The Louvre’s new expansion in Abu Dhabi will be announcing 300 loans from its Paris counterpart and twelve other French museum partners by the end of the year, The Art Newspaper reports. The works on loan will rotate over the course of the next ten years, joining up with about 500 new acquisitions that will make up the new museum’s permanent collection. (more…)
Mark Leckey, GreenScreenVegetables (2011), all images courtesy Untitled, New York
Currently on view at Untitled, located at 30 Orchard Street in New York, is a group exhibition of work by both emerging and well-known artists surrounding themes of decontextualization and absence. The show will be on view through August 2nd, 2014.
Lord Jacob Rothschild has been awarded with the J. Paul Getty Award for his contributions to British arts and culture. Rothschild has long been a supporter of the arts, and has served as a board chair at the National Gallery in London, the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund. “No one embodies the ideals of the Getty medal more than Lord Rothschild,” Cuno said in a statement, adding that “he is without question the most influential volunteer cultural leader in the English-speaking world.” Says Getty President and CEO James Cuno. (more…)
6.2 million domestic and international visitors made their way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art during this past fiscal year, making it the third year in a row that the museum’s attendance has exceeded six million visitors. This number is comprised of visitors to both the Met as well as the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, which attracted 350,00 visitors of its own, a marked 50% increase from the previous year. These high numbers are due in part to the Museum’s recent decision to open seven days a week as well as to popular exhibitions such as PUNK: Chaos to Couture and Balthus: Cats and Girls-Paintings and Provocations. (more…)
A new gallery is scheduled to open in 2016 at Goldsmith College, University of London, which will showcase art created by the college’s current students and alumni, who include Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, and Sarah Lucas. The gallery will be housed in the renovated water tanks of the early twentieth century Laurie Grove Baths, a project which will cost 1.8 million pounds. Sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, who announced the plans alongside architect Sir David Chipperfield, called the future gallery a “resource for the university and for London.”
The new guide “Not the Met” seeks to introduce museum-goers to New York City’s lesser-known institutions. Written by a pair of friends from Brooklyn, the guide contains information and reviews of 80 museums, including more well-known institutions like the Frick Collection and the Morgan Library alongside smaller, more specialized museums like the Paley Center for Media and the Museum of Biblical Art. (more…)
An article in the New York Times reports on a recent wave of high-profile announcements from some of the world’s most prominent auction houses in attempt to gain the upper hand in the upcoming fall sale season. Among these announcements is the news that Sotheby’s will partner with eBay while Christie’s will expand with a house in Shanghai and Phillips de Pury will unveil a impressive new space in Mayfair. While these announcements might project an attractive appearance of prosperity and growth, the article contrasts them against the inherent instability of public sales, comparing the auction market to a “Baked Alaska dessert — firm and shiny on the top, but soft in the middle and on the bottom.” (more…)
With the busy summer season in full swing, popular European museums are examining new methods of crowd control in an effort to curb the ever-growing hustle and bustle that could cause damage to both visitors and the art itself. Some museums such as the Louvre and the Prado in Madrid have pursued softer methods like timed tickets and extended hours. Others such as the Vatican Museums and the Uffizi in Florence have taken a harder line. Within the next year the delicate frescoes of the Sistine Chapel will be protected by a crowd-limiting climate control system while the Uffizi has already established a cap of 980 visitors at a time. (more…)
A recent article in the New York Times takes a closer look at a new movement in the physical display of digital art. The movement seeks a middle ground between digital photo frames used in homes and professional digital art displays used in galleries, creating a larger, more sophisticated screen on which art aficionados can display both personal pictures and favorite artists. These screens are capable of showing only one image at a time, however, an effort by developers to encourage a “slower, more thoughtful pace.”
In a conversation with the Financial Times, Irish businessman Niall Fitzgerald reflected on his time as chairman of the British Museum‘s trustees. The former chief executive of Unilever, Fitzgerald became chairman in 2006 and has focused his eight years in office on reworking the museum’s funding models and providing a stronger structure to the museum’s management. Under his auspices, the British Museum has entered into a profitable deal loaning objects to Abu Dhabi’s Zayed National Museum in addition to becoming, after the Louvre, the second-most visited museum in the world in 2013 . (more…)
Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel (1916/64) © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2014. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photo by Philippe Migeat
Cunningly installed just down the street from the monumental Jeff Koons retrospective at The Whitney Museum, Gagosian Gallery is currently presenting a small but impressive exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s body of readymades, offering a nuanced historical counterpoint to some of the artist’s most distinguished predecessors. (more…)
Researchers at Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering have created an impressively accurate replica of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise using nano printing technology. The new technology, which uses focused beams of electrons and microscopic aluminum rods to print at extremely detailed levels.“Each color pixel on this image was mapped to the closest color from a palette that we created using arrays of metal nanodisks, and the code spits out a series of geometries corresponding to this color,” says researcher Joel K.W. Yang. (more…)
Sigmar Polke, Plastik-Wannen (1964) via Kelly Lee for Art Observed
Sigmar Polke’s output was diverse to say the least. Raised in the lean years following World War II in West Germany, the artist moved quickly from painting to photography to installation, film and back over his almost five decades of work, shifting his techniques and approaches with each subsequent piece. Sharply critical and always challenging the nature of capitalist negotiation with the art world, his pieces cover a broad spectrum from overtly comical and self-aware to dark and brooding.
Jenny Savile, Untitled (2014), all images courtesy Gagosian London
On display at Gagosian Gallery in London is a series of monumental oil paintings by Jenny Saville, focusing on the materiality of the human body. The works are large in scale and extremely detailed, and some of the works have taken up to 7 years to complete. The exhibition will be on view through July 26th at Gagosian London.
A new Internet program called Touching the Art has premiered on the Ovation Youtube channel. Hosted by Casey Jane Ellison, the show takes an irreverent tack on discussing and analyzing the mechanisms and trends of the contemporary art world, with a sense of humor much akin to Hennessy Youngman’s Art Thoughtz. “Is art somehow better because the person who starred in Transformers made it?” Ellison asks in one segment. (more…)
The Wall Street Journal Reports that the death of German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt in May of this year has brought to light works by major artists such as Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, and Henri Matisse, which had been part of Gurlitt’s over 1,400 piece collection. Although Gurlitt willed this collection to the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, the possible origin of the collection in Nazi seizures on Jewish art dealers leaves its fate uncertain. (more…)
Media artist Daniel Canogar follows in the footsteps of artists like JR, Ryan McGinley, and Tracey Emin as he takes the reins for the latest iteration of the Times Square Alliance series “Midnight Moment”, an initiative that seeks to promote creative content through the Square’s billboards and news kiosks. Titled “Storming Times Square,” the installation is unique in the way it generates content; from July 24th to July 27th, Canogar will film willing passers-by as they crawl over a green-screen, creating footage which will then be displayed on the Square’s 47 screens each night in September. (more…)
Huma Bhabha, Untitled (2013 ), all images courtesy VeneKlasen/Werner
On view at VeneKlasen/Werner Berlin is a group of new works by Pakistan-born artist Huma Bhabha, marking her first solo exhibition in Berlin. The sculptures and collage drawings, which were created in 2013 while Bhabha was working as a resident artist at The American Academy in Berlin, will remain on view through July 26th.
A recent Bloomberg article features an examination of the direct correlation between value appreciation and the price of pieces at auction. By studying the auction sales of the top ten artists over the past ten and twenty years, the article suggests that, in the ever-shifting art market, the safest way to ensure a profit is to buy big names like Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, and Damien Hirst at big prices.
The new 5th avenue home for The Museum for African Art was planned as an elegant and impressive addition to Museum Mile and a cultural contender to neighbors such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Neue Galerie. Unfortunately, the planned move and expansion have been fraught with budgeting and funding problems, forcing the museum to downsize its dream and echoing the struggle faced by many smaller art institutions. (more…)
A Machinery for Living at the Petzel Gallery, installation view, via Art Observed
On view at Petzel Gallery is a group exhibition organized by Walead Beshty entitled “A Machinery for Living.” Composed of over 100 photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptural and installation works, the exhibition approaches a concept of embracing the subversive within everyday life.
Bridget Riley, About Yellow (2013-2014) via David Zwirner London
Whether black and white stripes contrast with each other in bewildering harmony, or vividly sharp colors calmly line-up to soothe the eye, there exists an exquisite charm in Bridget Riley’s entrancing canvases. Starting her career in the late 50’s after graduating from London’s famed Goldsmith’s College, Riley experimented with Pointillism and Abstraction while working as an illustrator. What she would be widely recognized for later in her career, however, were her optical works, which emerged as result of her fascination with Futurism, Constructivism and Minimalism. Focusing on the artist’s colorful stripe paintings from 1961 to the present on a large scale, Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014 at David Zwirner’s London location marks Riley’s largest survey since her 2003 retrospective at Tate London. (more…)
