Mondo Fine Art

Angie Renfro’s Newest Wire Piece

July 1st, 2010

Angie Renfro's latest "wire" piece is a fabulous addition to the series that embraces the raw beauty of urban landscape. Recently, Angie relocated to the beautiful city of Chicago to find new inspiration and a way to expand her talent, so make sure to keep your eye out for even more new works of art from the talented Mondo artist. We are also thrilled to announce that Angie will be a featured artist in September's issue of Southwest Art Magazine. Please make sure to check it out. There is even more good news: On September 1st, Mondo Fine Art will be hosting a show for Angie Renfro and Aaron Bushnell. This will be an evening full of beautiful new works by both artists. Details coming soon! For more info on Angie Renfro and her work, click here for her Mondo Profile Angie's Latest Piece: Title: When the Road Runs Out Dimensions: 48" x 18" Medium: oil on panel

June 30th, 2010

Ulster Museum, Belfast

• The UK’s largest museum award, the £100,000 Art Fund Prize, has been awarded to the Ulster Museum in Belfast. The original 1929 building was renovated for three years before reopening in October 2009 with a new atrium and increased gallery space. Check out The Art Newspaper for all the details. • With one of the largest collections of works by female artists in the country, the Long Beach Museum of Art is mounting an exhibition entitled A Light in the Shadow – Decades of Art by Women. Paintings, sculpture and non-traditional media from the museum’s permanent collection will celebrate female modern and contemporary artists since 1925. Read more here. 1277743393image_web

• The Whitney Museum of American Art will focus on performance art and dance in its two-part exhibition called Off the Wall. Famous works (and their documentation) by 20th century artists will be shown in "Part 1: Thirty Performative Actions." Re-performances of dance pieces by acclaimed choreographer Trisha Brown make up "Part 2: Seven Works by Trisha Brown." Go to e-flux for more information. • Filmmaker David Lynch has teamed up with shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, real name Brian Warner, in Genealogies Of Pain, the new show on view at the Kunsthalle in Vienna until July 25. Manson’s 21 watercolor paintings and Lynch’s sculptural and film pieces trace themes of aggression, fear, and insanity. From ArtDaily.

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June 28th, 2010

Wu Guanzhong, "Zhoushan-Harbour"

• Painter Wu Guanzhong, a pioneer in Chinese modern and impressionist art, died in Beijing on Friday. In the years before his death Mr. Wu gave hundreds of works to public museums, collectively valued over $50 million. Go to ArtForum to read about the life of this master. • As part of the Advanced Course in Visual Arts organized by the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, professor/artist Hans Haacke will give a public lecture on July 19, two days before the opening of his first Italian solo show. Check out e-flux for more information. • A stolen painting by Italian master Caravaggio was recovered on Friday as four men attempted to sell the work known as The Taking of Christ, or The Kiss of Judas. The painting has been gone for two years after being stolen from a museum in Odessa, Ukraine. It is valued above $100 million. Read the full story here.

Brigitte Kowanz, "Now I See"

• The MUMOK modern art museum in Vienna is mounting a retrospective of work by Brigitte Kowanz as part of a program highlighting internationally successful Austrian artists. Kowanz's most recent pieces involve mirrors and light fixtures within an installation setting. Read more at Art Knowledge News.

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June 25th, 2010

Protesters outside the National Portrait Gallery

• Environmental groups will protest the “toxic sponsorship” of BP on Monday, during the celebration at the Tate Britain to commemorate the institution’s twenty-year association with the international oil conglomerate. The company, out of favor since the Deepwater Horizon spill, has been a longtime supporter of organizations like the Tate Galleries, the British Museum and the Royal Opera House. The Tate has issued a statement saying it means to preserve the commercial partnership. Learn more at ArtForum. • An Oslo-based real estate investor has ignited debate over his proposed plan for a sculpture park dedicated to works that “celebrate women”. More than €45 million has already been spent acquiring works, including pieces by Rodin and Fernando Botero. The concept of a “feminine themed” park has been called both “old fashioned,” and “a fantastic gift.” Read more at The Art Newspaper. • The sentencing of Lawrence Salander, the New York art dealer who pleaded guilty to 29 counts of grand larceny in March, will be postponed until August 3 due to scheduling conflicts. Salander conducted phony art-investment schemes and repeatedly sold art he did not own. More on the story here.

Finalists for the Sondeim Prize

• The seven finalists for the $25,000 Sondheim Artscape Prize will have their work presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art until August 1. The prize is “designed to assist visual artists or visual artist collaborators in furthering their careers” and the winner will be announced on July 10 at the BMA. Check out Art Knowledge News for information about the individual artists whose work is on display.

John Bell’s “Elegant Universe”

June 25th, 2010

We are very happy to announce that on June 10, the Salt Lake County public art Board of Directors voted unanimously on the acquisition of Bell's, the elegant universe, #1 painting for the county's public art collection. Salt Lake County has one of the largest collections of museum-quality artwork on exhibit by the state's best artists. Bell's painting will be on permanent public display at the Salt Lake County Government Center located at 2001 So.State St. There are now only two pieces left in Bell's compelling "Einstein's Dreams/ Elegant Universe" series (below), and now available exclusively through Mondo Fine Art. If you would like more information on these pieces, please contact us at 801-971-6330 or info@mondofineart.com. "The 'Einstein's Dreams' series of work is in part based on a book of the same name by Alan Lightman. In it he bases several of his short stories on Einstein's notion that time is circular and is constantly repeating itself, sometimes exactly the same, other times slightly or completely different based on our individual decisions... and that all these moments in time may still exist in parallel space. Based on an abstract understanding of this, I simply asked the question 'what might that look like as a painting, if you could see clusters of random moments all at once?' In each paining of the series, I have repeated images from each canvas in the series as well as past works as an even more tangible illustration of this theory." - John Bell If you haven't already, watch John Bell's artist profile video and see him share his inspiration and talent! The two remaining paintings in the "Einstein's Dreams" Series: Title: the elegant universe # 2 Medium: acrylic on canvas Dimensions: 49"x31"

Title: the elegant universe #3

Medium: acrylic on canvas

Dimensions: 49"x31"

Contemporary Masters – Review

June 23rd, 2010

by Patrick Maguire, Mondo Fine Art

The Salt Lake Art Center’s Contemporary Masters mini-golf course is an unusual and imaginative way of presenting art to the public, allowing visitors to play with artworks, instead of just looking at them. Everyone can try their hand at the course – young children with their parents, older couples with cameras slung about their necks, and curious art appreciators can all be seen wandering through the exhibition with their colorful putters and scorecards, playing the holes in no particular order. It certainly does not feel like an art gallery anymore, and instead takes on the informal characteristics of a relaxed summertime activity.

Laura Chukanov playing Contemporary Masters

The Salt Lake Art Center hosted a VIP opening event for Contemporary Masters on the 17th of June, a day before the course opened to the public. Laura Chukanov, a member of our Mondo Fine Art staff and former Miss Utah 2009, was part of the celebrity foursome among the first to try their hand at the 18 holes.

Every hole is designed and built by separate artists, so themes, materials, and playability widely vary. This is a welcome change from the standard putt-putt golf. Some holes are whimsical, like Davina Pallone’s par six Putting to the Center of the Earth, a multicolored wool and cotton representation of the earth’s geologic strata. Golfers must descend into the illuminated, cork-floored structure of Stephanie Leitch’s Untitled to retrieve their ball. The course concludes with Craig Cleveland’s mechanical Siphon & Reservoir, which shoots your ball into a series of netted funnels before depositing it near the hole. These are but examples of the fantastic diversity of this course.

John Bell "Pissing in the Wind"

The challenges of contemporary art are evident enough on the surface of a painting or sculpture, but they surface as well in the absurd difficulty of some holes - namely the two par infinities. Peter Everett’s Donkey Kong pays homage to the trickiness of the 1981 arcade classic, and John Bell, a Mondo Fine Art artist, explicitly deals with the issue in his near-impossible, minimalist sculpture Pissing in the Wind. Bell says he "was more interested in making a work of art that you could play miniature golf on, than a miniature golf hole that you called art. The title is a metaphor for so many of the futile pursuits we inflict upon ourselves in daily life. My hope is that instead of trying to dominate or win on this piece / hole, participants will let go of that notion and just enjoy it as a work of art and a point of conversation."

Contemporary Masters is at once a group art show and recreational activity, which says something about the mission of the Salt Lake Art Center. Art can involve everyone. Experiencing art in the context of mini-golf is a unique way to bring the viewer closer to the artist whose work they are putting upon.

Contemporary Masters runs through September 16th, 2010. For more information, please visit SALT LAKE ART CENTER's WEBSITE

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June 21st, 2010

Russian artist group AES+F

• Two major exhibitions devoted to video art open in Moscow this month, that organizers hope will “stimulate greater interest in video as an art form among the younger generation.” The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture will show work by the Russian collective AES+F, while the GMG gallery mounts a survey of work by US artist Gary Hill, a pioneer in the video art medium. Check out The Art Newspaper for the full article. • Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, the New York couple who amassed a remarkable collection of minimal and conceptual art on modest income, are loaning art to institutions across the nation through the program The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. The Delaware Art Museum is the most recent recipient of the Vogel’s art, which spans 1966 to 2003. Art Knowledge News has all the details.

The Vogels in their NYC apartment

• Joe Deal, the Kansas born post-war photographer, passed away last Friday in Providence, Rhode Island following an eight-year battle with cancer. Deal’s photographic series like “Wild and West: Reimagining the Great Plains,” and “Karst and Pseudokarst” has had a lasting influence upon today’s contemporary photographers. Visit ArtForum for more details on the life of Joe Deal. • The Philiadelphia Museum of Art has loaned 55 oil paintings and 5 bronze sculptures, by masters such as Picasso, Degas and Manet, to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. It is the first time America and Taiwan have worked together to organize an international art exhibition. More at ArtDaily.org.

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June 18th, 2010

• The 41st annual Art Basel, perhaps the most renowned of contemporary art fairs, opened on Thursday and will run through Sunday. Carol Vogel reports for the New York Times that “business is brisk,” citing numerous multimillion dollar acquisitions by dealers and collectors alike. Works by late artists Louise Bourgeois and Sigmar Polke were quickly snapped up, and this year’s fair included a proliferation of installation and video art, shown at the “Unlimited” space for oversized works. • Arts Council England has suffered a budget cut amounting to about $34 million at the hands of the country’s new coalition government, including $2.6 million in grants offered to regularly-funded arts organizations. From ArtForum.

Picasso's "Femme lisant"

• The Seattle Art Museum will be home to the unparalleled exhibition “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris" from October 8 through January 9, 2010. Over 150 works from all phases of the artist’s legendary career will be presented, on loan from the world’s most important repository of Picasso artworks, the Musée Picasso, while it undergoes renovations. Go to Art Knowledge News to learn more. • The Musée de l’Elysée (a museum of photography in Lausanne, Switzerland) is surveying the work of more than eighty contemporary photographers in the second edition of the successful "reGeneration" exhibition. The collection embraces both documentary and artistic approaches within digital, film, conceptual, and spontaneous photography. Check out ArtDaily for more information.

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June 16th, 2010

Paris Museum of Modern Art/Palais de Tokyo

• During the next year, a group of Sarajevo artists will convert a decades old nuclear bunker into a contemporary art gallery, with most of the funding provided by the Council of Europe. The 70,000 square foot bunker was completed in 1979, for use by the Yugoslavian revolutionary and statesman Josip Broz Tito. The entrance lies beneath an ordinary garage door in the town of Konjic, and visitors will have to traverse a 920 ft. corridor that leads deep into an adjoining mountain. Click here for more information. • The Paris Museum of Modern Art and the Palais de Tokyo, housed in different wings of the same building, are collaborating on a new exhibition entitled “Dynasty,” in which 40 French artists contribute two pieces each, to be separated and shown simultaneously by the two institutions. Read Katherine Knorr’s quirky review of the opening soiree and the effect of unrestricted combinations of art at the New York Times website.

Aram Jibilian, “Gorky and the Son he Never Had," part of the Blind Dates exhibition

• Belgian-born Chris Dercon was appointed yesterday to the position of Director for London’s Tate Modern. Dercon was previously director of Munich’s Hans der Kunst, and has also been affiliated with the MoMA/PS1 in New York. For more information visit ArtForum. • The Pratt Manhattan Gallery will mount an ambitious exhibition in November called “Blind Dates,” whose purpose is to trace “what remains of the peoples, places and cultures that once constituted the diverse geography of the Ottoman Empire.” Established and emerging artists from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East will contribute work showcasing the Ottoman effect upon different artistic explorations. Check out HyperAllergic for more.

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June 14th, 2010

Andy Warhol, "Shadows I"

• On June 18 the Brooklyn Museum will debut Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, the first US exhibition to focus on the final chapters of the artist’s forty-year career. Included will be Warhol’s translation of da Vinci’s Last Supper, self-portraiture, and examples of his return to abstraction in the Oxidations and Shadows series. Read more at Art Knowledge News. • The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is teaming up with YouTube to find the most innovative and exceptional talent in the realm of online video with YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video. A jury of experts in the arts and entertainment fields will select up to twenty video works to be simultaneously presented at the Guggenheim in Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice. Check out the full story at ArtForum.

"Bench Around the Lake" by Jeppe Hein, at 100 Acres.

• SITE Santa Fe, a not-for-profit contemporary arts organization, will open their Eighth International Biennial on June 20. Titled The Dissolve, the biennial will survey “a striking creative development found in contemporary art: the synthesis of the handmade with the high-tech.” 26 works by 30 international artists will be shown, alongside early 20th century historical animations. Go to e-flux for more. • Next week will see the opening of 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, an outdoor collection of temporary, site-specific works located on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Unlike the objects inside the museum, these works invite the public to touch, climb upon, and generally experience them in a physical manner. Read a full review at NYTimes.com.

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