The Metropolitan Museum of Art has set a new record for attendance for the fiscal year, tallying a total of 6.7 million visitors over the last 12 months. “Our audiences are local, national and international, reflecting the depth and breadth of the extraordinary works of art in our galleries,” said director Thomas P. Campbell. (more…)
The LA Times has an in-depth piece on the current struggles and conflicts in Boyle Heights, where local activists are demanding galleries leave the neighborhood amid fears of gentrification. “In many ways, that Chicano Civil Rights movement looked to Boyle Heights as ‘our community, our home.’ And that’s changing now,” says Eric Avila, a professor of history, Chicano studies and urban planning at UCLA. “If you think about it, the struggle for Mexican American civil rights has always been strongly connected to this idea of turf, territory … Mexican American history is about displacement and dislocation and conquest.” (more…)
USC’s Roski school has made a series of new hires in its art program, following the departure of the school’s last student last year. “Leveraging our enviable position in a major comprehensive university, the only major research university that boasts six independent art schools as well as schools of social work, public policy and the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been a strategic goal since 2013,” USC Roski dean Erica Muhl said in a press release. “We are steadfast in preparing our students to thrive in a more complex art world.” (more…)
Mika Rottenberg, Bowls Balls Souls Holes (Bingo) (2014), via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed
Currently on view at Palais de Tokyo for its annual summer exhibition, Argentinian-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg presents a broad selection of works, bringing a series of her expansive installation and video works, alongside new commissions, to the Paris institution’s grounds. Centered around the artist’s recent Venice Biennale commission, NoNoseKnows, the show runs across a broad variety of the artist’s work over the last decade, exploring themes of production, economy, and the body through her own uniquely madcap lens. (more…)
Wangechi Mutu, Throw (2016), via Art Observed
Blackness in Abstraction is Pace Gallery’s museum level survey of a candid, simple concept—the use of the color black in art since the 1940’s—stemming from the visual impact of its subject color and spreading toward its various pertinent connotations. Curated by Adrienne Edwards, the selection, featuring twenty-nine intergenerational artists, puts a particular emphasis on monochromes, yet a broad array of media, including video, sculpture and photography, is available in an exhibition that joins in on the highly populated list of conceptually potent summer group shows. (more…)
A Manhattan dealer filed a lawsuit against David Zwirner Gallery this week, alleging that the gallery’s mishandled transaction cost the customer over $2 million. Gallery spokeswoman Julia Joern responded that Bue Art Limited, the plaintiff in the case, is “unfortunately attempting to use the court system as a negotiating tactic.” (more…)
Rachel Whiteread, Yellow Edge (2007-2008), via Art Observed
Continuing its slow but steady expansion around the globe, Gagosian Gallery has inaugurated a new exhibition space in downtown San Francisco, opening a spacious and beautifully lit gallery on Howard Street, just across from the recently re-opened SFMoMA. Taking the opportunity to flex its roster in its new home, the gallery has curated a strong exhibition, Plane.Site, taking intersections of form, practice and material across a variety of artists from the gallery’s expansive representation. (more…)
Kenneth Noland, Adjoin (1980), via Art Observed © Estate of Kenneth Noland/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY www.vagarights.com
Like many of the forms of 20th Century abstraction, the shaped canvas invites both dedication and constant reinvention, a technical fold in the painterly language that allows an artist to work between the picture plane/mark-making relationship of traditional practice, and the more sculptural elements of the art form that have developed alongside critical reappraisals of the medium since the historical avant-garde. Twisting the canvas and the artist’s gestural vocabulary around edges and into curious re-examinations of space, it has remained a core element of the craft ever since the advent of minimalism pushed a new language of space both within the canvas, and around it. (more…)
Researchers in Australia have discovered a hidden face beneath the surface of Edgar Degas’s Portrait of a Woman, which bears similarity to a popular model of the time, Emma Dobigny. “When I first saw the scan I was over the moon, it was very exciting,” says Daryl Howard at the Australian Synchrotron in Victoria. “At the time I considered it to be one of the most exciting times in my scientific career.” (more…)
François Pinault has shortened the timeline for the completion of his private museum in Paris, bumping the completion date up to 2018. The shortened timeframe was in part driven by recent terrorist attacks in France. “In the face of this barbarism, the only possible reaction is to move forward,” he said. “As André Malraux said, ‘Art is the shortest path from man to man.’ That is what prompted me to accelerate the completion of my project in Paris.” (more…)
The Independent profiles “art detective” Arthur Brand, who recently tracked down Salvador Dali and Tamara de Lempicka works thought to have been destroyed by thieves. “What I do with my company is we advise collectors to prevent them from buying forgeries,” Brand says. “That’s about 70 per cent of my work. The rest of the time we work with Jewish families to recover works from their collections stolen by the Nazis. But a small part of our work is recoveries of thefts, and these are the things that hit the headlines, these huge cases.” (more…)
“The economic point here is that if a museum like the Met isn’t able to keep up as its customers’ tastes change, revenue will likely fall,” he writes. “And by the time it might recognize this, it’s already too late to do much about it because the costs to acquire the in-demand art is sky-high.” (more…)
Fine Young Cannibals (Installation View), via Petzel Gallery
Fine Young Cannibals, a summer group show currently up at Petzel Gallery’s 18th street location, is currently undertaking the perpetually ambitious task of examining the current state of painting. Bringing together work from sixteen different artists, the show poses the question of whether the type of contemporary work sometimes categorized as “Zombie formalism,” borrowing a term first coined by critic Walter Robinson, is purely market driven, or whether the work should be given more consideration. The pieces on view, which range from challenging formal workouts to coy, momentary operations on canvas, offer an intriguing look at current threads in the painterly discourse, adopting a fairly even-handed approach to the artists on view, and their respective interests.
The Tate Britain is celebrating the return of a series of major JMW Turners from loan to U.S. institutions with a rehang of its galleries devoted to the artist. “We were slightly bereft,” says David Blayney Brown, Tate curator of British art from 1790-1850. “Although it is always wonderful to see things in a different gallery because they come to life in such different ways.”
The New York Times reports that Ronald Lauder has admitted one of the major works in the Neue Galerie collection has been found with spotty provenance, and may be returned to its rightful owner. “If you asked me a year ago, ‘Do we have everything there?’ I would have said yes, because that is what I was told,” Lauder said. “I was told there were no questions about the pieces we had.”
Russia’s Garage Museum is expanding to St. Petersburg with plans for programming on New Holland Island. Its first exhibition, “Experiences of the Imaginary” will feature nine emerging Russian Artists through September 25th. The expansion plan is part of a development proposal by Roman Abramovich’s Millhouse Capital. (more…)
Magnus, the art-spotting app that claimed it would “democratize access to the art world,” has been pulled from app stores, following several lawsuits and legal claims that the app had stolen copyrighted images for its database. “The resistance by some galleries is understandable and expected,” founder Magnus Resch told Hyperallergic. “Sudden price transparency is disruptive to current business practices. However, this movement towards greater and greater transparency, which began with Artnet in the 1990’s, cannot be stopped. Whether we are challenged in the press, or threatened with lawsuits, we will fight it and win — the app will be up again soon.” (more…)
Public artworks surrounding the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio have been cancelled following budgeting cuts, the Art Newspaper reports. Italian artist Giancarlo Neri’s installation was chief among the cancellations, described by the Brazilian government as “adjustments so that the principles of administrative efficiency and public spending are respected.” (more…)
The Art Newspaper notes an increased pressure on museums and arts institutions to increase the level of diversity in their top positions. “Information can be a powerful agent,” says cultural organization consultant Holly Sidford of Helicon Collaborative. “This is about engaging people in a tough conversation that engenders tremendous emotion and whether cultural institutions are going to be increasingly relevant or irrelevant to future populations. Change only comes about when the organization sees that this work is mission-critical.” (more…)
Lori Hotz, one of Christie’s heads in its post-war and contemporary art department, has left the company, continuing a series of departures from the auction house. “I have had a wonderful four-year run at Christie’s, where we have built a leading global postwar and contemporary art department and achieved significant growth,” Hotz told Bloomberg. “It’s now time for me to help build and develop other opportunities.” (more…)
A long-lost Albrecht Dürer engraving has been discovered at a French flea market, and since has been returned to Staatsgalerie Stuttgar in Germany. The work had been classified as stolen from the French occupation zone in the years following World War II. (more…)
Paul Lee, Lung (2016), via Art Observed
Currently on view at Maccarone Gallery in LA, New York-based Paul Lee has brought a series of his enigmatic assemblages to bear on the gallery walls. The artist, who previously worked between film and photography, has branched out over the course of his career into a wide variety of techniques, formal elements and material engagements, turning his attention here to a minimal selection of objects that allow him to explore a series of visual correlations and systems within Maccarone’s spacious rooms.
Paul Lee, Either Side of the Night (2016), via Art Observed
Exhibition View, Courtesy of Metro Pictures
Bas Jan Ader’s work currently on view at Metro Pictures succeeds in conveying the Dutch artist’s interest in the body and the self. While Ader’s work has been exhibited in Europe through group and solo shows, his pieces have not been shown in the United States on such a scale. Thus, this show provides American viewers the opportunity to actively engage in Ader’s photography, films, and installations.
The soon to open ICA Los Angeles has announced that Hammer Museum assistant curator Jamillah James will serve as its new head curator. “She champions the values that ICA LA holds in highest regard—critique of the familiar and empathy with the different,” says Elsa Longhauser, the museum’s executive director. (more…)