A rare pair of floral paintings by Queen Victoria will go to auction next week, expecting prices of £8,000 and £10,000, Art News reports.  (more…)

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz is proposing that the British Museum return one of its ancient Assyrian treasures to Iraq in exchange for the donation of his fourth plinth sculpture to the UK. “As I pondered my gift to the nation of Great Britain, I began to fantasise that it could be attached to a second gift: the return of one of the British Museum’s lamassu to the country of Iraq, to replace what was destroyed by Daesh [or Islamic State],” he writes in an open letter. (more…)

Art News has a piece this week discussing ongoing issues with repatriation at The Met, reviewing some disputed works still on view. “Once you know that someone is acquiring artifacts without looking too closely as a source, the first thing you should do is look deeper,” says Erin Thompson, an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. (more…)

UNESCO is holding programs in Warsaw to help identify looted cultural materials from the Ukraine. “Poland is really a country at the forefront of this work,” Krista Pikkat, UNESCO’s director of culture and emergencies, says. (more…)

The New York Times writes on the revival of artist Robert Whitman’s 1959 happening American Moon at Pace. “I used to try to explain things to myself — what I was doing,” he said. “Then I suddenly realized my ideas and thoughts and rationalizations were nonsense, and I just decided to go with my intuition.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles Whitney Museum curator Marcela Guerrero, the first Puerto Ricaan curator at the Museum. “She is at the right place at a time when Latinx art is emerging as a force to be reckoned with,” says Mari Carmen Ramírez, the first curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “We all expect her to contribute to this transformation in a significant way.” (more…)

Clearing Gallery will depart its longtime home in Bushwick for a new space on the Bowery. “There’s nothing wrong with Brooklyn, but there’s more to New York than Brooklyn,” says founder Olivier Babin. “We’re not leaving for a bigger or better space. We’re leaving for a better location.” (more…)

Ciarán Murphy, hollow daze (2023), via GRIMM

On this month at GRIMM in London, Irish artist Ciarán Murphy presents a solo exhibition of new paintings that mark his ninth solo show with the gallery, and his first at its new London outpost. Engaging with the entanglement of technological and analogue modes of image-making, the artist’s work here works through a range of histories of the image and the act of art-making in turn. (more…)

Alma Allen, Not Yet Titled (2022), via Blum & Poe

This month in Los Angeles, Mexico-based artist Alma Allen’s fourth solo exhibition with Blum & Poe marks a continuation of the artist’s work in intense, gesturally-oriented sculpture and meticulously carved and cast bronzes, here exhibited for the first time as a series of wall-hanging works. (more…)

Jim Shaw, Going for the One (2022), via Gagosian

On view this month at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, artist Jim Shaw presents a selection of new works that continue his enigmatic and challenging exploration of modernity and culture. United under the title Thinking the Unthinkable, the show reanimates mythological themes through incidents from political history and popular entertainment, outwardly disparate fields that collide here in a dreamlike mélange. (more…)

Maggie Lee, Unique Boutique (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings

Artist Maggie Lee’s work functions on complex twists of both memories and their embellishment. Frequently approaching her works as both the material of her past and their continued presence and importance in the present, Lee’s pieces dwell on constructions of culture through materials and experiences simultaneously. For her latest show, open this month at Reena Spaulings and Gaga’s shared Los Angeles space, the artist continues this mode of practice, her delving deep into clothing as both container and surface for a range of associations and meanings.

Maggie Lee, Unique Boutique (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings (more…)

Tara Donovan, Screen Drawing (2021), via Pace

On view this month, from January 13 to February 25 at Pace, artist Tara Donovan brings together a selection of screen drawings made with aluminum insect screen, a body of work that began during the pandemic, and which involves moving, pinching, and cutting the wires of an aluminum screen to extract mesmeric patterns from the material’s existing grids. Ranging from just over a foot in height and width to nearly four feet wide and tall, these two-dimensional screen drawings feature unique geometric motifs that produce varied visual effects. (more…)

Will Boone, No Man’s Land (Installation View), via Karma

Artist Will Boone presents a body of new sculpture this month in New York at Karma’s East 2nd Street location, a scenic tableau that mixes together a studied investigation of still-life, pop culture and a range of varied iconographies and techniques.  (more…)

Lucio Fontana, Nudo (Nude) (1926), via Hauser & Wirth

This winter, Hauser & Wirth presents the second in a trilogy of exhibitions dedicated to the late Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana, considered among the 20th century’s most inventive artists. Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, in collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, and focused on Fontana’s prolific breakthroughs and experiments in the medium of sculpture, this exhibition will fill the gallery’s uptown location at 32 East 69th Street, the very same address where, in 1961, Fontana’s first solo show in the US was presented at the galleries of the legendary art dealers Martha Jackson and David Anderson. (more…)

Silke Otto-Knapp, Versammlung (Installation View), via Buchholz

On view this month at Galerie Buchholz in New York, the gallery presents an exhibition by the artist Silke Otto-Knapp (1970-2022). Produced in the 18 months before the artist’s death last year, and conceived of specifically for the Buchholz space in New York, Versammlung (German for “assembly”) unites a series of free-standing paintings that depict a series of bodies traversing space, moving and floating through the gallery.  (more…)

Jannis Kounellis (Installation View), via Gladstone Gallery

This winter, the artist Jannis Kounellis is the subject of an expansive exhibition of work on view at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea this month, underscoring the artist’s powerful and expressive body of work, and its exploration of violence, loss and pain. Like many of his generation in Europe, Jannis Kounellis (1936 – 2017) experienced war at close quarters throughout his childhood; first during the German Nazi/Italian Fascist occupation [subjugation] of Greece, and then the civil war that erupted in the power vacuum when the occupiers were defeated in 1943. One of the first Cold War conflicts, the war lasted until 1949, when Kounellis was 13 years old. (more…)

Jacqueline Fraser, The Making of Reflections in a Golden Eye (2022), via Downs & Ross

Marking artist Jacqueline Fraser’s first solo show at Downs & Ross in New York, The Making of Reflections in a Golden Eye marks a continuation of the artist’s fascination and exploration of the processes and mythos of filmmaking. Here turning her attention to the 1967 film Reflections in a Golden Eye, directed by John Huston, the artist interprets its subject matter and plot through a series of collaged materials and spaces, arranged costumes and various materials that trace a distinct sense of anxiety and exploration of the modern cultural and social landscape.

Jacqueline Fraser, The Making of Reflections in a Golden Eye (2022), via Downs & Ross

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Robert Colescott, MOM’S OLD FASHION ROOT BEER (1974), via Venus Over Manhattan

On through the end of the week at Venus Over Manhattan’s downtown space, the gallery presents a body of works by painter Robert Colescott, organized to trace the development of the artist’s depictions of female subjects over the course of his sixty-year career. Serving as a coda to the recent, critically-lauded traveling museum retrospective Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, the show charts the evolution of Colescott’s ambitious practice through some thirty works produced between 1955 and 1996. (more…)

David Altmejd, The Vector (2022), via White Cube

This winter in London, artist David Altmejd has opened a new show at White Cube, continued his strange fusions of the human form, its constituent parts, and inflections of foreign material to create otherworldly new images. Drawing on classical mythologies of the trickster and the hare as a classical symbol of that mythological archetype, the artist blends languages and images through the frame of Carl Jung to create a surreal interior landscape.  (more…)

Laurie Simmons, Color Pictures/Deep Photos (Pink Dressing Table with Toiletries) (2022), via 56 Henry

On view this month at 56 Henry in New York, Color Pictures/Deep Photos 2007–2022, surveys a collection of new work by Laurie Simmons on view from November 9, 2022 through January 15, 2023. Marking the artist’s first show with the gallery, the exhibition underscores Simmons work in the photographic medium, revisiting a series of works she first made over a decade ago.

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David Hockney, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures (Installation View), via L.A. Louver

Marking a major global exhibition of the work of painter David Hockney, L.A. Louver is currently presenting 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, a series of works created by Hockney in 2021, expanding on a series of iPad paintings in 2020 while quarantining at his studio and residence in Normandy, France. Inspired by his daily observations, Hockney devoted himself to the iPad, a medium of unique immediacy that allowed him to be prolific in his depictions of his home, the changing seasons, and surrounding countryside.

David Hockney, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures (Installation View), via L.A. Louver

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Thomas Ruff, d.o.pe.01 II (2022), via Sprüth Magers

Artist Thomas Ruff’s multi-faceted practice mines the ever-changing possibilities of photography, investigating visual and cultural phenomena to address the ways in which technology influences our seeing. It manifests across a wide range of subjects and methods ranging from classical portrait photography to algorithmically generated digital images. For the artist’s most recent show, on view this winter at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, the artist continues this practice, taking on a series of wall-tapestries as a mode for the continued exploration of image-making and its connections to material. (more…)

Michel Majerus, gemälde (Installation View), neugerriemschneider, Berlin, November 8, 2022 – January 14, 2023 © Michel Majerus Estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe

This winter in Berlin, neugerriemschneider is printing a dynamic show by Michel Majerus – gemälde, 1994. The show recreates gemälde, the first exhibition in the gallery’s collaboration with Michel Majerus in 1994, and is her reconstructed for the first time as part of an ongoing focus on the artist by the gallery this year. The historic exhibition will be reconstructed to scale and includes the same works it originally showed, evoking the inception of Majerus’ innovative artistic method, which presented a new way of approaching painting and making it accessible in the form of installations. (more…)

K.R.M. Mooney, Radial Affordance (c.) i (2022), via Miguel Abreu

On view this winter at Miguel Abreu in New York, artist K.R.M. Mooney marks his debut solo show at the gallery with a body of new works that emphasize the artist’s meticulous interpolations of hardware, construction materials and mechanical parts, applied here in a subtle and engaging series of operations.  (more…)