David Salle has published a collection of his essays and writings on art, written during the past several years in conjunction with his painting work. “I like the challenge of finding a verbal equivalent for certain states of looking,” he says, “and taking apart what it is someone made.” (more…)
Sotheby’s has landed a major collection for its fall auctions, selling works from the holdings of Steven and Ann Ames, including a pair of Gerhard Richter works valued at $20-$30 million each. “They have a Richter from every major period and a de Kooning from every major period,” says Amy Cappellazzo, chairwoman of Sotheby’s fine art division. “That’s an immense and important study about painting.” (more…)
The New York Times reports that billionaire J. Tomilson Hill is opening a museum in Chelsea, where he wants to show his $800 million collection, and to use the space for arts education. “They’re cutting out arts programs in the public schools,” he says. “These are kids who wouldn’t even think The Frick was accessible to them,” Mr. Hill said. (more…)
Three Christie’s employees have left the company, shortly after the auction house announced its sales had dropped last year from $4.5 billion to $3 billion in the past year. “As a private company, we don’t comment on speculation around our employees,” the company said in a statement. “However, like any business, we continue to review the deployment of resources and focus investment on areas of growth so as to best to serve our clients.” (more…)
Richard Serra, NJ-1 (2016), via Art Observed
Spread across both of Gagosian’s Chelsea exhibition spaces, Richard Serra’s immense spatial investigations have returned to New York City, marking a continuation and expansion of the artist’s already tightly honed sculptural language. Consisting of a total of only four works, the gallery is showing Serra’s immense rolled steel work NJ-1 in its 21st Street space, while giving over its 24th Street gallery to a trio of Serra’s pressed steel installations, a pairing that sees him returning to his precise visual vocabulary while pushing its expressive limits.
Richard Serra, Every Which Way (2015), via Art Observed (more…)
Alex Katz, Fall (2015), via Thaddaeus Ropac
Continuing his recent surge of output, Alex Katz has brought a new series of landscapes to Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Marais exhibition space. Bringing his attention yet again to the landscapes of Maine, the artist’s work here presents his calm, subdued style in a fitting conversation with the untouched curves and lines of Northern New England.
Alex Katz, New Landsacpes (Installation View), via Thaddaeus Ropac
Brian Belott, Untitled (After Guston) (1995), via Art Observed
Gavin Brown’s 291 Grand Street location is playing home to the gallery’s summer exhibition this month, a cunning and often comical play on art history curated by painter Brian Belott. Inviting a group of artists to take their own improvisational runs on various artists from the last 100 years of painting and sculpture, the show plays on the memory of Glenn Gould, whose own takes on popular figures and music themes equally expressed his own artistic brilliance.
Bobo, The Legendary Impetus Behind Wegmans (2016), via Art Observed
Roxy Paine, Meeting (2016), via Art Observed
The concept of “the narrative” is one that feels increasingly relevant in a contemporary art context defined in part by gestures and approaches that owe much to the last 60 years of creative practice. Considering the work in relation to an isolated other, a sort of phantom context that either motivates, grounds or produces the work in question ultimately seems to be one such strategy for re-invigoration of the techniques used in creating the object itself. This is the strategy through which the current group exhibition at Pierogi’s LES Gallery space, False Narratives, presents its artists, compiling work that not only explores the construction of ulterior situations and modes for the work itself, but equally questions these narratives as unreliable.
Brian Conley, Decipherment of Linear X (2004), via Art Observed
The New York Times reports on the quiet sale of a major Florine Stettheimer work from the collection of Nashville’s Fisk University, a sale that drew criticisms from many in the field. “Shame on them,” says Lyndel King, director of the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota and chairwoman of the Task Force for the Protection of University Collections. “It’s very much against the ethics of our profession.” (more…)
The Art Newspaper follows the story of Udnie, a long-unknown muse of Francis Picabia that scholars now believe was model and silent-film actress Audrey Munson. Munson “posed for him for several days, but never in still position,” she is quoted. “He had me walk about the studio in different lights, taking different postures. He wanted to paint me in action, he said, not in repose.” (more…)
Sadie Benning, The Crucifixion (2015), via Art Observed
Artist Sadie Benning has returned to New York for a strong summer exhibition this month, filling Mary Boone’s Fifth Avenue location and Callicoon Fine Arts’s downtown space with a series of mixed media pieces that continue a taste for colorful abstraction, formal evasiveness, and cartoonish figures, applied here towards the perception of and reflection on the presence of higher powers. Viewing the catastrophes and power struggles of modern society through the lens of the divine, Benning has realized a series of images depicting various gods and value systems in her signature blocks of color, lending a loose style to already weighty subject matter.
Sadie Benning, Nature (2015), via Art Observed
The Swiss Institute has announced the location and opening date of its new temporary gallery, “Swiss In situ.” Occupying a 5,000 sq. ft space in Tribeca, Swiss In situ will function as the institute’s main center until a more permanent location is announced next year. The temporary gallery plans to mirror its status as “transitional” through its exhibitions, by focusing them on fleeting and “temporary structures–including publishing formats, social experiments, and architectural forms.” The gallery will open with an exhibition by Swiss publishers, Nieves and Innen called, “Nieves and Innen Zine Library.” The exhibition will feature “hundreds of pocket-sized, image-based publications [Nieves and Innen] have commissioned over the past 15 years,” along with artist and publisher talks at the opening event on August 4. (more…)
Robert Irwin is profiled in the Art Newspaper this week, as he opens his major permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. “What I’ve been doing all these years, you couldn’t sell, you couldn’t house it, you couldn’t put it in a museum,” he says. “Marfa was a good place for me to fantasize some idea of what I might do, which for a long time was all I had… It was a nice place for me to stretch my legs a little and try some things.” (more…)
The current market stature for Modigliani is driving extensive research and pursuit of a catalog raisonné, the Art Newspaper reports. “Let’s just say that an exciting first step has been taken, with further news to come,” scholar Kenneth Wayne says. (more…)
The New York Times has a profile on Richard Bellamy this week, the founder of New York’s influential Green Gallery, and the dealer who first provided space and a voice for many of New York’s influential minimalists, including Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and many more. “I think,” Robert Morris says of Bellamy’s impact on this group, “it had to do with the fact that we — the artists and Bellamy himself, who we regarded as more of an artist than a ‘director’ — were sitting in a space on 57th Street, when we all belonged downtown in our ratty lofts. There was something slightly ridiculous about occupying that zone where the serious, moneyed New York galleries were located.” (more…)
The Louvre-Lens has committed to restoring a Charles Le Brun work that had been missing for over 200 years, and which was discovered with so much dirt and grime on its surface that it was almost unrecognizable. “This was a hugely successful painting,” says Nicolas Milovanovic, the chief curator in the Paris museum’s paintings department. “When [the art collector and chief minister of France] Cardinal Mazarin saw it, he wanted a copy. A third version was made for Anne of Austria. We know [there are] around ten other versions. It was a painting that pleased many people.” (more…)
The Observer takes a look inside the collection of dealer turned museum owner Judy Goffman Cutler, whose National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, Rhode Island holds an impressive collection of pieces from American artists. “I have the second largest collection of Rockwells anywhere,” she says. (more…)
Artist Bill Viola is set to unveil a new large-scale video installation at St Paul’s Cathedral, depicting Mary holding the body of Jesus after his crucifixion. The piece is considered a companion to his Martyrs series. “One is concerned with birth and the other death; one with comfort and creation, the other with suffering and sacrifice,” Viola says. “If I am successful, the final pieces will function both as aesthetic objects of contemporary art and as practical objects of traditional contemplation and devotion.” (more…)
15th Century Flemish Master Dieric Bouts’s St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child will stay in the United Kingdom, following funding help from the UK Lottery to prevent the export of the work outside of the country. “It’s fantastic news that this stunning painting will remain in the UK for the public to see. I’m delighted that the export deferral has allowed this outstanding work of art to find a new home at the Bowes Museum,” says new Culture Minister Matt Hancock. (more…)
The Art Newspaper reports on the opening of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yongwoo Lee’s Shanghai Project, multi-disciplinary biennial that has struggled with planning issues, scheduling, and problems with securing funding. “Shanghai Project has restructured its priority from exhibitions to public programs and prioritised the difference of its context,” says Lee. (more…)
James Turrell installed one of his signature lighting systems in Berlin’s Dorotheenstadt Cemetery chapel this summer, playing a series of changing light arrangements against the fading light at dusk each night. (more…)
Bortolami Gallery is launching a series of “mini-Marfas,” exhibition spaces in unexpected locales and structures across the United States, where their artists will have free reign to show their work. Early entries in the series include a show of works by Eric Wesley in a former Cahokia, Illinois Taco Bell, and a Daniel Buren show in Miami. “It’s a way for us to expand our reach without opening full-scale operations in another city or in New York,” says associate director Emma Fernberger, “and just getting to see more of the country.” (more…)
Robert Irwin, Dawn to Dusk (2016), via Art Observed
For the past two decades, Robert Irwin’s installation in the Texas town of Marfa has been something of a distant possibility, a long-rumored project commissioned by the Chinati Foundation, and focused around the dilapidated grounds of the former Fort D.A. Russell hospital where the organization makes its home. Now complete, the massive installation work, Irwin’s only permanent, free-standing composition, has transformed the space into a placid marker of time, a place where meticulous architectural geometries make masterful use of the West Texas sun and landscape in a prime example of Irwin’s unique sculptural vocabulary.
Robert Irwin, Dawn to Dusk (2016), via Art Observed
Nairy Baghramian, Scruff of the Neck (LR 30/31/32), All images via Marian Goodman Gallery
Now on view, Marian Goodman Gallery in London is presenting Scruff of the Neck, a series of site-responsive sculptures by artist Nairy Baghramian. This is Baghramian’s first major solo show in London since The Walker’s Day Off at the Serpentine Gallery in 2010, and continues the Berlin-based Iranian artist’s practice in creating formally inventive sculptures that operate in both physiological and mechanical dimensions, articulating and reflecting the artist’s interest in exploring the space of the body in a non-habitual way. (more…)