Olga Hirshhorn, the collector and widow of Hirshhorn Museum founder Joseph Hirshhorn, has passed away at the age of 95. “I had to choose whether to learn about art or finance or mining,” Mrs. Hirshhorn said of her early years married to her husband, “and I chose art.” (more…)
A Bulgarian artist has delivered a coy sculptural work to the European Central Bank, a giant chunk of aluminum that will be replaced with a finished sculpture when the institution achieves all of its stated goals and its staff is fully “satisfied.” “This will of course never happen because a serious institution is never satisfied,” artist Nedko Solakov says. “I just let the people imagine what the sculpture would look like.” (more…)
Serge Lasvignes, the President of Centre Pompidou, has announced a string of new plans for the institution, including a series of pop-up exhibitions in Korea and China, and exhibitions focusing on Arte Povera and Beirut. “My aim is to start a dialogue with foreign [art] centers which will enable us to build our collections for the future,” he says. (more…)
Barnaby Furnas, The First Morning (Scarlet) (2015), via Art Observed
Presenting a new body of work that combines his prior interests in masses of color and space with geometric inversions and breaks with the autonomy of the canvas, Barnaby Furnas returns to Marianne Boesky this fall, his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery since 2002. Continuing his ongoing interest in the formal potentials for landscape painting in the Twenty-First century, Furnas’s new work negotiates a line between modern practice and the historical innovations of his forbears over the past several centuries. (more…)
Three men in suits posing as authorities at the Beijing Biennale reportedly attempted to destroy works at the Armenian pavilion, Artforum reports. The men entered the pavilion and sought to remove works by artist Karen Mirzoyan depicting lands contested by Azerbaijan. “For now I can say that our team and artworks are safe,” said pavilion curator Anna Garrigan. (more…)
The body of Sebastiano Magnanini, a former Italian art thief, was found in London’s Regent’s canal near Kings Cross this week, the Guardian reports. “His life in Italy, before coming to London, will inevitably form part of the investigation, but at this early stage we are not looking at organized crime as a motive,” says Investigator Rebecca Reeves. (more…)
A group of artists are being evicted from studio spaces across three Ninth Street buildings in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. “For the overall arts and creativity in Gowanus, this is a huge loss,” says Abby Subak, executive director of Arts Gowanus. “The implications for this go beyond Gowanus and are being felt by the entire artist community of New York City.” (more…)
The New York Times profiles the work of curator Koyo Kouoh, who has built a reputation for bringing contemporary African Artists to the wider art world. “She has always been somebody who was interested in much more than just contemporary art, and these are the strong people of today,” says Chris Dercon, director at the Tate Modern. “She is very interested in possible links, not only in other disciplines, especially literature, but also to have a much wider view of what visual art means, especially in Africa.” (more…)
Adrián Vilar Rojas, Two Suns (2015), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
The work of Adrián Vilar Rojas often occupies itself with remainders, leftovers, and detritus from the visual and aesthetic languages of human culture. Suspending forms and materials in a timeless ruins that translates human-kind’s greatest accomplishments into a faded wreckage, the artist still manages to incorporate a certain degree of grace and elegance to his work, allowing the natural elements and human impulses that underscore his project to gradually take the foreground. (more…)