Courtesy of the Artist and The Third Line

The Third Line in Dubai is currently presenting What Happened to My Dreams?, Fouad Elkoury’s latest photographic series. The artist, who lives between Paris and Beirut, earned a degree in architecture in 1979, but later turned to photography. He covered the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 and has since been photographing war torn areas and landscapes in the Middle East. What Happened to My Dreams? consists of several black and white and color photographs mounted on aluminum, often with an overlay of written text. The title of the exhibition references the work of cultural theorist Paul Virilio (b. 1932), whose writings include Speed and Politics (1977), Pure War (1988), and The Information Bomb (2005). The author and filmmaker explores the complex relationships between technology, war, information, and society, asking the question “ce qui arrive” (what happened?).

Courtesy of the Artist and The Third Line

Elkoury’s Smile, 2008, depicts three armed soldiers standing over an empty swimming pool, photographed with their backs to the camera. The young men look across signs of demolition and vacancy, with the ocean in the distance. The poignant text “what I miss most is your incredible smile” is handwritten across the bottom of the image in an elegant white script. The picture captures and stimulates a moment of personal reflection amidst an otherwise fragmented and militaristic world, evoking broader histories of both national and individual conflict.

Elkoury, born in Paris in 1952, took part in a collective series in 1991 capturing the aftermath of the war in downtown Beirut.  The series was later published in the album Beirut City Centre and presented in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Following the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, he created the photographic diary On War and Love, which was exhibited at Galerie Tanit in Munich and at the 2007 Venice Biennale. In 1997, he co-created the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, which seeks to archive and preserve photography from the region and increase the accessibility of the medium.

What Happened to My Dreams? will remain on view at The Third Line in Dubai until December 17, 2009.

Images of interiors from 20th century Amsterdam architecture, references to Art Nouveau, and potential sites of phantasmagoria are all found in a new series of paintings on paper by Dutch-based artist Delphine Courtillot, titled Raptures of the Deep. Courtillot’s new exhibition, which is on view at Roberts and Tilton in Los Angeles through December 19th, continues the artist’s use of subdued and atmospheric palette, which leads viewers into a dark and mysterious interior space. Some of the interior references that the artist depicts include the Tuschinski movie palace, the Tiffany Lamp Studio, and the Dijsselhof room in the Central Museum in The Hague; all places that embody a certain bourgeois spirit.  The paintings gain significance not through the particular imagery presented or historical place that is represented, but through the psychology and potential narrative that her imagery merely suggests.

Raptures of the Deep marks the second solo exhibition for the artist at Roberts and Tilton. The artist has also exhibited with Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam and ASPN in Leipzig, Germany. The artist attended both Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France.

Jeff Koons, Couple (Dots) Landscape, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Jeff Koons, November 14-January 9th, Gagosian Gallery

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” sang Bob Dylan in 1966, in his brash classic Absolutely Sweet Marie. It’s a line Dylan presumably appropriated from Don Siegel’s dark 1958 noir, The Lineup, a fact Jonathan Lethem insightfully pointed out in his 2007 essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence.‘  Siegel’s film used the more unwieldy “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” No matter which way it’s said, the sentiment rings true. It’s honesty that distinguishes the unlovable, often spineless villain from the law-breaker who nihilistically disregards conventional morality and candidly embraces his renegade status.

For two decades, Jeff Koons’ has been a lovable villain precisely because of his lawless honesty—a certain purity of motive has run through his otherwise amoral oeuvre. His art ads, made in the 1980s—in one, a bathrobe clad Koons surrounded himself with nearly nude models whose perfect skin compliments the brightly colored foliage—were insouciantly crass, so self-contained as to be unaware of the institution they were teasing. Later, the bust of his porn-star/diplomat wife and himself also seemed completely sincere as a floozy: as sultry as a romance novel and as pristine as any classical Greek statuette might have been in its hey-day. Then there were those oversized stainless steel keepsakes, like the Hanging Heart valued at $20 million, and the overstimulating collage-like paintings with surfaces as slick as Vogue’s ad-space.

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I Like Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Likes Me: SuttonBeresCuller, Lawrimore Project

I Like Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Likes Me is the title of a photograph produced by the Seattle-based artist group SuttonBeresCuller. Created in 2001, the photo playfully riffs on Joseph Beuys‘ famous performance from 1974 titled, I Like America and America Likes me. SuttonBeresCuller also has a new exhibition on view at Lawrimore Project in Seattle through December 19th.

Happy Thanksgiving from DailyServing!

Currently on view in the project space at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles is a solo presentation of work by Montreal-based French artist, Turf One, entitled Shining Darkness. Often perversely proportioned, Turf One’s curious depictions of bowler hat and imperial mustache-donning men read like the lineup of a Coney Island sideshow act. His mixed media constructions of the seemingly dark side of kitsch reflect this aesthetic as well, with vintage-inspired depictions of a fortune telling monkey or a palmistry booth being presented inside the dark dimensions of ornate wooden frames. In possible homage to Francis Bacon, the grim-faced man in the piece entitled Meat holds a sow’s head out in front of his shirtless body, the folds of his stomach and tufts of his dark chest hair peeking out from behind it. Shining Darkness is the first offering of Turf One’s new work on the West Coast, and it brings a fresh approach to the canon of work being produced or shown in in Los Angeles by artists with roots in–and inspiration from–comics and street art.

Born Jean Labourdette, Turf One has had his work exhibited internationally, including this summer in the group show, Beach Blanket Bingo, at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, and in the two-person exhibition, Life Size, at Yves Laroche Galerie d’Art in Montreal. He is currently putting the finishing touches on a film project he’s been working on for the past three years with his partner Lela.

Artist Cy Twombly has created a new series of sculptures, under the humble title Eight Sculptures. These new objects are currently being presented at Gagosian Gallery’s 980 Madison Ave location in New York City. The exhibition is a companion to a new series of paintings, titled Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves, on view at Gagoisian’s Athens gallery. In addition to the shows at Gagosian, the acclaimed artist also had two major museum exhibitions on view this fall, Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000-2007‘ that inaugurated the new wing of The Art Institute of Chicago, and Cy Twombly: Sensations of the Moment at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Eight Sculptures is a continuation of Twombly’s acclaimed formally driven, pedestal-based objects. While the earlier forms were created from accessible materials and objects, generally coated in gesso to create hauntingly white forms, the new sculptures are cast bronze with a white patina creating a very similar effect. Each sculpture references the unearthed fragility of an object of antiquity, while remaining distinctly modern in its formal presentation.

Walead Beshty

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently presenting New Photography 2009, this year’s installment of a series that began in 1985 with the aim of exhibiting the most compelling recent work in the field of contemporary photography.  Organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, the exhibition brings together six young artists, Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek, in a visually diverse body of work.  Most of these artists actively produce work in other media, such as drawing, video, and installation, and each one has an innovative and distinct method of constructing a photograph.  Collectively, these artists investigate the making of a photographic image in the twenty-first century, often utilizing processes of collecting, assembling, or manipulating other images or items.

With the advent of contemporary aesthetics and technologies, photography, long characterized by its ability to capture and represent reality, is again the subject of critical debate. The historical definition of the medium is challenged by the rise of digital capabilities and software programs, which allow photographers to combine their own images with others that are digitally uploaded or scanned.  The abundance of imagery now available at the click of a mouse has led artists towards a deeper analysis of the role of an image within society.  The six artists included in the exhibition create their pictures in a studio or darkroom, investigating the expanded vocabulary of digital processes and its technical and theoretical implications for photography.   The exhibition highlights an epochal moment of transformation for the medium, showcasing the work of artists who critically confront our media saturated world, and open a new era of possibility for photography.  Some works reference traditional techniques of the medium while others are constructed from online images; the works included range from abstract to representational. (more…)