“Amazing Spider-Man” star Andrew Garfield swung through Frieze New York during yesterday’s VIP preview, pausing in Gavin Brown’s booth to check out works by Jonathan Horowitz (above), while famed designer Valentino Garavani added a dash of style to the proceedings, and drew stares. (more…)
The artist Joe Fig creates meticulous dioramas of famous artists working in their studios, including Chuck Close (above), Jackson Pollock, Ross Bleckner, Malcolm Morley, Jasper Johns, Inka Essenhigh, Alex Katz (below), Constantin Brancusi, James Rosenquist, and, in a particularly meta piece, himself (at bottom). Fig, who also creates figurative paintings that he shows with Chelsea’s Cristin Tierney Gallery, pays attention to every detail, from the architecture of the artists’ studios, to paint splatters, furniture, and in some cases he even recreates the entire building where they work. (more…)
As you may have noticed, we’ve spent much of the last month poring over art history’s best mustaches, like the would-be surgeons curiously leaning over the corpse in Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632, above), which was the penultimate pick in our Movember series. Now, for the sake of convenience, we’ve gathered all 17 featured artworks in one convenient place. (more…)
While facial hair lends itself just as readily to being portrayed with either smooth or frenzied brushstrokes — as we’ve seen throughout our Movember-long survey of art history’s best mustaches — the idea of painting a hyperrealist ’stache with every bristle and whisker sharply defined and delineated seems, with good reason, excruciating. That has never dissuaded Chuck Close, whose oeuvre includes beards and mustaches aplenty, foremost among them the fellow in “Robert/104,072” (1973-74). (more…)
The devastating passage of Superstorm Sandy wasn’t enough to wipe out art-lovers’ penchant for pining and romance, as evidenced by this week’s batch of Art World Missed Connections, which include a pair of encounters at or near MoMA, another at the 2012 IFPDA Print Fair, and the second such post from Tatzu Nishi’s living room atop Columbus Circle. Let’s start there. (more…)
Chelsea was burning (metaphorically speaking) last night with big openings. Hank Willis Thomas deconstructed the nefarious language of advertising at Jack Shainman, while Chuck Close debuted portraits of Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Philip Glass, and Paul Simon at Pace. (more…)
Chuck Close is already quite a decorated painter, but he now has one more line to add to his resume: presidential portraitist. Earlier this week, a tapestry depicting President Obama by the artist was unveiled at the Mint Museum in North Carolina in honor of the Democratic National Convention. The tapestry is one of 10 that will be made available for sale (at $100,000 each) as part of a fundraiser supporting the Obama Victory Fund. (more…)
