"Artist takes issue with South Pointe dog park" @ Miamiherald - The George Lindemann Jornal

BY DANIEL DUCASSI

dducassi@MiamiHerald.com

When Miami Beach commissioned German artist Tobias Rehberger to design a $500,000 sculpture for South Pointe Park in 2010, he envisioned his Obstinate Lighthouse rising five stories above an open lawn, unobstructed on all sides.

In May, when he found out the City Commission made his sculpture the centerpiece of an off-leash area for dogs, he wrote to the city’s planning department complaining: “If the public art project was for a dog park I would not have considered the invitation.”

The city’s Art in Public Places Committee shared similar concerns, telling the City Commission last month that surrounding the off-leash area and sculpture with a planned landscape buffer would compromise the integrity of the artist’s intent and concept.

However, the city’s Design Review Board on Tuesday approved the landscaping plan 4-1, with Jason Hagopian dissenting, essentially plowing the way for 450 feet of landscaping on three sides of the lighthouse.

Megan Riley, chairwoman of the Art in Public Places Committee, warned the board that the off-leash dog area and landscaping buffer could put the city in violation of the Visual Artists Rights Act, a federal law that protects visual artists against distortion or destruction of their work.

Patricia Fuller, also on the committee, told the board that “the base of the sculpture is very integral to the sculpture.”

“In fact it’s not a base,” Fuller said. “It’s part of the sculpture. It’s an important part of the vista that you see and establishes the relationship between the verticality of the lighthouse and this open flat lawn area that [Rehberger] was asked to address.”

“We need to consider that if we want to work with major international artists and spend the money of the city wisely on important works of art for the collection, we need to respect the relationship that we have with the artist.”

The city’s planning department wrote in a staff report for the Design Review Board that “any form of perimeter landscaping material or additional park signage in this focal location … would distract from and have a significant adverse impact upon and detract from the design integrity of the lighthouse sculpture as well as its intended ‘open lawn’ setting.”

However, though assistant city manager Mark Taxis described the landscaping as a “physical barrier,” he said, “I don’t think [the landscaping] will have a detrimental affect on the viewing of that art piece.”

The buffer, not to exceed 42 inches in height, would consist primarily of muhly grass and spartina (or cordgrass), which are both native, and firecracker plants as accent.

The Design Review Board considered the landscaping buffer at the request of the City Commission due to safety concerns arising from dogs running out of the off-leash area and chasing passers-by.

Parks and Recreation Director Kevin Smith stressed to the board that the off-leash hours are limited, that leashed dogs are allowed in the park at any time the park is open, and that the area is not a “dog park” but rather an “off-leash dog area.” Smith said dogs can run leash-less in the area from sunrise to 10 a.m. seven days a week, and 6 to 9 p.m. on weekdays. He also mentioned it’s a pilot program that expires at the end of the year. The nearest dog park is two blocks away.

The planning department also wrote in the staff report that having off-leash dogs near the seating at the base of the sculpture “will almost certainly result in an unsanitary condition for park users, especially children and tourists.”

While the material near the base of the sculpture is treated for graffiti, it has not been treated for urine.

Dennis Leyva, coordinator for the Art in Public Places Committee, told the board, “We never considered, or the artist, urine protection.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/03/3483791/artist-takes-issue-with-south.html#storylink=cpy

"Art Fatigue in London" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Critic’s Notebook

Art Fatigue in London

By CAROL VOGE
Published: June 28, 2013 

LONDON — The spring auctions here, which ended on Thursday night, were a sharp contrast to those that recently took place in New York. There was not a night in London over the last two weeks when sales reached nearly $500 million, as happened in May at the Christie’s evening sale of postwar and contemporary art in New York.

In fact, that one Christie’s auction almost eclipsed the total from all five of the evening auctions in London.

It’s been generally a struggle for Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips to gather property to sell. Unless a big estate comes up, or a collector is in financial trouble and needs cash, people these days are hanging on to their art rather than investing in the financial markets.

The London auctions also followed an unusually jampacked spring calendar that piled art fairs in Hong Kong and Basel, as well as the Venice Biennale, on top of the New York sales. Collectors seem tired. Many experts grumbled that the quality of what was sold in London paled in comparison with New York, and said that the auction houses should have considered canceling their June London sales.

Even the auction houses acknowledged some problems. “After New York and Basel, it was a challenge to keep clients focused,” said Brett Gorvy, Christie’s worldwide chairman of postwar and contemporary art.

Still, London is one of the world’s art capitals, attracting buyers from other parts of Europe as well as Russia and the Middle East. And the diversity of collectors was more pronounced than ever this season. On Wednesday, for example, Sotheby’s reported that at its contemporary auction, bidders came from 38 countries, its broadest participation ever, with one in 10 registered bidders from what Sotheby’s calls “new markets.”

Here are some of the high and low points of the London sales:

BACON STARS AT SOTHEBY’S Two paintings by Francis Bacon — one of the artist’s favorite female model and another of a man peering at the viewer from behind a pair of delicate glasses — were the stars of Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art. Both Bacon canvases were being sold by William Acquavella, the New York dealer, according to several dealers familiar with the works. The better of them — “Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne” — was a 1966 triptych of Rawsthorne, an artist, who was Bacon’s confidante and model.

Two bidders fought for that painting, which was purchased by Alex Corcoran of the Lefevre Gallery in London for $17.3 million. It had been estimated to bring $15.5 million to $23.3 million. Mr. Acquavella had bought the triptych at Christie’s in London nine years ago for $4.2 million.

The second Bacon — “Head III” — a 1949 canvas of a man’s head peering eerily out, was bought by an unidentified telephone bidder for $16.1 million, well above its $10.8 million high estimate.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent from $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

STRONG ABSTRACTS Abstract paintings have been all the rage recently, and two works by Lucio Fontana commanded high prices at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night. His “Concetto Spaziale, le Chiese di Venezia,” a 1961 canvas inspired by the mosaics, frescoes, glass and stone of churches in Venice, which was expected to fetch $6.2 million to $9.3 million, went to a telephone bidder for $6.8 million. And Fontana’s 1965 “Concetto Spaziale, Attese,” a white canvas with his signature slashes that was expected to bring $5.1 million to $7 million, sold for $6.7 million to another telephone bidder.

Another top seller was de Kooning’s “Untitled XXVIII,” from 1983, which was auctioned at Christie’s. The abstract canvas of swirling ribbons in reds and blues had sold for $4 million in November 2011. This time around, it was estimated at $2.8 million to $3.8 million and brought $4.4 million.

POPULAR IN LONDON David Hockney is always a favorite here, especially after his blockbuster exhibition last year at the Royal Academy of Arts. At Sotheby’s, two works brought higher-than-expected prices. “A Small Sunbather,” from 1967, depicting one of his famed swimming pools, had belonged to Stanley J. Seeger, the celebrated collector who died in 2011. Although it was expected to bring $467,000 to $780,000, it sold to a telephone bidder for $1.7 million. Mr. Seeger had bought the painting at Christie’s in New York 13 years ago for $270,000. A later Hockney work, “Double East Yorkshire,” a colorful landscape from 1998 that had been estimated to sell for $3.1 million to $4.6 million, went to another telephone bidder for $5.3 million.

The sale also included five photographs by Andreas Gursky depicting stock exchanges around the world. They were being sold by Greg Coffey, a former hedge fund manager living in London. Among the best was “Chicago Board of Trade III,” which was estimated at $935,000 to $1.2 million and went to a telephone bidder for $3.3 million.

MIXED RESULTS Jean-Michel Basquiat was a big seller at Christie’s on Tuesday night when a painting from 1982 went for $29 million. But at Sotheby’s, “Quij,” a 1985 canvas featuring a large yellow windmill, failed to sell. It was one of the evening’s biggest casualties, as was “Hoax,” a 1983 collage on canvas, also by Basquiat.

LOW BIDS Damien Hirst continues to lose his luster. At Christie’s, “Soulful,” a 2008 circular work made up of hundreds of butterfly wings on canvas, failed to sell. It was expected to fetch $980,000 to $1.3 million. “Zinc Chloride,” from 2002, one of Mr. Hirst’s spot paintings, was expected to bring $460,000 to $750,000, but sold for $432,320, or $521,679, including Christie’s fees.

But “My Way,” from 1990-91, one of the artist’s early medicine cabinets filled with old drug bottles, did well. Two people were interested in the piece, which was estimated to sell for $1.1 million to $1.4 million and brought $1.3 million.

At Sotheby’s, two works sold for well below their estimates. “Judgement Day/Atonement,” a canvas filled with butterfly wings from 2004-5, was expected to sell for $780,000 to $1 million but brought $651,537 to a lone telephone bidder. “Girl,” another butterfly painting, this one round and bright blue, from 1997, sold for $535,890, or $651,537, including Sotheby’s fees.

YOUTH SELLS Works by a younger generation of artists had some surprising results. Glenn Ligon’s neon sculpture, “Untitled (Negro Sunshine),” from 2005, sold to Ivor Braka, a London dealer, for $299,938, exceeding its high estimate of $234,000. At the Phillips auction on Thursday, younger, high-profile artists, including Rob Pruitt, Kelly Walker, Tauba Aueerbach, Sterling Ruby and Oscar Murillo, brought better-than-expected prices. The South American Mr. Murillo was particularly hot; a 2011 untitled painting by him brought $224,145, nearly four times its high estimate.

BIDDING UP The Scottish painter Peter Doig has been something of a star in London, especially after his 2008 retrospective at Tate Britain. On Tuesday César Reyes, a psychiatrist who lives in Puerto Rico and is one of the artist’s biggest collectors, was selling “Jetty,” a 1994 canvas of a lone figure on a dock at sunset. Four bidders went for the painting, which was estimated to bring $6.1 million to $9 million and was bought by a telephone bidder for $11.3 million.

POPPED Several Pop canvases had mixed results. There were no takers for Warhol’s “Colored Campbell’s Soup Can,” a 1965 painting that had been in the collection of the legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend and was being sold anonymously by Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire, according to people familiar with his collection. But Lichtenstein’s “Cup of Coffee,” a 1961 painting from one of the artist’s series of a single image with his signature Ben-Day dots in the background, brought $4.3 million, above its high $3 million estimate.

The George Lindemann Journal

"Dia Foundation to Sell Works to Start Acquisition Fund" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Dia Foundation to Sell Works to Start Acquisition Fund

Left, Cy Twombly Foundation; right, 2013 John Chamberlain/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Cy Twombly’s “Poems to the Sea” (1959), left, and John Chamberlain’s “Candy Andy” (1963) are among works to be auctioned by the Dia Foundation in November to start an acquisition fund.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: June 27, 2013

There hasn’t been any news about the Dia Art Foundation since it announced more than a year ago that it had bought the former Alcamo Marble building at 541 West 22nd Street in Chelsea. Dia is in fund-raising mode, trying to secure at least half the money needed to build its new Manhattan home on that site and on two spaces either side of it.

Dia closed its two Chelsea galleries in 2004, saying it had outgrown the buildings. Those who want to see its permanent collection — primarily works from the 1960s to the present — can visit its outpost along the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y.

Philippe Vergne, the Dia director, said this week that he had more on his mind that just the new building, though. Surprisingly, the foundation has no acquisition fund for its collection, which includes works by artists like Warhol, Walter De Maria, Joseph Beuys, Robert Ryman and John Chamberlain. “Dia cannot be a mausoleum,” Mr. Vergne said. “It needs to grow and develop.”

So the foundation plans to sell a group of paintings and sculptures at Sotheby’s in New York on Nov. 13 and 14, hoping to raise at least $20 million for an acquisition budget.

The works for sale include pieces by Cy Twombly, Chamberlain and Barnett Newman. In 1991 Dia gave the Menil Collection in Houston six of its best works by Twombly in anticipation of the Twombly Gallery that opened there in 1995. Mr. Vergne said that when he started evaluating Dia’s collection he felt it no longer made sense to keep the remaining Twomblys because there are not enough to fill a gallery.

The Sotheby’s sale will include 14 works by Twombly from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, including “Poems to the Sea,” a suite of 24 drawings from 1959 created when the artist moved to Sperlonga, a fishing village between Rome and Naples. “Poems” is expected to sell for $6 million to $8 million.

Chamberlain has been crucial to Dia since its founding in 1974. “Dia has about 100 Chamberlains, and even after the sale we will still have among the largest and deepest representation of works by him,” Mr. Vergne said.

Among those being sold is “Shortstop,” from 1958, one of the artist’s first sculptures fashioned from crushed automobile parts. It is estimated to bring $1.5 million to $2 million.

Dia has also decided to sell its only Newman, “Genesis — The Break,” a 1946 abstract canvas that is a precursor to the artist’s so-called zip paintings, which feature feathery bands of contrasting color. It is estimated at $3.5 million to $4.5 million. (Dia tried unsuccessfully to sell “Genesis — The Break” before, in 1985, to raise money for an endowment.)

Mr. Vergne said it was premature to say what he planned to buy with the auction proceeds, but he did give a hint: “There are things at Beacon that are on long-term loan and don’t belong to us,” he said. He was referring to works by the German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher and by Louise Bourgeois.

MORE KELLYS AT MOMA

Ellsworth Kelly’s 90th birthday on May 31 has become a summer-long celebration, with exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit, as well as Paris and London. At the Museum of Modern Art, which has a show of 14 paintings from Mr. Kelly’s “Chatham Series” on view through Sept. 8, the occasion was also an excuse for the museum’s curators to assess their Kelly holdings and come up with a plan to barter some for better ones.

MoMA was an early supporter of Mr. Kelly. In 1959 Dorothy Miller, one of its first curators, organized “Sixteen Americans,” the first show there to feature his work. The next year it bought “Running White,” a black canvas with a giant white swirl that appears to be moving. It now has 22 Kelly paintings and sculptures, along with prints and drawings. Many of these works are regularly on view, but others have languished in storage.

“We decided to collaborate with the artist,” said Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, “to see how we could best enhance the collection.” She, Mr. Kelly and Matthew Marks, the artist’s Chelsea dealer, devised a plan for Mr. Kelly to trade five works from his own collection for paintings and sculptures from MoMA’s.

Three were even exchanges with Mr. Kelly. But because of differences in value among the works, trustees stepped in to help the museum with promised gifts. Marie-Josée Kravis, MoMA’s president, and her husband, Henry, the Manhattan financier, and Glenn Dubin, a trustee, and his wife, Eva, bought works from Mr. Kelly and promised them to the museum. In addition, Agnes Gund, the museum’s president emerita, has promised the museum a sixth work, “Orange Green,” a 1964 painting she owns.

“Two of the works from the 1950s are paintings that Ellsworth had never been willing to part with,” Ms. Temkin said. In exchange, the museum gave Mr. Kelly two works of lesser importance from the same period. The museum got “Fête à Torcy,” a 1952 painting named for a village outside Paris where the artist spent the summer. It is composed of two canvas panels separated by a thin, dark wood strip. It also received “Two Blacks, White and Blue” (1955), a multipanel painting inspired by tugboat smokestacks in the harbor near his Lower Manhattan studio.

CHRISTIE’S DEPARTURES

After a decade at Christie’s, Joshua Holdeman left two weeks ago to join Sotheby’s, where in March he will become a vice chairman working globally with various departments, including postwar art and design.

Mr. Holdeman, who was Christie’s international director of 20th-century art, is yet another top business-getter there to leave. Most recently, Ken Yeh, its Asia chairman, departed for the Acquavella Galleries in New York.

"One Eye on Art, the Other on Water" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

One Eye on Art, the Other on Water

Whitney Revamps New Museum After Hurricane Sandy

Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

The interior of a future gallery in the new downtown home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, expected to be completed in 2015.

When Adam D. Weinberg was planning a new home in the West Village for the Whitney Museum of American Art, he did not expect to have to worry about waterproofing walls or finding a hydro-engineering firm that makes watertight hatches for the United States Navy.
But then Mr. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, also didn’t expect Hurricane Sandy.

The storm hit the Whitney hard, just as construction had started on the museum’s new home by the Hudson River, flooding the basement with 30 feet of water and ensuring that weather protections would become nearly as important as aesthetics.

Mr. Weinberg talked about these changes during a tour on Wednesday that offered a first glimpse of the building designed by Renzo Piano and expected to be completed in 2015. The new Whitney, Mr. Weinberg said, will be a temple of American art and a model of storm protection.

“It’s the worst thing that ever happened to us and the best thing,” Mr. Weinberg said. “We will now have a building in which we can be assured that the art will never be at risk.”

Fortunately for the museum, work had not progressed very far before the 2012 storm, and the construction equipment was insured. Moreover, the Whitney had taken some precautions because its location, at the corner of Washington and Gansevoort Streets, was just a block from the river. While most museums keep their art-handling activities below grade, the Whitney put them on the fifth floor. “We always knew it was a vulnerability,” Mr. Weinberg said.

Nevertheless Sandy did force significant adjustments. The water had risen a foot above the 500-year flood plain, Mr. Weinberg said, so the museum searched the world’s leading hydro-engineering firms — including those in watery places like the Netherlands and Venice — for help. It settled on the German firm WTM, which partnered with the Franzius Institute at Hanover University, which specializes in storm modeling.

“They did an analysis of water conditions, wave conditions,” Mr. Weinberg said. “They came up with a plan for us to bolster and retrofit the lobby and basement to make sure we could withstand far beyond what happened in Sandy.”

Now the building will have a temporary barrier system — an aluminum wall with steel footings that can quickly be assembled around the perimeter — and the Whitney will conduct flood drills once or twice a year. The northern glass wall will be waterproofed. And both the loading dock and west entrance will have watertight doors, designed by Walz & Krenzer, which made high-pressure doors for Chevron’s “Big Foot” drill rig and a watertight hatch for the Canadian Coast Guard.

To pay for this, the museum has increased its capital goal by $40 million, bringing the project’s total expense to $760 million, including endowment and other costs. Mr. Weinberg said 77 percent of the total had been raised. About half of the additional funds will pay for flood mitigation, Mr. Weinberg said; the other half will cover unexpected costs.

Mr. Weinberg detailed these developments as he walked through the site, riding the construction elevator to the top floor, which offers views of the Statue of Liberty. He was clearly most excited to show off the art-related aspects of the project taking form around him.

These include a fifth-floor temporary exhibition gallery, which will be perhaps the largest column-free exhibition space in the city and has floor-to-ceiling windows at the east and west ends.

“It’s the first thing you can see coming down the street,” Mr. Weinberg said. “So you’ll know it’s a building about art.”

Four terraces will serve as outdoor galleries, doubling the museum’s total exhibition space to 63,000 square feet, and will feature plantings. Piet Oudolf, the garden designer for the nearby High Line, has been hired as a consultant.

The museum’s ground level will be entirely open to the public, including a free gallery space, an outdoor cafe (which Mr. Piano refers to as “the piazza”) and a Danny Meyer restaurant.

“People can get a taste of the museum” before deciding to buy a ticket, Mr. Weinberg said. “It feels like a community space.”

When the Whitney moves, its landmark Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue will be used for at least eight years by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a place to showcase its modern and contemporary art.

Mr. Weinberg said the new Whitney pays homage to Breuer’s brutalist design, namely its use of industrial materials like the concrete core that holds the building’s mechanicals and the central staircase.

“It’s rough, robust, but at the same time has an elegance to it,” Mr. Weinberg said.

Unlike the heavy blockiness of the Breuer, which Mr. Weinberg described as “castle-like,” the rest of the new Whitney aims to be more transparent, welcoming and connected to the neighborhood. The galleries will be warmed by wooden floors made of recycled pine from old factory buildings. The central staircase will be walled in by glass, allowing visitors to look out to the river at every level.

And if another storm does come this way, the Hoppers and DeKoonings will be out of danger, Mr. Weinberg said, 60 feet above the lobby level.

“If the water comes up that high, I’m sure Manhattan is gone,” he said. “And we’ll have a lot more to worry about than art.”  

The George Lindemann Journal

"A Shoe Sun and a Wire Ram" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

The George Lindemann Journal

Laura Vookles

A sun, dominating one of the three gallery rooms that the installation “Fantasy River” is spread over, is made from about 200 Puma shoes. The cornstalks below the sun are shovel handles.

Stepping into “Federico Uribe: Fantasy River,” a sprawling installation at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, visitors encounter fish swimming in schools, a beaver building a dam and crows perching in a cornfield beneath an enormous sun.

Not until they move closer do they discover the defining quality of Mr. Uribe’s work: the unexpected materials he has used to construct his world.

In it, the fish are paintbrush handles, and the beaver and its dam are made from hundreds of colored pencils. The crows are bits of twisted bicycle tires and the cornstalks are shovel handles painted green. Mr. Uribe’s sun, measuring nine feet in diameter, is constructed with approximately 200 yellow Puma sneakers that he disassembled, flattened and mounted on the wall, and countless radiating shoelaces.

The 4,400-square-foot, site-specific installation is the newest iteration of the sculptural landscapes Mr. Uribe has been populating with his composite creations for the last seven years. Bartholomew Bland, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, first saw them in late 2010 in Miami, where Mr. Uribe has lived for the past 13 years. “There’s a sensual pleasure to his work, a beauty that draws you in,” Mr. Bland said. “Not that many serious contemporary artists embrace beauty, but he does.”

“Fantasy River” occupies three galleries. One is for wild animals, where zebras graze and alligators snap at a cheetah. Another is for domesticated species, with bees buzzing around an apiary and chickens roosting in coops. The third, the site of the cornfield and the shining sun, is devoted primarily to natural life in the Hudson Valley. This room includes pieces designed specifically for this exhibition, among them two squirrels that were once a pair of Alexander McQueen shoes.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Uribe, a trim man with short brown hair and an accent reflecting his native Colombia, sat amid the scenarios discussing his work. He wore custom-made clothing that echoed his artwork: pants patterned with flowers and a shirt covered in fish. (“Sí,” he said, “I always wear clothes like this. I buy fabrics wherever I go.”)

He is also always on the lookout for the commonplace items — tennis rackets, computer keys, garden hoses — that he uses to build his installations. He trolls hardware stores and lumberyards; friends give him things they think he might want. “They tell me: ‘My grandfather died and he has 10,000 golf balls. Can you use them?’ ” Mr. Uribe said.

Sometimes his choices are based on the way the objects look: artificial fingernails glued onto pencil erasers resemble bumble bees; old-fashioned coiled phone cord suggests a sheep’s black coat.

Other decisions are more conceptual, like his use of 45,000 bullet casings for the fur of a tiger. Pointing toward the majestic, metallic creature, he said, “That tiger got killed thousands and thousands of times.”

Another metaphoric sculpture is a rowboat made entirely of suitcases, an allusion to the numerous immigrants who, like Mr. Uribe, crossed bodies of water to begin anew in the United States. “They came with nothing but what they were wearing,” he said. “They were their own suitcases.”

Noting the boat’s oars, Mr. Bland said, “I think it’s so beautiful that he used shovels for oars, to represent the labor that is involved in getting here.”

A prevalent theme in “Fantasy River” is reconnecting manufactured products to their sources in nature. In Mr. Uribe’s installation, many animals are constructed from leather shoes. “People kill animals to make shoes,” he said. “I am destroying shoes to make animals.”

Likewise, Mr. Uribe builds his trees from books. Spines align to form bark, rolled pages serve as branches and covers become leaves. “I am letting them be trees again,” he said.

Mr. Uribe uses screws to secure most of the pieces, and says that the repetitive act of turning each screw is an outlet for his anger. “It’s a very aggressive gesture,” he said, “and I’m doing it thousands of times a day.”

Many of the screws remain visible, and like his other materials, they carry a message.

“I like the idea that people can read my effort in them, the time I have spent screwing every screw,” Mr. Uribe said. “They are the testimony of my work.”

Mr. Uribe, 50, was raised on a farm where, he said, “I had a terrible childhood, for many reasons.” He attended art school and began painting — “Painful paintings relating to religion,” he said. “But then my life changed and I couldn’t paint anymore and I started playing with objects.”

That was 18 years ago. Since then, he has continued to play, albeit with a highly disciplined practice.

“I work six days a week, from nine in the morning till eight at night,” he said. “Even when I don’t feel like it, I just do it, no excuses.”

But it is more than discipline that drives Mr. Uribe. “I work with the purpose of creating beauty and bringing uplifting feelings to people,” he said.

He is a man obsessed. “I do this and I can’t stop doing it,” he said. Then, gesturing around the gallery, he added, “I’m making it bigger and bigger and bigger. It will never be done.”

The George Lindemann Journal

"Ken Price: Yes, the Ceramics Are Art" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

The George Lindemann Journal

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Ken Price's “Arctic” (1998), “Balls Congo” (2003), “Moose the Mooch” (1998) and “Phobia” (1995).

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 20, 2013

OVER six months in 2011 and 2012, dozens of art institutions in Southern California joined forces in a festival of exhibitions, “Pacific Standard Time,” celebrating the history of contemporary art in Los Angeles. The project was a big success and continues to generate energy. A jolt of it hits New York City this week in an unheard-of convergence here of major California shows.

Most are historical, documenting West Coast art movements and careers stretching over the last 60 years. “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970,” opening at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on Sunday, tells the story of California Conceptualism, which emerged in parallel with its East Coast counterpart but developed its own distinctive trajectory.       

Traveling retrospectives flesh out important West Coast figures still under the mainstream radar here. The much-loved ceramic sculptor Ken Price, who died last year, is the subject of a doubleheader survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Drawing Center in SoHo, while the Los Angeles artist Llyn Foulkes, an artist’s artist with an avid hometown following, is at the New Museum.

A keenly awaited new site-specific project by the Los Angeles-born James Turrell, a leader of the West Coast Light and Space movement, is flooding the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda with unearthly illumination. (A recreated 1977 light piece by his California colleague Robert Irwin opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday.) And in the cavernous Park Avenue Armory, the veteran bad-boy Paul McCarthy brings Disneyland innocence crashing to earth.

How “California” is all of this? Totally. What can New York learn from it? We’re just finding out. HOLLAND COTTER

A Career of Bumps and Twists

Tableware? Toys? Genetic accidents? Objets d’art? The ceramic sculptures of Ken Price suggest all these possibilities and many more. To the market’s old divide-and-label query, “Is this art or craft?,” Price offered one finessing answer: “Yes.”

And right he was.

You see the rightness instantly in “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is one of those rare ideal shows: right size, great design (by Frank Gehry), pretty near faultless art. Ideal, too, in a plainer way, is a concurrent survey of the artist’s works on paper, “Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race,” at the Drawing Center in SoHo.

Price, who died last year at 77, was in certain ways a classic Southern Californian. Born in Los Angeles and raised there in the 1930s and ’40s, as a kid he lived for surfing and jazz, and he had art on the brain from the start: drawing, painting, sculpturing, he liked it all.

Where he departed from the stereotype was in the matter of focus: creatively, there was nothing laid-back about him. He was alert, hungry for input. One day on the beach he met a surfer named Billy Al Bengston, a serious painter who, like Price, had an interest in ceramics. They buddied up and eventually shared a studio, but while Mr. Bengston stuck with painting, for Price clay became the way.

It was not, however, the way in most art schools, where the art-craft divide was firm. At the University of Southern California, Price ended up studying, among other things, cartooning and animation.

He made a major shift in 1957, when he was a graduate student at what is now Otis College of Art and Design. There he worked with Peter Voulkos, who is often credited with shifting ceramics, in the art world’s eyes, from craft to fine-art status.

Voulkos, a big-gestured sculptor in the Abstract Expressionist mode, was a don’t-talk-but-do-as-I-do sort of teacher. And what he did was work with clay every day in the Otis studios.

Seeing Voulkos in action and working beside him had a deep effect on Price, who always seems to have learned more from experience than from instruction. On early surfing trips to Mexico, he paid close attention to folk pottery sold in Tijuana shops, noting that even objects produced in bulk were individually enlivened by flourishes and flaws that came with handmaking. In the early 1960s he traveled to Japan — in a charming pen-and-ink scroll at the Drawing Center he depicts himself as a visiting pooh-bah — less to gather technical tips than to feel the vibes of a place where great pots were made.

For Price, nature was a real presence. In the 1930s, Los Angeles was still rural around the edges. He grew up at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains, near the sea. Mountainous landscapes recur in his drawings. Some of his sculptures look like things that were fished from tidal pools: extravagant crustaceans, tangles of kelp and a variety of oozy, amphibious eel-ish critters.

And he was soaked — what young person isn’t? — in visual pop culture, which in the 1940s and ’50s meant, among other things, comic books, monster movies and advertising. He embraced it all, though selectively, in the same way he did modern art, paying attention to Abstract Expressionism’s appetite for color; to Joan Miró’s soft-porn blobs and curves; to Joseph Cornell’s blend of adorableness and abjection.

The Met show — organized by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and department head of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and overseen in New York by Marla Prather — is arranged in reverse chronological sequence, with late Price coming first.

Strategically, this makes sense. His last sculptures are his largest, weirdest and, with their wondrous surface patterning, prettiest. You see them and you want to see more of him. Yet an early-to-late narrative is well worth tracing.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, as if in recoil from Voulkos’s dour, crushing work, Price went light, bright and anti-titanic. Instead of clay colossi, he made ceramic cups. Some were ornamented with frogs, turtles or snails, like children’s breakfast mugs. Others had handles in the shape of branches or stems, like jade brush holders found on a Chinese scholar’s table.

Mr. Bengston was also making cups at the time, as was the slightly younger artist Ron Nagle, a Voulkos acolyte (and a star of this year’s Venice Biennale). All three were learning about the power of smallness. As Price correctly perceived, diminutive doesn’t have to mean dinky. Imaginatively shaped, a very small object can seem more monumental than something many times its size.

For Price, such insights were arrived at through experimentation. At first, for example, he enclosed some of his cups in display cases, as if uncertain that they would otherwise be perceived as art. Such framing became unnecessary as the cup forms, broken down into modular cubes or stacks of craggy planes, lost all pretense to utility, making them sculptures for sure.

Even after he retired the cup as an image, he kept exploring what was most salient about it sculpturally: namely, that it wasn’t a solid mass, but a container, with an inside and an outside of equal importance. Containment itself, put under psychological pressure, became a recurrent subject of Price’s. His first noncup series, in the 1960s, featured egg-shaped sculptures. With their smooth exteriors and vivid, sharp colors — the paint is automobile lacquer — these roughly ovoid objects look solid from a distance. But when you get closer, you see that the surfaces are pierced by orifices from which abstract forms, phallic or fecal, protrude like tongues or groping fingers. The recurrent image is of a high-polish shell hiding appalling activity, sexual or excremental, or both.

Price stayed fixed on this drama of dark recesses even as his sculptural forms changed. Gradually growing larger, they moved from quasi-architectural to freakishly organic. By the early 1990s, he was turning out warty, bulbous, fruitlike lumps that combined realism and fantasy, comedy and pathology in ways reminiscent of Basil Wolverton’s 1950s Mad magazine portrait heads and of gloriously schlumpy Oribe-wear tea bowls.

What saves even outrageous forms from grossness, though, is color, the element that Price ultimately cared about most, worked hardest at, and mastered most completely. By the late 1990s, his forms had simplified — no more orifices, no more interiors — and his colors had grown staggeringly complex, as he covered pieces with up to 70 coats of different-colored acrylic paint, sanding surfaces between applications or swiping them with pigment-dissolving fluid to create mottled and speckled patterns of breathtaking depth and subtlety.

Such fine-grained effects would have been lost on a four-inch-tall cup. But they can be fully savored on sculptures that, by the end of Price’s career, had attained an average height of two feet, twice that in the case of the all-black “Ordell,” completed the year he died. This work comes at the front of the show, exquisitely framed by Mr. Gehry’s multivista design.

The Met retrospective also has several of the artist’s paintings on paper, all landscapes, and dozens more are at the Drawing Center. Price drew almost daily for 50 years, in a crisp, sophisticated pop style. The Drawing Center survey, organized by Douglas Dreishpoon, chief curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, gives some sense of his range, with sculptural studies, book illustrations, cartoons and erotica.

But, as at the Met, landscapes dominate, and they’re odd, disturbed, eschatological images of erupting volcanoes, rising seas and a bleak world viewed from the mouth of a cave. Price has often been celebrated by his fans as an upholder of the pleasure principle, that California specialty, in an era when art was idea-intensive and political. I wonder about that evaluation, though. His surfaces are as gorgeous as Pacific sunsets. But they cover some tough subterranean stuff.

The George Lindemann Journal

On View | Ron Arad’s Metallic Vision @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

“Pressed Flower Yellow,” a crushed Fiat 500, is part of “In Reverse,” an exhibition on the work of Ron Arad at the Design Museum Holon. Courtesy of Ron Arad Associates

The Israeli-British architect and designer Ron Arad has always been fascinated by metal. He made an international name for himself designing furniture like the sheet-steel Well Tempered Chair for Vitra, and he designed an entire building with a ribbonlike Cor-Ten steel exterior — the Design Museum Holon in Holon, Israel, which opened in 2010.

Mr. Arad is now returning to that museum as the subject of an exhibition, “In Reverse,” which opens on Wednesday and looks at metal in a startlingly different way.

While the exhibition includes examples of his designs from the 1980s to the present, Mr. Arad didn’t want it to be a conventional retrospective, so he added a new component: a project that explores how automobile bodies behave under compression. He installed six Fiat 500s (a car he has a particular fondness for) on the walls of one of the galleries; each is crushed into cartoonlike flatness. In the center of the room sits a wooden mold, on loan from the Fiat archive and museum, that was used to shape the 500’s metal panels, and “Roddy Giacosa,” a new sculpture made from hundreds of polished stainless steel rods in the shape of the 500’s body.

The show also includes Mr. Arad’s digital simulation of the crushing process, and a sculpture that is the result of applying a 3-D printing technique to one frame of the film.

The idea of crushed metal is personal for Mr. Arad: when he was a child, his family’s Fiat Topolino Giardinetta was mangled in an accident, and a crushed toy police car that he found in the street when he was 11 actually ended up in the exhibition. “Rather than manipulate materials to render them functional or render digital models towards a functional object,” he said, “here I ‘reverse’ perfectly functional objects and render them useless.”

“In Reverse” runs through Oct. 19 at the Design Museum Holon.

The George Lindemann Journal

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective-Major Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum opens

NEW YORK, NY.- For more than 50 years, Los Angeles artist Ken Price, who died on February 24, 2012 at the age of 77, made innovative works that helped redefine contemporary sculpture by advancing the medium of clay well beyond its traditionally assigned roles. Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art—a long overdue major exhibition showcasing the artist’s unique and groundbreaking approach to sculpture—is the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in New York. By assembling the full range of Price’s innovative work, with 62 sculptures dating from 1959 to 2012 along with 11 late works on paper, the exhibition aims to situate his art beyond the realm of craft and into the larger narrative of modern sculpture.

Born in Los Angeles, Ken Price received his BFA from the University of Southern California in 1956 and his MFA from the famed New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1959. In the late 1950s, at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (later renamed the Otis College of Art and Design), Price’s ceramics professor, Peter Voulkos, encouraged the artist to create work that transcended the traditional boundaries of the medium. Price soon found his calling and within a few years was showing his own abstract clay sculptures. The curved surfaces of Price’s brilliantly colored egg sculptures, such as L. Red from 1963, are disrupted by small portals that open to murky interiors or crevices with sexual and scatological associations. Among the early works in the exhibition is a group of highly colorful cups. According to Price, “The cup essentially presents a set of formal restrictions—sort of a preordained structure. . . . But it can be used as a vehicle for ideas.” He took this everyday object and embellished it with snails, or, in one instance, melded a cup onto the shell of a ceramic turtle (Blind Sea Turtle Cup, 1968). In the early 1970s, the artist moved from Los Angeles to Taos, New Mexico (where he re-settled in 2002 after a sojourn as a professor of ceramics at USC from 1991 to 2001). In Taos, the predominant Mexican folk aesthetic inspired the artist to embark on the series Happy’s Curios (1972-1977). Named for his wife, the works are wood cabinets filled with ceramics—his personal homage to the style of Mexican folk pottery.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Price also created a series of abstracted, geometric sculptures that are brilliantly glazed and painted. Their fabrication was remarkably labor intensive, involving multiple firings and layers of glazed color. The 1972 work Gaudi Cup has obvious affinities to architectural forms. Moving into the 1980s, works such as Big Load (1988) resemble strange unearthly boulders, or meteorites, with mysterious, glowing apertures that have been sliced into the form.

Beginning in the late 1990s and continuing until his death, Price began a series of haunting, subtly erotic sculptures with mottled surfaces that he created by apply roughly 70 layers of paint that were then painstakingly sanded to uncover each stratum through variations in the pressure of the sanding process. The result, as seen in works such as Hunchback of Venice (2000) and Balls Congo (2003), is a lyrical composition of colors held together in a layered arrangement that is unmistakably anthropomorphic. Price’s work grew in scale in later years and his glazes became even more elaborate, with complex layers of color that were scrupulously sanded to achieve a wonderfully iridescent, speckled effect of blues, purples, reds, and greens. Zizi (2011), though abstract, has an undulating, typically organic shape that suggests a primitive life form.

The installation of Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective was designed by Price’s close friend, the renowned architect Frank O. Gehry, who worked closely on the show with the artist. A number of the wood and glass vitrines that contain the sculptures were made by the artist, while the rest were inspired by his original designs.

The exhibition is organized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Senior Curator and Department Head of Modern Art, Stephanie Barron, and overseen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Marla Prather, the Museum’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

At the same time as the Met’s venue, The Drawing Center, New York, will present Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, a comprehensive survey of Price’s works on paper (June 19—August 18, 2013), organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, where it will travel September 27, 2013–January 19, 2014 and at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico, from February 22–May 4, 2014.

The George Lindemann Journal

"Hirst Counts the Dots, or at Least the Paintings" @nytimes

The George Lindemann Journal

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

Published: June 11, 2013

Damien Hirst’s spot paintings — some with dots about the size of pinholes, others 60 inches across — have long been celebrated, and disdained, for a certain anonymous, machinelike industrial uniformity.

But since his first spot paintings appeared, in the mid-1980s, something of a mystery has grown: just how many are there?

Mr. Hirst has said he painted the first few dozen. The others he left mainly to a coterie of assistants, who, it seemed, could make them ad infinitum.

For buyers, dealers and auction houses, the prospect of an unlimited supply was a complication. A flooded market might affect the paintings’ future value — not a small worry when they can cost as much as $3.4 million.

“Even art market professionals like myself don’t know the exact count,” said Koji Inoue, a Christie’s specialist who is in charge of its evening sales.

Now Mr. Hirst’s London company Science Ltd. will finally provide a definitive number.

This fall his publisher, Other Criteria, will release a book, a catalogue raisonné, that will show that there are exactly 1,365 spot paintings.

“All paintings are in the book,” Jude Tyrrell, an official at Science Ltd., said in an e-mail.

For Mr. Hirst, the inventory is but another example of how, as an artist and businessman, he has often sailed against the winds. At a time when experts increasingly fear putting out catalogs and authenticating art, lest they be sued by owners whose works don’t make the grade and are left out, Mr. Hirst, 48, is creating a book that could define what is — and what is not — an authentic Hirst spot painting.

The catalog, beyond providing scholarly luster, could well boost prices for the paintings, which in the past 18 months have sold for $53,000 to $1.7 million, by reassuring buyers who suspected there were many more in the series. In April The Art Newspaper reported that the catalog would include around 1,400 spot paintings. It could also dismay any forgers who think the spot works are particularly conducive to fakery. (In March a man was indicted in New York after being accused of trying to sell five fake Hirsts, including three fake spot limited-edition prints. He has pleaded not guilty.)

But a catalog could draw new attention to questions like whether those made by his assistants are of equal value. And while such a catalog is usually a sign that an artist or scholars are drawing a final line under a specific body of work, the spot paintings are still being made, said James Kelly, the director of Science Ltd. “Damien is working on some spot paintings with very small spots, including a painting with one million spots, which will take a number of years to complete,” he said in an e-mail.

Mr. Kelly added that Mr. Hirst would eventually follow this catalog with a complete catalogue raisonné for his entire body of work.  Mr. Hirst did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

For many experts, this catalog — along with a flurry of activity last year that included a commission for the London Olympics, a retrospective at Tate Modern in London and exhibitions of more than 300 spot paintings at 11 galleries in 8 cities — seems like an effort to turn around a career that rose to dizzying heights until 2008, when prices, and the artist’s reputation, took something of a plunge.

“He needs to regain the trust of the marketplace,” said Jeff B. Rabin, a co-founder of Artvest Partners, an art investment advisory firm. “It seems the catalog is one measure he could perhaps take to start to rectify some of the ill feeling out in the marketplace.”

Mr. Hirst has often been a polarizing figure in the art world. As part of a 1990s wave of young British artists, known as the Y.B.A.’s, he produced work — from a dead shark swimming in formaldehyde to a platinum human skull paved with 8,601 diamonds — that often provoked outrage as well as mystified shrugs.

Brought to prominence by the British advertising executive and art collector Charles Saatchi, with whom his relations, by many accounts, later grew strained, Mr. Hirst became as famous for his self-promoting style as for his work. He flouted art world custom in 2008 when he bypassed dealers and staged an auction of 223 pieces of his own work at Sotheby’s in London that September. The auction, which took place even as financial markets were crumbling, was wildly successful and helped make him one of the richest artists in the world, with a fortune said to be more than $300 million.

But Mr. Hirst, like many artists, has been hurt by the financial crisis and recession. Prices of his works at auction are down by about 60 percent since their extraordinary peak in 2007, according to Artnet, the art market information company. And the lingering effect of his blow-out 2008 auction, experts say, is that Mr. Hirst’s prices have been slower to bounce back than those of other artists.

The spot paintings — especially early ones — have tended to retain their value better than his other works, but for an artist whose ideas are often regarded as sly comments on the link between money and art, it may be disappointing that last year the value of all Hirsts sold at auction barely reached $26.5 million. In 2008 the figure was 10 times that amount, according to Artnet, showing perhaps that owners are reluctant to bring his work to market and take a loss.

As if to underline that all may not be well in his commercial relationships, he broke with the super-dealer Larry Gagosian in January.

Science Ltd. said the catalog had been scheduled for last year, with the global exhibition, but took longer than expected. Mr. Hirst’s company would not comment on whether it is concerned about possible objections from owners of works that might be omitted from the list, which is being put together in conjunction with the Gagosian galleries and White Cube, Mr. Hirst’s London gallery. As it stands, all collectors who own what they believe are Hirsts can submit them to be authenticated by the Hirst authentication committee.

“Science Ltd., Damien’s company, have a very comprehensive database of all his works, and if they were prior to our record keeping, we drew upon the extensive records for earlier spots, from White Cube gallery,” Ms. Tyrrell said. She said only 14 paintings would be included without images.

The practice of authenticating art has become fraught, encouraging continual second-guessing, though the risk for Mr. Hirst is greatly diminished by the fact that the book is being produced while he is alive, experts said. Greater trust is put on the artist’s own opinion about what is genuine.

An expert considering a spot painting’s authenticity will look at a number of things. Is it featured in an earlier, credible publication? Are there documents of provenance, like gallery labels? Does it bear a Hirst signature or stamp, or carry, as some works do, a unique identification number from Science Ltd.?

The very concept of inventorying the “genuine” spot paintings rings silly to some critics who have long complained about the mass-produced nature of Mr. Hirst’s work.

“No one was clear how many spot paintings there were — and Hirst himself didn’t know,” Julian Spalding, an author and a former director of museums in Britain and a outspoken critic of Mr. Hirst’s work, said in an e-mail. “But then why should he? They were made purely to an unbelievably simplistic and boring formula by his assistants.”

But Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s senior international contemporary-art specialist, who was the principal auctioneer for Mr. Hirst’s 2008 single-artist sale, said such critics are missing the point. The paintings, he said, are not about mass production, or volume, or about the kind of limits implied by giving them a fixed count.

“He has made no secret,” Mr. Barker said, “of the fact that the spot paintings were an infinite series.”

For many collectors too, the number is beside the point.

Andrew Cogan, chief executive of the Knoll furniture company, owns a thin, horizontal pastel-colored spot painting about six feet long he bought around 2000.

The painting, he said, is in his home in New York and reminds him of the dot candy on paper sheets he used to enjoy as a child.

“I don’t get tired of looking at it,” he said, adding, “I assumed there were literally thousands of them.”

Beyond the ‘Palace,’ an International Tour in One City @nytimes

Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Venice Biennale Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser’s “387 Houses of Peter Fritz,” right, part of the main show, “The Encyclopedic Palace.” By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 5, 2013

VENICE — Dark weather and high water were the backdrop to the start of the 55th Venice Biennale, an event that predictably combines enough cold cash and hot air to create a storm system of critical opinion. The main barometric indicator is always the big show that gives each Biennale its theme, and on this score, for the first time in years, there’s fairly smooth sailing.

The main show, “The Encyclopedic Palace” — organized by Massimiliano Gioni, 39, chief curator at the New Museum in Manhattan and this Biennale’s director — is a quiet success. Spread over two sites, in the park called the Giardini and the fortresslike Arsenale nearby, it’s immense, with more than 150 artists, but as tightly thought out as a small show — maybe too tightly to allow for wild-card surprises. Most shows on this scale are too messy; this one may be too neat. But it works.

Plus — a significant plus for anyone fed up to here with big-buck art — “Palace” doesn’t seem to have much interest in the mainstream market. It doesn’t say no to it, exactly. It just goes its own interesting way, not without problems.

And of course, the show is not the whole story. The Biennale is as much an archipelago of islands as Venice itself is.

Clustered around the main exhibition are dozens of national pavilions, each with an exhibition of its own, with more pavilions scattered around town in premises — churches and palazzi — more interesting than any on the Biennale grounds. Nearly 50 “collateral events,” semiofficially part of the Biennale, must be included in any comprehensive tour.

The total is overwhelming, but equipped with decent shoes and multiday vaporetto pass, I saw roughly 80 percent of this year’s sights on a trek that took me through most of city, always the Biennale’s real attraction.

Mr. Gioni titled his exhibition after a single piece of art, an 11-foot-high tower built by the self-taught artist Marino Auriti. Born in Italy in 1891, Auriti moved to the United States in the 1920s, settling in Kennett Square, Pa., where he ran an auto body shop while painting on the side.

After retiring in the 1950s, he began work on the tower, a stack of seven cylindrical layers surrounded by a colonnaded piazza, constructed of wood, glass and plastic (including hair combs). He conceived it as a model for a museum to be called the Encyclopedic Palace of the World, which would display the range of human achievement, “from the wheel to the satellite.”

He also made it a monument to ethical values, spelled out on the colonnade entablatures: “Live by your work,” “Make friends of your enemies,” “Watch that you don’t become greedy.” He wanted the museum to be erected on the Mall in Washington, took out a patent on it, even initiated a fund-raising campaign.

Mr. Gioni has placed Auriti’s dream tower up front in the Arsenale as a key to what follows: art that embodies utopian and dystopian visions; or attempts to encompass and categorize vast amounts of data; or is composed of many small and repeated parts.

Among works that qualify are paintings by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who claimed to receive her images from otherworldly beings. A video by the young French artist Camille Henrot jams the entire creation story into one short, percussively edited video. A set of 130 small clay sculptures made by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss cover a period of 30 years.

Although Mr. Gioni includes several young artists on the rise — Ed Atkins, Helen Marten, Paloma Polo, James Richards, Shinichi Sawada — he also chooses some offbeat figures, like the nature photographer Eliot Porter, and brings in spiritual utilitarian objects like Tantric paintings and Roman Catholic ex-votos that were not created to be art in the conventional sense.

In combining these things, Mr. Gioni refers to the model of the “wunderkammer,” or cabinet of curiosities, collections of uncategorizable, often exotic objects first assembled in Renaissance Europe. This concept is not original, and it gets tricky when, as here, some curiosities are works by “outsider artists,” which can simply mean self-taught, but often implies having some form of physical, social or psychiatric disability.

The outsider art concept is tired by now, even ethically suspect, the equivalent of “primitive art” from decades ago. Mr. Gioni finesses the problem without really addressing it by integrating outsider-ish-looking inside art (there’s more and more of this around) so the two designations get blurred.

However you label them, it’s great to see in one place outsider pieces like the embroidery-encrusted vestments of the Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosario and the paper and twine sculptures of the American James Castle together with out-of-the-mainstream art like the copper-wire paintings by Prabhavathi Meppayil from Bangalore, and the thickly collaged notebooks of the Japanese noise-rock musician Shinro Ohtake. That they’re elbow to elbow with Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel and Jack Whitten is nice too.

Ms. Sherman is here as guest curator of a minishow embedded within Mr. Gioni’s larger one, but so much in its spirit as to be indistinguishable as a separate entity. Ms. Trockel is represented by components from the exhibition “A Cosmos,” from the New Museum.

She’s an artist I admire, but I found that show surprisingly unsurprising.

With a blend of insider-outsider and art-nonart components, it could have been stimulating. But the objects had little to say to one another. I feel a lack of surprise in Mr. Gioni’s show for the opposite reason: Its pairings — spiritualists paintings by af Klint and Emma Kunz, digital-printer abstractions by Alice Channer and Wade Guyton — are too neat and museumy.

Yet at the same time, the show’s curatorial line is so firm, its choice of artists so strong and its pacing so expert that you are carried along, and ultimately rewarded. This is particularly true toward the conclusion of the Arsenale, with its purgatory of sculptures by Pawel Althamer, followed by Ryan Trecartin’s video hell, followed by Walter De Maria’s Minimalist heaven. It’s a great end to a serious, standard-setting endeavor.

Once outside, you’re in a world of hit and miss among the national pavilions, which tend to be high in polish, low in impact. Some
of the best extend the accumulative density of Mr. Gioni’s show. This is true of Sarah Sze’s assemblages of countless tiny found things in the United States pavilion, and of archival photographic installations by Petra Feriancova at the pavilion of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

There are persuasive alternatives to material density. In the otherwise empty Romania pavilion, Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus have directed performers in stylized enactments of art from Biennales past. The work owes much to the example of Tino Sehgal, but it has its own charms. (Mr. Sehgal, who is in Mr. Gioni’s show, received the Gold Lion award for best artist this year.)  

Three young artists, Ei Arakawa, Gela Patashuri and Sergei Tcherepnin, make similarly interactive use the Georgia pavilion, a temporary, raised, loftlike enclosure at the edge the Arsenale for more sporadic performances. And Alfredo Jaar’s show at the Chile pavilion is centered around a sculpture that moves, an exact model of the Giardini campus that emerges from and sinks back into a vat of fetid-looking water.

Mr. Jaar is telling a story about the alignment of art and power: Many of the older, pre-World War II pavilions are relics of a murderous nationalism were built as cultural trophies by economically competitive nations that created colonial empires and eventually led Europe into war.

This show is filled with narratives. Everything seems to have a back story, many of them politically inflected. Tavares Strachan’s entrancing installation at the Bahamas pavilion tells of exploration and who really got where first.

At the Lebanon pavilion, a film by Akram Zaatari fleshes out a real-life account of an Israeli Air Force fighter who, in 1982, was sent to destroy a building in a Lebanese town, recognized the place as a school and dropped his bombs into the sea. And in a church converted into an exhibition space, a group of dioramas installed in a church dramatize, in exacting detail, the ordeal that artist Ai Weiwei underwent in police custody in China.

This notable display, technically a collateral event, is not far from the Arsenale but hard to find. Others are long walks or boat rides away, but worth tracking down. An Iraq pavilion is an informal affair up the Grand Canal. You’re invited to relax, read up on Iraq, have tea. And the artists, based in Babylon, Basra and Baghdad, are terrific, from Abdul Raheem Yassir, who has been producing mordant political cartoons since 1970, to the two-man collective called WAMI (Hashin Taeeh and Yaseen Wami), which produces ingenious furniture from cardboard boxes.

Without biennales we would probably never see shows of such art, made under truly challenging conditions. And without such shows, we would never see so many of Venice’s varied interiors, from sports arenas (the Cyprus and Lithuania pavilions), to commercial galleries (the Kosovo pavilion), to the National Archaeological Museum, where work by the Cuban-American artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons sits amid Roman sculptures.

Every now and then, a visit gives a shock.

When I climbed the stairs of an old building to the Angola pavilion, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Gorgeous photographs by Edson Chagas, from the city of Luanda, were there, in neat stacks of giveaway prints. And the walls around them were lined with Renaissance paintings: Sassetta, Bernardo Daddi, Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo. I and Angola were in the Palazzo Cini, a private museum that, except during the Biennale, keeps eccentric hours.

Mr. Chagas worked perfectly into the setting. (The pavilion, with his installation, was later awarded best of show.)

He and the young curators, Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera, had keyed colors in the photographs to the paintings: a stack of prints of a blue-painted Luanda door stood in front of a blue-robed Botticelli Virgin. Neither blue was more beautiful than the other, but the African blue was soaked in sunlight. And I could take it away. It made my Venice stay.

The George Lindemann Journal