Bloomberg does a bit of digging against the claim that the Da Vinci Salvator Mundi portrait was the last of the artist’s works in private hands, finding several corroborating reports that two smaller works remain held privately. “They are both in private hands,” says Martin Kemp, a da Vinci scholar and emeritus research professor of art history at Oxford University in the U.K. “I know both owners.” (more…)

Facing harsh criticism, Düsseldorf Mayor Thomas Geisel has backtracked on the cancellation of a show at city’s Stadtmuseum about Max Stern, a Jewish art gallery owner who fled Nazi Germany in 1938.  “It was never my intention to sweep the life and career of Max Stern under the carpet,” Mr. Geisel says. (more…)

Artist Mark Bradford will open Hauser & Wirth’s new gallery space in Hong Kong, the Art Newspaper reports. “Venice created an entirely new and huge wave of interest for one of the most relevant artists of our time, not only from mainland China and Hong Kong but also wider Asia, including Indonesia, Taiwan and Japan,” gallery president Iwan Wirth says.  (more…)

The Broad is opening a massive retrospective of the work of Jasper Johns, the first in the U.S. in 20 years, LA Times reports. “We already know that there’s strong buzz for this show,” director Joanne Heyler said. “And it’ll only get stronger as we get closer, as the exhibition approaches. It’s extremely rare to bring a full survey of this artist’s work — so rare that it hasn’t happened in over 50 years in Southern California.” (more…)

Vanity Fair has a piece this week on how institutions in Southern California are planning and adapting to the increasingly frequent wildfires in the hills of the region. “After this, what else is there to burn? It’s demoralizing. I’ve had it with the fires,” says collector Jim Lichtman. (more…)

The Cultural Development Fund of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs has received over $40 million in funds this year, including funding for Mayor DeBlasio’s CreateNYC plan. “Together with our partners in City Council, we’re taking steps to ensure New Yorkers in every corner of the city are able to participate in our unrivaled cultural life,” the Mayor said. “CreateNYC gave New Yorkers the opportunity to speak up and be heard, and now we’re building on our long history of supporting the arts while directing new funding to communities where it can do the most good.” (more…)

Katharina Fritsch, Skull (2017), via Art Observed

Compiling a range of new works from the artist’s enigmatic sculptural practice, Matthew Marks Gallery has brought a show by Katharina Fritsch to Chelsea, the artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York since 2008. The show, which continues the German artist’s practice in a ground-level engagement with both the forms and images of our everyday lives, as well as the mythologies that animate our daily relationships and cognitive practices, consists of a small series of new sculptures, spread throughout the gallery’s three rooms.  (more…)

Arshile Gorky, Painting (1947-1948), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

Hauser & Wirth’s first exhibition for Arshile Gorky, the seminal Armenian-American painter of Abstract Expressionism, focuses on a four-year period in his life, beginning with his stay at Crooked Run Farm in Virginia, and concluding around the time of a series of unfortunate events in 1947, a year prior to his passing. Already an established artist as a key figure in non-figurative painting during the mid 1940’s, Gorky retreated to his wife’s parents’ farm in search of creative stimuli that would augment his interest in fluid nonlinear forms and subliminal themes. His isolation from the New York art scene—a network the artist always chose to remain distant from while his peers Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning dominated the social circle—ultimately manifested itself in contemplative and personal narratives and natural colors. (more…)

The annual Condo gallery exchange project has announced the lineup for its next iteration in London, with Société, Misako & Rosen and 25 other galleries from around the globe coming to the British capital.   (more…)

The heirs of investment banker Kurt Grawi, are demanding the city of Düsseldorf hand over a 1913 painting of foxes by Franz Marc that they claim was taken from Grawi as Nazi loot. “My husband’s family had to sell everything of value in Nazi Germany in order to pay for the discriminatory and confiscatory charges on Jews and for the costs of their emigration,” says Ingeburg Breit, Grawi’s Hamburg-based daughter-in-law. “That is how the painting was lost.” (more…)

Artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto has been hired to redesign the lobby and interior entrance of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.  “The lobby was always thought of as a light box by [original designer Gordon] Bunshaft,” says Museum director Melissa Chiu. “We gave Sugimoto the opportunity to think of the Hirshhorn not just as a museum space but also as a public space.” (more…)

Richard Prince, Untitled (#109) (2016-2017) all images Copyright Richard Prince Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Richard Prince returns to Gladstone Gallery after a prolonged absence with his new body of work, Ripple Paintings, a series of large scale inkjet prints that riffs on the painted medium with both its title and process. An avid collector of vintage Playboy imagery, Prince uses Whitney Darrow Jr. watercolor drawings published by the magazine between 1967 and 1970 to create his swirling collages. Pages from different issues he acquired on eBay provides Prince new surfaces to paint onto, while the caricatures’ sexist and vulgar language gets blanketed by watercolor paint in bright hues and fluid forms. Placing pages he torn out of various issues flat onto floor, Prince loosely pours watercolor paint and lets the liquid meander on each page. After an overnight drying process, each work gives a unique and uninterrupted silhouette of paint with traces of the cartoon behind. (more…)

W Magazine has an interview with designer Miuccia Prada this week about her recent collaboration in Miami with Carsten Höller, and her passion for collecting.  “It’s difficult to summarize a life interest in a few words, but, of course, art has been part of the search and truth in my life,” she says. (more…)

The NYT spotlights a new exhibition project in Antwerp, a disused brewery taken over by dealer and designer Axel Vervoodt. “It’s about creating the best place for art,” he says. “I fell in love with the distillery building. Industrial architecture is real, and it just wants to be useful. It’s very spiritual, intimate and religious, but I don’t know what religion.” (more…)

San Francisco has announced the shortlist for a series of installation commissions on Treasure Island, with Ai Weiwei, Antony Gormley and Hiroshi Sugimoto among those being considered. (more…)

Beth Rudin DeWoody gives the New York Times a tour of her new project, The Bunker Artspace, which has made its home in West Palm Beach. “I’m just a hopeless and perpetual collector and I know I’ve overdone it,” DeWoody says, “but it’s just very hard for me to say no.” (more…)

Damien Hirst is featured in a lengthy profile this week in The Times of London, as he looks back at his exhibition in Venice this year, and its reception. “I only ever did one show where I got slagged off and I agreed with it and felt terrible,” he says. “I think you’ve got to be in a strong position to deal with the barrage of negative press.” (more…)

Michael Krebber is featured in the latest installment of a Bloomberg series spotlighting young artists with strong market potential this week. “I find the group of collectors who buy his work are incredibly devoted,” says adviser Eleanor Cayre. “This group only seems to be getting larger and larger, particularly now as we’re seeing many museums and institutions joining the fray.” (more…)

The Tate Modern is embracing works dealing with forced migration and sexual brutality in its new Tanks space, unveiling a pair of works by Emeka Ogboh and Amar Kanwar. “You also want your art shown properly and Tate can do that,” Ogboh says of his monumental piece. (more…)

Ellen Gallagher, Whale Falls (2017) © Ellen Gallagher, Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth

Accidental Records, now showing at Hauser & Wirth LA, is Ellen Gallagher’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The collection of paintings, drawings and collage on view includes both new and recent works, which tread familiar conceptual territory while expanding upon themes from her rich and evolving oeuvre. The show’s title reflects the breadth of referential material that substantiates Gallagher’s work—from the literary to the musical, the psycho-theoretical to the culinary. In this erudite exploration of the Middle Passage—the deadly intercontinental journeys of slave ships—Gallagher excavates the depths of black history as well as the oceanic context in which so many slaves died. Known for her minimalist, pop-inflected collages that meditate on the African American body in history and culture, Gallagher focuses her lens upon the Black Atlantic.

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The shortlist for the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize has been announced, including Bouchra Khalili, Simone Leigh, Teresa Margolles, Emeka Ogboh, Frances Stark, and Wu Tsang among its list of nominees. “The Hugo Boss Prize remains a cornerstone of the Guggenheim’s contemporary programming, and we are thrilled to highlight the work of these six deserving artists, who are working at the vanguard of contemporary art practice, exploring urgent social issues, and providing new artistic vocabulary through which to examine personal and universal themes,” says Guggenheim artistic director Nancy Spector. “We are pleased to join with Hugo Boss in this long-term commitment to celebrating the most important and impactful artists of their time.” (more…)

A recent survey by the Art Newspaper has found that sales by women artists at auction tend to make 47.6% less than those by men. “Male buyers are a driving force of the auction market and yet we see that they are also more likely to think that women’s art is inferior,” says researcher Roman Kräussl. “Our research adds to the mounting evidence of discrimination towards women that is systemic in so many industries.” (more…)

Canada has selected Inuit video-production team Isuma to represent the country for the 2019 Venice Biennale. “Since the mid-1990s the Isuma collective has been challenging stereotypes about ways of life in the North and breaking boundaries in video art, including the first video-based work to win a major film award at the prestigious Cannes film festival,” says Marc Mayer, director of the National Gallery of Canada. (more…)

Dean Levin, Arches (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Returning to Marianne Boesky for his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Dean Levin has brought together a more ambitious and, paradoxically, more understated body of work than in his prior Boesky show, A Long, Narrow Mark. Through the series of sculptural installations and series of paintings assembled here, Arches takes Levin’s architectural interests and focuses them on the curved construct of an arch. (more…)