Don't Fret's crumbling giant

A new giant sized paste up piece from Don't Fret has appeared downtown at Wabash and Balbo.

Maxwell Colette Gallery and Pawn Works have joined forces to bring internationally lauded contemporary artists to Chicago, who are known for their involvement in the Street Art movement. The first of these joint ventures, GAIA: Resplendent Semblance, launches this month with a series of projects showcasing the artist Gaia. The events will include a show of new, large scale paintings and decollage on wood art works at Maxwell Colette Gallery, a site specific installation and show featuring additional pieces at the Pawn Works space and a massive window installation at State Street and Adams presented in conjunction with The Chicago Loop Alliance's Pop Up Art Loop initiative.

Maxwell Colette Gallery and Pawn Works will co-host an opening reception for GAIA:Resplendent Semblance on Friday, March 25th from 6 - 9 pm in Maxwell Colette's space at 833 W. Chicago Ave, suite 200.  

Keep an eye on our Flickr and our Facebook page for further details and photos of the projects, the new work, and the installations.

Jeff Koons comes back to Earth

Back in December we were shocked and awed to find out that Jeff Koons had filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco gallery Park Life, over their sale of book ends that were based on the image of a balloon dog.  Koons, after all, is an artist whose work famously features appropriation (and who has been sued over this very issue himself).  The truly amazing part of all this was that Jeff Koons himself had appropriated the balloon dog in the first place.  Had Koons been the first to twist one up, the notion of protecting his balloon creation and it's use would have merit.  Unfortunately for Koons, a lawsuit like the one he filed requires more than simply having giant balls, deep pockets and a gung ho legal team.

On Koon's birthday, January 21st,  Park Life's attorney answered the suit with a witty and sarcastic counter punch in the form of a federal complaint that contained numerous tweaks including this little nugget:  "Upon information and belief, Jeff Koons LLC purports to represent the intellectual property rights of Jeff Koons, a retired stockbroker whose sculptures and other works are well-known for copying pre-existing forms and images from popular culture."  Referring to a man, who is considered by many to be among today's preeminent contemporary artists, as simply a "retired stockbroker" must have rattled Koons.  He's lucky they didn't call him a pornographer as well.

We waited to see what form of bluster would come next from the great and terrible Koons legal team, but in the end there was only silence.  And then last week they quietly they dropped their misguided intellectual property suit, once again leaving the balloon dog squarely in the public domain where Koons found it in the first place.  Somebody's getting fired over this one.

Barry McGee retrospective

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has recently awarded a $100,000 grant for a Barry McGee retrospective exhibition.  The yet unnamed retrospective will take place in 2012 through The University of California's Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.