Julia Turner will become the Arts Editor at the LA Times. “Los Angeles is where entertainment, culture and technology intersect in interesting and exciting ways,” says Times Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine. “Julia is a versatile and experienced editor who will work with our journalists to capture, criticize and have a conversation about everything from literature to emerging business models.” (more…)
Art Newspaper has a piece this week on Anni Albers, and her work in the field of textiles. “Painting is applied on to something,” she writes in one text. “Sculpture uses a given material… [Weaving] is closest to architecture because it is a building-up out of a single element, building a whole out of single elements.”
New York Magazine has a piece on dealer David Killen’s discovery of a series of unauthenticated works he attributes to Willem de Kooning works in a New Jersey storage locker, and his decision to auction them off himself after provenance issues scared auction houses off. “My hope,” Killen says, “is that serious people come to the exhibition, bring their expert with them, and let the expert whisper in their ear, ‘Yeah, they’re real.’ ” (more…)
Landscapes of the Mind: Masterpieces from Tate Britain (1700-1980), a show on view at the Shanghai Museum this year, attracted 615,000 visitors over its 14 week run, making it The Tate’s most popular ever. (more…)
Zhang Xiaogang at Pace, via Art Observed
Pace Gallery in New York is currently exhibiting a selection of new works by the renowned Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang, a body of works that sees him continuing to explore and interpret his unique painterly language. Mixing together domestic scenes and surrealist iconographies, then populating them with a mixture of shared cultural symbols and figures from his own childhood memories. Xiaogang’s work is a remarkable window into complex psychological states and cultural moorings. (more…)
Josep Maynou, Rugs (2018) Bombon _Projects
Located at the University of Westminster, the Sunday Art Fair is a decidedly mellow counterpoint to the expansive aisles and big-ticket sales of the proceedings at Regent’s Park. Capped at just 30 international galleries exhibiting solo projects or curated group presentations, the exhibition welcomes galleries dedicated to emerging artists, new concepts and new contexts for showing work. (more…)
A Banksy painting “self-destructed” following its sale at Sotheby’s in London this week, after being sold for over £1m. Following the final hammer, an alarm sounded, and the painting began shredding itself as it slid through its frame. “We have not experienced this situation in the past . . . where a painting spontaneously shredded, upon achieving a [near-]record for the artist. We are busily figuring out what this means in an auction context,” says Alex Branczik, senior director at Sotheby’s. (more…)
Calvin Marcus, Blue Devil (2018) at David Kordansky, all images by Diletta Fenicia and Quincy Childs for Art Observed
Opening its doors this week for its 16th edition, Frieze London 2018 has once again turned the art world’s collective eye towards the British capital for the next week, as sales and installations across its spacious halls make for a fitting center to one of the city’s busiest art events. With 160 galleries from around the globe showing at the Regent’s Park exhibition space, the rest of the world seems to have come along for the ride.
Daniel Arsham, Patch 5 (2018) at Perrotin
Antony Gormley, FRONT (2016) and Alvaro Barrington, A Straight Face (2018) at Thaddaeus Ropac
Jenny Saville, Propped (1992), via Sotheby’s
With the conclusion of the week in London, a trio of auctions have painted an unclear picture of the Post-War and Contemporary Market in Britain, as a series of sales at the major houses saw particularly mixed results over the past two evenings. With a number of high-profile works going unsold, and a somewhat unsteady level of interest among paintings as a running theme, the sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips saw several strong outings as well as a few notable disappointments, summarized below.
Jeff Koons, Cracked Egg (Blue) (1994-2006), via Christie’s (more…)
The Guggenheim has returned an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting Artillerymen (1915) to the heirs of one of previous owners, art dealer Alfred Flechtheim. The work was shown to have been taken from the family by the Nazis during the Holocaust. (more…)
Frieze London has awarded Blank Projects of Cape Town, South Africa its Focus Stand Prize, while Sprüth Magers took home the fair’s main Stand Prize, while artist Wong Pong was awarded the Camden Arts Centre Emerging Arts Prize. (more…)
The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder has returned to the walls of Spain’s Museo del Prado, following a lengthy restoration. “The work required a complete cleaning, which was particularly complex because of the thinness of the original layer of paint compared to the thickness of the retouches—a real crust,” says lead conservator Maria Antonia López de Asiain. (more…)
Real estate investor and developer Lawrence B. Benenson has donated Do Ho Suh’s 2003 installation The Perfect Home II to the Brooklyn Museum, Art News reports. The work re-creates the artist’s former apartment on West 23rd Street in Chelsea. “The work addresses loss and memory on several levels—the personal, the local, and the global—making it an ideal piece to initiate a range of fascinating conversations with our diverse audiences,” says Eugenie Tsai, the Brooklyn Museum’s senior curator of contemporary art. (more…)
Sotheby’s has unveiled its marquee works for its November Impressionist and Modern Sale in New York, works from a private European collection that totals $90 million, and features a trio of Wassily Kandinsky paintings with a combined low estimate of $55m. ““Infused with an intensity of color and expression, this collection of works provides a rare and exciting opportunity to acquire several exceptional examples of early-20th Century Art,” says Helena Newman, Head of Sotheby’s Worldwide Impressionist & Modern Art Department. (more…)
Collector Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas is seeking the termination of his loan of 700 drawings to the Serralves Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, following the censorship of a show of Robert Mapplethorpe works. (more…)
David Hockney is interviewed in the NYT this week, as the artist prepares to unveil a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and reflects on his decision not to paint the Queen. “I’m not sure how to paint her, you see, because she’s not an ordinary human being,” he says. (more…)
A Paris court has decreed that a Pissarro painting stolen from a French Jewish family during the German occupation must be returned to the family, The Guardian reports. The work, seized from a Jewish collector, Simon Bauer, in 1943 by the Vichy government, was currently in the collection of American collectors Bruce and Robbi Toll. (more…)
More than 140 artists and professionals from Documenta 14 have sent two letters to Greek officials yesterday, protesting over the murder of LGBTQI+ activist and drag performer Zak Kostopoulos, who was attacked during a performance and died from his injuries. “The public killing of Zak Kostopoulos bears strong resemblance to lynching,” the letters read. (more…)
A French research claims he has identified the sitter of Courbet’s Origin of the World, claiming withe near certainty that the painting is of Constance Quéniaux, a dancer at the Paris Opera. “My only contribution was to make this object a subject,” says historian Claude Schopp. “Now she’s something else besides flesh. I wanted to restore a person.” (more…)
Frieze London, via Art Observed
Frieze London returns to Regent’s Park this week, bringing with it its reputation for presenting the best of international contemporary art by emerging and established artists, and its signature program of dynamic commissions, talks and films, all unified under the fair’s bespoke tent design at the heart of the British capital. Opening Wednesday, the fair will offer a unique look at the state of the British art market, and that of the EU more broadly, while providing a platform for artists in Europe and abroad to explore and express new concepts and ideas in art practice. (more…)
The New Art Dealers Alliance has named the winners of this year’s NADA Miami International Gallery Prize: London’s Arcadia Missa and Tokyo’s Asakusa. “The International Gallery Prize was founded to provide galleries from outside the U.S. an opportunity to participate in a NADA fair—which often happens to be their first American fair—in a way that both minimizes the financial risk and encourages experimentation. It has been a great way for us to direct attention to the quality of programs from galleries around the world,” says Heather Hubbs, NADA’s executive director. (more…)
The Financial Times looks at recent curatorial and exhibition ventures by galleries, and asks if commercial spaces are leading the intellectual charge in the current art landscape. “The nature of collecting and connoisseurship in the 21st century, and in doing so,” Sean Kelly says, “to inspire a new generation of collectors and individuals committed to making a meaningful investment in our shared cultural future.” (more…)
New York’s Spring/Break Art Show will return for its eighth edition next year, running from March 6th – 11th, and centered around the theme “Fact and Fiction.” “We thought, ‘Well, since high stations of office are calling into question what most people would consider factual, maybe it’s a good time to explore how artists inhabit paradoxical spaces,’ ” says co-founder Andrew Gori. (more…)