Different, but not a random names. They are all familiar to the gallery going public. The reason they reviewed together is a retrospective of art of Piero Manzoni, young, and suddenly deeply intellectual, at Gagosian. 2009 was an extremely simple year. We have choosen Manzoni show as a considerably best artistic event which took place in New York this year. Dana Schutz presence was noticeable during a several years, her faux-naive abstract-surrealist paintings obviously can hardly go unnoticed; Yue Minjun's art, indeed, is a mark for the new Epoch. However, we see a new wave of art from China that made art world totally different during just a few years.
Piero Manzoni has lived disappointingly short, but vibrant life that amazingly reflected in his art. His compact proto-conceptualist oeuvre stated more than a number of artists did during long decades of making art. Disregard the fact, that appreciation for enfant-terrible kind of art often is totally unfamiliar with the wider audience. His work possess an extremely rare kind of materialist beauty and have a complex intellectual message. The show was brilliantly orchestrated and, shall you seek for the aesthetics which is minimal, intellectual, and yes, simple, Manzoni's show was exactly that. Just a short remark; how difficult to find something as good as this Manzoni's exhibition was. Try to find the show without any sort of an art that represent maximalism or overgrown but not necessary ambition; just equilibrium of idea and form; that apparently played together in the fashion of Beethoven's sonata and let you think subconsciously about surreal worlds reminiscent to art of Jean Arp.
When i think about Dana Schutz, i probably start to remember nights spent at different places, sometime joyful, sometime sleepless because of a climate changes or mosquitoes around. Sometime, new experiences could be superb. What we always like is to fulfill desires; what we usually hate is impossibility to attain something really wanted. Sometime, her compositions not-all-the same good, as one expects. Sometime they poised to fulfill all of your visual desires. The questioning remains: is something what seemed attractive during the period of 6 years can attract same interest in the years ahead.
Yue Minjun. This several years were amazing years for China. China achieved something new in technology and society, something new and and extremely powerful in art. Chinese finally got the ability to produce mainstream art of a world level, new and truly own. This cynical realism made in China seem to belong to our time. One can't predict what awaits Chinese power in the next thousand years, we may be just guessing what's going to be next... Yue Minjun's "Execution", is a mark for a new epoch. Death of the old and beginning of the new. This is a years of a hard work that indeed resulted in his art.
