It’s half a century since BMW pioneered the intersection between automotive design and fine art. The very first BMW Art Car was unveiled in 1975, the work of American sculptor Alexander Calder. The idea came from French auctioneer and racing driver Hervé Poulai, who convinced Jochen Neerpasch, the founder and head of BMW Motorsport, to let Calder create the livery of the BMW 3.0 CSL he was entering into that year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. Despite not finishing, Poulain’s idea set the stage for more collaborations, buoyed by a positive public reception.

The scheme was driven by a collaboration with Leo Castelli, the pioneering New York art gallerist and dealer. Castelli’s contacts brought Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol into the project to create new liveries for Poulain’s subsequent drives at Le Mans. Then in the early 1980s, the Art Car programme opened up and invited artists to work on standard product models, before returning to a racing focus in 1999. Since then, the BMW Art Car has been a dynamic expression of the company’s commitment to the arts in all its forms, ‘a perfect playground for art and design, technology and innovation, motorsport and engineering’.

To celebrate the scope and scale of this ongoing corporate commitment, BMW has released archive imagery of the works in progress, as well as announced a worldwide celebratory programme of exhibitions and displays. The BMW Art Car World Tour will roll through 2025 and 2026, taking select cars to auto shows and fairs, including Art Basel Hong Kong, the Shanghai Auto Show, Art Basel and Contemporary Istanbul. There will also be a major display at the Louwman Museum in The Hague throughout July and August 2025, featuring eight of the 20 cars.

The BMW Art Cars and their creators

Further information on the BMW Art Car Collection can be found at BMW.com

The idea for an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’ work curated by Jenny Holzer had been in process for some time before the puzzle pieces came together. But the Kunstmuseum Basel began to work in earnest with Holzer and the Eastern Foundation, Bourgeois’ estate, and at long last, this potent meeting of creative minds is a reality.

In ‘The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page’ Holzer curates selected excerpts of Bourgeois’ notes and writings alongside her artwork in a huge exhibition that spans sculpture, installation, works on paper and textile art. Tying these elements together captures the essence of Bourgeois as an artist, a person deep, forceful, outspoken and uncompromising.

‘I was invited to her house, and I had the luxury of spending an extended period of time with her, where I could look at, for example, a red wax ear of what appeared to be a demon sitting on the table beside us, and to have [an] extended, unselfconscious, absolutely sincere conversation about how to make the colour blue work,’ Holzer recalled of their first meeting.

Holzer, who knew the legendary late French artist when they both lived in New York, always held great respect for her work and achievements. Combining this with an intrinsic boldness and understanding of the impact of language, Holzer brought together the text selected for the exhibition alongside works created throughout Bourgeois’ prolific career. 

‘We went deep into the writing. She worked incessantly on her art, and wrote when she couldn't sleep, so we had a treasure trove,’ said Holzer, who brought in a team of readers to get as deep an understanding as possible of the artist’s notebooks.

Holzer’s clean, precise type only serves to emphasise the visceral fury, blood, sex and humour in Bourgeois’ words and works, in projections that cover the façades of three locations in the city at night – Kunstmuseum Basel, City Hall, and the Old University on the Rheinsprung. Inside the museum, the works tap into Bourgeois’ comfort with extreme thoughts and emotions. Her drawings and textile works bear phrases such as ‘The Rage to Know’ and ‘I am afraid therefore I live’. You can also experience these through an augmented reality app and Instagram filter. 

‘As they say in Brooklyn, she was not playing,’ said Holzer. ‘Although she did have a wonderful sense of humour [and] a sense of adventure, she was utterly serious, dead serious about what she attempted and she would try again, again and again, to get it right. Unlike many artists, she often did.’

In studying Bourgeois’ notes – a task Holzer says she could never have done while Bourgeois was alive – she was able to see where words and ideas translated into sculpture and drawing. Shown in Europe for the first time is the mechanised work Twosome, 1991, which links the old museum, the Hauptbau, to the contemporary wing, the Neubau via an underground passage. This takes you to four works by Bourgeois, in dialogue with the medieval to post-impressionist collection including pieces by Holbein and Cézanne. 

Holzer’s take on Borgouis is a celebration of this inimitable artist. From an air of levity as you hear her singing in the museum lifts and bathrooms to her unwavering fearlessness and ability to confront the most unruly facets of humanity, this work hits you with its complexity in a manner impossible to misinterpret. ‘She was enormously intelligent,’ said Holzer. ‘She was distressed, she was determined, she had incredible range, she was obsessive, she was furious, she would have a giggle from time to time and I will have to resort to the word infinite again. She was infinite.’

INFORMATION

Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer: 'The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page', until 15 May 2022, Kunstmuseum Basel. kunstmuseumbasel.ch

Jenny Holzer’s work has long been an integral part of the Guggenheim Bilbao’s furniture. Her towering Installation for Bilbao (1997) was commissioned for the museum’s opening and dominates its atrium with nine luminous columns, each more than 12m high. Five of the American neo-conceptualist’s inscribed stone benches also form part of the collection, alongside two works made for her 2019 retrospective ‘Thing Indescribable’: a vertical LED sign called There Was A War and the light projection For Bilbao.

Now, the erstwhile Wallpaper* Guest Editor has harnessed the power of AR to take this long and fruitful relationship into a new dimension. Here, Holzer is doing what Holzer does best: democratizing art and sparking intrigue with provocative, arresting, text-based interventions in the public realm for all to experience. 

Like Beauty In Flames sees Holzer’s signature text-based art translated into three distinct AR experiences: two site-specific works that engage the Guggenheim Bilbao’s architecture and one that can be accessed from devices anywhere in the world.

This new, distinctive artwork has been created exclusively for the museum’s permanent collection and inaugurates its three-year plan to present pioneering projects in which technology is at the heart of the art. 

In the open air, AR projections appear on the Guggenheim Bilbao’s façade from five campus sites, in a virtual echo of For Bilbao. Holzer selected texts from different authors for the projections – the artwork’s title, Like Beauty In Flames, is borrowed from Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska’s compelling poem Beauty Dies.

Inside the museum, an AR version of one of Holzer’s LED signs glides through the central atrium, the column contorting and spiralling as Truisms in English, Spanish, Basque and French scroll past.

Like Beauty In Flames can be experienced via a dedicated app for mobile devices, which has been developed by London-based digital agency Holition and is available to download from The Apple App Store or Google Play.

INFORMATION

Like Beauty In Flames is available to download from the Apple App Store or Google Play. 

guggenheim-bilbao.eus

jennyholzer.com

Jenny Holzer was 26 when she arrived in New York. The freshman art student at the Whitney Museum had grown up in Gallipolis, Ohio, a sleepy town in America’s Midwest, and had spent her early twenties jumping from place to place in search of her artistic identity. She started out as an abstract expressionist. Then she tried to capture the human form at its most explicit. But she was frustrated; the themes that animated her – sexual and physical violence against women, systemic abuses of power, meditations of love, lust and longing – could not be properly evoked by her canvas.

A year after she arrived in New York, she discovered a way to use language and started to work on what remains possibly her best-known series. Truisms was at first a series of posters: 250 single-sentence declarations on brightly-coloured paper, wheat-pasted onto Manhattan’s streets anonymously and often in the dead at night. Soon after arriving in the city, Holzer quickly became involved in Colab, a progressive downtown artist collective. There she began to associate with a new wave of explicitly feminist artists, names like Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Charlesworth.

Holzer worked on Truisms for two years. She would distill into one-liners the old, erudite texts from the reading list at the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, where she was a student, and turn them into statements resembling a haiku – something between a bon mot and a confessional cry for help. She would isolate provocative phrases from the academic texts found in the library, re-associating them in a new sequence, imbuing them with a very modern and very radical minority mindset.

By 1979, those in the know were beginning to associate the thought-provoking posters as the work of the young, comparatively shy woman from Ohio. This was a new, public-based and powerfully activist style of visual art. Street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambelton and Keith Haring had not yet been swallowed up by the established art world, while punk was animating youth culture, with the Ramones, New York Dolls and the Heartbreakers a fixture in Manhattan’s dive bars. Standing in the Guggenheim today, that era seems fused into Holzer’s persona, with the 68-year-old resplendent in Converse and an army surplus jacket, her hair falling almost to her waist.

And yet, while punk and street art places in opposition to the mainstream, Holzer showed an ability to take it down from the inside. In late 1980, some of Holzer's street art was included in the exhibition ‘Social Strategies by Women Artists’ at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Two years later, in 1981, she was exhibiting on the electronic billboards of Times Square. She talks today of ‘switching the messages’ of advertising. ‘It’s useful for people to see a message in the street that isn’t advertising, but perhaps has some real importance.’

With the help of the Public Art Fund programme, Holzer used the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) on the Spectacolor board of Times Square to take Truisms to the millions who move through one of the iconic commercial districts of the world – a dazzling light-show of advertising and commerce. One of Holzer’s the most iconic statements – Protect Me From What I Want – was beamed out across New York. Associated phrases also shown have had a comparably long shelf-life. Raise Boys and Girls the Same Way, another Holzer phrase, became a rallying cry for the LGBT rights protests in the US, while Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise was used as a point of reference for the #metoo movement.

Now, Truisms is visible in one of the early rooms of ‘Thing, Indescribable’, a quite jaw-dropping retrospective of Holzer’s work at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, and which includes never-seen-before ‘site-responsive’ installations built especially to respond to Frank Gehry’s architectural creation.

I ask Holzer at the opening of the event about the use of her work by the #metoo movement, and how she feels about the ongoing fight for women’s rights when a self-avowed abuser of women sits in the Oval Office. ‘The women are going to win this one, and Trump is going to go away. It’s just not happening fast enough,’ she tells me. You have no doubt, I ask. ‘No, no, no – the women are not going to go back into the back of the cave. I think he’s most inspirational in this department,’ says Holzer. ‘Because if it wasn’t clear before, it is now. He’s tangential [to the women’s movement]. But it’s good to have something useful from him.’

Jenny Holzer in her Brooklyn studio with works in progress.

Holzer has a long association with the Spanish city’s iconic gallery, which last year hosted four of the 20 most-seen exhibitions in the world. In the atrium of the building, visitors still trace their way trough the original installation built by Holzer for the opening of the exhibition in 1997. The art work is made up of nine luminous columns, each more than 12m high. Last year, Holzer gifted to the museum a set of engraved stone benches, many of which have been repurposed for this exhibition.

‘Thing, Indescribable’ demonstrates the diverse ways in which Holzer is able to harness different media to present and distribute her texts, from the monumental to the everyday, the highbrow to the lowbrow. It could be a chunk of marble, a canvas, a gleaming, colourful LED display – or a condom.

Holzer is now based in Hoosick Falls, a tiny village-like commune near the Green Mountain national park in upstate New York. By her own admission, she barely leaves the place. As she’s grown older, she’s become more focused on finding and appropriating the words of others, rather than forming phrases of her own. At the same time, her work has become more sculptural, more experiential. Rather than a poster, we now enter a cavernous space.

In a vaulted, curved room of the Guggenheim Bilbao, we witness hanging from the ceiling an installation titled Sworn Statement. In 2004, the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command (USACIDC) launched an inquiry after reports of abuse at Afghanistan’s Gardez Fire Base were brought to light in the American media. Afghan detainees, witnesses, doctors and American soldiers at Gardez and other facilities were interviewed. Yet the USACIDC investigators ultimately accepted the US soldiers’ denials, and ruled no abuse had taken place. Holzer has taken testimonials from the investigators’ reports and placed them in this huge LED installation, asking us to form our own judgement on how and if someone could invent experiences of abuse like this.

In the adjoining room we come across Ram, an LED sign measuring over seven metres long and attached to a robotic system which draws the work back and forth across the floor of the gallery. Words scroll along each face of the sign at varying speeds. We witness the text periodically flashing, blacking out, and breaking into rainbow spectrums that cast a toxic glow on the surrounding floor. The differing speeds evoke speech patterns, which Holzer describes as the kinetic equivalent to inflection in the voice’.

Ram holds a selection of poems from the Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska, who joined the Warsaw Uprising during the Second World War. She wrote about her experience 30 years later, publishing her cycle of 100 poems in 1974. Surrounding both Ram and Sworn Statement are piles of human bones. Inside the next room, two stone sarcophagi, one made from red Ankara marble and the other from Nubian black granite, feature sections of Holzer’s text Laments (1989). Written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Holzer wrote in the first-person to chronicle the voices of unknown and unnamed victims to the epidemic – men, women and children.

Finally, we witness another new LED installation. Titled I Woke Up Naked, the work explores first-hand testimonies from survivors of sexual assault and rape. They’re such massive, almost overwhelming works of art that it might be easy to forget how deep and personal they are to Holzer. But, speaking at the launch, Holzer gives an insight into her own experiences of post-natal depression – a reminder that the ongoing battle for feminine equality remains anything but an abstract issue.

‘When I had my daughter, I had to come out in a different way to be right for her,’ Holzer says. ‘It took me about six years to be where I should have been when she was born. That involves tenderness and an ability to give something sustaining. ‘She’s not as weird as I am now, so it was a little victory, I guess.’

INFORMATION

‘Jenny Holzer: Thing Indescribable’ is on view until 9 September. For more information, visit the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
48009 Bilbao

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‘I don’t believe in cooking as an art form,’ admits German artist Rosemarie Trockel, famous for her machine-knitted works. ‘I have never cooked anything in my entire life, and neither have I personally knitted anything,’ she admits. But this lack of culinary ability has not stopped Trockel from recently redesigning a Düsseldorf restaurant called Lido Malkasten.

Located in a 1950s addition to the legendary Malkasten, which translates as ‘paintbox’ and has been home to the city’s artists’ association since the 1860s, Lido Malkasten features site-specific artworks and bistronomy-inspired cuisine by chef Florian Ohlmann, who has worked for Alain Ducasse in Paris. The centrepiece is a 400 sq m carpet, Trockel’s largest artwork to date, which she created in collaboration with manufacturer Desso. ‘The carpet was supposed to be yellow,’ says Trockel, ‘but there’s always the possibility of a bottle of red wine tipping over.’

In the main dining room, the carpet is teamed with custom-made, colour-coded Thonet chairs and round tables, while a safari theme prevails on the mezzanine. On the wall of the open kitchen hang black and white prints – featuring stoves, pendants and a theatre curtain, created by Trockel for the space and referencing her earlier work. ‘The philosophy of the kitchen is a favourite subject,’ Trockel says. ‘It’s a place where communities and families gather – it’s the birthplace of our lives.’

On another wall, the artist has placed her own work alongside loans from friends such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, whom she met in New York in the early 1980s. The display will change regularly, as Trockel plans to eat in the restaurant regularly. ‘I have always loved to eat,’ she says, ‘and I am lucky enough to have friends who are very skilled in the kitchen.’

As originally featured in the April 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*229)

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Lido Malkasten website

ADDRESS

Lido Malkasten
Jacobistraße 6
40211 Düsseldorf
Germany

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For nearly four decades, the American artist Jenny Holzer has put unexpected things into unlikely locations. She has projected verses of poetry onto the banks of the Tiber in Rome; relayed slogans across the electronic billboards in New York’s Times Square (‘Protect me from what I want’, said one); inscribed tales of human cruelty onto human skin in ink made of blood; and in her earliest days, used everything from T-shirts to condom packets to disseminate texts all around the city. ‘Men don’t protect you anymore’, cautioned the prophylactic boxes in 1985.

So the fact that she’s about to install a 21st-century version of a medieval battering ram in Hauser & Wirth’s Zurich gallery should come as no surprise. Or that, come September, she hopes to use cutting-edge technology to overlay text onto heroic battle tapestries at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the testimonies of rather more contemporary veterans of war.

She says she’s been ‘sneaking up’ on one of Britain’s stateliest of homes for a while now, the palace itself a spoil of war. (The magnificent pile was John Churchill’s reward from the nation for winning the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.) ‘I very much appreciate the exterior, the complexity and strength of the architecture, but especially the blushing quality of its walls,’ she says. ‘When I found out that the pink colour comes from iron in the stone, I thought, what a great metaphor for a military prize!’ Perhaps it put her in mind of seeping blood, too.

When we meet in the picture-perfect village of Woodstock, just down the road from Blenheim, Holzer is warm and witty and upbeat. (And tall, very tall.) Her work has often been inspired by battles – women’s rights, AIDS, Yugoslavia, Iraq – and the results are always powerful, disturbing even, but never depressing or dour. ‘I grew up in the 1950s,’ she says. ‘My father was a veteran, there was still a lot about World War II on TV and in films. I was imprinted by war, and it’s shown up in my work. I’ve not done Matisse’s Joy of Life, that’s for sure. But I just dealt with what’s out there.’

Our limited-edition cover by Jenny Holzer, Design for Linens from Counter-Intelligence Document, graphite and watercolour on vellum, 2017. Limited-edition covers are available to subscribers. See inside the issue here

Not long after the 9/11 attacks in New York (her studio is in Brooklyn), she developed an ongoing interest in archived declassified US government documents – descriptions and denials of military abuse in Afghanistan, reports from Save the Children and, more recently, first-hand information from Syrian refugee camps – all heavily marked with the thick black lines that are struck through information deemed too sensitive for public revelation, more commonly known as redacted text. ‘I’m drawn to first-hand accounts and primary source material,’ she says. ‘Even if hundreds of words are missing, if you read 500 of them, you’ll come to some sort of accuracy.’

A single surviving phrase on page 26 of a 45-page FBI report compiled in 2004 about the terrorist threat to the US, ‘Shifting to softer targets’, inspired the title of her 2015 show at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. More fighting talk has found its way onto Holzer’s battering ram, with close to 60 works by the poet Anna Swir – a Polish resistance fighter during World War II – running along its 7.6m arm as LED letters. Holzer worked out the battering ram mechanics by watching medieval battle re-enactments on YouTube. ‘To me, the battering ram represents war at large, what happens when you turn on the TV and feel assaulted, and the ongoing, escalating war against women,’ she says, before adding brightly, ‘but it looks like a sex toy, too!’

Now 66, Holzer embarked on her art career at a time when no one expected to turn a profit by following their creative dreams. She studied painting and printmaking in Chicago and Ohio, then did an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. But it was her time at the Independent Study Program at New York’s Whitney Museum that introduced her to literature and philosophy, and drove her practice towards the use of pithy texts that could be inserted into the cityscape. By the late 1970s, she was printing phrases like ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise’ in black serif type onto white stickers and pasting them on phone boxes and front doors in Lower Manhattan.

‘We didn’t think about making a living as an artist,’ she says. ‘Kiki Smith was an electrician’s assistant. I worked for Laundry News, I’m proud to say, as a typesetter. Our practice wasn’t skewed by the need to sell anything. We had no reason to tilt our work one way or the other.’ Holzer’s aim was always to be invisible and for the Truisms, as she called them, to speak for themselves. But success came quickly; the phrases hit home. In 1990, she became the first female artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, though not everyone approved. ‘Robert Hughes [the most venerated art critic of the day] wrote, “Miss Smarty gave a party; no one came”. He said, if it had to be a woman, then why had they chosen me?’

Holzer has always hidden in the shadows to see how people would react to her work. ‘My favourite pieces are still the light projections,’ she says of works where entire poems, sometimes by Swir, who wrote of war, death and the female body, are displayed on walls, trees or running water. ‘People just come across them, and it’s a treat to watch them watching. In the city, people form quiet, contemplative groups. They don’t know I’m there and besides, outside the art world, they wouldn’t care.’

She tells me about a time in Mexico City when a dust storm came up and made both the front and backs of the letters visible in the glow of the projector. ‘They were wafer thin, but I’d never seen the back of a letter, in space, travelling,’ she says. ‘That’s how I get my aesthetic thrills, with pulsing amber LED light.’ Or at least it was. More recently, Holzer – the artist who once said it was ‘absurdly hard’ to make a good painting – has picked up a paintbrush again. Her Redaction Paintings follow the shapes formed by the large blocks of deleted words in the various documents she has found, but she renders them in oranges, blues, whites, greys and reds. The end results look, to all the world, like abstract works, and the woman who once blurted out text is now working with its elimination.

‘I’m a closet painting fan,’ she says, ‘and I talk to a lot of dead artists. I think about Cy Twombly – I so admire his hand. Not that I have that hand, but I want to attempt my own version and that’s what I’m doing at 3am with watercolours.’ She paints standing at an easel. ‘It’s nice to involve the body after all this thinking and rooting through digital archives. I like to fret in motion.’

The new paintings will be seen in Zurich, but so will Holzer’s more techy side. She’s currently developing an app that will allow visitors to make their own augmented reality projections from their phones. ‘You could have a text from Save the Children, or from Anna Swir, and you could relay it onto your lover’s back, or a waterfall.’ Perhaps even those vast tapestries at Blenheim Palace – ten of them, each 15ft high – which depict John Churchill’s triumph over Louis XIV. For the opening weeks, there will also be outdoor projections in Blenheim’s grand gardens.

Meanwhile, Holzer is alert to present portents of war and will be watching her new president’s progress with caution. ‘Hillary is hardworking and intelligent. If being a woman got in her way, that’s hard to take,’ she says. ‘And Trump? Well, he’s the worst result possible, for the United States, and possibly for the world.’ So, I ask, what would you put on a condom packet now? ‘Oh that’s easy,’ she says. ‘Today I’d say: “Republican men are even worse”.’

As originally featured in the July 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*220)

INFORMATION

Jenny Holzer is showing 12 June – 29 July at Hauser & Wirth Zurich and 28 September through 31 December at Blenheim Palace. For more information, visit the Hauser & Wirth website, Blenheim Art Foundation website and Jenny Holzer website

Upon entering the peculiar playpen of design currently on view at Chamber in New York, the urge to learn the exhibition's theme is inevitable. With 'Just What Is It' – the show's tongue-in-cheek title – the answer is a little more complex; the jumble is an artwork of its own, a conceptual collage conceived by Switzerland-based curator Matylda Krzykowski.

Krzykowski follows in the footsteps of Studio Job and Andrew Zuckerman for the third iteration of the exhibition series at the boutique/gallery. Taking her inspiration directly from Richard Hamilton’s collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, Krzykowski reinterprets the British artist’s concept in a 3D compilation of specially comissioned and existing works.

'Ancient Drawing of a Very Mysterious Forceniert Nochmals' by Rafal Dominik

‘Richard Hamilton thrived on ambivalence, playfulness and observation, and without comparison, I thrive on the same,’ says Krzykowski. Contrasting forms, like Studio Silo’s surreal Chicken sculpture and Studio Swine’s boulder-shaped ‘Metallic Geology’ cupboard, she appraises the side of design void of consumerism. The curator explains: 'Once something is successful, the industry mass-produces it to a level that nothing is left from the initial idea.'

The fringes of the 'photomontage' play between silhouettes in steel squiggles by Polish sculptor Rafal-Dominik, and organic curved shelves by Robert Stadler. These stand in opposition to the abstract geometry of a trio of specially comissioned pieces – Florian Ziller’s dynamic foldable mirror, Martino Gamper’s rubbish bins and Deborah Bowmann industrial room dividers, all in metallic or reflective finishes.

Elsewhere Jochen Holz's blown glass neons and Os and Oos' graphic lighting straddle the realms of art and functional design. Mirka Laura's Still Life series tackles Krzykowski's tumult, questioning the very notion of what a product is.

Still life by Mirka Laura

Krzykowski steers clear of the one-note palette of mass-produced domestic design too – blue accents guide visitors around the space. Sprawled across the central marble plinth is Louie Rigano and Gil Muller’s robust weaved rug, Jiří Pelcl's whimsical metal teddies and Tina Roeder’s shelving, all in similar electric hues.

‘Once the pieces in the gallery find an owner, the mode of camaraderie is broken, and the individual relationship to these possessions begins,’ she adds. Krzykowski intends to add more layers to her collage – the next three chapters of her installation are set to unfold between now and spring next year.

INFORMATION

’Just What Is It’ is on view until May 2017. For more information, visit the Chamber NYC website

ADDRESS

Chamber
515 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

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The idle days of summer are quickly becoming prime territory for art world extravaganzas. So it makes sense that Ibiza is quickly becoming a hub for such programming. 

From Christo's Floating Piers on Italy's Lake Iseo, to Roberto Cuoghi’s Putiferio installation/performance in Hydra at Projectspace Slaughterhouse, and Katharina Grosse's Rockaway! installation at Fort Tilden, the idle days of summer are quickly becoming prime territory for art world extravaganzas. So it makes sense that Ibiza is quickly becoming a hub for such programming.

Last August, collector/curator/hotelier Lio Malca opened La Nave Salinas, a former salt warehouse turned 8,000 sq ft exhibition space, with a show of paintings and sculpture by KAWS that was surrounded by highlights from his collection (including works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol).

This summer, Malca is giving the space over to Marco Brambilla. Known primarily for his mesmerising 3D video collages in the elevators of the Standard Highline hotel in New York, La Nave will show the entirety of the artist's Megaplex trilogy.

'Each piece in the trilogy deals with a specific human narrative,' says Brambilla, whose epic historical narratives and hyper-saturated tableaux were inspired by Breugel and Bosch. 'I wanted the pieces to test the limits of visual overload, looping and interlacing in a way that confounds the temporal parameters of the moving image.'

For Brambilla, the trilogy works as 'surrogate movie theatre floating within the brick space'. He says, 'I wanted the visitor's first impression upon entering the space to simultaneously satirise and celebrate the golden era of Hollywood.'

Jenny Holzer took a similar approach with her two-site exhibition, 'Are you alive?', at Guy Laliberté's Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza spaces. The galleries display works from the Lune Rouge collection in the winter and stage projects with artists in the collection in the summer, beginning last year with a Blum & Poe curated show from Takashi Murakami. 'We really let the artist decide the pace and the project,' says director Heather Harmon. 'Jenny really wanted to go out into the landscape and find materials she wanted to experiment with against the architecture of the spaces.'

Inside the Art Projects Ibiza space Holzer installed a group of LED works attached to false walls (with texts running into and out of the wall) and a larger, more dynamic version of her animatronic work, Sworn Statement. And at Lune Rouge, Holzer has a series of footstools made with stones she's never worked with – Bahia Azul and Labradorite from Madagascar with impacted pearlescent shards – inscribed with the artist's iconic Truisms.

Meanwhile, Holzer excavated 13 boulders from the island upon which she inscribed lines of verse (in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Catalan) from modernist poets like Hilda Doolittle and Guillaume Apollinaire. 'They all explore modernity and sexuality in phrases about the land and the sea,' says Harmon. 'Some are in plain sight and those have really incredible views and they really make you observe the landscape. [...] Others are nestled in the middle of pine trees that are more secluded and you can have a more quiet, intimate moment. She wanted people to walk around the property and discover them. It's almost like a treasure hunt.'

With a vieweing approximately every thirty minutes, the exhibition is the third time Megaplex is being shown to the public. The previous two showings have been at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, and the Venice Film Festival.

Megaplex is a 3D video trilogy, featuring the works Civilization, 2008; Evolution, 2010 and Creation, 2012. ’Each piece in the trilogy deals with a specific human narrative,’ says Brambilla, whose epic historical narratives and hyper-saturated tableaux were inspired by Breugel and Bosch.

Over at Guy Laliberté’s galleries Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza, Jenny Holzer presents the two-site exhibition ’Are you alive?’.

The exhibition brings together several text-based works by Holzer, from LED installations and Truisms carved into footstools and benches, to  boulders inscribed with verse.

The footstools and benches are made from rocks including Porto Rose quartzite and Sodalite blue.

Inside the Art Projects Ibiza space, Holzer installed a group of LED works attached to false walls (with texts running into and out of the wall) and and a larger, more dynamic version of her animatronic work, Sworn Statement.

LED installation pieces have long been a signature medium of the American artist.

INFORMATION

’Marco Brambilla: Megaplex’ is on view at Lio Malca until 30 September. ’Jenny Holzer: Are you alive?’ is on view until 17 December. For more information, visit Lio Malca’s website, the Lune Rouge website or the Art Projects Ibiza website

ADDRESS

La Nave Salinas
Carrer La Canal 2 12-13
07830 Sant Josep de Sa Talaia
Ibiza

Lune Rouge
Calle Alcalde Bartomeu Rosselló Sala, 7
07800 Ibiza

Art Projects Ibiza
Callle Alcalde Bartomeu Rosselló Sala, 9B
07800 Ibiza

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Even in the colossal threshing barn, the first room we enter in Hauser & Wirth's year-old gallery in Bruton, Somerset, Jenny Holzer's new 2.5m LED ticker Move is a commanding presence, able to stand on its own. Or rather hang, vertically; its text rising up to the vaulted ceiling in a rhythm controlled, via sensors, by the movements of visitors.

It's mesmerising, not least because its 'thoughts' are extracted from wartime documents declassified by the US government in response to Freedom of Information requests. To read Move in its entirety would take most of the day, but even ten minutes will get you in the gut. It is the flagship installation in a mini-retrospective that encompasses her Truisms of the 1970s and 80s; her 1994 Lustmord Table from the height of conflict in the former Yugoslavia; and new paintings that faithfully and painfully transcribe declassified documents.

Holzer's work speaks volumes, to twist the cliche. So loaded is it with the power to bewilder and infuriate, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the artist herself would offer so few words as commentary. What more could she have to say?

Present and amenable at the recent launch of 'Softer Targets', Holzer nonetheless spoke sparingly. Her positioning of Move, dangling downward at the centre of the 18th-century barn, was 'possibly Freudian'. As we proceed to the next gallery, lit naturally from unusually tall windows, she expands on how useful it was to handle the primary source material, gathered over weeks at the National Archives in Washington DC.

'These documents were written in the moment, by people who were not thinking anyone might be reading it one day,' says Holzer. 'It's not just one person's filter – they were reacting to orders and decisions made by others.'

Here are the new paintings, hand-traced from victims' own script, testimonials of 'very sad and very brave things'. One is taken from a woman clearly suffering from mental illness, another from an Afghan prisoner whose brother died in custody. An earlier series reproduces heavily redacted memos – one of which leaves just a single word uncensored: 'waterboard'. 'You wonder if the people tasked with redacting the text were playing around,' says Holzer. If 'waterboard' was the least damning word in the memo, what's been blacked out? Or was leaving it exposing a red herring?

In the Rhoades Gallery, a 12m LED post called Floor butts up against the wall, its cascade of text – extracts from the artist's best known works – seemingly sucked into and spat out by the adjacent wall. It directs us outside, where one-line Truisms from Holzer's early career are carved into a collection of granite benches. 'As a child I thought the art world would be much improved if there was just more seating,' says Holzer.

Nearby, Louise Bourgeois' Spider perches in the full summer grass, leading the eye to the big sky, providing solace. Out here, the inevitable lump in the throat begins to ease. Feelings of peace and freedom pervade the country air. 'It's kind of great having the spider on guard,' says Holzer.

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth Somerset
Durslade Farm
Dropping Lane
Bruton, Somerset
BA10 0NL

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The sleeping security guard is already the star of this year's edition of Frieze. He sits, we assume he sits there still, head propped against a wall of the Hauser & Wirth stand, snoozing oblivious, tweeted and Instagrammed, gone social, possibly even viral. It doesn't look like a happy sleep, or a tormented sleep or an active sleep, just a standard preparation for death sleep. Frieze can get you that way.

Visitors look at the tagged-up security guide and smile or think about a prod. Is he art or just a lazy sentinel? He is art of course - phew, no unpleasantness required then - actually Sleeping Guard by Christoph Büchel. And he is part of what is easily the most interesting and successfully conceived stand at the fair.

Curated by Mark Wallinger, a new signing for Hauser & Wirth, the stand is cluttered and domestic. Titled 'A Study in Red and Green', it is a take on Sigmund Freud's study in Hampstead and greater than the sum of its Louise Bourgeois, Martin Creed, Paul McCarthy, Roni Horn, Subodh Gupta (amongst others) parts. It feels nocturnal, like the seemingly random-but-not-stops of a restless unconscious. Perhaps these are the security guard's dreams. Who knows what he has seen. There are other interesting things to look at, disorientating and random in their own way, but nothing as arresting.

Carsten Höller has created a kindergarten at the Gagosian stand. Which is nice. Cory Arcangel's carpet on the Lisson Gallery stand is a success. The gallery goes big on Arcangel's video pieces and Ryan Gander's concrete sculptures and to good effect. Thomas Dane's stand is well composed and I liked the paintings by Ella Kruglyanskaya, a New York-based Latvian, at the Gavin Brown stand which looked French and flighty and funny though no one else seemed much taken.

There is a strong showing from Brazilian galleries this year, including Galeria Luisa Strina from Sao Paulo and the excellent A Gentil Carioca from Rio. They are a welcome addition to the mix, even if most of the action is around the cluster of blue chips during the press and VIP opening (how 'V' is always hard to know. The Frieze caste system remains impenetrable.)

The experience (more of an 'assault' in the past) is also generally more civilised this year. BarberOsgerby's Universal Design Studio has designed the tent and the aisles are wide and there is more air in the air but still too few places to sit down and get your bearings. The VIPs - men in art scarves and art spectacles, tottering ladies in leopard print skirts with taut, tortured looking faces - are as worth watching as ever. And listening too.

The more abundant air is kissed, dinner arrangements made (and probably forgotten) before they wobble or glide back to their idling luxury sedans which will spend much of the rest of the day snarled and stuttering amongst other luxury sedans. While our security guard, happily or unhappily, remains oblivious.

ADDRESS

Frieze London
Regent’s Park
London NW1 4PJ

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