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…)

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…)

Ai Weiwei has reportedly found what he thinks are “listening devices” in the walls of his studio.  The artist posted photos and video of the devices, which were found during a renovation of his studio.  “There will always be surprises,” he noted. (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…)

The Dia Foundation is no longer planning on a new building project in Chelsea, the Art Newspaper reports, as new Director Jessica Morgan is pushing for a more active use of the Foundation’s existing space in the city.  “I want to be programming constantly in Chelsea again because it makes no sense to have this incredible real estate and to be renting it out,” Morgan says. “It’s essential that we have a presence in the city.” (more…)

London’s Royal College of Art has suspended admissions for the incoming year’s design interactions course due to a shortage of teaching staff for the program.  “Several tutors left this summer instead of working their notices until December,” says an anonymous alumnus. (more…)