Nicolas Party, Portrait with Snakes (2019)

Currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles exhibition space, the Swiss artist Nicolas Party has inaugurated his representation with the gallery, opening up an impressively arranged exhibition of new works just in time for the bustle of Frieze Week in the Californian metropolis. Born in Lausanne, Party’s figurative technique has earned him critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, celebrating and challenging conventions of representational painting, taste, and form. (more…)

The Aspen Art Museum will close its Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room show 11 weeks early due to an unresolved building code violation.  “The AAM and the City of Aspen have reviewed the museum’s [Kusama] installation to ensure its compliance with municipal building codes,” the museum says. “It is the determination of both parties that fulfilling the artwork’s need for natural light and appropriate space and code requirements cannot be achieved equitably within the museum’s layout at this time.” (more…)

LA Times critic Christopher Knight has won the $50,000 Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation’s lifetime achievement award.  “He was always the one who chose the important things and wrote in detail and beautifully,” says Executive Director Susan C. Larsen. “The most outstanding thing about his career, that lifts him and distinguishes him across the country, is his fearlessness. He’s not afraid to tackle the issues everyone talks about.” (more…)

Bloomberg reports that David Geffen was the buyer of David Hockney‘s The Splash at Sotheby’s last week. “Everyone was thinking about Brexit,” says gallerist and former auctioneer Brett Gorvy. “No one wanted to consign unless there was a financial situation that guaranteed security.” (more…)

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The Cooper Hewitt’s ouster of director Caroline Baumann is profiled in the NYT this week, as some point to controversy behind her wedding and a perceived conflict of interest in her work with a wedding dress designer. “I know the circumstances of the investigation that led to Caroline’s dismissal and I must say I am appalled that this was its conclusion,” says philanthropist and Cooper Hewitt Board Secretary Judy Francis Zankel. “I have been working with her long enough to know without a doubt that she has been unfairly accused and unjustly judged.” (more…)

Artist Dawoud Bey gets a profile in The Guardian this week, as he opens a retrospective at SFMoMA. “What I hope to create is work that makes it apparent that black people exist not only in a social world,” Beys says at the press preview for the SF Moma opening, “but they also have rich interior lives as human beings.” (more…)

Artist Pyotr Pavlensky is once again facing possible imprisonment over his recent stunt leaking a politician’s sex tape. “[Candidate Benjamin Griveaux] despises his constituents,” the artist says in a statement. “He was the only candidate to use his family to promote a political image. He told a big lie; he began his campaign with a big lie.” (more…)

The LA Times has a piece this week on the closure of the Marciano Foundation, noting issues with unionizing labor alongside organizational breakdowns and a lack of internal structure. “[Maurice Marciano] didn’t really know how expensive it is to run his own private museum,” says an unnamed source. “He did it in a very generous, very first-class generous way.” (more…)

Jonathan Paul

Continuing its own intriguing and honed perspective on booth its surroundings in Los Angeles and on the model of the art fair, SPRING/BREAK has once again touched down in the City of Angels, launching a supplementary event that offers an ample supply of artists and galleries presenting in a concept that stands as a stark contrast to the traditional fair model.   (more…)

Korakrit Arunanondchai at Clearing, all images via Art Observed

As Frieze opens up shop for the week on the West Coast, the bevy of satellite fairs and event openings are underway across the city.  One particular highlight, and also a second-time event for Frieze Week, Felix LA, the joint effort of collector Dean Valentine and dealers Al and Mills Morán, has returned to the rooms and public spaces of the iconic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles for the week.  One of the more compelling fair entries of the week, the work’s program, which sees gallerists taking over rooms in the hotel, allows a unique mixture of intimate exhibitions and adventurous concepts that felt well-suited to the well-heeled patrons of the contemporary art market, both looking for a good piece of work and a unique experience shopping for it.   (more…)

Clément Chéroux, senior curator of the photography center at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is heading to MoMA’s to serve as the museum’s chief curator of photography. “It was a pleasure to work at SFMOMA for three years and to have the support of a fantastic Bay Area photo community,” Chéroux said in a statement. “I am very excited to be part of the energy of the new MoMA and to work with the team and collection to develop great projects.” (more…)

Billionaire Mark Pincus, founder of online gaming firm Zynga, has pledged $3 million to James Turrell’s Roden Crater project. “The project itself feels, to me, like modern-day pyramids,” he says. “The ambition and scale and scope of it is something that has the potential to be something that people, many generations from now, will be able to experience and get something amazing from—maybe something beyond what we can imagine today.” (more…)

A piece in Art Newspaper asks why so many private museums are already shuttering. “It’s more fun building a museum and a collection and opening it than running it,” says Adrian Ellis, the founding director of AEA Consulting. (more…)

Oil and ranching heiress Anne Marion, founder of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico has passed away at the age of 81. “Anne Marion was one of the most generous, admirable, and inspirational people I have ever known,” says Marla Price, director of the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, where Marion was an active benefactor. “Her great leadership and generosity to the museum has continued until the present, and her loss is heartbreaking for everyone involved with the Modern.” (more…)

Russian provocateur and artist Pyotr Pavlensky, whose prior stunts involved setting the doors of a Russian security organization aflame, has taken reportedly taken responsibility for interfering in the Parisian mayoral elections, leaking compromising sexually graphic videos of candidate Benjamin Griveaux online. “He is someone who is always playing up family values, who says he wants to be the mayor of families and always cites as examples his wife and children. But he does the opposite,” Pavlensky is quoted. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama will stage another major show of her Infinity Rooms at the Tate Modern this May, the museum has announced.  The show will feature two such works as well as documentation of early performance pieces by the artist.  (more…)

Fast Company has a piece on the renovation of the Rothko Chapel in Houston and a look at the space’s improvements. “The Chapel was built with a vision that brought together modern art and a sacred space to promote human unity, solidarity, justice and peace,” says Christopher Rothko, Opening Spaces chairman and the artist’s son. “The universality of this vision is very relevant for us today and I believe will remain so for generations to come.” (more…)

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Lorna Simpson, all images via Art Observed

As the early hours of the second Frieze Los Angeles Art Fair draw to a close this evening, and the sun sets over the Pacific, the fair seems to have once again hammered home its vital engagement with the city, and with its thriving art scene, launching another strong event spread across the grounds of the Paramount Studios.   With strong sales reported and an energetic atmosphere across the fair, it would seem that the small-scale and focused approach of the fair had once again seen the fair brand making its case as an arbiter of thoughtful, curated approaches towards the market and its participants.

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Artist Amoako Boafo criticizes Stefan Simchowitz over the collector’s attempt at flipping one of his works at auction tonight at Phillips. “Now he wants to make profit from it,” he says. “It’s only sad. The painting is so recent.” (more…)

A piece in the Art Newspaper this week documents a series of court cases around gallery-artist splits, noting the various ways and legal issues around the break of a business relationship in the art world. (more…)

Artist Luchita Hurtado gets a profile in the WSJ this week, as she finds a more responsive market for her work. (more…)

Residents of the luxury flat next to the Tate Modern, who sued over the the museum overlook’s vantage point into their apartments, have lost their court appeal.  “These properties are impressive, and no doubt there are great advantages to be enjoyed in such extensive glassed views, but that in effect comes at a price in terms of privacy,” the ruling judge stated. (more…)