Armory Show Report: Day 1

NEW YORK—SALES IN THE CITY: HOT DEALS FROM THE FAIR

Body Snatchers
Javier Peres of Peres Projects, with galleries in Los Angeles and Berlin, reports a painting by Matt Greene entitled Corporeal sold for $37,500 to an unnamed institution. Several collectors inquired about the painting but were told the work had already sold. In addition, a diptych on paper and two drawings by Greene went to a museum and two private collectors.

The Lurie Lift
Even the most devoted art lover can get cranky after hours of walking from booth to booth, so it was a hugely uplifting surprise, toward the end of the first day, to come across work by John Lurie at the Robert Miller Gallery (which is planning to coordinate on some upcoming projects with Lurie’s usual gallery, Roebling Hall). Lurie’s laugh-out-loud titles (Rimbaud as Incan God in Yellow Sweater, The Accountant Has Stolen My Face) were par for his course. More unusual, were some works on canvas, instead of his usual paper. A large, quite beautiful landscape on canvas (Fuck, It Is Pretty) is available for $17,000. Many of the works on paper, selling for $3,500 to $5,000, are still available, but The Ghost in My Bathroom Thinks It’s a Chandelier is sold. On reserve at the same gallery is a $725,000 Tom Wesselman work, Times Square Nude, on painted vinyl.

Honey of a Deal
Anton Kern Gallery sold a sculpture by Matthew Monahan for $15,000 to an L.A. collector about three hours into the fair. It’s a beeswax figure covered with an old drawing that is folded and attached to the sculpture.

Win One for the Schipper
One of the works drawing the most attention at the fair was a giant, round steel ball composed of hundreds of video monitors and titled 215 Points of View by the artist Jonathan Schipper (whether an intentional homage or not, the piece brought to mind the efforts of the recently departed Nam June Paik). The work, on display at Brooklyn’s Pierogi Gallery, was still for sale as of Thursday afternoon for $60,000. We liked even more at the same gallery a self-portrait by Jim Torok. While the price is a relatively modest $10,000, the price per square millimeter is high, as the tiny work measures only 3.75" x 3".

Sex (and Violence) Sells
Looking for some sex and violence at this year’s Armory fair? Well, you weren’t the only one. The suggestively titled wood and plastic sculpture, Sex and Violence, by L.A.-based artist Patrick Hill was quickly snapped up by a foreign collector at the booth of L.A. dealer David Kordansky (who was also seen chatting intensely and at length with some of Miami’s biggest collectors). The gallery also sold a 2005 painting by 34-year-old Aaron Curry, who is in the fair for the first time. The painting, entitled Sea Hag—Picabia’s Shack (Reprised in Blue and Purple) #2, sold to a “very important collector” for $3,800. The piece is an abstract composition based on Basel Wolverton’s cartoons and primitivist masks.

Wiley’s Worth
Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery is featuring a giant Kehinde Wiley painting, a full-length portrait of two young men in hip-hop gear; Wiley was one of the artists whose work was quickly scooped up at Art Basel Miami Beach. At first, we were afraid the cost would not be disclosed: When we picked up the gallery’s price list, it was torn out of our hands by an assistant and clutched protectively to her chest. When we politely inquired, however, the assistant told us the Wiley work could be had for $45,000, plus $2,000 for the ornate frame.

Tokyo Transfer
We were admiring three small paintings by Izumi Kato at Tokyo’s SCAI gallery, when our attention was diverted for a few minutes by a friend. When we returned, the paintings had already sold and had been replaced by two slightly larger, similarly themed works of creepy/cute dolls against luridly colorful backgrounds. These were priced at $2,800 and $2,500, respectively. The gallery also has two Julian Opie paintings on sale for $25,000 and an Opie video, in an edition of four, for $46,000.

The Deal from Delhi
New Delhi’s Nature Morte, whose director, Peter Nagy, is originally from New York, is dedicating its booth to recent work by Atul Dodiya: His Devoured Darkness series are large-scale watercolors, covered with phrases (translated into English) from ancient, South Indian devotional poetry. The works are priced at $110,000 each. Nagy tells us that he doesn’t expect to sell any of the works here in New York, but he’s eager to expose the artist—whose work easily attains those six-figure prices in his native country—to a broader audience.

Biennial Sales Boost
Rivington Arms is already pre-selling prints from the upcoming April solo show of Hanna Liden, whose work is in the current Whitney Biennial. The prints, which come in an edition of 5, start at $3,200.

Zwirner, Dzama and Ofili
Two out of three unusual Marcel Dzama paintings at David Zwirner were still available starting at $12,000, as were two Chris Ofili drawings for $42,000 a piece. The gallery also has several smaller Ofili works in the backroom.

Five-Figure Mangolds
Chicago-dealer Donald Young is offering some recent pastel and pencil on paper drawings by Robert Mangold, including a few works from his recent show at the gallery. The works, which Mangold has been making since 2000, start at $12,000 for the smaller drawings.

From Madrid: Polke, Not Flamenco
Madrid’s Galeria Pepe Cobo has a Sigmar Polke from 2002, a black, honeycombed abstraction against blue strokes (acrylic on paper) for $45,600.

Lots of Lira
Blue-chip Milan gallery Monica De Cardenas is selling a stellar, wall-size, pink Alex Katz painting from 1992 for $600,000. The same gallery also has for sale one of our favorite works from the fair: Flavio Benetti’s Il Mare. It’s a large-scale C-print, with toy figures densely packed on the lower half of a wooden board (the beach), with the empty upper-half of the board (the sea) receding endlessly. It’s an edition of five and for sale for about $5,000.

Soft Core’s Cost
Tokyo’s Taka Ishii Gallery has for $60,000 a large, one-of-a-kind work comprised of hundreds of small, color photos by the notorious full-frontal fan, Nobuyuki Araki.

Strange Customs
Stephanie Dieckvoss of London’s Frith Street Gallery was particularly pleased to have already sold a couple of works this afternoon, including a Cornelia Parker Pornographic Drawing (2005). These Rorschach-like images are produced by Parker using a sort of ink that she makes from crushed pornographic videotapes that have been seized by Her Majesty's Customs and Excise.

Guessing Game
Rothschild Foundation honcho Harvey Shipley Miller, sans bowtie and his curator Andre Schlechtriem, who has now opened his own gallery, was seen spending quality time with some Christine Hill drawings at Galerie Eigen + Art. The work was reportedly sold—so should we put two and two together as to who was the buyer?

WEST SIDE STORY: ARMORY NEWS

Keeping Pace with the Big Guys
While the Armory Show is best known as the place to see the latest and most cutting-edge of contemporary art, one major dealer has opted to show choice works from some of the biggest names of the last half of the last century. PaceWildenstein’s booth, in prime real estate near the entrance of Pier 92, is showing works by Alex Katz, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Other heavy hitters on display include Keith Tyson, Tim Hawkinson and John Chamberlain.

30-Year Art
Phillips de Pury head Simone de Pury was seen chatting up gallery owner Yvon Lambert in front of a Pedro Reyes sculpture in Lambert's booth, where a brilliant new piece by new-media artist Charles Sandison was being offered at $25,000. The remarkably hypnotic piece digitizes and scrambles 44 million words from an encyclopedia—which it will take 30 years to cycle through.

Ryman, Ryman, Ryman
At least three galleries (showing in Pier 92 alone) have Robert Ryman works for sale: PaceWildenstein, Peter Blum and Rhona Hoffman. Peter Blum also features works by Yayoi Kusama, Yves Klein and Louise Bourgeois.

Castelli’s Tough Love
L.A. dealer Patrick Painter enthralled a group of rather hoary-haired collectors with some priceless anecdotes about working for the godfather-of-all art dealers, Leo Castelli. Reminiscing on how he used to work for Castelli for free—“I just sat there,” quipped Painter—he then revealed he “would get slapped on the head all the time by Leo.”

Miami Migration
While it’s still cold enough for those of us in the Northeast to dream of flying south, some of Miami’s most prominent collectors have decided to brave the cold (although the weekend weather in NYC is forecasted to be fine) and come north for the show. Among those spotted at the fair: Jason and Michelle Rubell, Rosa de la Cruz, Ella Cisneros and Craig Robins.

Stockholm Syndrome
We confess that, before today, the Swedish capital has never been on our short-list of must-see cities for contemporary art. It is now. The three Swedish galleries we visited were some of our favorites at the fair. Galleri Magnus Karlsson, in fact, batted a clean 1.000: We wanted everything they had on display. And some collectors did, too. An hour into the preview, one of the gallery's paintings by Carl Hammoud, whose subjects vary between cityscapes and interiors, sold in the $5,000 range, as did one of his drawings for $2,500. Other new artists who caught our eye: Jens Fange’s oil on linens and Lars Arnhenius’ animation video. We also recommend Johann Nobell’s paintings on view at Andrehn Schiptjenko. At Galleri Charlotte Lund, the faux-naif paintings of formally dressed little girls by Ulrika Minami Warmling seemed like deals for their $12-15,000 price tags. And a group of construction workers, who were still busy setting up certain booths, stopped to admire 48 bathroom scales, in orange, blue and white, arranged in a grid on the gallery’s floor.

Olympic Letdown
Turin’s Galleria Maze tells us that having the Olympics in one’s backyard does nothing for sales of contemporary art. But the gallery is confident that the works it has brought to NYC will fare better, including Katrin Sigurdardottir’s Haul—a section of her native Reykjavik, rendered in Styrofoam, which collapses into its own carrying case: neat, and just $9,000.

Aussie First Timer
The Darren Knight Gallery, of Sydney, Australia, is exhibiting at the Armory for the first time. Mr. Knight tells us that although contemporary works by Australian artists are popular with their countrymen, the international market has been slow to appreciate the efforts from Down Under—but he fully expects this will change as his gallery and others begin to be accepted on the global circuit. The most striking work at his gallery is a room-wrapping work by James Morrison, The First Man and the Last Man, Arnhem Land, which stretches an impressive five meters and is selling for $33,000.



Knock on Wood
ArtInfo spoke to Mary Sabbatino, vice president of Galerie Lelong.
“What are you hoping for this Armory Show?” we asked her. “We're looking forward to showcasing some new works by artists of the gallery—like new sculpture by Petah Coyne—and introducing the public to some new artists who've recently joined the gallery, like Catherine Yass.” “And hoping to make some sales?” we prompted. “You have to make sales. It's an art fair. But even if it's really awful and you don't make sales, if you have important work by the artists you work with, it represents them, it's wonderful publicity.” Then, after a pause, she continued, “But you know, we've never had an art fair where ... Oh, but I shouldn't say that ...” she stopped herself, not wanting to tempt fate by completing the sentence, but she did, “where we didn't sell something.” We are happy to report therefore that Lelong indeed did start selling later in the afternoon.

Seen in Seoul
The art market in Seoul, Korea is said to be sizzling, so we eagerly entered the city’s Kukje Gallery, founded way back in 1982, which is doing well enough to have taken an oversized booth at the Armory. We liked quite a lot of the work on view, especially the $45,000 A Memory of the 20th Century, a work by Duck-Hyun Cho in charcoal and graphite depicting a traditionally dressed Korean couple. You know this work is meant for contemporary viewers, however, by the colored dots interspersed across its upper half. A diptych self-portrait by Kwang Ho Lee also caught our eye, with one half of the work a DVD showing the artist answering questions while slumped in a chair; the other half shows the artist in the same chair, although this time his image is rendered in oil paint.

Name Dropping
Dealer Javier Peres was overhead telling journalist Marc Speigler and Frieze’s Amanda Sharp about some secretive, hot party later that night on Ludlow St. on the Lower East Side, adding, “Just say my name at the door.”

Looking Good
At Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn’s stand, gallery assistants are wearing skirts from the New Museum/Bergdorf Goodman venture that launched this week. Their design was a collaboration by designer Tory Birch and artist Cameron Martin. Perfect for the booth as they matched the Martin work hanging nearby.

Error or Art?
The Armory was still ironing some wrinkles this morning. A leak in the roof near Art:Concept of Paris left passersby wondering, is that art?

En Español
Anyone finding the Armory atmosphere a little intense might care to wander across town to the Cervantes Institute on East 49th Street, where a polite little festival “En Español” is taking place March 8–10. Our Spanish friends offer a program of film, video and poetry in their recently refurbished center. ArtInfo sampled the modest video program on the opening afternoon in the Institute’s comfortable little cinema. Fourteen works were shown, which meant that as things got underway artists actually outnumbered audience. To be frank, Berta Sichel’s selections in a program entitled “Continuous Cities” varied alarmingly in quality, and only some of the work seemed to have anything to do with the festival’s overall theme of Spanish as a “living language.” (Could anyone in New York City have imagined that it isn’t?) Highlights included the technically impressive Ciudad Moderna (2004) by Terence Gower, and Aarón Fernández’ entertaining Corrido Callejero (2005), in which Don Quixote was rewritten on Mexican Street signs.