Bloomberg profiles the ongoing battle for market share by Sotheby’s and Christie’s this week, and the companies’s use of guarantees and third-party lenders to drive up auction prices as a show of strength. “They have been making absolutely absurd deals just to be seen selling this Koons or that Rothko,” says gallerist David Nash. “They’d do anything to get the deal away from the competition.” (more…)
Alexis Rockman, Cervid Cervacles (Jacob Riis Beach, Queens) (2015), via Salon 94
Alexis Rockman’s work is expressly involved in the correlations between image and ground, material and subject, often pulling from the biological intersections of human and animal, flora and fauna, or land and water, that define the landscapes of modernity. Shifting this focus to a more microcosmic level, the artist has opened a show of drawings of New York City wildlife, a project that heightens his sense of delicate relations between nature and its inhabitants, on view at Salon 94. (more…)
The Economist profiles the long-awaited publication of Francis Bacon’s catalog raisonné, which will be released on April 28th, the 24th anniversary of the artist’s death. The five-volume collection is priced at £1,000 ($1,430), and features over 800 illustrations. (more…)
Daniel Arsham details his usual weekend routine with his wife and son in the New York Times this week. The artist takes frequent trips to art museums around the city. “My son knows, if you ask him what we say about art, he says ‘touche pas,’ which means ‘don’t touch’ in French,” Arsham says. (more…)
Tacita Dean, A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds (2015-2016), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
The Marian Goodman Gallery, New York presents ‘…my English breath in foreign clouds’, a comprehensive survey of Tacita Dean’s recent works: a collection of clouds observed from Los Angeles, three 16mm films including the striking ‘Event for a stage’ (2015) and ‘Portraits’ (2016), an intimate one on one with David Hockney smoking in his studio, as well as a photographic series newly printed on Cibachrome paper, ‘Gaeta 2015 – Fifty photographs, plus one’ (2015) which subtly links Cy Twombly’s house and studio in Italy with the poetics of his thinking process.
Ellsworth Kelly, Barn, Long Island (1968), via Matthew Marks Gallery
The late Ellsworth Kelly’s photographic works are the subject of the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in New York this month, offering a unique and alternative perspective on an artist already seen as one of the most influential and prominent abstractionists of the 20th Century. The show, on view at Matthew Marks in Chelsea, showcases over thirty gelatin silver prints, originally taken between 1950 and 1982, the first ever devoted to Kelly’s photographic endeavors. Kelly finished preparing these prints and planning the exhibition shortly before his death on December 27th, at the age of ninety-two. Here, these photographs offer a fitting perspective of the artist’s own aesthetic inclinations, and his unique perspective for the world around him. (more…)
Dealer Perry Rubenstein has been arrested on criminal charges following a series of lawsuits over allegedly fraudulent art sales to Eli Broad and Michael Ovitz. “We deny all these allegations and look forward to clearing his name and getting his reputation back,” his lawyer, Stephen Sitkoff says. “There’s no criminal conduct on Perry’s part.” (more…)
Tauba Auerbach gives Nowness a look at her recent book collaboration with Printed Matter. Titled 2,3, the piece utilizes die-cut pages to create a series of intricately folded paper sculptures inside its covers. (more…)
David Geffen has given a massive, $100 million gift to the Museum of Modern Art, which will aid substantially in the museum’s expansion plans. “When I worked in the mailroom at the William Morris agency I used to brown bag it at the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art,” Geffen says. “It’s where I developed my interest in post-World War II art.” (more…)
A Lucian Freud self-portrait from the artist’s estate has been donated to the United Kingdom in lieu of an inheritance tax payment. “The acceptance in lieu scheme enriches our public collections and we are delighted that Lucian Freud’s estate has made this latest offer,” Edward Harley, the chair of the acceptance in lieu panel, says. “Following the success of the National Portrait Gallery’s Lucian Freud Portraits exhibition in 2012, it is wonderful to see this exceptional self-portrait join its collection.” (more…)
Following several years of aggressive expansion, the Met is facing a $10 million deficit, which some project could increase to $40 million without changes and cuts to the institution’s structure. “We’ve had increasing pressure on the budget and knew that we were going to have to take actions to get it back in balance,” says Director Thomas P. Campbell. (more…)
Douglas Chrismas, founder of Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, has filed for bankruptcy, sparking a rush by artists to get their works back from the gallery’s holdings before they are sold to pay off creditors. “So many important artists have showed with Ace and deposited works with the gallery,” says lawyer Christine Steiner, “the gallery has made it very difficult for some artists to pick up their art. I think the fact that an accountant is taking over is going to be seismic.” (more…)
A scientific research team monitoring the Tate Modern’s Damien Hirst show in 2012 has reported that the exhibition had unhealthy levels of formaldehyde leaking into the air. The readings come out to be ten times the 0.5 parts per million levels set by the EU, a charge that Hirst’s Science LTD. flatly denies. “At five parts per million your eyes would be streaming and you would be in serious physical discomfort,” a spokesperson says. (more…)
Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek has placed a never-before seen brooch made by Paul Gauguin on view at its exhibition space. The work, created from scrap metal, a watch case and a piece of hair, is being argued as one of the first historical readymades in existence. (more…)
Yayoi Kusama is among TIME’s annual 100 Most Influential People List, celebrated by designer Marc Jacobs in a short profile piece. “Her eyes never left mine, and she held my hand often as she talked to me,” Jacobs writes. “She kept repeating certain phrases: ‘We must create, we must create, it’s important that we create.’ We spent a few hours together, and every time I tried to leave, she’d pull me back in. It made perfect sense with the art she creates—the intensity, the repetition. She just felt like the embodiment of what she makes.” (more…)
Alex Israel & Brett Easton Ellis, Born and Not Made (2016), all images © Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis; courtesy iStock and Gagosian Gallery Photography: Jeff McLane
Marking one of the art world’s more unique collaborations in recent years, Alex Israel has partnered with writer Brett Easton Ellis to create a series of large-scale acrylic and ink canvases, reveling in the unique iconography and landscapes of Los Angeles. The show, which opened earlier this Winter at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills location, combines Ellis’s distinctively modern texts with Israel’s particular blend of pop-influenced wit, here manifested in sprawling scenes from the varying spheres and vistas of Los Angeles’s shifting landscape.
Alex Israel & Brett Easton Ellis (Installation View)
James Franco is interviewed by Jerry Saltz this week in regards to his ambitions and work as an artist, and makes his case for his own work to be considered away from his fame as an actor. “I’ve done everything that I can to respect these professions that I’m interested in,” he says. “I’ve gone to all these schools. I went to the art school that so many of my favorite artists have gone to. But when an actor goes into music, when an actor writes a book, when an actor goes into the art world — before it even is made, people are considering it bad.” (more…)
The New York Times notes the installation of James Rosenquist’s work at Donald Judd’s former SoHo home, and the conversations between pop art and minimalism that has resulted from the show. “There’s this myth that the two movements were against each other somehow, and it’s complete nonsense,” Judd’s son Flavin says. “Don and James were good artists. And I think that’s the only required commonality.” (more…)
Artist Maurizio Cattelan has come out of retirement, and is planning to install a a solid gold toilet in the rotunda bathroom of the Guggenheim as his first new work since his 2011 exhibition at the museum. “There’s the risk that people will think of it as a joke, maybe, but I don’t see it as a joke,” he says. (more…)
T. J. Wilcox, Word on a Wing (The Girl) (2016), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
“Staring at the starry field, I ardently hoped…” intones T. J. Wilcox in Word on a Wing (Altar Boy), one of four poems the artist penned for Equivalents, his first exhibition at Gladstone Gallery. On view through April 23rd, the exhibition urges its audience to stare upwards, much in the same way as protagonist of Wilcox’s poems, to break with the conventional exhibition viewing experience. Dispersed throughout the high ceilings of the otherwise empty gallery interior are hybrids of steel, Plexiglass and projected video, glaring in the dimly-lit space. (more…)
A replica of Palmyra’s ancient Arch of Triumph has been built in London’s Trafalgar Square, part of a joint venture by researchers at Oxford, Harvard, and Dubai’s Museum of the Future called the Institute of Digital Archaeology. “The Trafalgar Square project is a celebration of the heritage of the Middle East and an optimistic response to the ongoing destruction of cultural sites,” says Alexy Karenowska, director of technology at the IDA. (more…)
The Tate has announced its 2017 exhibition plans, including an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the UK decriminalizing male homosexuality in Britain, and featuring works by John Singer Sargent, David Hockney and Francis Bacon, among others. (more…)
Alexis Rockman is interviewed in the New York Times this week, and breaks down his influences in the natural world, and his frequent attempts to incorporate its materiality into his works. “Once, I was making this series of pieces about the history of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles,” he says. “I asked the director of the museum there to send me a canister of tar. If I could make the tar fluid enough, I thought, I could use it draw the creatures of the Tar Pits. Well, to do that, I had to find the right solvent. As I experimented, all I got was a congealed mess that ate the paper.” (more…)
Mark Bradford will represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale next year, curated by Christopher Bedford, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. “The black body is always a heavy politicized body, in America in particular, and so carrying that burden is kind of a birthright for me,” he said, adding: “I’m thinking a lot about what matters to me right now. And I think this is a time to put that on the table.” (more…)