Marianne Boesky is expanding to the Colorado enclave of Aspen, where a group of newly renovated museums, new galleries and pop-ups have made the resort town into a new hotspot for the U.S. arts community. “Our plan is to be able to invite artists to spend time in Aspen to experience the outdoor life,” Boesky says. (more…)
Andrew Kuo, Oops (2/9/15) (2015)
Marlborough Chelsea and its second location on Broome street recently hosted a two-man show featuring the work of Andrew Kuo and Scott Reeder. Entitled It Gets Beta, this ambitious selection stems from a subdued affinity Kuo and Reeder share in their artistic practice, combining Kuo’s juxtapositions of sharp-edged abstract structures and humorously mundane charts with Reeder’s equally, if not less, witty lists of random topics, a comical one-two punch that plays on various constructions of the art historical as a fertile ground for playful subversion. (more…)
The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has given a $5 Million gift to Vermont’s Bennington College, which the artist graduated from in 1949. “Helen‘s education at Bennington was critical to shaping her sensibility as a young artist, nurturing a spirit of risk-taking, experimentation, and inquiry that formed the basis of her creative process,” says Clifford Ross, chairman of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. “The foundation is delighted to be making this gift.”
Williams College is receiving an impressive gift of contemporary works from the collection of anti-virus software developer Peter Norton, a trove of 68 works including pieces by Tracy Emin, Allan Ruppersberg, and Christopher Wool, among others. (more…)
The Public Art Fund and Brooklyn Bridge Park will host an exhibition of public works by Danish artist Jeppe Hein this summer, the New York Times reports. “One of the brilliant things about Jeppe’s work is he can engage you no matter what your background or experience or age in a very direct way,” says chief curator Nicholas Baume. (more…)
The Whitney has announced the details for its first exhibition at its newly completed Meatpacking District location. America Is Hard to See will open on May 1st, showing off the vast new exhibition spaces of the Renzo Piano-designed building, and traces the history of the museum alongside the development of American art in the 20th and early 21st century. “The game changer is the space,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator. (more…)
Ed Ruscha is bringing his Cactus Omelette recipe to the Barbican this year, serving up portions of the recipe to festival-goers at London’s installation of Doug Aitken’s Station to Station project. “It’s essentially an artwork, says curator Leila Hasham. “It’s edible cactus art.” (more…)
Cory Arcangel is interviewed by Dazed this week, as the artist prepares to open his first solo gallery exhibition in Italy. “Back in the early aughts, Italy was one of those places where it was always very advanced in terms of their understanding of art on the Internet,” Arcangel says. “I don’t know if people know this but there were a couple of places in the world where people were really excited about the idea that you could make art on the Internet. New York, Eastern Europe, and Italy. I think people forgot about that whole era.” (more…)
The New York Post reports on a recent tour of artist Jeff Koons’s 29th Street New York studio, by painter Alex Gardega, in an article that offers some interesting, and occasionally bleak snapshots from the artist’s high-precision production methods. “They have lasers printing holes in paper, so they make thousands of pieces of paper with holes in it, and these artists sit all day long and take one stencil, dab paint over it, take the next over that,” he says. “Hundreds of times a day — all for a 5-inch section.” (more…)
Matthew Darbyshire, CAPTCHA No.24 – David (2015)
Lisa Cooley is currently presenting British artist Matthew Darbyshire’s first U.S. solo exhibition, Suite, featuring eleven life size sculptural pieces, that utilize polycarbonate, a material that can be described as a type of thermoplastic polymer known for its practical commercial usage. Composed of narrowly piled half inch sheets of semi-transparent layers, these neatly arranged forms deliver juxtapositions of certain commercial mundane objects and a replica of Michelangelo’s David. (more…)
The Battersea Arts Center has received a £1 million grant from the United Kingdom following a massive fire at the South London institution that destroyed its Grand Hall. “The arts center is having to divert all its available resources into dealing with the aftermath and so I am pleased to be able to confirm that the government will provide £1 million towards the ongoing redevelopment work to help get this south London venue back on track,” says Culture secretary Sajid Javid. (more…)
New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched an investigation into the financial decision-making at Cooper Union in New York, where protests and lawsuits erupted following the school’s decision to charge tuition after nearly two hundred years of offering free college education to admitted students. (more…)
John Baldessari is featured on Vogue this week, discussing the formal and thematic concerns he reads in Philip Guston’s Stationary Figure, part of The Met’s new series featuring contemporary artists discussing their favorite works from the museum collection. “He’s almost a dumb artist, and I’m using dumb in a good way,” Baldessari says. “It’s seemingly clumsy but very sophisticated brushwork. I guess it comes out of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of old boots: you don’t need to paint a cathedral, you just need to be an interesting painter.” (more…)
The design for the Serpentine’s annual summer pavilion has been announced for 2015, a colorful, cocoon-like structure by the architectural collaborative Selgas Cano that celebrates the program’s 15th anniversary. Selgas Cano “sought a way to allow the public to experience architecture through simple elements, [a] journey through the space, characterized by color, light and irregular shapes with surprising volumes.” (more…)
The New York Times notes the city of Malaga’s recent push to become a new hotspot for art in Spain, as the city opens its arms to out of country spaces run by the Centre Pompidou and the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. “One of the cancers of Spain is that culture is seen as a public good that can’t somehow generate real revenues and be turned into a profit center,” said Salomón Castiel, the director of La Térmica, an arts center in the city. (more…)
Joyce Pensato, Mouse Mask (2015), all images courtesy Petzel Gallery
To advertise her fourth solo show at Petzel Gallery, Joyce Pensato released a short video, a brashly black and white, slapstick affair, set to classic ragtime piano tunes. In it, superhero Batman is knocked upside the head and shipped off to the exhibition, while Pensato, playing the gun moll in round-framed dark sunglasses, imitates her dumbly-smiling cartoon portraits. The video perfectly encapsulates Castaway, a new series of black and white cartoon portraits, erasure-paintings and drawings, both large-scale and small-scale, in addition to digital c-prints of the artist’s studio space. (more…)
Thomas Demand, Backyard (2014), via Matthew Marks
The artifice that drives Thomas Demand’s practice is simple, but the results are impressively commanding. Utilizing carefully cut and assembled cardboard pieces to create familiar images, scenes and spaces, the artist’s work carries an evocatively nostalgic aura, while emphasizing his own craft in the construction of the scene itself. (more…)
An El Greco from the collection of industrialist Julius Priester, and seized by the Gestapo during WWII, has been returned to its rightful owners. Portrait of a Gentleman has traveled widely since its confiscation in 1944, turning up in galleries in Stockholm, New York and London before a European Commission for Looted Art claim led to its return. “The story of the seizure and trade of this painting shows how much the art trade has been involved in the disposal of Nazi-looted art and how difficult it is for those who have been dispossessed to find and recover their property,” says Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission. (more…)
A painting recently authenticated as the work of Peter Paul Rubens is set to go on view at the Rubenshuis Museum in Antwerp. The work, Portrait of a Young Girl, was purchased $626,500 in 2013, and was confirmed as authentic shortly after. (more…)
The continued instability of Ukraine has led to cancellation of the second Kiev Biennale, the New York Times reports. The 2014 edition had been postponed due to conflict, and the ongoing military confrontation in the eastern portion of the country has ultimately led to the event’s cancellation. “Due to the fact that the armed conflict in the East of Ukraine does not stop,” a release from the organization says, the event has become “absolutely impossible.” (more…)
Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit (1970), via Art Observed
Beyond his most iconic performance works and sculptural environments, Joseph Beuys’s multiples constitute an entire aspect of the artist’s practice rarely seen as a complete series of works. While some of his more iconic small-scale works, including Capri Battery or Sled, as well as his prints and drawings have become iconic entries in the artist’s elusive, and often enigmatic creative history, the works have rarely been presented as a complete series. (more…)
An article in The Atlantic this past week acknowledges the 25th anniversary of the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft in Boston, and examines the public fascination with art heists, examining this phenomenon against the difficulty in unloading stolen works of such cultural prestige. “The true art isn’t the stealing, it’s the selling,” says Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI’s Art Crimes division. (more…)
Roy Lichtenstein’s The Ring (Engagement) will be one of the top prizes at Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Sale this May in New York, the Wall Street Journal reports, with initial estimates placing the work’s sale price at about $50 million. That figure nearly matches Lichtenstein’s $56.1 million record set in 2013. “I think it’s so sexy how he takes this quiet moment of a proposal and turns it into an exciting crash,” says Chicago plastics magnate Stefan Edlis, the work’s current owner. “Clearly, the woman accepted.” (more…)
Blinky Palermo, Wooster Street (1975), all images via David Zwirner
In collaboration with the Palermo Archive, David Zwirner presents an exhibition of rarely displayed works by Blinky Palermo at its 537 West 20th Street gallery. The works on display in this exhibition were made by the artist from 1973 to 1976, and range from objects to paintings and large-scale drawings. Following two years after David Zwirner’s exhibition of Palermo’s works on paper from 1976–1977, this show further explores the artist’s short but influential career, which is largely associated with abstraction, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, but also extends beyond these realms. These pieces are being presented together for the first time since their installation in Heiner Friedrich, New York in 1974.
Blinky Palermo, Objekt mit Wasserwage (Object with Spirit Level, 1969–1973) (more…)