Andy Warhol's "Empire"

The Art Institute of Chicago is hosting a very special viewing of Andy Warhol's 'Empire'. The groundbreaking conceptual film is set to be projected onto the Aon Center.

Viewing: Dec 9th, 8pm
Tickets will set you back $60...ouch!
More Info: HERE

Andy Warhol Screen Printing

SOFIA COPPOLA by PAUL JASMIN 1993 for INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

Easily one of my fave pictures of all time. Paul Jasmin shot this image of Sofia Coppola for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine some 17 years ago. The image was recently re-published in Interview's 40th Anniversary Issue.

IN

THE GREAT DAIN: ABOUT AS OLD SCHOOL GRAFFITI AS YOU CAN GET

Dain, mad props to the OG Brooklyn Graffiti artist.

JONATHAN MONK vs JEFF KOONS: INFLATED DEFLATED

If imitation is flattery, what is it called when Jonathan Monk flattens Jeff Koons' "Rabbit"? Jonathan's wit steps outside the box and does what many of us out there wish we could do, he lets the air out of an iconic piece of pop-art by the master himself, Jeff Koons.
I love both pieces, the before and the after. Many a snob has ragged on about the work that Koons puts out. Most say it's not art, but what the hell is art anyways? Art is 100% subjective. It as as the cliches reads "...in the eye of the beholder". Heck, if we're still talking about Koons' "rabbit" some 20 years later, then I'm sure that suggests that it is probably art.
Hey, I'm not a fan of watercolor flowers or an oil rendition of society's high and mighty picnicking in the countryside painted by many a supposed master 150 years ago, but I'd never in a million years say that it isn't art...it's just not my kind of art. Art is, and that's all. It just is. Like it or leave it.

CASEY KAPLAN GALLERY
525 WEST 21st STREET
NEW YORK, NY 1011
212.645.7335

Lifted from a Press release by Casey Kaplan Gallery*

“Appropriation is something I have used or worked with in my art since starting art school in 1987. At this time (and still now)
I realised that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own
work. By doing this I think I also created something original and certainly something very different to what I was re-
presenting. I always think that art is about ideas, and surely the idea of an original and a copy of an original are two very
different things.” – Jonathan Monk, 2009

Casey Kaplan is pleased to present new work by artist, Jonathan Monk (b. 1969 in Leicester, England, lives and
works in Berlin, Germany), in his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, The Inflated Deflated. Previously, Monk has taken
on artists such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, and Lawrence Weiner, as source material
for his own artwork. For this exhibition, Monk turns his attention to the artist, Jeff Koons. By employing his own
intrinsic artistic strategies, appropriation and recontextualization, Monk presents an exhibition that appends art history
with a narrative of his own interplay between the objects and ideas of the past and his newly conceived reincarnations.
In the late 1980’s, while Jonathan Monk began art school in Glasgow, Scotland, Jeff Koons created a highly polished
stainless steel cast of an inflated, plastic bunny shaped balloon, entitled “Rabbit”, 1986. The sculpture debuted that
same year in the seminal Group Show at the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in New York. “Rabbit” has become an icon of
its era. Utilizing a similar inflatable, carrot carrying, plastic toy bunny as a starting point, Monk presents his own version
of Koons’ infamous work in five different poses. Monk’s stainless steel bunnies capture five frozen moments of silent,
animated, slow deflation. With each dissipation of air, the mirrored bunny droops, folds, and gently falls from a
standing position to a reclined figure. If seen as a sequence, the sculpture ultimately comes to rest in a low, undulating
heap of metal, recalling one of Henry Moore’s classic bronze reclining nudes.
Surrounding the five sculptures are five photorealist style paintings that depict various stages of the fabrication
process of Monk’s bunny sculptures from the clay moulds to welding of steel. Through the paintings, Monk
demystifies the process of the creation of his own artworks as a conceptual component to the exhibition.
In Gallery III, the exhibition transitions from balloons losing their air to light bulbs that gradually burn out and go dark.
Monk additionally presents four wall-based, light bulb artworks entitled, “The Death of Geometric figures” (circle,
square, rectangle, and triangle). Each of the geometric signs is a mirror surrounded by ceramic white light bulbs that
recall Hollywood-style vanity mirrors, and also artworks from the 1960’s and 70’s by various Conceptual artists. As the
bulbs burn and fade to black, Monk’s signs become realized.

SWOON, THE POLAROID KIDD & CHRIS STAIN

An exhibition at galerie lj beaubourg, Paris 2007.
Soundtrack provided by Fedayi Pacha.



Click Here to see The Polaroid Kidd at the Needles and Pens Gallery in 2007, San Francisco. http://www.needles-pens.com/polaroidkidd.html

Click Here for additional work by Swoon as featured in the NY Times.

If you're down with seeing more of Chris Stain's stencil graffiti, then Click Here.

AIKO: JAPANESE BORN-BROOKLYN GRAFFITI ARTIST

As a founding member of the artist collective FAILE, formed in 1999, AIKO helped fuel the current wave of global contemporary street art with spontaneous wheatpastings and stenciling in numerous world capitals. The artist launched a solo career in 2006 with works on canvas that incorporate collage, stenciling, brushwork, spray paint, and serigraphy. This bricolage technique perfectly suits AIKO’s eclectic practice—a voracious mash-up of Japanese and American pop culture, including comics, children’s book illustrations, advertising, classic movie posters, and soft-core pornography.

AIKO draws inspiration from the urban street, Kawaii culture (“cute” in Japanese), and globalized depictions of female sexuality. While a Media Studies student at New School University in New York, she hid her art in plain sight by wheatpasting images throughout the city. It was then that she developed a signature synthesis of commercial graphics, sexual imagery, and the vocabularies of seduction and fantasy found in print, film, and electronic media. The implied decay of the graffiti-style works reads not only as autobiography but also as a subtle breakdown of surrounding structures. 'Welcome to the Planet of Lady A', for example, features a provocative soft-porn image silkscreened onto a window, all elements reclaimed from cultural and literal junk heaps.

Like Warhol in the ’70s, AIKO embraces silkscreen techniques as the ultimate (and seemingly timeless) signifier of the contemporary. 'Madam Butterfly' elegantly combines a reproduced newspaper image with collaged decorative motifs, masking and transforming the identity of the painting’s female subject. In the show’s title work, 'Love Monster', the artist layers nude nymphets holding spray paint with the recurring tags “King” and “Knights” to capture not only the relational aesthetics of the day but also contemporary culture’s relative ethics. Here and elsewhere, her visual language borrows from fairytales and pulp fiction—virgins and vixens—exploring themes of romance, morality, and religion. Yet AIKO’s energetic works eschew judgment in favor of something more generative, a pop-culture phoenix rising from the real and virtual ashes of the urban street.

AIKO (Nakagawa)’s debut solo exhibition, 'Shut Up & Look', took place at Brooklynite Gallery in 2008. Selected group exhibitions include: in 2008, 'Heart & Soul', Alphabeta, Queens, NY; 'Time Changes', Calm & Punk Gallery, Tokyo; 'PINK AIKO: Brick Ladies of NYC', Ad Hoc Art, Brooklyn; and in 2007, 'Heart Throb', Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles; 'Bestial', Iguapop Gallery, Barcelona, and 'Eleven', Leonard Street Gallery, London.

She's showing from April 18-May 16.

Joshua Liner Gallery
548 West 28th Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
212.244.7415

http://joshualinergallery.com

RECOMMENDED WEBSITE: LOST AT E MINOR

http://www.lostateminor.com
Lost at E Minor: photography, art, fashion, design and fuck-ups. Tons of amazing images.

ARTIST: LAWRENCE WEINER

Born in the Bronx, NY in 1942, Lawrence Weiner is a central figure of conceptual art, whose work often takes the form of typographic texts. He lives and works in New York and Amsterdam.

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