Tom Sachs: locked and loaded…

Better known as the “Olympics of the art world,” the mammoth art convention that is the real ART BASEL, as in Basel Switzerland, not Miami, was in full effect last week in the land of money and chocolate. Luckily, our international man of mystery MISTER G was on the spot to take in the debauchery and bring us a glimpse of some of the exhibition’s greatest hits. Also on display at this year’s Basel—now in its 38th year—was NIKE’s aesthetic celebration of the checkered ball in the form of “ART/OF/FOOTBALL,” a user generated content exhibition curated in conjunction with SHOWstudio as part of Basel’s DESIGN/MIAMI fair. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

Helper gets a makeover… 

Supertouch’s own TIM BISKUP unleashed his attack on the art world high and low last week when his show of new paintings “The Artist In You” opened at the JONATHAN LEVINE GALLERY. Packing in a crowd of admirers, gawkers, and stone throwers like lemmings in a tin, Mr Biskup revealed a new series of heavily cubist-inspired works reflecting his new, minimal aesthetic direction and released a new book of ponderings/vitriolic rants on the state of the art world that gave the show its name. Love it or hate it, Mr Biskup’s exhibition was one of the most thought-provoking bodies of work to hit the so-called alternative art world in some time and one glance at the accompanying writings (which are available as a free PDF download HERE) will have you pondering your own artistic inadequacies and cursing the hypocrisy of the fine art world simultaneously. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

Geoff’s custom bike is easier to ride than it looks but parking’s a nightmare…

Graphic design & fine art powerhouse GEOFF McFETRIDGE is a force of nature, consistently pulling off incredibly compelling installations in an oftentimes-static art scene. Such is the case with both of the young artist’s current exhibitions (in radically different scales) at Seattle’s OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK and the fantastic MOLLUSK SURF SHOP in San Francisco. Creating a massive landscape of sculptural and printed works for the long-term installation “In The Mind” in Seattle that opened late last month, McFetridge’s bold imagery creates a playful environment—the centerpiece of which is a huge and amazing blue trumpet/bicycle sculpture—that is daunting in its scale. In contrast, the artist’s exhibit “Bury Me in the Sand” in San Francisco is a much smaller-scale but equally compelling one nonetheless. Featuring a large array of hand-drawn and printed works along with custom skateboards, McFetridge’s Mollusk show is a very intimate, personal affair, with the artist’s hand evident in all the works on display. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

The art world’s power couple: Jeff Koons & Shepard Fairey… 

In NYC as a featured speaker at the media symposium announcing the launch of GOOGLE’s new iGoogle artist themes last week, Supertouch’s own SHEPARD FAIREY shared the stage with none other than mega artstar JEFF KOONS. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Google’s new themes for personalizing the interactive iGoogle page include imagery and gadgets by Lance Armstrong, Shepard Fairey, Hysteric Glamour’s Nobu Kitamura, A Bathing Ape’s Nigo, Jeff Koons, The Beastie Boys, and the Rolling Stone’s Ronnie Wood to name a few. In other SHEPARD FAIREY news, it seems our boy wasn’t content tackling the realms of popular culture and politiks with his trademark neo-constructivist artwork and has moved on to the canon of modern literature by redesigning the covers of author GEORGE ORWELL’s legendary novels of doom and paranoia, “1984,” and “Animal Farm.” Damn, kids are spoiled these days…

LA-based painter SYLVIA JI’s morbidly beautiful women are as alluring as they are complex, and when a new army of them went on display at Culver City’s COREY HELFORD GALLERY late last week, they were greeted by a throng of adoring fans who fell hard for their noir charms. Titled “Por Vida“ the new show of acrylic on wood paintings, many of them large-scale, further explores 26-year-old Ji’s fascination with love, death, and fleeting beauty, all colored with heavy doses of symbolic imagery for good measure. A veritable who’s-who of the LA art scene turned out to support our girl who sold the gig out in no time at all. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend Brooklyn’s emporium of high tattoo art, SCOTT CAMPBELL’s SAVED TATTOO played host to the East Coast installment of the American Breast Cancer Foundation’s charity art show “Seul Contre Tous (’Alone Against All’): Art for a Cure” where tattoo art heavyweights like CHRIS CONN, FILIP LEU, HORIYOSHI III, GRIME, CHRIS O’DONNELL, TIM LEHI, and DAN TROCCHIO, showed original works alongside modern art stars like BANKSY, SHEPARD FAIREY, DEREK HESS, MICHAEL HUSSAR, and BLEK LE RAT. All work sold benefits the research foundation directly and is tax deductible, so break out those black cards and ring up our boy Othelo (718 486 0850) now to take home some original art. HAVE A LOOK:

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