ART - NEWS / PAINTINGS / MASTERCLASS / Pierre van Dijk
$ 400K Fish Balloons
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
Philippe Parreno's $ 400K Fish Balloons are a hit with collectors (and children) at Art Basel in Miami BeachThe fish of the French artist comes with a number of interesting maintenance requirements. Julia Halperin ,
Tucked between the gangways of the Miami Beach Convention Center, one woman has the best or the worst job on the entire fair: balloon wrestler.
She has the task not to float the inflatable fish of the French artist Philippe Parreno from the booth of London-based dealer Pilar Corrias. At Art Basel in Miami Beach, the My Room gallery is Another Fish Bowl (2016), an installation of silkscreen-mylar balloons that float around in the loft as if hanging in water.
Parreno originally created the work as part of his Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern in London, which was closed in April.
Philippe Parreno's My Room is Another Fish Bowl (2016) with its fish cracker at Art Basel in Miami Beach.
But if the hollow turbine hall was an aquarium that gave the fish sufficient space to roam around, the relatively tight part of a fairground window is related to a fishbowl. And without proper supervision the fish can take a break.
"Before the fair opened, the people of the White Cube brought back one that had escaped through the hallway," says Mary Cork, director of the gallery. A local helium supplier drops new inflatable versions every other day, so that the fish stay in top shape.
The balloon-based installation, priced at € 350,000 ($ 412,818), is the latest available edition of the work, which is being sold in a three-copy editor (plus a proof from an artist). It was at the end of the VIP preview of the fair on Wednesday.
All together, each version of the work consists of a total of 90 balloons: 30 salmon, 30 smelt and 30 roache. A collector can choose to display as much or as little as they want. At Art Basel in Miami Beach only three fish can be seen, but that seems more than enough to serve the stand officer.
What is it like to be a balloon wrestler? "It is better than to stand still all day long", Melody Alexander, a local Miami, tells Artnet News about her new performance.
The happy buyer of My Room is Another Fish Bowl will receive the 90 fish plus 60 additional backup balloons. Any further replacements must be ordered through the Parreno studio.
A similar installation - focusing on tropical fish - put a record for the artist at the auction last month. After fierce competition it sold at Christie's for $ 516,500 with premium, well above the estimate of $ 250,000-350,000. (Parreno's previous auction record, set in 2012 for another balloon-based job, was only $ 19,380.)
"The material itself does not really respond to the value - there is no sense of value," says Cork. It can occupy and adapt to any space. "It is literally a pop-up sculptural work."
Indeed: it gives a whole new meaning to the term 'pop art'.
How Many Animals Have Died for Damien Hirst’s Art to Live? We Counted. Nearly one million, by our conservative estimate. Damien Hirst is back . More than a decade after he last made headlines, the artist has a new exhibition at François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana in Venice with a new body of work that delves into the imagined story of an ancient collector and the shipwreck that consigned his treasures to the bottom of the sea. One of the many noteworthy elements of the show? It doesn’t contain the unusual art material that has powered Hirst’s most famous work: the dead bodies of animals. Ever since his explosive entry to the British art scene with his 1990 masterpiece One Thousand Years —a vitrine featuring a rotting cow skull that breeds maggots that become flies that meet their end from a buzzing bug zapper above—Hirst has made mortality the great theme of his oeuvre. He deploys real cadavers in gallery settings to confront viewers with the...
David Choe’s Controversial Bowery Mural Targeted in Protest Against Rape Culture The art world is protesting after David Choe bragged about a questionable sexual encounter. The Bowery Mural, currently home to a controversial work by street artist David Choe, will be the site of an anti-rape protest and performance art piece titled “NO MEANS NO” on June 18. The high-profile street art location has come under fire for offering a platform to Choe, after he bragged about a sexual encounter that sounded anything but consensual. The protest is organized by curator Jasmine Wahi, co-owner and director of the Gateway Project Spaces, and founder and director of Project For Empty Space, both in Newark. “This piece is intended to examine examples of violent and predatory misogyny,” reads the Facebook invite to the event. “Our aim is to provoke widespread rejection of the continued normalization of rape culture by bringing visibility to the topic.” Th...
‘Radical Women’ at the Hammer Museum Is the Kind of Show That Art Critics Live For It leaves you wanting more, and asking questions. “ Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 ” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is not just a fantastic exhibition. It’s the kind of exhibition that people always say we need more of—as regular as a ticking clock—every time the latest selfie-courting contemporary-art spectacular provokes a new spasm of anguish from critics about the decline of the museum. Based on six years of research, “Radical Women” is a serious and scholarly show. And yet at the same time it feels like its own kind of crowd-pleaser. You don’t have to choose between being smart and being popular if you’re telling a story that feels necessary. And “Radical Women” has necessary stories to spare. Installation view of “Radical Women.” Image: Ben Davis. The show brings together 116 female artists hailing from ...
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank you for your response
Kind regards Pierre