– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art presents two installations by renowned artist Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity and Narcissus Garden. An immersive experience for visitors, Yayoi Kusama offers a unique wonderland of lights and reflections where guests become part of the artworks and can experience Kusama’s exploration of infinite space. 

Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity is a room of infinite, shimmering lights. Guests step into an enclosed room to become immersed, as an array of lights ignite a delicate mirage mirrored on every surface representing the eternal cycle of life over the span of just under a minute. The space represents Kusama’s lifelong obsession with the dissolution of the self into the infinite.

Narcissus Garden has been re-installed and commissioned in various settings since its creation more than 50 years ago. This iteration is comprised of 750 stainless steel silver globes that create an infinite lake that distorts images of reality reflected on the surface of the 12-inch orbs.

Recognized today for her robust career, Kusama is one of the most successful and well-known living artists. Time Magazine named her one of the most influential people in the world in 2016.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Legends of Speed is the first major exhibition of racing cars presented at Phoenix Art Museum. Open now through March 15, the landmark exhibition features more than 20 legendary cars by Maserati, Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, Ford, and more, an unprecedented collection of cars driven by some of the greatest drivers in the history of racing, including A.J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, and Stirling Moss.

Featured cars have won many of the world’s most iconic races, including Le Mans, the Indianapolis 500, and the Italian Grand Prix, and were loaned to the Museum by internationally recognized collectors from Arizona and across the United States. Legends of Speed offers an unparalleled opportunity for Museum guests to experience and learn about some of the most successful and famous racecars of all time.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Celebrating today’s most significant creatives and leading contributors to the worlds of design and visual arts, the fair assembles 48 leading international galleries; prominent 20th-century and contemporary design dealers; a weekend of exciting programs; and 21POP, a special installation created by Stanlee Gatti.

FOG has become a focal point for the design and arts communities on the West Coast and further afield. The fair is synonymous with a uniquely pioneering spirit due to its bold hybrid approach and intimate presentation of art and design, dynamic programming on-site and its community-led mission to champion art and design in its historic Fort Mason setting. Building on FOG’s longstanding commitment to cultural institutions, the fair’s Preview Gala is honored to continue its crucial support of SFMOMA’s exhibitions and education programs. FOG represents a key moment in which the local and global community congregate to engage in critical dialogue, artistic exchanges, and a shared passion for creative pursuits.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

UNTITLED, ART is an international, curated art fair founded in 2012 that focuses on curatorial balance and integrity across all disciplines of contemporary art. UNTITLED, ART innovates the standard fair model by selecting a curatorial team to identify and curate a selection of galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and non-profit institutions and organizations, in dialogue with an architecturally designed venue. The next edition of UNTITLED, ART San Francisco will take place January 17 – 19, 2020 at Pier 35, 1454 The Embarcadero.

Jeffrey Lawson is the Founder and owner of Art Fairs Unlimited, LLC, UNTITLED, ART and ELEMENTS Global Trade Show, LLC. Lawson has produced and consulted on large-scale trade shows globally for the past 12 years. In 2010, Lawson founded Elements Showcase. In 2012, he established UNTITLED, ART which launched in December 2012 on the sands of Miami Beach at Ocean Drive and 12th Street, and debuted on the West Coast in San Francisco in January 2017.

In July 2017 UNTITLED, ART appointed Manuela Mozo as Director to lead the international development of UNTITLED, ART and oversee the curatorial and strategic vision of the fairs in Miami and San Francisco. Manuela Mozo was a partner at Simon Lee Gallery from 2013, where she established the gallery’s office in New York. Prior to this, Manuela was a Director at Metro Pictures and Skarstedt Gallery, both in New York. Manuela holds a Masters in Contemporary Art Theory and Cultural Studies from New York University and currently sits on the advisory board of RxArt.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“With her very first exhibition in Brussels (and incidentally in Europe) which is hosted at la Patinoire Royale — Galerie Valérie Bach, Gisela COLON rips apart the great white veil of our contemporary art world with her, let’s face it, truly groundbreaking works. These extraordinary iridescent curved shapes, made of her own take on blow-molded acrylic techniques, reveal tangible futuristic anticipation, toying with our visual perception using the very properties of light. Here the infinite variations of light and color show themselves as one moves around, depending on the angle from which it is viewed. The eye is delighted while all our certitudes come crumbling down.
Gisela’s brilliant production has grown from the crossover between Californian minimalism and the kinetic art of the 60’s, taking shape in Los Angeles where she lives and works.Her work resides precisely within this research of pure shape and color, perfectly aligned with the «iLight and Space Movement » started in the early sixties by West Coast artists such as James Turell, Bruce Nauman, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, etc. Their artworks were then (and continue to be) true to their own nature, perfectly autonomous objects, inspired by the light and colors unique to Southern California: these shapes appear in all their glory, in their absolute purest form, without engaging the viewer’s own subjectivity.
Gisela’s works, on the other hand, call upon the involvement of the viewer. Through this shift she engages the optical kinetic art of the sixties, directly inspired by Carlos Cruz Diez (to whom the Galerie Valérie Bach concomitantly devotes a significant retrospective, precisely due to his proximity with Gisela’s work which she acknowledges and claims as her own heritage), Horacio Garcia Rossi, Gregorio Vardanega, Karl Gerstner, Antonio Asis, Rafael Soto or Julio Le Parc.”

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

CURATORS’S POINT OF VIEW
(MICHEL GAUTHIER AND ARNAULD PIERRE)

“While the name Vasarely evokes colourful images playing with optic illusion, the whole scope and logic of this artist’s work remains little known more than twenty years after his death. The last major Parisian exhibition devoted to the artist dates back to 1963 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. This new retrospective at the Centre Pompidou explores his work from all its facets, rather than focusing only on the aspects which would conform to the popular concept of Great Art. Through an outstanding collection of nearly eighty paintings, an architectural integration and a wide selection of multiples, discover a work which rose, like the DS or Pierre Paulin’s armchairs, to the status of the great technical and cultural mythologies of its time.
This exhibition reveals Vasarely’s ‘software’, which holds a dual dimension. As the heir of the historical avant-gardists of the early half of the 20th century, in particular Bauhaus, Victor Vasarely launched into a radical undertaking to secularise art. In other words, he was committed to defining ways of designing and producing which would enable widespread social distribution of art. At the same time, and this is the other major aspect of his work, Vasarely developed forms which caught the eye to a further degree than abstract painting in general and thus marked history as the inventor of kinetic art. The exhibition invites you to discover each of these aspects and how they are linked

Vasarely studied in Budapest alongside the historical avant-gardists. His master, Sandor Bortnyik, was one of the major figures of Hungarian modernism. The first section of the exhibition reveals a Vasarely adapting the language of modernism to advertising and laying the foundations, in the 1930s and through his advertising works and various studies, of his creations to come. The Zèbres series is a striking precedent to the optical-kinetic forms which were to emerge two decades later.

Some twenty paintings, some from private collections and exhibited here for the first time in more than fifty years, demonstrate the uniqueness of Vasarely’s brand of abstraction in the late 1940s. This abstraction is based on the observation of reality, nature and architecture. Particular emphasis is placed on a dozen paintings in the Gordes-Cristal series. In 1948, the artist visited Gordes for the first time, and under the Provence sun, he made a decisive discovery for the development of his work, i.e. the angular geometry of the site and the powerful contrasts of shadow and light which provoked optical illusions and destabilised vision. Crystal, with its complex effects of reflection, transparency and blurred planes, became a model for his abstraction. The instability of these crystalline forms, the first explorations of an elementary visual language and the desire to bring movement to inert forms of abstraction combined to pave the way for the impressive aesthetic revolution which was to be the birth of optical-kinetic art in the mid-1950s, renamed Op Art in the following decade. By reducing his language to black and white, Vasarely thus defined a vocabulary which transports the eye to the dynamic world of waves and particles. The exhibition presents some major works which seem to vibrate or flash. In these works, a shape captured by the eye is endlessly transformed in other shapes.” …

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson