Pasternak, via New York Times
Following 20 years serving as President and Artistic Director of New York City’s prolific non-profit arts org Creative Time, Anne Pasternak will take over as President of the Brooklyn Museum, taking the helm from the recently departed Arnold Lehman, who had worked almost as long in the position. (more…)
Nina Beier, Female Nude (2015), all images via Art Observed
Metro Pictures’s airy gallery is currently open to artist Nina Beier’s plotted sculptures that map the conceptual revisions of objects and their representation. Interposing sculptural still lives with flattened three-dimensional picture hangings, the artist presents crisply-laundered down comforters and jackets, flattened as a backdrop for wigs and fashionable ties, while nearby, burrowed coconut forms perched on lush soil. In another room, gigantic stemware houses familiar objects, introduced by the gallery as an effort in problematizing representation and depiction.
A new British £20 note has been announced this week, and this time, a creative figure from British history will replace economist Adam Smith, the New York Times reports. “Banknotes are the principal way the Bank of England engages with the British public,”Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England. “These sparse pieces of paper from the 17th century have developed over the years to become the small works of art that are in everyone’s wallets. There are a wealth of individuals within the field of visual arts whose work shaped British thought, innovation, leadership, values and society and who continue to inspire people today.” (more…)
The Telegraph looks at the record-breaking sales last week at Christie’s in the context of the auction house’s penchant for pre-sale guarantees, noting that over $250 million of the Looking Forward to the Past sale’s monumental $706 million final tally was guaranteed. They are effectively buying market share,” says one unnamed art advisor. (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…)
Michael Heizer is profiled in The Guardian this week, following the opening of his newest show in New York. “Years ago, when I had no money and I made a work of art, maybe I couldn’t afford to make it more resistant to the weather. I did, however, exploit that situation,” he says of his early work. “I wasn’t an environmental, greenie artist making things out of moss and leaves. But I knew that some things dissipate, and I factored that into the work.” (more…)
Some of the paintings allegedly stolen from Picasso’s stepdaughter, Catherine Hutin-Blay, were found in the collection of Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who purchased them through art broker and adviser, Yves Bouvier (currently under investigation for fraud). Bouvier’s lawyer denies any knowledge of the works’ stolen status. “For all the paintings he acquired, he asked for a certificate from the Art Loss Register, demonstrating that it has not been registered as missing or stolen,” says Bouvier’s attorney, Luc Brossollet. (more…)
The court case over the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice has begun, a lawsuit by the collector’s grandson to prevent the Guggenheim Foundation from showing any works not in the collection within the museum space, “alleging it breaks with the original arrangement that Peggy wanted and which should be respected after her death,” according to plaintiff Sandro Rumney. (more…)
The Whitney Museum has launched a new program for emerging and young artists, giving them access to the spaces of the new downtown location to put on their first U.S. solo exhibitions. The first artists selected for the project are New York-based artists Jared Madere and Rachel Rose, as well as Qatari-American writer and artist Sophia Al-Maria. (more…)
The Guardian has an article this week looking at composer Arvo Pärt and Gerhard Richter’s early careers under communism, and the pair’s respective pieces dedicated to the work of the other, to premiere at this year’s Manchester International Festival this month. (more…)
Continuing her fundraising quest through the sale of her grandfather Pablo Picasso‘s estate, Marina Picasso is selling her inherited villa in Cannes, La Califnornie, a space she has already seen a €150 Million offer for. “Of course I’m selling,” she says. “But it’s also a way to share.” (more…)
Elmgreen & Dragset, Past Tomorrow (Installation View)
Currently on view at Galerie Perrotin is Past Tomorrow, Elmgreen & Dragset’s second installment of their ongoing tale focused on the life and loves of imagined architect Norman Swann. The project that, in its core, is an unrealized play by the Berlin-based Scandinavian duo, had its inception at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013 exhibition, titled Tomorrow, turning the museum’s galleries into Mr. Swann’s residence. The narrative resumes as their protagonist migrates to a studio apartment in New York’s Upper East Side neighborhood, after he consumes his entire family inheritance and vacates his London house in South Kensington. (more…)
The Guardian takes another look at Grayson Perry’s recently completed home design in Essex, the fittingly-titled A House for Essex, which he calls a monument to “thwarted female intelligence,” and executed as a sacred communion with an imagined Essex woman named Julie May Cope. (more…)
Josh Reames at Johannes Vogt, all photos via Art Observed
NADA New York returned to the edge of the Lower East Side, drawing a diverse, hip crowd to the Basketball City complex. Free in price, NADA once again brought high-quality exhibitors and young artists, combining art from regional and international galleries alongside NYC Downtown heavy hitters. This year’s preview event was an engaging alternative to the bright lights and high prices of Frieze. Embodying the social, communal nature of the city’s young arts scene, NADA’s Preview day was filled with with conversation, friendly jokes and familial reunions. Maintaining the lightness of art openings opposed to the serious air of sales oriented art fairs, the galleries, their friends and artists will spend this weekend sipping drinks out of plastic cups while a roster of interdisciplinary performances, conversations and events take place. (more…)
Galeria Franco Noero, via Art Observed
The doors are open on Frieze New York, marking the early days of the summer art season with a major art event up the East River on Randall’s Island. Returning for its fourth year, the fair has come into its own as a dedicated staple in the New York Art Calendar, and its presentation this year seems to echo it, with a stripped back tent design that seemed to stretch out much longer than in previous years, but distilled the experience down to only three rows of booths, with the occasional inlet allowing for an enjoyable wander through the space. The VIP opening launched Wednesday morning for a quiet preview where a number of major collectors and celebrities strolled the aisles, among them Neil Patrick Harris, Mike Meyers, Uma Thurman, Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Gere and François Pinault. (more…)
Santa Maria della Misericordia church converted in THE MOSQUE: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice (2015) by Christoph Büchel, all photos by Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
Historically, there have been no mosques in the city of Venice. Despite the port city’s history as an open gateway to the East and a point of trade that facilitated new cultural, artistic and scientific developments to spread across Europe from trade with the Ottoman Empire and beyond, the city has never permitted the construction or reconstitution of a site of worship for its Muslim population. Today, in the heated political climate that surrounds international conflicts, not to mention the recent Italian (and, at large, European) controversy regarding immigration from Syria, Lebanon and other regions in North Africa and the Middle East, the prospects for a dedicated Islamic worship site seems even less likely. For the time being, however, the Venice Biennale has changed this scenario, as the Swiss-born, Iceland-based artist Christoph Büchel opened his frankly-titled installation THE MOSQUE: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice this month. (more…)
A piece in the Financial Times notes that the value of the global art market topped €51 billion last year, an astounding figure that comes as Christie’s topped a $1 billion in sales this week alone. Featuring in-depth analysis, the article notes the U.S. and China as the top shareholders in market value, and as well as the interesting detail that most dealer inventory rarely moves in under 6 months, despite that current clamor for works on the market. (more…)
NPR has a profile on painter Elaine de Kooning (wife of Willem de Kooning) this week, focusing on the artist’s interest in portraiture as a retrospective of her work opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., including her famous depiction of John F. Kennedy. “The idea of a man who happens to be president of the United States — well, that’s already, right there, he’s bigger than life,” de Kooning said in 1976. “I was scampering up and down the ladder to do this painting.” (more…)
With Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Art set to open on June 12th in Moscow, the museum has released a video offering a preview of both its impressive architecture and its world-class collection, including a colorful mural unearthed during renovations of the site, previously a Soviet-era restaurant. (more…)
Art Basel’s Popular large-scale installation section, Unlimited, has released a 74-artist roster for its upcoming edition next month in Switzerland, including work by Martin Creed, Olafur Eliasson, Jeppe Hein, Robert Irwin, and many more. (more…)
In a perhaps unprecedented move, the entire first year class at USC’s Roski School of Arts MFA Program have dropped out of the program, protesting moves by Dean Erica Muhl to overhaul the department’s structure and funding models. “Whatever artistic work we created this spring semester was achieved in spite of, not because of, the institution,” the seven students wrote in an open letter announcing their withdrawal. “Because the university refused to honor its promises to us, we are returning to the workforce degree-less and debt-full.” (more…)
In a single week, Christie’s has sold over $1 billion in art, a daunting feat that signals a new level for the global market perhaps never seen before. “It’s a spectacle of excess at the highest level,” says Abigail Asher of Guggenheim Asher Associates Inc. “The last few years have been building up to this moment. A new class of buyer has entered the market and they’re prepared to pay staggering sums for trophy pictures.” (more…)
Francis Bacon, Seated Woman (1961), via Phillips
The Phillips Contemporary Evening sale has concluded, bringing to a close a week full of fireworks and smashed records with a relatively lackluster sales event that saw several impressive sales, countered by a number of less than exceptional performances. Of the sale’s 71 lots, 14 went unsold, and few others managed to surpass high estimates, bringing the final sales tally to a respectable $97,100,000. (more…)
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. III Red, Blue, Yellow, and Black (1929), via Art Observed
The auction week has come and gone, and Christie’s has closed out a major week for both its Impressionist/Modern and Contemporary Departments, as the combined sales of its three Evening events this week have collectively brought in well over a billion dollars in sales. This Evening, the Impressionist and Modern Evening sale added an exclamation point to the proceedings, bringing in a final tally of $202,608,000 that saw a major new record for Piet Mondrian. (more…)