Artist Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner prize in 2004, has been selected for the British pavilion at next year's Venice Biennale.

The news follows his recent retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, which included a recreation of his boyhood bedroom and a Lancashire cafe serving tea throughout the show.

Deller told the Guardian: "I really don't know what I'm going to do. I was a bit daunted at first, but now I'm looking forward to it, I think.

According to the Guardian:

Much of Deller's work has a strong and eclectic political element, including his recreation of the 1984 Battle of Orgreave - also in the Hayward retrospective - one of the bloodiest clashes between striking miiners and police where some of the actors were former miners. As well as film, installation and music, his shows often involve roping in outside groups and individuals as participants, including brass  bands, bat enthusiasts and ham radio operators, partly because he cannot draw and has described himself as 'not technically capable person'.

Contemporary artist Polly Morgan, renowned for using taxidermy to create artworks, says her upcoming London show will not only include taxidermy but will also include drawings made using cremated animal ashes.

In a new interview with FAD, she says: "I have in my freezer ashes from the animal crematorium, and I have used those ashes to draw. What I mean is, I draw blind as I'm using a pen with glue, so it's completely transparent and it's only when I scatter the ashes on top that the picture suddenly appear."

Morgan also says the main piece in her upcoming London show will be a rotten tree, which she found in Norfolk and made a mould out of, making it look like "a very life-like looking rotten tree". The new show will also, accordingly, feature rubber castings of animals that she says look more convincing than taxidermy.

You can read the full interview here.

Morgan's new show Endless Plains was inspired by her recent visit to the Serengeti and confronts the view with the cycle of life: predators, parasites and prey. According to the press release, shortly after Morgan's trip she herself confronted her own mortality "developing life-threatening peritonitis and gangrene, where part of her own body died and went under the scalpel".

Polly Morgan's new show Endless Plains will be on at All Visual Art 8 June to 14 July.

Mark Rothko's luminous canvas 'Orange, Red, Yellow' sold for $87 million at Christie's auction last night, breaking the record for the highest selling postwar and contemporary artwork sold at auction.

Rothko's work sold alongside work by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Alexander Calder, Gerhard Richter and Yves Klein at the Christie's auction on Tuesday May 8, 2012, the evening totaled $388.5 million (£240.5m).

The New York Times reported that there was an unusually large array of Abstract Expressionist paintings at the auction, which the publication says was due in part to Christie's having won property from the collection of David Pincus who, with his wife Geraldine, had collected paintings and sculptures by Rothko, Pollock, Newman and de Kooning for decades.
Pollock's 'Number 28, 1951' sold for $20.5 million to a telephone bidder.

Newman's 'Onement V' sold to a telephone bidder for $22.4 million and Klein's 'FC1' also sold for a a record price of $36.4 million.

Only last week, Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' sold for a record $119.9 million (22.6m), proving forecasts that May was tipped to be a very big month for several auction houses selling Impressionist, modern and contemporary artwork this month.

London's hugely successful Frieze Art Fair heads across the Atlantic this weekend for the launch of Frieze New York, which runs from May 4-7 in Randall's Island Park, Manhattan and boasts approximately 180 of the world's most forward-thinking galleries from around the globe showing their most cutting-edge art.

According to the official website, The New York fair will take a similar approach to that which has made the Frieze Art Fair one of the world's most influential contemporary art fairs.

In an interview with ArtSpace, Frieze's co-creator Amanda Sharp (with Michael Slotover) said holding a Frieze Art Fair in New York came out of people's suggestions. "We only did the fair in New York  because a lot of galleries came to us over the years and said 'Would you consider doing a fair in New York? We'd love to do a fair in New York but at the moment there isn't a fair there that we feel is right for us."

The New York Times has reported that: "in just under a decade, the fair has gone from being a scrappy upstart to becoming a fixture on the international art circuit, a requisite stop for an elite group of buyers and sellers and, increasingly, for a broader public that just likes to look."

Reuters reiterates that the majority of visitors to Frieze's 180 galleries are likely to be members of the public with neither the means nor inclination to buy, but who want a snapshot of the contemporary art world combined with the glamour of the venue.

But there will also be plenty of serious collectors, many of them in New York for the series of auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's held at the beginning of May each year.

London art duo Gilbert and George and 2012 Turner Prize nominee Spartacus Chetwynd are among the artists whose work will be exhibited.

Here's a short promo video of the fair:



Are you based in New York? Are you heading along to Frieze New York?

Edvard Munch's iconic painting The Scream was sold for a world-recording breaking £19.9 million at Sotheby's auction last night, on May 5, 2012.

The 1895 painting was estimated to sell for $80 - $200 million, it was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder, and it surpassed Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which sold for $106.5 million in 2010, to be the highest selling artwork at auction.

Cezanne's The Card Player is the highest selling work of all time, having been sold at a private sale in Qatar for $250 million in 2011.

The masterpiece, one of four versions of The Scream created by Munch, had been owned by a Norwegian family since the 1930s, who knew Munch personally, and it was put on the market by the family member Petter Olsen.

This version is the only one of the four to be owned privately with the other three versions of The Scream currently in museums; two versions have been stolen while on display but have since been recovered.

This privately owned version is said to be the most desirable as it contains a poem on the frame, written by the artist that reads:

"I was walking along the road with two Friends

The Sun was setting

The Sky turned a bloody red

And I felt a whiff of Melancholy

I Stood, Still, deathly tired over the blue black

Fjord and City hung Blood and Tonges of Fire

My Friends walked on

I remained behind

Shivering with Anxiety

I felt the great Scream in Nature

-EM

Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul Noble and Elizabeth Price are the four nominees for this year's Turner Prize, announced today 1 May 2012.

Chetwynd is a performer, Fowler works in film and photography, Noble creates technical drawings and Price presents video installations. 

Britain's most respected annual art prize, the Turner awards £25,000 to the year's most outstanding British artist aged under 50 years of age for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding,

Work by the shortlisted artists will be shown in an exhibition at Tate Britain, opening on October 2.

The winner will be announced at a ceremony on December 3.

Over the recent decades the Turner Prize has played a significant role in provoking debate about visual art and the growing public interest in contemporary British art in particular, and has become widely recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe. 

Last year the prize went to Martin Boyce and previous winners include Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor and Grayson Perry. The award has also seen some unexpected results: Tracey Emin's My Bed (pictured), was overlooked in 1999 despite drawing large crowds to the Tate.

The Chapman brothers lost out to Grayson Perry in 2003 – Perry accepted the award dressed as a girl while Jake Chapman described "losing the Turner prize to a grown man dressed as a small girl" as his "most embarrassing moment".

 

As part of the big May art auctions, three New York houses are gearing up to sell as much as $1.5 billion of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art in the next two weeks, including a version of Edvard Munch's The Scream which alone is set to fetch around $80 million, according to Bloomberg.

Munch's The Scream, which will be auctioned at Sotheby's, has the highest pre-sale value the auctioneer has ever put on a work of art, and if it sells for the estimated value it will be one of the most expensive art works ever to be sold at auction.

"More people believe in art as a good wealth holder, and that's driving the market upward," Suzanne Gyorgy, global head of art advisory and finance at Citi Private Bank, told Bloomsbery. "They want to buy real estate in the US and in London, and they want to buy art for the blank walls."

The auction will also include:

Picasso's 1941 portrait of Dora Maar, which is valued at $20 million to $30 million and will be sold by Sotheby's.

Cezanne's watercolour Joueur de cartes, from the estate of Texas collector Heinz Felix Einchenwald and which is expected to be sold for $15 - $20 million 

Yves Klein's 19632's fire-colour painting FC 1, which is estimated between $30 million and $40 million

Rothko's Orange, Red and Yellow at $35 - $45 million
Pollock's No 28 for $20 - $30 million

Bacon's Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror, for $30 - $40 million
Lichtenstein's Sleeping Girl, for  $30 - $40 million
Read the full article here

Over the last quarter of a century Damien Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation.

At the Tate Modern is the first substantial survey of his work in a British institution bringing together key works from over twenty years. The exhibition includes iconic sculptures from his Natural History series, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991, in which he suspended a shark in formaldehyde. Also included are vitrines such as A Thousand Years from 1990, medicine cabinets, pill cabinets and instrument cabinets in addition to seminal paintings made throughout his career using butterflies and flies as well as a vast array of spots and spins from the last couple of decade. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We went over the weekend and like him or loathe him recommend that you check it out. We liked it!

Go here for available work

A short movie showing the legendary Sir Peter Blake at work and behind the scenes at the Coriander Studios

Hot off the Press from Henrietta Williams on Vimeo.

We enjoyed this story seen on Arts Hub over the weekend.

 A lucky garage sale customer has truly struck a bargain. Andy Fields, 38, from Devon paid $5 for five paintings in 2010 and after deciding to get one of the paintings framed, discovered an original Andy Warhol sketch hidden behind it.The sketch is worth $2 million.Warhol’s sketch of 1930s singer Rudy Vallée is thought to have been drawn when the artist was around the ages of 9 or 10 and bears the customary Warhol red lips. In the background, brightly coloured squares are reminiscent of Warhol’s later pop art. Fields stated that “experts think it is of historical importance because Warhol did not do pop art properly until he was 23.”

When Warhol contracted Chorea as a child, he spent several years in bed recovering and it is at this time that Warhol taught himself to draw and may have completed the portrait of Vallée, the American singer and entertainer.The artwork was discovered after the sale had been made, and the man who sold Fields the initial five paintings had told the businessman that he grew up with Warhol. “I didn’t take any notice,” said Fields.Fields assumes that the sketch had been hidden there for safe keeping and now hopes to display the drawing in a museum; “It’s much better than putting it in a vault somewhere.” But in the meantime, Fields has said he will abstain for selling the sketch.For now, he will remain a garage sale devotee. The artwork had been surreptitiously bought in one when Fields and friends were travelling around Las Vegas: “It’s always a fun thing to do, you find some very good bargains.”

A lucky man.