Violence, generosity, emptiness and the search for the sacred and ritualisitic at the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana

Dane Mitchell is in the lineup of artists represented in the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana. Curated by Beti Zerovc, THE EVENT will explore the rise of the art event in recent decades, along with its distinguishing attributes and its role as a producer as well as presenter of art. The exhibition will be developed around four topics: violence, generosity, emptiness and the search for the scared and ritualistic. Read more...

Connells Bay billboard project winner announced

Gavin Hipkins has been awarded the biannual photographic billboard project at the Connell's Bay Sculpture Park on Waiheke Island. He has worked with the billboard format before, notably with a nine-part work at Macraes Art and Heritage Park in East Otago.

Image: Gavin Hipkins' The Mine, Macraes Village, East Otago, NZ

Artbox project for the Christchurch arts community

Artists in the quake-ravaged city of Christchurch face many challenges, including the loss of studios, galleries and artists' quarters. However, a recent initiative by the CPIT Faculty of Creative Industries has introduced a ray of hope. The Faculty has designed and is about to construct a series of mobile art galleries and artists' studio modules that will function as moveable art precincts. Intended to be affordable, the 300 square metre spaces will be offered to artists at a weekly rental of $50.

Spokesperson for the Artbox project Martin Trusttum says the spaces interlocked and grouped will create the feeling of a gallery hub, not only proving venue and workspaces for artists but also taking the arts to all corners of the city.

Image: Cho Duck Hyun, Dark Water: The Antipodes Project, 2009, Princes Wharf, Auckland. Photographs courtesy of the artist

For want of a nail at the Tauranga Art Gallery

Glen Hayward's exhibition For Want of a Nail runs at the Tauranga Art Gallery to 6 November 2011.

Image: Installation view of Glen Hayward's For Want of a Nail (detail), all pieces acrylic paint on carved wood

Upstairs at Starkwhite

Upstairs at Starkwhite we are presenting works by represented artists, including Clinton Watkins' Force Field. Over the past 15 years Watkins has worked with combinations of sonic and visual material. With this work he translates sonic frequencies into minimal colour fields through customised audio/visual hardware.

Images: A sequence of video stills from Clinton Watkins' Force Fields, 2010

The Matter of Air at Gertrude Contemporary

Running for over a decade, the annual Octopus exhibition series at Gertrude Contemporary offers a curator "the opportunity to explore key ideas in current curatorial practice, experimenting with their methodology and opening up new possibilities for the discipline."

The Matter of Air takes air as a starting point for broader examination of matter in its many physical, perceptual and symbolic guises. Featuring five artists from around the globe, including Dane Mitchell, the exhibition considers the transformation of artworks that traverse the threshold between the material and the immaterial.

Image: Dane Mitchell, Various Solid States, 2010-2011, installation view, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth

$20,000 dollars in cash to be sold as an artwork at auction

Later this month, Sydney-based artist Denis Beaubois' Currency, 2011 goes under the hammer at Deutscher and Hackett's August Fine Art Auction. The work consists of two sections of uncirculated Australian banknotes with a face value of AUD20,000, presented as a sculptural object for auction. Beaubois sees the auctioning of Currency as a key part of completing the work.

The material for the work (ie cash) was sourced from a New Work- Established grant from the Visual Arts and Craft section of the Australia Council for the Arts.

So how will it do on the night? Auction house director Damien Hackett believes the concept has added an intangible value to the work and that it has the potential to fetch more than its face value.

Image: Denis Beaubois' Currency, 2011

Jim Speers' New Windsor Rd screens at Starkwhite

Jim Speers' New Windsor Rd is screening upstairs at Starkwhite to 10 September 2011. You can read our exhibition release here.

Image: Jim Speers, New Windsor Rd, 2011 (still), digital film on DVD, 25 mins

Time and money at the MFA, Boston

Christian Marclay has censured the Museum of Fine Art, Boston over its plans to charge $200 per person for a VIP showing of The Clock, the work that won him the Golden Lion for best artist at the 54th Venice Biennale. In a statement he said: "It has always been my express wish that there should be no additional charge to show my work The Clock over and above any general admission price to an institution or any other venue, nor should it be used in connection with promotion, advertisement, or sponsorship of any person or business...It is my intention that the work be made equally accessible to all." Read more...

Image: A still from Christian Marclay's The Clock, 2010

Art and money at the Guggenheim

As the winner of the 2010 Hugo Boss Prize, Hans-Peter Feldmann received an honorarium of $100,000 and the opportunity to stage a show at the Guggenheim, where he chose to pin this exact amount to the gallery walls in a grid of overlapping one-dollar bills.

The curator of the project Katherine Brinson says: "Feldmann has a history of resisting the art world's commercial structures, issuing his work in unsigned, unlimited editions and retiring from art making altogether for nearly a decade in the 80s at which point he gave away or destroyed works remaining in his possession. Banknotes, like artworks, are objects that have no inherent worth beyond what society agrees to invest them with, and in using them as a medium Feldman raises questions about notions of value in art." Read more...

Image: installation view (detail) of Hans-Peter Feldmann's exhibition at the Guggenheim, NY which runs to 2 November 2011

Mobile utopian house stars in design show

Designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1964, the Futuro was designed for mass production as a kit of prefabricated parts that could be assembled, taken apart and reassembled anywhere. Nearly 100 Futuros were manufactured in the late 60s and 70s and are scattered all over the world. The prototype, which looks like a flying saucer in a 60s comic book, is now on display at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam in the exhibition Futuro: Constructing Utopia. Also in the exhibition are objects by other designers who shared Suuronen's desire to create the perfect form.

Images: the Futuro designed by Matti Suuronen, which has a central living space, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen.

A bridge over troubled waters

One of Venice's four bridges to cross the city's Grand Canal may be torn down and replaced by a more contemporary equivalent. Designed by Alfred Neville and constructed in iron in 1854, the original Ponte dell'Accademia has been replaced twice - the steel original exchanged for a wooden counterpart in 1933, then perfectly replicated in 1986. However, plans to replace the bridge have met with strong opposition. Echoing the sentiments of local residents and other conservation groups, Lidia Fersuoch of the Italian conservation group Italia Nostra says the splintering bridge should be restored. Others argue that a new bridge will save the city money and and cater to the needs of all visiting demographics saying elderly and disabled access to the bridge is limited.

Image: Ponte dell'Accademia, Venice

Starkwhite exhibition opening today

Jin Jiangbo's exhibition Dialogue with Nature opens this afternoon at 4.00pm.

Image: Jin Jiangbo, Vast (2011), pigment inks on paper, 1000 x 750 mm

Rachel Shearer's sound installation at the Wynyard Quarter

Located at the Wynyard Crossing, Flooded Mirror is a sound installation by Auckland-based artist Rachel Shearer that "tells an abstract sound story of the interconnections between sea, geology and humans." Shearer has developed sounds inspired by mineral structure as a metaphor for those processes that affect land formation, geological strata, culture and communities. She says "it is like an aural map of energy flow narrating ancient general histories and specific recent histories."

The sound operates on a six hour ten minute loop in time with the ebb and flow of the tide. Within the loop there are sections of sound that build, peak and recede delivering an ongoing undulating wave of sound.

Image: Rachel Shearer's sound installation The Flooded Mirror (2011). Photograph by Terry Urbahn

Rewriting Worlds: the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art opens on 23 September

Titled Rewriting Worlds, the 4th edition of the Moscow Biennale gets underway next month. The main exhibition features 64 individual artists and 16 groups of artists from 33 countries and is curated by Peter Weibel, with Joseh Backstein as commissioner.

"Peter Weibel is a specialist in new media," said Backstein. "Unlike the contents and style of the main project in the third biennale, this year's exhibition will show different approaches to how media can be used in the contemporary artistic process, as well as types of art that are deliberately critical of the role of technology and media in the life of modern civilisation." Read more...

Sounds of the Sea at Auckland's new Wynyard Quarter

The suite of artworks installed at Auckland's Wynyard Quarter includes Sounds of the Sea by Company, an art and design duo (Finland/Korea) that has been operating in various fields of art and design since 2000.

Sounds of Sea is based on the ventilation funnels and speaking tubes used on ships with the components designed for sitting, listening and speaking. The commissioners say "the sculptures act as a reminder of the history of the warterfront and its on-going role as an active shipping harbour, transforming the wharf into and old shipping deck."

Images: Company's Sounds of Sea (2011), stainless steel & powder-coating, Wynyard Quarter, Auckland

Something old, something new at Auckland's Wynyard Quarter

Over the next few days we'll post images of the public art projects installed for the opening of Auckland's Wynyard Quarter, a 36 hectare area of reclaimed land stretching from the eastern side of the Viaduct Harbour to the Westhaven Marina.

The suite of works respond to the character of the waterfront through reflection, sound, texture and movement. Today's post features Michio Ihara's Wind Tree with its stainless steel trusses designed to swing in the wind. First installed in Queen Elizabeth Square in 1977, it was removed in 2002 to make way for the new landscape elements as part of the redevelopment of the Brittomart rail station and square upgrade. After years in storage, the work produced as a result of the Auckland International Sculpture Sypmosium in 1971 has finally found a permanent home on Auckland's waterfront.

Image: Michio Ihara's Wind Tree, Wynyard Quarter, Auckland. Photos by Terry Urbahn

Harriet Friedlander Residency takes Seung Yul Oh to NYC

Seung Yul Oh arrived in New York this week courtesy of the $80,000 Harriet Friedlander Residency. Administered for the Friedlander Family by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, the award has no strings attached to it. Recipients are free to stay in NYC for as long as the $80,000 lasts, and Oh picked the right time to go with the NZ dollar trading at a post-float high of between US$0.8000 and US$0.8600. While recipients of the award are not required to develop specific projects under the Residency, the inaugural awardee, filmmaker Florian Habicht, set the bar with his NY film Love Story which premiered in Auckland recently at the New Zealand International Film Festival.

Image: a recent (untitled) work by Seung Yul Oh

JIn Jiangbo: Dialogue with Nature opening

Jin Jiangbo's exhibition Dialogue with Nature opens on Saturday 20 August, 4.00 to 7.00pm. You can read the exhibition release here.

Image: Jin Jiangbo, Boundless (2011)

Top 10 best selling lots for 2011

As the art world awaits to see how the global market downturn will affect the art market, MutualArt looked back over the first six months of the year with a review of the top lots so far.

Top 10 best selling lots:

£26,697,250 - Francesco Guardi, Venice, a view of the Rialto Bridge, Looking North, from the Fondamenta del Carbon, late 1760s
£25,241,251 - Pablo Picasso, La Lecture, 1932
£24,681,250 - Egon Schiele, HAUSER MIT BUNTER WASCHE (VORSTADT II), 1914
$38,442,500 - Andy Warhol, Self Portrait in four parts, 1963-64

£23,001,250 - Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Portrait of Lucien Freud, 1964
£22,441,250 - George Stubbs, Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a trainer, a jockey and stable lad, 1765
$33,682,500 - Mark Rothko, Untitled No.17, 1961

$29,202,500 - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 BC, 1883
£17,961,250 -Pablo Picasso, Femme assise, robe bleue, 1939
£17,961,250 - Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, 1953

Hans Ulrich Obrist's latest domestic intervention in Sao Paulo's Glass House

Hans Ulrich Obrist will curate an exhibition of 15 to 20 artists' projects in Sao Paulo's Glass House, the former home of modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. "Lina is one of the great women architects of the 20th century and her major projects haven't been recognised enough", he says. The project is the latest in a series of domestic interventions by Obrist. He has previously staged exhibitions in the homes of architect Luis Barragan in Mexico City, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Sils Maria, Switzerland and poet Frederico Garcia Lorca in Granada, Spain.

$1k to $50m

50 years ago LA art dealer Irving Blum, a former furniture salesman who bought a stake in Ferus gallery, persuaded Andy Warhol to mount his first solo show there. He also had the foresight to buy Campbell's Soup Cans for $1,000. The work which eventually sold for $15 million has returned to LA MOCA for a tribute exhibition to the gallery and Blum as one of its directors who also championed Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and Frank Stella early in their careers.
Image: Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

Marina Abramovic to direct LA MOCA gala

Following her Manchester performance The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic with actor Willem Dafoe, singer-songwriter Antony Hegarty and director Robert Wilson, Abramovic has been named to direct LA MOCA's annual gala in November. The fundraising event has become something of an art world extravaganza. Last year Doug Aitken created an immersive, multimedia project that included a set by Devendra Banhart, and in 2009 Francesco Vezzoli created a spectacle that included Lady Gaga performing on a Damien Hirst-painted piano.

Image: From The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic

LEAP on design at the boundaries of art in China

LEAP is the international art magazine of contemporary China. Published six times a year it presents a mix of contemporary art coverage and cultural commentary. The August issue covers design at the boundaries of art, from fashion to architecture. If you want to check out the magazine you can look for its content to appear online at leapleapleap.com in the coming weeks.

Image: from LEAP's feature article on design in China

Coming up at Starkwhite

Coming up is Jin Jiangbo's Dialogue with Nature which runs from 19 August to 17 September 2011.

Image: Jin Jiangbo, Hidden (2011), pigment inks on Ilford paper

Is the art market entering another period of volatility?

On 3 August Sotheby's (BID) reported its best ever quarterly profit of $127 million with record sales of $3.4 billion for the first half of 2011. Yesterday Sotheby's shares plunged 20% showing the publicly-traded auction house wasn't exempt from the recent market drop triggered by the US debt ceiling crisis and credit downgrade. With concerns about the state of the art market on the rise, eyes will be on Sotheby's September 13 auction of classical Chinese painting.

Image: an electronic board showing stock market information in Wuhan, China

AGNSW director Edmund Capon calls it a day

The Australian reports that Edmund Capon is to retire after more than three decades as director at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Capon leaves on a high note with the recent creation of new gallery space to house the $35m John Kaldor Collection gifted to the AGNSW under his watch. Read more...

Len Lye curator Tyler Cann takes up new position at IKON gallery

Tyler Cann, the Len Lye curator at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, is moving to the Ikon gallery in Birmingham. He takes up his new curatorial position at the end of this month, but will continue to work with the GBAG as a curatorial advisor and trustee of the Len Lye Foundation.

Image: Tyler Cann with Len Lye's Wind Wand

Light as experience and symbol

Trenton Garratt's exhibition What's the Sun continues at Starkwhite this week, closing Saturday 13 August. You can read an exhibition review here.

Image:Trenton Garratt, Clearing (2011), oil on linen, 1000 x 1200 mm

Chartwell and Starkwhite present an art download project at the Auckland Art Fair

We are presenting Chartwell's Art Download Project at the Auckland Art Fair. Developed with Starkwhite and artist Clinton Watkins, the project delivers a free artwork to collectors formatted for presentation on a mobile phone or iPad. If you email chartwellartdownloadproject@gmail.com (you don't need to add a subject or message) you will receive Clinton Watkins' Feedback in MP4 format compressed as a.zip file as a gift for your collection.

Image: Clinton Watkins, Feedback (2011), video stills

BMW Guggenheim experimental lab launched in New York

A new BMW Guggenheim Lab has been launched in New York. The think tank/art installation is part of a six-year enterprise that aims to better urban living through arts collaboration. Architects will design mobile structures to reflect given themes, which will then travel to cities worldwide.

For the first outing, Tokyo-based architect Atelier Bow-Wow has designed a space that will transform a gravel lot at the border of Manhattan's Lower East side and the East Village. The 2500 square-foot carbon-fibre Lab will host programmes focusing on the problems associated with art and urban planning.

The New York Lab team was nominated by an advisory committee including designer Elizabeth Diller, artist Rikrit Tiravanija and Zimbabe's mayor of Harare, Muchadeyi Ashton Masunda. It is comprised of Bronx environmental justice activist Omar Freilla, Canadian journalist and urban experimentalist Montgomery, Nigerian microbiologist Olatunbosum Obayomi, and Dutch architects Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman who planned the events for the Manhattan Lab including the screening of Blank City, a documentary that explores the underground arts scene of New York in the 70s.
Image: the BMW Guggenheim Lab showing the interactive installation Urbanology

Auckland's carbon-friendly museum

The Auckland museum is the first in the world to get a carbon-friendly stamp of approval after making big cuts in its energy use. It has been certified through the internationally recognised Certified Emissions Measurement and Reduction Scheme (CEMARS), which measures every detail of an organisation's carbon footprint from the number of flights staff take to the type of lawnmower used on the grounds.

Trenton Garratt's exhibition What's the Sun continues at Starkwhite

We are at the Auckland Art Fair this week (booth 11) but the gallery will be open throughout the Fair, 11am - 6pm daily and 11am - 4pm on Saturday. Downstairs we are showing Trenton Garratt's What's the Sun and upstairs we have works by represented artists.

Image: Trenton Garratt, Suncatcher 2011 (detail), crystal and chain, pencil on paper

US debt crisis: down to the wire

America has raised its debt ceiling 140 times without controversy, but on this occasion time is running out for warring political factions to find a way to head off a devastating fault. A last gasp compromise began to take shape in Congress on Sunday night aimed at ending the US deadlock that has threatened to throw the US and world economy into chaos, but with time running out Congress may have left it too late. The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill reports on the crisis as the clock runs down. Read more...

9/11 show for PS1

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches MOMA PS1's curator Peter Eleey is preparing an exhibition that examines how our way of looking at the world has changed as a result of the attacks on the twin towers. Called September 11 and opening on that day, the show will occupy the second floor of the museum with some works located around the neighbourhood.

Image: Mary Lucier's video installation of a sunrise over north Brooklyn, one of the works in the September 11 exhibition