Art Photos mixed

A large suspended piece by Marisa Merz, (Living Sculpture) (1966) (© Tate/Tate Images)

In early February, we asked the artist Dara Birnbaum to share her reactions to the exhibition Marisa Merz: the Sky is a Great Space, at the Met Breuer. The career survey, which closes in May (and travels to Los Angeles) includes more than 100 works made during Merz’s 50-year career, from small drawings to large sculptures that hang from the ceiling. Here, Birnbaum reflects on Merz’s place in the Arte Povera movement and explains how her art echoes through contemporary art.

One of the arguments curators make with this show is that Merz’s abstract sculptures and constructions are directly related to her figurative work. What do you make of that?
The work seems to go in so many different and diverse directions. The fact that she didn’t date many of her works is interesting, as if it wasn’t important to her at the time—like she didn’t want to give a birthdate to some things. So they start to feel like cast-offs, and that seems okay. I personally like it when artists try to engage and experiment with differing aspects of their work. I’d rather see some confusion than a pretence toward simply doing something over again.

In thinking of different angles, are there artists her work reminds you of?
I think there’s a kind of Primitivism that I relate to Marlene Dumas or Huma Bhabha, which keeps coming to mind. It seems that artists like Dumas, Bhabha and Merz want to bring things down to an essence. Louise Bourgeois is another artist who comes to mind in a few of Merz’s works. A bronze [by Merz] from 1983 has some aspect of Bourgeois’s psyche in it. An untitled work from 1989 looks a little like Isa Genzken. A lot of women artists, basically, come to mind, but some men too. In photographs, from an oblique distance, some of her hanging aluminium sheet sculptures resonate with Warhol’s silver balloons, but they are so much heavier in posture and aspect. And some of the works are full of humour and an openness to play that reminds me of Franz West.

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The Nashville and New York-based American businessman, art collector and philanthropist Spencer Hays died on Thursday, 2 March, aged 80. In October 2016, Hays and his wife Marlene announced a gift of 137 turn-of-the-century works from their collection—which is especially strong in Nabi artists including Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard—to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it will be shown in a dedicated space. All 600 works in their collection will eventually be given to the museum, the largest gift by a foreign donor to a French institution since 1945.In a statement announcing Hays’s death, France’s Minister of Culture, Audrey Azoulay, said he and Marlene “only considered themselves the provisionary guardians” of their collection. They were each presented with the order of Commander of the Légion d’Honneur by the French president François Hollande last October.

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The Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem will open his first US solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) next month. The artist, who was until recently also a lieutenant colonel in the Saudi Arabian army, is known for his politically and socially engaged works that draw on his Muslim heritage.

Abdulnasser Gharem: Pause (16 April-2 July) includes 11 works of sculpture, prints and film, all of which were created after a significant moment for the artist, when he says “the world stood still”—the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York, where two of the hijackers were former classmates. The exhibition also comes on the heels of President Trump’s revised immigration ban, which suspends entry visas to the US for citizens of six Muslim-majority countries—Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Libya—for 90 days, with the promise of more “extreme vetting” of migrants in the future. “Some of the works reflect on what’s happening both in Saudi Arabia and in the US,”* Gharem says. “But I am not picking a side, I’m just trying to be a mirror to my society.”

Abdulnasser Gharem,

Road to Mecca, from the series Restored Behaviour (2011). (Image: © Gharem Studio, photo courtesy of Mrs. Georges Marci)

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Beyond Caravaggio
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin until 14 May

Considering that Caravaggio (1571-1610) made a deep impression on patrons in Rome and indelibly made his mark on Neapolitan art, it is remarkable that by the 1630s his influence was spent, while Bolognese classicism and the flamboyance of Pietro da Cortona’s baroque triumphed. The so-called “Caravaggeschi”—Caravaggio’s followers, contemporary and posthumous—are the subjects of this show. Paradoxically it seems that the works of those who tried most closely to imitate him tend to be weak, while those who borrow more loosely from him strain the style label “Caravaggesque” to breaking point.




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Chief among the treasures to emerge from the Osaka-based Fujita Museum is this ancient wine vessel, which was acquired before 1940 by the family of museum founder Denzaboro Fujita. A very rare example of a Shang dynasty vessel in the form of an animal (there are only about a dozen known examples), this ram-shaped vessel is extraordinary for its artistry and naturalism, its fine patina and near-perfect condition; after 3,000 years, there is just one little break to the tail. It’s also incredibly charming, a sacred beast whose body is embellished with tigers and dragons—with a little bird sitting on its haunches employed as the handle for the cover. “We don’t really understand how and why such vessels were used, because they were made at the time of the advent of language in China,” explains Michael Bass, Christie’s specialist in Chinese works of art. “But it was clearly meant to be appreciated up close.”

Blue and White Reserve-decorated Peony Dish, Ming dynasty, Xuande mark (1426-1435). Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Ming: The Intervention of Imperial Taste, Sotheby’s New York, 17 March
Estimate: $1m-$1.5m

This handsome Ming plate, measuring 14in in diameter, is highly unusual because of its experimental resist technique, with all the reserves left in white. “There are only four known dishes of this design,” says Angela McAteer, the head of the Chinese works of art department at Sotheby’s. “The technique was either abandoned or forgotten until it was revived in the 18th century.” Two other examples are held by the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Museum of Oriental Ceramics in Osaka, Japan. A third, once owned by the same Parisian collector as this one, was sold at Christie’s in 2015 for $2.6m. “Ours was almost certainly made for imperial use,” McAteer says. “It bears the reign mark on the underside of the rim. It is in perfect condition and the glaze is very unmarked.”

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A diminuative sculpture of a lion and a lighthouse donated by Peter Doig helped a selling show of works by more than 50 fellow artists get off to a flying start yesterday (until 15 March). Within half an hour of opening Cure³, an exhibition in aid of medical research into Parkinson's at Bonhams in London, almost half of the works had found buyers online. As well as Doig's lion (£40,000), other works by leading artists created for the 20cm sq. Perspex boxes provided by the curatorial team at Artwise included a box full of pill packaging and assorted medical bits and bobs by Damien Hirst (£20,000), a blingy bear by Grayson Perry (£15,000) and a buxum soft sculpture by Sarah Lucas, Acts Like a Real Tit.

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More than 20 art and theatre institutions in Lisbon and Porto are participating in the inaugural Biennial of Contemporary Arts in Portugal (17*March-30 April). Capitalising on the burgeoning art scenes in the cities, the show promotes a crossover between visual and performing artists. Among the projects is a staging of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist 1957 play Endgame in a Porto monastery by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and a film installation at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon by the Portuguese duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. The event’s artistic director is John Romão.


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The artist Christo tells The Art Newspaper at Art Dubai that his long awaited project in the desert, The Mastaba, is still on track. For 40 years, Christo has been planning the structure. Comprising 410,000 multi-coloured aluminium barrels, it would be the largest sculpture in the world, and, unlike many of Christo’s projects, permanent.

“My projects are about the real things,” says Christo, “The real wind. The real wet. The real dry. The real things. Not photographs. I don’t know how to use a computer. Not flat surface. Not propaganda. But the real things.”Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, 81, is in the UAE to double down on his efforts to bring his long-awaited*project to fruition and*is brimming with renewed zeal for the structure, which he first conceived for the Abu Dhabi site with his late wife and creative collaborator, Jeanne-Claude.

Christo says*that preparation will take three years, but once done, the colossal structure itself can then be elevated in a matter of weeks, and will stand at 150 meters high, 225 meters deep (at the 60 degree slanted walls) and 300 meters wide at the vertical walls. It will consist of 410,000 multi-coloured aluminium barrels, which will recall Islamic geometric patterns, when viewed from a distance, set in an ascending form reaching a plateau of 126.8 meters wide.


Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the 1980s. Courtesy Wolfgang Volz

In the 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had planned a smaller version of The Mastaba to be sited between Houston and Galveston in the US, with the encouragement of the De Menil Foundation. The pair ultimately abandoned the project due to planning regulations.

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A New Day by William Patino