Santiago Rumney Guggenheim, great-grandson of the collector Peggy Guggenheim and son of gallerist Sandro Rumney, is opening a new project space in the former Williamsburg Savings Bank at 834 Driggs.  “Here, in this project, I try to carry on the legacy of my family by bringing new faces to the art world,” Rumney Guggenheim says. “But I am making a strong point to my family that I am trying to build this on my own.” (more…)

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Orange over Mountain Walk, Italian Mask M30.g) (2014), via Anton Kern

Twisting the formal language of both his chosen objects and the painterly signifiers he has built up over the course of his career, Mark Grotjahn returns to Anton Kern Gallery for his fourth solo exhibition with the New York Gallery.  Building on the sculptural objects presented last year at the artist’s exhibition at the Nasher in Dallas, the works on view take Grotjahn’s interest in cast-off materials and repurposed objects, the show turns the artist’s frequently reoccurring subject, the cardboard box, into a container for his own aesthetic interests. (more…)

Dana Schutz, Fight in an Elevator (2015), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Petzel Gallery is a series of new works by artist Dana Schutz, the New York-based painter whose fluid hand, surreal scenarios and meticulous commitment to polymorphous narratives have made her a leading voice among U.S. painters. (more…)

Damien Hirst’s £25m, 37,000 sq ft Newport Street Gallery has opened, drawing rave reviews from The Guardian.  “I’ve felt guilt owning work that’s stored away in boxes where no one can see it. Having a space where I can put on shows from the collection is a dream come true,” Hirst says. (more…)

Carlyle and Banque Pictet have announced plans for an art market venture that will provide funding for collectors in exchange for up to 50 per cent of the value of the art.  “We will drive the institutionalization of this huge market. By introducing more liquidity to the market, we think the cost of capital for these assets will go down and the value will go up,” said Oliver Sarkozy, of Carlyle’s Global Financial Services Fund, and who is investing in the project. “Leverage generally means asset prices inflate.” (more…)

MoMA PS1 has announced that it will offer free admission to New Yorker’s for the next year, thanks to a gift by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.  “It is important to give back to New York City, a city with so many artists,” says Marina Kellen French, the vice president of the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.  “MoMA PS1 in Queens has many exhibitions that should be seen by everybody from all five boroughs. I hope the gift will help MoMA PS1 efforts to lower the barriers to enter the museum and reach out to an even wider audience.” (more…)

LACMA has a post on its Unframed blog this week, following the life Human the dog from Pierre Huyghe’s work recently installed in the museum, and her owner, artist Marlon Middeke, as he opens a show in Kassel.  “Marlon takes back mastery of himself after years of being, quite literally, just a piece of Huyghe’s art,” writes author Brian Sonia-Wallace. (more…)

Phillips has announced a non-selling exhibition of works by Barbara Hepworth next summer in London, organized by Andrew Bonacina, the chief curator at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire.  The show “will serve to show the strength and importance of our collection to a wider audience”, says Simon Wallis, the gallery director. (more…)

Douglas Druick, the current president and director at the The Art Institute of Chicago, has announced that he will be stepping down from his post when a replacement is found. “I have been deeply proud to lead one of the finest museums in the world and to work for three decades with an exceptional cadre of remarkably talented museum colleagues,” Druick says. (more…)

A $25 million gift from trustee David Rubenstein has ensured a new expansion of the Duke arts program, aiding in the construction of a $50 million arts building, billed as “a major step in Duke’s commitment to supporting the artistic work of our students and faculty,” according to Duke President Richard Brodhead. (more…)

Interview takes a look inside Theaster Gates’s recently completed Stony Island Arts Bank on the south side of Chicago, and the artistic impetus behind the project.  “I often meet people who live in my neighborhood, when I’m downtown or in other neighborhoods, and we’re all looking for the same amenities,” he says.  “We all want to go to the reggae spot up north, we all want to go to the jazz club downtown. So I think that being here, I’m thinking about, “What are the amenities that I want to benefit from?” In their absence, I feel like, “All right, maybe I should make them.” (more…)

Wolfgang Tillmans, Iquitos Dos (2013), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

David Zwirner is currently presenting artist Wolfgang Tillmans’ PCR, his first exhibition with the gallery following his departure from longtime representatives Andrea Rosen Gallery. Doing the justice to the exhibition’s inaugural nature, the gallery has reserved its two locations on 19th street for the massive show of photographs, sculpture and video, which takes its name from an abbreviation of the scientific term “polymerase chain reaction.”  A technique applied in molecular biology to reach a deeper and more particular genetic identity for a person’s DNA, PCR serves as a metaphor for the works on view, which near a hundred in total.  Each piece here underscores the breadth and depth of the artist’s expansive oeuvre, and every piece, similar to a molecule, contributes to build a larger pattern, holding traces of the German-born artist’s decades long career. (more…)

David Douard, bat-breath battery (Installation View), all photos by Daphné Mookherjee for Art Observed

David Douard’s bat-breath battery, presented at the Gallery Chantal Crousel, is a hybridization of formal territories, exploring correlations between poetry and vernacular, human and machine – recurring interests for the artist.  Often delving into the mechanisms of transformation and development, Douard’s work centers on  infectious relations between different worlds and objects, explained through media terminologies that draw from tech, biology, history, and visual culture at large.

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MoMA PS1 has announced the artist list for its recurring Greater New York exhibition, documenting a range of artists working in and around the New York City area.  Highlights of the list include rising star Jamian Juliano-Villani, conceptual retail project Kiosk and designer Mary Ping.  The show opens Sunday (more…)

Christie’s has announced plans for a new division of sales this coming April in New York, centering its calendar around the Revolution sale, focusing on 18th to 20th century art.  “Most of our collectors are buying in five or six different fields,” says President Jussi Pylkkanen. “Ten years ago, they may have been buying in one or two fields.” (more…)

The lawyers representing Ann Freedman in her court case over the selling of forged works at Knoedler Gallery have sent an open letter to Art Market Monitor, taking the offensive on maintaining her innocence.  “The criminals who committed these crimes have been charged.  Ann Freedman is not one of them,” the letter reads.  “The discovery in these cases has yielded tens of thousands of pages of documents.  Not one proves that Ann Freedman knew these works were forgeries.  It is the plaintiffs’ self-serving fairy tale that has allowed the case to continue for this long, but a trial will finally show the truth:  plaintiffs just want to print money (their lawsuits request three times more than what they paid for the art), and Ann Freedman just wants justice.” (more…)

CNN profiles Sifang Art Collective, a massive architectural and art project funded by businessman, Lu Jun, and his art collector son Lu Xun, which features an impressive private museum and buildings by a number of prominent architects and artists, including Ai Weiwei, Chinese Pritzker prize winner Wang Shu and David Adjaye.

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The Financial Times has a profile on the generations of Brazilian collectors that rose to global influence during the 1990’s, and those in market today as Brazil deals with its economic struggles.  “We live in a country of highs and lows, a country that went through a period of euphoria in which many people made money, giving a boost to the art market. But I don’t think that’s what Brazil truly is. Today we’re going through one more crisis, that for those of us who are a bit older has already become a habit from time to time,” says collector Bernardo Paz. (more…)

Jim Shaw is profiled in the New York Times this week, in advance of his retrospective opening at the New Museum this month.  “Jim has always been very important and influential to me because of the way he blurs the distinction between insider art and outsider art, which is something I’ve been involved with for a long time,” says Massimiliano Gioni. (more…)

Chantal Akerman, the Belgian filmmaker whose relentless experimentation and prolific output as both a director and writer defined her as a major influence on late 20th century film, has passed away at the age of 65.  Akerman’s work had achieved wide acclaim for her embrace of experimental and groundbreaking techniques, particularly in her landmark work Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which was shot in real-time.  French newspaper of record Le Monde is reporting the death as suicide. (more…)

Sarah Sze, Hammock (2015)

Following her acclaimed 55th Venice Biennale presentation for the U.S. Pavillon in 2013 and her current participation in this year’s Okwui Enwezor-curated 56th installment, Sarah Sze is the subject of a solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery for her new body of work, returning to common themes that have informed her particularly interdisciplinary practice over two floors of the gallery space.  As is frequently the case with Sze’s work, architecture is often used as a meditative force on the space surrounding her pieces, rather than a utilitarian system of constructing materials.  Here, these explorations fall into conversation with Sze’s use of visually calm and fluid materials, as she strips the physicality of such objects from their primary definitions and purposes. (more…)

Sotheby’s has announced a major commission for its fall sale in New York, one of Andy Warhol’s iconic Mao works, estimated to sell for $40 million or more.  The work is the artist’s first in the series of Mao paintings, and came from an idea by dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who suggested Warhol paint the most famous person in the world.  “‘I was just reading in Life magazine that the most famous person in the world today is Chairman Mao. Shouldn’t it be the most famous person, Bruno?'” Interview editor Bob Colacello recalls the artist saying. (more…)

Antony Gormley has contributed a special piece to the Financial Times this week, describing his vision for the future of sculpture.  “Our need is to leave a trace: a trace of our living and dying on the face of an indifferent universe,” he writes.  “Sculpture’s central purpose in confronting the body with another materiality is to engage the imagination, to make links with all that lies beyond the palpable and the observable, deep in space or deep in the unconscious mind.” (more…)

Painter Luc Tuymans has reached an out-of-court settlement with the photographer Katrijn Van Giel, following the artist’s conviction of plagiarism and subsequent lawsuit over a work that had allegedly borrowed from one of Van Giel’s works.  The work, A Belgian Politician, was originally claimed as “a parody” by Tuymans. (more…)