The Spanish Civil Court has ruled that the Salvador Dalà Foundation has no legal standing to protect the artist’s image, the Art Newspaper reports. The decision backs up previous decisions in Spanish courts, which found that the foundation did not have grounds to defend the artist’s image rights. (more…)
The Artist Pension Trust, a mutual fund founded on and maintained with the donations of a group of artists including Mark Bradford, Nina Beier, Daniel Arsham, and Rob Pruitt, among others, has made its first payout, following a $452,085 private sale of works from its collection. (more…)
The Guardian takes a tour of the recently completed but still unopened Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, which has been forced to remain shuttered during Greece’s fiscal woes. “In difficult moments like this, you need hope,” says Renzo Piano, who designed the space. “Making a good building is an important civic gesture. It makes you believe in a better world.” (more…)
Ben Patterson, via Art News
Ben Patterson, an early Fluxus member, musician and composer, has passed away at the age of 82 at his home in Wiesbaden, Germany. (more…)
Thaddaeus Ropac has committed himself to a an exhibition space in the London neighborhood of Mayfair, following concerns over the loss of businesses after the Brexit. “However bad [the Brexit situation] is, London is the quintessential centre of the art world, I am absolutely committed to it,” Ropac says. (more…)
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has received a major gift of contemporary work from the collection of Keith and Katherine Sachs, currently on view at the institution. “One day, I had one important work by Robert Gober to work with, the following day I had six,” says curator Carlos Basualdo. “This allows you to tell more interesting stories, and more stories in general.” (more…)
Terence Koh, Bee Chapel (Installation View), via Art Observed
Since his departure from the New York art scene several years prior, Terence Koh has appeared in the art context at fits and starts; a performance here, a reading there, or an unexpected appearance at the PS1 Art Book fair in 2014, where the artist sold materials from his farm in upstate New York. His momentary appearances implied the artist was continuing his work while living far from the madding crowd, but rarely was his work on view, or presented within the gallery context. This changes with Koh’s Bee Chapel, a powerful install at Andrew Edlin Gallery on the Bowery that hints at Koh’s increasingly nuanced practice.
Terence Koh, Bee Chapel (Installation View), via Art Observed
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Portrait (1981), via Christie’s
This week’s Contemporary Evening Sales have concluded, following Christie’s stolid outing in London this evening, as only 4 of the auction house’s 40 lots went unsold to reach a final total of £39,566,000. Sales were consistently focused over the course of the evening, with few works falling under estimated price. While an early warning note was sounded with the withdrawal of the sale’s leading Gerhard Richter lot, the auction house’s commitment to placing works this evening ultimately drove it towards a strong bottom line, even if the sale held back from ambitious benchmarks or marquee lots. (more…)
Jenny Saville, Shift (1996-97), via Sotheby’s
The post-Brexit contemporary sales continued in London this past evening, as Sotheby’s capped a 47-lot offering of contemporary and post-war works, seeing all but 7 works find a buyer, and bringing in a sales tally of £52,194,000 that exceeded its initial $35 million estimates. (more…)
W Magazine profiles 22-year old collector Michael Xufu Huang, a co-founder of Beijing’s private M Woods museum, as he finishes school and continues his work in building out his collection. “In the beginning, you buy with your ears,” he says. “You get really excited when people sell you stuff. Now, I’m very careful.” (more…)
The New York Times reports from the arts community in Lahore, Pakistan, charting the violence and unrest that has come to factor heavily in the work of those educated at the city’s National College of Arts. “The confusion is a kind of blessing because there is no consensus,” says artist Quddus Mirza. “India has this thing about Indianness. Here, there is no identity.” (more…)
The WSJ reports on the success of New York City’s new ID program, which has resulted in 400,000 new yearlong memberships to major city arts institutions, a point that also sees these institutions engaging with communities they had long sought out but struggled to connect with. “It’s not just an issue of how many people are going to buy memberships. It’s how many people are going to retain a relationship to the institution,” says the city’s Cultural Affairs Commissioner, Tom Finkelpearl. (more…)
Christie’s head Jussi Pylkkanen is interviewed in the Art Newspaper this week, as he reflects on his company’s path through the next decades and beyond. “Staying relevant, making sure the contemporary side of the business is in good order and reaching out to the younger audience of 35 and under… we used to send a catalogue to a few hundred people; now, a video on YouTube can be viewed by hundreds of thousands,” he says. (more…)
A landmark report by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe has uncovered evidence that the German government had frequently given Nazi-looted works back to the families of Nazi officers rather than their rightful owners, and had covered up this practice for decades. The report points to a trove of works returned to Henriette Hoffmann-von Schirach, the daughter of photographer and close friend of Adolf Hitler, and wife of Baldur von Schirach, who was condemned at Nuremburg for crimes against humanity. (more…)
Anselm Kiefer, Für Velimir Khlebnikov: Die Lehre vom Krieg: Seeschlachten (2004-2010), via Phillips
The first of June’s Contemporary Art sales in London has wrapped up in London this evening, as Phillips concluded its 20th Century and Contemporary sale to mixed results and a final sales total of £11,873,000, within the evening’s sales estimate. The 31-lot sale saw 10 of its works go unsold, while a handful of other pieces brought impressively strong prices, ultimately casting ominous, albeit foggy indications of the European market in the wake of the Brexit vote.
Frieze London has announced its planned events and curated sectors for the 2016 edition of its annual fair in Regents Park. For its 14th edition, the fair will feature over 160 galleries, its annual projects sections, and a new section called “The 90s,” organized by Geneva-based curator Nicolas Trembley to reflect on important installations and projects from that decade. (more…)
Author Douglas Coupland is searching for a Vincent van Gogh lookalike, with the person most closely resembling the artist winning a $5,000 prize. “I’m learning that most people have someone in their life who looks like Vincent van Gogh,” Coupland says. “It could be your next-door neighbor. It could be a guy at work. It could be you.” (more…)
Rachel Whiteread has installed a new installation on Governor’s Island, an immense, cast-concrete cabin that sits just at the edge of the island. “I wanted to have something that was very humble but had a sort of idea of solitude and showed the city from a different angle,” Whiteread says. “I like the idea of being there on your own with the Statue of Liberty and the site of the former World Trade Center over the water.” (more…)
Loïc Gouzer is the subject of a profile in the New Yorker this week, as he discusses some of the curated projects he has run at Christie’s and his perspective on the selling exhibition. “If you start putting works around another work, they give each other meaning,” he says. “Each of the works are in dialogue, and they help each other.” (more…)
Jenny Holzer will install a site-specific work on the cliffs of Ibiza this summer, the Art Newspaper reports, created in conjunction with a pair of shows the artist is opening on the island. “Holzer will undertake her first site-specific commission on the island. Using raw materials from the Ibicencan countryside and coastline, she will engrave poems on cliffs, monumental boulders and on bedrock,” a statement reads. (more…)
The Whitney Museum will stay open seven days a week during July and August, the institution announced today. It will also be open late into the evening on Fridays and Saturdays, allowing visitors to view their current exhibitions through 10 pm. (more…)
Nicole Eisenman, Under The Table 2 (2014), via Art Observed
On view through this past weekend at the New Museum, painter Nicole Eisenman was showing a striking exhibition of pieces on the third floor, spanning the artist’s output over the past several decades, and underscoring her impressive creative investigations into the modes of sculpture and painting.
Nicole Eisenman, Hanging Man (2016),via Art Observed
Yayoi Kusama, Chandelier of Grief (2016). All images via Victoria Miro.
Now through July 30th, Victoria Miro in London is presenting new works by Yayoi Kusama, spanning the gallery’s three locations and waterside garden across the British capital. The work featured here was created exclusively for this show, including the artist’s iconic pumpkin sculptures, immersive mirror rooms, and her ongoing My Eternal Soul series. Across the work exhibited, the artist’s ongoing investment in themes of the infinite and the sublime is explicit. (more…)
Imi Knoebel, Bild 16.02.2016 (2016), via Thaddaeus Ropac
Comprised of 22 new artworks, Imi Knoebel’s current exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Marais exhibition space offers a new direction for the German painter, whose decades of practice in the intersection of color field painting, shaped canvases and minimalist serialism offer a new point of departure for a series of loosely rendered, yet exceptionally vital new works, pushing his honed stylistic practice towards new experiments within the art historical lexicon. (more…)