SFMoMA has opened its doors after a lengthy renovation and expansion process, totaling over $300 million.  The result is an ambitiously deep exhibition program showcasing the recent donation of the Doris and Donald Fisher collection. (more…)

Alighiero Boetti, Oggi Ventiduesimo giorno dell’ottavo mese dell’anno millenovecentootantotto (1988), via Art Observed

There’s a tangible spirit of enthusiasm in the opening exhibition for Totah Gallery in the Lower East Side, a dual exhibition exploring the work of Alighiero Boetti and Mel Bochner in concert.  The pairing, at face value, seems obvious; a pair of artist’s whose roughshod textual inversions made established their roles in the language and semiotic turns in art during the 1970’s.  Yet proprietor and principle curator David Totah’s investment in the broader material aspects of both artist’s careers unfolds here into a nuanced exhibition that rewards deeper readings and lingering views on each composition.  It’s a point of focus that he will continue at the space, driving research-heavy installs that blend history with personal encounter, always emphasizing exchanges between the artists and his own relationships with them.

Mel Bocher and Alighiero Boetti, Verba Volant Scripta Manent (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

LACMA has received two major donations totaling $75 million to help fund its new, Peter Zumthor-designed permanent collection building.  The funds came from Wynn resort co-founder Elaine Wynn and A. Jerrold Perenchio, who also donated a selection of paintings valued at $75 million.  “There has been quite a bit of work to get the project to this point,” Director Michael Govan says. “These two gifts together are the largest single pledge to a cultural institution in L.A.” (more…)

Fast Company looks at the ongoing debates over MoMA’s expansion plans, and the multiple adjustments made after strong response to the museum’s proposals.  “I think the reaction in the press was less directed against our curatorial experiment than an expression of the fear that MoMA was no longer going to have its architecture and design collection on show in dense and medium-designated spaces,” Martino Stierli, says the museum’s Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design. “This fear is unnecessary.” (more…)

Wolfgang Tillmans has spoken out ardently against the pending vote over the UK’s departure from the European Union, and has made a number of posters available on his site advocating against the “Brexit.” “I feel that we have reached a critical moment that could prove to be a turning point for Europe as we know and enjoy it – one that might result in a cascade of problematic consequences and political fall-out,” he writes. “Brexit could effectively spell the end of the EU. It’s a flawed and problematic institution, but on the whole it stands for a democratic worldview, human rights and favors cooperation over confrontation.” (more…)

Larry Gagosian is the subject of a lengthy profile in the Wall Street Journal this week, which profiles both his impressive empire of galleries worldwide, and his views on the market he wields such influence over. “I don’t think the art market is for everybody. Yeah, of course, we have a global gallery. But we’re like the one-tenth of the one-tenth of the one-tenth. OK?” he says. “Not just who’s buying but who’s really seriously engaged with art. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. I believe in the popularizing of art. But when you get right down to it, it’s a bit of an elitist world. Not just economically elitist—how many people read poetry?” (more…)

Francois Pinault has signed a 50-year lease on the Bourse de Commerce building in Paris, which will serve as the site of his €1.2bn collection. “It is great to have our captains of industry helping to fly our colors. With this and the Fiac art fair, Paris is regaining its place in contemporary art,” Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo says. (more…)

303 Gallery is returning to 21st Street next week, opening a new space designed by Foster + Partners. “The rare opportunity to build a gallery from the ground up made it possible for us to create a dynamic space for the artists,” says 303 founder Lisa Spellman. (more…)

Mark Wallinger, Ego (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over Hauser and Wirth London for his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Mark Wallinger has brought a nuanced collection of both new and recent works, showcasing the artist’s unique interests in the associative and perceptual variations of one’s encounter with the surrounding world, mixing together explicit psychoanalytic technique with less concrete forms that trace the body’s relation to the urban environment, or the preservation of time through similar modes of engagement.   (more…)

Olafur Eliasson has given an interview in The Guardian this week about his Little Sun project, which has seen modest successes in its few years on the market.  “I was fortunate to enjoy a lot of exposure in that incredible resource-full part of the art world, where, let’s face it, there’s quite a bit of wealth,” he says.  “So on one side I felt privileged and yet I also wanted to see if I could test my creative muscle and make it useful in other situations. And, frankly speaking, I say that Little Sun is a work of art that works in life.” (more…)

Artist Maria Eichhorn’s current exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery has given the institution’s employees five weeks of paid vacation, a piece which comments as much on labor rights and working conditions as it does on concepts of freedom and performance.  “My work for Chisenhale Gallery consists in giving time to the staff, the only specification is that there is no specification. Once the staff accept the time, once work is suspended, the artistic work can emerge,” the artist says.   “The employees are not assigned any tasks by me. They should do nothing other than not work for Chisenhale Gallery.”   (more…)

The Miami Herald looks at a peculiar case of tug-of-war for a Pablo Picasso work between a Manhattan collector and Miami dealer.  Socialite Wilma Tisch claims that her Picasso was stolen from her apartment in 2009, but was not noticed as missing until this year, while dealer Kenneth Handel claims he purchased the work in 2013.  “When are you too rich to notice that a Picasso is missing after eight years?”  Hendel says. (more…)

Artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman have founded their own Super PAC, For Freedoms, which will raise funds to promote and present political perspectives on major issues for the 2016 U.S. elections, and to“elevate and expand the dialogue that no longer exists in our sound-bite culture, its ‘gotcha’ tactics, or in its oversimplified conversations,” Gottesman says. (more…)

The Brooklyn Museum has embarked on an ambitious rehang of its galleries, including a changing focus on Egypt as an African empire, and changed selections for the European galleries.  “It’s very rare to have two encyclopedic museums in one city,” Director Anne Pasternak. “We get to be something different.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper notes efforts by both Gagosian and Lisson Gallery to extend their influence to Tehran, lending works to an exhibition in downtown gallery Ab-Anbar.  “The galleries were very cooperative; I think they are testing the waters,” gallery director Salman Matinfar says. (more…)

Cindy Sherman is featured in the New York Times this week, as the artist prepares to open a new show at Metro Pictures next week.  In her new works, Sherman presents herself in the guise of different aging starlets and celebrities.  “I, as an older woman, am struggling with the idea of being an older woman,” she says. (more…)

Cecelia Alemani, the director of the High Line’s Art program in New York, has been tapped to curate the Italian Pavilion at next year’s Biennale.  Alemani has run the High Line program since 2011.   (more…)

Bloomberg profiles the ongoing battle for market share by Sotheby’s and Christie’s this week, and the companies’s use of guarantees and third-party lenders to drive up auction prices as a show of strength.  “They have been making absolutely absurd deals just to be seen selling this Koons or that Rothko,” says gallerist David Nash. “They’d do anything to get the deal away from the competition.” (more…)

Alexis Rockman, Cervid Cervacles (Jacob Riis Beach, Queens) (2015), via Salon 94

Alexis Rockman’s work is expressly involved in the correlations between image and ground, material and subject, often pulling from the biological intersections of human and animal, flora and fauna, or land and water, that define the landscapes of modernity.  Shifting this focus to a more microcosmic level, the artist has opened a show of drawings of New York City wildlife, a project that heightens his sense of delicate relations between nature and its inhabitants, on view at Salon 94. (more…)

The Economist profiles the long-awaited publication of Francis Bacon’s catalog raisonné, which will be released on April 28th, the 24th anniversary of the artist’s death.  The five-volume collection is priced at £1,000 ($1,430), and features over 800 illustrations.   (more…)

Daniel Arsham details his usual weekend routine with his wife and son in the New York Times this week.  The artist takes frequent trips to art museums around the city.  “My son knows, if you ask him what we say about art, he says ‘touche pas,’ which means ‘don’t touch’ in French,” Arsham says. (more…)

Tacita Dean, A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds (2015-2016), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

The Marian Goodman Gallery, New York presents ‘…my English breath in foreign clouds’, a comprehensive survey of Tacita Dean’s recent works: a collection of clouds observed from Los Angeles, three 16mm films including the striking ‘Event for a stage’ (2015) and ‘Portraits’ (2016), an intimate one on one with David Hockney smoking in his studio, as well as a photographic series newly printed on Cibachrome paper, ‘Gaeta 2015 – Fifty photographs, plus one’ (2015) which subtly links Cy Twombly’s house and studio in Italy with the poetics of his thinking process.

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Ellsworth Kelly, Barn, Long Island (1968), via Matthew Marks Gallery

The late Ellsworth Kelly’s photographic works are the subject of the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in New York this month, offering a unique and alternative perspective on an artist already seen as one of the most influential and prominent abstractionists of the 20th Century.  The show, on view at Matthew Marks in Chelsea, showcases over thirty gelatin silver prints, originally taken between 1950 and 1982, the first ever devoted to Kelly’s photographic endeavors.  Kelly finished preparing these prints and planning the exhibition shortly before his death on December 27th, at the age of ninety-two.  Here, these photographs offer a fitting perspective of the artist’s own aesthetic inclinations, and his unique perspective for the world around him. (more…)

Dealer Perry Rubenstein has been arrested on criminal charges following a series of lawsuits over allegedly fraudulent art sales to Eli Broad and Michael Ovitz.  “We deny all these allegations and look forward to clearing his name and getting his reputation back,” his lawyer, Stephen Sitkoff says. “There’s no criminal conduct on Perry’s part.” (more…)