Hasta La Ideas

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(Photos: Wright)

As far as were concerned, Wright can do no wrong. Bolstering our position is the design-focused auction house’s current exhibition of new work by designer Ron Gilad. On view through Saturday at Wright’s Chicago gallery, “Spaces Etc. / An Exercise in Utility” is Gilad’s first solo show in the United States, and the artist-designed installation ranges from pops of superealism (the “Butler No. 1” table, perched atop a pair of trouser-clad human legs) to the edges of abstraction (three-dimensional line drawings made into forms that wink at the work of Sol Lewitt). In Gilad’s fasctinating “Spaces” works, fragments of architectural space become functional objects, including playful coffee tables (one with a slabby monumentality reminiscent of the work of Rachel Whiteread), a trompe l’oeil skylight, and a glass stool within a stool (“Void Stool,” pictured at right). “The process of translating ideas into three dimensional functional objects is something that has always intrigued me,” explains Gilad in the catalog essay by Zoe Ryan, curator of design at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I am not inventing anything new. I’m basing my thinking, research, and creative process on what I see, know, and what already exists. Almost naively I ask the question, why is it like this?”

We would also be sad right now that we’re not soaking in all the design-y stuffs at Milan Design Week (or the Salone del Mobile, if you like saying that title as much as we do), except that it’s sunny and eighty degrees here in Chicago right now and it’s pretty tough to top that. But we’re not alone, not being there, as Dezeen reports this fun piece about artist/designer Karen Ryan, who couldn’t afford to make the trip to Milan, so instead she decided to host her own booth in her home in the UK, complete with its own advertisement reading (in rapidly shrinking font size) “Milan exhibition…in a room in…Portsmouth…England.” No matter what you think of Ryan’s work, you have to appreciate her moxy. For elsewhere on the web, if you’re interested in seeing what’s going on at the real Milan, we highly recommend checking out Core77‘s always terrific coverage. Our pals over at Wallpaper also have some boots on the ground and have put together this cool interactive map, updating it with photos and notes of what they’ve seen and where. Both should function as great resources to check out the new, the fun, and the weird, all of which are par for the course there every year. And hey, if you are in Milan right now and see something extra special, drop us a line and let us know. We’d love to hear about it.

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How do you get an art shark to the Ukraine? Give him a retrospective. Next Saturday, Kiev’s PinchukArtCentre (funded by billionaire oligarch Victor Pinchuk) will welcome visitors to an exhibition of approximately 100 works created by Damien Hirst between 1990 and 2008. The show is called “Requiem,” which could be interpreted as a somber nod to Contemporary Art as We Knew It but is more likely a reference to the common name for Carcharhinidae, the family of sharks that Hirst prefers for pickling.

The requiem sharks will be represented in Kiev by “Death Explained” (2008) and “Death Denied” (2007), the latter a bisected and dissected tiger shark split between two vitrines. Other Hirstian hits on view through September 20 (all loans from private collections) include early sculptural works such as the maggot-filled “A Thousand Years” (1990) and “Away from the Flock” (1994), the embalmed sheep snapped up by Charles Saatchi; a flurry of butterfly pieces; and a series of skull paintings created between 2006 and 2008 and shown here for the first time. With titles such as “The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth” and “Men Shall Know Nothing,” the new skull works aren’t of the hypercolored, spin art-flavored variety you might be thinking of: the PinchukArtCentre describes them as a “return to the solitary practice of painting [in which Hirst] confronts, in very personal terms, the darkness that lies at the heart of human nature and experience.”

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If you live in Chicago right now, there are three things you’re looking forward to: 1) the end of winter some time in mid-June, 2) the final outcome of the 2016 Olympic bid some time in 2017, and 3) Zaha Hadid and Ben Van Berkel‘s pavilions right in the heart of the city to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Daniel Burnham‘s “Plan of Chicago.” Fortunately, according to Blair Kamin, we shouldn’t have to wait much longer for the latter, as it looks like April 7th, next week, will be the day the initial plans are released for Hadid’s and Van Berkel’s work. Here’s a bit of what to expect from Kamin:

My sources tell me that the project has confronted the architects with a major challenge — essentially, given the pavilions’ shoestring budget, how to do more with less. It will also be interesting to see how (if at all) Hadid and Van Berkel, two avant-garde modernists, try to relate to the classical city planning legacy of Daniel Burnham. I expect they’ll speak to Burnham’s boldness, not his Beaux-Arts vocabulary. Zaha and Corinthian columns go together like Chicago and clean politics.

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