Back to Hamburg

We are back. Two exiting and exhausting weeks in New York behind us, we took the liberty to close the Ranch for a week. Sitting back at our desks in our temporary transit space we call our home until the big move (April? May!), we enjoy the tranquility of Hamburg - and miss all the rest.

There will be a bigger New York update soon. Currently I am compiling the dearest moments in a five-part mini series over at small-things.eu, an editorial site I am contributing to on a regular basis. As long as the memories are still fresh and we can still hear the laughter of our friends, old and new, echoing in our heads, I am writing down a longer feature over there - my very personal view on the great time we had. The first three parts are online already, once all five have been posted you will also be able to read them in our heliumcowboy-blog. Until then, visit this site for my New York Diaries.

Our finished booth at Volta New York was a boxing gym including (cardboard) locker filled with boxing gear and plastered with pin-ups.. This is how it looked before ...

... and this after take-down. what didn't get sold fit into some folders and a suitcase. World record for heliumcowboy. This includes the take-down time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

I've added some pictures taken during the last days below: from the very busy closing day of the VOLTA art fair, some city images from New York in springtime (remember, we arrived in a snow storm? well, when we left it was T-shirt weather ...), and impressions from food we ate at really nice places ...

The biggest thankyou goes out to the people that made our stay so special: Ali and Adam from Factory Fresh Gallery for ... everything (so go check out their available artwork section and honour their efforts), Boris and Patrica for the hard work and great company, Isabel for being the undisputed number one assistant director, the best you can wish for; Alex for his "elusiveness", Jonathan for his friendship, Jade for being one of the greatest artists in the world (take care of that St. Pauli-shirt I gave you, remember, it was worn in the stand during so many matches), Jeff and Megan (and good luck with the Restaurant), Amanda and Chris for the support and indestructible good mood, everyone else at VOLTA, Sven for staying a close buddy, and of course all the friends that didn't get mentioned so far. Don't worry, this last part loses 99% of readers after the first six words anyway ... 

Now open: Boris Hoppek & Alex Diamond at Factory Fresh

Ever had an exhibition opening in Brooklyn, New York? We just did, and I can tell you it feels amazing. And we got the images to prove it ... below are some first photos from the opening of DAMAGE:CONTROL, a joint exhibition of Boris Hoppek & Alex Diamond at Factory Fresh Gallery. 

Too tired today for a longer entry, I will write more when I've recovered from last night. We're counting day 3 of the fair, it is warm and sunny and beautiful in New York and things couldn't go any smoother than during this trip so far... think we need to get some of those tourist shirts with the heart on them and NY next to it. Well, not really. But honestly, this city may never sleep but it most definitely doesn't stop being a perfect host for the heliumcowboys ...

DAMAGE:CONTROL - Boris Hoppek & Alex Diamond team up

Two of the six collaborations by Boris & Alex on display at their joint show at Factory Fresh

Tonight is the night: from 8 - 11 pm, we have our big opening at FactoryFresh Gallery in Brooklyn with the first ever joint show by artists Boris Hoppek and Alex Diamond, titled DAMAGE:CONTROL. I am really looking forward to this, it is really exciting to open an exhibition in New York instead of Hamburg for once. 

The VOLTA NY art fair started pretty well for us. I have the feeling that the mood has improved a lot and that the city tries to prove that art was not neglected or forgotten in the past dark months - people just waited for the right moment to resurface with confidence. 

Today is day 2 of the fair, and yesterday I managed to check out PULSE, one of the other New York fairs, and get wasted in Brooklyn afterwards with my friend Jade Townsend (an incredible artist you have to check out! Click here to view some of his work).

And just finishing this post I learned that heliumcowboy has been nominated as one of the favourite booths during this week's Armory Week Fairs at artlog.com. Nice one, we're up there with big names like Deitch Projects etc. Feels good to be appreciated for the sweat we all are putting into this. Thanks!

Setting up at VOLTA NY: Solo booth with Boris Hoppek

VOLTA NY art fair opens its doors tomorrow, and we are almost done setting up our booth. Boris Hoppek still needs to work on a few details, and yes, we need to clear out the inspiring chaos we always create during set up, but other than that we are nearly there. Which is really unusual for the heliumcowboy's - normally we need the full 48-hours build up period.

This time, we almost wallpapered the stand, something we haven't done in a while but seemed the most appropriate thing to do with lots of smaller sized watercolors and photos by Boris. It looks really good. I am very happy with it, and now let's hope that the people of New York appreciate our hard work and Boris' amazing talent. 

Detailed info on VOLTA NY can be found at their website. These are the key facts:

We are at Booth #C7

VOLTA NY is located right across the Empire State Building, at 7 West 34th Street (betw. 5th and 6th Ave.)

THURS, March 4, 2010: Guest of Honors 11a.m. - 12 noon | VIP 12 noon - 2 p.m. | Public 2 p.m. - 8 p.m.

FRI - SUN 7: 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.

Some impressions from the first day setting up the booth:

Getting ready

It's already our 5th day in New York, and since we are here, we have been mostly working on setting up the exhibition at Factory Fresh. It was not all work until now, also a bit of play: We took yesterday off to explore the city and get out of the art cloud for 24 hours.

Alex cleaning the floor after finishing the wall.It's all done now over at the Factory in Brooklyn, and the show, which will open this Friday, is ready. A big thankyou goes out to Ali and Adam, who are running the place, for everything they've done for us!

The exhibition is called DAMAGE:CONTROL - each of the artists supplied one of the words when finding a joint theme for the show. Who does the damage and who's controlling it is hard to tell, all I can leak is that we know who contributed which word ...

Allthough being close friends for a long time, Boris Hoppek and Alex Diamond have never collaborated this closely in the past. Everyone involved in the show is really happy with the result: it seems like the perfect match; the works correspond nicely, and the whole set up of the room couldn't be more harmonic.

While Boris will be showing photos and watercolors, Alex brought along brand new china ink brush drawings as well as a series of collages. Most of the work has never been exhibited before and was specifically created for the Factory Fresh show.

Isabel sorting through Boris' photos.On location, Boris installed a new upskirt installation (this time you have to slip underneath a beautiful, vintage wedding dress), as well as painting one of the walls with markers. Alex has been busy creating a new piece of collage work (assembled and painted on the gallery floor). It seems to be heavily influenced by this trip, and sports quite an unusual motive compared to others. It comes on 4 wood panels, that are attached to each others, and is integrated into a wall painting, jointly with the six new collages he brought along on this journey. The work is called "Demon skull".

On top of this, Boris and Alex have produced 6 collaborations for the exhibition: jointly created ink drawings. The last 2 ones were finished in New York. Please click on the images below to enlage. Those are just rough photos taken off the wall, so the quality of the images is not perfect. 

Today, we will start setting up the booth at VOLTA NY. Together with Boris Hoppek, we have 2 days to build a stand. For VOLTA NY, galleries have to present solo-artist projects, so it will all be Boris at the fair. This is my preferred way of doing fairs, and if you've been following heliumcowboy a bit in the past years, you'll know that we've gone solo in new York in 2008 (Alex Diamond) and 2009 (Jon Burgerman) on two consecutive Scope art fairs as well. But this time everything is new, because even though we've done the VOLTA in Basel last year, this is our first time we present us at their New York event.

Okay, that's it for today. I know I have gotten really wordy on the new site's blog, but during the relaunch I decided that this journal on our homepage needs to be less corporate and should be more like my personal notebook instead... you just have to deal with it.

Some pictures from the set up at Factory Fresh.

Links:

March 5, 8-11 pm: DAMAGE:CONTROL, Boris Hoppek & Alex Diamond at Factory Fresh Gallery

March 4-7: Solo presentation Boris Hoppek at VOLTA NY art fair