Background to the Chelsea Art Scene

For the past 20 years, Chelsea has remained a designated area for true art lovers. 
It is in this particular moment that Chelsea has become the center for contemporary art in New York City, while the neighborhood is going through a massive face lift and things are always changing.

The famous wild art scene of the 60’s and 70’s in NYC was based in Soho—at that time it was considered the industrial area for businesses like import/export houses, textile houses and “rag trade” clothing stores.

Artists began to move to Soho mainly because of it’s big loft spaces and cheap rent. 
Artists like Philip Glass, Twyla Tharp, Nam June Paik, Meredith Monk, Chuck Close and Frank Stella were of the few that helped create and shape the ideal situation which made Soho a nexus for creative activity at a very magical time in the 1960's. SoHo became the focal point which represented the hip, avant garde scene of the time.

Not long after, artists concentrated the area and marked it as a hip neighborhood in NYC, Soho was announced to be the “art district of new york” and what started as an organic process of art imigration, continued to be a real estate target for “art oriented” commercial businesses.
The rise of rent and change of atmosphere in the  Soho of the early 1990’s meant that galleries needed to find themselves a new home. 

This  leads us to the Chelsea art scene... 

Today, the art galleries of Chelsea are located in a small zone near the Hudson River where shipping containers used to get stored. It still feels like a secret location—an isolated art bubble that is somehow being protected from the neighborhood’s gentrification process.  With more residential spaces and tourist destinations surrounding it (like Chelsea Market, The High Line, etc.), Chelsea still maintains a good balance of the native New York scene and a tourist-friendly environment.

Considered to be the most updated center for main discourses in the international art world, expressing a wide range of innovative ideas and outstanding techniques, Chelsea is currently home to more than 350 galleries, institutions and independent art projects. It has some of the most important art galleries today, representing the most acclaimed artists from around the world.

When looking at Chelsea, one will see how it has evolved and still remains a hip and fun location. Most importantly, Chelsea is definitely the place to be to engage with the contemporary world of art!

- by Maya Yadid

The Roman Contemporary Art scene

With its priceless ancient attractions, Rome boasts the best sightseeing in the world. Despite its worldwide fame as the ‘Eternal City’, Rome surprisingly hides a vivid contemporary art scene. 

Institutional art finds place in two of the most important contemporary art museums in Italy: the MAXXI (Museum of XXIst Century Art) and the MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome). Since the beginning, with it’s futuristic architecture designed by Zaha Hadid, the Maxxi stunned Rome’s citizens—and it still does—with consistently new and controversial exhibitions, giving space to international artists in dialogue with the permanent collection of Italian artists. 

The MAXXI by Zaha Hadid

The MACRO is currently reinstating itself, after a recent inexplicable crisis. It’s new 2017 season just opened with a great Anish Kapoor exhibition that will surely be an inspiration for the young artists in residence who have won the Macro’s annual residency prize.

Anish Kapoor at MACRO

Meanwhile, contemporary art galleries in Rome are doing a pretty interesting job, bringing famous international names to town in addition to displaying the work of young Italian artists. Apart from the glamorous Gagosian gallery, which is a brand itself, Lorcan O’Neill is the next great guarantee in the Rome art scene.

Adriana Varejao at Gagosian Gallery Rome

A brand new underground culture is finally offering an alternative scene that seems to be more and more appraised in the city. New galleries run by young directors fit very well into this, spreading throughout Rome’s industrial districts. Roman street art also has a good reputation because it’s gradually changing the landscape of Rome’s grey suburbs into a colorful and diverse art scene. 

Rome doesn’t have an art district, but it does have a district of artists’ studios. The so-called Pastificio Cerere in the San Lorenzo neighborhood is a dynamic place where art lovers can easily meet artists while they are working in their studios—a fascinating experience which is not easy to get anywhere!

- by Valentina Di Pietro

Haifa City- the Florence of Israeli Street Art

Haifa is a multi-cultural city of social involvement with strong community ties that are reflected in the street art community as well. In the early 2000's, groups like "Pyramida" and "Block – Art in the Street", emerged in Haifa and created art in the streets that dealt with the urban features of the city.

Block Group started some very important processes that are present in Haifa until today—those of high quality and very developed urban art projects, involving artists in the community and emphasising  bi-nationality. For example, different signs in Haifa's urban landscape are usually written in Arabic as well as Hebrew and English. That is true also regarding texts that make up the vibrant, diversified and complex urban art scene in Haifa, where whole graffiti pieces, tags, street poems and other types of texts in street art pieces can often be found in Arabic.

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Broken Fingaz Crew

Haifa can be thought of as the “Florence of Israeli Street Art" in a way. It populates several artistic geniuses, such as the very recognized Broken Fingaz crew, individual artists like Keos, Crash, Tipa Graphic and many others that are living and working in the same place at the same time, making enormous artistic and cultural contributions—much like the Renaissance artists of 16th century Florence in Italy. During the past few years, Haifa also became an important center for original Israeli hip-hop and rap music.

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Kartel 

An ideal way to get to know Haifa's cultural and artistic DNA, is through an Alternative Tel Aviv graffiti and street art tour in downtown Haifa which focuses on the leading artists, graffiti writers and crews that make up the unique urban art scene in the city. Tours deal with independent and free art in the streets of Haifa and are finished with a visit to the Kartel compound—Israel's no. 1 urban art attraction, a huge abandoned building covered with amazing graffiti and street art by leading Israeli and International street artists.

- by Yael Shapira

Introducing the Avant-Garde Institute, Warsaw

The Institute of Avant-Garde is an extraordinary gallery at the site of the studio of late Polish artist Edward Krasiński. It is preserved exactly in the same state as it was left in 2004, after the artist’s death. Edward Krasiński was one of the most important protagonists of the Polish neo-avant-garde from the 1960s and '70s. 

The main feature of his studio is blue Scotch tape, which he stuck horizontally at the height of 130 centimetres, “everywhere and on everything”.

 “I don’t know whether this is art”, he commented, “but it’s certainly scotch blue, width 19 mm, length unknown”. Krasinski’s works are currently showing at the Tate Liverpool until March 2017, where his blue Scotch is juxtaposed with the Yves Klein exhibition.

Edward Krasiński in his studio

The studio is placed on the eleventh floor amongst a block of flats in Warsaw’s city center. From 1970 Krasiński shared the atelier with Henryk Stażewski, another well-known avant-garde and constructivist artist.The studio is open to the public but because of the unusual conservation restrictions, groups have to be small and must be booked in advance.

The terrace pavilion which was newly attached to the studio houses all kinds of exhibitions, lectures, workshops and academic sessions—forming a broad context for the tradition created by Stażewski and Krasiński. The confrontation of Krasiński’s ephemeral works with new exhibitions and critical reflection makes the Avant-Garde Institute a unique experiment in contemporary museum practice.

- by Zuzanna Zasacka

Taryn Simon "Paperwork and the Will of Capital, Tel Aviv Museum

When entering “Paperwork and the Will of Capital”, Taryn Simon’s first solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, visitors might become seduced by the 16 large colorful prints representing floral centerpieces. It therefore might be surprising that one of the starting points for the show was a picture of Mussolini and Hitler from 1938 signing the Munich agreement and separated by a floral centerpiece. The second inspiration was 17th century Dutch still life painting and the notion of the “impossible bouquet”, where artists were aiming to represent flowers together that could not grow naturally in the same geographical place.

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The flowers represented in the show were present at different international conferences, where world leaders signed treaties, decrees and accords—many of which revealed themselves not long after as false promises. The prints, framed with heavy mahogany wood reminiscent of boardroom furniture, are accompanied by an explanatory text about the agreement which was signed in their presence. 

Simon imported 4000 specimens from Holland’s biggest flower auction and worked with a botanist to identify the types of flowers.  In the center of the space, Simon placed five sculptural elements, pedestals that contain the same flowers used for the prints, which Simon had dried and sewn on archival herbarium paper.  

Visitors to the show might wonder why Simon chose these floral arrangements as the center of her exhibition. The flowers act like silent witnesses to lost promises. Like many of her previous research-based projects, here, Simon tackles questions surrounding international politics, economics, the notion of the archive, memory and time.

Until January 28th, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

- by Sarah Peguine