Flash News: Drawing Now – DDESSIN {16} – Nobuyoshi Araki

[24 Mar 2016]

 

Every fortnight, Artprice provides a short round up of art market news: Drawing Now – DDESSIN {16} – Nobuyoshi Araki

Drawing Now celebrates its 10th anniversary
The 10th edition of the Contemporary drawing fair Drawing Now will be held at the Paris Carreau du Temple from 30 March to 3 April 2016, with approximately 80 galleries invited. Philippe Piguet, the fair’s Artistic Director, has decided to mark the occasion with a number of additional features. Among them, a partnership with Christie’s, which will dedicate one of its rooms to an exhibition of works by the 5th winner of the Drawing Now prize (2015), Abdelkader Benchamma (24 March – 1 April). This show has been organized to coincide with an exhibition of a selection of Modern and Old Master drawings that will be auctioned on 31 March and 1 April. Another addition to the fair is entitled Master Now, a section in which a dozen galleries have selected “outstanding works”. The artists in this section have already been announced: Guo Fengyi (Christian Berst Art Brut), Claude Viallat (Bernard Ceysson Gallery), Michel Parmentier (Jean Fournier Gallery), Jean Dubuffet (Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery), Paul van der Eerden (Bernard Jordan Gallery), Pierre Alechinsky (Lelong Gallery), Erik Dietman (Papillon Gallery), Georg Baselitz (Catherine Putman Gallery), William Burroughs (Semiose), Markus Lüpertz (Suzanne Tarasiève Gallery) and Richard Jackson (Vallois Gallery). Works by these artists – already well established in the history of Contemporary art – will be shown alongside newer creations and debated in a symposium at the Carreau du Temple auditorium. Chaired by Fabrice Hergott, Director of the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the debate aims to generate an overview of Contemporary drawing today, with contributions from a number of international specialists including an analysis of the Contemporary drawing market by Jean Minguet, manager of Artprice.com’s Econometrics Department.

DDESSIN {16}, an alternative Parisian Contemporary drawing fair
Among the key fairs in Paris’s spring calendar, DDESSIN has become a benchmark since its launch in 2013. For the emerging drawing scene, it represents an important alternative to Drawing Now and the Salon du Dessin, and the magnificent Atelier Richelieu (60 rue de Richelieu in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris) gives it additional soul. The layout is less formatted than traditional fairs, with a freer flow through its 700 square meters, a walk through the drawing rooms and a number of side events. Eve de Medeiros, the fair’s Director, wants the fair to be a place of exchange and creativity in a warm and friendly spirit of quality…. My role is to invent a world without borders in which artists, their collectors, art world professionals and the public can meet and interact at the leading edge of creativity” (interview for IAM, March 2016). The fair’s ambitions are clear: to highlight promising artists and make time for a dialogue between collectors and different art world players. It also awards two prizes to support and promote young artists: the DDESSIN prize and the Art est Vivant prize, organized by a group of collectors and art enthusiasts in collaboration with Winsor & Newton and Arches.
DDESSIN{16} hosts around twenty galleries, including Céline Moine Gallery from Lyons, Creative Growth from Oakland, California, the Galerie 3e parallèle from Paris, the KO21 Gallery (Paris), the LWS Gallery (Paris) and the Polysémie Gallery (Marseille). The price range (from a few hundred euros to around 10,000) targets a broad population of collectors and permits no-risk acquisitions. The fair also offers drawings by Nidhal Chamekh and Massinissa Selmani, both present in the fair’s first three editions and included in Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures selection at the Arsenale of the 56th Venice Biennale.

The Araki obsession targets Paris
The Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi ARAKI (aged 74) is soon to enjoy a major exhibition at France’s Museum of Asian arts – Guimet (13 April – 5 September 2016): the exhibition traces fifty years of work with more than 400 photographs organized thematically with series devoted to Flowers, the Sentimental Journey (from his honeymoon in 1971) and Winter Travel (1990, year of his wife’s death). The exhibition illustrates a life obsessed by eroticism, desire and death. Considered the most important Japanese erotic photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki’s work ventures far beyond this field, photographing literally everything he sees. From the roof of his house to pictures taken from inside cars, nothing escapes him. His world is clearly dominated by his obsession with the camera. From polaroids to large prints (painting format) as well as prints altered by fire or paint, the exhibition provides a strong introduction to the incredible diversity of an oeuvre sought-after worldwide, and particularly on the secondary market. Araki’s works are often affordable at less than $1,000 (36% of his market – essentially his polaroids) but his large scale prints can easily exceed $100,000. Expect to pay between 500 and $1,500 for a polaroid of a woman tied up according to ancient rules of Kinbaku (literally “the beauty of tight binding”, or bondage art), and slightly more for a picture of a woman taken like that of a flower… always radiant and always close up. Araki likes to say that it is not his photographs that are erotic, but rather the models he photographs. And in spirit, some of his flowers are indeed more erotic than his women. In fact, his auction record was generated not by a woman suspended by carefully arranged ropes, but by a diptych of flowers, immensely sensual and on the verge of decay: titled From Close to Range, the work buried its already high estimate of over $100,000, fetching $191,000 at Phillips New York on 1 April 2014.

All listed artists: GUO FengyiJean DUBUFFETClaude VIALLATMichel PARMENTIERPaul VAN DER EERDENPierre ALECHINSKYErik DIETMANGeorg BASELITZWilliam Seward BURROUGHSMarkus LÜPERTZRichard JACKSONAbdelkader BENCHAMMANobuyoshi ARAKI