Collector Audrey Irmas is selling an iconic Cy Twombly blackboard painting this fall at Sotheby’s, with $30 million from the sale proceeds going to fund a new Rem Koolhaas designed building for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. “I hope this building will provide a gathering place for cultural life and social events in a very diverse neighborhood,” says Ms. Irmas. (more…)
LA’s The Broad is set to open September 20th with a vast exhibition of its permanent collection. “This installation is an incredible opportunity to highlight the collection’s breadth and demonstrate in full force the Broads’ nearly five-decade engagement with art,”Founding Director Joanne Heyler. “We are not only able to present exciting moments of the collection’s well-known depth in artists like Twombly, Lichtenstein, Koons, and Warhol, but we also have explored interconnections between artists, and are showing works not previously associated with the collection and shared for the first time with Los Angeles audiences, including many of our most recent acquisitions.” (more…)
Will Boone, RID (2015), via Art Observed
David Kordansky Gallery is currently presenting Flat World a group show organized by Karma New York, an exhibition of familiar objects rendered in conceptually minimal fashions, cohesively utilizing form as content while transforming formal aesthetic style into subject and material. Flat World includes works by Richard Artschwager, Tauba Auerbach, Will Boone, Jeff Elrod, Robert Grosvenor, Peter Halley, Lee Lozano, John Mason, and Charlotte Posenensko. Combining the work of artists both young and old, the exhibition spans the years of the 1960’s through the 1980’s and on to the early 2010’s. (more…)
Katherine Bernhardt has completed a commissioned mural for Venus Over Los Angeles, covering the outside of the gallery in her signature cartoonish drawings of food and cigarettes. The mural is on view through August 9th. (more…)
Olaf Breuning, Life III (2015), via Michael Benevento
Compiling a body of work from the past several years of the artist’s practice, Michael Benevento in Los Angeles is offering a broad look at the recent practice of Olaf Breuning, exploring the artist’s interest in vastly differing modes of production, and the thematic interests that unify his work.
LACMA is currently showing the video collaboration between Steve McQueen and Kanye West, depicting the musician rapping and running through the Chatham Dockyards in London. The video is currently running at the museum. (more…)
David Hockney is interviewed in The Guardian this week, discussing his recent practice using digital technology and his lifestyle in Los Angeles. “It’s a reasonably sophisticated city down the hill,” he says. “It’s very nice. It’s home, really. But I’m not that interested in what’s happening outside. I like my way of life. I just work.” (more…)
An Auguste Rodin sculpture stolen 24 years ago has been recovered after it was offered for sale to Christie’s, and returned to the owner. “In accordance with the insurance policy to which this work was subject, Young Woman with Serpent was offered back to the theft victim upon its successful recovery,”says Spokesman Jerome Hasler of Art Recovery Group, the company that assisted in the recovery of the piece. “In this instance, however, the victim has decided that the work should be sold, and it will now be consigned later this year for a new owner to enjoy.” (more…)
Rachel Harrison, Magnum (2015), via Regen Projects
New York-based artist Rachel Harrison is presenting a multifaceted exhibition at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects this month, exploring notions of representation, perspective and time as they function in both the context of the gallery and in the artist’s own work. Titled Three Young Framers, the exhibition’s tacit reference to the photography of August Sander points to this notion of the subject as a participant in the act of photography, echoed today in an era of widely proliferating photographic technology. (more…)
Shepard Fairey’s warrant in Detroit resulted in the artist’s arrest at the Los Angeles International Airport this past Monday, where he was held overnight on charges of vandalism. The artist has since been released, and has not made a statement on the event. (more…)
The LA Times looks at the immense efforts taken at the Broad Museum to ready the exhibition space, including the negotiations in installing and managing immense artworks like a recently purchased Takashi Murakami piece. “Contemporary art is so varied in form, material and scale that you often need to devise new approaches for moving and installing certain pieces,” says the Broad’s director of collections management, Vicki Gambill. “That’s what makes the work infinitely interesting and complex. Preparators love solving problems.” (more…)
As the Broad Foundation prepares to open its Los Angeles Museum, its founders are on a major buying spree, buying about one work per week to bulk up its collection. The museum already holds the world’s largest collection of works by Cindy Sherman, and is noted as having more Roy Lichtenstein works than anyone else outside the artist’s own foundation. (more…)
Artist Mark Bradford is profiled in the New Yorker this week, discussing his work, his early life growing up in Los Angeles, and his recent adventures into performance and stand-up comedy. “I’d seen so many black male comics, with their untouchable heterosexual superiority,” he says. “I thought, well, why not do a piece where we shake that up a little bit?” (more…)
Maccarone Gallery is the latest New York gallery opening an exhibition space in Los Angeles, the New York Times reports. The gallery will take up residence at 300 South Mission Road, a location that inspired gallerist Michele Maccarone. “I saw the space and was very inspired by it,” she says. “The departure point was really the building.” (more…)
Ode to Santos Dumont the last work completed by the late Chris Burden this year, has gone on view at LACMA, a helium-filled dirigible that circles inside the Resnick Pavilion, paying tribute to the balloon pilot who sailed around the Eiffel Tower in 1901. “The idea that you try and fail and try and fail and have an imagination is very much Chris Burden the artist,” LACMA Director Michael Govan says. “I think he saw in Santos Dumont a bit of himself having ideas and an imagination and tenacity and also that kind of joy of achievement.” (more…)
David Hockney is the subject of an interview in The Guardian this week, revisiting his life among movie stars and artists during the 1960’s, contrasted with his intense work ethic. “I thought I was a hedonist at the time, but when I look back I was always working,” he says. “I am always working. I work every day. I never give parties; I never gave them.” (more…)
Sterling Ruby will end his representation with Hauser & Wirth this year, the Art Newspaper reports, after three years with the gallery. Marc Payot, VP of Hauser & Wirth, stated the gallery remains on “very friendly terms” with Ruby. (more…)
William Pope L., Trinket (Installation View), via MOCA
Inside the MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary building in Downtown Los Angeles, an immensely oversized American flag endlessly flutters in a synthetic breeze, held aloft by a series of industrial grade cooling fans. The breeze is intense, and the force exerted on the delicate stitching holding the iconic stars and stripes together is gradually tearing apart, a powerful metaphor in a time when the nation is riddled by high levels of police brutality, harsh military involvement overseas and increasingly vitriolic partisanship. (more…)
French artist Vincent Lamouroux has completed a new public project in Los Angeles, covering the full exterior of an historic motel at Bates and Sunset Blvd. in white paint. “It couldn’t have been any other place,” the artist says. “Because it is a motel, a place shared by a lot of people. And this type of architecture, international style, coupled with palm trees, the motel sign and the billboard as well, is a combination of the LA idea that we all have, the California dream.” (more…)
As the Los Angeles County Museum of Art continues its 50th-anniversary acquisitions campaign, the museum announced over $200 million in new art received as “anniversary gifts” to the institution. A number of the works go on view this week as part of the museum’s “50 for 50: Gifts on the Occasion of LACMA’s Anniversary” exhibition. (more…)
Former Walt Disney President Michael Ovitz has filed a $2.5 Million bad faith breach of contract lawsuit against insurance company American International Group (AIG) and Chartis Property Casualty Co. for allegedly failing to reimburse Ovitz for a lost Richard Prince work. “While Defendants ultimately acknowledged coverage and full insurance benefits for another loss under almost identical circumstances, Defendants steadfastly, unreasonably, and without probable cause, refused to provide coverage for the loss at issue herein,” and thus represented bad faith, the suit says. (more…)
The New York Times profiles Joanne Heyler, the leader of Los Angeles’s Broad Foundation, and her role in establishing Eli Broad’s vision for his soon to open museum. “She’s thinking about how to nest this institution in the community, how to engage the broader culture, how to broaden its audience and what the experience is going to be like for someone going to this museum,” says Lisa Dennison, former Guggenheim director and a chairwoman of Sotheby’s. “The book shop, lighting, conservation, storage, the plan for the opening show — it’s all Joanne.” (more…)
Glenn Ligon, Come Out #5 (2014)
Regen Projects is presenting its fourth exhibition with Glenn Ligon, the prominent New York-based artist who has established himself as one of the strongest voices in American contemporary art. Well, it’s bye-bye/If you call that gone, featuring three bodies of work, adopts its title from the lyrics of the blues song “What’s the Matter Now”, projecting Ligon’s interest in text as a mode of expression and an agent of collective identity. (more…)
John Baldessari, Pictures & Scripts: A glass of water sweetheart (2015), all images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery
On view at both Marian Goodman Gallery, London and Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris are two simultaneous exhibitions by John Baldessari: Pictures & Scripts and Early Work. The London gallery’s Pictures & Scripts show focuses on a series of new works, while the Paris gallery will show a selection of the artist’s important early catalog.