The V&A in London has unveiled the design for its new building at the former Olympic site in east London, now named Olympicopolis.  Called a “museum for the digital era” in press materials, the structure will feature a brick and glass design by O’Donnell + Tuomey and will open in 2021.   (more…)

Bloomberg has an article on Sotheby’s increasingly broad lending practices, which have grown from $682 million to almost $1 billion in recent years, a point that some consider extremely inviting for those looking to launder money.  “One way to launder is to use art as a security for a loan,” says David Hall, former special prosecutor for the FBI Art Crime Team. “The level of scrutiny you’ll receive from a bank is much higher than you will receive from an auction house.” (more…)

Taikang Life, one of China’s largest insurance companies, now owns a 13.5% stake in Sotheby’s, CNN reports.  The company is run by Chen Dongsheng, who is also the founder of China Guardian Auctions, the country’s first government-run auction house.  Taikang has not disclosed whether it will seek an active position in the company. (more…)

Miami’s Bass Museum is set to reopen during Art Basel Miami Beach in December, drawing its $12 million renovation to a close with a major museum show by Ugo Rondinone.  “It used to be that going to a museum was akin to going to church,” she said. “Now museums are places where people gather,” says director Silvia Karman Cubina. (more…)

Gagosian is now representing Jeff Wall, who leaves Marian Goodman after 25 years.  “He would like to be seen more widely as an American artist,” says Gagosian director Mark Francis.  “I think that may be something we can do well.”

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The Tate has been ordered to reveal how much sponsorship money it has received in the last five years from British Petroleum, a victory for activists who have harshly criticized the museum for its role in greenwashing the oil company’s image.  “Oil branding of art is a threat to our galleries and our climate,” says Anna Galkina of the activist organization Platform.  “Tate has tried to hide how embarrassingly low BP sponsorship fees were. We’re delighted that the information tribunal ruled against Tate’s secrecy.” (more…)

The Tate Modern has announced that it will borrow a major Rauschenberg assemblage, Monogram, which features a full-size stuffed Angora goat bound to a canvas, for the artist’s retrospective later this year. “Rauschenberg is one of those artists who, in the decade after the second world war, truly transformed the nature of artistic practice, smashing through the boundaries of different media,” says Tate Director Frances Morris. (more…)

David Salle has published a collection of his essays and writings on art, written during the past several years in conjunction with his painting work.  “I like the challenge of finding a verbal equivalent for certain states of looking,” he says, “and taking apart what it is someone made.” (more…)

Sotheby’s has landed a major collection for its fall auctions, selling works from the holdings of Steven and Ann Ames, including a pair of Gerhard Richter works valued at $20-$30 million each.  “They have a Richter from every major period and a de Kooning from every major period,” says Amy Cappellazzo, chairwoman of Sotheby’s fine art division. “That’s an immense and important study about painting.” (more…)

The New York Times reports that billionaire J. Tomilson Hill is opening a museum in Chelsea, where he wants to show his $800 million collection, and to use the space for arts education. “They’re cutting out arts programs in the public schools,” he says.  “These are kids who wouldn’t even think The Frick was accessible to them,” Mr. Hill said. (more…)

Three Christie’s employees have left the company, shortly after the auction house announced its sales had dropped last year from $4.5 billion to $3 billion in the past year.  “As a private company, we don’t comment on speculation around our employees,” the company said in a statement.  “However, like any business, we continue to review the deployment of resources and focus investment on areas of growth so as to best to serve our clients.” (more…)

Richard Serra, NJ-1 (2016), via Art Observed

Spread across both of Gagosian’s Chelsea exhibition spaces, Richard Serra’s immense spatial investigations have returned to New York City, marking a continuation and expansion of the artist’s already tightly honed sculptural language.  Consisting of a total of only four works, the gallery is showing Serra’s immense rolled steel work NJ-1 in its 21st Street space, while giving over its 24th Street gallery to a trio of Serra’s pressed steel installations, a pairing that sees him returning to his precise visual vocabulary while pushing its expressive limits.

Richard Serra, Every Which Way (2015), via Art Observed (more…)

Alex Katz, Fall (2015), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Continuing his recent surge of output, Alex Katz has brought a new series of landscapes to Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Marais exhibition space.  Bringing his attention yet again to the landscapes of Maine, the artist’s work here presents his calm, subdued style in a fitting conversation with the untouched curves and lines of Northern New England.

Alex Katz, New Landsacpes (Installation View), via Thaddaeus Ropac

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Brian Belott, Untitled (After Guston) (1995), via Art Observed

Gavin Brown’s 291 Grand Street location is playing home to the gallery’s summer exhibition this month, a cunning and often comical play on art history curated by painter Brian Belott.  Inviting a group of artists to take their own improvisational runs on various artists from the last 100 years of painting and sculpture, the show plays on the memory of Glenn Gould, whose own takes on popular figures and music themes equally expressed his own artistic brilliance.

Bobo, The Legendary Impetus Behind Wegmans (2016), via Art Observed

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Roxy Paine, Meeting (2016), via Art Observed

The concept of “the narrative” is one that feels increasingly relevant in a contemporary art context defined in part by gestures and approaches that owe much to the last 60 years of creative practice.  Considering the work in relation to an isolated other, a sort of phantom context that either motivates, grounds or produces the work in question ultimately seems to be one such strategy for re-invigoration of the techniques used in creating the object itself.  This is the strategy through which the current group exhibition at Pierogi’s LES Gallery space, False Narratives, presents its artists, compiling work that not only explores the construction of ulterior situations and modes for the work itself, but equally questions these narratives as unreliable.

Brian Conley, Decipherment of Linear X (2004), via Art Observed

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The New York Times reports on the quiet sale of a major Florine Stettheimer work from the collection of Nashville’s Fisk University, a sale that drew criticisms from many in the field.  “Shame on them,” says Lyndel King, director of the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota and chairwoman of the Task Force for the Protection of University Collections. “It’s very much against the ethics of our profession.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper follows the story of Udnie, a long-unknown muse of Francis Picabia that scholars now believe was model and silent-film actress Audrey Munson.  Munson “posed for him for several days, but never in still position,” she is quoted.  “He had me walk about the studio in different lights, taking different postures. He wanted to paint me in action, he said, not in repose.” (more…)

Sadie Benning, The Crucifixion (2015), via Art Observed

Artist Sadie Benning has returned to New York for a strong summer exhibition this month, filling Mary Boone’s Fifth Avenue location and Callicoon Fine Arts’s downtown space with a series of mixed media pieces that continue a taste for colorful abstraction, formal evasiveness, and cartoonish figures, applied here towards the perception of and reflection on the presence of higher powers.  Viewing the catastrophes and power struggles of modern society through the lens of the divine, Benning has realized a series of images depicting various gods and value systems in her signature blocks of color, lending a loose style to already weighty subject matter.

Sadie Benning, Nature (2015), via Art Observed

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The Swiss Institute has announced the location and opening date of its new temporary gallery, “Swiss In situ.” Occupying a 5,000 sq. ft space in Tribeca, Swiss In situ will function as the institute’s main center until a more permanent location is announced next year. The temporary gallery plans to mirror its status as “transitional” through its exhibitions, by focusing them on fleeting and “temporary structures–including publishing formats, social experiments, and architectural forms.” The gallery will open with an exhibition by Swiss publishers, Nieves and Innen called, “Nieves and Innen Zine Library.” The exhibition will feature “hundreds of pocket-sized, image-based publications [Nieves and Innen] have commissioned over the past 15 years,” along with artist and publisher talks at the opening event on August 4. (more…)

Robert Irwin is profiled in the Art Newspaper this week, as he opens his major permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa.  “What I’ve been doing all these years, you couldn’t sell, you couldn’t house it, you couldn’t put it in a museum,” he says. “Marfa was a good place for me to fantasize some idea of what I might do, which for a long time was all I had… It was a nice place for me to stretch my legs a little and try some things.” (more…)

The current market stature for Modigliani is driving extensive research and pursuit of a catalog raisonné, the Art Newspaper reports.  “Let’s just say that an exciting first step has been taken, with further news to come,” scholar Kenneth Wayne says. (more…)

The New York Times has a profile on Richard Bellamy this week, the founder of New York’s influential Green Gallery, and the dealer who first provided space and a voice for many of New York’s influential minimalists, including Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and many more.  “I think,” Robert Morris says of Bellamy’s impact on this group,  “it had to do with the fact that we — the artists and Bellamy himself, who we regarded as more of an artist than a ‘director’ — were sitting in a space on 57th Street, when we all belonged downtown in our ratty lofts. There was something slightly ridiculous about occupying that zone where the serious, moneyed New York galleries were located.” (more…)

The Louvre-Lens has committed to restoring a Charles Le Brun work that had been missing for over 200 years, and which was discovered with so much dirt and grime on its surface that it was almost unrecognizable.  “This was a hugely successful painting,” says Nicolas Milovanovic, the chief curator in the Paris museum’s paintings department. “When [the art collector and chief minister of France] Cardinal Mazarin saw it, he wanted a copy. A third version was made for Anne of Austria. We know [there are] around ten other versions. It was a painting that pleased many people.” (more…)

The Observer takes a look inside the collection of dealer turned museum owner Judy Goffman Cutler, whose National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, Rhode Island holds an impressive collection of pieces from American artists.  “I have the second largest collection of Rockwells anywhere,” she says.   (more…)