Art Basel Art Basel co-directors Annette Schönholzer and Marc Spiegler

This year’s Hong Kong International Art Fair is a week away, but its organizers are already focused on 2013.

That’s when the event — Asia’s biggest and most lucrative art fair — will be reborn as the Hong Kong edition of Art Basel. It will be held May 23 to 26 and remain at the city’s convention center.

Associated Press

Paul McCarthy’s ‘Daddies Tamato Ketchup Inflatable 2007′ at the entrance to the Hong Kong International Art Fair in 2011.

Marc Spiegler, co-director of Art Basel and sister event Art Basel Miami Beach, the biggest art fair in the U.S., said there will be “significant differences from this year” but declined to share details. MCH Group, which owns both Art Basel fairs, bought a 60% stake in Hong Kong’s fair last May.

Exhibitors, however, will get some idea of what’s changing on June 11, when Basel releases information on the selection committee and makes its 2013 applications available.

Among galleries’ concerns: that Art Basel Hong Kong will feature the same names that pop up in the U.S. and Europe. That won’t happen, Mr. Spiegler said.

“Every gallery has to apply every time to every show,” he said. “We want [to avoid] shows that all look the same. There will never be a get-in-once, get-in-three times concept, though that would make our lives simpler.”

Magnus Renfrew, the Hong Kong art fair director who is now Art Basel’s director in Asia, said the fair is committed to keeping a 50-50 split between Western and Asian (which they define as including the entire Asia-Pacific region as well as the Middle East and Turkey) galleries.

WOW Productions - Magnus Renfrew

What patrons can expect is to see top-selling Asian artists and galleries appear in Miami and Basel, similar to Art Basel Miami, which raised the profiles of Latin American artists, who were then invited to Switzerland. “There is cross-pollination,” Mr. Spiegler said.

In an effort to cultivate Asian collectors, Art Basel has hired VIP relations officers in Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney, and is seeking representatives in Beijing and Taipei.

“This kind of high-touch approach is important,” said Mr. Renfrew.

While the May date is conveniently near Hong Kong’s spring auctions, it’s not ideal for overseas collectors and galleries, who are already hopping from Frieze in New York to Art Basel in Switzerland this time of year.

Mr. Spiegler cited the logistics of booking Hong Kong’s convention center, which is packed with trade shows and other events in the spring. “This is an issue we’ve been working on,” he said.

Follow Alexandra A. Seno on Twitter @alexandraseno

 

Feathery blue skies, pheasants, puppies and pretty youths: Many of Karen Kilimnik's paintings read like an adolescent's fanciful dreams.

But fans and curators see more than that. Ingrid Schaffner, senior curator at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, says the artist's work is akin to the ballet, "something that looks so beautiful," with "these women who appear to be suspended in a permanent adolescence but are in fact hardworking, disciplined artists." (Ms. Schaffner organized a 2007 Kilimnik show.)

303 Gallery, NY and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Karen Kilimnik's 1998 'Prince Albrecht at Home...' will be on view in Greenwich, Conn.

The artist's imagery is lifted from cult TV shows, 18th-century French paintings, foreign fashion magazines and celebrity promo stills.

A solo exhibition of Ms. Kilimnik's work begins this weekend through September at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Conn. (guided tours open to the public by appointment). The show's 60 paintings, drawings and installations are all from the collection of the museum's founders, paper magnate Peter Brant and his wife, the onetime supermodel Stephanie Seymour.

In a phone interview, Ms. Kilimnik herself seems a sweet and shy embodiment of her work. Born in Philadelphia sometime in the 1950s (she's mum on precisely when), she studied architecture at Temple University, worked odd jobs and, ultimately, plied New York dealers with letters and postcards in an effort to get them to show her artwork. Ms. Kilimnik cited a few of her key influences (animal portraitists Sir Edwin Landseer and François Desportes) and explained her paintings' signature small scale: "I couldn't afford anything, I didn't have much room, and I like to work on my own."

Her painting of Leonardo DiCaprio, "Prince Albrecht at Home at the Castle on School Break," sold at Christie's London for $533,117 in October. It's in the Brant Foundation display.

—Rachel Wolff

A version of this article appeared May 5, 2012, on page C14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Art That Dissects the Pretty.

R. C. Kemper Charitable Trust
A drawing said to be by Richard Diebenkorn that is in dispute.

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: May 6, 2012

A few months after the abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn died in 1993 his family visited Knoedler & Company, the gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that had long been his dealer. His wife, Phyllis; his daughter, Gretchen; and an art scholar went to see two gouache drawings that the gallery had recently acquired and that it hoped to sell as works from Diebenkorn’s celebrated Ocean Park series.

What happened at the meeting nearly two decades ago is now a matter of dispute, one that has only grown in significance as the gallery, once venerable and now closed, battles accusations that it sold many works of modern art that were actually sophisticated forgeries.

The Diebenkorn family says it made it plain that day, before the drawings were sold, that it suspected the drawings were fakes.

“They didn’t look quite right, and we said, ‘The provenance is wacky and the story behind the provenance makes no sense,’ ” said Richard Grant, the artist’s son-in-law and the executive director of the Diebenkorn Foundation.

The gallery and its former president, Ann Freedman, say the family embraced the drawings as legitimate.

“We have definitive documentary evidence,” said Nicholas Gravante Jr., Ms. Freedman’s lawyer, including a copy of a 1995 letter from the gallery to the family members “confirming that they had viewed and authenticated the works Ms. Freedman showed them as being by Diebenkorn.”

For months Knoedler has been buffeted by accusations that it failed to check sufficiently the authenticity of more than 20 paintings it promoted as the work of Modernist masters. Now, in the matter of these Diebenkorn works, Mr. Grant said that Knoedler intentionally overlooked adverse information in order to sell the two drawings, and perhaps eight others, that he says it wrongly attributed to Diebenkorn. Most of them were not shown to the family, he said.

While the gallery and Ms. Freedman deny the accusations, the art scholar who accompanied the Diebenkorn family that day in 1993 said he could confirm the family’s account. “This was a long time ago, but I can remember standing in the room at Knoedler, particularly Phyllis and I looking at them,” said the scholar, John Elderfield, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art who still assists the family in reviewing artworks. “We did express doubt.”

The drawings in question were two of five sold by Knoedler as Diebenkorns that came from a man who would not say where he had gotten them, Mr. Grant said. The family also disputes the authenticity of another five drawings that Knoedler sold in the 1990s as part of the Ocean Park series and were said to have come from a second source, a Madrid gallery called Vijande, now shuttered.

Knoedler and Ms. Freedman declined to discuss the Diebenkorn matter, including the provenance of the drawings or how many were sold.

Disputes have been piling up for Knoedler since it closed five months ago. Two former clients who bought paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have sued the gallery separately, saying that the works are fakes that did not pass forensic analyses they commissioned, and that they have cloudy provenances. The clients are seeking $42 million.

Those paintings and about 20 others attributed to Modernist artists were brought to the gallery by a little-known Long Island dealer, Glafira Rosales, whose transactions are now the subject of an F.B.I. investigation. Ms. Rosales has said through her lawyer that she never knowingly defrauded anyone.

Ms. Freedman has said that Ms. Rosales told her the paintings came from a previously unknown cache acquired by a secret collector in the 1950s. No paperwork from these transactions has surfaced.

Ms. Freedman has testified in court that she continues to believe the Rosales paintings are authentic. Her lawyer, Mr. Gravante, said they have spoken to experts who will back that assertion at trial.

“Just last week we received another expert opinion confirming the authenticity of those works,” he said. He declined to provide the expert’s name.

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Kevin Druckmann, 5, of Palmetto Bay, jumps through a beaded art frame amid a wall of child producted replications of famous artworks at the new $26 million Young At Art Museum in Davie for children. Hundreds of children and parents flocked to the place Saturday at 751 SW 121st Ave. just off State Road 84 for the long awaited grand opening day. EILEEN SOLER / FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

IF YOU GO
What: Young At Art Museum
Where: 751 SW 121 Ave. Davie, FL 33325
Cost: $13 for adults, $12 for seniors and children, and $11 for Broward County residents.
Information: 954-424-0085 or YoungAtArtMuseum.org.

BY MARIA CAMILA BERNAL

MBERNAL@MIAMIHERALD.COM

MiamiHerald.com

Four-year-old Yasmeen Buchheit could not contain her happiness in front of a four-foot-tall wax cylinder. In her hand was a small utensil she was using to carve and shave designs into the wax.

“This is my favorite thing so far! It looks like a big candle and I’m going to blow it out like in a birthday cake,” said the kindergartner who visited the new location of the Young At Art Museum in Davie, “I want to come back 50 times again!”

The Young At Art Museum first opened in 1989 in Plantation, after Mindy Shrago, artist and CEO of the museum, realized there was no place where children could go to be artistically inspired.

“My mom and I sat down to think about what we could do to help this community broaden the arts and fill the void for the lack of arts in Broward County,” said Shrago. “That’s how we started Young At Art.”

The museum opened at a new location on Saturday, making it their third move.

“This is like Disney World,” said Weston resident Katina Taylor, who brought two of her kids to the museum. “Having indoor activities for the summer when it’s hot is a dream come true for parents.”

The new $26 million facility includes the museum and the Broward County Library at Young At Art, the first Broward County Library location that is exclusively focused on kids.

“We work in cooperation rather than competition,” said library branch manager, Gina Moon.

Broward County purchased the land and leased the space to the Young At Art Museum. The partnership began in 2002 and according to Shrago it was just a natural fit. “It was a win-win partnership to be able to infuse art- and literacy-based learning,” she said.

The library is free but there is an admission fee for the museum, which includes access to its four permanent art galleries designed for children and adults.

“It was a tiny museum before. This one is completely different — it’s hands-on and colorful,” said Virginia Engestrom who brought her 10-year-old son and two neighbors. “The museum is perfect.”

Each of the four galleries has a specific theme including WonderScape — an area dedicated specifically to toddlers and children under 5 that helps them learn through art, literacy and play.

Weston resident Tia Dubuisson loved taking her 2-year-old and a 4-year-old to the early childhood area.

“They have very practical ways of making amazing happen,” Dubuisson said.

The other three galleries include GreenScapes, a gallery that calls attention to environmental issues and incorporates go-green activities; CultureScapes, which incorporates contemporary artists works and is home to Making Waves — an 18-foot structure that allows kids to climb and explore inside the wave-like play area; and ArtScapes, a gallery that takes kids on a fun and educational journey of art history.

The museum is designed for all ages and even older kids enjoy the activities. Mark Halavin lives in Cocoa Beach, but was visiting his family and decided to bring his 13-year-old son to the museum.

“It was very wonderful, all the exhibits were fun and exciting to see,” said Noah Halavin, who is in the sixth grade.

The museum also includes areas for workshops, where fifth-grader Jessica Ortiz was making paper mache.

“I have lots of fun here — the other museum was not as fun as this one,” said Ortiz, 10, from Fort Lauderdale. “The activities here are cool and I can play.”

The galleries in the museum include art from more than 60 artists including Pablo Cano, a Miami-based artist who created a marionette theater, gallery and workshop for the museum.

“It’s not just for kids, it’s for adults and artists. This museum incorporates fine arts,” said Cano who described the museum like a sanctuary for arts and culture.

Approximately 3,000 children and adults visited the museum Saturday. Although Shrago said she feels satisfied and inspired, she said her work is never done, and that she is looking forward to the summer.

“We spent so much time in the planning, that we know we will become a model for other museums and for the generations to come,” said Shrago. “There is so much more around the corner at Young At Art.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/05/2785450/young-at-art-museums-new-digs.html#storylink=cpy

By JENNIFER MALONEY

Philip Montgomery for The Wall Street Journal

A guest, glimpsed through a cutout, walks through various paintings by artist Sophie Von Hellermann inside the tent at New York's Frieze Art Fair.

A cheer went up as rubbery goo encased the face of art collector Ellen Stern.

"You OK, Ellen?" artist John Ahearn asked, laying strips of plaster-soaked gauze over the goo—the same material used to make dental impressions—to form a mold from her forehead to her collarbone. Breathing slowly through straws tucked in her nostrils, she gave a thumbs-up. Observers snapped photos, and Mr. Ahearn continued with his painted plaster face cast (price: $3,000).

The Frieze Art Fair had arrived in New York, and brought with it a touch of the London fair's signature spectacle. Planted on an island just east of Manhattan, the fair offers a carnival trailer where visitors can toss rings to win art, an outdoor children's-art project set to the score of Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and—amid very serious art for sale—a smattering of interactive, chuckle-inducing works. Fairgoers cracked walnuts, for example, between the legs of a Barbie-like mannequin.

New Yorkers contributed to the spectacle. The actor Mark Ruffalo, with his friend the art dealer Gavin Brown, cooked sausages and handed them out free, while making their pitch. "I'm here to feed the 1%," said Mr. Ruffalo, who lives in upstate New York and is active in drilling protests. "Have a sausage and stop hydrofracking."

Frieze's original London iteration began in 2003 and has become a major date on Europe's art-fair calendar. Fairgoers at a preview Thursday said the four-day U.S. offshoot, which ends Monday, was a stop worth adding to art's busy spring season, despite the challenge for locals and visitors alike: how the heck to get there.

"Our cabdriver didn't do too well," said Don Rubell, a prominent Miami collector. But the venue, he said, was "fabulous. It's definitely the best ambience that I've ever seen." (The fair is providing free ferry service from midtown for passengers with fair tickets.)

In the 19th century, Randall's Island held the city's outcasts: orphans, paupers, the developmentally challenged. Now, it houses a complex of athletic fields—and not much else.

Sales were strong Thursday, art dealers said. Hauser & Wirth sold a blue silicone statue by Paul McCarthy—"White Snow Dwarf, Sleepy #4"—for $950,000 and a bronze dwarf not displayed at the fair for more than $2 million, according to the gallery's London director, Neil Wenman.

David Zwirner sold a blue John McCracken sculpture for $750,000 and two aluminum and plexiglass boxes by Donald Judd for $500,000 and $475,000, respectively, the gallery said.

"Aurora 1," a graphite panel by Teresita Fernández, went for around $200,000 at Lehmann Maupin, Rachel Lehmann said.

The fair's 180 gallery booths occupy a long, serpentine tent hugging the edge of the island, with windows on the East River and Manhattan. With no restaurants in walking distance, Frieze offers dining areas catered by well-known New York eateries. In Thursday's chilly and overcast weather, only one child arrived to participate in Tim Rollins's "Midsummer Night's Dream" workshop, though the artist said he expected a full complement on Saturday. Streaming off the ferry, people did stop to toss rings at artist Joel Kyack's carnival trailer.

Meanwhile, at Andrew Kreps Gallery, all three editions of Darren Bader's "French Horn With Guacamole" sold out. Fairgoers posed for photos as they dipped tortilla chips into the bell of the horn. Filiep Libeert, a collector from Belgium, picked one up for $10,000.

"Isn't it brilliant?" he said. "The madness of the piece…the generosity, the craziness of the whole thing. It's beautiful."

Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 5, 2012, on page C14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: British Art Carnival Wakes a Big Apple Isle.

by Peter Plagens 

Crystal Schenk

Crystal Schenk’s ‘Artifacts of Memory,’ at Linfield College’s MillerFine Arts Center.

Portland, Ore.

In what U.S. city might you find an “alternative” art exhibition space on a 200-ton, 135-foot decommissioned crabbing ship? Or another in an industrial area, founded and run by an undergraduate from a small liberal-arts college? Where else, for that matter, would a mayoral candidates’ forum take place at an art school, moderated by the graduate design program’s chairman? Naturally, it would have to be where practically everybody rides a bicycle, a place touted as the country’s “capital of conscience.” If you answered Portland, Ore., you probably own more than one plaid shirt. But Portland isn’t all ecology and “community” (a word I heard many times during my recent visit). It has a history as a tough logging town and still has one of the largest per-capita concentrations of strip clubs in the country.

This residual roughness and collective spirit is reflected in Portland’s ever-growing art scene, characterized by a plethora of “alternative spaces.” Just what is an alternative space? Philosophically, they’re less about art’s being—art objects displayed and for sale—than they are about artists becoming—creating circumstances free from market pressures and the need to hobnob with the rich (who are, after all, the only people able to buy even modestly priced art with any regularity).

Jeff Jahn

FalseFront

Such spaces are often off the beaten track. FalseFront, for example, describes itself as a place that’s “positioned off in residential Northeast Portland and housed in a renovated neighborhood storefront … [and] provides the regional contemporary artist and curator an exhibition space away from the accustomed gallery setting.” 12128, the former crabber, is moored just outside the city at Multnomah Yacht Repair. Its 30-square-foot on-deck exhibition space, roofed with translucent cloth, will next feature erstwhile sculptor Dan Gilsdorf’s text-art venture in “an algorithmic series of sentences that instruct rather than describe.” Recess, guided by Reed College senior Tori Abernathy, sees its “curators merging to cultivate their own audience under their own terms and to shake up the foundations.” Its most recent exhibition consisted of an installation (blue plexiglass panels and a white plexi box) by Zoë Clark, who’s also one of the curators at 12128. Yes, the art scene here can be a little cozy.

Sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Installation artist Laura Fritz is the significant other of Jeff Jahn, proprietor of “Port,” one of the best art blogs going and my guide through a lot of the Portland scene. Ms. Fritz’s “Entorus” comprises mostly abstract—and, at first, barely perceptible—images projected on the walls and floor of a darkened room temporarily set aside in an office-building basement. It was one of two truly memorable artworks I saw during my brief tour. If you think that’s skimpy, remember that these days a stroll through New York’s Chelsea gallery district probably wouldn’t yield much more.

Jeff Jahn

From left, Zoë Clark, Caitlin Ducey and Kyle Thompson outside 12128, a decommissioned crabber.

Artsies in Portland seldom utter the word “gallery” without preceding it with “commercial”—reminiscent of the way people in Southern California used to say “snow skiing.” Portland’s art galleries—at least the ones I sampled in the Pearl District—have more of a goods-for-sale vibe than the feeling of standing up for particular aesthetics. In size and plain-white-cubeness, the Elizabeth Leach Gallery most closely resembles a serious New York or Los Angeles gallery. Charles A. Hartman Fine Art and PDX Contemporary Art, both recommended to me as standard-bearers, offered fairly conservative painting (respectively, Eva Speer’s realist chunks of ocean garnished at the edges with “unfinished” skeins of combed paint, and the twee veggies of Tina Beebe’s “Of Gardens” exhibition). Both shows were quite respectable but hardly as weirdly compelling as Ralph Pugay’s wickedly faux-naive little pictures (one title, “Chicken Pox Orgy,” should convey the flavor) at a funky place on the north side called Rocksbox—which is, naturally enough, yet another alternative space.

As in Los Angeles or Chicago, many of the artists here teach at one of the local art schools or college art departments: among them, Pacific Northwest College of Art (where the candidates’ forum was held, and where painter and 2012 Guggenheim Fellow Arnold Kemp teaches); the Oregon College of Art & Craft; Lewis & Clark College (where 12128’s owner, Kyle Thompson, teaches chemistry, and where the strongest undergraduate exhibition I’ve seen in a long time was being held); and Linfield College, about 30 miles out of town. In the Linfield gallery resides a truly poetic stunner, Crystal Schenk’s installation, “Artifacts of Memory.” Open until May 5, it comprises two dense, horizontal arrays of closed artificial flowers hovering at eye level. The upper field hangs from the rafters on barely visible strands of monofilament, while the lower field strains up from the floor. Although the work’s mechanical secret lies in hidden magnets, its beauty is elegantly obvious.

Joe Macca’s “Two-Man Show” at Marylhurst University’s “Art Gym,” on the other hand, is an example of a less felicitous side of Portland’s art scene, common to mid-size art worlds: a schizophrenia in which participants want to both play the art game as it’s contested in New York or Miami and thumb their noses at it at the same time. The bigger part of Mr. Macca’s show consists of finely tuned color abstractions on crisp, square panels. But the artist can’t quite bring himself to stake his entire worth on straightforward, muted, color-field painting. In a smaller section of the show, he displays (to quote the press release) “postcards and studio flotsam [that] run the gamut from rude and crass jabs at his fellow artists to mockingly self-aggrandizing promotions.” One example is a fictional conversation between Mr. Macca and Richard Diebenkorn, who speaks from heaven. This is so undergraduately callow it probably wouldn’t have made the cut at Lewis & Clark.

To be blunt, Portland’s art scene has a lot of no-no on its lips but yes-yes in its eyes. Storm Tharp, one of Portland’s bigger stars who sports that regional artist’s badge of honor, inclusion in a Whitney Biennial, has said, “If it becomes an art capital, I might have to move back to the Snake River.” He’ll probably have to call for the moving van sooner than expected. Portland might be, as Mr. Jahn puts it, “a lot of soggy people drinking a lot of coffee,” but you can feel it in the drizzly air: It’s livable, lefty and crammed with those unpolished launching pads known as alternative spaces. For the foreseeable future, anyway, artists will keep heading to Portland.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer. He writes the bi-weekly gallery-review column for the Journal.

Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures, via Sotheby's

 

ARTIST Cindy Sherman

TITLE 'Untitled #91'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $800,000 to $1.2 million

Although Ms. Sherman already has a considerable fan base, her blockbuster retrospective on view at the Museum of Modern Art through June 11 has enhanced her popularity.

This season works by Ms. Sherman from various years and series are for sale at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury. This 1981 image is from her famous “Centerfold Series,” a group of portraits inspired by photographs in Playboy but with the women in clothes and conveying a complicated mix of emotions.

The estimate may seem steep considering that the Museum of Modern Art purchased her entire “Untitled Film Series” — a group of 69 prints — for a reported $1 million in 1995. But another image from the “Centerfold Series,” “Untitled #96,” brought nearly $4 million a year ago, a record for her work at auction.