Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco currently has a retrospective on at MoMA that was recently reviewed in the NY Times.
I was particularly taken with the description of one of the pieces in his first MoMA show in 1993, pictured above. Instead of using the sterile gallery space offered him by MoMA, he "chose instead the museum's nooks and crannies," creating this piece by placing bright pieces of fruit in the windows of the building across the street from MoMA. Holland Cotter writes in the Times, "You looked up and there they were: bright dots connecting art and life."
The main point of the article is a contrast between that show and the current one, which is bigger and more flamboyant. Cotter makes the point that the tones of these two shows point to a dichotomy in Orozco's artistic practice, concluding, "at some point he may decide which he really wants to be: the artist of poetic epiphanies or of institutional product. In this show he is both."
Yet he also says, "Mr. Orozco likes to disappoint; it is almost a credo of his. "I want to disappoint the expectations of the one who waits to be amazed," he has said." To me that quote would indicate that Orozco cultivates not just a dichotomy but a continuous change in his practice so as to confound expectations.
Either way, I cannot help being captivated by this description of "what Mr. Orozco has always done best: find the cosmic in the commonplace, sweeten abjection with wisdom and wit." Yet supposedly now, "At 47, Mr. Orozco is no longer the footloose wanderer, toothbrush, notebook and camera in hand, who found poetry in puddles and dignity in debris, dung and dryer lint."
Sounds like such an interesting show, not just for the art itself, but for what the chosen pieces and tone of the show overall say about a career and a man.
Wish I could see it!

Google shows 14 paintings from the Prado

I just heard about this. On Google Earth now you can go to the Prado Museum in Madrid and view 14 of their masterpieces paintings in ultra high resolution. See the video below to see just how up close and personal you are able to get. It's amazing!

San Jose Art Museum

Went for the first time today...
They have an exhibit up on Andy Warhol that I wanted to check out. The actual selection of pieces was blah--a couple rooms of screen prints that I've seen a million times before. But there was an interesting blurb about his "fascination with fame" on one wall and an informative documentary playing in one corner. The best part, though, was the little craft table in the middle of one gallery where you could combine Warhol's images (soup cans, a self portrait, and flowers) printed in black on clear plastic with your own compositions of colord paper cutouts and crayon drawings. It was neat.
Upstairs they had an exhibition called "Process as Paradigm" with works from the permanent collection and it was a great smattering of things, including Tony Oursler's Slip (2003), seen above. It's an S-shaped fiberglass sculpture with a video of a woman's mouth and lips projected onto it. Her skin looks green and there's a soundtrack of various phrases, some more intelligible than others, all emphasizing the 'sss' sound. It was both creepy and alluring; I really liked it.
There was also an exhibition of works by female printmakers, where these two aquatints:

by Pat Steir (whose work I just realized I also saw at Crown Point Press last year) really reminded me of my own work:


Other standouts:

Edward Corbett Untitled (Black Painting), 1950
(part of an exhibition on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism)


A detailed Franklin Williams 1972 thread and fabric canvas kind of like the one above.

Anderson Collection

Alexander Calder

Mark Rothko

Robert Motherwell

Vija Celmins

Franz Kline


I also liked work by Lynda Benglis, Carole Seborovski, Donald Sultan, Mark Fox (a recent Stanford MFA), and many more.
I had no idea this incredible collection of modern art was so nearby! I was lucky enough to see the private collection in the Anderson home, but there is also a public portion of the collection of which there are tours on the third Thursday of every month. The collection website is here with info about signing up for tours of the public collection. There's also a great feature on the SF MoMA website here that gives an in-depth look at 15 works from the collection and more. Check it out!