This year's event took place at the beautiful sky-lit rooms of the James Cohan gallery, NY. The show presented over 1000 original, postcard-sized works on paper by established and emerging artists benefitting the Visual AIDS Archive Project.
A selection is still available to satisfy your Christmas shopping needs! (see below)
All Postcards from the Edge proceeds - 100% of all sales - support the programs of Visual AIDS. Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS utilizes the visual arts to promote AIDS awareness and, through the Frank Moore Archive Project, historicizes the contributions of artist with HIV and the estates or artists lost to AIDS.
It has been noted that if you should participate in only one benefit a year as an artist, this should be the one.
I can only agree. Few people organizing benefits using art can match the sensibility, professionality and generosity of the Postcards from the Edge crew. We took part with two postcards and sponsored a plate to the raffle, it was very nice to be involved, even if it was from afar.
Artist/art writer Judy Rey, who also took part, has a good blog post at Ungraven Images on her experience with Postcards from the Edge.
Still Available: Selected original works from the show can still be acquired for $75 each, buy four get one free. Details can be found at the charity's web site.
To get your postcards, contact Visual AIDS info at visualaids dot org / 212-627-9855. Artwork will be mailed out from a special selection, you can specify some preferences. Postcards are still random and there are no returns or exchanges. Postcards are mailed out after payment is received.
You can pay by credit card by calling 212-627-9855 or mail checks to: Visual AIDS, 526 West 26th Street #510, New York, NY 10001
So if you need some holiday gifts, and want to support the arts while helping an important cause - then a beautiful postcard-sized artwork is the perfect holiday solution!
Impressions from the Preview Art Fair, relocated to a hangar at the bombastic Flughafen Tempelhof, designed and built (though not completed) in the late 1930's by Nazi architect and sculptor Ernst Sagebiel.
The image is a detail of the 2006 "Bureaucratic Sonata", by Mexican artist Raul Ortega Ayala, at the London-based Rokeby gallery.
"The materials used to create the work for this series include post-it notes, window blinds, office chairs and lamps. Each work is driven by Ortega Ayala's impressions of the corporate world having immersed himself in the environment for a substantial period of time."
Resisting the temptation to ridicule office life, Raul Ortega Ayala instead turns everyday office objects into surreal installations and pieces. At the fair, he presented a paper relief out of post-it notes on the bottom of a metallic reflecting airway transportation box, viewable through little windows only. The result is a Kusama-like piece with very painterly qualities.
View an interview with the gallery owner at Vernissage TV.
Lot's of architectural-model art at this fair as well..
U.K. artist Matthew Houlding at Büro für Kunst (Dresden) had his usual captivating architectural extravaganzas on display.
And of course there were Plattenbauten galore, what else. No Fernsehturme though.
Artist-owned commercial gallery Stedefreund adopts the concept many Leipzig artists successfully apply in Berlin, setting up a collective space, managed by an emerging art-historian.
They presented themselves in a beautifully styled installation, that included a nice phallic Medalla-style bubble sculpture.
(Is it really Rita Suessmuth checking out the price list?)
"Since July 2006 the A trans Pavilion located in a courtyard of the Hackeschen Höfe at the heart of Berlin is presenting innovative strategies designed to intervene into urban spaces while providing new perceptions of them. The architect and curator Isolde Nagel directs a program aimed at individuals who value artistic and architectural vision with a focus on social issues," the art fair website wrote.
Villa Delirium: a wonderful book providing an overview of the subversive ceramic "Disasterware" made by Charles Krafft.
Apart from commemorative plates depicting disasters, it documents, in the artist's words, "life-size ceramic weaponry so gorgeous and patently functionless that it will bedazzle and confound everyone who sees it."
The provocative pieces are shocking and darkly funny. Krafft, at 60 "the oldest promising young artist in the Pacific Northwest", has his roots in the 60's counter culture and the 80's industrial scene. Thanks to the wildly sarcastic sprit permeating his art, it's only natural that young guys should like it special.
Ironically, globalization has us all living in a "Villa Delirium" instead of a Global Village: a resurgence of regionalism, tribalism and religion, and a willingness to go to extremes for them.
Many art pieces from this book were copied in Delft Blauw porcelain after rifles borrowed from Ljubljana arms dealers in 1995, and painted in the inglaze technique a circle of old blue-haired ladies had taught Krafft.
"While his jocular explorations of human catastrophe may make those who share his dusky sense of humor chortle, they also force the viewer to look at mankind's cruelest, most absurd behavior in a way that penetrates the numbness induced by media overload", Salon wrote.
Charles Krafft is not afraid to get his hands dirty doing commissions. Under the motto "ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DELFT", the artist offers to make commemorative pieces out of your human remains: Human bone China This is Krafft at his most Industrial. After all, the Ovens are to Industrial culture what kittens are to Victorianism.. Charles Krafft updates those familiar Industrial preoccupations with dehumanization and death, adding humor and ambiguity.
The latest exhibition by Charles Krafft at the London Stolen Space gallery is an appropriate follow-up to the brilliant political graphic art show by Pedro Inoue. Called 'Artists Rifles Requiem', it proves why unacademic art can be so great and surprising. "Stolen space" is an original metaphor for Street-art, it also well illustrates the sectarianism and exclusiveness of the art world towards artists from an unacademic or subcultural background.
Nice to see the artist supporting this undergroundish artist-run gallery, instead of some fancy upscale one. Krafft has produced some amazing Delft pieces for this show, including porcelain hand grenades, AK 47s and Tommy guns.
Visit:
Stolen Space Gallery Dray Walk, The Old Truman Brewery
91 Brick Lane
London E1 6QL
United Kingdom
P: +44 (0) 207 2472684
Open: Wed - Sun 11:00am - 7:00pm
Geo: 51.521652 -0.072268
Alex Tornado calls his music Psychoschlager, neuer deutscher Schlager (NDS), Psycho-Elektroschlager, Elektroliedermacherpop, Ultra Neue Deutsche Welle (UNDW), or Lyro-Pop, I'd suggest 'Glamfolk'.
Irm Hermann never misses a gig!
Impressions from the new Wallywoods location in Berlin Weissensee.
The travelling art space/atelier/home of British artist Paul Woods has landed in a derelict GDR "Kulturhaus" located deep into an unfashionable and slightly scary Eastern part of town.
Woods resides over a pool of some 150 maladjusted unrecognized local talents, his taste for performers is superb.
My favorite piece from the show: "Lady Macbeth" by Marie-Cécile Lutta (Switzerland).
The exhibition seemed decidedly "unfertig", unlighted and chaotic, yet the whole exhibition worked like one big brilliant art installation: Haight Asbury meets squatter Outsider Art, Berlin 1980.
You never knew if the whole set up was all very self-conscious or very naive.
Unambiguously fine was the musical programme though: especially the Ugly Americans played some great distorted punk-jazz.
This is my first mobile phone clip; I'd like to dedicate it to Andrew Keen. Sorry 'bout the sound Andrew, that's really how it sounded!
The image is a detail of the 2006 "Bureaucratic Sonata", by Mexican artist 
Lot's of architectural-model art at this fair as well..
Artist-owned commercial gallery 
A sinister vision of a future Berlin-Mitte, as a militarized terror-fearing city, done in the style of a paranoid architectural model-maker.
My favorite piece from the show: "Lady Macbeth" by