Los Angeles–based artist Max Hooper Schneider has won the BMW Art Journey award, and will use the funding for an exploration of global coral reef sites.  The project will spotlight “pilgrimage sites seminal in the development of the coral imaginary in science and art: Cocos Keeling Islands, where Charles Darwin conducted fieldwork for his 1842 treatise, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs; and the Bahamas, to which André Breton traveled on an imaginary voyage via readymade photographic representations of Bahamian coral in order to document nature’s surreality. (more…)

The Art Newspaper profiles New York collector Thomas Kaplan, who currently holds one of the largest private collection of Rembrandt works, possessing 11 of the 35 works currently outside of institutional collections.  Kaplan is currently touring large portions of his collection globally as a way to build cultural connections.  “We, as collectors, are American,” he says. “We can use Dutch art, with an exhibition starting at a French museum, to build bridges between the West and China. Then, at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the paintings will be down the road from Mosul and Palmyra.” (more…)

Gallerist Andrea Rosen has announced that she will be closing her gallery to focus on representing the estate of Felix González-Torres in collaboration with David Zwirner.  “While the gallery will continue to exist, with selective activities, like the representation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, I will no longer have a typical permanent public space and therefore no longer represent living artists,” she said in a statement.  “This transition will transpire over the next few months.” (more…)

Susan Greenberg Fisher has been appointed as director of collections at the Brooklyn Museum.  Fisher previously worked as the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation’s executive director in New York.   (more…)

The Royal Academy of Art has embarked on a partnership with over 60 London Galleries to rebrand the Mayfair Art Weekend with a three-day calendar of exhibitions and events.  “Our aim is to open up our schools, the collection and our buildings and make them all more accessible to the public,” says Kate Goodwin, the RA’s curator of architecture. (more…)

Paper Magazine has a piece on painter Alex Becerra, as he prepares new work for the LA Art Book Fair this week.  The artist, who works out of a 1,700 square foot studio in Inglewood, gives the magazine a tour of the space as he discusses his work and the the U.S.’s current political climate.  “My studio is a creative hub, not for this kind of politics,” he says.  “My attitude hasn’t changed, it is more of a question of how can I stay positive in these times.” (more…)

Artnet examines the market for Raymond Pettibon, as the artist’s New Museum retrospective renews interest in his dauntingly massive body of work.  “Pettibon’s works are extremely collectible,” says Alexander Berggruen, specialist for post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s. “They brilliantly tread the line between house-able and viscerally pleasing, while also irreverent, provocative, and challenging in many others ways.” (more…)

The New Yorker has a piece this week on various museums’ gestures of resistance against the Trump White House, including rehangs of work to emphasize foreign artists, and a seven-hour reading of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” at the Brooklyn Museum.   (more…)

The Gurlitt Art Trove will finally go on public view at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany, the New York Times reports.  The collaborative exhibition will focus both on the Gurlitt collection and more broadly on themes of looted art in Europe.   (more…)

A rare set of Old Master Drawings is set to go on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery, including sketches and pieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Rubens and Rembrandt.  “Some of the drawings were perhaps never intended to leave the artists’ studios, but are arguably among the most engaging and powerful impressions of personal likeness in the history of art,” says Director Nicholas Cullinan.  (more…)

The Guardian has a piece this week on Claude Monet’s fascination with the foggy landscapes of London, and the city’s enduring influence on his work.  “Without fog London would not be beautiful,” he once claimed. (more…)

Nathalie de Gunzburg, chairwoman of the Dia Art Foundation’s board in Manhattan, is featured in this week’s edition of NYT’s new ‘Show Us Your Wall’ series, touring the paper through her collection of classic minimalist works, and reflecting on the era’s initial impact on her.  “I always thought that it looked like New York — rigid, sometimes imposing, very muscular. But I have to say that living with it in a place like this city actually calms me,” she says. (more…)

France’s culture ministry has launched a new prize dedicated to female contemporary artists, the AWARE awards.  “Invisible for too long, put in the background, ignored, women artists must find in the 21st-century their place in all the artistic disciplines,” French culture minister Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.  The first winners of the award are Laetitia Badaut Haussmann and Judit Reigl. (more…)

A 100% cut to the arts budget in the city of Bath has led to calls for intervention by the UK Culture Secretary.  “The council has committed an act of cultural vandalism in Bath that will result in a new dark age for arts and culture in the region,” says Equity deputy general secretary Stephen Spence. (more…)

The failure to purchase a £30 million painting for the National Gallery and prevent it from leaving the UK has resulted in calls to reform the country’s art export rules, the Guardian reports.  “Today’s news that Tom Hill, the American buyer of Pontormo’s Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, has refused the National Gallery’s matching offer of over £30m marks a great cultural loss to the nation,” says the Art Fund’s Stephen Deuchar.  “We believe the UK’s art export control system should serve our public collections more effectively than at present.” (more…)

The Guardian reports on the current state of public art in the UK, often supported by private estates and new building projects rather than the public organizations of previous eras, and looks at recent efforts by artists to use public art to engage these problems.  “We questioned the capitalist logic of the proposed development,” says artist Jessie Brennan of a recent work on public land in Peterborough, “and offered alternative evidence for the current social use and value of the land.” (more…)

Anish Kapoor’s swirling, watery void Descension is set to go on view at Brooklyn Bridge this summer, courtesy the Public Art Fund.  “Anish Kapoor reminds us of the contingency of appearances: our senses inevitably deceive us,” says Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume says.  “With Descension, he creates an active object that resonates with changes in our understanding and experience of the world.” (more…)

Jannis Kounellis, via Art Newspaper

Greek-Italian Arte Povera pioneer Jannis Kounellis has passed away in Rome at the age of 80, according to the Italian Minister of Culture.  “It is a sad day, Kounellis has left us. A master, Italian by adoption, who left a mark on contemporary art,” Minister Dario Franceschini tweeted today. (more…)

After only nine months at the Brooklyn Museum, Nancy Spector is returning to the Guggenheim as both chief curator and artistic director, the New York Times reports, a role that will see her expand on the museum’s projects globally.  “Because we’re multi-sited and that’s growing, it seemed to me like the institution really needed a discriminating synthesizer, and Nancy was interested in that and I think really the best person for it,” director Richard Armstrong says. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama is the subject of a profile in the Washington Post this week, as the artist continues to paint and design new pieces.  “I’m old now, but I am still going to create more work and better work. More than I have in the past,” she says. “My mind is full of paintings.” (more…)

David Hockney’s early lithograph Fish and Chips Shop, which hung for years over the fryers at Sea Catch fish and chip shop in Eccleshill, West Yorkshire, will sell at Christie’s in London next month, expected to bring £6,000 to £8,000.  “There is something wonderful about a local chippy with a rare Hockney hanging above the fryer,” says Murray Macaulay, the auction house’s head of prints.  (more…)

The Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, Germany, has announced the discovery of a rare drawing by Rembrandt, which had sat in its collection unnoticed for almost 250 years.  The drawing of a dog is one of only a few known works by the artist depicting animals in that medium.   (more…)

Widespread lay-offs at auction startup Paddle8 have left the company “gutted” by some reports, as many departments are now run by a single staffer.  The news comes after the company’s split with Auctionata, with little information provided about either company’s next steps. (more…)

Anicka Yi is profiled in the New York Times this week, as she prepares to open her Hugo Boss Prize exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, and elaborates on the relationship of smell to both her work and personal history.  “Smell is the sense that’s most closely associated with women, and I think it’s a mistake to relegate it that way,” she says. “That gendering reflects a long history of misogynist understanding about the mind and the body.” (more…)