Unexpected Art

Serendipitous Installations, Site-Specific Works, and Surprising Interventions

Jenny Moussa Spring

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781452135489
• eBook ISBN:
  9781452144078
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Graffiti made from cake icing, man-made clouds floating indoors, a luminous moon resting on water. Collected here are dozens of jaw-dropping artworks—site-specific installations, extraordinary sculptures, and groundbreaking interventions in public spaces—that reveal the exciting things that happen when contemporary artists play with the idea of place. Unexpected Art showcases the wonderfully experimental work of more than 50 innovative artists from around the world in galleries of their most astonishing artworks. An unusual package with three different-colored page edges complements the art inside and makes this tour of the world's most mind-blowing artwork a beautiful and thoughtprovoking gift for anyone interested in the next cool thing.

ARTIST BIOS

Adel Abdessemed, born in 1971, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Batna and the École des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, Algiers (1987–1994), before traveling to France, where he attended the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (1994–1998). He was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris in 1999–2000, and the following year at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s International Studio Program in Long Island City, in Queens, New York City. In 2012, his work was the subject of a major solo exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, which was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the museum and Steidl. Now based in Paris and New York, the artist has also lived and worked in Berlin.

→ www.davidzwirner.com/artists/adel-abdessemed

Tanya Aguiñiga (born 1978) is a Los Angeles–based designer and artist who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from the Rhode Island School of Design. She created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. She founded the group Artists Helping Artisans, through which she helps spread knowledge of craft by collaborating with traditional artisans. Her work has been exhibited from Mexico City to Milan. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a GOOD 100 2013 Recipient, and has been the subject of a cover article for American Craft magazine and included in PBS’s Craft in America series.

→ www.aguinigadesign.com

Ball-Nogues Studio is an integrated design and fabrication practice operating in the territory between architecture, art, and industrial design. The studio has exhibited at major institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art; the Guggenheim Museum; PS1; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; arc en rêve centre d’architecture + Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux; the Venice Biennale; the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale; and the Beijing Biennale. It has received numerous honors, including three American Institute of Architects Design Awards, United States Artists Target Fellowships, and a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

→ www.ball-nogues.com

Robert Barta was born in 1975 in Prague, and now lives and works in Berlin. He holds degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has mounted solo exhibitions in Berlin, Rome, and Istanbul, among others, and participated in group exhibitions throughout Europe and in the United States. His works appear in private collections in Belgium, France, Italy, and the United States.

→ www.robertbarta.de

→ www.furiniartecontemporanea.it

Amanda Browder, born in Missoula, Montana, in 1976, received an MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, producing large-scale fabric installations for building exteriors and other public sites. She has shown on three continents, including at the Nuit Blanche Public Art Festival/LEITMOTIF in Toronto; FAB Fest, New York City; The Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn; Mobinale, Prague; Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York City; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo; White Columns, New York City; and No Longer Empty, Brooklyn. Photos and reviews of her work have appeared in print media from the New York Times to Fibers magazine, and she is a founder of, and can be heard on, the art podcast, www.badatsports.com.

→ www.amandabrowder.com

Nick Cave is a messenger, artist, and educator working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of media inclusive of sculpture, installation, video, sound, and performance. His solo exhibitions have expanded globally from the United States through France, Africa, Denmark, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. He has been described as a Renaissance artist and says of himself, “I have found my middle and now . . . working toward what I am leaving behind.” Cave also works as a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. Cave has earned multiple major awards and honors and his editorial coverage continues to explode worldwide.

→ www.jackshainman.com/artists/nick-cave/

Jenny Chapman and Mark Reigelman

Jenny Chapman is interested in the overlapping boundaries between architecture, infrastructure, art, and design. She believes that designed objects in the world exist along a continuum and endeavors to erode the established barriers between the various design disciplines. Jenny finds inspiration and happiness in the examination of all objects and their origins. Her art practice is an investigation of site, use, and history. Jenny Chapman lives and works in Seattle.

→ www.unofficialoffice.com

Mark Reigelman’s installations deal in the remarkable. Whether it be the materials he uses, their head-turning scale, or their placement in public spaces, his works marry wit, context, and the element of surprise. He approaches each site without any preconceived notion of what should exist, and through meticulous research and exploration of each location’s history, physical characteristics, and function, Reigelman creates unique site-specific objects and installations. Reigelman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

→ www.markreigelman.com

Miguel Chevalier was born in Mexico in 1959. He has been living in Paris since 1985. Since 1978, Chevalier has focused exclusively on computers as an artistic means of expression. He quickly secured a spot on the international scene as a pioneer of virtual and digital art. His inspiration lies in the history of art and his work explores recurrent themes such as nature and artifice, flows and networks, virtual cities and ornate designs. In the 1980s, Chevalier began tackling the question of the hybrid and generative image.

→ www.miguel-chevalier.com

Michel de Broin has developed a constantly expanding visual vocabulary, with work ranging from assemblage to video and photography. Piece by piece, the objects involved are sometimes universally recognizable, but their behavior defies their functions and uses that are taken for granted. Crafting new relationships among waste, productivity, risk, and consumption, established modes of signification are endangered, yielding retooled technological environments that feed a constant questioning.

→ http://micheldebroin.org

Patrick Dougherty was born in Oklahoma but grew up in North Carolina, where he roamed the woods as a child. As an adult, he combined his carpentry skills with his love of nature and began to learn about primitive techniques of building and to experiment with tree saplings as construction material. Beginning about 1980 with small works fashioned in his backyard, he quickly moved from single pieces on conventional pedestals to monumental site-specific installations that require sticks by the truckload. To date, he has built more than 240 such massive sculptures all over the world. His home is his handmade house of logs outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Linda, and son, Sam.

→ www.stickwork.net

Suzan Drummen works in the media of painting, photography, installation, and public art. She prefers to work on site-specific installations and on a large scale. Her works are a playful investigation of space, illusion, optical effects, and other visual phenomena as part of a broad exploration of visual perception and the limits of beauty. In the works, there is an ongoing inquiry into the limits of seduction and repulsion.

→ www.suzandrummen.nl

Alejandro Durán is a Mexican-born, New York–based multimedia artist working in photography, installation, video, and poetry. Durán received En Foco’s New Works Award in photography and has exhibited his work at the Bronx Biennial of Latin American Art and the Galería Octavio Paz at the Mexican consulate in New York. Durán is also the founder of The Digital Project, a video production company focused on culture and education, with clients including MoMA, the Museum of Arts & Design, and Columbia University.

→ www.alejandroduran.com

Janet Echelman builds living, breathing sculpture environments that respond to the forces of nature—wind, water, and light—and become inviting focal points for civic life. Exploring the potential of unlikely materials, from fishing net to atomized water particles, Echelman combines ancient craft with cutting-edge technology to create her permanent sculpture at the scale of buildings. Experiential in nature, the result is sculpture that shifts from being an object you look at, to something you can get lost in. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Echelman was named a 2012 Architectural Digest Innovator for “changing the very essence of urban spaces.” Her TED talk “Taking Imagination Seriously” has been translated into thirty-four languages and is estimated to have been viewed by more than a million people worldwide.

→ www.echelman.com

Leandro Erlich (born 1973, Argentina) lives and works in Buenos Aires. He began his career in the United States (Houston, New York), moved to Paris for a few years, and returned to Buenos Aires. He has participated in many art biennales (like Whitney, Venice, Saõ Paulo, Istanbul, Echigo-Tsumari) and had his work exhibited in great museums of the world including P.S.1 MoMA (NY), Centre Georges Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Museo Nacional Reina Sofía (Madrid). His works are in private and public collections, including Tate Modern, Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris), 21st Century Museum of Art, and Kanazawa.

→ www.leandroerlich.com.ar

Christine Finley is known for her vibrant geometric paintings and site-specific public art installations. Her Wallpapered Dumpsters project has been featured in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, CNN.com, NYLON magazine, Dazed, and the BBC World Service, Brazil. Finley has shown internationally with exhibitions at Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna; Robert Fontaine Gallery, Miami; Scope Miami and New York; FDA Projects, Rome; and the Dumba Collective, New York, among others. In 2012, Finley was the artist-in-residence at the Gai Mattiolo fashion house in Rome, Italy. As the recipient of the Eszter Cohen Grant, Finley continues to wallpaper dumpsters in cities throughout the world. Finley received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in New York and her MFA from California State University, Long Beach. Finley lives in Rome and New York.

→ iamfinley.com

FriendsWithYou is the fine-art collaborative of Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, working collectively since 2002 with the sole purpose of spreading the positive message of Magic, Luck, and Friendship™. As artists working in a variety of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Adel Abdessemed
• Tanya Aguiñiga
• Ball-Nogues Studio
• Robert Barta
• Amanda Browder
• Nick Cave
• Jenny Chapman and Mark Reigelman
• Miguel Chevalier
• Michel de Broin
• Patrick Dougherty
• Suzan Drummen
• Alejandro Durán
• Janet Echelman
• Leandro Erlich
• Christine Finley
• FriendsWithYou
• Joost Goudriaan
• Ann Hamilton
• Lynne Harlow
• HENSE
• Florentijn Hofman
• HOTTEA
• Gyun Hur
• Institute For Figuring
• Kaarina Kaikkonen
• Erik Kessels
• Tetsuo Kondo Architects
• Tomoko Konoike
• Cornelia Konrads
• Joris Kuipers
• Hitoshi Kuriyama
• William Lamson
• Christopher M. Lavery
• Myoung Ho Lee
• LILIENTHAL|ZAMORA
• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
• Toshihiko Horiuchi MacAdam
• Russell Maltz
• Marshmallow Laser Feast
• Rowena Martinich
• Mademoiselle Maurice
• Shelley Miller
• Mihoko Ogaki
• Kimihiko Okada
• Soo Sunny Park
• Paola Pivi
• Malene Hartmann Rasmussen
• Marc Andre Robinson
• Rub Kandy
• Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés
• Mary Sibande
• Berndnaut Smilde
• Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger
• Swoon
• Leonid Tishkov
• Michal Trpák
• Serena Garcia Dalla Venezia
• Phoebe Washburn
• Artist Bios
• Photo Credits
• About the Author
• Chronicle Ebooks