Bill Ruprecht has returned to the art world, the WSJ reports, as he chairs the advisory board for the online art venture Invaluable.  “The art world is a hothouse, and I purposefully tried to get a little distance from it,” he told the paper, “but I keep getting drawn back in.” (more…)

Investor Jeffrey Gundlach has made a $42.5 million gift to Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Museum, the largest in the museum’s 154-year history, for a planned expansion project.  “I learned about art by going to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery with my family,” Gundlach says. “It was the place that first opened my eyes and mind to the endless possibilities of art and showed me that Buffalo didn’t just have the potential for greatness, but actually had a museum that was world-class.” (more…)

The Broad Museum has drawn over 820,000 visitors in its first year of operation, according to a report issued by the museum.  “Edye and I could not be more delighted with the public reception to the museum,” Eli Broad says of the report. “Our goal has always been to share our art with the broadest possible public, and our first year has exceeded all of our expectations.” (more…)

The New York Times looks at the career of Zeng Fanzhi, and poses his own development as an artist against the backdrop of China’s market explosion for contemporary art over the past decades, and more recent market crises.  “The art market is something you can’t mess with,” he says.  “Just take it one step at a time, develop slowly, and honestly work together with galleries to sell works to people who actually like art and not to people who are trying to speculate on art. Now that we’ve worked with a lot of international galleries and museums, artists here pretty much get it. It’s not like 2007 anymore. We needed this time to mature.” (more…)

Jessica Stockholder, The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room (Installation View), via Art Observed

In The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, Jessica Stockholder’s scattered arrangements of sculptural elements play with assumed boundaries to become a fluid meditation on space.  Through a variety of materials and forms, Stockholder avoids overtly breaking down traditional artistic lines, so much as she highlights that they have never truly existed at all.  Here, in her third show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Stockholder adds new dimension to her longstanding interest in intersection and continues to define the multifaceted significance of surface and structure.

Jessica Stockholder, Security Detail [JS 688] (2016), via Art Observed

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Hassan Sharif, the celebrated artist and major voice of contemporary art in the Middle East, has passed away after a battle with cancer.  He was 65.  Sharif’s work as both an artist and organizer in the United Arab Emirates was instrumental in the development and proliferation of the country’s contemporary art scene, and he continued to work to strengthen and promote the artists of the UAE in the region and abroad until his death.   (more…)

NADA has announced its 2016 Exhibitor List, with 72 galleries coming from 36 cities and 17 different countries, including projects from the ICA London, Mexico City’s Lulu, and American Medium in New York.  The fair returns to the Deauville Hotel this year after one year at the Fontainebleau.   (more…)

Activists in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights embarked on a march across the neighborhood’s gallery district earlier this week, serving “eviction notices” against a group of galleries established in the area.  “This is not street theater,” says Elizabeth Blaney, co-founder of one group, Union de Vecinos. “This is something we are very serious about and we do expect them to leave. This isn’t a show. This is real life that’s happening to real people.” (more…)

The Guardian writes on the ongoing complaints of a series of luxury condo residents living adjacent to the Tate’s Modern new Switch House extension, who claim their privacy is constantly being invaded by museum-goers looking out from the institution’s 10th floor viewing gallery.  ”I need to repeat the fact that clearly people purchasing those flats were in no doubt that Tate Modern was going to build its new Switch House building and the character and uses of that building were widely known,” says director Nicholas Serota.  “People purchased with their eyes wide open.” (more…)

A Dutch court has ordered Marina Abramović to pay her former partner Ulay over â‚¬250,000 arising from the sales of collaborative works and a re-enactment of one of their works for Adidas.  “I won the case on the most crucial points,” Ulay says. “The relief was like shedding my skin, physical and mental.  My cancer ordeal was aggressively threatening my life and the massive legal battle with Abramović was threatening my existence. To my opinion, the court verdict was fair and just to the truth.” (more…)

Greek collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos is set to open a new cultural center in Athens, which will serve as a base for his ongoing support of the arts in the Greek capital.  “It is a great joy for me that our refurbishment program has resulted in a new cultural venue, which we are now handing over to the public of Athens,” Daskalopoulos says. (more…)

The New York Times sits down with art dealer Virginia Dwan, whose collection is set to go on view at the National Gallery in Washington, as she reflects on her career and her contributions to the development of post-war conceptualism and the neo-avant-garde, including her support of works like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or an early version of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field.  “There was a feeling of connection, other than just paying them — I was interested in their ideas,” she says. (more…)

Bloomberg notes the ongoing troubles for the contemporary market this week, focusing on the work of a group of young artists whose previously skyrocketing prices have now left collectors taking large losses to sell their works.  “This whole year has been a big readjustment, a much-needed one, like a chiropractic session,” says dealer Timothy Blum of Blum & Poe Gallery. “It can hurt, but you come out on the other end better than before.” (more…)

Stefan Kalmár, the longtime head of Artists Space in New York, will join ICA London as its new director.  “I’m honored to be joining the ICA, and am looking forward to shaping the institute’s future,”Kalmár said in a statement. “There really is no other organization like the ICA—indeed it is the birthplace of all ICAs.” (more…)

The Louvre has appointed Manuel Rabaté to head its new museum in Abu Dhabi, the Art Newspaper reports.  Rabaté has been the director of Agence France-Muséums since 2013, and will helm the museum as it prepares to open next year.   (more…)

The city of London has unveiled a plan for “artist zones,” designed to shield creatives from rising rents in the British capital.  “You grow as a capital city and that puts pressure on infrastructure that layers down into the arts world,” says the city’s Deputy Mayor for Culture Justine Simons.  “If you look at the average salary of an artist it’s about £10,000 a year. The average property price in London is about £600,000 a year. There is real pressure on affordability. We’re predicting we’ll lose 30 per cent of artist spaces in the next five years so that is a particular pressure area.” (more…)

The Rijksmuseum has announced that a group of six paintings should be included in the canon of painter Hercules Segers, following an extensive research process.  “He’s one of the most innovative painters of the 17th century, who has an oeuvre smaller than that of Vermeer,” says museum director Taco Dibbits, the director of the Rijksmuseum. “To be able to add to that oeuvre is just an amazing thing.” (more…)

Public outrage over a statue in the Egyptian city of Balyana has resulted in a government decree banning statues in the country’s public squares that do not have prior government approval. “It is forbidden to set up or renovate statues, murals or sculptures in Egypt’s public squares except after a thorough review by the ministries of antiquities and culture,” prime minister Sherif Ismail said. (more…)

The Tate has announced a round of new acquisitions, including Joan Carlile’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, making it the earliest known work by a female artist in the museum’s holdings.  Carlile is believed to be the first female professional artist in the country.  “We have a big strategy in trying to make women more visible on our walls,” says Tabitha Barber, a curator of British Art at Tate.

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The New York Times notes a proportional increase in the number of fall museum shows focusing around artists who are not white and male, including the Met Breuer’s upcoming Kerry James Marshall retrospective, and Hilma af Klint’s work on view at the New Museum. (more…)

Jared Leto is producing and starring in a biopic about the life of Andy Warhol, adapting Victor Bockris’s 1989 biography as the basis for the screenplay, written by Oscar-nominated writer Terence Winter.   (more…)

Martin Kippenberger, Ohne Titel (Aus der Serie ‘Fred the Frog’) (1990), via Art Observed

Skarstedt Gallery’s 79th Street town house takes a cunning turn on the rule of threes this month, as the space shows a minimal, yet nuanced exhibition focusing on German painting.  Culling together three works each from a trio of post-war innovators (Albert Oehlen, Georg Baselitz and Martin Kippenberger), the gallery allows a subtly arranged, yet distinctly felt series of interconnected themes and formal investigations over the course of the exhibition.   (more…)

Jonas Wood, Rosy in my Room with His Cat (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over both rooms at Anton Kern’s Chelsea exhibition space, LA painter Jonas Wood has brought a well-rounded and entertaining series of new paintings, which chart the artist’s continually playful and inventive approach to figuration.  Mixing together abstract signifiers with a cool, even-handed approach to the world around him, Wood’s pieces here are an exceptional entry in the discourse of modern painting.

Jonas Wood, The Bat/Bar Mitzvah Weekend (2016), via Art Observed

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Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Audience (detail) (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over the full expanse of Hauser and Wirth’s 18th Street location, Rashid Johnson has brought a series of new paintings, sculpture and assemblage to New York for his first gallery show in the city in several years.  The show, which dwells on concepts of escape, anxiety and history, is a concise examination of Johnson’s practice through a range of theoretical approaches and material interests.     (more…)