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At SF’s FOG Fair, Dealers Tempt Tech Collectors

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Stan Douglas’s photographs at David Zwirner’s booth at FOG

Elena Platonova is an art advisor, writer, and curator in New York, London, and San Francisco. Her Instagram handle is @ElenasArtAdventures

San Francisco’s FOG Design+Art Fair opened its fifth edition this past Wednesday in an atmospheric, waterfront building at Fort Mason, formerly occupied by the US army. With 45 galleries in attendance, what material did local and visiting dealers bring along in hopes of attracting armies of potential buyers?

San Francisco has a fair share of long-time art patrons of a traditional kind. Yet, art and design purveyors are certainly taking note of the major demographic shift in the foggy Albion of the West Coast, home to an increasingly growing number of potential new entrants to the collecting field, who are amassing quick fortunes by harnessing the power of technology.

Some dealers took a fairly straightforward path and displayed work by artists that they know locals already collect, perhaps hoping that they will do so in depth or inspire their social circle to follow suit. Take, for instance, Lévy Gorvy Gallery’s display of photographs by Diane Arbus. The artist is favored by serial start-up founder and member of a deep-rooted San Francisco family, Trevor Traina. Traina once paid a then-record price of $600,000 for Arbus’ iconic “Identical Twins” photo, a well-publicized fact that did not escape the attention of the dealers.

In a similar fashion, David Zwirner Gallery thoughtfully displayed two monumental interior shots by photographer Stan Douglas at the opening section of the fair, which was certainly meant to grasp the attention of Pamela and Richard Kramlich. Work by Douglas graces the home of the local power duo, who are also major collectors of video art.Continue Reading

Pre-Existing Conditions in New Haven

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Tom Burr is working out his hometown’s social and political controversies, as well as his own personal struggle, inside the Marcel Breuer-designed, IKEA-owned, abandoned building sitting by the highway in New Haven, Connecticut. The exhibition Burr has assembled in the former Armstrong tire warehouse and executive offices is the first of Bortolami Gallery’s Artist/City projects in which the gallery rents spaces in various locations around the country for artists to transform.

Burr’s choice fell on his native New Haven, a locale deeply engrained in his personal history. The Breuer building, it turned out, was waiting for someone to make use of it. Regular commuters on Interstate 95 who drive by New Haven are accustomed to the sight of the imposing concrete structure hovering over the surrounding landscape like a giant Brutalist spaceship. In 1968, when the Armstrong Rubber Factory commissioned the modernist starchitect Marcel Breuer—a once-faculty member at Bauhaus and New Haven’s own Yale—to design the building, it was positioned in a highly visible spot to be a gatepost to the city at the time of its mid-century urban renewal.

In 1988, Armstrong and its building were purchased by the Italian Pirelli Tire Company. In 2002, the edifice and the surrounding area were acquired by IKEA, which built a regional store on the site. You’d think IKEA would have an idea for repurposing the landmark structure. Alas, after chopping off large part of the building’s foundation—to make room for more parking spots—IKEA left the rest intact but found no use for it.

The Breuer building was an obvious choice for Burr. It had been used and abandoned. It had passed hands. It had suffered violations and become a site of intrusions by the city’s homeless and downtrodden. Burr saw the building as a body, with signs of aging, scars, and bandages he wanted to expose in the project entitled Body/Building: Pre-Existing Conditions.

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The most painful scar is on the long wall opposite the entrance. The wall itself was transported from the far-end of the torn down warehouse to cover the opening left after the demolition. Dramatically highlighting the scar, Burr installed a narrow white banner along the length of the building (“Wide Wall Wound”), pointing to the cement seams below.Continue Reading

A Visit to Stefania Bortolami as She Opens Her New Tribeca Space with Daniel Buren’s Stripes

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Bortolami Buren Exhibition

Stefania Bortolami has been part of New York’s art scene for years: first, as an artist liaison for Larry Gagosian—after a successful stint with the legendary London dealer Anthony d’Offay; then co-owning a Chelsea gallery with Amalia Dayan and finally, on her own, as the founder of an eponymous gallery five blocks down the street from the previous space. This May, Bortolami relocated again, this time to Tribeca, joining the likes of Team Gallery, The Drawing Center and Alexander and Bonin in gradually forming yet another art neighborhood in the dynamic Downtown New York.

Sun & Stripes

On the sunny morning of our interview in Bortolami’s new space, I take a pause on the pavement across the street from the gallery, on the spot that offers the best view of the neoclassical columns decorating its façade, each covered in vertical black-and-white stripes. Daniel Buren, the French grand maître for years gracing Bortolami’s artist roster, transformed the columns as part of his solo show inaugurating the new gallery. The stripes may well become the hallmark of the building, as Stefania has received a permit to preserve them until 2021.

Bortolami is fashionably late. No wonder—she must still be in the habit of taking a short walk to her former space, located near her Chelsea loft. I take this opportunity to see what the show looks like inside. A row of colorful columns flanks each side of the long hallway leading into the main space of the gallery—a spacious room completely filled with the same square columns, colored blue, red and yellow on each facet, except for the one that faces the back wall. The columns’ back side bears Buren’s signature 8.7-centimeter vertical stripes, alternating in white and black. I walk to the very back and then look up at the only window in the room—an expansive skylight bearing a sequence of multicolored filters applied by Buren, in a manner similar to his decorations on Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton Foundation building in Paris. Despite the pure joy projected by this radiant color, I can’t get rid of a murky feeling produced by the view below. When you look back to the room, all the colors completely vanish. All that’s left is a black-and-white wall of striped columns, leading back to the entrance, as if one walked into a jewel box and is forced to leave through a prison gate

Stefania Arrives

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Milwaukee Leverages Its Hidden Strength in Art with Huge Outdoor Sculpture Event

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Elena Platonova is an art advisor, curator, and artist liaison in New York and London. Her Instagram handle is @ElenasArtAdventures.
“Avenue des Champ-Elysees. Park Avenue. Michigan Avenue… Milwaukee’s Wisconsin Avenue is emerging as one of the grandest,” say the organizers of Sculpture Milwaukee, an ambitious plan to install twenty-two monumental outdoor sculptures along a major downtown business thoroughfare. Art, despite the presence of a starchitect-designed art museum and a city with a history of wealthy collectors, is not synonymous with Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is better known for its numerous breweries, quality dairy products, and the world’s largest summer music festival.

Star Sculptors, Diverse Styles

The selection of sculptures chosen for the project represent a diverse list of names in terms of techniques, styles and artists’ backgrounds: from an oversized ‘liquid’ bronze tower by the Englishman Tony Cragg, which took four month of negotiations with the adjacent building to install, to Manolo Valdez’s stately Spanish queen gazing at the sleek new Northwestern Mutual building across the street (one of the project’s sponsors), to a bronze horse cast from twigs found in Montana woods by Deborah Butterfield. A white minimalist ‘zikkurat’ by Sol LeWitt was assembled locally according to the instructions provided by the artist’s estate. Santiago Calatrava’s spiky metal ring, reflected in the windows of the nearby Chase Bank, was previously displayed at New York’s Park Avenue. (Calatrava, a renowned Spanish architect, has a special relationship with the city, having built the Quadracci Pavilion for the art museum down the street—by now an architectural symbol of Milwaukee.) Alison Saar’s life-size dark-bronze sculpture with a glass-covered belly that lights up from the glow of fireflies at nighttime distantly resembles ancient monuments of fertility goddesses. This work, made by an African American artist, placed in the middle of downtown Milwaukee, could be a statement on the diversity, and segregation, of the city’s population, as well as symbolize hope for reconciliation of racial tensions. Works of three local artists—Jason S. Yi, Michelle Grabner and Paul Druecke, whose text-based “Shoreline Repast” refers to the local history—complement the multifarious roster.Continue Reading

Six Works on Paper That Matter In This Week’s Contemporary Auctions

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Elena Platonova is an art advisor, curator, and artist liaison in New York and London. Her Instagram handle is @ElenasArtAdventures.

This auction season, the art world talk revolves around a few typical speculations: the gold Stingels—the six-panel one at Sotheby’s and the one in four parts at Christie’s— and the potential records they might break; Phillips’ push to match the other two rivals in the pricey-masterpieces arena; and the guaranteed Basquiat skull painting at Sotheby’s. The sensationalism of the Evening Sales left aside, most artists’ output goes beyond large-scale, multimillion-dollar canvases and monumental sculptures.

Works on paper, for example, often constitute an integral part of an artistic production. They serve as a working laboratory where ideas and themes are developed or form an independent oeuvre in its own right. Thus, buying works on paper allows for a thoughtful and more affordable way to form a collection and to complement a selection of pieces in other media. To illustrate this premise, I highlight six contemporary works on paper—two at each house—coming up for sale this week. These pieces are mostly included in the less publicized Day, or Morning, Sales—the ones that rarely make newspaper headlines but still present ample opportunities to spot a masterpiece and to acquire a slice of history.

Christie’s:

Sam Francis (1923-1994), Untitled, circa 1958-59 Watercolor on paper; Estimate: $200,000-300,000

Lot 554 of Morning Session, May 18, 2017

With its dynamism and technical bravura, this Sam Francis watercolor is strikingly similar to the artist’s larger, highly coveted, and often record-breaking, canvases of the late 1950s. Resembling a sensual, otherworldly flower sprinkling drips of color in the infinite space, the work amalgamates the effects of some major formative experiences in Francis’s career: the time the artist spent in Tokyo and his interest in Japanese calligraphy, his fascination with compositions resembling aerial views as a one-time pilot and his studies of botany as a Berkeley student. It is probable that the tremendous impression that Monet’s Water Lilies made on Sam Francis during an exhibition in Paris in 1956 also has reverberations in this work. Continue Reading

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