Renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid has passed away at the age of 65. Hadid has been a foundational voice of contemporary architecture over the course of the early 21st Century, including London’s Olympic Aquatic Centre, the Guangzhou Opera House, and the MAXXI in Rome. (more…)
Chris Burden, via NY Times
Chris Burden, the Californian performance art pioneer and sculptor, who consistently pushed the envelope of physical endurance and human capacities, passed away at home this weekend from a malignant melanoma. He was 69. (more…)
Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Walter Liedtke was one of the victims of this week’s tragic MTA North crash outside of Valhalla, NY, the New York Times reports. “He had a wonderful way with words and engaged people through those unexpected approaches in language,” says Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of Northern Baroque paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “He had strong opinions about things, and he was not shy about expressing those opinions.” (more…)
Artist Jane Wilson, whose work frequently explored the rich colors and hues of the midwest skyline, has passed away at the age of 90 in New York City. “The way she increasingly translated natural events — seasons of the year, times of day or night or conditions of weather — into barely representational, hovering substances of color and light is the miracle of the artist’s later work,” says Whitney Museum curator Elisabeth Sussman. (more…)
Filmmaker Harun Farocki has died at 70. Born in German-annexed Czechoslovakia, Farocki attended the German Academy of Film and Television in Berlin before getting kicked out in 1968 and pursuing an artistic career creating politically-charged experimental films. Called the “best-known unknown filmmaker in Germany”, Farocki operated outside the New German Cinema movement that featured contemporaries such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. Represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Farocki exhibited an installation of his work “Images of War (At a Distance)” at the MoMA in 2011. (more…)
Artist On Kawara, whose ongoing artistic project involved the painting of each day of his life, has passed away at the age of 81.
Born in 1933 in Japan, Kawara worked in Tokyo until 1965, when he moved to New York City. Shortly after arriving, Kawara began his famous “date paintings” series, painting the calendar date for each day of his life, meticulously recording the passage of his life on canvas through a simple, tracing of dates and time. His absurdist, heavily conceptual bent opened a new engagement with the processes of time and context in art, making him an unlikely air to the work of early Dadaists like Duchamp and Magritte. (more…)
Sir Anthony Caro, via New York Times
The widely recognized British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro passed away today after suffering a heart attack. He was 89. A former assistant to Henry Moore, Caro first made a name for himself in the 1950’s and 60’s, creating roughly rendered, abstract structures which he used as a gradual transition away from the traditionally figurative work of the medium. “I have been trying to eliminate references and make truly abstract sculpture, composing the parts of the pieces like notes in music,” he said in 1975.
Sir Anthony Caro, Déjeuner sur l’herbe II (1989), via Tate Modern (more…)
Artist Ruth Asawa, known for her complexly crocheted wire sculptures and communal sculptures has passed away at the age of 87. A pioneering student at Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, Asawa worked to transcend the fierce discrimination she faced as a Japanese-American in mid-20th century America, creating a body of work that mixed elegant architectures with a spirit of communal obligation, epitomized in her Union Square fountain sculpture in her home city of San Francisco. “She was in a very real sense knitting the community together with the communal public fountain,” says Timothy Anglin Burgard, curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “ mirroring the city back to itself and saying we are a community.” (more…)
American sculptor Walter De Maria, via LA Times
Walter De Maria, the New York sculptor known for his monumental sculptures that helped pioneer the conceptual, minimalist and land art movements of the mid to late twentieth century, has passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 77.
Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer (1977), via New York Magazine (more…)
Ronnie Cutrone, Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, (1998), via Huffington Post
Artist Ronnie Cutrone passed away this past Sunday, at the age of 65. Perhaps best known for his time as pop artist Andy Warhol’s assistant from 1972 to 1982, Cutrone had been a regular at Warhol’s Factory since 1965, when he was still in high school. At the age of 15, Cutrone became a go-go dancer with the Velvet Underground as part of the band’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable show, and befriended many of the artists associated with the West Village arts scene of the 70s and 80s, including Lou Reed and Jim Morrison.
Ronnie Cutrone, Quick Change Artist (2004), via Galerie Gmurzynska, Art Basel Miami 2011
Gagosian Gallery has just announced the death of Richard Artschwager, mere days after the closing of his retrospective exhibition at The Whitney Museum in New York City. He was 89. Artschwager’s unique path helped to define the perceptual and spatial explorations of conceptual and minimalist art while retaining the artist’s personal aesthetic. Often utilizing objects from the everyday, he continually sought to explore the interaction between object and space, notably in his reworkings of chairs, pianos, and tables. The artist’s work had been the subject of several major exhibitions worldwide, including shows at the Centre Pompidou, Deutsche Guggenheim, and the aforementioned Whitney Museum. (more…)
