• Artist Louise Bourgeois died today in Manhattan at 98 years old. Born in Paris in 1911, she “gained fame only late in a long career,” with the recent sculptural spider Maman being among her best-known work. For more information go to the New York Times website.
• Experimental film is the subject of the exhibition “Celluloid. Cameraless Film” at the Schirn museum in Frankfurt. 21 artists explore techniques of direct image creation on film stock, using processes like painting, scratching, and chemical manipulation to create colorfully abstract animations (see picture). Visit e-flux to read more.
• The Whitney Museum of American Art was open for 24 hours a day last week from Wednesday until Friday at 11:59 pm. Conceptual artist Michael Asher designed the all-night collection of tours, performance art and museum going. Click here for the article.
• A retrospective of 16 works by American artist Alice Neel from 1940 to 1978 is now on display at the L.A. Louver gallery in Venice, California. Neel’s striking portraiture and bohemian acquaintances earned her a spot on a FBI watch list in the 1950s. Read the full review of the show here.
• Kurt Jackson’s expressionist paintings of England’s Glastonbury music festival are being auctioned in an original fund-raising effort for Greenpeace. Jackson is the festival’s artist-in-residence, and his pictures include both landscapes and performances by Glastonbury acts like Radiohead. Check out Art Knowledge News to learn more.

• “Greater New York” is the title of the new exhibition at the MoMA P.S. 1 in Queens. Recent works from 68 emerging artists reveal a prevalence of performance, durational, and video art within the New York contemporary scene, and there is an “inexplicable optimism” that permeates the assortment of work. Article featured in The New York Times.
• The third edition of Hong Kong’s Art HK10 saw thousands of visitors flock to the city’s Exhibition Centre on Wednesday to view Asia’s “leading showcase for international Modern and Contemporary Art.”  More than 150 galleries from 29 countries presented works geared towards beginning art collectors and veterans alike. Head to The Art Newspaper for a full review.
• After more than ten years of preparation, Rome will open the doors of its new National Museum of XXI Century Arts – MAXXI – to the public on May 30. The building was designed by Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, the first woman to receive the Nobel Pritzker Prize in global architecture. Click here for more information.
• Two exhibitions now on view at Germany’s Kunstmuseum Wolfsberg jointly explore the influence of Austrian philosopher-architect Rudolf Steiner has had upon modernist art and culture. Fifteen contemporary artists will present their take on Steiner’s esoteric, transcendentalist ideas. Read more at e-flux.

• In a unanimous vote on Tuesday, the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art decided to begin construction on a new building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. With no room to expand at the institution’s uptown location, the new Whitney will expand the size and scope of the museum. For more information visit Art Forum.
• The 26th annual Art Amsterdam exhibition takes place May 26-30 and features a multinational collection of artists and exhibitors. Different programs will cater to specific interests and demographics, such as “No Holds Barred,” an unrestricted section sure to include a wide range of theme and media, and “Club C,” an invite-only selection of artistic debates, lectures and auctions. Read more at the Art Amsterdam website.
• A federal judge has denied an injunction made by Miami art collector Craig Robins against New York gallerist David Zwirner regarding a painting by artist Marlene Dumas. The judge proclaimed Robins’ breach of confidentiality lawsuit “unwarranted.” For more information about the case, visit The Art Newspaper.
• Edinburgh’s Jupiter Artland, a recent addition to the UK contemporary art scene, has announced four new site-specific sculptural commissions for its 80-acre grounds. Works by Cornelia Parker, Nathan Coley, and Jim Lambie – all short-listed for the Turner Prize – will be unveiled this month. Click here to learn more.

Olivia Pendergast, another of Mondo Fine Art’s talented artists, has been painting for over ten years, simply painting as a response to what she is experiencing in her life.  Olivia sites several artists who have inspired and influenced her paintings: Modigliani, Alice Neel, Egon Schiele, Jenny Saville, and Degas.

Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian artist who worked primarily in France as a figurative artist.  Modigliani became famous for his modern style with mask-like faces and elongated forms.  Olivia states that she was influenced by his “gentle, simple portraits of Humanity.”

Egon Schiele was a major figurative painter in the early 1900s.  Schiele’s work uses an intensity in the twisted bodies and expressive lines that give his work an element of  Expressionism.  His bold use of line is one of the primary influences on Olivia. Olivia says “There is an unspeakable [...] feeling that arises when I see line being used in art.  It seems to try to define what cannot be defined, what could never be truly known.”

Jenny Saville is an English artist best known for her monumental images of women.  Olivia has been influenced by the way Saville has used weight in her images.

Alice Neel was a famous American portrait artist.  Her paintings involved anyone from friends and family to other artists or even strangers.  Her work is known for expressionistic line and color, psychological insight and emotional intensity. “Truth about form and [the] grotesqueness of humanity” are the influential elements of Neel’s work that Olivia sited.

Olivia expresses admiration for the use of composition and negative space in Degas’ works. Edgar Degas was a French painter who was one of the primary founders of the Impressionist movement, though he rejected the term as it applied to his work.  Degas was a master at portraying movement, especially in his well known works of dancers.

Besides artistic influences, Olivia is inspired by the people she paints.  She says “I paint whatever breaks my heart” – whether it is musicians, nature, children, or people she has met in her travels. Two years ago Olivia had the opportunity to spend four months in Malawi, Africa, with the “goal to paint” and to find inspiration in a new people and way of life. One of the highlights of her trip was a visit to the Amatofo Care Center, a Buddhist orphanage, where she spent time drawing and reading with the children.

Olivia is still working on paintings of the Malawian people after returning from a second trip to Africa earlier this year.  She has also recently returned from doing humanitarian work in Haiti, where she had the opportunity to work with the children.

To view available works by Olivia, please visit her Mondo profile HERE.  We will be receiving new works from Olivia in the next month or so.  If you would like to be the first to view these new works, please enter your info on our contact page and click the box next to Olivia’s name.

• Through interviews with prominent Iranian female artists, Robert Adanto’s new documentary Pearls on the Ocean Floor examines the ways the younger generation of Iranians are forming a new cultural identity for their nation. The film reaches outside the cloistered and repressed stereotype of Islamic women, focusing instead on their compelling artistic responses to Iran’s continual national conflicts. For more information about the film, click here.
• A new exhibition at Britain’s Tate St. Ives, Object: Gesture: Grid: St. Ives and the International Avant-Garde, features the largest body of Collection work shown at the museum in over ten years. The show concentrates on the emergence of Modernist art in the seaside artists’ colony at St. Ives following WWII, and the relationship of the American and European ideas and practices that emerged there. Visit the Tate website for more information.
• The cities of New York and Turin are recognized as epicenters of Post-Minimalist sculpture in Forms of Contingency: New York and Turn 1960s-1970s, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September. Experimentation in forms of process and earth art, as well as the employment of non-art materials, characterize the conjunction of visual culture and object-making that developed in these two cities. Read more at e-flux.
• Click here to read Peter Plagens’s entertaining account of his visit to Beijing to attend the conference “China Contemporary Art Forum 2010: What Happened to Art Criticism? Problems in Chinese and Western Art Criticism.” It seems the discussion diverted quickly from criticism to the censorship and control the state exercises upon China’s contemporary art scene, and included a Q&A “grilling” of a Chinese cultural official.

If you haven’t been to see our latest show, you still have an opportunity to see “Modern Values”, featuring new works by Carlise and John Bell.  The show is currently hanging at Light Spot on 2927 South Highland Dr. in Salt Lake City. We had a small private opening on April 22nd with a panel discussion of all things modern as it applies to art, architecture, and design.  We were delighted to hear from our fabulous panel: Jill Dawsey, Chief Curator of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts; Prescott Muir of Prescott Muir Architecture and new Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Utah; and Walt Cowie, designer and owner of the Light Spot.

If you did not receive an invitation to this event and would like to be invited to future shows/events, please sign up on our contact page and check which artists you are interested in and we’ll make sure you are at our next event!

The show will remain up through this weekend, and several pieces will stay up for the next couple weeks.  We encourage you to stop by Light Spot to see this fantastic show.  We’d like to thank Light Spot for graciously hosting us in their beautiful showroom.  It was the perfect venue for the show!

To see works online click HERE for Carlisle and HERE for John Bell.

• A theft at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris was revealed early Thursday morning, having occurred overnight on Wednesday. A single masked individual stole five paintings, collectively valued at $123 million – a Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani, and a Leger. Click here for the full story.
• Japanese-born designer and conceptual artist Arakawa died at 73 on Tuesday in Manhattan. Along with his wife Madeline Gins, Arakawa explored a philosophy he called Reversible Destiny, which questioned the definitive nature of mortality, through painting, poetry, and most recently, architecture. Check out nytimes.com for information on his oeuvre and some critical remembrances.
• The Sydney Biennale, “The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age,” places focus on the experiences of the indigenous and historically marginalized peoples from all over the world, forming a coherent, if thematically diverse exhibition. “The aim of this biennale,” says artistic director David Elliott, “is to bring work from diverse cultures together…on the equal playing field of contemporary art.” Find out more about the work, the artists, and the venues here.
•  The Vancouver Art Gallery has mounted an exhibition of work by video artist Fiona Tan, centered on a commissioned film installation entitled Rise and Fall. This will be the first chance American audiences have had to view Tan’s recent work. Based in Amsterdam, Tan’s work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, the Rijksmuseum, and the Centre Pompidou. Read more at e-flux.com.
• The $64,000 Artes Mundi Prize for contemporary art was awarded on Wednesday to Israeli Yael Bartana. Bartana’s video, photographic, and installation works often focus on the political situations in her home country, and is the fourth artist to receive the prize. See more at artforum.com.

• BAK, basis actuele voor kunst presents, Rabih Mroue, a Lebanese theater director, actor, playwright and visual artist.  Mroue’s work mixes ”methods and cultural cannons, by complicating the distinctions between fiction and reality, and by blending past “facts” with speculation about the current moment.”  The show starts this weekend and runs through August 1, 2010.  Read about the exhibit on E-Flux.com. 
• The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Italy presents Pig Island by Paul McCarthy.  The installation is a”contemporary Raft of the Medusa… [a] carnivalesque amusement park in which human beings behave like pigs.”  The exhibit also includes some of  McCarthy’s works from 1970 to the present.  Read more here. 
• “Modern does not equal radical.”  Jonathan Jones of Guardian.co.uk writes of his experience with the Tate Modern’s birthday celebration.  For his critique click here.  Waldemar Januszcsak of TimesOnline.co.uk also comments about the Tate’s talent with audience participation.  But is it good?  Check it out here. 
• Sharon Butler, a writer, blogger, academic and artist, created a TV channel on Vimeo dedicated to art.  Two Coats of Paint is up and running, and Butler has encouraged “painters to make videos about their process/practice and submit them.”  Read about it here. 
• “A urinal is a urinal is a urinal.”  HyperAllergic.com’s Hrag Vartanian writes about Marcell Duchamps Fountainand its many imitations.  Read more on HyperAllergic.com. 
• The Tate St Ives will exhibit the colorful, almost child-like work of Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker.  Van der Stokker’s work “plays on stereotypical femininity, engaging with the legacies of Feminism, and exploring ideas that seem to be forbidden in art, especially decorative” art.  Check it out on ArtKnowledgeNews.com. 

• Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona presents With a Probability of Being Seen through October 12, 2010.  The exhibition is centered around Konrad Fischer, the artist, gallerist, collector and curator, and allows the museum to study the “social, political and economic forces that shape artistic production and its effect upon a broad international community.”  Read more about the exhibit on E-Flux.com.
• The Oakland Museum of California has always worked to engage the public, but now with a renovation the museum is rethinking its strategy for public interaction.  Read up on NYTimes.com.
• Starting May 22, 2010 the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen presents work by three contemporary artists: Atelier van Lieshout, Olafur Eliasson, and Thomas Demand.  The exhibit includes over 25 photographs and installation pieces that include the former Submarine Wharf.  Check it out here.
• Spring art auctions have come to an end and prices are up over the last few years.  Sales nearly tripled last year’s total, but some artists barely participated.  The Wall Street Journal reports who’s up and who’s down in the art market.
• L&M Arts will exhibit Alexander Calder and Yves Tanguy together in Between Surrealism and Abstraction.  Calder and Tanguy have been friends and neighbors, but this is the first time their works have been combined in a significant show.  Although different in style, both artists have used biomorphism in their work, adding an element of compatibility.  Read more about the show and the artists on NYTimes.com.
• Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea presents In Search of the Miraculous, works by Bas Jan Ader, May 28-September 5, 2010.  Ader was part of the first generation of conceptual artists in Los Angeles during the 1970s.  The show brings together works from when Ader set out by boat to “challenge nature and its ultimate consequences.”  His boat was found partly submerged months later at a fishing grounds.  Learn more here.

• New York street artist Momo has taken his work off the street and into the private art spectrum.  Momo is known for large paper pieces typically found on or near construction site scaffolding with large flat wooden surfaces to put up his works, but he began working with locals in Key West, Florida to create his works inside their homes.  In an interview he said “I wanted to try one kind of art work against a changing context.”  Check it out on HyperAllergic.com.
• Noveau Musee National de Monaco presents Training for a Museum (TM) a collective work by the museum’s team aiming at “explaining to the general audience and local public what a national museum is and its relationship towards and through contemporary life.”  Director Marie Claude Beaud laid down a program for Art and Performance and Art and Territory that have lead to TM.  Read more about the exhibits at E-Flux.com.
• The Frieze Art Fair announced British/Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara as winner of the 2010 Cartier Award.  The Cartier Award is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading art awards and forms an exciting and visible element of a commitment to the commissioning and display of contemporary art.  More here.
• One of Antony Gormley’s most famous works, Critical Mass, is being displayed on the De La Warr Pavilion.  The exhibition includes 60 bronze sculptures cast from Gormley’s body in different positions and runs through August 31, 2010.  Read more on ArtKnowledgeNews.com.
• HyperAllergic.com will stream William Powhida’s event How to Survive the Art World Using the Art of Sorcery live tonight.  For more click here.
• The New York Times reports that Postwar and Contemporary Art have finally become “fully integrated into the broader art market.”  This month has seen a massive influx of sales at Christie’s for Contemporary Art.  Read more on NYTimes.com.
• The Tate Modern has started to expand its collection by obtaining contemporary art from countries such as Algeria or Iran.  The museum acquired 13 new pieces for its permanent collection.  Read more on the guardian.co.uk.
• The biennial of contemporary art in Africa, Dak’Art, has opened.  A co-founder of the event, Florence Alexis said “Africa is not artistically marginalized because it’s economically fragile.”  Read more on ArtForum.com.
• On Saturday May 29, 2010 the Dertien Hectare opens its exhibition The Woods That See and Hear.  The exhibition responds to the immediate surroundings of dertien hectare, in the southern Netherlands, an area that has “gone through significant social, economic and ecological changes in recent decades.”  The exhibit aims to bring awareness of our relationship with the land we occupy.  For more on the exhibit visit E-Flux.com.