Glenn O’Brien, via NYT
Glenn O’Brien, writer, editor, creative director and founder of the famed downtown public-access television show TV Party, has passed away at the age of 70. (more…)
An art gallery focused around the work of Andy Warhol is suing a pair of online dealers who the dealers claim sold them a pair of forged Warhol Shadows works. “Brian and Ana Walshe (the sellers) likely sold the authentic Warhols to a collector in South Korea and passed off the forgeries in the United States assuming that because the paintings are on different continents, the forgeries would not be detected,” the complaint states. (more…)
Grayson Perry is collaborating with the Apparata architecture firm in London to design a series of affordable housing for artists, complete with studios, in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. “By placing artists squarely within the community, the project aims to remove barriers to engagement, fostering inclusive and creative ways of using civic space,” says Create London, the commissioning organization on the project. (more…)
In a momentous decision, the Met will now show Native American art in the American wing of the museum, “to display art from the first Americans within its appropriate geographical context,” according to a museum statement. The decision comes as part of an agreement between the institution and collectors Charles and Valerie Diker, who stipulated the move as a condition of their donation of the collection to the museum. “We always felt that what we were collecting was American art,” says Mr. Diker. “And we always felt very strongly that it should be shown in that context.” (more…)
David Zwirner will return uptown this year, opening a project space at 34 East 69th Street. The gallery will share the space with an advisory firm, Adler Beatty. (more…)
Arnold Lehman, former director of the Brooklyn Museum, is featured in the New York Times this week, as he gives the paper a tour of his Brooklyn Heights apartment, and showcases his collection of works. “Do you think I got to talk a lot about contemporary art as a museum director? No,” he says. “I was speaking to politicians, raising money, bringing on new trustees, repairing roofs. Once in a while, I got to talk about art.” (more…)
David Wildenstein has sold his townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for $79 million, making it the most expensive townhouse ever sold in the borough. The former home of the Wildenstein Gallery was sold to an affiliate of HNA Holdings Group. (more…)
Klaus Biesenbach gives the New York Times a tour of his sparsely appointed Manhattan apartment this week, which features little decoration or adornment, save a single jacaranda tree seedling. “I think art should be public,” he says. “That’s why I work with institutions. I have it so much in my life that for me my home is a retreat.” (more…)
Damien Hirst sits down with the BBC this week to discuss his new exhibition in Venice, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, and the story behind the works. “For me the show is about belief, you can believe whatever your want to believe,” he says. “I’ve spent so much time on this that I believe it.” (more…)
Parker Ito is now represented by Team Gallery, Art News reports. The artist had worked independently for several years, showing work recently with Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles, but made the move to Team for his upcoming solo exhibition in New York. “It’s a strange thing to say, but I think that the work is truly visionary,” gallery owner José Freire says. (more…)
London’s National Portrait Gallery has acquired a Sir Thomas Lawrence canvas of the Duke of Wellington, following a £1.3 million fundraising campaign. “This arresting portrait must sit in the national collection and now, following an outpouring of generosity, it will do,” historian Dan Snow says. “The artist has captured the duke’s legendary demeanor. It is as special as a work of art as it is as a primary source.” (more…)
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is the subject of a lengthy profile in the Art Newspaper this week, profiling the work’s origins and the artist’s perspectives on the creation of the canvas. “Guernica, Picasso had taken on the grisaille of mourning and grief, and the peculiarly powerful tenor of Spanish religious ritual,” researcher Gijs van Hensbergen writes. (more…)
Cory Arcangel commemorates Tony Conrad with the launch of a website dedicated to Music and the Mind of the World, a long-running project Conrad took on that involved recording every encounter the artist had with a piano. Arcangel has since digitized and uploaded the artist’s recordings to a website where each recording can be browsed and explored. “Tony once said to me that ‘life is too rich to finish everything,'” Arcangel writes in Art News. For Tony, this was true. Like a smokestack burning off excess fuel—Tony’s former students used to say he had “genius to burn”—he had an army of ideas, some finished, some in progress, some new, some old, all ready to go, on and on, seemingly never ending. (more…)
Las Vegas is inching towards the construction of a major art museum, with space targeted downtown in the city’s Symphony Park, and financial commitments of up to $2 million. The project has long been talked about in the city, with previous attempts failing to reach fruition. (more…)
The Documenta 14 artist list has been published this week on the exhibition website, charting the participating artists in both Kassel and Athens. The exhibition opens this week in Athens, with the Kassel edition set to open its doors in June. (more…)
Tunisia is setting up its a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale next month, the first time since 1958, where it will issue “travel documents” to visitors, turning each holder into an “immigrant” of sorts. “The Tunisian pavilion is forgoing the cloak of nationalism in favor of a more global and humanistic narrative. What is fascinating is that this is the only place and time where people can move freely from nation to nation,” says Lina Lazaar, who curated the project. (more…)
Egypt has begun pushing to continue construction and renovation projects on a number of national museums and institutions, but funding remains challenging, the Art Newspaper reports. “The challenge is to find funding,” says Mahrous Said, director of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. “When we have the funds, we will finish our permanent exhibition within two or three years.” (more…)
U.S. federal court will allow a lawsuit proceed against Germany over a a group of Nazi-looted art works, Reuters reports. “This is a dispute that was already resolved on the merits in Germany, and it doesn’t belong in a U.S. court,” Germany’s attorney, Jonathan Freiman, argued in response. (more…)
Riga, Latvia will get its first contemporary art biennial next year, the Art Newspaper reports, with curator Katerina Gregos helming the artist selection. Gregos previously organized the Belgian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. “We have selected a curator who is attuned to the debates around the proliferation of biennial culture, and counteracts this by shaping a model that will take the interests of artists and artistic production as the first priority,” says biennial founder Agniya Mirgorodskaya. (more…)
Hauser & Wirth has announced its representation of artist Lorna Simpson, who leaves Salon 94 to join the gallery. “We are honored and delighted to welcome Lorna Simpson into the gallery’s family,” Hauser & Wirth partner Marc Payot said in a statement. “Her rigor, her passion, and her incredible sensitivity produce not only extraordinary art but also an invitation to engage in a dialogue about identity that we are eager to share.” (more…)
A €700,000 Rodin sculpture has been discovered in a furniture storage unit in Biarritz. The piece, a preparatory work for the artist’s work I am beautiful has caught local auction houses and dealers by surprise. “This is a moment that will remain engraved in my memory and career,” says Patrice Carrère, the auctioneer and head of the Gestas & Carrère auction house, who make the discovery. “My first thought was: ‘No it is not true, it is not possible! The plaster has traces of the master’s fingerprints and nails.” (more…)
Adam Szymczyk, curator for the soon to open Documenta 14, is interviewed in Artforum this month, as he reviews his work for the exhibition, and his views on the current state of world politics and art, framed through the exhibition’s location in Athens. “The other day I was talking to someone about their first visit to Athens, and they said, ‘What amazed me most was the way the ruins of the Parthenon are actually right in the middle of this huge city, that they’re not on the outskirts—the city’s built around this ruin and this rock.'” he says. “It’s a massive fragment, a completely broken thing that constitutes a sort of symbolic beginning, on the rock of the Acropolis, around which the city sprawls.” (more…)
Jack Whitten, Black Monolith X, Birth of Muhammad Ali (2016), images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
Artist Jack Whitten has opened an exhibition of new work in New York this spring at Hauser & Wirth, his first show with the gallery since joining its roster last year. Presenting pieces from the last two years of practice, Whitten’s work, on view at the gallery’s temporary 22nd Street location, continues his exploration of the canvas as a site for engagement with the material consistency and visual expressivity of paint in a manner that often eludes easy classification as abstraction or minimalist technique.
The Centre Pompidou has been shuttered for the past several days, following a walk-out by guards in protest over law changes in France that bill them as civil service employees. “Due to a strike against the implementation of a law aiming to reform the recruitment process of employees, we regret to inform you that the Centre Pompidou will not be open to the public today,” the museum said in a statement on Saturday. (more…)