JTM Gallery

I spent a lot of time at this gallery in Paris. Johan Tamer Morael is an old friend from New York. He's doing great things in Paris with contemporary art and his art fair, Slick. I saw some desirable pieces for sale there, and performances that showed a decidedly New York Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Lower East Side influence. One of his artists Hughes Rochette had an installation with his partner Nathalie Brevet at the Colleges des Bernadins.

Image Credit: Cellula. Nathalie Brevet and Hughes Rochette. Photo by Franck Thibault.

Le Musee d'Orsay

Art Nouveau Revival and James Ensor were reasons to make the line at the Musee d'Orsay. I didn't know Ensor's work very well, but now I'm a convert, and there were some brilliant pieces by Verner Panton (to die for!)

Image: Living room with "Wohnskulptur" at private house at Basel Binningen, Rebgasse 108

Veilhan at Versailles

This artist was in Hubert Neumann's exhibition, The Incomplete, at CAM. He's definitely one of the best contemporary artists France has produced. Here you can see his work as it is created for and installed at Versailles. Brilliant!
Image: The coach of Xavier Veilhan © CVS

elles@centrepompidou

This is an amazing exhibition. Perhaps too much to take in in one go, but worth a revisit in that case. Artists like Marina Abramovic, Valie Export, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, and many others are in the exhibition. I realized just now as I went through the female artists in my head that they are lacking black female artists, African, African-American, African-French, whatever, there is a dirth of them and someone should add some to the collection of the musee national d'art modern.
Image Credit:Pipilotti Rist: «À la belle étoile»,2007, (détail), installation audiovisuelle. © Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London.

Pinacotheque de Paris: L'Age D'Or Hollandais

This is a great exhibition. I actually got to see this painting by Vermeer for the first time:

It's worth exploring all the visual symbols in the work and a treat to simply look and marvel at genius.

Saatchi Gallery and Phillips de Pury & Co

Simon de Pury once again played the elegant host at a party that featured some works by German artist Martin Kippenberger. If you saw the exhibition at MoMA earlier this year you would have seen some of the work Kippenberger did on Hotel stationary. I love the intimacy of these pieces, so small and delicate and vulnerable versus his larger manly works.



Image credit: http://www.artnet.com "Drawings on hotel stationary by Martin Kippenberger exhibitions, 1979-1997, in "Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective" at the Museum of Contemproary Art, Los Angeles
Photo by Brian Forrest"

Again a super glam crowd and a wonderful space to exhibit art. Peter Coffin's Alice in Wonderland-like staircase greeted visitors on entering. I love that piece too. I would guess it came from Emmanuel Perrotin as I saw a similar one some time ago at his gallery in Miami.



Image credit: http://www.artnet.com
Peter Coffin
Untitled (Spiral Staircase), 2007
Saatchi Gallery

Project Space 176 as part of the Zabludowicz Collection

I met Liz, the curator of the Zabludovicz Collection, in NYC for the Armory a few years ago. The project space in the north of London is quite impressive. It has a feel of something originating from a place of sincerity, which a lot of times seems lacking in the contemporary western art scene. Ai Weiwei & Serge Spitzer's painted urns were to die for!



Image credit: Ai Weiwei and Serge Spitzer from http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com

KANDINSKY PRIZE for Russian Art at the Louise T Blouin Foundation

This was an amusing evening. Though seemingly poker faced, Russians can be lots of fun. I fell in love all over again with the Blue Noses and their often irreverent, satirical view of the world.

The foundation itself is a beautiful space and I'm glad to have finally seen it.

London Lost

You're probably wondering why the posts have been so few and far between and a little bit impersonal. Well I lost the charger and usb connection for my camera but now I've found it and will be taking pics again. I'll post links to some of the things I saw in London....

From London with Love: Frieze Art Fair

London's sunny like New York. I was lucky to find somewhere to stay, considering I booked so late and there's the Frieze Art Fair in town. Jose Parla was on the same flight with me. It was good to have someone to talk to about art while waiting for this, that or the other. Hope to see him again before this is all over. Then off to Paris.

Later I'll see Florian, from Soho House, at his house, and maybe a cocktail party later. So much to do, so many people to see and not so much time.




Jose Parla at work from http://www.maldeojo.com

Gagosian Gallery: ED RUSCHA On the Road

ED RUSCHA
On the Road: An Artist Book of the Classic Novel by Jack Kerouac

October 12 - November 28, 2009

Gagosian Gallery
Davies Street
17-19 Davies Street
London W1K 3DE
T. 44.207.493.3020
F. 44.207.493.3025
london@gagosian.com
Hours: Mon-Sat 10-6


The original novel was published in 1957 and it's about a group of crazy young people who just travel back and forth across the United States. Sometimes they hitch-hike and sometimes they drive cars. They steal cars and just want to be on the road the whole time. I've always liked that notion.
--Ed Ruscha

In 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on his typewriter as a continuous 120 foot-long scroll, feverishly recording in twenty days his experiences during road trips in the United States and Mexico, which he began with Neil Cassady in the late 1940s. On the Road was finally published in 1957, and Kerouac was immediately acknowledged as the voice of the Beat Generation, a new group of writers, including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, who became known for their embracing of radical free-verse style.

Ed Ruscha's singular art has recorded the shifting emblems of American life in the form of Hollywood logos, stylized gas stations, and archetypal landscapes. His wry choice of words and indirect phrases mines the perpetual interplay between language as a physical thing and language as a transparent medium. During the sixties, he created a series of cheaply printed photographic books as deadpan meditations on the romantic vision of the road epitomized by the Beats. His typologies of the urban environment of Los Angeles included Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963) and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). In Royal Road Test (1967), he brought the word and the road together in a conceptual prank by documenting himself dropping a vintage typewriter from a speeding Buick.

Over the last couple of years, Ruscha has turned his attention to On the Road, resulting in his own version of Kerouac's Beat bible. Kerouac's entire text appears accompanied by black and white photographic illustrations that Ruscha has either taken himself, commissioned from other photographers, or selected from found images to refer closely to the details and impressions that the author describes, from car parts to jazz instruments, from sandwich stacks to tire burns on a desert road.

Coinciding with "Ed Ruscha : Fifty Years of Painting" at the Hayward Gallery in London, Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of selected illustrated spreads from this special version of On the Road, along with a bound copy of the limited-edition book.

On the Road is published by Gagosian Gallery and Steidl. The leather-bound book comprises 228 pages, signed and numbered by the artist in an edition of 350 and presented in a slip-case.

Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937 and studied painting, photography, and graphic design at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). His work is collected by major museums worldwide and has been shown extensively, most recently the drawing retrospective Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips®, Smoke and Mirrors, which toured U.S museums in 2004-2005 and Ed Ruscha: Photographer at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Musée National Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2006. "Ed Ruscha : Fifty Years of Painting" opens at the Hayward Gallery on October 14.

For further inquiries please contact the gallery at london@gagosian.com or at +44.207.493.3020.

Kapitall: Let's Start The Revolution

Hello Everyone!

Please join my friend's private beta test of Kapitall http://Kapitall.com and explore this fun platform for investing. It's free but if you have money issues and haven't started saving, much less investing, you can go to my friend's money spa, http://www.yourmoneyrelationship.com for advice on how to start being financially responsible and prosperous.

Once you've registered on Kapitall don't forget to add me to your contacts. My username is "Nicollette". I'll share my portfolio with you and we can exchange tips for investing!


With a designer from Apple, a founder from the gaming industry and a founder from the financial software industry, well, I think we have a winning formula here to start a financial revolution...

Login for more money matters: http://www.kapitall.com

xo
Nico

John Gorman Reading From Shades of Luz at Telephone Bar Next Monday

Reading by John Gorman from Shades of Luz
Monday October 12, 8 pm
Telephone Bar
149 2nd Avenue near 9th Street



Shades of Luz is a modern day Don Quixote, a picaresque rich in characters searching for love and meaning in an otherwise manic-paced world. Grad School dropout Benny Fluke goes from stuffed animal peddler to thumb-wrestling champ. He is a monkey trainer, philosopher, wine snob, and a strip club connoisseur. Above and beyond all that he is a romantic at heart and is desperate to win the love of Luz the hot-blooded, ambitious beauty who keeps boomeranging into his life. Something from Luz’s past inextricably bonds them together and Benny will not stop until she is his. Their delightful repartee is crisp, witty, and sumptuously engaging.

"A coming-of-age story that is refreshing to read because it is empty of dyfunctional types of characters."

Weam Namou, author of The Feminine Art and The Mismatched Braid

"Shades of Luz is a frantic, cockeyed search for love and meaning. This wonderfully odd story introduces us to a marvelously inventive universe with tough guys, loony broads, jazz-playing monkeys and surprises that can change lives."

Check out the sleeper for the National Book Award
http://www.shadesofluz.com

Paper Cut: Blog that covers lit, pop culture, and all the cracks in between
http://jgpapercut.blogspot.com

"Don't let schooling interfere with your education."
Mark Twain

Don't Miss It! This Friday at The Slipper Room

Burlesque star Dirty Martini to Host World Premier Screening Party of Filmmaker Stephen Dirkes "the Object" at the Slipper Room, 167 Orchard St., Lower East Side, NYC Friday October 9th at 8pm. Our screening at 8pm will segue into a night of live burlesque.

Obscure Object Films announces the release of Stephen Dirkes short film The Object, starring burlesque star Dirty Martini and Paul Richard. This 5 minute film shot on location in Brooklyn and Long Island City follows a protagonist whose lust for women unattainable leads the viewer from stop action animation to a live action set reminiscent of the best of 1930s cabaret.

Combing stop-motion animation and live-action with photographer, Tal Shpantzer, creates a quirky brilliance that has received the thumbs up in festivals, screenings, installations and live VJ/DJ sets from audiences as varied as those at the Chelsea Museum to the connoisseurs of the Lower East Side's Slipper Room, including Filmmaker, John Waters.

Stephen and Dirty met DJ/VJing and Dancing respectively at the Slipper Room and next on the set of a Terry Richardson shoot and creative sparks flew as they do on any fashion shoot. The Francophonic lovely has returned to New York and the arms of her obsessed pursuers as embodied by the painter and now actor, Paul Richard. He and a cast of French men on holiday pursue their fantasies of the billowing blonde who is recently returned from a turn in Tournee, a film by and starring Matthieu Almaric, which is slated for screening in Cannes.

A filmmaker, composer and artist Stephen Dirkes has firmly planted himself in the New York scene after global residencies as far flung as Prague, Indonesia, Korea and Brazil. His multi-channel video installations are often combined with live VJ sets and have made him the resident VJ of the Chelsea Art Museum's Summer Soirees Rooftop Series. As a multi-disciplinary artist Dirkes started quite young, attending the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto and the University of Michigan while in his teens.

Paul Richard plays Hank, the brooding artist whose baroque world Ms. Martini inhabits through a twisted melange of emotional states expressed through deft technological collage. The film also features a performance from Rebecca Trent, owner of the Creek theatre space and Fabien Sagard as Dirty Martini’s young french lover in his first film role.

Obscure Object Films copyright 2009
a film by Stephen Dirkes
Dirty Martini, Paul Richard, Fabien Sagard, Rebecca Trent
Photographed by Tal Shpantzer
Lighting Design by Miklos Buk
Hair and Makeup Masha Gvozdov
Styling by Ayka

My Grandmother's Blog

I know this has nothing to do with the art world at large, but my grandmother was a big part of my life, my best friend, and her passing has been an important event in my life. Everything I've ever done and everything I will do will be to honor her. I made a blog for my family to share things.

Van Gogh's Letters

From The Art Newspaper

Van Gogh’s letters: the definitive edition
The publication next week of the complete letters of the artist is a distinguished scholarly achievement

By Martin Bailey | From issue 206, October 2009

Click the link of the title to read more.

Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese at the Louvre

Image Credit: Titien. La femme au miroir.© Musée du Louvre / A. Dequier - M. Bard

This was a great exhibition. I didn't pay attention to the names of the curators but here's an article about the exhibit on Artdaily.com so if you're in Paris, in spite of it being fashion week, you can be inspired to visit with the works of these great dead painters.

Pigalle and Ari

My friend Wael has an office in Pigalle where he edits his films. We had a fun time hanging out there last week. Now, like me, Wael is in NYC.
I like Pigalle though people say it's changed; too hip now. It still has an edge of seediness which harkens back to the real days of cabaret. I met Ari there with Wael. Ari is Nico's son i.e. Nico from the Velvet Underground.

Tonight! CAM's Fall Benefit Party