The Versailles Palace art exhibitions are shifting focus this summer, following the controversy over Anish Kapoor’s work in 2015. The organization will now embark on a group show approach opening this fall, and curated by Alfred Pacquement, former director at Paris’s Musee d’Art Moderne. (more…)
Gabriel Orozco, installation view, Kurimanzutto, 2017, via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
Gabriel Orozco’s new solo presentation takes place in Galeria Kurimanzutto, in San Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico DF. The show, which opened last month in conjunction with Zona Maco 2017, sees Orozco exploring a unique two-part exhibition that draws attention to Mexico’s core contemporary culture embedded in the everyday: its Oxxo tiendas, with their cheap consumer goods massively distributed across the country. These retail stores satisfy the daily needs of millions of Mexicans with sodas, snacks, cigarettes, toilet paper, shampoo, condoms, etc… Over the past 40 years, the Oxxo chain, subsidiary of the multinational multi-billion dollar company Femsa, has expanded to over 14,000 locations.
Gabriel Orozco, installation view, Kurimanzutto, 2017, via Art Observed
Francis Picabia, The Adoration of the Calf (1941-42), via Art Observed
Taking on the endlessly inventive and ever-shifting formal abilities of artist Francis Picabia, MoMA’s current survey dedicated to the painter (and the first of its kind in the United States) has earned almost ceaseless praise, diving deep into the fluid and challenging series paintings, poems, published works, performances and films of one of French surrealisms landmark voices. Spread across the gallery’s sixth floor exhibition space, Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction (which closes at the end of the week), serves as both a striking introduction and an impressively deep elaboration on the artist’s body of work. (more…)
Theaster Gates is profiled in the New York Times this week, as the artist opens an exhibition of work at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. “It’s a super-interesting moment to be at the National Gallery, where the question of what it means to be an American, and what kind of American are you, has a new kind of resonance,” he says. (more…)
A.I. Friedman, an 80-year-old art supply store on West 18th Street is the next shop in a wave of art supply stores to go under in the current market situation, as increasingly high numbers of sales move to large retailers like Blick or online sellers like Amazon, and demand also seems to dwindle. “The average freshman art student at Parsons and Pratt is buying less than they used to,” says Blick CEO Bob Buchsbaum. (more…)
A group of protestors dumped 88 pounds of animal dung on the steps outside of the Palazzo Grassi this week, protesting Damien Hirst’s use of animals in his works. “It’s an insult to a city of art, of real art,” the group 100% Animalisti wrote in a statement. (more…)
The Musée Rodin in Paris will put a never-before exhibited work by the artist on view as part of an exhibition by Anselm Kiefer at the institution. The work, Absolution, features a series of plaster sculptures with a cloth draped over the top. “I think it will be a surprise to most visitors as few people know about the piece. It hasn’t been published or exhibited before,” says Christine Lancestremère, head of collections at the museum. (more…)
A new Zaha Hadid-designed luxury condo complex in Chelsea has set aside space to accommodate 15 galleries within its structure, with Paul Kasmin Gallery signing up as one of the first to take up space within the structure. “It is a completely new-to-market concept that [will] allow domestic and international galleries to showcase their collections while we take care of all of the mundane details,” says Greg Gushee, the executive vice president of Related property company. (more…)
Sotheby’s has opened a new gallery and office in Dubai, Artforum reports. “As our company evolves to meet the needs of every aspect of the art and luxury market globally, we’ve seen particular traction with our Middle Eastern clients,” says Edward Gibbs, Sotheby’s chairman for the Middle East. “Our Dubai office enhances our ability to serve our fast-growing community of clients across the region and is geared to broadening the scope of what we offer to a whole new audience.” (more…)
Artist Ai Weiwei is set to unveil his newest installation piece in Prague, a massive lifeboat complete with passengers meant to illustrate the actual risks and human toll of modern humanitarian crises. “There’s no refugee crisis, but only human crisis,” Ai said. “In dealing with refugees we’ve lost our very basic values.” (more…)
Raymond Pettibon, A Pen of All Work (Installation View), via Art Observed
Over the past 50 years, few artists have produced a body of work as expansive, multivalent, and formally diverse as Raymond Pettibon, the longtime illustrator whose early work for the Los Angeles punk band Black Flag set the stage for his later career delving into the often elusive, twisting histories of American culture. Ranging from literary rumination on baseball, surfing and poetry through to comical interpretations of the dark history of the American counterculture, Pettibon’s endlessly evolving body of work, often executed in pen and ink, twists and turns varied histories into an endlessly flowing stream of images, one that often functions as an alternative to the prolific mass media systems of modern American culture. This restless approach to his craft is on view this spring at the New Museum, where his first major retrospective, A Pen of All Work, has brought hundreds of the artist’s works to bear on the walls of the institution. (more…)
The New York Times reports on comments by Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedelijk Museum, noting that the time may have come for museums to focus on more sustainable modes of growth and operation. “We always want as many people to see our exhibitions as possible,” she says, “but when we think specifically in terms of ticket buyers, that might have an impact on the decisions we make about quality.” (more…)
Pier Paolo Calzolari, Untitled (2014-2015), via Art Observed
Taking over both of Marianne Boesky’s exhibition spaces on West 24th Street in Chelsea, Italian artist Pier Paolo Calzolari is currently showing a wide range of works exploring his specific interpretation of the Arte Povera movement, and his engagement with a broad range of materials that lend each of his works a notable sense of diffusive agency, allowing his chosen materials to function as both subject and object.
Pier Paolo Calzolari, Untitled (Scarpetta) (1994), via Art Observed
B. Wurtz, Bunch #4 (1996), via Lulu Gallery
Opening in conjunction with the broad range of events and projects around the Zona Maco art fair this past week in Mexico City, the Cuauhtemoc-based gallery Lulu has welcomed New York-based artist B. Wurtz to present a body of new works, continuing the artist’s enigmatic engagement with the materiality of the everyday. The exhibition will remain on view through the middle of April.
B. Wurtz (Installation View), via Lulu Gallery
Terence Koh, Sleeping in a beam of sunlight (Installation View), via Art Observed
When Terence Koh announced his sudden return from Upstate New York for a show in Manhattan last year, few could anticipate the artist’s intricate clusters of collaged material, soundscapes, and of course, his Bee Chapel, an immense hive installed inside a wax structure viewers could sit inside and listen to the insects buzzing drones. So when the artist announced a second show in Los Angeles, and took up residency inside the rooms of Moran Bondaroff, one expected something of a second shock inside the sun-filled gallery space.
The estate of the photographer Jean-François Bauret has won its case in a French court against Jeff Koons, alleging that the artist plagiarized one of the Bauret’s photos for his sculpture Naked. Koons must pay $46,500 in fees and damages to Bauret’s estate. (more…)
A Turkish painter and journalist has been sentenced to two years in prison for painting the destruction caused by Turkish security forces in the Nusaybin district of the city of Mardin. Zehra DoÄŸan was covering the region for Kurdish news agency JINHA, and the Turkish government used the work to claim her connection to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which it labels a terrorist organization. “I was given two years and ten months only because I painted Turkish flags on destroyed buildings. However, they caused this. I only painted it,” she said. (more…)
Attendants at the Louvre have made good on their threats to strike, protesting poor management of the recently opened Vermeer show and the chaotic crowds that ensued. “It’s been a big mess,” says Françoise Pinson, the secretary general of a museum workers union. “The signage wasn’t good; the planning wasn’t good.” (more…)
Art advisor Lisa Jacobs has been ordered to repay $1 million she made off the sale of a Jean-Michel Basquiat work after a court set her fee at $50,000. “It was a textbook private art deal,” says Carter Reich of Nicholas Goodman & Associates, but nevertheless “puts private dealers and art advisers on notice to be careful.” (more…)
Private sales continued to grow against auction sales for the secondary market, the newly published TEFAF market report has shown. “Buyers and sellers alike are seeking privacy and opacity in their transactions,” says head researcher Rachel Pownall. (more…)
Recent research into cave paintings in southwest France has uncovered approaches to figuration similar to the late 19th Century technique of pointillism. “Imagine the first time a human convinced someone else that a line, or a group of lines is an animal,” says Randall White, an anthropologist at New York University, who led the research. “Today we live in an extremely visual culture, and we digest and interpret, on the run, a million different kinds of illusions that we take to be reality.” (more…)
The Mosse Art Research Initiative, a new project by the Freie Universität Berlin in partnership with German museums, university researchers and the descendants of publisher Rudolf Mosse, has been founded to aid in the research and return of Nazi-looted artworks in Germany and abroad. The group will coordinate among parties to facilitate locating and securing works, continuing efforts by the Mosse family to aid in broader restitution projects. (more…)
