Glenn O’Brien, via NYT
Glenn O’Brien, writer, editor, creative director and founder of the famed downtown public-access television show TV Party, has passed away at the age of 70. (more…)
Ren Hang, via Art Info
Chinese photographer Ren Hang, known for his bold style and provocative nude images, has passed away at the age of 29 of an apparent suicide. Hang was a self-taught photographer who drew frequent controversy in his home country for his unapologetic depictions of both male and female models, and had previously been arrested a number of times over his work.
Work by Ren Hang, via CNN
Hilla Becher, via Artforum
Hilla Becher, the influential German photographer who, alongside her husband Bernd, worked as a pioneer in the field of contemporary art photography, has passed away at the age of 81. (more…)
Ingrid Sichy, International Editor of Condé Nast, former editor of Interview Magazine, and longtime contributor to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, passed away late this week in New York City at the age of 63. Sichy was a foundational chronicler of the New York avant-garde and modern fashion for nearly forty years, and was a fixture at openings and runway shows around the globe. “She could write about anything, but what interested her most were art and fashion, and she traversed those two hothouses like a bemused empress,” says Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. “She had a crisp mind and an almost uncanny focus when she sat down to write. She was a fun, conspiratorial gossip, but never with malice or envy — the working tools of so many gossips.” (more…)
Artist and dealer Dorothee Fischer, who headed the Konrad Fischer gallery in Düsseldorf, and advocated for artists like Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, and Blinky Palermo, has passed away at the age of 78. Fischer’s tireless, focused work in conceptual and minimal art built a dedicated group of artists around her, and she in turn built an impressive collection of 250 works, alongside her gallery archives, both of which were purchased by the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen for over $1 million. (more…)
Sturtevant, the appropriation artist who worked at making manual repetitions and recreations of iconic artists and young upstarts alike, has died. Reports claim that the artist, who won the Golden Lion at the 54th annual Venice Biennale, was 84 years old, but as much information about the artist remains unknown, this is not certain. Sturtevant will be the subject of an upcoming career retrospective this November at MoMA. “Her various catalytic conversions prove that art can be (at its best?) an impetus for action—aesthetic, cerebral, insurrectionary ,” said writer Bruce Hainley. (more…)
Scottish-born painter Alan Davie passed away last week at the age of 93. Davie’s expressionistic, abstract canvases earned him considerable attention during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and was considered as a major influence on the work of David Hockney. The artist’s work is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate Britain. “It’s an urge, an intensity, a kind of sexual need,” Mr. Davie said recently in an interview with The Telegraph. “I don’t practice painting or drawing as an art, in the sense of artifice, of making an imitation of something. It’s something I do from an inner compulsion, that has to come out.” (more…)
Martha Beck, New York curator and founder of the Drawing Center, has passed away at the age of 75. Ms. Beck, a champion of both emerging artists and the more rugged, experimental drawing works of masters like Michelangelo and architect Antonio Gaudi, established the Drawing Center in the late 1970’s, using a small, publicly-funded budget to put on world-class shows of drawings and works on paper that earned her museum a reputation of quality and adventurousness. “Amazingly, she would ask the most important museums all over the world to lend their precious rare old master drawings to this funky warehouse space in Lower Manhattan — and they would — because its reputation for innovation, connoisseurship and excellence preceded it,” says Ann Philbin, a former director of the museum. (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…)
Allan Sekula, the multimedia artist and former recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, has passed away at the age of 62. Working across disciplines, Sekula produced a diverse and challenging body of work that included film, installation and photography (his most recognized work), often generating texts alongside the work that helped to further investigations into the media he utilized. His work has shown at the Tate Modern, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and MoMA, among others. His death comes just days after MoMA announced the acquisition of his seminal Fish Story series. (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…)
