The New York Times recaps Art Basel this week, noting the conservative buying perspective at the fair, and the conditions affecting the market for new works. “If you’re going to spend $5 million you want to spend it on something that will get you $5 million back,” says advisor Michael Short. (more…)
Bloomberg published an article this week on the myriad issues affecting buying confidence in the art market, noting the impending Brexit in particular for its potential to disrupt easy movement of work from the UK to Europe. “There is a definite sense of caution until we know what happens with Brexit,” says dealer Pilar Ordovas. “Unless you really have to, why would you sell right now?” (more…)
Sigmar Polke, Rotter Fisch (Red Fish) (1992), via Sotheby’s
As the sales and events surrounding Art Basel begin to wind down this weekend, many collectors will turn their attention to London, where two weeks of auctions will mark the final major sale of the first half of 2016. Spread across five auctions, the sales seem notably subdued in comparison with last month’s attempts to shoot the moon in New York, perhaps in part due to concerns about Britain leaving the EU blunting collectors’ willingness to invest in the pound, yet strong works and seemingly hearty interest may manage to keep the them interesting. (more…)
The Guardian reports on the seemingly minor impact of the Knoedler Gallery fraud on buying enthusiasm in recent months. “A case like this tends to wake people up,” prosecutor Jason Hernandez, the lead prosecutor in the criminal investigation says. “It touched such a well-known gallery in addition to how much money was involved.” (more…)
MoMA PS1 has extended its year of free admission through October 15, 2017, sponsored by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation and Marina Kellen French. The museum has also added Maria Arena Bell, Adrian Cheng, George Farias, Svetlana Kuzmicheva-Uspenskaya, Lisa Roumell, Robert Soros, and John L. Thomson to its board. (more…)
The Met has seen three major departures in the past week, as the institution tries to close a $10 million budget shortfall. Cynthia Round, the museum’s senior vice president for marketing and external relations, and Susan Sellers, head of design, have left their posts, as well as chief digital officer, Sree Sreenivasan. (more…)
The New York Post reports on attempts by the U.S. government to reclaim an Ad Reinhardt painting created for the WPA. The work had accidentally been disposed of, and ended up at auction in 1997 at Sotheby’s. The government has “demanded immediate possession of the painting and threatened to refer this matter to the US Attorney’s office for criminal prosecution,” and has filed papers in court asking the auction house to disclose the location of the work. (more…)
Nicole Eisenman, Weeks on the Train (2015), via Art Observed
Blurring together vastly divergent styles, historical epochs and scenes, painter Nicole Eisenman’s work has defined itself as some of the era’s most stylistically inventive, moving from hyper-stylized abstraction and almost absurdist arrangements through to impeccably rendered portraiture and often lyrical arrangements of figures in space. Offering a counterpoint to the artist’s current exhibition at the New Museum, Anton Kern is currently playing home to a series of new works by the artist, underscoring the artist’s ever-changing stylistic approaches, and aesthetic interpretation of image-making in the 21st Century.
Haegue Yang, Sol LeWitt Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times, Split in Three (2015), all photos via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed
With the early hours of Sunday morning comes the last sales of Art Basel’s flagship fair in Switzerland, as dealers begin to close up shop and begin their treks home from the Messe Basel, beginning the more relaxed summer months. This recess begins on something of a high note, as the contemporary market pushed onwards in the face of foreboding predictions for a weak buying market. Sales remained consistently strong across the course of the event, with a number of major sales occurring both in the early hours of the VIP Previews (which saw an impressive line of collectors outside the exhibition, patiently standing through the rainy weather), onwards throughout the rest of the week.
Yoshitomo Nara, MIA (2016)
The New York Times tours the Zoma Contemporary Art Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, profiling its role as a link between local initiatives and artists, and broader networks of African and European art institutions. “I stumbled onto shows that blew me away, different angles that I really responded to,” artist Abel Tilahun says. “Zoma is pushing the envelope, making art intellectual and saying, ‘We have to get away from the status quo that limits.”’ (more…)
The New York Times looks at several generations of art dealing families, from the Zwirners to Marc and Arne Glimcher, and the experience of working in what has become a family business. “At some point, if your parent is Arne Glimcher or Paula Cooper or Rudolf Zwirner, you have to confront two things. You have to come to peace with the idea that you’re going to do the same thing that your father did, and your father was pretty great at it,” Marc Glimcher of Pace. “You also have to come to grips with the fact that he started it from scratch and you are never going to do that. It’s an internal struggle that took me 20 years to untangle.” (more…)
Martin Creed, Work No. 2721: Shutters Opening and Closing (2016), via Art Observed
The long-awaited Martin Creed retrospective at the Park Avenue Armory has opened its doors, bringing an almost exhaustive survey of the artist’s work to New York for one of the summer’s more peculiar, and ultimately, more striking exhibitions. Pulling from the artist’s 20+ year career, the exhibition offers a fascinating and adventurous exhibition, that asks as much from the viewer as it presents, allowing free-roaming exploration and rewarding it with a range of shocks and surprises.
Martin Creed, Work No. 548 (2006), via Art Observed
Meg Webster, Solar Grow Room (2016), via Paula Cooper Gallery
Currently on view at Paula Cooper’s West 21st Street space, Meg Webster is currently presenting a selection of new works, continuing her focus on sculptural works that encourage viewer participation while engaging subtly with the space around it. In Chelsea, Webster has injected the pristine gallery with natural elements, fostering a deeper sensory examination of the spatial and relational interactions among viewers and the space they pass through, in turn revealing the always-existing power and beauty of nature through the individual’s relationship with it, and within it. (more…)
The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design has laid off more than half of its faculty in the midst of its ongoing restructuring, raising cries from its faculty and students. “The past few years have been absolutely exhausting,” says Antje Kharchi, one of the professors who was let go. “As much as I loved the Corcoran, I feel relief that the seemingly endless wait is finally over. We’ve been lied to, undermined, disrespected, while trying to hold the thing together for our students.” (more…)
Jonas Mekas is interviewed in the Art Newspaper this week, as he shows a series of works at James Fuentes’s Art Basel booth, and reflects on the course of his life and work. “In my life and work, I choose to celebrate the beautiful. I’ve seen enough horror, so why put it in films or on paper?” He says. (more…)
Bernard Frize, Navia (2016), all photos via Art Observed
The work of Bernard Frize is something of a painterly exercise in contradictions, playing with sensations of an endless void against dualities of hindrance and motion, creating complex dialogues over the surface of the canvas. Lustrous veils of color plunge to the edge of the frame, highlighting its periphery in a vibrant glow. Voluminous swirls and blends of color challenge the often opaque surfaces with deeper dimensions, hints of infinite planes of white or black beneath its surface, that offer his pieces a sense of weight and depth far beyond their material capacities. (more…)
Guillermo Kuitca, Untitled (2011), all images via Hauser & Wirth
Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca is widely considered one of the most important and influential contemporary Latin American artists working today. Kuitca, born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, represented Argentina in the 2007 Venice Biennale, and his work is housed in some of the most important galleries and collections across the world. Now through the 28th of July, Hauser & Wirth’s London gallery presents an exhibition of Kuitca’s recent paintings and works in graphite. (more…)
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Michael Jenkins) (1991) Paint on wall Dimensions vary with installation
All photos courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation Photo: Pierre Le Hors
At Andrea Rosen Gallery, the first leg of a three-part exhibition commemorating the legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres concentrates on a single thread of the late artist’s expansive oeuvre. Each one of his portraits—often times installed at their subjects’ residences—depicts a selected subject through a selection of important or trivial happenings loosely attached to the subject’s biography. Placed on high ends of the gallery walls, right before ceilings begin, the portraits complicate hierarchies between climaxes and details in one’s lifespan, while challenging the methods of displaying art. Curated by Julie Ault and Roni Horn, this current installment is set to continue with exhibitions at Massimo De Carlo in Milan and Hauser & Wirth in London this month, weaving an intercontinental dialogue through other prominent threads in the Cuban-born artist’s body of work. (more…)
Sam Pulitzer, Untitled (2012), via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed
Offering a more focused counterpoint to the impressive sprawl of the Art Basel fair nearby, the LISTE Art Fair has also opened its doors for its 20th anniversary edition, bringing trademark selection of smaller galleries, curatorial projects, and a more relaxed, familiar atmosphere to the bustle of Fair Week in Basel, Switzerland. Having opened its doors to VIPs this Monday, LISTE has already drawn impressive praise and attention for its offering this year. (more…)
A piece on WNYC radio today explores efforts to keep artists in New York City through affordable housing initiatives, speaking with Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, one of the nation’s largest grant-making foundations. “Artists are the essential ingredient to the vibrancy of a city,” he says. “Without artists, your city is in many ways without life.” (more…)
The WSJ notes Hong Kong developers’ continued success with mixing real estate sales with design and fine art, creating more expressly shaped spaces for the city’s wealthy buyers. “Instead of just hiring a big designer or a big architect, we treat every object, and the entire space like an exhibition, a museum that we curate,” developer and K11 Art Foundation founder Adrian Cheng. (more…)
One of Zaha Hadid’s final designs, an architectural structure for Zürich’s Galerie Gmurzynska designed to show the compiled works of Kurt Schwitters, has gone on view this week. “Obviously she died before it was finished: all the ideas were there, the concepts were there, we had talked about every detail, but it hadn’t been realized,” says gallery director Mathias Rastorfer. “It’s literally the last project of Zaha, finished by her team.” (more…)