Adrián Villar Rojas’s new installation at the National Observatory of Athens prompts thoughts about how far we should dive into the depths of our own past.
Adrián Villar Rojas
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Inside LA’s Newest Art Museum, the Private Foundation of Fashion Moguls
A new private museum has taken over a former Masonic lodge in LA and transformed it into a 55,000-square-foot contemporary art venue.
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Treasures from the Met Ascend to Its Roof in a Scramble of Art History
Adrián Villar Rojas has transformed the open-air space into a dystopian banquet hall where culture is the main meal, long-ago consumed.
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Spilled Bananas, Split Blades, and Books with Bullets: Eclectic Offerings at Mana Miami
MIAMI — The Miami neighborhood of Wynwood smells like stale weed, paint fumes, and gentrification.
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Witnessing the Passage of Time with Detritus and a Crumbling “David”
The elevator opens onto a dark, shrouded foyer. A few steps in and one encounters quite unexpectedly the large, gloomy front room of Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas’s first solo exhibition, Two Suns, at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
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Major New Multifaceted Exhibition Focuses on Ecology and Environmental Issues
The word “expo” conjures big visions: grand pavilions, ferris wheels, exotic exhibitions, a world’s fair. But last Sunday, a different kind of expo opened at MoMA PS1, in Long Island City, Queens — Expo 1: New York, the latest curatorial effort of the institution’s director, Klaus Biesenbach. It’s not quite a world’s fair, but Expo 1, which is the result of a ongoing partnership between MoMA and Volkswagen, riffs on the idea by comprising many pieces that fit loosely together as a whole. It might best be described as an exhibition of exhibitions, or an extremely multifaceted exhibition, or an exhibition that’s “not only an exhibition,” as Biesenbach said at a press preview last week. He also talked about it in terms of wrapping “an envelope around the building [MoMA PS1],” while curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a co-organizer of the show, called it “almost like a Russian babushka.” This was shortly after Obrist posed the essential question from which Expo 1 sprang: “What is a large-scale exhibition for the 21st century?”
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The Pursuit of Art, 2012
Tomorrow, Patti Smith will turn 66. The day before yesterday, on the 27th, her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye reached the same age. “We’re three days apart,” Smith announced last week in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art at her “walk-in” concert celebrating the birthday of the French writer Jean Genet.
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Stealing the Triennial and Other Neat Tricks
As good as the last Triennial was — and, all qualms, quibbles and philosophical differences aside, it was a pretty good survey of emergent art — what it didn’t have was a monster.
Adrián Villar Rojas’ “A person loved me” (2012) has already achieved show-stealer status at The Ungovernables, the second installment of the New Museum’s Triennial, snagging a feature by Randy Kennedy in The New York Times with the sweeping headline, “A Colossus in Clay Speaks a Generation’s Message.”