The Getty Institute has announced that it will purchase the former Knoedler Gallery’s complete archives. Before the gallery was mired in lawsuits and closed its doors, it was an 165-year old institution whose client roster included Paul Mellon, Henry Clay Frick and Robert Sterling Clark. It exhibited and sold work by van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer, Frederic Church, John Singer Sargent, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman, among others. The well-preserved archive includes stock books, sales books, photos and illustrated letters from artists and collectors. (more…)

Marian Goodman Gallery, “Ellsworth Kelly,” installation view. All photography courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery unless otherwise noted.

Ellsworth Kelly‘s installation of four 2-panel paintings executed this year is on view at Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris until July 13, 2012. The show, as the gallery’s press release relates, is his first in Paris in 20 years, when his formative paintings made in his youthful residence in the city were exhibited at the Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume. This new work comprises four paintings, each consisting of a curved geometrical relief on a white panel, progressing on the ordered spectrum from red, yellow, blue, to green. Laconically hung a single panel to each of the four walls in the gallery, the paintings seem a further distillation of Kelly’s painterly system, a continuation of the experiments he first executed in Paris in his early years.

Marian Goodman Gallery, “Ellsworth Kelly,” installation view

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Andy Warhol “Double Elvis” (1963) Via Kunsthaus Graz

Currently showing at the Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria is a group exhibition of work by artists Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool and Barnett Newman.  The show is designed to explore parallels between the three artists and to simultaneously shed light on the influence of American Abstract Expressionism on Minimalism and Pop Art.  A critical assumption underlying the exhibit is the idea that Warhol was influenced directly by Newman’s work.  Christopher Wool, one of America’s most significant contemporary painters, is brought into the comparison by way of his “Word Paintings,” which demonstrate a “mediatisation” of images and an overall radical approach to conceptual art–comparable to that of Warhol’s. Ultimately, “Painting Real” is a unique reflection on the work of Warhol and Newman from the contemporary perspective of Christopher Wool–supporting the idea that Wool’s work would never have been conceivable without the transformative work that both Warhol and Newman produced in the generation preceding him. Exploring shared themes of space, time and repetition, the exhibit functions as a kind of  historical compilation that speaks to the cumulative nature of artistic movements and the inner dynamics that propel them.

More text, images and related after the jump…

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