High Line Billboard: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

JTF (just the facts): A single billboard by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, displayed at the corner of 18th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea. The work is print on vinyl, 25x75 feet, from 2012. The work was originally made for Toilet Paper magazine (here).

Comments/Context: The newest image in the series of billboard installations near the High Line amps up the shock value for early summer. Ten delicately severed fingers float against a background of blue velvet, their luscious, color saturated ghoulishness monopolizing attention from blocks away. Whether the fingers have actually been cut off (unlikely) or are just the deft illusion of some devious magician or Photoshop technician doesn’t really matter; they sit disembodied, like secret treasured objects on display for our amazement, their red polished nails sparkling with electric lavishness. Photographed with the high style of a glossy jewelry advertisement, the fingers recall classics of photographic Surrealism from the 1920s and 1930s (Man Ray, Tabard, Cahun, Moholy-Nagy etc.), but add in a layer of sleek 21st century commercialism, making the picture even more gruesomely excessive. It’s a wonderfully playful interlude, and there’s nothing like a jolt of the fiendishly macabre to lighten up an afternoon of sweaty gallery hopping.

Collector's POV: This work was not overtly for sale, nor are there many comparables in terms of scale in recent auction history. Cattelan has recently opened a new gallery in Chesea with Massimilano Gioni called Family Business (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here)

Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

Through June 29th

 

High Line

Billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue

JR on the High Line

Another JR mural has popped up along my normal gallery pathways, this time up on the High Line near the 30th street entrances. Covering the entire side of a building, it's much wider than the other one I saw a few weeks ago on Mulberry and Prince (here), although it's clearly from the same series. Its background dot pattern is optically bold and the scale of the eyes-closed face is imposing, even from far away. Helpfully, this one has slightly more information printed on it: a title Brandon Many Ribs, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, and the logo of his Inside Out Project (here). JR is represented by in New York by Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery (here).

High Line Billboard: Anne Collier

JTF (just the facts): A single billboard, 25x75 feet, displayed at the corner of 18th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea. The work is entitled Developing Tray #2 and is print on vinyl, from 2009.
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Comments/Context: The High Line Billboard series is turning out to be much more intriguing than I might have thought at the outset. The parameters of the billboard make for unexpected experimentation with monumental scale, and its location allows for contextual relationships that are wholly different from a gallery setting.

In this second iteration of the series, one of Anne Collier's recent developing tray images is blown up and left drifting in an expanse of wide, thick blackness. On the white walls of a gallery and at normal scale, this image (it's the artist's eye) would be much more intimate and personal, and the whole process centric theme of the emerging image floating in the tray would be more at the forefront of engaging with the work. But on this massive scale, and in the context of the bustling city around it, the work is transformed into a penetrating, disconcerting, Orwellian gaze. It's as though she's peering through the knothole of the tray out into our diorama world.
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Collector's POV: This commissioned work was not overtly for sale, nor are there many comparables in terms of scale in recent auction history. Collier is represented in New York by Anton Kern Gallery (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Review: Societe Perrier (here)

Anne Collier
Through February 29th

High Line
Billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue

High Line Billboard: John Baldessari

JTF (just the facts): A single billboard, 25x75 feet, displayed at the corner of 18th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea. The work is entitled The First $100,000 I Ever Made and is print on vinyl, from 2011.

Comments/Context: Plunked down in the middle of a Chelsea parking lot, John Baldessari's monumental photograph of a real $100,000 bill is a disconcerting symbol for a neighborhood full of retail art galleries. By replacing the normal fare of forgettable movie ads and holiday sale announcements with a not-so-subtle swipe at the dollar driven world in the streets below, Baldessari successfully jolted me out of my huddled winter stupor and made me look again.

What I like best is that Baldessari's work is more than just a snappy one-liner; it mixes photographic appropriation and Pop art, with a surprisingly current-events relevant Conceptual zinger. I'm pretty sure Woodrow Wilson was never particularly brash, but in this setting, his serious Big Brother visage seems both judgmental and confrontational, and depending on your point of view, the steely-eyed critique can point in many different directions. Baldessari's wild transformation of scale is simultaneously absurd, cautionary, and perspective-changing, and it's absolutely worth a detour down the High Line, even if the winter winds are blowing.

Collector's POV: This work was not overtly for sale, nor are there many comparables in terms of scale in recent auction history. Baldessari is represented in New York by Marian Goodman Gallery (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Daily Beast (here), Gawker (here), Arts Observer (here)

John Baldessari

Through December 30th
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High Line

Billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue