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Urs Fischer
The artistic practice of Urs Fischer (b. 1973, Zurich) is founded on a radical investigation of the possibilities of the creative process. Deploying startling combinations of materials and drawing on the structures of varied artistic modes, Fischer creates ambitious sculptural works and environmental installations that are provocative, playful, and disorienting. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Insititute of Contemporary Art, London (2000); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2000); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004); Kunsthaus Zürich (2004); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2005); and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006). In fall 2009, Fischer will be the subject of a museum-wide exhibition at the New Museum in New York.
Dan Graham
Dan Graham (b. 1942, Urbana, Illinois) began his career in the early 1960s as a part of a new generation of Conceptual and Minimalist artists working in New York. Much of his early work occurred outside the gallery with projects such as the insertion of texts into mass-market magazines. In the 1970s, he worked primarily with performance, film, and video to explore shifts in individual and group consciousness and the limits of private and public space, evolving in the 1980s into the installations and architectural pavilions for which he is internationally known today. In 2001, he was awarded the French Vermeil Medal by the City of Paris. In 2001–02, a comprehensive retrospective of his work was shown at the Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto, and traveled throughout Europe. He is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Mary Heilmann
Mary Heilmann (b. 1940, San Francisco) has been working as a painter in New York since 1968. She arrived in the midst of the Conceptual movement and drew inspiration from the work of Joseph Beuys, Lee Bontecou, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Marisol, and Bruce Nauman. Heilmann’s practice is characterized by her experimentation with vibrant color and abstract composition that elicits a sense of movement and rhythm. In addition to many solo and group exhibitions worldwide, a retrospective of her work was organized in 2007 and traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the Orange County Museum, Newport Beach, California; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2008); and the New Museum, New York (2008).
Curator of the Year
Whitehot prediction WINNER: Massimiliano Gioni
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Daniel Birnbaum
Daniel Birnbaum has been the director of the Städelschule Art Academy and its Portikus Gallery, both in Frankfurt am Main, since 2000. He is the founder (with Isabelle Graw) of the Institut für Kunstkritik. In 2003, he was cocurator of the Venice Biennale and cocurated the first Moscow Biennial in 2005. Together with Christine Macel, he curated Airs de Paris at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007, which celebrated the institution’s thirtieth anniversary. In 2008, he organized the exhibition Fifty Moons of Saturn in Turin, and he was director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. He is the author of several books on art and philosophy including The Hospitality of Presence (1998); Production (2000), a collaboration with artist Carsten Höller; Chronology (2005); and As a Weasel Sucks Eggs (2008).
Connie Butler
Connie Butler is the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), a position she has held since February 2006. From 1996 to 2006, she was Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA). Butler has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art focusing primarily on the postwar period, working extensively with emerging artists. She curated a monographic exhibition of Marlene Dumas, which opened in June 2008 and was organized by MoCA in association with MoMA. She has curated several installations of MoMA’s permanent collection and was the curator of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an international survey of feminist art, which opened at MoCA in March 2007.
Butler is currently organizing exhibitions of work by artists Paul Sietsema and Artur Żmijewski, both scheduled to open at MoMA in fall 2009. She is co-organizing the exhibition On Line: Redefining Drawing in the Twentieth Century, scheduled to open at MoMA in fall 2010.
Massimiliano Gioni
Massimiliano Gioni is the Artistic Director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan and the Director of Special Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York. He was recently named the director of the 8th Gwangju Biennal for 2010. Gioni curated the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006) with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, with whom he founded the Wrong Gallery in 2002. Gioni also cocurated Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain (2004) and curated The Zone, a special project for the 50th Venice Biennial, in 2003. In 2009, Gioni curated exhibitions including Parts of a Movie with a Rat and a Bear and Still Life for Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and A Guest + A Host = A Ghost for Deste Foundation–Dakis Joannou Collection in Athens. At the New Museum, he has curated After Nature (2008), cocurated The Generational: Younger Than Jesus (2009), and is curating the upcoming Urs Fischer: Marguerite De Ponty.
Exhibition Outside the United States
Whitehot prediction WINNER: Jeff Koons Versailles, Château de Versailles, France
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Jeff Koons Versailles, Château de Versailles, France
For the first time, the Château de Versailles hosted a contemporary artist with the exhibition Jeff Koons Versailles. Koons exhibited seventeen sculptures, which the artist had created over three decades. Koons’s iconic sculptures, like Rabbit, shown in the Salon de l’Abundance, continued the artistic history of Versailles by engaging visitors with contemporary art of the moment and the decorative arts of past generations. The exhibition extended into the gardens with the installation of the large-scale floral sculpture Split-Rocker, planted in the Parterre de l’Orangie within the classical and baroque landscape of Versailles.
Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels
Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 comprised a large selection of Kelley's recent works—installations, videos, photographs, sculptures, and paintings—on loan from international collections. Conceived as a history in which every work forms a chapter, the exhibition showed how and why Kelley has in recent years used the notion of autobiography to explore in a poetic fashion the forms of power and the power of forms.
Wolfgang Tillmans: Lighter, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
This exhibition showcased the way in which Wolfgang Tillmans has reinterpreted genres from portraiture to still life to landscape through the medium of photography. In the early 1990s, Tillmans was recognized for his unconventional portraits of his friends and street subculture. While embracing a broad range of subjects, he also explores abstraction through dark-room experiments with the photographic process. Tillmans was recently awarded the 2009 Kulturpreis of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie. This retrospective exhibition celebrated more than twenty years of Tillmans's photographic work.
Group Show of the Year, Gallery
Whitehot prediction WINNER: Your Gold Teeth II, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
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Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns? Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
Conceived by Urs Fischer and Gavin Brown, this exhibition, which included works by Keith Haring, Sarah Lucas, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Rudolf Stingel, among others, attempted to intuitively create a “community” of objects and pictures whose collisions and free associations unshackled and unleashed the interpretations repressed within them. With Fischer's mammoth wall installation wall paper enveloping the gallery, the exhibition juxtaposed and demonstrated how each work of art has many selves hidden within and how forces outside the frame constantly embed and limit a work.
Your Gold Teeth II, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
This exhibition presented seventy-three works by forty-three artists, ranging from painting, drawing, and sculpture to collage and video by artists such as Joseph Cornell, Rodney Graham, and Yoko Ono. In the words of curator Todd Levin, “Within this group exhibition one senses that boundaries are being tested, and rules of art conduct are being subverted. . . . But even when these artists systematically subvert themselves for the devious pleasure of it, they still maintain a level of control where they strange can be made familiar—and vice versa. Ideas, rendered in these artists' distinctive lo-fi argot, feel aired out and simplified without being rendered trivial. A sense of satisfactory unsatisfaction remains. The artwork featured in Your Gold Teeth II is about the opening up of ideas and approaches, not the pin-point sharpening of them.”
ZERO in New York, Sperone Westwater, New York
ZERO in New York was the first survey in the United States of works by members of the ZERO group. It concentrated on the movement’s artistic output between 1957 and 1966, examining the collaborative relationship that developed between groups of artists in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven, Lucio Fontana, Jef Verheyen, and Yves Klein. The exhibition was organized by David Leiber, Director of Sperone Westwater, and Mattijs Visser, Founding Director of the ZERO Foundation.
Group Show of the Year, Museum
Whitehot prediction WINNER: After Nature, New Museum, New York
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The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Organized by Douglas Eklund, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs, The Pictures Generation was the first comprehensive exhibition to examine the work of young artists who, beginning in the early 1970s, both extended and broke away from Minimalism and Conceptualism by returning to recognizable images as the foundation of their work. Inspired by movies and Pop art, this group of artists, including John Baldessari, Dara Birnbaum, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, employed various mediums to explore the ways in which images had come to usurp rather than augment or document reality.
The Quick and the Dead, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
With an international group of fifty-five artists working in a range of media, including James Lee Byars, Lygia Clark, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Bruce Nauman, this exhibition grappled with art’s relationship to many of life’s big questions as they were defined and examined during the pivotal decade of the 1960s and carried forth to the present day. Instead of providing a historical overview of a movement or the period, the show surveyed the preoccupations with mortality, transience, and the unknown that marked much classic Conceptual art, linking these interests to new understandings of time and space that evolved during the 1960s as well as to a younger generation of artists who continue to explore similar subjects in their work. The exhibition was organized by Walker curator Peter Eleey.
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York
Organized by Connie Butler, WACK! was the first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art. Focusing on the crucial period of the 1970s, the show included work by women who operated within the political structure of feminism as well as women who did not necessarily embrace feminism as part of their practice but who were impacted by political and cultural feminism. Comprising work by one hundred twenty artists in a broad range of media—including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art—the exhibition was organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses.
New Artist of the Year
Whitehot prediction WINNER: Ryan Trecartin
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Daniel McDonald
Daniel McDonald (b. 1971, Los Angeles) began his career as a founding member of the collaborative Art Club 2000 (1992–2000). In his own practice, he uses an interest in horror films, comic books, and action figures to stage humorous tableau which seek to indict the romantic myth of the bohemian artist’s life. His works often align the role of the artist with that of a Hollywood movie monster, drawing attention to the similar stigmas and auras society projects onto each. In keeping with his fascination with horror and theatricality, McDonald also designs his own line of conceptual and absurd costume jewelry. His work has been shown at Salon 94 Freemans, New York (2007); Galerie Riis, Oslo (2009); and Mesler & Hug, Los Angeles (2009).
Marlo Pascual
Marlo Pascual (b. 1972, Nashville, Tennessee) takes found imagery and film as a point of departure, enlarging, repositioning, and juxtaposing fragmentary images—often depicting unknown glamorous women or men—with other photographs, domestic objects, and stage props. Sometimes dramatically lit, the resulting installations and sculptures suggest ambiguous narratives and fictive theatrical settings that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. A solo exhibition of the artist's work was organized by the Swiss Institute, New York, in January 2009. Recent group exhibitions include Crop Rotation at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2008); three person show at White Columns, New York (2008); and curated by_vienna ’09 at Georg Kargl, Vienna (2009). Pascual’s work is currently on view as part of the In Practice series at the Sculpture Center, and her first solo gallery exhibition will open in January 2010 at Casey Kaplan, both in New York.
Ryan Trecartin
The videos of Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981, Webster, Texas) catapult viewers into a hallucinogenic alternate reality in which cybernetic avatars run amok, presenting themselves with gleeful sass as they play out a complex web of melodramatic fictions. The works are filtered through a distinctive do-it-yourself aesthetic that incorporates ramshackle sets, brightly colored homemade costumes, cheap off-the-shelf video and sound effects, and rapidly edited, jargon-filled dialogue. Trecartin draws his audiences further into his virtual reality through sculptural objects and installations built from his sets. His work has been shown at major international institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006, 2008); the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2006); the Saatchi Gallery, London (2006); the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2009–10); Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (2008); the New Museum, New York (2009); and the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2009).
The Rob Pruitt Award
Whitehot prediction WINNER: TBA
Solo Show of the Year, Gallery
Whitehot prediction WINNER: Picasso: Mosqueteros, Gagosian Gallery, New York
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Manzoni: A Retrospective, Gagosian Gallery, New York
The first comprehensive retrospective of the work of Piero Manzoni in the United States, this exhibition was curated by Germano Celant. It spanned the entire range of Manzoni’s oeuvre, from his first anthropomorphic silhouettes and canvases bearing the imprints of everyday objects, to the diverse Achromes, Bodies of Air (Corpi d’aria), and Lines (Linea), and finally, to the radically conceptual Artist’s Shit (Merda d’artista) and Living Sculptures. The exhibition also included works by Manzoni’s American and European contemporaries—among them Alberto Burri, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella—in order to trace his brief but brilliant career within a broader international context.
Paul Sharits, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
For this exhibition, Greene Naftali debuted Paul Sharits's restored four-projector "locational" film installation, Shutter Interface (1975), a room installation that consists of four projectors placed side-by-side on large black pedestals. Their projections partially overlap, effecting live color mixing and creating a horizontal flood of changing hues on an infinite loop. A second gallery presented a wide array of rarely seen works on paper. A pairing of the practical with the fantastical (as in his fashion drawings of the early 1990s) and of mathematically specific formulas with expansive ideals (as in his film scores, colored diagrams, and meditations on Mayan and Aztec monuments) provided insight into Sharits's metaphorically rich process.
Picasso: Mosqueteros, Gagosian Gallery, New York
Picasso: Mosqueteros was the first exhibition in the United States to focus on Picasso's late paintings in twenty-five years. The exhibition was curated by John Richardson, Picasso’s noted biographer, and Dakin Hart. Focusing on a large group of important, rarely seen works from the collection of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, as well as from the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo Picasso Málaga; and other private collections, the exhibition aimed to expand the ongoing inquiry regarding the context, subjects, and sources of the artist’s late work. Presenting selected paintings and prints spanning 1962–72, the exhibition suggested how the portrayal of the aged Picasso, bound to the past in his life and painting, has obscured the highly innovative and contemporary nature of the late work.
Solo Show of the Year, Museum
Whitehot prediction WINNER: Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museum of Modern Art, New York
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Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See marked the first retrospective mounted in the United States of the work of Lawrence Weiner. Combining nearly one hundred twenty works, this exhibition showed Weiner as a prolific artist whose growing, often text-based body of work is profoundly relevant today. Weiner’s ideas have reshaped the terrain of contemporary art in their generosity and simple goals. Like Weiner's oeuvre, the exhibition emphasized choice, personal experience, and looking.
Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, New Museum, New York
Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton is the first survey of Peyton's work in an American institution. The midcareer retrospective included more than one hundred works made over the past fifteen years. From her earliest portraits of musicians like Jarvis Cocker, Kurt Cobain, and Liam Gallagher to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics, including Matthew Barney, Marc Jacobs, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Peyton chronicles America at the end of the last century. Her paintings celebrate the aesthetics of youth, fame, and creative genius and are testaments to Peyton's deeper passion for beauty in all its forms, from the elevated to the everyday.
Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museum of Modern Art, New York
Martin Kippenberger's artistic career was a twenty-year commitment to unrestrained excess. It began in the late 1970s, at a moment when the greatness of modern art seemed suddenly distant—a century-long celebration whose door was now closed to newcomers. Kippenberger's response was to create his own party and cast himself as an artist-jester whose antics both disguised and permitted a piercing analysis of contemporary art and society. He channeled creative energy into thousands of works, including paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, prints, multiples, books, and recordings. Embracing his full range of output and yet by no means comprehensive, The Problem Perspective contributed to the ongoing process of absorbing one of the most inventive and influential bodies of artwork of the late twentieth century.
Writer of the Year
Whitehot prediction WINNER: Jerry Saltz
winners at an awards ceremony on October 29 in the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda
NOW THE RESULTS:
Artist of the Year
Winner: Mary Heilmann (WM Prediction)
Louise Bourgeois
Urs Fischer
Dan Graham
Curator of the Year
Winner: Connie Butler
Klaus Biesenbach
Daniel Birnbaum
Massimiliano Gioni (WM Prediction)
Exhibition Outside the United States
Winner: Jeff Koons, Versailles, Château de Versailles, France (WM Prediction)
Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London
Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels
Wolfgang Tillmans: Lighter, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
Group Show of the Year, Gallery
Winner: Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns? Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
A Twilight Art, Harris Lieberman, New York
Your Gold Teeth II, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (WM Prediction)
ZERO in New York, Sperone Westwater, New York
Group Show of the Year, Museum
Winner: The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
After Nature, New Museum, New York (WM Prediction)
The Quick and the Dead, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York
NOW COMPARE THE RESULTS WITH THE WHITEHOT PREDICTIONS:
New Artist of the Year
Winner: Ryan Trecartin (Also a WM Prediction)
Elad Lassry
Daniel McDonald
Marlo Pascual
The Rob Pruitt Award
Winner: Cynthia Plaster Caster
Solo Show of the Year, Gallery
Winner: Manzoni: A Retrospective, Gagosian Gallery, New York
Cindy Sherman, Metro Pictures, New York
Paul Sharits, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
Picasso: Mosqueteros, Gagosian Gallery, New York (WM Prediction)
Solo Show of the Year, Museum
Winner: Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museum of Modern Art, New York (WM Prediction)
Dan Graham: Beyond, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton, New Museum, New York
Writer of the Year
Winner: Jerry Saltz (WM Prediction)
Tim Griffin
John Kelsey
Walter Robinson
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