Anselm Kiefer, Für Velimir Khlebnikov: Die Lehre vom Krieg: Seeschlachten (2004-2010), via Phillips

The first of June’s Contemporary Art sales in London has wrapped up in London this evening, as Phillips concluded its 20th Century and Contemporary sale to mixed results and a final sales total of £11,873,000, within the evening’s sales estimate.  The 31-lot sale saw 10 of its works go unsold, while a handful of other pieces brought impressively strong prices, ultimately casting ominous, albeit foggy indications of the European market in the wake of the Brexit vote.

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Frieze London has announced its planned events and curated sectors for the 2016 edition of its annual fair in Regents Park.  For its 14th edition, the fair will feature over 160 galleries, its annual projects sections, and a new section called “The 90s,” organized by Geneva-based curator Nicolas Trembley to reflect on important installations and projects from that decade. (more…)

Author Douglas Coupland is searching for a Vincent van Gogh lookalike, with the person most closely resembling the artist winning a $5,000 prize.  “I’m learning that most people have someone in their life who looks like Vincent van Gogh,” Coupland says. “It could be your next-door neighbor. It could be a guy at work. It could be you.” (more…)

Rachel Whiteread has installed a new installation on Governor’s Island, an immense, cast-concrete cabin that sits just at the edge of the island.  “I wanted to have something that was very humble but had a sort of idea of solitude and showed the city from a different angle,” Whiteread says. “I like the idea of being there on your own with the Statue of Liberty and the site of the former World Trade Center over the water.” (more…)

Loïc Gouzer is the subject of a profile in the New Yorker this week, as he discusses some of the curated projects he has run at Christie’s and his perspective on the selling exhibition.  “If you start putting works around another work, they give each other meaning,” he says.  “Each of the works are in dialogue, and they help each other.” (more…)

Jenny Holzer will install a site-specific work on the cliffs of Ibiza this summer, the Art Newspaper reports, created in conjunction with a pair of shows the artist is opening on the island.  “Holzer will undertake her first site-specific commission on the island. Using raw materials from the Ibicencan countryside and coastline, she will engrave poems on cliffs, monumental boulders and on bedrock,” a statement reads. (more…)

The Whitney Museum will stay open seven days a week during July and August, the institution announced today.  It will also be open late into the evening on Fridays and Saturdays, allowing visitors to view their current exhibitions through 10 pm. (more…)

Nicole Eisenman, Under The Table 2 (2014), via Art Observed

On view through this past weekend at the New Museum, painter Nicole Eisenman was showing a striking exhibition of pieces on the third floor, spanning the artist’s output over the past several decades, and underscoring her impressive creative investigations into the modes of sculpture and painting.

Nicole Eisenman, Hanging Man (2016),via Art Observed

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Yayoi Kusama, Chandelier of Grief (2016). All images via Victoria Miro.

Now through July 30th, Victoria Miro in London is presenting new works by Yayoi Kusama, spanning the gallery’s three locations and waterside garden across the British capital.  The work featured here was created exclusively for this show, including the artist’s iconic pumpkin sculptures, immersive mirror rooms, and her ongoing My Eternal Soul series. Across the work exhibited, the artist’s ongoing investment in themes of the infinite and the sublime is explicit. (more…)

Imi Knoebel, Bild 16.02.2016 (2016), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Comprised of 22 new artworks, Imi Knoebel’s current exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Marais exhibition space offers a new direction for the German painter, whose decades of practice in the intersection of color field painting, shaped canvases and minimalist serialism offer a new point of departure for a series of loosely rendered, yet exceptionally vital new works, pushing his honed stylistic practice towards new experiments within the art historical lexicon. (more…)

Sotheby’s has announced that Benjamin Doller will take over as the chairman of Sotheby’s Americas, effective immediately.  Dollar has worked with the company for over 35 years, and has recently served as the company’s Vice Chair for the Americas.  “The auction world is an evolving space, and I thrive on change,” he said in a statement.  “Sotheby’s its embracing that evolution in everything it does, which makes this a particularly exciting time to be a part of this business.”  (more…)

Anish Kapoor has designed for the performance of Tristan and Isolde at the English National Opera.  “My sculptures are deeply rooted in orientating the body, in putting one in a frame of a certain kind of looking and thinking,” he says.  “I think that’s religious. It’s often processional and intentionally philosophical, too. That’s what Wagner is about, too.” (more…)

Spain’s Guardia Civil has released the inventory of works seized from collector Benito Amor, totaling over 10,000 pieces of art and antiques, including an alleged fragment of Jesus’s cross.  The collector had been arrested over several counts of theft, and questions remain as to the provenance of many of these works. (more…)

The New York Times charts the numerous challenges to galleries and museums in the face of rising rents and immense auction prices, and the solutions some art taking to sustain themselves.  Gavin Brown’s new exhibition space in Harlem is profiled alongside new spaces in the Lower East Side, the Meatpacking District, and elsewhere. (more…)

The Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam was forced to evacuate works from its collection last night as flooding and water seepage threatened to wreak major damage to museum holdings.  Deputy director of the museum Ina Klaassen described the threat to the works as “very serious.” (more…)

An article in the Art Newspaper this morning charts the uncertain fate of arts funding and international exchange in the UK following the vote to leave the EU this week.  “At one level there is obviously now great financial uncertainty—the effect on European funding streams for the arts, for example—but quite as important is the potential effect on the spirit that drives a myriad of international partnerships in the arts,” said Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund. (more…)

MoMA has announced a major upcoming retrospective for Louise Lawler, running in the spring of 2017, and titled Why Pictures Now.  The show will cull together over 40 years of the artists work, and will include the artist’s sound work installed in the museum’s sculpture garden. (more…)

Clara Drummond has been selected as the winner of this year’s BP Portrait Award, receiving the award’s $44,000 purse and a commission by London’s National Portrait Gallery.  “‘She is always immersed in the ideas around whatever she is making at the time—history, nature, mythology, and art all feed into her work” Drummond said of her sitter in the winning picture, fellow artist Kirsty Buchanan, “so when I am drawing or painting her it feels more like a collaboration than a portrait sitting.’” (more…)

The L.A. Times looks at the boon Instagram has provided to artists and dealers looking to promote work online, but also notes the issues of censorship that have plagued the platform.  “We are making up the rules as we all go along,” says Rebecca Morse, associate curator of photography at LACMA. “This is a topic that social scientists are grappling with — how [a social media platform] is laid out affects the information that people insert into it.” (more…)

MOCA has added Hard Rock Cafe Founder Peter Morton to its board of trustees.  The board is co-chaired by Maurice Marciano and Lilly Tartikoff Karatz.   (more…)

Jean Dubuffet, Late Paintings (Installation View), all images via Timothy Taylor

Now through July 2, London’s Timothy Taylor Gallery presents an exhibition of Jean Dubuffet’s late works, featuring paintings, sculpture, and works on paper completed from the late 1960’s through to the 1980′.  Works from his L’Hourloupe cycle, pieces from the Théâtres de mémoire, as well as a selection from the Psycho-sites, Mires, and Non-Lieux series join together in the gallery space, marking the artist’s transition from traditional painter to sculptuor and conceptual architect in the late years of his prolific career. (more…)

Walter de Maria, Truth/Beauty series (detail) (1993 – 2016), © The Estate of Walter De Maria, Photo Joseph Asghar. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Comprising two separate series created by the artist during the course of his career, Gagosian Gallery on London’s Britannia Street has opened an exhibition of work by renowned minimalist Walter de Maria, opening a dialogue within the artist’s own body of work across decades of practice, and through a range of materials that underscore the artist’s particular approach to questions of space, subjectivity and time. (more…)

Amedeo Modigliani, Madame Hanka Zborowska (1917), via Christie’s

Early warnings about this week’s sales in London seem to have some weight to them following the sales outcome at Christie’s this evening.  The auction house’s summer Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale wrapped in London tonight with a dreary outing, closing the 36-lot auction to the paltry tune of £25,612,500, with almost one third of the works offered failing to find a buyer.

Claude Monet,  L’Ancienne rue de la Chaussée, Argenteuil (1872), via Christie’s

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Terence Koh will be transmitting the names of the Orlando shooting victims into space tomorrow during a performance outside Andrew Edlin Gallery.  The performance will be followed by the simultaneous screening of a selection of films including John Waters’ Pink Flamingos and David Wojnarowicz’s Beautiful People. (more…)