Buying the Whitney
by Ana Finel Honigman
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After much anticipation, The Whitney Biennial runs through May 30,
2004. As always, speculating on future art-stars versus forgettable
Biennial fodder is the art insiders’ favorite sport.
This year's roster, corralled by museum curators Chrissie Iles (film and video), Shamim M. Momin (branch director) and Debra Singer (contemporary art), features 108 artists and 2 collaborative groups out of which New York Magazine has aleady tapped ten artists including Eve Sussman, Dario Robleto, Juile Mehretu and Banks Violette as obvious highlights while the ten more artists, such as Aïda Ruilova, Matthew Ronay, and Christian Holstad, have been handicapped by the Time Out New York. But while it is certainly fun to hypothesize about which artists are generating the most heat, it is infinitely wiser to start collecting some work from the show’s hottest young talents, before success pushes them far out of reach. Out of the Biennial participants featured on artnet gallery sites, our picks are:
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Untitled
Miller Block Gallery
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Laylah Ali
Laylah Ali's signature cartoon protagonists drift around the 36-year old New York-based artist’s delicate little paintings and prints with bandaged heads, gouged eyeballs, wounded bodies and legitimately frightened expressions. Using candy-colors and playful simplified forms, Ali creates racially fraught scenes of torture and rage. Ali’s etchings are available through the Miller Block Gallery for $4,000 each, while her drawings are priced at $6,000-$8,000 and her painting can be had for $10,000-$15,000.
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Bagheads
1301PE Gallery
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Andrea Bowers
The Los Angeles photographer mimes and undermines the ridiculous rituals integral to American consumerism and sport’s cultures. The series of photographs available on artnet through the LA-based 1301PE Gallery, for $5,000, shows a sports team whose members are so scared of competition that they pose for their player portraits with their faces hidden behind plastic shopping bags.
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9 Nites
Metro Pictures'
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T.J. Wicox
T.J. Wilcox, who was born in Seattle, Washington in 1965, collages images culled from television, home-made cinema and hand-drawn cartoons. The results are saucy, baroque Paul Morrissey-inspired films shot on Super-8 film and then transferred to 16mm film for projection. The photographs and drawings available in editions of 10 for $1,000-$5,000 on artnet at Metro Pictures' page are all ephemera from his films. The films themselves can be had in editions of 5 for $15,000.
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Birding
Blumenfeld/Lustberg Fine Art
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Amy Cutler
Sadistic little girls with houses masking their heads, horses plummeting in the air, women weeping out, instead over, pools of milk populate Amy Cutler’s meticulously painted cartoon world. The 30 year-old New York artist exhibits her magnificent fairy-tale dystopias on the artnet pages for the New York’s Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, Boston's Miller Block Gallery, and the Brooklyn-based Blumenfeld/Lustberg where her prints can be found for $600-$1,800, her color-pencil drawings run $7,500-$10,000 and her oil paintings are priced at $7,500-$15,000
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Joshi, Mystic Lake, Medford, MA
Artemis · Greenberg Van Doren · Gallery
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Katy Grannan
Katy Grannan meets her portrait sitters when they respond to the sparsely worded want ad she places in the back of their local suburban newspaper. Then, the 35 year-old Yale graduate takes her crisp, carefully crafted photographs in locations with sentimental or symbolic significance for her sitters. The results are oddly haunting exposés of common people’s insecurities, aspirations and unsung glamour. Grannan’s photographs are sold for $3,000-$5,000 with the California Michael Kohn Gallery, Belgium’s Fifty One Fine Art Photography and New York’s Artemis · Greenberg Van Doren · Gallery.
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Untitled (Moon)
Senior & Shopmaker Gallery
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Laura Owens
Born in 1970 in Euclid Ohio, Laura Owens has been an art-world hit since her sweet and spicy blend of abstract and representation over pale washes of pastel color, hit the scene in 1995 with her first-solo show at Gavin Brown Enterprises in New York. She rarely produces multiples but a few choice examples of her delicious prints can be found for approximately $3,000 at the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery, Parkett Editions, the gallery component of Parkett magazine and the Carolina Nitsch Gallery.
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Christian Car Wash
Michael Steinberg Fine Art
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Dario Robleto
The 32-year old sculptor from San Antonio, Texas, who has previously been seen at the Whitney Altria space at 42nd Street, is best known for elaborately beautiful sculptures and installations made from recast burnt, wrecked and ravished LPs. He mines another lively rock artifact, the LP cover, in the two suites of four prints found on artnet at Michael Steinberg Fine Art for $4,800.
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