Vilnius, Lithuania has opened the new, €15m MO Museum, housing the 4,000-work private collection of biotech entrepreneur Viktoras Butkus and his wife Danguole.  (more…)

A Jackson Pollock painting originally purchased for $306 in 1950 by Nelson Rockefeller is headed to Phillips in New York next month, carrying a $18 million estimate. “There’s a real magic to that provenance,” says Robert Manley, co-head of 20th century and contemporary art at Phillips. “They were the biggest collectors of their time. They had access and very good taste. People knew that much of their art will end up in major museums.” (more…)

Fausto Melotti, The Deserted City (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s expansive 22nd Street location in New York, a body of work by the Italian master Fausto Melotti spreads across the upper floors, a snaking, intricate series of pathways that draw the viewer into an intimate, almost theatrical relationship to the works on view. Presenting a series of varied scenes and arrangements of the artist’s delicate, surreal formal arrangements, the show is an exemplary demonstration of Melotti’s capacities to create other worlds and new sensations within the gallery. (more…)

Pope.L, Rebuilding the Monument (chicago version/the vitrine problem/one of three) (2007), via Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Currently on at both of Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s New York locations, artist Pope.L presents an exploration of various projects both current at historical at its Chelsea exhibition space and uptown gallery.  Pope.L’s practice often focuses on the uncertain but productive space between differences in language, class, race, and gender to create works that simultaneously enlist, mock and re-write convention. For Pope.L this gap is where ignorance, the unknown, or the unintended collides with human meaning and, even hubris to create fresh tensions around authenticity, self and icon. (more…)

Pierre Huyghe, UUmwelt (Installation View), Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (3 October 2018 – 10 February 2019). Copyright Ola Rindal. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries

Artist Pierre Huyghe is known for his complex immersive ecosystems, creating impressive arrangements of space and material that incorporate living organisms, active agents and forces that gradually transform or reactivate the gallery in which its placed.  For his new exhibition at The Serpentine Gallery in the UK, which opened during Frieze London this past month, the artist has turned the museum into a porous and contingent environment, housing different forms of cognition, emerging intelligence, biological reproduction and instinctual behaviors. (more…)

Simone Leigh was has won the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, given every two years to a contemporary artist. The prize includes a $100,000 check and an exhibition next April at the museum.  (more…)

A fine art consultant in New York and an interior designer in Florida are facing charges of fraud after allegedly using an elderly woman’s identity to buy a Mark Rothko for $6.4 million and an Ad Reinhardt work for $1.16 million at Sotheby’s, AP reports. “Our discussions with the purchasers raised significant suspicion and concern for the elderly client they purported to represent and we felt it was necessary to contact the FBI,” Sotheby’s said in a emailed statement. “We are pleased that the appropriate action has been taken and the victim has been protected.” (more…)

Jenny Holzer gets a profile in New York Magazine this week, reviewing her recent work and her approach towards creating her bracing, direct brand of text art. “I have made much of my work sex-blind and anonymous so that it wouldn’t be dismissed as the work of a woman,” she says. “I don’t want to be looked at or dismissed, or even attract anybody, as a female.” (more…)

Barbara Kruger will reprise her iconic installation Untitled (Questions) on the facade of LA’s Geffen Contemporary, the LA Times reports. “People in this city didn’t realize what a gem this building was,” Kruger says of the space. “It was able to shape-shift and be altered in brute, really material ways. It wasn’t a precious over-designed museum.” (more…)

Kassel’s controversial obelisk sculpture, installed during Documenta 14 last year, Monument to Strangers and Refugees by artist Olu Oguibe, will remain on view permanently in the city, following protests, defacement, and a temporary removal at the beginning of the month.  “There was no way that I could possibly agree with, or approve of, or be party to the removal of the obelisk from the Königsplatz, and it is my hope that the ugly event of October 3 will give Kassel’s leaders cause to revisit the violence that they’ve repeatedly done to artists’ works and visions, and finally put in place a decent policy to avoid such violence in the future,” the artist said in a statement. (more…)

Olafur Eliasson, Straight Back (2018), via Art Observed

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is currently presenting Olafur Eliasson: The speed of your attention, the first solo exhibition dedicated to Eliasson at the gallery’s recently inaugurated Los Angeles location. The phrase “the speed of your attention” was introduced to Eliasson by Joe Dumit, an anthropologist at UC Davis who conducted a movement experiment during a workshop at Eliasson’s Berlin studio this summer. Dumit learned the phrase from Nita Little—one of the pioneers of contact improvisation, a contemporary dance technique in which movements arise through contact between two or more dancers—in the form of the instruction to “move at the speed of your attention.” (more…)

The Met and The Brooklyn Museum will reportedly halt the use of Saudi Arabian money for programs on Middle Eastern art, support coming from groups tied to the Saudi government. The move comes after the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi after entering the Saudi embassy in Turkey. “While this conversation and a subsequent public colloquium were to be supported by external funds, in light of recent developments we have decided that the Museum will itself fund this event,” says Met President Daniel Weiss. (more…)

Kerry James Marshall gets a profile in the Financial Times this week, with the paper profiling and exploring the impact of his work. “Because I make figures does not mean that making work that appears to be abstract is not available to me, ” he says. (more…)

Carrie Mae Weems gets a profile in the NYT this week, documenting her early life and the evolution of her groundbreaking photographic practice in conjunction with her socially-engaged practice regarding violence in black communities and against the same communities by the police. “There are days, especially when we’re editing, when we just leave the studio in a shambles, or we’re just too mentally exhausted to look at another image of someone being shot,” she says. “But as much as I’m engaged with it, with violence, I remain ever hopeful that change is possible and necessary, and that we will get there. I believe that strongly, and representing that matters to me: a sense of aspiration, a sense of good will, a sense of hope, a sense of this idea that one has the right, that we have the right to be as we are.” (more…)

The New York Times takes a deep look at Okwui Enwezor’s ouster from Munich’s Haus der Kunst, profiling the management issues, flagging sales and strange controversies that led to his termination, including government surveillance after a number of Scientologists were discovered working in the museum. “Enwezor had too many scandals to handle at once,” says Isabell Zacharias, a spokeswoman from the center-left Social Democratic Party in the Bavarian Parliament. “Enwezor is not a manager. He’s a great artist, but artists are not managers.” (more…)

Artist Sophie Calle’s last project is an expansive tribute to her deceased cat Souris, featuring songs and pieces by Laurie Anderson, Jarvis Cocker and Michael Stipe, among many others. (more…)

Collector  J. Tomilson Hill claims that the art market shows no sign of cooling or crashing due to the number of interested buyers from new museums and private collections in China. “In 1949, when Mao took over China, there were 25 museums in China,” Hill said. “Do you know how many museums there are in the United States today? 35,000. There are under 7,000 museums in China but they’re growing at between 500-1,000 museums a year. So there is a massive demand for interesting things to either look at, to talk about.” (more…)

Christie’s is offering 16 pieces from the collection of Herbert and Adele Klapper in its upcoming evening sale of Impressionist and modern art on November 11 in New York, Art News reports. The collection, estimated at $50 million, includes Claude Monet’s L’escalier à Vétheuil, (1881), estimated at $12 million–to–$18 million.  (more…)

Xavier Veilhan at Perrotin, via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

Spread out along the spacious aisles and picturesque dome of the Grand Palais in Paris, the Foire internationale d’art contemporain, also known as FIAC, has returned once again for another year of sales in the French capital.  With Wednesday evening slowly dragging into the late hours, the fair’s VIP opening is now concluded, once again garnering strong praise and enthusiastic response from its attendees.  This year, the list of galleries brings together exhibitors from 25 countries, marking its 45th edition with a fitting reflection of its storied history, one echoed by the prestigious locale of the Grand Palais.  With an exacting selection of modern art, contemporary art, and design galleries, among the most emblematic of the international scene, the fair’s opening hours once again underscored its vitality in the modern fair circuit. 

Alicja Kwade at 303, via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed (more…)

The former Actes Sud CEO Françoise Nyssen has been replaced today as France’s minister of culture following allegations of conflicts of interest.  She will be replaced by Franck Riester. (more…)

The most recent filing in a case between collector Steven Tananbaum and Jeff Koons/Larry Gagosian claims that the collector should have expected to wait several years for the work he paid $13 million for. “Tananbaum is a prominent hedge fund manager, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, and a sophisticated art collector who regularly invests in exclusive works of fine art,” Gagosian’s attorney Matthew Dontzin notes in court papers. “Mr. Tananbaum was being advised by one of the world’s leading art advisors and fully understood that (i) Mr. Koons is a perfectionist who often takes years to make each sculpture; (ii) Mr. Koons provides only estimated completion dates for the sculptures; and (iii) those estimated dates are often extended by multiple years,” Dontzin adds in the motion to dismiss the suit. (more…)

Three Georgia O’Keeffe paintings deaccessioned by her namesake Museum in Santa Fe will head to Sotheby’s in New York this November, Art Newspaper reports. “Removing an artwork from the collection is never an easy thing for any museum to do, but it is an integral part of good collections management to continually build and refine our holdings,” Museum Director Robert A. Krets says. (more…)

Five pieces from the collection of filmmaker and architect François de Menil will join the Christie’s New York postwar and contemporary art evening sale in November, including a 1964 Mark Rothko painting that is estimated to sell for between $35 million and $45 million. (more…)

After many years of rumor and preparation, e-flux is opening Bar Laika, a restaurant and bar that will host readings, screenings and more alongside food by chef and artist Hsiao Chen.  The space will open for the first time with a screening by Anri Sala. (more…)