David Nahmad gives a rare interview this week with the New York Times, insisting that the disputed Modigliani work in his collection is not Nazi war loot. “Looted art, hidden art — they made me look like a crook instead of doing real battle in the court,” he said. (more…)
The Menil Drawing Collection in Houston has received a massive, 110-work gift from the holdings of two trustees, featuring an impressive collection of works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and other mid-Twentieth Century masters. “I’ve never been a collector with a capital C,” says donor Louisa Stude Sarofim. “It’s just been a matter of looking, and loving art.” (more…)
Icelandic musicians Sigur Ros have announced an ambitious multimedia performance at the Tate Modern’s new building. The work explores “the past, present and future of Tate Modern, the Bankside building that hosts it in London and its new extension.” (more…)
The New Yorker has an interesting piece on tech start-ups and the art world this week, comparing initial valuations of tech companies to the often abstracted valuations of the art market. “The point of sale, rather than the point of creation, came to take precedence in determining the primary meaning for certain works of art,” says writer and critic James Panero. (more…)
Hauser and Wirth has announced plans to temporarily occupy the former home of Dia Chelsea at 548 West 22nd Street, until the gallery completes construction on its new exhibition complex in the neighborhood. “We are honored and delighted by the prospect of presenting Hauser and Wirth exhibitions in the birthplace of the West Chelsea arts scene,” the gallery said in a statement. (more…)
An article in the New York Times this week looks at the upcoming market events in Basel and London in the coming weeks, and notes a more nuanced and complex sales picture in response to what many have considered a period of market correction. “There’s a growing rift between price and value,” says advisor Heather Flow. “In some cases, gallery prices are higher than the levels at which similar works are being flipped,” meaning resales at auction. (more…)
Galerie Perrotin has joined the migration of galleries to the Lower East Side, and will set up shop next year at 130 Orchard Street. The 25,000-square-foot space echoes moves by other galleries as Chelsea rents continue to rise. (more…)
Jasper Johns, Untitled (2014), via Art Observed
Spanning the last thirty years of his career, Jasper Johns’s monotypes make up a fascinatingly diverse, unique body of works, one that forms something of a microcosm for the rest of the artist’s body of work. Themes appearing throughout Johns’s career; jagged minimalism, number systems, and the incorporation of the art historical into various structures of subversion or reinterpretation, are presented again through a selection of etched prints across a wide variety of hues, subjects and approaches. This body of work is the subject of the artist’s current exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, following his continued exploration of the monotype as an expressive and diversely capable medium from 1983 to the present day.
Jasper Johns, Untitled (2015), via Art Observed
Bjarke Ingels Group Serpentine Pavilion, via Serpentine Galleries
The annual Serpentine Galleries pavilion commission is a rare architectural project predicated on immediate and widespread public use while also encouraging formal inventiveness to the furthest possible degree. Each year’s works, laid out on the grounds of Kensington Gardens, function as a site for talks, performances and other events, while also as a showcase for some of the brightest talents in contemporary architecture. (more…)
Stephen Prina, Carl Sandbug, Born: January 6, 1878, Galesburg, Illinois, Died: July 22, 1967, Flat Rock, North Carolina (2015), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
Stephen Prina’s eighth solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery pulls its audience into an ephemeral territory, where the fluidity of one’s memories engages with the tactile presence of objects. Through a highly introspective narrative, the exhibition pays homage to Prina’s hometown of Galesburg, a small city in Illinois where the artist grew up. Currently based in Los Angeles and Cambridge, Prina elaborates on the act of remembering his home, while seeking creative stimuli in the mundane details of the day to day, to reach broader conclusions on the human condition and artistic endeavor. The works on view are singular, autonomous artifacts, eventually converging in focus through Prina’s grand orchestration of converging narratives that twist the past through a contemporary lens. (more…)
The New York Times spends a day in the offices of Dominique Lévy, as the dealer prepares for her gallery’s booth at Art Basel next week. “It’s really your one moment where you can show who you are,” Lévy says. “It’s acutely important for existing relationships, new relationships, the way the art world perceives you.” (more…)
Venus Over Manhattan has named gallery director Anna Furney as a partner in the gallery. Furney has worked with the space since 2012. (more…)
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo has tapped Rem Koolhaas’s OMA to design its new campus expansion. “Over the next year, we will work together to imagine a renewed Albright-Knox for the twenty-first century, one that includes state-of-the-art spaces for special exhibitions and the display of our world-renowned collection,” museum director Janne Sirén says. (more…)
The Louvre has reopened following the massive flooding that swept through Paris last week, causing over €1 billion in damage to the city, and €1.5 million in lost revenue to the museum itself. (more…)
Michelangelo Pistoletto has been tapped as the next artist to show at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. “I am very pleased to be presenting a comprehensive show of my work within a place brimming with history, tradition, and craft,” he said of the show, opening this September. “I look forward to seeing my art in an entirely new context.” (more…)
The Atlantic reports on the continued efforts of museums to make their collections more accessible to the blind and those with low vision, including Louvre galleries of replica sculptures for visitors to touch, or the Met’s “Multisensory Met” project. “We see through our brains, not our eyes,” art historian and museum educator Georgia Krantz says. “The eye is just one of the channels through which sensory information is passed to the brain for processing.” (more…)
Pyotr Pavlensky, the Russian artist who set fire to the doors of Russia’s Federal Security Service headquarters, has walked free, subject only to a fine for the damage, which he refuses to pay.“It does not matter how the trial ended,” he said. “What is important is that we were able to unmask, uncover the truth: the government is founded on the methods of terror.” (more…)
Jordan Wolfson, Colored sculpture (2016) All images are Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London and David Zwirner, New York.
On view at David Zwirner’s 525 West 19th street location is Jordan Wolfson’s most recent investigation of the sculptural genre in the age of new technology. Following 2014’s exceptionally received and widely seen (Female Figure), the voluptuous and arresting female animatronic that Wolfson created at a professional Hollywood film studio, his current exhibition introduces Colored sculpture: a larger-than-life, red-haired teenage boy suspended from a mechanic structure that controls his movements and often violently degrades his body.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker (2014), all photos via Luhring Augustine Gallery
The Canadian artist duo of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, known for their immersive installations mixing deeply sculpted sonic environments with an often theatrical narrative, are currently presenting their fourth solo exhibition with Luhring Augustine this month with two recent works: The Marionette Maker (2014) and Experiment in F# Minor (2013). (more…)
Gert and Uwe Tobias, Untitled (GUT / 2489), via Art Observed
Artists Gert and Uwe Tobias return to Team Gallery in New York for a show of new drawings and sculpture this month, bringing with them a new variant on their already prolific output of work negotiating the spheres between the folklore of their native Romania, and the context of Western art production that their own work is situated within. (more…)
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation has recruited artist and oral historian Alan Nakagawa to aid in its plan to end traffic deaths, approaching language in a way to reinforce shared space and communal perceptions of the roads. The artist will “will continue this tradition, with a focus on how we can infuse art into design to create safer streets,” according to a statement. (more…)
A commission of U.S. Senators are working on a proposal to make Nazi-looted works easier to recover by their original owners, the New York Times reports. “It is our moral duty to help those survivors and their families achieve what justice can be found,” said NY Senator Charles E. Schumer. (more…)
The Bronx Museum has delayed an exhibition of Cuban artworks, following concerns by the Cuban government that any works sent to the U.S. for the show may be seized in lieu of claims by American citizens. There are $7 billion in outstanding claims over property seized by the Castro government during the 1959 revolution, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) in Havana had expressed concern over the works’ immunity from seizure. “This is an issue that is going to be very difficult and I don’t see a short-term solution to it,” says Cuban art dealer Ramón Cernuda. “In the current climate, I really don’t see any important museums in the US wanting to convey an image of not caring for or considering valid claims to ownership of art or other claims against the Cuban government. It’s not just the uphill battle of getting the immunity, but the backlash that could come with that.” (more…)
Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery have once again been named in a copyright infringement lawsuit over a photograph of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious. Photographer Dennis Morris has filed the lawsuit over a photograph used as the cover of a book by David Dalton. (more…)