Steve McQueen is embarking on an ambitious project that will see him attempt to shoot all year 3 seven- and eight-year-olds in the UK for a show at Tate Britain. “We live in London and we all think we know London, but we don’t and to have a reflection of our immediate future is I think quite urgent,” he says. (more…)
Cy Twombly, Untitled (1967), via Levy Gorvy
If you follow Brett Gorvy on Instagram, it’s immediately apparent that the Lévy Gorvy partner is a master of narrative, spinning long, anecdotal tomes around the images and artworks that he posts in his feed. Gorvy’s vision and passion for art, and for the stories that surround each of the works that passes through his lens, is almost unparalleled anywhere in the art world, and his move in the past few years towards a gallery position should come as no surprise. Yet Gorvy has plenty more tricks up his sleeve, and his most recent venture, a curated exhibition at his gallery, showcases just how deep his care and skill towards his profession go. (more…)
Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Embedment) (2018), via Marianne Boesky
Marking the first show of the fall season at Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea exhibition space, artist Anthony Pearson returns to his long-running experimentations with hydrocal for a new selection of works. The artist’s work as a lingering, enigmatic engagement with this material functions as an explicit practice in deep intellectual and physical engagement with a few materials, exploring the behaviors, reactions, and open possibilities of his intentionally limited material vocabulary.
Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Embedment) (2018), via Marianne Boesky
Frieze Los Angeles, which will run February 14 through 17 at Paramount Pictures Studio in Hollywood, has announced its initial gallery list, with a heavy focus on blue-chip galleries that speaks to the impact it is looking to make on the West Coast. (more…)
The Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale has been reopened, with a restored interior that The National Gallery of Canada is hoping will improve the working conditions for its chosen artists. “I give always very much importance to the conservation, as much as possible, of the original design,” says designer Alberico Belgiojoso “Nature changes, while architecture stays at it is.” (more…)
A federal appeals court in New York has rejected a claim to a 1908 Matisse painting owned by the National Gallery in London by the grandchildren of the woman in the work. “The alleged taking of the painting was committed by a private actor” not “a sovereign”, the panel of judges said. “The National Gallery’s refusal to compensate appellants for that taking after the fact does not provide a basis for jurisdiction over a foreign sovereign and its instrumentality.” (more…)
Artist Dorothea Rockburne’s immense Soho loft is profiled in New York Magazine this week, where the artist has lived and worked since 1974. “It’s like my work,” she says. “It isn’t tarted up. My work is straightforward, and the answers are there because that’s the answer; there is no other answer. And that’s how this place is.” (more…)
The Menil Collection’s new Drawing Institute will be headed by chief curator Edouard Kopp, Art News reports. “I’m very passionate about the drawing medium and have been for the past 20 years,” Kopp says, “so to join an organization with such a stellar reputation as the Menil’s when they are devoting a new program to the study and celebration of modern and contemporary drawing in an amazing new building purposefully designed for that mission is very exciting.” (more…)
The Art News’s annual power list of the top 200 collectors is out for 2018, with Roman Abramovich once again topping the list. New additions include Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective and widow of Steve Jobs, and Elizabeth and Phillip Chun, founders of the art-filled resort Paradise City in Incheon, South Korea. (more…)
Christian Marclay sits down with The Guardian this week, as he prepares for the opening of The Clock at the Tate. “I’m always seeing clocks in films and thinking, ‘Damn, now that would have been great for The Clock!’” he jokes. (more…)
The Al-Thani family of Qatar is reportedly eyeing an exhibition space for its art in Paris, Art Market Monitor reports. Reports note that the family is in negotiations with a private developer representing the French state which has plans to re-develop L’hôtel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde. (more…)
The Tate has reportedly turned to Wikipedia to fill in gaps in artist biographies for works held in its collection, Art Newspaper reports. A Tate spokesperson said it is “working on a partnership with Wikipedia to ensure the biographies for artists in our collection are as accurate as possible.” (more…)
Greenspon Gallery has cancelled a show featuring the work of the alleged Ne0-Nazi Boyd Rice, following stark criticism from across the art world. “Given the issues this show and these artists raise, we will try to use this episode to consider the various meanings and histories of provocation and dissent in art. As contexts, boundaries and political realities continue to transform, so do the the codes of what can and cannot be accepted,” said gallerist Amy Greenspon. “I deeply regret my lack of oversight when I planned this exhibition, and I apologize to anyone the gallery may have offended when we sent out our email announcement.” (more…)
Giacometti (Installation view), via Art Observed
White, for Alberto Giacometti, is presented as something of an etheric form, the color of death or absence playing on is interrelation with temporal action. Space is generated only from the presence of space, and not from its reciprocal orientation. His practice is disposed towards the ideal void, where reality, untouched, is always waiting to be discovered. Giacometti’s opposition to easily read concepts of reality lies in his belief that merely representing figures alone, leaving behind the density and materiality of their surroundings and ignoring the distance between himself and the object of his perception, offered an incomplete picture of the truth. Giacometti’s eye was profoundly sensitive to different kinds of empty, negative space. He wanted to give form to space, opening his figure from within to its presence or surroundings. (more…)
Charline von Heyl, New Work (Installation View), via Art Observed
Few artists possess the sort of free-ranging, exploratory style and vocabulary that seems to mark the output of artist Charline von Heyl. The German-born painter’s work is relentlessly committed to the canvas as a space for both formal reinvention and ongoing investigation. Moving through a new selection of works this fall at Petzel Gallery, von Heyl returns to this mode, presenting a series of new compositions that marks her continued interest in texture and space as formative modes of the painter’s internal language. (more…)
Moritz Wesseler previously director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Germany will lead the Fridericianum museum in Kassel, Germany, Art News reports. “My goal is to offer a platform for key players in the realm of contemporary art still largely unknown in Germany,” he said in a statement to press. “In addition, I intend to strengthen the institution’s connection within the city and the local region.” (more…)
The Städel Museum in Frankfurt will publish a series of discussions with leading figures of the West German postwar art scene, looking to create a broader perspective on the era’s art scene. “By publishing both online and in print, we want to enable access for as many people as possible to this unique primary source, and we hope that both interested amateurs and expert readers will make rich discoveries,” says Franziska Leuthäußer, the leader of the project. (more…)
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac will host an installation by artist Tom Sachs during Frieze Week, Sachs’s studio issuing its own version of Swiss passports to anyone who is willing to pay €20. “With this project we break down the borders and eliminate the concept of nationality,” Sachs says. “This comes at a time where our liberal democracies are being threatened, and oppressed people all over the world live in danger and without refuge. Borders are artificial. They are artificially created by governments and the corporations who control them.” (more…)
Marguerite Humeau, Birth Canal (Installation View), via Adelaide Pacton for Art Observed
Marking a new chapter in a body of work that has long mined the strange juxtapositions of history, culture, form and space, artist Marguerite Humeau has touched down at the New Museum this month, opening a show of works that will remain on view throughout the fall season. The show, titled Birth Canal, presents a new body of digitally rendered sculptures realized in cast bronze and carved stone, each proposing its own unique vision of how to think through the understanding of the body and it relation to modernity. (more…)
The estate of Barney Ebsworth, the founder of Royal Cruise Lines, will go to Christie’s in the coming months, estimated at over $300 million, including Edward Hopper’s famed Chop Suey, which is estimated at $70 million. “This is the greatest collection of American modernism ever to come to market,” Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas.
Johannes Vogt Gallery will relocate to the Upper East Side, Art News reports. “If you told me five years ago that I’d be setting up shop on the Upper East Side, I’d have called you crazy,” Vogt said. “What I show is not as well-represented [on the Upper East Side], and that’s very exciting, to me. I can create a new framework for the work I’m showing.” (more…)
Dealer Mary Boone has plead guilty to filing false federal income tax returns, the New York Times reports. “This is the worst day of my life,” she says. “I have learned from my mistake and I am working very hard to put it behind me.” (more…)
Harold Ancart, Untitled (2018), via David Zwirner
Over the past few years, Belgian-born, New York-based painter Harold Ancart has remained one of the more unique voices in modern painting. The artist’s deceptively simple, ragged style of painting and his intuitive interpretations of natural phenomena and iconographies have seen his work move through a broad range of styles and iterations, including massive depictions of flames, icebergs and lush forests, always offset by a sense of spatially-sound minimalism. Captivating in their spare, exploratory style, the artist’s works are a fascinating look at the language of modern practice, and how historical touchstones can double back on themselves to create new structures and vocabularies. (more…)