Dodorye for Art President

Traver Dodorye Takes Miami Art Basel 2014

 

He speaks on how every year he sees people outside of the state and country come and take over the city. Being young humble and ambitious is one thing he lives by. Traver Dodorye took some of his work to the streets of Miami. Some of the pieces hanging on trees others stickers on bus stops. Traver understands the importance of exposure and plans on working towards that this year.

Dodorye Graphics

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The Scream by Andy Warhol sells for $5.5 m At Frieze

Warhol’s “The Scream (After Munch),” a 1984 work inspired by the Norwegian artist, was sold by Skarstedt Gallery for about $5.5 million to a private collector.

Hirst Tops Sales as Buyers Pick $2.2 Billion Frieze Art

Damien Hirst, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol works sold for more than $3 million each as wealthy collectors got first dibs at the opening of the Frieze Art Fair in London.

Select guests including billionaire Indonesian collector Budi Tek, who opened a private museum in Shanghai in May, actressSienna Miller and architect Zaha Hadidpacked 162 galleries this week at the main contemporary art fair in Regent’s Park and 127 booths at Frieze Masters, a sister event showing modern and historic works.

Frieze Week is Europe’s biggest concentration of commercial fairs, public sales and gallery shows, offering as much as $2.2 billion of art. Frieze, whose organizers expect 70,000 people to attend the two fairs, runs through Oct. 18; Frieze Masters closes Oct. 19.

“There’s so much going on in London this week for art,” Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum in New York, said as she toured the booths at the Oct. 14 preview. “People really converge here.”

Contemporary-art sales at public auctions globally totaled 1.5 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in the 12 months to July 3, up 33 percent from the previous year, according to Paris-based arts data researcher Artprice.

Dealers reported brisk sales in the first two days of the fair. Within the first hour of the Frieze Masters preview, Mnuchin Gallery sold one of four elongated varnished steel sculptures from the 1955 “Forgings” series by U.S. sculptor David Smith for $2.4 million to a private collector.

Promoting Smith

“Americans know David Smith, but we need to broaden his audience,” Robert Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive whose New York gallery specializes in postwar art, said of the artist who died in 1965. “I’ve already had a lot of interest from non-U.S. collectors.”

Many of the bigger sales were at Frieze Masters, which had booths showing works by Francis Bacon, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens.

Warhol’s “The Scream (After Munch),” a 1984 work inspired by the Norwegian artist, was sold by Skarstedt Gallery for about $5.5 million to a private collector.

Picasso remains popular as his “Tete de Mousquetaire” crayon and black ink on board went for $4 million at Van De Weghe Fine Art. The artist’s 1964 “Le Peintre au Travail” lithograph on paper sold for 2 million pounds ($3.2 million) at Dickinson’s booth. A small Henry Moore bronze sculpture of a reclining woman with a child sold for as much as $500,000 at Richard Green gallery in London.

Formaldehyde Fish

At the main fair, Hirst’s “Because I Can’t Have You I Want You,” a 1993 diptych of glass-enclosed fish in formaldehyde, fetched 4 million pounds at White Cube within minutes of the opening preview. The gallery, with branches in London, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo, also sold a 2001 piece composed of an electric microphone, metal stands and electrical cords by David Hammons for $4 million.

“I can’t keep up with the sales,” said David Maupin of Lehmann Maupin, which sold British artist Tracey Emin’s embroidered calico of a reclining woman in a price range of 120,000 to 175,000 pounds. The New York and Hong Kong gallery also sold Mickalene Thomas’s 2008 work composed of rhinestone-encrusted portraits in the 60,000-to-100,000-pound range.

Kaws’s Creature

Hauser & Wirth’s booth at the main fair was an installation inspired by Sigmund Freud’s study in London’s Hampstead neighborhood. The booth features works by 20 artists including Louise Bourgeois and Phyllida Barlow with themes representing Freud’s conscious and unconscious. A 2012 work by Anna Maria Maiolino, “Between Inside and Outside,” made of plaster with acrylic resin varnish on a metal table, sold for $120,000 and Rashid Johnson’s 2012 red oak daybed with zebra skin went for $90,000.

“Final Days,” an almost 7-foot-tall black sculpture of a creature with big feet, hands and ears by Brooklyn, New York-based artist Kaws sold for about $300,000 at Galerie Perrotin, which has galleries in New York, Paris and Hong Kong. An almost 10-foot-fall 2014 bronze sculpture of a standing sausage by Erwin Wurm sold for 250,000 euros at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, which is in Paris and Salzburg, Austria. George Condo’s “Portrait With Green Shapes,” oil on linen sold at Spruth Magers for $500,000.

Rembrandt, Twombly

Sigmar Polke’s untitled 2003 gouache on paper abstract, sold for $800,000 at Michael Werner Gallery of New York and London. New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery sold drawings and a sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid, who was born in Syria and lives in Brooklyn, made of stainless steel treated with plaster and fiberglass at prices from $20,000 to $120,000.

“It’s been a good morning,” Adrian Turner, senior director of Marianne Boesky, said at the VIP preview.

One of the most expensive works at Frieze Masters is a Rembrandt 17th century portrait of a man with arms akimbo, being offered at New York’s Otto Naumann gallery for $48.5 million. A Cy Twombly paint, crayon and graphite canvas from 1959 is at Van de Weghe for $24 million. Picasso’s “Jeune Garcon Nu a Cheval,” oil on canvas from 1906 has an asking price of 14 million pounds at Dickinson.

Emerging Artists

Jeffrey Deitch, the art dealer and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, said he preferred to walk the aisles of galleries showing emerging artists. He said Ella Kruglyanskaya’s work stands out because it brought a “fresh approach” to figure drawing. All six of her portraits of women at the booth of New York’s Gavin Brown’s Enterprise sold for about $50,000 each.

Collectors drank champagne as they toured the booths, wandered around the sculpture garden or walked through Regent’s Park to get from one fair tent to the other -- or took the BMW courtesy car.

Andre Balazs, the New York entrepreneur whose businesses include London’s trendy Chiltern Firehouse hotel and restaurant, said he hadn’t bought anything in the fair’s initial hours.

His first impression of the art?

“A lot of stuff looks the same,” Balazs said, laughing. “Sorry, but it does.”

(An earlier version of this story corrected the price of the Smith work in the sixth paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Mary Romano in New York at mromano6@bloomberg.net

George Condo Creates Portraits in Action

Last June, the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked the artist George Condo to participate in a discussion on Willem de Kooning. In the course of his research on de Kooning, Condo read several texts by the art critic Harold Rosenberg and became inspired by the concept of “action painting” — the term Rosenberg coined to describe the intense, almost performative energy the Abstract Expressionists used to paint their canvases. Condo experimented with that idea while creating his newest body of work earlier this year in his East Hampton studio. “They coalesced into the form of a portrait, rather than just a sort of abstract painting,” Condo says. That series, which he calls “action portraits,” is on view from Nov. 8 to Dec. 20, in a 12-piece exhibition titled Double Heads / Black Paintings / “Abstractions” at Skarstedt’s Chelsea location.

Though Condo explored the idea of portraiture in the series, he wasn’t focused on the subjects, as he has been in the past (among his best-known works are a Cubist-style portrait of Kanye West, one of the five covers he designed for West’s album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” as well as several warped portraits of Queen Elizabeth). The figurative element in this series, Condo explains, is less specific. “They’re really not so much subjects in themselves as they are observations of the emotional content of human nature, so they’re variables in that sense,” he says. “They’re sort of interchangeable.” In the paintings, the subjects are rendered unrecognizable, thanks to a complicated layering process. In one piece, “Beginnings,” Condo blacks out an entire face, except for one eye, with charcoal. In another, “Double Heads in Silver,” the artist references Andy Warhol’s “Double Elvis,” turning two heads into abstract forms. 

One subject Condo did reveal was himself, depicted in “Self Portrait Right Now,” a study of, he says, “the changing atmosphere of my feelings that I have about life.” In the complex piece, strokes of charcoal and blocks of silver paint cover a colorful drawing of his face — his representation, Condo says, “of a mix of desperation, sort of darkness, alienation, loneliness and freedom.”

“Double Heads / Black Paintings / Abstractions” is on view Nov. 8 through Dec. 20 at Skarstedt, Chelsea, skarstedt.com.

 

Q&A: Actor Jeffrey Wright revisits role as artist Jean-Michel Basquiat

By Kiko Martinez
Digital Media Manager

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the death of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (he died in 1988 at the age of 27 of a heroin overdose). Best known as a graffiti artist in the 1970s in New York City and for his neoexpressionist work in the early 1980s, Basquiat is still admired today for his daring social commentary and for what art historian Robert Farris Thompson refers to as “a quest for a sharper, ecumenical assessment of the troubling – yet promising – configurations of our urban destiny and predicament.”

In 1996, fellow artist and friend Julian Schnabel directed the biopic “Basquiat,” which film critic Roger Ebert called “confident, poetic filmmaking.” Basquiat was portrayed in the film by Tony Award-winning actor Jeffrey Wright (“Angels in America: Perestroika”).

During an interview with Wright last week, I had a chance to talk to him about his role as Basquiat and whether or not he feels the street art-style techniques he incorporated into his work are now fully accepted in the contemporary art world.

Wright can be seen next in the highly-anticipate sequel “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” which hits theaters Nov. 22.

This year we marked the 25th anniversary of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat death. It’s been 17 years since you portrayed him on film. Is that one of those roles that stays with you long after you finish shooting or are you the type of actor that can move on fairly quickly after a project is completed?

You know, I felt at the time – and I still feel – a close kinship with Basquiat as an artist. One of the reasons I was so attracted to playing the role is because I feel his work fits into similar cultural and historical and creative reservoirs that I use often in my work. So much of his work is an absolute celebration of not solely the African American experience, but the diasporal African experience. Those are things I take a huge delight in exploring when I work. You look at his work today and see the references to these ancestral artists that came before him like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis and other iconographic figures like Muhammad Ali and references to slavery. He used all of those things to form the vocabulary of his art. Those are all things I hold precious myself. Beyond that, when I did his film I, too, was a feasibly creative guy trying to explore New York City and trying to find my creative voice within that world. So, I still feel very close to that story – to his story – and to the movie as a result.

What do you think Basquiat would say about the recent attention he has been getting from people in the entertainment and fashion industries? Musicians like Jay-Z are including his name in song lyrics. There’s also a new clothing line that was just released by Supreme New York that is inspired by Basquiat’s work. For someone who thrived for so long as an eccentric, how do you think he’d react to his work and his name being commercialized like that?

(Laughs) You know, [Basquiat] was a guy that used to wear $1,000 Armani suits while he painted. (Laughs) So, if he was materialist at all, he was subversive about it. If he was commercial at all, it was in the subversion of it. I’m not sure how he would take it, but I’m sure he would encourage people to wear the clothes and destroy the clothes at the same time.

Basquiat, of course, was the first artist to bring street art to the mainstream. Today, we see artists like Bansky going around doing their thing. Do you think the art world has learned to embrace that genre since Basquiat? I mean, I know artists teaching at the college level who started their careers tagging trains as teenagers. So, do you think it’s now a fully accepted form of art?

Well, I don’t know if it’s fully accepted yet, but certain aspects of it and certain artists have been accepted. When one of Basquiat’s paintings sells for $43 million earlier this year at auction, I would say that’s a pretty warm embrace of at least his street art and the way it has evolved over time.

Ye and Jay Killing the Game still

  

Dodorye on EDIT

   

Graffiti war Documentary

Banksy Documentary - Exit Through The Gift Shop

The Clothing line that Traver Dodorye established.