Afterglow

Oh, to have an extra $60,000 on hand to buy this fiery red neon text work by the French artist and filmmaker, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. It’s glowingly on sale right now at Artspace.

EAR MISS

Must hand it to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Diffusing the gravitas and reverence of the great Vincent’s public image is no easy feat. But they’ve cleverly managed it with the subtle humor of this ad campaign for the museum cafe–which features a still life image that’s, well, almost perfect.

DAMAGE CONTROL

Any artistic practice that calls itself Snarkitecture can’t be expected to have a wholesome worldview, and the Brooklyn-based team behind the name is particularly drawn to imperfections. Broken Ornament, made from gypsum cement, may raise a few eyebrows around the Christmas tree, but there’s no denying its wabi-sabi allure.

BIRD OF PREY

Barbara Kruger has been busy. On the heels of her recent contribution to the New York Times’ op-ed section, comes this new print, commissioned as part of the Lincoln Center’s Vera List Art Project.

SHOW OF STRENGTH

A sculpture made of powder-coated steel, plexiglas and LED lights by the Canadian conceptual artist, Kelly Mark.

MIXED MEDIA

Neon is not, whatever else it may be, a nuanced medium. But Todd Sanders, a Texas-based neon artist, employes weathering techniques and recycled materials to create signs like this fleur de lis–made for a project to benefit New Orleans’ rebuilding efforts–in which neon is a key player, but not the only one.

AMERICAN0

At Germany’s Vitra Design Museum, the current exhibition entitled Pop Art Design brings together some of the most familiar images of that art movement, along with some less familiar objects–like this Leonardo sofa, designed in 1969 by Francesco Audrito and Athena Sampaniotou of the Italian architectural firm Studio 65.

BEAUTY AND GRAINS

The recent defacing of a seminal work by the great Mark Rothko at Britain’s Tate Modern Gallery incited international outrage, but the Brooklyn artists Henry Hargreaves and Caitlin Levin put their displeasure to creative use.

Taking their cue from the marred painting’s provenance as part of a failed triptych commission for New York’s The Four Seasons restaurant, Hargreaves and Levin have impressively interpreted these works in edible matter–grains of rice–and, to boot, injected a bit of levity by entitling the series Mark Rice-Ko.

STRANGE TURN

Lucia Quevedo’s startling–and oddly unsettling–sculpture, Suits Me Fine.

EMPTY

 

Accompanying an editorial bemoaning the decline of contemporary art in America, Alex Nabaum’s illustration cleverly depicts a Warhol soup can, upended.