Good News -ART LA, New Los Angeles International Contemporary Art Fair

ART LA, the New Los Angeles International Contemporary Art Fair, takes place at the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport,
January 23 - 25 2009. The fair presents a select roster of 60 top international and Los Angeles based galleries representing an informed cross-section of today's contemporary art trends and directions.

The exhibiting galleries at ART LA are an even balance of established blue chip and emerging galleries, all presenting the most progressive, international art work being produced today. Half of the exhibitors hail from the immediate Los Angeles area, and half are from the United States and abroad.

The fair is designed to spotlight the Los Angeles art scene and its prominence within current international artistic trends. The fair brings influential international galleries and their artists work for the interested art patron and collector alike to enjoy. The finest examples of contemporary art work will be available for view and sale.

The weekend of ART LA 2009 has been expanded to include a full auxiliary programming series. Special exhibitions, performances, conversations and premiere film screenings will be staged at the Barker Hangar and throughout the city during the run of the fair.

in www.art-la.com

Damien Hirst - The Young British Artist

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst’s wide-ranging practice – installations, sculpture, painting and drawing – has sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture. His energy and inventiveness, and his consistently visceral, visually arresting work, has made him a leading artist of his generation.

Hirst explores the uncertainty at the core of human experience; love, life, death, loyalty and betrayal through unexpected and unconventional media. Best known for the ‘Natural History’ works, which present animals in vitrines suspended in formaldehyde such as the iconic The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) and Mother and Child Divided (1993), his works recast fundamental questions concerning the meaning of life and the fragility of biological existence. For Hirst, the vitrine functions as both window and barrier, seducing the viewer into the work visually while providing a minimalist geometry to frame, contain and objectify his subject. In many of the sculptures of the 1990s, such as The Acquired Inability to Escape (1991) and The Asthmatic Escaped (1992) a human presence was implied through the inclusion of relic-like objects: clothes, cigarettes, ashtrays, tables and chairs. That implied human presence became explicit in Ways of Seeing (2000), a vitrine sculpture with a figure of a laboratory technician seated at a desk looking through a microscope. The more celebratory work Hymn (2000), a polychrome bronze sculpture, reveals the anatomical musculature and internal organs of the human body on a monumental scale. Hirst is equally renowned for his paintings. These include his ‘Butterfly Paintings’, tableaux of actual butterflies suspended in paint, or in Amazing Revelations (2003), for instance, he arranged thousands of butterfly wings in a mandala-like pattern. His ‘Spin’ series are made with a machine that centrifugally disperses the paint steadily poured onto a shaped canvas surface, while his ‘Spot’ series have a rigorous grid of uniform sized dots. Recently, he has explored photo-realism in the ‘Fact’ paintings.

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, UK. He lives and works in London and Devon. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Into Me / Out of Me, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006), In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Tate Britain, the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and Century City, Tate Modern (2001). Solo exhibitions include Astrup Fearnley Museet fur Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2005), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2005) and Archaeological Museum, Naples (2004). He received the DAAD fellowship in Berlin in 1994 and the Turner Prize in 1995.

in whitecube.com