Dealer Kavi Gupta gives Architectural Digest a tour of his Chicago home, and his impressive art collection this month. “The design is very much in service to the art,” says his wife, Jessica Moss. (more…)
According to initial estimates, six million people visited Christo and Jean-Claude’s Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped during its run this fall. “It was a crazy dream and you have accomplished it, Vladimir [Javacheff, the late artists’ nephew]. We give you infinite thanks,” said President Emmanuel Macron. (more…)
With the announcement that the United States will reopen to international visitors, the NYT looks at the needs of cultural institutions, and the hope that the return of international visitors will help bolster budget shortfalls at a number of venues, galleries and museums. “We’re waiting with arms open,” says Victoria Bailey, the executive director of the Theater Development Fund. (more…)
Arts non-profit Anonymous Was a Woman has announced its largest series of awards recipients this year, providing funding to 14 women in a variety of creative fields. “It is an unexpected honor to finally receive recognition for my work as a painter and sculptor,” says recipient Suzanne Jackson. “I have known about the Anonymous Was A Woman award for years, though I never thought that I would be a recipient. I plan to use the award funds to continue my work exploring new aspects of integrating drawing, painting, and sculptured forms as related to various American relationships to our natural and urban environments.” (more…)
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.237, Hanging Six-Lobed, Interlocking Continuous Form), c. 1958, Private Collection © 2021 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
Marking an ambitious exploration of the life and work of artist Ruth Asawa, David Zwirner in New York is currently presenting All Is Possible, an expansive exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth that situates the artist’s iconic looped- and tied-wire sculptures in the context of her extraordinary drawings and her lesser-known sculptural forms. Presenting viewers with one of the most comprehensive looks at this artist’s work to date, the show larger context illuminates an artist in pursuit of form as a means to reshape the act of seeing, and the role of art in daily life.
The Vatican will open a new contemporary art space in the papal library. “Our challenge is to strengthen the cultural role of the Vatican in the contemporary world,” says Vatican’s librarian Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça. (more…)
Amy Lincoln at Sperone Westwater, via Art Observed
As the art world gradually returns to the pace and flow of the days before the chaos of the Covid-19 outbreak, the ADAA Art Show returns to New York for another iteration of its curation-first focus and studied, engaged relationships between exhibitors and artists. This year, liberated from the usual hustle and bustle of the weeks around the Armory Show, the fair offered an even stronger draw, welcoming a casual, meandering pace, with its gentle lighting and wide aisles, making for a more relaxed and exploratory atmosphere.The result, as last year, was a packed few days of the fair, as scores of New York collectors, dealers and art lovers came out in force.
The Vancouver Art Gallery has received a $100 million gift from the Audain Foundation in support of a new building in downtown Vancouver. “The new Vancouver Art Gallery — from its conception and design — will reflect a Coast Salish worldview,” says Vancouver Art Gallery Elder-in-residence and art and design consultant Skwetsimeltxw Willard ‘Buddy’ Joseph.
Mark Rothko, Untitled (1968), via Pace
Marking the first exhibition at its new London gallery, Pace has brought out a striking body of works by Mark Rothko, focusing in particular on the artist’s output during the final years of his life, specifically smaller works on paper that have rarely been seen in public, and which will serve as the first dedicated to the artist’s paper-based practice (more…)
A piece in the Art Newspaper notes that in the growing field of NFT art, women make up only 16% of the market. (more…)
The Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam will soon open The Depot, a large-scale archive and storage site for the museum that will put its full collection on view to the public. “You’ll go through the collection like you would visit a library looking for a book and finding three others,” said Sjarel Ex, the museum’s joint director. “We also decided to take private collectors, to give private collectors opportunities to work with us in the same building. So you see when you go around and you see the floors, you will meet with several collections that enjoy a collaboration with the museum.” (more…)
Alicia Keys and her husband, producer Swizz Beatz, give a tour of their La Jolla, California mansion, and their extensive art collection to Architectural Digest. “The interiors don’t in any way shout; they’re simple and timeless,” says interior designer Kelly Behun. “It was never going to be about trying to upstage the natural surroundings, the architecture, or the art.” (more…)
An official at the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg broke the nose of a visitor this weekend after the guest tried to enter the museum through an exit. “The employee who committed the offense fully admits his guilt and is sorry for his excessively emotional actions,” a statement reads. “He explains it by the general state of nervousness connected to the pandemic and its influence on life, including the museum’s new regime of work.” (more…)
Sarah Sze, Crisscross (2021), via Victoria Miro
Sarah Sze brings a new body of works to Victoria Miro in London this week, continuing her meticulous and studied treatment of the painted canvas across a selection of densely layered new works. The show, which opened this past month, brings an expanded sense of Sze’s work as a painter, and an elaboration of her already well-documented interest in intense visual fields, using her concept of the image in constant generation, evolution and degradation as a centerpiece of this show. (more…)
As world leaders meet in Glasgow for the UN Climate Change Conference, Jenny Holzer is projecting the words of activist Greta Thunberg onto the walls of the Tate Modern in London. “If not now, then when,” the piece reads. (more…)
Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes (Installation View), via Aleph Molinari for Art Observed
German multi-disciplinary artist Anne Imhof creates environments that integrate painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and performance amidst large-scale architectural installations. Following the success of her previous exhibitions, including the performance Faust, for which she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, Imhof takes over the Palais de Tokyo for her latest exhibition, Natures Mortes. This sprawling and multifaceted show is a meditation on the transience of time, on life and death, youth and desire. The ensemble of works in the exhibition echoes themes present in her previous body of work, reflecting an aestheticization of postmodern ennui in Imhof’s singular, dark, post-punk aesthetic. Going beyond the temporality of a vanitas or a memento mori, the show enters into a jarring dystopian connotation, creating a space where nature has literally died, and was replaced by a landscape of metal and glass, by a cold materiality and a dark sense of foreboding.
Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes (Installation View), via Aleph Molinari for Art Observed
Jules de Balincourt, Old lost Horse (2021), via Praz-Delavallade
On view this month at Praz-Delavallade in Paris, the gallery presents The Greek Garden, a groups how show drawing on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, and using its tenants to explore notions of vanity, politics, spirituality and science. “The Greeks were superficial – out of profundity,” the text reads. “And isn’t it precisely what we are coming back to? – we spiritual adventurers, who have scaled the highest and most dangerous peak of today’s thought and looked round from up there, looked down from up there. Aren’t we, then, precisely, Greeks?” (more…)
Tatiana TrouveÌ, March 23rd, The New York Times, USA; Le Soir, Belgium from the series From March to May (2020), via Gagosian
On view this month at Gagosian’s uptown exhibition space in New York, the gallery is presenting a never-before-seen body of work by Tatiana Trouvé produced in direct response to the pandemic era, drawing on the contemporary landscape to create a series of works that both trace time and reflect on the chaos of the past year. At the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine in March 2020, Trouvé, isolated in Paris, began a series of daily drawings using inkjet-printed reproductions of various international newspaper front pages as her starting point. As the pandemic marched on, spreading instability and uncertainty throughout the world, Trouvé continued to work ever more methodically in graphite, ink, and linseed oil.
Tatiana TrouveÌ, April 3rd, The Star, Kenya, from the series From March to May (2020) via Gagosian
Not Vital at Alma Zevi (Installation View)
On view at ALMA ZEVI through November 6 is SNOW & WATER & ICE by Swiss artist Not Vital. As Vital’s first solo exhibition at the Venice gallery, it coincides with the artist’s solo show in Andrea Palladio’s Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, organized by the Benedicti Claustra Onlus, on the occasion of this year’s Architecture Biennale.
The Whitney will transfer a large collection of Andy Warhol’s cinema works to MoMA as part of an ambitious research effort. “The Whitney’s ongoing efforts to document, research and study Warhol’s remarkable film works—along with the preservation and digitisation initiatives of the MoMA and the Andy Warhol Museum—have brought them to a wider audience,” says Whitney head Adam Weinberg. (more…)
Paul Thek, Untitled (Meat Piece with Chair) (1966), via Alexander and Bonin
Offering a rare opportunity to view a series of resonant historical works by artist Paul Thek, Alexander and Bonin is currently presenting a selection of works by the artist that span a range of pieces from the 1960’s into the later years of his career. Exploring the artist’s evolving aesthetic concerns and range of media and techniques, the show presents Thek’s work in relation to changing societal contexts and political situations. (more…)
Six people have been arrested in the Spanish city of Valencia over a series of forged works attributed to Goya and other artists. “[The group’s] methods were as simple as placing a small piece of paper over a signature to swap it for another one, reusing both sides of a canvas, and imitating cracked paint by burning the canvas with a blowtorch,” the government said in a statement. (more…)
Jeff Koons gives an interview to Wallpaper magazine this week, as he invites the publication into his home and holds court on a range of subjects. “I started making art as a young kid and would always draw and paint, and I never knew what art was,” he says. “When I was in art school and learned about art history, I started to realize how it connects all the human disciplines. When I graduated from art school and started to really focus on my work, there were moments I would create things that were so powerful to me that they would overtake me physically.” (more…)
Sam Moyer, Ester (2021), via Kayne Griffin Corcoran
Artist Sam Moyer brings a body of new works to bear on Kayne Griffin Corcoran this month, continuing her investigations into scale, balance, and weight, with particular attention to the physical experience of space and the effects of natural light. (more…)
