Ugallery

The Art of Tim Burton

2010-03-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" hit theaters on March 5th and is sitting firmly atop the box office. Although critics may be torn about the film (Rotten Tomatoes is split down the middle), no one can deny how visually stunning it is.

Even the New York Museum of Modern Art has taken notice of Burton. The museum is currently featuring a retrospective of Burton's noncinematic drawings, which will run through late April. For a cool interactive exploration of the show, click here.

Below is a New York Times article that explores Burton's youth in Southern California, the themes of his work ("cinematic tales of sensitive misfits triumphing over, or succumbing to, a world of repressive mediocrity") and the quality of the show. The article calls the exhibition a "let down." Has anyone seen it? What do you think? Leave us a comment and give us some first-person insights!

November 20, 2009

Art Review | 'Tim Burton'

A World of Macabre Misfits

By KEN JOHNSON

Tim Burton's career is the ultimate revenge of the art nerd. Mr. Burton, the self-professed alienated child of a dysfunctional family in Burbank, Calif., who funneled his loneliness, pain and grief into drawing cartoons, has found fame, fortune and a beautiful companion (Helena Bonham Carter) by telling cinematic tales of sensitive misfits triumphing over, or succumbing to, a world of repressive mediocrity.

His recurring theme has near-universal resonance. Who has not dreamed of proving that he or she was underestimated by the forces of ignorance and venality? But it is Mr. Burton’s extraordinarily inventive and adventurous way with the languages of popular film that accounts mainly for his success. Without the confectionery beauty and technical ingenuity of his movies — and performances by charismatic actors like Paul Reubens, Michael Keaton and Johnny Depp in films as diverse as "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," "Beetlejuice" and "Sweeney Todd" — his Oedipal pathos would not be enough.

Given the tremendous visual appeal of Mr. Burton's movies, you would hope that "Tim Burton," the Museum of Modern Art's expansive retrospective of his noncinematic art, would be equally exciting. Alas, it is a letdown. Focused mainly on hundreds of drawings dating from his teenage years to the present and including paintings, sculptures, photographs and a smattering of short films on flat screens, it is an entertaining show and a must for film buffs and Burton fans. To see the raw material from which the movies evolved is certainly illuminating. But there is a sameness to all Mr. Burton's two- and three-dimensional output that makes for a monotonous viewing experience. (The exhibition was organized by Ron Magliozzi, Jenny He and Rajendra Roy, curators in the museum’s film department.)

Since Mr. Burton hit his stride in drawing around 1980, little has changed. Amalgamating the styles of Edward Gorey, Ralph Steadman, Edward Sorel and other cartoon expressionists into his own less-than-original Victorian-Gothic-Grotesque, Mr. Burton has created countless cartoons resembling illustrations for cutely perverse greeting cards. (After graduating from the California Institute of the Arts, he worked as an animator for Disney for four years.)

Often accompanied by doggerel in the vein of Gorey and Dr. Seuss, his drawings are usually amusing, but neither shocking nor laugh-out-loud funny. The caption under the image of a rotund child with flipperlike appendages reads, "My name is Jimmy, but my friends call me the hideous penguin boy." One called Toxic Boy says his Christmas "was really quite weird./his fumes accidentally burned off Santa Claus' beard." Loghead "discusses with his psychiatrist his recurring nightmare about a crazed lumberjack and a fireplace."

Bizarre monsters are a favorite motif, but what is most remarkable is Mr. Burton's ability to generate variations on the archetype of the freakishly gifted but wounded child. From Stainboy, a superhero whose only power is leaving stains, to the dangerously dexterous Edward Scissorhands — his most poignant creation — his gallery of endearingly pathetic juvenile weirdos is impressive. But it also reflects a state of arrested psychological and artistic development. Adult sexuality, for example, almost never rears its ugly head, and despite Mr. Burton's lifelong drawing and doodling habit, he never ventures into unexpected formal or technical territory.

It is when the drawing ideas are translated to the screen that the magic happens. The black-and-white Claymation short "Vincent" (1982), in which a lonely boy assumes the guise of Vincent Price (who narrates the film) and imagines a series of Poe-like situations, like plunging his aunt into a vat of hot wax, is truly captivating.

Most of the three-dimensional works representing characters from Mr. Burton's drawings and films were produced by professional fabricators, and as such are uninteresting. Beetlejuice's head on a coiled snake and others are like the models sold in comic-book stores.

Film props are also on view, including an angora sweater from the cross-dresser Ed Wood in the movie of the same name; three versions of Batman's pointy-eared cowl; and a pair of realistic severed heads. But this material, too, is more memorabilia than art. The full-scale model of Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands regalia could be in a wax museum.

It's not as if Mr. Burton were toying formally and conceptually with popular culture the way Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons do. What Mr. Burton does, rather, is pop culture. The inflatable, multi-eyed "Balloon Boy" in the museum lobby and a topiary deer in the garden that Edward Scissorhands might have carved are not commentaries on advertising - they are forms of advertising itself.

Downstairs in the film theater lobby are large-format Polaroid photographs that Mr. Burton produced in the 1990s, evidently with higher artistic aims. Viewers familiar with photography since Cindy Sherman will not be impressed. One set of four portrays a Chihuahua with reindeer antlers, a la William Wegman's dog pictures. Another series depicts a blue-skinned woman in a funereal black gown and dark glasses holding a blue baby doll; in one print, she hammers nails into it.

More funny than scary, that last image is telling. In his static work, imaginative as it may be, Mr. Burton plays with the clichés of horror but never descends far into the heart of darkness. Maybe he's protecting his poor inner child.

None of this is to take away from his films, which will be screened at MoMA during the run of the exhibition. To be a popular Hollywood moviemaker and to be an interesting fine artist in today's terms are very different propositions, and it's no knock on Mr. Burton that he's not great at both. Nobody is that good.

"Tim Burton" continues through April 26 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

Artist in Focus: Sarah Beth Goncarova

2010-03-10T05:01:00.000-08:00

Sarah Beth Goncarova has been exhibiting with Ugallery for just over a year. Originally from New England, she now lives atop a hill in San Francisco. She is one of our top selling artists and one of our favorite personalities. We hope you enjoy this interview with Sarah Beth, part of our new "Artist in Focus" series.

At Wood's Edge (2009)

What's your earliest art memory?

When I was three or four, I asked my mom to color code my fingers to keys on the piano and notes on the staff. An interesting effect of this is when I would listen to music, I would visualize sinuous colorful shapes in space. Music and art have always been interconnected in my life.

What keeps you up at night?

Other than back and joint pains? (she laughs). A general worry that there is always so much more to do.

Study for Line of Trees (2008)

Your artworks are largely landscapes. Where were some of these pieces painted?

I like to paint places that I have some sort of connection to - places that I've been to or lived near. But I also have an interest in painting places that have been changed by human impact, so there's a strong sympathetic emotional connection.

Where did this appreciation of the outdoors come from?

My father is an environmental scientist, so I guess it's in my blood.

Where Ice Meets the Sky IV Night (2009)

You have a series focusing on ice, the sky and the sea. What inspired you?

This is inspired by the glaciers that my husband and I visited in Iceland, but they also reach beyond a specific place. On one level, I wanted to capture the glaciers as they were melting, breaking apart, flowing downstream - ultimately to document what I saw. On another level, they are a metaphor for changes that have already been set into motion.

A portion of the proceeds from your art sales goes to a non-profit. Can you tell us more about this non-profit and how you got involved?

I want my paintings to not only be good piece of art, but also to do some good for some of the dire situations that my paintings depict. So I donate to the Nature Conservancy, Direct Relief International and the American Red Cross.

What are you working on now?

I am working on several projects. I am making a series of large oils of friends and family and some very small watercolors and goaches. I have also been working on a continuing performance/video piece called "Xena vs. Zuul," a sculpture called "Eighteen Million Cracks," that currently takes up most of my apartment and I am in the process of publishing a book.

Coastline on a Rainy Day (2010)

I know you live in San Francisco. What's the art scene like in the city?

The art scene in the Bay Area offers a lot of interesting spaces and opportunities to emerging artists and that is unique. Oakland and San Jose are also really coming into their own.

Where do you go to look at art?

Art Zone 461 (on Valencia) and Creativity Explored (on 16th) are two of my favorite galleries in San Francisco. In general, in this city there is always a friend's opening to go to in some interesting place.

Fish Line I (2009)

What advice would you offer to other emerging artists?

Keep your inner critic out of the process of making. Work on your art every single day, no excuses.

For more of Sarah Beth's work, click here.

Happy Birthday Michelangelo!

2010-03-08T10:25:00.001-08:00

Michelangelo David (1504)

Over the weekend (Saturday, March 6) Michelangelo Buonarroti, one of the world's greatest painters and sculptors, turned 535. Mike is an oldie - he was born before Columbus set sail for America!

Here are some of the highlights from his career:

Michelangelo was left motherless by the age of six and fought ceaselessly with his father for permission to apprentice as an artist. Things haven't changed much!

His most famous statues include the 18-foot David (1501-1504). Although Leonardo da Vinci and others were considered for the work, twenty-six year old Michelangelo ultimately convinced the project overseers that he deserved the commission

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo greatly preferred sculpture to painting, and complained for four straight years while creating one of the greatest masterpieces of all time on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-1512). Hence, his quote: "Genius is eternal patience."

One of our favorite works at Ugallery this Re Creation of Adam by Ugallery artists Robert Darabos. Can you imagine this beaut hanging above your couch? Darabos masterfully modernizes the work with chunky light and geometric composition. He cools the colors of the original in a way that introduces a sort of malaise into Adam's passé posture. It's a truly creative reinterpretation of one of our most iconic images, a task not easily pulled off! Cheers Robert!

We also feature sculpture at Ugallery and are always expanding our collection. To see these works, click here.

Finger on the Pulse: The Armory Show

2010-03-05T05:00:00.001-08:00

Yesterday marked the start of The Armory Show, arguably America's top modern and contemporary art fair. Every March, art lovers from all over the world flock to New York City's Pier 94 and treat their eyes to works by today's most innovative artists.

This "new" Armory Show carries a potent legacy. The original month long event in 1913 provided a platform for groundbreaking modern and abstract art when realism was still the dominant style. George Seurat's dotted landscapes, George Bellows' gritty urban scenes, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne's slushy post-impressionist paintings and Cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp all astonished New Yorkers. The artworks in the original Armory show catalyzed the burgeoning American Art scene and opened the door for many emerging and inventive artists.

Here are some of the most important pieces from the original Armory Show accompanied by a Ugallery counterpart:

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending Staircase, No. 2 (1912) is remembered as the most infamous piece from the 1913 show. The painting evokes the movement of a geometric figure across a two dimensional canvas, although many observers at the time thought otherwise. An art critic for the New York Times wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory," and many cartoonists satirized the piece.

Ugallery artist Saule Piktys' Turbulence (2008) echoes the movement and geometry of Duchamp's infamous work. Piktys' work takes the abstraction one step further, abandoning Duchamp's human figure entirely. Piktys says that abstract painting is the "process that makes me most alive."

Henri Matisse's The Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) (1907) is considered a Fauvist work. Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) were a group of early 20^th century artists who emphasized brushwork and strong color. Matisse in particular is famous for his bold lines and, although he grew into one of the finest modern artists of his time, he initially received much criticism. Critic Camille Mauclair condemned Matisse's works saying, "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public," and this painting, The Blue Nude, was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in 1913.

Beo Nguyen's Gravity (2009) adopts Matisse's appreciation of color and simple yet bold lines. Nguyen, however, also adds absurd and surreal elements into the mix, removing the face of his figure and adding a floating purple foot and sea foam green hand to the composition.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Paul Cezanne's View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph (ca. 1880) at the show, signaling the museum world's growing acceptance of modernism. Although Cezanne was already an established artist by the time of the show, his impressionist works served as a spark plug for the growing movement towards abstraction.

Sarah Beth Goncarova's At Wood's Edge (2009) transports Cezanne's free brushwork to another continent. A little cottage sits amongst a lush landscape, harking back to Cezanne's appreciation of color and nature.

Claude Monet's Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge (1897-1899) is one of a series of approximately 250 oil paintings of Monet's garden at Giverny. The pieces were made over the last thirty years of his life while the artists suffered from cataracts. This work is one of the earliest in the series. As his cataracts worsened, the paintings became more abstract and the brush strokes thicker.

Barry Close's Summer Pond (2009) adds texture to his Monet-esque lilies with a novel approach. Close stretches jute over masonite and applies multiple coats of fesso to fill the fabric. He uses a rough surface because it "aids in the blending of color" and "provides a totally non-reflective surface."

For all the New Yorkers out there, make sure to check out the heart of the art world at the Armory Show this March 4-7.

Los Artistos Chilenos Famosos

2010-03-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

In the midst of the crisis in Chile, Ugallery would like to honor the country by highlighting some of the country's most famous artists.

If you'd like to find out more about ways to help the relief effort in Chile, visit the American Red Cross Website.

Alfredo Jaar Six Seconds (2000). Ugallery recommends: Ornitz, Maruca

Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago de Chile in 1956 and now lives in New York. His films, photos and architectural work is always politically charged and almost always highlights conflict in Africa.

These two images are from Jaar's Rwanda Project: 1994-2000. Jaar traveled to Rwanda while the genocide was still going on. Over a three month period from April-July 1994, experts estimate that over 1 million people were killed. The art he created in the midst of this conflict critiques accepted practices of photojournalism. He avoids scenes of jarring violence and victimization in favor of calls to action (see below) and haunting stills of the landscapes where such incomprehensible bloodshed was staged.

Alfredo Jaar Rwanda (1994)

"These posters, scattered around the streets and squares of Malmo, reduced the rhetoric of advertising to a cry of grief. But they also served notice on a complacent public: 'You—in your tidy parks, on your bicycles, walking your dogs—look at this name, listen to this name, at least hear it, now: Rwanda, Rwanda, Rwanda...' The posters were a raw gesture, produced out of frustration and anger. If all of the images of slaughter and piled corpses, and all of the reportage did so little, perhaps a simple sign, in the form of an insistent cry, would get their attention." - Alfredo Jaar

Claudio Bravo Calabazas Verdes (1992). Ugallery recommends: Ebeling, Pickart

Claudio Bravo's work is noticeably less political, but just as stirring. (Yes, that piece above is a painting!) His technical virtuosity has led many to compare Bravo to Spanish master Diego Velazquez and his life itself is something of an old world fairy tale.

Bravo was born in 1936 in pastel-drenched Valparaiso, Chile. He left Chile at an early age with little money in his pocket because he felt "there was no taste [in Chile]" (Burn!). He would later relocate to Madrid and gain fame for his portraits of celebrities, including infamous Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. He ultimately moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he he continues to create hyper-realist still lifes from the seats of his three "palaces."

Eugenio Dittborn Weakness Made it Happen (Airemail Painting - 01) (1983). Ugallery recommends: Eichorn, Graham

Of the artists discussed here, Eugenio Dittborn is in a sense the most Chilean. Dittborn uses his homeland as a subject and continues to live, work and teach in Santiago. Whereas Bravo abandoned Chile for its lack of culture, Dittborn made the country's artistic marginalization the focus of his oeuvre in the 1970s.

In an effort to build the credibility of Chile's art scene, Dittborn's work broke decidedly from the aesthetic norms of his home country. He screenprints ready-made images from old Chilean criminology magazines, uses cheap paper and brown bags as canvas, and even distributes his work through the mail (see piece above). The mobility of this "Airmail Art" served as a witty way for Dittborn to sidestep the oppressive policies of General Augusto Pinochet's autocratic government and deliver his artwork anywhere.

Roberto Matta Foeu (1941). Ugallery recommends: Fredrickson, Zeleznak, Manrique

You can't talk about Chilean art without Roberto Matta. Matta's smokey, electric canvases can be seen the world over and for good reason. Matta was born in Santiago in 1911 and by the time of his death in 2002 had greatly contributed to two of the biggest aesthetic movements of the 20th Century: surrealism and abstract expressionism.

Matta moved to Paris at the age of 24 and studied architecture with Le Corbusier, the master of his era. Soon, Andre Breton lured him away from architecture and into his brand of fantastical and unexpected surrealist art. Matta used a style of automatic painting to create spontaneous works that addressed metaphysics, birth, death and regeneration. When World War II broke out in Europe, Matta moved to the United States. There, his work became more figurative and addressed psychology and emotion in response to the horrors of the war. Along with other European exiles and young American artists (Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell), Matta sparked the abstract expressionist movement that would bring the New York City to the forefront of the art world.

Roberto Matta's The First Goal of the Chilean People was covered by 16 coats of paint. It celebrates the 1971 victory of Socialist President Salvador Allende. (Santiago Llanquin/Associated Press)

Although his work was dream-like and otherworldly, Matta dabbled in politics. He supported Salvadore Allende's socialist government in Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. When Pinochet violently overthrew Allende's government in 1973, the General had one of Matta's massive murals covered with 16 coats of paint. The work was rediscovered in 2005 and can be seen today completely in Santiago's La Granja City Hall.

Finger on the Pulse: The Contemporary Artist as Collector

2010-03-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The artist Jeff Koons in his Upper East Side home, which houses examples of his own collecting efforts.

There's a growing movement in art curation, and it starts with the artists. As this story about Jeff Koons tells us, the sensational Pop Artist has assumed some curatorial responsibilities for the work of one of his top collectors at the New Museum of Contemporary Art - a move some are calling too "clubby." In the article, Koons gives an exclusive interview to defend his role as not just an artist, but a collector of art.

Ugallery is considering having some of our own artists guest curate collections on our sites every couple of months. What do you think - too "clubby"?

The Koons Collection

By RANDY KENNEDY
February 28, 2010

JEFF KOONS, at 55, is one of the world's most famous living artists. And every night before drifting off to sleep in his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he is able to survey the salmon-pink walls of his bedroom and commune with a small pantheon of the most famous artists of centuries past.

Quentin Massys A Grotesque Old Woman (ca. 1525-1530), National Gallery of Art, London

In one corner hangs an early-16th-century painted bust of a hollow-cheeked, very tender-looking Jesus by Quentin Massys, the first important painter of the Antwerp school. Across the way, perhaps reflecting Mr. Koons’s love of mingling the sacred and the profane, a risqué Fragonard stares back, showing a young woman cradling a pair of puppies at her bared breasts. But for the most part this extremely private collection, piled up salon style on the walls, seems far more classicist than Koonsian, like an eccentric little gallery transplanted from the Met: Manet, Courbet, Poussin and scholars’ delights like Nikolaus Knüpfer and Cornelis van Haarlem.

Over his big flat-screen television, where a late Picasso now on loan used to hang, is an 1873 Courbet that Mr. Koons particularly treasures. It’s a big, loving portrait of a mottled bull calf, glowering at the viewer with an unsettlingly human mixture of defiance and hamburger-meat fatalism.

"It looks like he's set up to be slaughtered," Mr. Koons said recently, smiling.

These days he is undoubtedly feeling kinship with his prize bull. Over the last several months Mr. Koons, who has always been a polarizing artist, has been at work in a role he has never assumed during his three-decade career, that of curator of other people’s art. Last summer he accepted an invitation by the New Museum of Contemporary Art to organize an exhibition of works from the important collection of the Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, a collection in which Mr. Koons’s own work plays a pivotal part. That fact — along with Mr. Joannou’s close friendship with Mr. Koons and Mr. Joannou’s role as a trustee at the New Museum, though he is not underwriting the show or providing input — has caused some people, even in the insular contemporary-art world, to worry that the arrangement is too clubby.

This was part of Mr. Koons’s motivation for sitting down recently in his Chelsea studio to speak in detail for the first time about his life as a collector of art, not just as a creator of it. It's a subject he has generally avoided over the years out of discretion and privacy, but he decided to engage with it as a way to demonstrate his deep, idiosyncratic engagement with the history of art (mostly Western) and history's very literal role in many of his new paintings. More than that, he said, he wanted to make the case that, for many years now, he has viewed creating art and thinking about the works of art he loves as increasingly inseparable activities.

"Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does," he said. "I'm always looking for source material."

Chuck Close Lucas/Woodcut (1993)

While the New Museum runs a greater risk to its reputation if the show is poorly received, Mr. Koons has a lot riding on it too, not least because he wants to do well by the institution, which gave him his first solo exhibition in 1980, and by Mr. Joannou, whose collection is influential and widely admired. But as someone confident enough in his younger years to proclaim that he was picking up the mantle of Duchamp and Picasso and "taking us out of the 20th century" with his own work, Mr. Koons also wants to prove himself worthy of joining the ranks of well-known artists who have turned their talents successfully to organizing shows: Duchamp himself, in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Société Anonyme; Warhol, whose "Raid the Icebox I" at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1969 is legendary; Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum in 1990; and artists like Scott Burton, Elizabeth Murray and Chuck Close as part of the Museum of Modern Art's Artist's Choice series, inspired by a similar program at the National Gallery in London.

As he walks around his buzzing studio — which some visitors have compared to Santa's workshop, but which has the bright, hygienic aura of a pharmaceutical lab or a high-end car-detailing shop, with more than 100 artists at work under Mr. Koons’s direction — his source material often blares out these days. Images of Roman marbles, mostly female nudes, peek out of his paintings. Dalí motifs abound. Warhol and the Venus of Willendorf and Roy Lichtenstein share unlikely quarters in other paintings. A strange stone carving in the shape of a vagina, probably part a Celtic fertility figure, that Mr. Koons recently came across on the Internet and bought ("I love to just look around on the computer after the kids go to bed") was the centerpiece of another work in progress, being carefully painted by assistants on scaffolds.

Salvador Dalí Lobster Telephone (1936)

But the art-historical dots that Mr. Koons connects in his own thinking about such works are plentiful to the point of teeming, and harder to see. The form of an inflatable lobster can simultaneously name-check Duchamp, Dalí and H. C. Westermann, the eccentric Chicago sculptor. A Dalí motif appearing in the new paintings, the image of a draped cloth from a 1969 work that Mr. Koons owns, leads him back to a painting he says he believes was the clear model for the cloth, "Venus Rising From the Sea — a Deception," by Raphaelle Peale, America's first notable still life painter (a work of whose Mr. Koons just missed out on buying at auction), which leads him forward again to Dalí's last painting, "The Swallow’s Tail" from 1983, in which Mr. Koons said he can discern the form again, all but hidden.

Mr. Koons has collected since the beginning of his life as a professional artist, even before he could afford to pay for work. In the late 1970s, working in Chicago as a studio assistant for the painter Ed Paschke — working so hard to impress him, he said, that his fingers sometimes bled as he was stretching canvas — he traded a drawing for a Paschke print, which still hangs in his home.

By the late 1980s, as his star and his bank balance rose precipitously, he began to collect high-end work by artists he loved, like Lichtenstein, but he was forced to sell a lot of it during an acrimonious divorce and custody battle with his first wife, the Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller. Those troubles, overlapping with a treacherous period in the late 1990s in which he and his backers almost bankrupted themselves trying to create elaborate stainless-steel sculptures, forced him to stop collecting altogether for a while.

But as his fortunes roared back in recent years, he began pouring a significant amount of his wealth into building a collection, joining high-profile contemporary artists like Damien Hirst and John Currin in concentrating heavily on old masters and 19th-century works. Mr. Koons's choices are stylistically and historically diverse but tend to share a preoccupation with the body and sexuality, which is also a major theme in Mr. Joannou's collection and Mr. Koons's take on it, in a selection of more than 100 works by 50 artists. (The creepily corporeal title Mr. Koons coined for the show is "Skin Fruit," a riff on a vulgar title of a work by the collective that calls itself assume vivid astro focus.)

Even by the standards of the art world, where language about art strays easily into deep and enigmatic waters, Mr. Koons's way of explaining his own work is hard to take seriously, though he has always seemed to take it that way. With an ever-present warm smile and the comforting tones of a guidance counselor, he has spoken about how art "lets you kind of control physiology and the secretions that take place within the body," how his art operates in "a morality theater trying to help the underdog," how his balloon-based sculptures, at least sexually speaking, "really try to address whatever your interests are." In a profile of Mr. Koons in The New Yorker in 2007 Calvin Tomkins observed that "it is possible to argue that no real connection exists between Koons’s work and what he says about it."

The same might be said of the way Mr. Koons explains his reasons for collecting. He does so with a boyish excitement, rapid-firing requests to assistants at big computer screens to pluck images from his own collection or from anywhere in millennia of art history. His grasp of the historical details he cites is often shaky, but such precision doesn't seem to matter much to Mr. Koons. His visual memory, on the other hand, often feels boundless, like a human version of Google image search. "I could do this all day," he said at one point during two long visits to his studio.

What drew him to the Courbet bull, which he bought at a Sotheby’s auction in 2007, one of four paintings he owns by that artist? (Mr. Koons doesn't like to talk about prices, but since he buys mostly at auction, they are more or less public; the Courbet bull, for example, went for $2.5 million, and the entire collection is easily worth more than 10 times that. It resides mostly in his bedroom for safety’s sake; he and his wife, Justine, have four young sons and a fifth child on the way.)

"I like this type work," he said simply about the Courbet, then pointed to a brown patch on the bull's fur vaguely shaped like the state of New Jersey and explained that he stares at the patch often and wonders whether it might represent "some form of, you know, soul or really a personal part" of Courbet’s own being. His main fascination with Knüpfer's "Venus and Cupid" seems to be the spilled chamber pot at Venus’s side. Looking at a Manet nude, he talks about his appreciation for the "lack of violence" in Manet's work and refers on separate occasions to a crease in the nude's stomach, which he believes resembles a long-tailed sperm.

Lisa Phillips, the New Museum's director, said in an interview that one reason she and the museum’s curators made the unusual decision to hand the Joannou show over to Mr. Koons was precisely because of his unconventional and compulsive way of looking at art, what the New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni calls his "radical scopophilia."

In work sessions as the show came together, Ms. Phillips said, he would use examples of work, new and old, "pointing to things that often would be the peripheral things in them, things that you might not see that were actually the things that were the most interesting to him — a monkey under someone’s foot, something like that."

"He falls in love with these things; he’s obsessive," she said, adding that as he began this month to install selections of work on the museum's top floor — by Charles Ray, Tauba Auerbach, David Altmejd, Liza Lou, Kara Walker and others — she began to see exactly how unusual the show would look. "I don’t think many curators would have chosen those particular works to share that space."

But some in the art world worry that because of the nature of Mr. Joannou's collection itself, built primarily from the work of highly visible international art stars (Mr. Koons has selected only one of his own works), Mr. Koons's adventurousness might have little room to play. Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art and the organizer of the 2007 Venice Biennale, said that artist-organized shows often succeed because of the way artists find the "oddments" that trained curators, pursuing a more historical and formal mission, overlook.

"But in this case it's very hard to see how the show could possibly result in that because this collection is already so much of a piece," said Mr. Storr, who is also a painter, adding that in his opinion Mr. Koons's taste in art is more unorthodox than Mr. Joannou's, and that he would be more intrigued to see what Mr. Koons would do if invited to rummage around in the Met’s storage rooms.

It’s an idea that Mr. Koons would probably embrace with his trademark smile and some kind of pleasant, if strangely platitudinous, pronouncement. Standing in his studio next to an image of a radiant Poussin from his collection that practically leapt off a computer screen, he said, "When I view the world, I don't think of my own work. I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together."

Pretension: Where high fashion meets high art

2010-02-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

Marc Jacobs' collection unveiled at New York Fashion Week

Tomboy Lolitas, feather bedecked courtesans, sexy secretaries, impossibly chic Edwardians

I hope I haven't lost you already.

Those esoteric, dare I say pretentious, descriptors are the new fashion trends listed by the New York Times in a video article recapping New York Fashion Week. As words fall from the regal reporters tongue, I'm reminded of just how off-putting high fashion can be. I find myself asking What do those "impossibly chic Edwardian" pantaloons have to do with my Levis? or Who in their right mind would pay $5,000 for a pair of high heels?

But even an art-lover like me must realize that these same sort of critiques can easily be thrown at fine art. The exorbitant cost and the obscure language associated with modern and contemporary art is often entirely too alienating. The concepts are as untouchable as the price tags.

I'm not looking to incite class warfare here. Indeed, I truthfully believe that with technology, these daunting barriers to high art - whether paintings, couture, operas or texts - will gradually dissolve. The internet has opened countless portals for us to engage with others in casual conversation about what once were distant concepts. What's more, there are now unprecedented opportunities for the people creating art to connect to the writers, composers, designers and artists making it, whether to buy their work or simply hear directly from them.

At Ugallery, we hope to be one of those portals. We provide emerging artists a platform to meet art appreciators without pretension, just our effusive love for art. We also hope to build a community where you can talk to us and our artists (take this blog, for example).

I suppose all that's left now is to find a website selling emerging designers' duds for scandalous prices. Any tips?

Finger on the Pulse: Lady Whitney's Biennial

2010-02-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

Lana Williams Facing Change. Williams is Ugallery's top selling artist.

Comusina Hardman's A Day in Tuscany. Hardman is one of Ugallery's top-selling artists.

There's a sexual revolution going on in NYC!

This year's Whitney Biennial (opening today - Thursday, February 25) features more female artists than male. Traditionally, men have completely dominated the art scene. The New York MoMA has been publicly criticized by leading art critic Jerry Saltz for the lack of female representation in their permanent collection. It seems, the Whitney has been listening, which is fitting since their founder was a woman - Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

How does Ugallery factor into these gender wars? To be honest, we aren't entirely certain. Our inclination, however, is that we have more female artists than male. Lana Williams and Comusina Hardman are are two top sellers and both of the feminine persuasion. Interesting, eh? Perhaps there is something about the online space that changes things.

For more on the Whitney's Women, see the article below from the New York Times:

Photo by Dave Darnell

At 23, Tam Tran is the youngest of the 55 artists whose work was chosen for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, an ongoing survey of American art and artists in New York City. These year, female artists hold a slight majority.

Women's Work

By LINDA YABLONSKY | February 12, 2010

Hardly a Tweet had been sent after the Whitney Museum of American Art released the names of the 55 artists selected for its 75th biennial before it was already known as "the women's biennial." "That's crazy," says Francesco Bonami, the chief curator of the exhibition, now on view through the end of May. "To be the women’s biennial, 55 of the artists would have to be female."

Nonetheless, more than half the artists represented are women, a record for the Whitney's marquee exhibition. Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, his associate curator, say the number was happenstance. They intend their survey, titled simply "2010," only to reflect the tenor of American art right now, which they see as "somber and intimate." Not feminine.

If anything, "2010" suggests that the art of the moment has achieved gender equality, even if the market for it has not. But inequality is not the issue here. Whereas the wisecracking feminist protest group the Guerrilla Girls once listed "working without the pressures of success" and "having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood" among the perks for women artists, most of those in the biennial seem blasé about their place in the social order and entitled to the occasional appearance in a fashion spread, where the glamour quotient is highest.

That would have been anathema in the 1970s and '80s, when a gale force of feminism roared through every corridor of our culture and women made their own bodies a medium for art. In fact, many women selected for "2010" are simply making art and don’t believe their status as women has anything to do with how far they get with it — or not.

They seem preoccupied with the basics: material, color and form. Few would make a work today like the one Barbara Kruger did in 1989, when she stated flat out, "Your body is a battleground."

Aurel Schmidt The Fall (2010)

Take Aurel Schmidt's seven-foot-tall drawing of a minotaur, rendered in images of banana peels, cigarettes, bottle caps and a condom. "His body is a whole universe," says Schmidt, a 27-year-old Canadian-born New Yorker. "It's really an insane portrait of a man, but it's interesting to explore what is masculine and make it look sexual and positive." She adds, "I don't want anyone to accuse me of being a man hater, which I'm not. This is also about the masculine side of me."

Lorraine O'Grady, at 75 the senior presence in the biennial, also takes a poignant look at gender slippage but ups the ante by blurring the races, too. In a series of diptychs called "The First and the Last of the Modernists,"she paired found photographs of Charles Baudelaire and Michael Jackson as members of one miscegenated family. "I'm serious about making the comparison," she says. "They are the same person." Except that O'Grady has substituted the increasingly effeminate Jackson for Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s black common-law wife, the woman whose experience of his world she believes also deepened his understanding of art. But it is the progressive physical deterioration of the two men that is most striking. "The aspiration to greatness was the same with each," O'Grady says. "And it came back to bite both of them."

Tam Tran Battle Cry (2008)

Photographs by women in this biennial suggest anything but a weaker sex. The Memphis-based Tam Tran, just 23 and making only her second appearance in an exhibition outside of college, has contributed portraits of her 4-year-old nephew in a superhero costume that Bonami found disturbing. "I was interested more in photojournalism than constructed, high-production pictures," he says, describing Nina Berman's series on a veteran of the Iraq war as "brutal." And a photo essay by Stephanie Sinclair may threaten to steal the show. Sinclair, 37, has had to be tough. She covered the American invasion of Iraq and lived in Baghdad before moving to Beirut. Between 2003 and 2005 she documented the fate of young Afghan women who had burned themselves, often beyond recognition, sometimes to death. More than half were married between the ages of 9 and 13, uneducated and emotionally undeveloped. The reason one gave for her attempted suicide was that she broke her husband's television.

Sinclair's photos may be gruesome, but they're filled with more compassion than sisterhood. Still, her sex helped. "Because we're foreign," Sinclair says of her female colleagues, "Afghan men are more hesitant to get near us. Male photographers would ever get the same access."

This biennial generally puts the personal before the political. Sharon Hayes, 39, is mainly concerned with speech and who gets to voice or hear it. The mute character in her four-channel video installation, "Parole," came out of recent performances using texts like Anna Rüling's turn-of-the-century treatise, "What Interest Does the Women's Movement Have in Solving the Homosexual Problem?" Indeed, Hayes says everyone in her video occupies "a queer position." Or as she puts it, "There’s a fine line between a butch lesbian and a trans man."

Tauba Auerbach Untitled Fold Painting III (2009) (Detail)

Optical trickery plays a part in Tauba Auerbach’s "Fold" paintings, which occupy what she calls "a liminal state between two or three dimensions." So what if the artist is a vintage clotheshorse? She's a reader of science and art magazines, and her latest fascination is for hyperbolic surfaces and fractal patterns. "My measure of success has much more to do with communicating the ideas in my work," says Auerbach, 28, "than with the quantifiable achievement of being in a particular show."

Perhaps she doth protest too much. Josephine Meckseper's resplendent film, shot last year at the giant Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., is a "consumer critique on the collapse and failure of capitalism," and incorporates military recruiting footage on display there. "It's a very extreme juxtaposition of shopping and recruiting," Meckseper says, adding that the best time she has for shopping is usually between flights. "The Munich airport is amazing," she says. "They're even selling cars."

One thing the biennial isn't selling is sex. There is little in the way of explicit material, but that doesn't mean the show isn’t sexy. At times it is funny, and often it is beautiful.

Pae White Smoke Knows (2009) (Detail) - If you like this, you might like Mark Elverson's work

Pae White's nearly-40-foot-long digitally woven tapestry of a wisp of smoke is rather amazing. Maureen Gallace's modest still lifes of summer homes on Cape Cod, Mass., are dreamy. R. H. Quaytman’s photo-based paintings nest together in shimmering rectangles. Jessica Jackson Hutchins sends up domesticity with her loopy ceramics of common household goods sitting on furniture plastered with newspapers. Lesley Vance paints luscious abstractions that begin as still lifes. Aki Sasamoto’s installation and dance performance involves improvisations with Japanese oranges and furniture.

But not all the art is nice. Marianne Vitale's video "Patron" subjects an art-collecting audience to a series of humiliating tasks like "Imagine your feet soaking in gopher urine."

This is a biennial eager for emotional engagement. Isn't that a feminine trait? Ask the two guys in charge.

Artist in Focus: Kaylie Abela

2010-02-24T06:48:00.000-08:00

Ugallery is proud to feature Kaylie Abela in our inaugural edition of the Artist in Focus series. Twice a month, we will highlight some of the most intriguing artists from our gallery.

We asked Kaylie's to be our first featured artist because of her exceptionally unique methods of creating art. Enjoy Kaylie's story and stay posted to the Ugallery blog for more on Ugallery's artists and community.

Snap (2009)

What's your earliest art memory?

My mother would entertain me for hours with coloring books if she needed uninterrupted time around the house. I remember sitting at the breakfast bar with a coloring book and crayons all around me. My favorite color was "macaroni and cheese," just because of its name. Besides that color, I was a little girl who liked pink, not purple. (Those colors divided our cafeteria tables in elementary school.)

What keeps you up at night?

Everything! If I'm between pieces, I will visually assemble my next canvas in my head. I think of color combinations, whether or not I'm low on supplies, and most importantly: where the floor may be most level in my studio. Not everything is art-related. I work in a high-end shoe and accessories boutique in Beacon Hill and I lay awake or dream about that very often. I am the type of person who likes everything done in order, on time, and flawlessly. It can be beneficial for obvious reasons but also disadvantageous because it is impossible to achieve perfection, and as a consequence I worry a lot.

Five (2009)

In some of your pieces, you use a particularly interesting method to apply paint. Can you tell us a little more about the process?

In this series of paintings, ice is left to melt over beads of acrylic paint on the level surface of a carefully prepared canvas. I mix a primer that allows the surface to absorb enough paint to stain while simultaneously repelling the water enough for it to pool and evaporate. The results are mysterious marks of color that interact with one another spontaneously.

How did you come up with the idea?

The idea to work with ice came about while flipping through books on Andy Goldsworthy, oddly enough. I needed to make a presentation on his Earth art and stumbled across a photograph of what looked like mud stains on huge sheets of paper. The caption said only "Melted snowballs" and provided no further information, nor was I able to find that photo (or anything like it) elsewhere. At first, I tinted ice cubes and melted them. But then I found that I preferred the texture that results from melting regular ice cubes on raw paint.

Meandering 15 (2009)

What are these works inspired by?

I've always been interested in chance, possibility, inevitability, probability and randomness. Lately these interests have directed me to the categories of mathematics and physics. I am still working on describing these relationships more clearly in my paintings. My process requires me to surrender a great deal of control over imagery and that is how I exercise my interest in chance and inevitability through painting.

What do you see as more compelling/important in art today - the concept or the beauty/aesthetics?

A really powerful piece of visual art will involve a balance of aesthetics and conceptual validity, but I believe in aesthetics really strongly because that's what captivates a viewer first. An interested viewer can then use visual cues or read about the work to discover more about the artist's intent or concept. In this case, the "aesthetic" doesn't even necessarily have to be beautiful, just alluring in some way.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on canvases that are much bigger than the 6 x 6 canvases I typically sell on UGallery. These pieces are 48 x 60. I enjoy the process of making these because I build my own canvas stretchers and stretch them myself, which give them a heavier, more hand-made quality. I really like 2D artwork to function both as an object and an image and that's why I prefer to work on canvas (many people ask me why I don't just use paper.)

Wires in the Air 2 (2007)

I know you live in Boston, what's the art scene like there? Where do you go to look at art?

Boston and its surrounding towns are very active in the arts community, but my favorite place to go is to the galleries on Harrison Avenue in the South End. Carroll and Sons, Walker Contemporary, Samson Projects, Steven Zevitas and Howard Yezerski are among my favorite spaces to visit. The SoWa (South of Washington Street) Artists Guild also puts together an exciting First Friday when the artists open their studios, which are in a building in the same area as the galleries I just mentioned. My MassArt student ID gives me free admission to museums like the Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum so naturally I spend a good amount of time in those places, too. The possibilities to view art in Boston are endless.

What advice would you offer to other emerging artists?

Pursuing your art career is hard work. The age-old fantasy of being "discovered" is over due to advancement of technology and how easy it has become to access and receive information. Artists can and need to be very organized. As an artist, you need to find or make your own opportunities, be persistent, and be active within your local art community. It is up to us to make it happen, and rejection is just part of the process!

RIP Andy Warhol

2010-02-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

Robert Darabos Warhol (2007)

On this day in 1987, Andy Warhol died of complications from gallbladder surgery.

I'd argue that Andy Warhol is the single weirdest person who ever lived. He performed his art every single day, leaving audiences unsure whether he actually worshiped or despised the celebrities and popular he used as subjects. Warhol consistently spoke robotically and ambiguously, played "dumb" with the media and refused to explain his artwork.

Here are some of Warhol's quotes that I hope help illuminate my argument. Is he being honest, or just facetious?:

"I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."

"Just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

"I never think that people die. They just go to department stores."

"I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money."

And finally, here's a video that shows Warhol in all his glory and absurdity:

What do you think? Was Andy serious or just being sardonic?

Finger on the Pulse: Big things poppin up north!

2010-02-18T18:16:00.000-08:00

A visit to Canada is looking more and more appealing. From the Twilight films to the 2010 Winter Olympics, those Canucks are hosting some big time entertainment these days, and it seems the Canadian art scene is jumping in on the trend. See the article below for more on the scintillating pop exhibition the National Gallery of Canada will soon host:

Tate Gallery show Pop Life heading to National Gallery
February 18, 2010
Martin Knelman

The National Gallery of Canada is counting on a controversial contemporary art show to bump up attendance during the all-important summer tourist season.

"Pop Life: Art in a Material World" was swept up in controversy last fall at London's Tate Modern, but the public clamoured to see what the fuss was about.

A nude image of the 10-year-old Brooke Shields was withdrawn on the advice of Scotland Yard just before the show opened in October.

Critics in the British media snarled about the shameless opportunism and self-promotion of Jeff Koons, the high-flying American who is featured in a series of images about his carnal activities with the porn star he later married.

Jeff Koons’ 'Flash Art International.'

The show is now on display in Hamburg before its arrival in Ottawa, where it will run from June 11 to Sept 19.

According to Marc Mayer, the gallery's savvy and energetic new director, there's a hunger in Canada for contemporary art.

"Take Damien Hirst," says Mayer. "His name is a household name all over Europe, but Canadians haven't seen his work before."

It was Hirst whose work brought in over $200 million at auction just as the global economy was tanking in 2008.

The massive exhibit of more than 250 paintings, sculptures, prints, installation videos and what-not features the work of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Koons and Hirst. Its international reach includes Martin Kippenberger from Germany, Maurizio Cattelan from Italy, Takashi Murakami from Japan and Piotr Uklanski from Poland. It's appropriate that Mayer is hoping the show will be a box-office hit, since the theme of the show is the marriage of art with commerce, marketing, publicity and celebrity – as exemplified by the career of Warhol, who once said that "good business is the best art."

The fact is the gallery could use some good business to avoid the kind of revenue shortfall it experienced last year when attendance dropped and the U.S. tourists who used to be a reliable source of cash failed to show up for a prestigious and scholarly show about the art of papal Rome.

"Pop Life" is more likely to draw visitors who are more attuned to celebrity buzz, flamboyance and what's hot than to Renaissance art.

Warhol embraced celebrity, mass media and publicity to achieve what he called superstar status. Clearly his successful dabbling in these dubious fields encouraged artists like Koons and Hirst to go out and do likewise.

The show also signals an increased emphasis on contemporary art in Ottawa under Mayer, who enjoyed great success running Montreal's superb Museum of Contemporary Art.

Coming next fall: an exhibit of the National Gallery's recent acquisitions, especially showcasing contemporary art.

For more on Ugallery's Pop art collection, click here.

Happy Birthday Raphaelle Peale!

2010-02-17T09:02:00.000-08:00

Raphaelle Peale Melons and Morning Glories (1813)

Today is Raphaelle Peale's 236th birthday! Raphaelle was the 5th son of famous painter Charles Wilson Peale's. All of his brothers were also named after classical artists (one of note was named Rembrant). In the early 1800s when Raphaelle was painting, still life artists were considered amateurs. That didn't stop Raphaelle from devoting himself to the style. He is now know as the founder of the American Still Life school.

In honor of his birthday, here are some of Ugallery's still life works:

Caitlin Stewart Roasted and Ready (2007)

Bart Dluhy Hot in Traffic (2008)

Matt Howell Seeing Yourself or a Reflection (2005)

Jenna Eichberger Cut Vegetables (2007)

Melissa Ebeling The Egg (2007)

Jennifer Ross Domesticity (2009)

Tiffany Chen Peaches Still Life (2008)

For more still life work, see our collection here.

Art and the Presidency

2010-02-15T12:47:00.000-08:00

Happy Presidents Day! In honor of the holiday, we'd like to call attention to some of our current President's aesthetic tastes.

This May, President Obama announced that his family intended to update the White House's art collection. Here's a brief excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article describing their purchases:

Last week the first family installed seven works on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington in the White House’s private residence, including “Sky Light” and “Watusi (Hard Edge),” a pair of blue and yellow abstracts by lesser-known African-American abstract artist Alma Thomas, acclaimed for her post-war paintings of geometric shapes in cheery colors.

The Obamas are looking to update the storied White House art collection to include modern art and work by minorities and women. Washington reporters Amy Chozick and art reporter Kelly Crow explain.

The National Gallery of Art has loaned the family at least five works this year, including “Numerals, 0 through 9,” a lead relief sculpture by Jasper Johns, “Berkeley No. 52,” a splashy large-scale painting by Richard Diebenkorn, and a blood-red Edward Ruscha canvas featuring the words, “I think maybe I’ll…,” fitting for a president known for lengthy bouts of contemplation. The Jasper Johns sculpture was installed in the residence on Inauguration Day, along with modern works by Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Nevelson, also on loan from the National Gallery.

Can you imagine having free reign to pick from that kind of artwork to decorate your home with? It's enough to make you want to run for president!

For those of us without presidential powers, here are a few pieces from our notably more affordable gallery that echo some of the first family's choices:

A la Alma Thomas...

Alison Jardine Midnight Trees (2010)

Leonardo Orozco Looking Intently from Above (2007)

Ashly Metcalf Cellular Chaos (2008)

Homage to Robert Rauschenberg...

Clark Graham Gangrene (2009)

Robert Antonucci Chances (2009)

A reminder of Richard Diebenkorn...

Diana Delgado Menstrual Mountain II (2007)

Reviewing the flag like Jasper Johns...

Matthew King Modern Cinema (2008)

The Top Celebrity Art Couples

2010-02-12T16:21:00.000-08:00

I admit it - this post probably belongs in the pages of People magazine. But, in the spirit of Valentines Day, my sentimental side is out in full force. Just for today, I bid adieu to any form of propriety and present to you a list of five top artist couples:

5) Bjork and Matthew Barney

Here's a great excerpt from a story about the eccentric Icelandic singer and her husband, a freaky artist and one-time Ivy League quarterback:

Bjork searched for an image to describe a man with whom she had just spent a year making a movie and composing a two-and-a-half-hour soundtrack, the longest and perhaps most ambitious musical project of her career.

She had been in Iceland for several days, so the English language was hitting her at odd angles, but she finally found the word she was looking for.

"He's a bit of a submarine," she said, and grinned.

It was an apt description, not only because the man in question — Matthew Barney, the artist and filmmaker and Bjork's boyfriend for almost six years — operates at a kind of deep-sea level, silently (he dreads talking about his work) dredging up fantastical and sometimes fearsome creatures from the dark ocean bed of human consciousness.

On a scale of weird from 1-10, I give them a 19!

4) Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock

While Pollock may have come out on top in the history books, most contemporary art historians also give Krasner a lot of credit. She stood strong with Pollock as he battled alcoholism and created highly respectable art in her own right. Many feminists have expressed frustrations that Krasner's work was marginalized by Pollock's legacy. With time, hopefully the importance of her work will be able to be assessed free of any bias.

3) John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Now this is a contentious one. Yoko Ono may be one of the most hated nice people on the planet, as many Beatles fans claim she brought on the band's ruin. In terms of aesthetics, however, there is no doubt that both of them were exceptional minds. Ono emerged out of Japan and became a lead figure in the Fluxus movement and in feminist art. As for Lennon, his music and work for peace changed the world. (I'm only ranking them at number three because Lennon was never a full-fledged visual artist.)

2) Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg

Johns and Rauschenberg have never explicitly said they were lovers in the 1950s, but the art historical jury seems to be out (no pun intended) and most people accept that the two men were romantically linked. Talk about a power couple, eh?

Some critics go so far as to tie their gender into their art historical legacies. Johnathan Katz pushes the thesis that Abstract Expressionism was a monolithic, macho art, which Mr. Johns and Mr. Rauschenberg were in "joint opposition" to. In truth, Abstract Expressionism was not so chauvinistic- - its circle included gay artists, dealers and critics, and Mr. Johns and Mr. Rauschenberg have both repeatedly acknowledged their respect for it. Nonetheless, Katz's theory is scandalous!

1) Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

Frida is perhaps the most iconic artist of all time. Well after her death, her unibrowed visage has turned into a mass-produced visual commodity. During her life, however, her work was virtually unknown. Her husband, Diego Rivera, was a world famous muralist and communist supporter. Without their connection to one another, it's highly likely neither of them would have reached such insane levels of fame, and Latin American art would arguably have remained much more marginalized than it is now.

Titillating Titles

2010-02-10T06:10:00.000-08:00

Although sometimes ignored, titles are integral to art. Whether insightful, subtle, humorous or entirely nondescript, they say something about the work and give artists an opportunity to turn text aesthetic.

In honor of the underappreciated title, we have collected a few of our favorites:

Damien Hirst The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)

Alex Farkas, Gallery Director:

"The title says it all. Hirst perfectly articulates the intention of the piece and how it makes me feel. I can't even imagine putting life and death in simpler terms."

Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

Bailey Richardson (me!), Assistant Gallery Director:

"Marcel Duchamp is the absolute master for me. I love his titles because they are so dang witty. The most famous example is probably the urinal he called "Fountain." My favorite of his stuff though is "L.H.O.O.Q.," the title for a cheap postcard reproduction of da Vinci's Mona Lisa onto which he drew a mustache and beard. L.H.O.O.Q. is a pun in French. When pronounced aloud they form the sentence "Elle a chaud au cul," which Duchamp once gave a loose translation as "there is fire down below." Calling the most stoic woman in painting horny is just plain funny."

Takashi Murakami Army of Mushrooms (2003)

Stephen Tanenbaum, Director of Operations:

"I was able to see Murakami's artwork at the Brooklyn Museum back in 2008. I appreciate the large scale of some of his work. And I really enjoy his fun use of colors and characters, not to mention his titles. By calling the gridded mushrooms an "army," he anthropomorphizes them even more."

Here are some of the best titles from our artists Ugallery:

Shannon McLaughlin Jive Turkey Mother Clucker (2008)

Johnny Botts I'm OK -- I'll be OK (2009)
(A girl robot finds herself upside-down)

Janet Brusselbach It's Something You Would Do, If You Were Me (2008)

Did we miss anything? Give us a comment and share your thoughts on titles!

SFMOMA throws money away

2010-02-08T06:03:00.000-08:00

The late Donald Fisher pulls out art that is kept in storage hung on sliding walls at Gap headquarters.

Last week, the SFMOMA announced that it had raised $250 million dollars in just 6 months to boost their endowment and fund the museum's plans to expand to three times their current size (see SF Chronicle article for more). All the excitement comes in the wake of Gap Founder Donald Fisher's announcement this past summer that he would gift his 1,000+ piece contemporary art collection to the museum. Fisher's private collection is perhaps the largest in the world and will put the SFMOMA on par with the NY MoMA and the Tate Modern.

After some reflection, I've come to the conclusion that SFMOMA's purchase was frivolous. If only their curators were more web savvy, they would have saved $100s of millions of dollars by buying similar art on Ugallery at a much better price point. Allow me to elaborate...

Donald Fisher - anything you can do, Ugallery can do better!

Donald Fisher: David Hockney Interior With Sun and Dog (1994)

Ugallery: Kelley Stengele Mid-Century Space (1999)

Donald Fisher: Brice Marden The Sisters (1991)

Ugallery: Matt Osselaer All Paths Cross (2006)

Donald Fisher: Chuck Close Roy I (1994)

Ugallery: Sunil Nair Rendile (2008)

Donald Fisher: Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park No. 67 (1973)

Ugallery: JP Tormey Interlacken (2007)

Donald Fisher: Gerhard Richter Janus 1983

Ugallery: Stephen Proski 3-FOLD 2010

Donald Fisher: Alexander Calder Three Black Fishtails (1960)

Ugallery: Phillip Grass Drawing 003 (2009)

In all seriousness, Donald Fisher's collection is amazing. I can't wait to see it exhibited! For more about his works, watch this great video of Fisher guiding a tour of his collection:

Finger on the Pulse: Alberto Giacometti brings home the bacon

2010-02-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

Today the art gods smiled on Alberto Giacometti - one of his iconic thin sculptures pulled in $104.3 at Sotheby's in London. That's the highest sum paid for any artwork ever. Sotheby's made more money on this one sale than they did on their top four sales combined last year. Sounds like the art biz is back!

Be sure to check out Ugallery's sculpture work. Who knows, maybe one of our works will bring in $104.4 million in the coming years...

Here's an article on the auction from the Los Angeles Times:

Alberto Giacometti sculpture breaks auction record.
February 4, 2010

Will that be cash or charge?

A bronze statue by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti has broken the record for the most expensive artwork sold at an auction, according to Sotheby's.

The statue, "L'Homme Qui Marche I" ("The Walking Man I"), was sold for $104.3 million at a recent London auction. The artwork was reportedly expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million. It was owned by Commerzbank, a German bank that inherited the work when it acquired Dresdner Bank.

The selling price barely beats the previous record of $104.2 million for Pablo Picasso’s “Garcon a la Pipe” in 2004, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Giacometti's sculpture originates from 1960, when the artist planned a series of bronze figures as part of a commission. The artwork stands 6 feet tall and depicts an extremely emaciated human figure in midstride.

The winning bid came over the phone in the auction house's London sale room, and the bidder has chosen to remain anonymous, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Giacometti is known for his sculptures depicting thin human forms. His "Tall Figure II" and "Tall Figure III" are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and are featured in the current exhibition "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years."

-- David Ng

Photo: "L'Homme Qui Marche I" by Giacometti. Credit: Justin Lane / EPA

Reflections on Luc Tuymans

2010-02-03T14:03:00.001-08:00

Luc Tuymans The Architect (1997)

Early this morning, Gallery Director Alex and I (Bailey - I'm an Assistant Gallery Director and the newest member of the Ugallery team!) popped by the SFMOMA for a sneak preview of their upcoming Luc Tuymans' exhibition.

Tuymans, a prickly, chain-smoking Belgian, is one of the most important contemporary artists on the scene today. This morning, he personally led a big group of us around his retrospective and shared tidbits and context about each work. (!!!)

Alex and I saw whispers of some of our Ugallery artists' aesthetics in Tuymans' work, and we thought we'd share a few we found most poignant in particular.

One of the tropes of Tuymans' work is that his paintings alone often don't disclose enough to understand what's going on. The painting above, The Architect, is one of his most famous examples of this. The faceless man on skis fallen over in the snow is none other than Hitler's death camp architect Albert Speer. With no face, and no explanation, however, many of us are lost in ambiguity.

Lucille Park Hitler Youth
Oil painting on stretched canvas
Dimensions: 24" w x 18" h x 2" d

In content and form, Ugallery artist Lucille Park's work Hitler Youth echoes Tuymans. Faceless figures (their uniforms suggest they are younger boys) form a hierarchical pyramid before a textured black background. The boys' identity doesn't matter, only their cause is of note. Nonetheless, there is something haunting about their expressionless faces as their tear-dropped shaped eyes drift off in sadness.

Luc Tuymans Within (2001)

Luc Tuymans Our New Quarters (1986)

Luc Tuymans Gas Chamber (1986)

Another striking aspect of Tuymans' work is his limited chromatic range. Often his pieces employ only two or three pigments. With this limited palette, he translates landscapes and portraits much like an aged photo. (In fact, Tuymans often uses polaroids and low quality photos as studies for his paintings). The absence of light or the presence of shadows define the figures in his work.

Rachel Ridgley Big Empty
photography on paper
Dimensions: 18" w x 12" h x " d

Rachel Ridgley Wise Old Oak
photography on paper
Dimensions: 18" w x 12" h x " d

Ugallery artist Rachel Ridgley's photographs of aging scenes in her home state of Ohio reflect Tuymans' narrow chromatic focus. Light beiges and subtle blue hues permeate both artists' works. Ridgley's work is not intended to be precise, hyper-real photography. Much like Tuymans, she is interested in the power of the incomplete and the sentimentality attached to fading images.

Luc Tuymans

All and all, Alex and I both walked away from the tour moved by the experience of hearing a living artist personally discuss his body of work. Unlike wall texts drafted by curators, Tuymans' talk was full of anecdotes and personal reflections. While these stories may not be recorded in future art history text books, they do create the first iteration of his legacy. With time, and many more conversations, a dominant theory about Tuymans will emerge. But for now, we just have to start talking.

At Ugallery, we hope to encourage just that. We want our site to serve as a space for artists and art-lovers to meet and interact. We want to build an online art community to support artists working now. Won't you join us?

Decor Demon Features Artwork

2010-01-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

The popular new design site Decor Demon featured Ugallery artwork recently. Decor Demon was started by television producer turned decorator/designer Brian Patrick Flynn who offers up some great commentary on the pieces featured and in his other stories. Be sure to check it out!

December Deals Launched Today

2009-12-11T08:22:00.001-08:00

Hi All,

We launched our first day of December Deals with Free Shipping today! We will have a different deal each day for the next week. Below are the highlights:

Fri. 11 - Free domestic shipping on all art up to 40"x40" in size

Sat. 12 - Spend $100 or more and receive a $25 gift card, spend $250 or more and receive a $50 card, spend $500 or more and receive a $100 card

Sun. 13 - 15% off all art on the Top Rated and New Art pages

Mon. 14 - Secret Deal

Tues. 15 - 15% off all Landscape Paintings

Wed. 16 - 15% off all Oil Paintings

Thurs. 17 - Looking for an original last minute gift? Ugallery will match your gift card purchases! Buy a $50 gift card, receive a $50 gift card free; buy a $100 card, receive a $100 card free; buy a $200 card, receive a $200 card free

Hope everyone has a great weekend, TGIF!

Christie's last night & Fall Special!

2009-11-11T15:06:00.000-08:00

At Christie's Post War and Contemporary evening sale last night, the two top works on the block proved to be too expensive, and went unsold with nary a bid. Jean-Michel Basquiat's Brother Sausage (est. $9,000,000-$12,000,000), and Andy Warhol’s famous Tunafish Disaster (est. $6,000,000-$8,000,000), were both offered by Peter Brant, art collecting magnate and owner of Art in America, Interview Magazine, and The Magazine Antiques.

Critics and auction house professionals attribute the failure to Brant's extremely high estimate, rather than the current economy. “There is zero tolerance for overpriced or overestimated work now,” said dealer Lucy Mitchell-Innes, president of the Art Dealers Association of America. “The results are in line with the broader market. There is interest in buying, but it is more disciplined.”

Of course no one wants to pay too much for art. While Ugallery is always happy to offer affordable works, we're continuing in the spirit of savings and are happy to bring you our FALL SPECIAL!! With prices we're sure would get a lot of bids.

Now through November 29th...Enjoy!

Art Market Report

2009-11-09T09:18:00.001-08:00

Alberto Giacometti, "L'Homme Qui Chavire"

It's November...meaning it's auction season!! Last season's auctions produced lackluster results in a deflated economy, but last week proved the opposite! Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern sale on Wednesday exceeded all expectations, bringing in over $181million in four hours. It was the first time since May 2006, when art markets were flourishing, that an auction at Sotheby's New York exceeded its high estimate - in this case by almost 10%.

The evening's top lot, Giacometti's rare, painted bronze, L'homme qui Chavire, sold for $19,346,500 - well over it's estimate of $8-12 million. Collector and Conde Nast publishing magnate S.I. Newhouse, Jr., was offering the piece, which is the only cast in its edition of six to be hand painted by the artist.

Following the sale, Simon Shaw, Sotheby's head of Impressionist and modern art in New York, said that the market is "as vibrant as I've ever seen it." He added, "This was a real shot in the arm for the art market... There is great appetite for great works."

There is always appetite for great works, and you don't always have to spend a record-setting amount to acquire them! Please enjoy some examples of emerging artists who evoke the same highly expressive, attenuated figures of Giacometti:

Jiyoo Jye, "Wings of Time"

Anna Lemnitzer, "Black Figure, Dark Yellow Background"

Sumner Crenshaw, "Gentle Persuasion"

Caroline Morrell, "Mind"

Kate Fauvell, "Crash"

Rush Benefit Tee Photo Shoot

2009-10-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

In the past two weeks, you may have noticed promotions on the site for a limited edition art tee benefiting the Rush Foundation. Rush was founded by Russell Simmons and his brothers to expose urban youth to the arts and provide exhibition opportunities for underrepresented artists. It's a great organization, and Ugallery artist Lana Williams designed a beautiful shirt for their benefit. As you can imagine, everyone in the office has been wearing the same thing to work lately.

When the tees first arrived, we had a few discussions about how we were going to model them on the site. We took some pictures at the office, but it just wasn't the right setting. So, on a beautiful, sunny day in NYC a few weeks ago we took to the streets with our camera. The main image we chose to use in our promotions (pictured above) turned out great, but there were a number of other interesting shots. I have included some of them below. These pictures mark the first official Ugallery photo shoot. We had a lot of fun.

I highly recommend owning one of these tees, or giving one as a gift for the holidays. Lana is an incredible artist, and how cool to have one of only 400 limited edition tees she designed. Truly a piece of wearable art, and printed on sweet Alternative Apparel v-necks to top it off!

El Museo Del Barrio's Opening!

2009-10-26T18:38:00.000-07:00

Recently we had the opportunity to attend the Grand Re-opening of El Museo Del Barrio, New York's leading Latino cultural institution. Founded 40 years ago in a public classroom, the museum, which now occupies a space on 5th Avenue's Museum Mile, closed 18 months ago for a major renovation and makeover. The grand re-opening party on October 15th was amazing - the energy of the guests was palpable, and the newly created space for the permanent collection was an exciting reminder of the importance of Latino artistic influence.

The greatest thing about El Museo Del Barrio's renovation was perhaps not architectural, but cultural; for the time being at least, New York's art world focused on the creative energy of our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean. So many emerging artists today draw from Latino culture, whether influenced by their own heritage, by their travels, or by local cultural institutions such as El Museo Del Barrio. A number of Ugallery artists below, for example, capture the flavor of Latino art and heritage. Congratulations to El Museo Del Barrio for it's re-opening! Enjoy the following images:

"El Mariachi" by Efrain Cruz

"Lifetime of Memory" by Kristen Terrano

"Yellow & Green" by Darren Ornitz

"View of Cusco, Peru" by Jeff Wheeland

Jeffrey Hale Exhibition Opening

2009-09-24T06:36:00.000-07:00

Ugallery emerging artist Jeffrey Hale will be exhibiting some of his work at the Brad Metcalf Gallery in Salt Lake City, Utah. Join us in wishing him the best with his opening tomorrow night at 8pm! If you don't live in Utah, check out his portraits here at Ugallery! I personally love his Figure Pop piece below.

Jeffrey Hale, Figure Pop
Acrylic on Masonite Board, $600