Javier Pes CASEY FATCHETT CASEY FATCHETT
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