Georg Baselitz, Stunde der Nachtigall (2012). All images via Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

A new series of paintings by Georg Baselitz is on view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg through August 30. In Das Negativ, Baselitz paints from photographic negatives, resulting in a necessarily dark palette, with subjects obscured in their reversed portrayals– a step beyond the artist’s usual practice of painting his figures upside down. Though essentially painted from life, Baselitz subverts any realistic elements with his intense gentural abstraction, and tenebrous palette.

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Beyoncé travels to the remote West Texas art town of Marfa.

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The Hirschhorn Museum was closed temporarily after a security guard’s apparent suicide. The man was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the lower level of the security guard’s locker room. Patrons were immediately evacuated, but had no exposure to the shooting scene.

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Rob Pruitt’s chrome statue of Andy Warhol, which has been in Union Square since March of last year, will be traveling to Texas where it will be displayed in front of the Contemporary Art Museum Houston beginning next month, through the end of the year.

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Titian, Diana and Actaeon (1556-1559)

A monumental figure of the Italian Renaissance, Titian was considered  a master of color and figure whose vibrant works and striking subject matter cemented his reputation as the chief talent of the Venetian School of the 16th century.  His series the Poesies represents this skill through a series of depictions of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, pushing the evocative nature of visual storytelling to its limits on canvas.  Now, several of these works are being publicly shown again at the National Gallery in London.

Mark Wallinger, Diana (2012)

Yet another monumental event The National Gallery is showing the Death of Actaeon, Diana and Actaeon (both based on the myth of Actaeon the hunter, who stumbled upon the bathing Goddess Diana, and was transformed into a stag, doomed to a savage death at the hands of his own hounds) , and the recently acquired Diana and Callisto.  In addition, the museum has sought to tie the past with the present, commissioning a number of new works by Chris Ofili, Conrad Showcross and Mark Wallinger to be shown in conjunction with Titian’s classic pieces.

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Rob Pruitt – Holy Crap (2012), The Fireplace Project

Continuing in their six year mission to bring noteworthy contemporary art to the Hamptons, The Fireplace Project has opened its doors to New York gallerist and curator Michele Maccarone.   Focusing on a crop of New Yorkers, Maccarone has included works by Nate Lowman, Piotr Urlanski, Rob Pruitt and Dan Colen.  Titled “Holy Crap,” the show examines each artist’s practice of using scrap, detritus and trash in their work.

Dan Colen – Hard Day’s Night (2012), The Fireplace Project

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Two famous Spanish directors, Carlos Saura and Fernando Colomo, will release two films featuring different aspects of Picasso’s life. One will focus on the painting of Guernica, and the other will explore how Picasso became wrapped up in the theft of the Mona Lisa back in 1911. Carlos Saura’s Guernica film will star Antonio Banderas as Picasso and Gwyneth Paltrow as Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress.

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Artist Wes Lang has designed the cover for the the Grateful Dead’s newest box set, Spring 1990, a famous year of concerts for the iconic rock band.

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Henry Wyndham, chairman of Sotheby’s UK, was in a grouse hunting accident in Scotland where he was shot in the arm, throat, and face, sustaining 52 lead pellet wounds overall.  Wyndham is expected to fully recover.  Wyndham closed the most expensive work at auction, a Giacometti, in 2010. ‘Henry was very lucky – if he had not been wearing glasses he would have been blinded.’

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In “I was Jeff Koons’s Studio Serf” John Powers talks about his time working for Jeff Koons on the Celebration Series, as a studio assistant in 1995, casting light on the system behind production top works of contemporary art at auction. “The goal was to hand-fashion a flat, seamless surface that appeared to have been manufactured by machine, which meant there could be no visible brush strokes, no blending, no mistakes.”

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Bruce Nauman, One Hundred Fish Fountain, via Gagosian

Bruce Nauman’s body of work has long incorporated elements of identity, the potentials of art and the artist, and an interplay between himself and the viewer. These aspects converge in his One Hundred Fish Fountain (2005), on view at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue headquarters.

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Paul Signac’s great granddaughter recently filed a lawsuit requesting that his painting, In the Time of Harmony be moved to the Musée d’Orsay for safekeeping because it was vandalized in its current location, Montreuil’s town hall, in December of last year.

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With the recent redevelopment of the Löwenbräukunst art complex, a long time gathering place for aritsts, Zurich asserts itself as a city for contemporary culture and art in the twenty-first century.

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Jake and Dinos Chapman have created an effigy of Hitler as part of part of the Grundy Art Gallery’s Adventureland Golf exhibition, which features art works as holes on an imaginary  golf course. The work has stirred up a debate, causing those on the Board of Deputies of British Jews to call the work “tasteless.” Known for their controversial work, the gallery described the Chapman Brothers’ piece as “the powerful image of the Nazi regime within the context of holiday fun and in doing so making reference to the British wartime spirit of making humour at the Fuhrer’s expense.”

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Liquid Rarity Exchange, formed in response to the increasing value of artwork and collectibles, aims to offer investors a chance buy and sell shares of art, creating a way for new buyers to join the art market in fractional parts.

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Gardar Eide Einarsson – Infinite Crisis (2012), Home Alone Gallery – Photos by D. Creahan

Tucked away on Franklin Street at the edge of TriBeCa, Home Alone Gallery sits with its artwork exposed to the street.  Taking cues from well-regarded venues like Maurizio Cattelan’s Wrong Gallery, the exhibition space turns the street itself into a gallery, easily accessible by any pedestrian.  Conceived by artists Nate Lowman, Hanna Liden and Leo Fitzpatrick, the Home Alone Gallery takes joy in simplicity, showing a single piece from its small storefront window.

Gardar Eide Einarsson – (2012), Home Alone Gallery

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Erwin Wurm – Big Kastenmann (2012), The Standard, High Line

Austrian surrealist Erwin Wurm has a penchant for exploring the detritus of our everyday lives, taking common objects and distorting their forms, sizes and positions to create absurd commentaries on modern existence.  Creating bizarre portraits of our commodities and ourselves, Wurm challenges the conventions of contemporary consumer culture.

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Bravo’s docu-series Gallery Girls premiered last night to mixed reviews. “Bravo’s gallery girls need galleries like the real housewives need husbands: as an entrée into and excuse for a life of shopping, cocktail-drinking, and backstabbing.”

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Ellsworth Kelly, interviewed, describes his taste in art, his creative process and how he chooses to work against the art market rather than give into its pressures. His show, Plant Drawings, will be on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until September 3rd.

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After 13 successive Turbine Hall annual commissions at the Tate Modern, Unilever has ended their sponsorship of the program causing the institution to seek new sponsorship.  Since 2000, Unilever has sponsored commissions including Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, 2003-04, Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, 2007-08, and Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei, 2010-2011. Unilever’s sponsorship deal runs through 2013, after which, they will remain on board as a corporate member. The Tate is now beginning discussions concerning sponsorship from 2014 onward.

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Architect David Adjaye and artist Doug Aitken have collaborated on a pavilion for the Tate Liverpool designed to create a cultural destination away from the confines of its traditional gallery space. The pavilion, composed of corrugated acrylic, bitumen panels, and wood framing, will mark Aitken’s first public installation in the UK. Forming a gallery during the day, the perimeter walls will display a projection of Aitken’s work at night, similar to that recently displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum.

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Forbes reports on how China may be leading the media to believe its art market is more successful than it may actually be. In the past few years, demand for Chinese contemporary art has remained mostly domestic, and many of works sold at auction in Hong Kong and Beijing remain unpaid-for. Though China has been said to hold the number one spot in terms of ranking of art sales globally, the news tests the accuracy and truth of these rankings.

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Nate Lowman, Bulletin Board (2012) via Venus Over Manhattan

“Bulletin Boards” at Venus Over Manhattan, collector Adam Lindemann’s new uptown gallery, is the product of a collaboration with White Columns, the downtown alternative art space directed by Matthew Higgs. On the heels of Venus Over Manhattan’s heady, decadent “Á rebours” inaugural show, which resulted in the sensational Dalí art theft, “Bulletin Boards brings a notably more experimental endeavor to the space’s industrial walls. The exhibition is modeled on a curatorial project that Higgs debuted ten years ago at the California College of Arts, in which a glazed aluminum bulletin board purchased from an office supply store would become a “project space” for invited artists such as Trisha Donnelly and Carter. In this show’s press release, Higgs states that “the project sought to gently subvert the typical function of a bulletin board, replacing the anticipated pertinent or useful information typically found in such places with something that approximated ‘art’.” In the project’s current manifestation, a selected group of artists and curators were invited to envision their own bulletin boards, resulting in the twenty-five works currently on display. Born from the same conceptual and material conditions presented by the constant of the bulletin board, the final works spring from the different variables employed by the individual artist and curators, resulting in a diverse assortment of ideas and aesthetics that multifariously engage, entertain, and confront the viewer.

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