Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait (1963-64), final price: £6,008,750, via Sotheby’s

Marking its entry in London’s final week of major evening auctions for the first half of 2017, Sotheby’s closed a small, 41-lot proceeding this evening in its Contemporary department, running through its offered works with impressive results and  steady bidding  that ultimately brought home a final total sales figure of £62,325,750 for the sale.  Bounding through its lots, leaving only works unsold, the sale offered a high note for the contemporary market’s continued strength.    (more…)

New York State Representative Nydia Velazquez has introduced legislation in the House of Representatives to ease student debt for those working in the arts by $10,000.  “Those working in the arts and related fields make invaluable contributions to New York City and to our entire nation,” said Velázquez. “Individuals that dedicate themselves to these professions enrich our culture and my bill would provide many of them with relief from mounting student loan debt.”  (more…)

Max Beckmann, Hölle der Vögel (1937-38), final price: £36,005,000, via Christies

Continuing a series of auctions this month in London, Christie’s capped its Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale tonight at its King Street location in the British capital on a relative high note.  The decidedly subdued, yet well-appointed auction closed on a final tally of £149,500,000 for its 33 lot offering, with only a small fraction of works going unsold (94 per cent sold by lot) over the course of the proceedings. (more…)

Anselm Kiefer is profiled in the New Yorker this week, after opening an exhibition of new work in New York.  In the piece, the artist reflects on the inspiration behind his work, and growing up in post-war Germany.  “I was born in the war,” he says, “and our house was bombed on the night of my birth. Fortunately, we were in the hospital. I was brought up with ruins. For me, they were always the most beautiful thing.  What I like is the beginning, when all options are there, and you can dream, no?” (more…)

François Pinault and architect Tadao Ando are teaming up to convert Paris’s Bourse de commerce into a massive art museum, The Guardian reports.  The new exhibition site will serve as a permanent home for the luxury goods magnate’s €1.25 billion art collection.  “These are tumultuous times in Europe – the recurring terrorist incidents and the UK withdrawal from the EU have fueled anxiety over what the future holds, and countries and people alike seem unsure of their own identities,” Ando said of the project, hoping that it might “renew hope in the future.” (more…)

The Guardian takes a tour of the Centro Botin in Santander, Spain this week, the recently completed art gallery designed by Renzo Piano, which has already earned praise for its daring architectural design, levitating 20 feet above ground on a series of slender pillars.  “From the very beginning, I wanted the building to fly,” Piano says of his design. (more…)

Artist Ai Weiwei is featured in a podcast with the New Yorker’s David Remnick this week, as the artist reflects on his recent projects in the United States and Europe, and his political agency in both China and abroad.  “The whole thing is so ridiculous,” he says of the Chinese government’s seizing of his passport. “Right after I got my passport I left because they said I was free… I want to test them, to make them know I am not afraid.” (more…)

The New York Times reports on the string of closures for small and mid-size galleries in New York, and the challenges dealers are facing as the market leaves less and less room for younger artists. “I really feel like I’m not doing some of the things I love most — it’s just a very different business at this level,” says Candice Madey of On Stellar Rays, which just closed its doors in favor of a project-focused operational structure. “I’ve missed more of the spontaneity and the openness.” (more…)

The Financial Times profiles a group of galleries expanding to unfamiliar locales and cities in an attempt to break the mold of how art galleries do business in the 21st Century, focusing on projects like Thomas Dane’s new exhibition space in Naples.  “Everything we try to do is artist-led, and artists absolutely love Naples,” Dane writes.  “I wanted to offer them a different and interesting space, rather than just expanding. And I feel it will give them and myself more freedom to do what we want, rather than, say, in New York.” (more…)

Julia Joern, a partner at David Zwirner Gallery and a major voice in the gallery’s communications and publishing departments, is leaving the gallery due to health reasons, the Art News reports.  “In a field where a great deal of business is still conducted in a very old-fashioned way, Julia has been a relentless innovator and pioneer, and in the process has created the very blueprint for all the marketing efforts that are now necessary to effectively run and grow a large-scale, international art gallery,” David Zwirner himself wrote in an all-staff email last week. (more…)

In a timely announcement during New York’s Gay Pride weekend, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that artist Anthony Goicolea has been tapped to design the first official monument to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, which will be installed in Hudson River Park. “It feels like there are certain shapes and patterns that are encoded in our DNA as humans that transcend any particular culture and speak to how we are unified in the larger scheme,” the artist says. “I wanted to create a space that feels familiar, even though it is new.” (more…)

An altarpiece by Jacopo Tintoretto, formerly owned by David Bowie, will return to Venice for the 2019 Biennale, the Art Newspaper reports, after Belgian researchers discovered an underdrawing implying the work was created earlier than previously thought.  The show in Venice will serve as a “unique opportunity to show the Flemish masters to the world in the place where—more than any other—they drew inspiration from their Italian colleagues and from the classical legacy,” according to Ben Weyts, Belgium’s minister for tourism. (more…)

The Tate Modern has announced plans to stage the largest ever UK retrospective of the work of Amedeo Modigliani, The Guardian reports.  The exhibition will compile a wide view of the artist’s work, exploring his personal life and relationships to other artists of the era alongside his substantial body of paintings and sculpture. (more…)

Anne Imhof, Faust (2017), via Art Observed

Images capture. They calcify. Within space and time, images appear to sustain a frozen existence with a kind of false grace that suppresses the perpetual change and motion that could be posed as all that which, for lack of a more concise term, is not the image itself.  The dialectic between motion and image, fluidity and representation, is the central conflict of Faust, Anne Imhof’s Golden Lion-winning performance for the German Pavillion at the 57th Venice Biennale. (more…)

Daniel Buren, To Align: works in situ 2017 (Installation View), via Bortolami Gallery

On view through the end of the week, Bortolami Gallery is currently presenting its fourth exhibition of work by Daniel Buren, taking place in the gallery’s new Tribeca location.  Buren’s rich and varied career has been the subject of major museum exhibitions worldwide, and here, in the gallery’s spacious location at 39 Walker Street, turns towards the architectural character of the newly inaugurated space.  His works here draw on space, position and perspective to transform the space with his bright colors and filtered light. (more…)

A series of Antony Gormley sculptures on Crosby Beach outside Liverpool have been vandalized with brightly colored graffiti, The Guardian reports. “We want everyone to enjoy and interact with the impressive Antony Gormley statues on Crosby beach, which are synonymous with Sefton,” a spokesman says. “However, following this incident, we have been contacted directly by Mr Gormley with a view of removing these permanent decorations which we will now look into.” (more…)

The organizers of this year’s Documenta 14 are expanding the exhibition to a satellite exhibition in Luanda, Angola, where they will show a series of works by artists of African descent. “The last decade or so has seen the increased prominence of artists from Africa exhibiting across the contemporary artistic platform in the West,” says Congolese collector Sindika Dokolo, who is helping to fund the project. “I am delighted to help in initiating this opportunity of showing the African artists being exhibited in Documenta 14 for the first time on the continent.” (more…)

Wassily Kandinsky, Bild mit weissen Linien (1913), via Sotheby’s

Holding court with a short but well-appointed pair of sales in London, Sotheby’s kicked off a week of auctions in the British capital, closing its Impressionist and Modern Evening sale with a string of impressive figures and a new auction record for Wassily Kandinsky at £33 million, ultimately bringing a final sales figure of £127,945,750.  The night also saw a short curated sale, “Actual Size” precede the evening’s main event, which saw mixed results and a £20,931,250 final tally for its offering.

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The Guardian charts Nicholas Serota’s impact on the Tate during his tenure as its leader, and the challenges the institution faces in the years ahead as it seeks to continue the momentum he created.  “Beginning to get the momentum going, to turn the battleship – that was the most difficult thing,” he says of his efforts. (more…)

The Albright-Knox in Buffalo has unveiled its major expansion plans, funded by a $42.5 million donation by billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach, which will see the museum expanding underground and out over its current sculpture garden. “At the present time we are able to show about 2.5 percent of our collection. We have hundreds of masterpieces literally in storage at all times, we are not able to share them with the public. A key question we have been challenging ourselves and our architects with is where should we build,” Janne Siren, director of the museum, said. (more…)

The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is scrambling after nearly its entire staff resigned this week in protest over working conditions, the New York Times reports.  “How many organizations expect employees to work for 10- to 12-hour shifts without even a single 15-minute break,” says Nora Lupi, the former visitor services and membership manager. “How many institutions expect someone who makes less than $14/hr to be on call 24/7 for operational, managerial and executive assistant demands?” (more…)

The UK is preparing an online catalogue of its entire collection of publicly owned sculpture, the Art Newspaper reports.  The project will be headed up by Art UK, which led a similar effort in digitizing the nation’s collection of paintings in recent years.  The project is expected to be completed by 2020.  (more…)

Ellsworth Kelly, Diptych: Green Blue (2015), via Art Observed

Since the passing of Ellsworth Kelly in December of 2015, the exhibition of the artists’s final works has made for a sort of bittersweet anticipation. The show could be seen as a grand farewell to an artist who changed the landscape of American painting several times over during the course of his career, each time delving deeper into his clean, almost rhythmic approach to the shaped canvas that filled its confines with rich bounties of color.  Presented this month at Matthew Marks, the artist’s last body of work does not disappoint, and the series of pieces, culled from past sketches and concepts or completely new ideas, feels like a fitting look at the furthest points of the artist’s exploration before he laid down his brush for the last time.  (more…)

Arthur Brand, the Dutch private investigator working on locating works from the the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist has stated that he believes some works are in the hands of former IRA members, the Daily Mail reports, and is confident he can bring at least some of the works home. “Former IRA sources have told me or people that I know that there has been talk about these paintings for years within the IRA,” he says.   (more…)