DaWire

Finishing off DaWire’s one year week-long celebration, today we are revisiting the very first artist interview conducted for the site, featuring a conversation with the Spanish artist collective Aggtelek (Gema Perales and Xandro Vallés, 1978, Barcelona). This interview kicked off a series of conversations that have included artists such as Wilfredo Prieto and Victor Vázquez.[...]

The article we are featuring today as a part of our week-long 1 year celebration is on an extremely controversial work that made worldwide headlines in the arts and human rights communities. I am talking about Guillermo Vargas “Habacuc,” the infamous Costa Rican artist who tied up a stray dog during a show and left him to starve to prove a point. Adán Vallecillo’s essay eloquently explains not just the ethical problems the work poses, but the economic and political reasons that motivated the work; ideas that are seemingly completely obscured by the shocking nature of the work.[...]

As most of you may have noticed, to celebrate DaWire’s first year, this week we are revisiting articles that have made an impact in one way or the other. They are fan favorites, personal favorites or just plain great reads. Today we are featuring an article by Diana McClure on Murcia’s contemporary art scene, written after a trip made to the hosting region of Manifesta as a part of ARCO’s 2010 VIP Program.[...]

Continuing our one year celebration, today we are revisiting an article by our contributing writer in Mexico City Alejandro Sordo-Guzmán on the work of Hector Falcón. The book, its uses and transmutation by the hand of the artist into an art object makes us reflect further about how the act of mutilation turns into one of discovery.

On July 26th 2009, I founded DaWire to provide a serious platform for emerging writers and artists. The idea started in San Juan, with one single essay, and with a lot of motivation to accomplish something different from what was already around. After arriving in Puerto Rico after 12 good years abroad, my good friend and artist Catherine Matos Olivo suggested I write an essay about her work for publication in the visual arts section of Small Axe curated by Christopher Cozier. I accepted and embarked on a series of writings on Puerto Rican emerging artists that included Josué Pellot and Jason Mena.

You Were There, an exhibition curated by Thomas Duncan at Rachel Uffner Gallery, features work by Rita Ackermann, Justin Adian, Joe Bradley, Sarah Braman, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, and Josh Smith. The exhibition examines how time affects an artist’s practice, attitude and overall outlook.[...]

New York-based artists Steven Baldi and Lucas Knipscher have a show currently on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery until August 7th. The show is a continuation of a project initiated by Piper Marshall of the Swiss Institute at Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia. The current manifestation of the exhibition considers the capacity for images to synchronously reveal and obstruct meaning by ways of construction and reconfiguration. The works in the show reflect the shifts of geography and time, and include sculpture, film, photography and painting.[...]

Dani Marti‘s work deals with the impossibility of portraiture and unveils the frenetic desire in each of us to capture through a photograph, an object or a video the essence of a person. In his work, Marti pairs different mediums such as painting with video and photography, to construct a portrait of someone with whom he has had a personal, creative and/or sexual relationship. Marti transforms this very intimate encounter, however ephemeral it may have been, into an intricate pattern, a woven account of image, text and object that transcends the traditional notions of painting and portraiture.

On the occasion of the centenary of Max Weiler’s birthday, Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman dedicates an extensive exhibition to the doyen of Austrian landscape painting that will primarily consist of rarely seen masterpieces. The spectrum will reach from the representational earlyworks of the nineteen-forties via the milestones of painterly abstraction of the sixties and the lyrically reduced works of the seventies all the way to the brightly coloured,impulsive late works.

Continuing our partnership with our west coast friends at DailyServing, today we feature an excellent article written by Michael Tomeo of the current show at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh that draws comparisons between Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, pairing works and showing archival material of two of the most fascinating artists of the 20th century.