Former Art Basel fair head Magnus Renfrew is launching a new art fair, Taipei Dangdai, set to coincide with next year’s Taipei Biennial. “With Hong Kong, I was proud to be involved in organizing a fair that asserts itself as a global fair for the region and will remain so,” Renfrew says. “There is a big gap between Art Basel Hong Kong and other fairs in the region, in terms of quality and how they are progressing. It’s necessary to have other fairs that have real quality and don’t necessarily aspire to be the global fair for the region.”  (more…)

Artist Anthea Hamilton is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as the artist prepares a work for the Tate Britain’s Duveen Commission. “Well, I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about the work yet, I’d have to check,” she says drily. “But no, it’s not intimidating. The architecture is obviously very powerful but if you take that as a given, it’s not an issue.” (more…)

Paul Allen will be selling a $35 million Willem de Kooning painting at Art Basel Hong Kong through Lévy Gorvy, Bloomberg reports. “This sale is part of normal course of business for a collector like Paul,” said Alexa Rudin, a spokeswoman at Allen’s Vulcan Inc. (more…)

Tracey Emin has a new installation project in Sydney, installing small works around a section of the city. “I’m being gentle,” she says. “I’m not being domineering, I’m not being macho. I’m not using ego. I’m literally integrating within what’s already here. I really do think that there are a lot of public art projects that are just so ego-based, that take over everything.” (more…)

Amy Sherald, the portrait artist behind the acclaimed Michelle Obama official portrait, is now represented by Hauser & Wirth. “I have never seen portraits painted like this,” Marc Payot, a partner and vice president of Hauser & Wirth, says. “I believe the singularity of Amy’s approach is in itself a major achievement.” (more…)

The Cooper Union will return to free-tuition scholarships for all students over the course of the next ten years, Art News reports. “The return to full-tuition scholarships must be aligned with a sufficient endowment and reserve to weather the financial challenges of ever-rising costs, volatile markets, and economic uncertainty. This plan is designed to accomplish that,” the school said in its announcement of a schedule to return to its storied tuition program. (more…)

Helen Legg will take a position as the new head of the Tate Liverpool, Art News reports. “As the gallery enters its fourth decade, Helen will lead the institution into a new era,” says Maria Balshaw, the director of Tate. “Her impressive track record at Spike Island and at Ikon mean she brings a wealth of expertise to the role. Her curatorial achievements and her experience of developing crucial networks and partnerships will help us attract the audiences of the future to Tate Liverpool.” (more…)

Marina Pinsky, Trigger Trace 1 (2018), via 303

The Russian-born artist Marina Pinsky’s work is political in the most expansive sense of the word. Delving into intersections of spatial, material and ideological models of the world and its inhabitants, her pieces examine personal relationships, contractual agreements and concrete localities as part of an ongoing continuum, working at specific narratives and sites in a mode of process that seems as inspired by social research strategies as they are by the writings of Foucault. Delving into both sculptural and photographic practices, her works seem to both model and reconstruct environments and situations while also actively documenting them in real-time. In her most recent show at 303 in New York, the city’s origins become her focus. (more…)

The Broad Museum in Los Angeles has acquired a new Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirror Room, its second from the Japanese artist. The museum announced the acquisition, as well as purchases of a Mark Bradford mural and a series of pieces by Sherrie Levine.  (more…)

Ai Weiwei is in the Art Newspaper this week, as the artist opens a massive sculpture depicting refugees in a long canoe at the Sydney Biennial.  The show continues his advocacy and interest in the current humanitarian crises regarding immigration. (more…)

The Giacometti Institute will open in Paris this June, The Guardian reports, bringing a number of rarely seen works by the artist to exhibition, alongside a replica of his studio. “He was not interested at all in money, in glory. But I think he would have liked to see his work acknowledged,” says Catherine Grenier, the institute’s director. “He would find it very amusing. In his time the dominant strand was abstraction and [his art] was considered outside the trend. Nowadays he’s one of the most respected and the most important … of all his generation. He would be happy with this.”  (more…)

The Condo gallery exchange project has announced its first edition in Sao Paolo, featuring 8 galleries including Carlos/Ishikawa and Simon Preston.  The event will open April 7th in the Brazilian city.

Anna Harding, the chief executive of Space studios in London, has called for London to defend against the city’s skyrocketing rents, less it lose its position of prominence as a hub for the art world.  “Lack of affordable living and working space for low-waged people in London is forcing many to reconsider their future in the capital,” she says. “Increasing rents underpin the story of artists living and working in London, and the challenges of affording a studio and making work have worsened considerably.” (more…)

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon has removed a video by Adel Abdessemed depicting a string of chickens set on fire, after vocal outrage by activists. The response is the second time in a year that protests have resulted in the removal of work from a major museum, after the Guggenheim pulled works last year from a show on Contemporary Chinese Art.  (more…)

Barnaby Furnas, The Wrangler (2018), via Art Observed

Barnaby Furnas returns to Marianne Boesky Gallery this month, opening his seventh exhibition with the gallery with an act of both reflective meditation and an unflinching eye on the present.  Bearing the title Frontier Ballads, Furnas’s work is a sort of inverted nostalgia, recalling the golden age of the American West, and the political analogs of this era that seem to echo forth in the current wave of populist politics in the United States.     (more…)

A forgery case against a pair of art dealers has resulted in convictions for trafficking in forged Russian avant-garde works, but fell short of prosecutors’ goals after a divorce between art historians left courts unable to determine the authenticity of many works in question. “As someone who has studied these artists for over 50 years, [it] took me seconds to realize that these works were obviously fakes,” says Andrei Nakov, a Paris-based art historian. (more…)

Vogue profiles artist Camille Henrot’s recent ventures into fashion with a series of clothes and scarves she designed for the Swiss Institute booth at Independent NY last week.  “What was so special and fascinating about working on scarves was that I was thinking of the drawings as seen from multiple dimensions on the body—wrapping around a person but also folding onto itself—and how the wearer would make the drawing evolve,” she says. (more…)

Julian Schnabel is interviewed in the New York Times this week, as he prepares a show at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, and reflects on his shared view of painting and surfing. “It’s like paddling out in big surf. There’s a wall there, and you are a certain size and the sea is a certain size and these paintings are a certain size,” he says. “It happens so quickly you just want to relive that and be in that sensation again. Painting for me is like that. The joy of just doing it and being lost in the experience of that is compelling to me.” (more…)

A group of Münster residents are working to raise €1.2 million to buy artist Nicole Eisenman’s Sketch for a Fountain, which was installed this summer for the city’s Sculpture Projects Münster. “The work is a very political statement and we want to make a stand for tolerance and respect,” artist Sylvia Silbernagel says of the work. “We are trying to win over local businesses as ambassadors.” (more…)

Guards at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. are complaining of a hostile work environment, including confrontational management and chronic understaffing. “They treat us like we’re bad people,” says one guard, Albertus-Hugo Van den Bogaard, a 65-year-old Army veteran. “People are intimidated. They will not make much noise.”  (more…)

Yinka Shonibare, Wind Sculpture (2018), via Art Observed

With the weather turning slowly towards the gentle breezes and sunshine of spring in New York, a new sculpture by Yinka Shonibare has sprung up on the corner of 5th Ave and 57th, the southeastern corner of Central Park and long-running home to the Public Art Fund’s ongoing commission project.  The piece is a particularly resonant one for the current juncture, mixing bright colors and a fluid, windswept form that carries deeper political subtexts and histories of capitalist exploitation of the African continent.  (more…)

MOCA’s Philippe Vergne has fired his chief curator Helen Molesworth, an almost unprecedented move among large museums the signals a major shake-up at the institution that has many wondering about internal turbulence at the organization. “I think you have made a terrible mistake” artist Catherine Opie reportedly told Vergne upon hearing of the decision. (more…)

Darren Bader, more or less (Installation View), via Alex Kitching for Art Observed

For his most recent exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, artist Darren Bader continues his challenging and nuanced investigation around the concept of presentation, authorship and context, delving deep into the ready-made as a site for both critical examination and spiritual re-enervation. (more…)

Damien Hirst is profiled in the New York Times this week, as the artist looks back on his show in Venice. “I won’t be rushing to do something like that again,” he says. (more…)