The origins of the ballpoint pen go back to the late nineteenth century, but it was only after World War II that the technology was perfected and the ballpoint achieved commercial success. With the rise of anti-art movements such as Fluxus in the 1960s, a number of notable artists made drawings using the ballpoint including Cy Twombly and Alighiero Boetti. The last decade has witnessed a steady increase in artists drawing with the pen, using approaches from the abject to the sublime. This survey includes work by Rita Ackermann, Bill Adams, Alighiero Boetti, Dawn Clements, Russell Crotty, Joanne Greenbaum, Il Lee, and Martin Kippenberger. This exhibition is curated by exhibitions director Richard Klein.

The exhibition is curated by Dr Fiona Bradley, the Director of The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, and Philippe Van Cauteren, Director of S.M.A.K., Ghent, with Massimo Bartolini. It is accompanied by a new publication containing images of all the studioworks and both large installations, and a new conversation between Massimo Bartolini, Fiona Bradley and Philippe Van Cauteren.

D'Amelio Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Joanne Greenbaum at Greengrassi gallery in London. Alongside works by Jennifer Steinkamp, Greenbaum will present 100 paintings from her ongoing 1612 series.

Co-curated with Adrianne Rubenstein. Featuring works by Heike Kati Barath, Miriam Cahn, Ellen Gronemeyer, Alice Mackler, Annette Messager, Norbert Prangenberg and Hal Saulson.

Graphite is a naturally occurring mineral as well as a synthetic, industrial product that can be processed in multiple ways. This exhibition brings together recent artworks that reveal the material’s potential to take a variety of forms while also yielding a wide range of visual effects. Carvings, powder, liquid, lumps, sticks and pencils are just a few ways the material can be presented.

The first major museum exhibition to explore graphite as a medium in works beyond drawings, Graphite includes sculpture, drawing, and installation works created over the past decade—including several newly commissioned works—by emerging and established contemporary artists.

"Though Roland Flexner has been living and working in New York for 30 years, the French-born artist's Japanese-inspired abstract landscape drawings didn't become well-known until they were included in the 2010 Whitney Biennale. Here, Flexner shows 100 new modestly-scaled works made by gently manipulating (via blowing through a straw or tilting the paper, for example) liquid graphite and violet or gold calligraphy ink..."

Polly Apfelbaum Searches for Color and Geometry on Roman Floors

"Describe a particularly inspiring moment or location you've experienced in Rome thus far."

"It’s hard to narrow it down. To pick two, Borromini’s Cupola di San Carlo and Luigi Moretti’s Casa della GIL in Trastevere. Both have amazing complex geometries, one baroque and one twentieth architecture. For color and geometry, the beautiful Cosmati floors have been very inspiring..."

"In a hundred new black-and-white drawings, the French-born, New York-based artist uses gravity and breath to achieve dazzling yet subtle effects. Like clouds, the little framed works, which are created by blowing bubbles of ink onto paper and directing the flow once they burst, trick the mind into seeing what isn’t there: hidden grottoes, trees draped in Spanish moss, moonlit shores. The works are at once intimate and astronomical, contemplative and recreational, evoking both tantric drawings and acid trips. Through Dec. 22."

Tony Feher's twenty-five year traveling survey will open on October 13th at Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston. Organized by Claudia Schmuckli, Director and Chief Curator, the exhibition and the accompanying monograph represent the first attempt at a comprehensive, in-depth consideration of Feher's career. This will be Blaffer's grand reopening exhibition after WORK Architecture Company's major renovation of the museum.

Socrates Sculpture Park will honor Tony Feher and curator Richard Flood at their annual benefit in September. The evening will include cocktails, live music boat rides and a buffet dinner. Ticket information to follow.

Commentators on contemporary art have often claimed that Warhol is the most influential artist of the last half-century. No exhibition, however, has truly examined that assertion in depth. The exhibition is built around five broad themes ranging from vernacular subject matter to celebrity portraiture to issues of sexual identity. The presentation will include approximately 150 works of art in a broad range of media across five decades. A quarter of the selected works are by Warhol, and they will be juxtaposed with key examples by some sixty leading contemporary artists. The show will be arranged as a series of thematic vignettes, not simply to demonstrate Warhol's overt influence, but to suggest how artists both worked in parallel modes and developed his model in dynamic new directions.

Taking its title from the 17th-century British philosopher John Locke, “Idea Is the Object” features the variously reality-based efforts of 13 artists from the United States and Europe. Veering between routine and impressive, it has been organized by Tracy Parker, a curatorial assistant in contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Pavan Segal, a child and adolescent psychiatrist.

D'Amelio Gallery is glad to announce the opening of Tamar Halpern's solo exhibition "Fear for Poet and Drink Whiskey", at Egeran Galeri, Istanbul.

Polly Apfelbaum presents her installation “Haunted House” at “T” Space from June 16-July 22, 2012. “T” Space is open by appointment only. For further information contact Susan Wides at 917-697-0334.

Rhinebeck, NY

Art 43 Basel
Art Feature, Hall 2.1, Booth R5
Messe Basel. Messeplatz.
4005 Basel, Switzerland.
+41 58 200 20 20.

Preview: Tuesday 6/12 and Wednesday 6/13

D'Amelio Gallery is pleased to announce that Massimo Bartolini will be exhibiting work alongside the 150 artists in this year's Documenta.

dOCUMENTA (13) opens to the public in Kassel on June 9, 2012. For 100 days, over 150 artists from 55 countries and other participants from around the world will gather and present artworks, including sculpture, performance, installation, research, archiving and curatorial projects, painting, photography, film and video, text and audio works as well as other objects and experiments in the fields of art, politics, literature, philosophy, and science.

Exhibiting artists include:

David Altmejd
Jules De Balincourt
Huma Bhabha
Joe Bradley
Jason Fox
Daniel Hesidence
Sarah Lucas
Julie Mehretu
Sterling Ruby
Dana Schutz

Polly Apfelbaum
Brad Eberhard
Annie Lapin
Kim MacConnel
Allison Miller
Richard Allen Morris
Ron Nagle
David Reed
Matt Wedel

Please join Tony Feher on May 30th for a discussion with Zoe Leonard, in honor of the monograph’s release. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Jedediah Caesar presents new work that explores the artist’s broader practices as they pertain to land and site—specifically to that of deCordova’s landscape. For this exhibition, Caesar will present new outdoor installation, sculpture, video, and printed matter along with his sculptural cuts that collectively reflect on place as a temporal, social, and sculptural material.

Steel Life, a group show organized by Zak Kitnick, will take place at Michael Benevento, in Los Angeles, from May 25 to August 4 2012.

In conjunction with his travelling survey exhibition, D'Amelio Gallery is pleased to announce the release of a fully-illustrated monograph on Tony Feher's work. The 272-page book, with more than 100 full-color plates and essays by Russell Ferguson, Chair, Department of Art, UCLA, and exhibition curator Claudia Schmuckli, will be the largest publication to date to fully document and interpret Feher’s artistic output. For the first time, the book succinctly documents the numerous site-specific engagements of space and landscape in the artist's celebrated exhibition history of public commissions and installations. The monograph is designed by Takaaki Matsumoto Inc., New York, and published and distributed by Gregory R. Miller & Co., New York.

Feher’s commissioned public art installation at the new federal courthouse in Rockford, Illinois will be dedicated on Monday, May 14. A lecture with the artist will be held at 7pm at the Rockford Art Museum.

Super Special Happy Place is a two-acre installation composed of five varieties of crab-apple trees. The orchard will bloom with red, pink and white flowers, and grow clusters of apples in shades of scarlet, orange, and gold in the fall. This is Feher’s first work comprised entirely of natural materials. “I wanted each tree to be an individual, animated character,” Feher says, adding that the gnarled, stretching branches of the crab-apple tree make it especially expressive.

The installation is part of the General Service Administration’s Art in Architecture program, developed under the Kennedy administration.

For more information, visit: www.rockfordartmuseum.org

D’Amelio Gallery is pleased to announce a twenty-five year traveling survey dedicated to the American sculptor Tony Feher. Organized by Claudia Schmuckli, Director and Chief Curator of the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, the exhibition will open May 11 at Des Moines Art Center and be accompanied by a monograph that represent a comprehensive, in-depth consideration of the artist’s career to date. It seeks to reveal the richness, complexity, and impact of Feher’s investigations through a careful selection of 60 key works. The artist’s embrace of fragility, transience and emotion, along with his preference for non-precious, commonly available materials and found objects, has been highly influential with a younger generation of artists who have similarly decided to become archivists of their own lives and personal journeys. The sculptures presented give form to a spatial vocabulary refined over nearly three decades.

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/finer-things/2012-05-10/the-lookout-05102012/

Each year, through a national competition, the Rome Prize is awarded to approximately thirty individuals who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities. Prize recipients are invited to Rome for six months to two years to immerse themselves in the Academy community where they will enjoy a once in a lifetime opportunity to expand their own professional, artistic, or scholarly pursuits, drawing on their colleagues' erudition and experience and on the inestimable resources that Italy, Europe, and the Academy have to offer.

Polly Apfelbaum’s art, which typically consists of petal-like pieces of crushed velvet laid out on the floor, always looks as if it had just blossomed underfoot. So it’s surprising to see her invoke rigid Euclidean geometry in this pair of solo shows (which are titled after Edwin Abbott’s 19th-century novel “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” and Ian Stewart’s 2001 sequel, “Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So”).

With the indoor galleries closed for renovation, the Ulrich Museum of Art turned to Tony Feher to activate the outdoor spaces by creating a pair of temporary site-determined artworks titled titled "Caral Sagan, Caral Sagan" for the Martin H. Bush Outdoor Sculpture Collection. On the WSU campus, his inventive application of fluorescent orange to the museum’s façade and the branches of trees across campus encourages university students, staff, and visitors to see familiar spaces anew.

Unlike the minimalists of the 1960s, who tried to make something completely unprecedented, a “specific object” that was neither a painting nor a sculpture, I am interested in making objects that maintain the properties of both painting and sculpture: structure and support, flow and movement, color and surface, repetition and interval.

Polly Apfelbaum
Flatland: Color Revolt

Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden
511 West 20th Street, New York, NY

On view: 3/1/12 - 4/28/12

Since receiving his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1998, Los Angeles–based artist Jedediah Caesar has gained international recognition for sculptures that amass found materials into systems that reveal new patterns, often abstract, sometime social. Gathering natural and man-made debris like stones, packaging, and scraps, Caesar preserves them in a range of forms, including colored resin slices, impressions cast in clay, and raw assemblages. What results are works that evoke archeological strata, geodes, and fossils—forms at once raw and complex, echoing a mysterious past and an immediate present. Composed as wall installations that cling to architecture or freestanding sculptures, Caesar’s work exudes a blunt “it is what it is” presence, but with a highly visceral, permeable density that hints at greater depth.

SAC’s current exhibition approaches the timely subject of water through the work of 18 national and international artists and artist groups. The ideas and methods presented are diverse and expansive, but, for this exhibition, specifically hone in on water’s histories, mythologies, and ecologies. Salina’s iconic Campbell’s Ferry of the nineteenth century, the defunct Sutro Baths of San Francisco, a touring freshwater drinking station, the romances and broken hearts of Niagara Falls, and apocalyptic narratives set on stormy seas are among the many subjects adrift in Streams. Bridging then and now, local and global, metaphoric and scientific, the installation aims to elevate public awareness of the essential role water plays in the world today, in order to forecast a hydrated tomorrow.

Exhibiting artists: Scott Anderson, Amy Balkin, Priti Cox, Ian Davis, Tony Feher, Amy Franceschini, Katie Holten, Sigalit Landau, Marie Lorenz, Mary Mattingly, Michael Jones McKean, Json Myers, Robyn O’Neil, Julia Oschatz, Alicia Pozniak, Leslie Shows, Alec Soth, spurse.

For more information, visit: http://www.salinaartcenter.org/exhibitions/view/streams_of_consciousness_the_histories_mythologies
_and_ecologies_of_water/

Things forever collect in the margins and corners. Incessant accumulation seems to be a constant, especially if you are a good capitalist consumer. Clutter builds and spreads over every surface, monotonous and inexorable. It threatens to ruin spatial organisation and obscure mental clarity – so we cling to vestiges of order. Constant maintenance is required; the waste bin fills up so fast. We could gather up all the refuse and consolidate its diffuse unwieldiness into a few dense blocks: we could mould a scarecrow, an apotropaic talisman to ward off the mess monster of excess and decomposition that wants to bury us in a glut of things and material wreckage. We could and we would be modeling ourselves after Jedediah Caesar.