Art Photos mixed

The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York kicks off programming at its newly-renovated SVA Chelsea Gallery today (20 August) at full volume with The Beat Goes On, (until 17 September), an interactive show of four “listening rooms” given over to the artists Elia Alba, Paul D. Miller (alias DJ Spooky), Kevin Beasley and Tameka Norris that explore the fusion of contemporary art and music.

Alba—whose photography work draws on her experiences in the 1980s New York club scene—has conceived her gallery space as an old-school discotheque, complete with black-and-white checkerboard flooring and a DJ booth, a tribute to the late DJ Larry Levan. Norris’s gallery is “more of an intimate setting”, says Derrick Adams, the New York-based artist and curator who organised the exhibition, and resembles a record label listening room, with beanbag chairs and posters and lyrics from her rap and pop star alter ego Meka Jean.

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Sunflowers at Sunset by SilviaSil

Grandeur by Hengki Lee

The cyclist by Lars van de Goor

Yellow Dory at Low Tide by Steve Morrison

Matthew Stone's Snapchat filter

Over 40s need not apply but if you’re in London and stuck for something to do this weekend, then why not use Snapchat to be part of an exhibition at Somerset House? The UK artist Matthew Stone, 34, whose show Healing With Wounds—part of the Utopia2016 initiative - closes on 29 August, has created a custom Snapchat filter that will be available at and around the exhibition on its last day. Visitors will be able to capture Stone’s digital work as an overlay to a 10-second photo or video.

“It’s an exciting and new way to interact with viewers of my art,” says Stone, who is working with the digital creative agency, Slap, on the project.*Snapchat is one of the fastest growing social media platforms, and particularly popular with 18-to-24 year olds. Earlier this year, the company changed its policy to allow third-parties to submit original filters that Snapchat reviews and, if accepted, then charges these new filter pioneers a relatively small fee. Expect more artists to get into the groove (as a 40-something might say).

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With six exhibitions and several new commissions on the way, it is fair to say that Yinka Shonibare is busier than ever. This autumn, the London- and Lagos-based artist has shows at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, the Gemeentemuseum Helmond and the British Council in Lagos—Shonibare’s first solo exhibition in Nigeria.The original scale model of Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, which was unveiled in 2010 for the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square, is among the works to go on display at the Yale Center for British Art on 1 September (until 11 December). The show will focus on Shonibare’s interest in Admiral Lord Nelson. The artist returns to Yale next February, for an exhibition about three Georgian princesses: Charlotte, Caroline and Augusta. The show, called Enlightened Princesses, is due to travel to Kensington Palace in June 2017.

Also opening in September is an exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Helmond. Paradise Beyond (20 September-12 February 2017) coincides with a show of Vlisco textiles; the nearby factory produces the Dutch wax batik fabric that Shonibare often uses in his work.

For his show at Stephen Friedman Gallery (28 September-5 November), Shonibare has created sculptural appropriations of Michelangelo’s David, Venus de Milo and Myron’s Discobolus, hand-painted with batik patterns. The new works were inspired by the Cast Courts at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.



Yinka Shonibare, St Peter, 2016. Photo: © Yinka Shonibare MBE, courtesy, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London



Yinka Shonibare, African Joan of Arc, 2016. Photo: © Yinka Shonibare MBE, courtesy, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

A series of prints that fuse drawings of European saints with batik patterns, African ritual masks and extracts of stocks and shares from the Financial Times will also go on show. “First of all [I] think about picture making itself: the history of Modernism and the aesthetic of the mask in Modernist painting. So we are going back to Picasso. And then taking that signifier of religious ritual, which is the mask, and overlapping one religious symbol with another religious symbol,” Shonibare says.Visitors to London’s Royal Academy can also see his bold design wrapped around the façade of the Burlington Gardens building, which is currently under construction.
Meanwhile, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Nigeria will see a Wind Sculpture installed at the Ndubuisi Kanu Park in Lagos from November 2016 until January 2017. Shonibare will also present three of his films.

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Light in Darkness - A touch of magenta aurora, a milky way and a healthy dose of light pollution

Cécile Bernard

The Old Master specialist Cécile Bernard has been named general manager of Sotheby’s France, the auction house announced on Wednesday 1 September. The country is the auction house’s fourth-largest sales centre measured by annual turnover, and the appointment is intended “to strengthen the development of Paris in liaison with Sotheby's global strategy,” said Mario Tavella, the head of European operations.Bernard has a long track record in the international art market in London and Paris, working at Christie’s for 22 years before joining Drouot in April last year to take charge of the development of the iconic Paris auction rooms.

She started her career as a specialist in Old Master paintings at Christie’s Paris, before promotion to international director of Old Master and 19th-century paintings in Paris and London, and latterly director of overall operations in Paris. At both Christie’s and Drouot she built a reputation as a strong advocate of online business development, and of promoting Paris—often seen as a consignment centre for London and New York—as an international marketplace in its own right.

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Artists planning a big gallery show often try to surprise visitors with work that feels fresh or unfamiliar. The Los Angeles artist-provocateur Parker Ito has taken things one step further: he managed to keep his gallerists at Chateau Shatto in the dark, not letting them see the work in progress in his studio for nearly a year and banishing them from the show’s installation.Ito has clearly enjoyed building the suspense. A letter he wrote in lieu of a press release reads: “Dear chateau shatto, i am having an art show. thank you! or is it art shows? something will happen in your gallery between the dates of sept 1-nov 6, 2016… it has been hard to keep what i am doing hidden from you, but soon you will find out.”

The artist did not even give his wife, Liv Barrett, who is one of the gallery’s owners, a sneak peek. “I think she’s really been enjoying this,” Ito told us on Wednesday, the day before the show opened to the public and the gallery staff. Barrett, reached by phone opening day, described the experience of handing over the keys to the space as “suspenseful, yes, but also kind of pleasurable.” She called it a “reprieve from all of the day-to-day details of production, letting me access the exhibition in a very pure way.”

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