Hasta La Ideas

LA-based artist Eric Yahnker (one of CH’s favorites) takes his sharp and satirical view of American culture and politics across the pond for his first solo show in the UK…

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Move over, Willy Wonka. New York will soon be treated to creative confections from West Chelsea to the Brooklyn waterfront. The sweetness starts Thursday as Columbian-born, London-based Oscar Murillo transforms David Zwirner gallery into a candy factory churning out Chocmelos: chocolate-covered marshmallows sheathed in silvery smiley faced wrappers. The solo exhibition, entitled “A Mercantile Novel,” is a collaboration with the confectionery wizards at Colombina, where Murillo’s mother once worked.

Over in Brooklyn, the industrial relic of the Domino Sugar Factory will be the backdrop for Kara Walker’s first large-scale public project: “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” The physically and conceptually expansive work “will respond to both the building and its history, exploring a radical range of subject matter and marking a major departure from her practice to date,” according to Creative Time, which is presenting the exhibition beginning May 10.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On a rainy day in New York, we visited iconic artist Ultra Violet (aka Isabelle Collin Dufresne) in her studio. Quickly integrated into pop and surrealist artists’ social scene upon her immigration into the US…

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Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, currently home to exhibitions of the work of Marcel Wanders and Jeff Wall (and book your flights now for September when the Marlene Dumas retrospective will occupy a circuit of 15 rooms), has found a new director in Beatrix Ruf (pictured), the current director of the Kunsthalle Zürich. She succeeds Ann Goldstein, who was artistic director at the Stedelijk for the past four years, and will jointly lead the museum with managing director Karin van Gilst. Ruf will start her involvement with the museum immediately and take up her new role on a full-time basis in November.

As director of the Kunsthalle Zürich since 2001, Ruf initiated and oversaw the completion of an extensive reconstruction and expansion, commissioned numerous installations, and initiated projects such as the survey exhibitions of Yang Fudong and Ian Wallace, among others. In 2006, she was the curator of the successful third edition of the Tate Triennial in London. “I feel very honored, and am very moved, to be entrusted with the opportunity to be director of the Stedelijk Museum and to lead its extraordinary exhibition history and its collection into the future, together with the entire Stedelijk team,” said Ruff in a statement announcing her appointment. “Its courageous and outstanding contemporary—as well as art historical—exhibitions and world-class collection of modern and contemporary art and design were always a beacon and example in my own professional thinking and in numerous discussions with artists and colleagues. The Stedelijk Museum is a museum that shows us how to live in the present and how the future can be built on tradition.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The minimalist cover of Yale University Press’ new catalogue for artist Carl Andre uses a version of one of his text-based artworks from the 1960s to introduce the larger body of work inside…

Designed by Purtill Family Business, Sculpture as Place – 1958-2010, accompanies the first retrospective Andre has had since 1970 which opens at the Dia Art Foundation in May.

On the cover, the words that appear in the five line Preface to My Work Itself (1963) are simply arranged by length – from “in” to “interchangable” – and offer a playful way into Andre’s work.

The piece itself treats the words as objects of different sizes and – as a cover device – lets the reader arrange them into statements which may, or may not, be relevant to his wider body of work in abstract sculpture.

So “my art is made of the same stacked broken pieces; the work piled, interchangable” could be one way of ordering half of the words, for example.

It’s an interesting way of getting the reader to categorise Andre’s work – much of it having garnered its fair share of both positive and negative reaction over the fifty years he has been working (the controversy generated by The Sunday Times over the Tate’s acquisition of Andre’s firebrick piece, Equivalent VIII, in the 1970s being an infamous case in point).

In addition to ten essays, the book includes images of many of Andre’s sculptural pieces made from materials such as timber planks, concrete blocks and plates of metal, alongside concrete poetry, postcards, letters and documents relating to the installation of many of the artworks.

Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010 by Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond is published by Yale University Press; £45. See yalebooks.co.uk. Details on the Dia Art Foundation exhibition in New York are here.