Christian Boltanski, via Marian Goodman

The French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski has passed away at the age of 76, his gallery announced this week. The artist, whose work long explored the notion of absence and trauma in the face of death and violence, politics and memory, leaves behind a legacy of works that challenge the progression of history at human scale, rendering physical traces and concrete representations of lives lost, bodies now absent, and spaces haunted by past events.  (more…)

A long-lost Van Gogh watercolor has resurfaced in Japan, the Art Newspaper reports. The work’s movements over the years have been somewhat difficult to track, but was purportedly purchased last year by collector Katsushige Susaki. (more…)

A Dutch portrait of a vegetable seller has undergone a two-year restoration, removing the smile from the figure’s face that seems to have been added in the years after the work was completed. “The frame was flaking and very dirty,” says conservator Alice Tate-Harte.“The painting had a very yellow varnish on it and dirt layers … there was an awful lot of overpainting on it too, so it wasn’t the beautiful object it could be.” (more…)

Jean Genet, Un Chant D’Amour (film still) (1950), via Metro Pictures

On now at Metro Pictures, a group show featuring the work of Reza Abdoh, Jean Genet, Nash Glynn, Torbjørn Rødland, Elliot Reed, Heji Shin, and Nora Turato, takes on an engaging notion of the dream, drawing on Freudian psychology and philosophy to explore the idea of wishes, imagined landscapes and distorted impulses as the landscape of the repressed and the taboo, a show that unfolds like a dream in its own right, and which poses its images as a set of tableaus in which the viewer is welcome to find fragments of themselves. (more…)

Artist Peter Saul has a profile in the New York Times this month, as he discusses politics, art, and his career. “I’ve always been a kind of isolated person,” he says. “I thought it was a great, luxurious thing to not have to deal with people. It’s a bad sign, mentally, but I seem to be OK. I mean, who knows? Maybe not, really. Don’t care. As long as I have a beautiful woman, I’m satisfied. I don’t need to talk to five other people.” (more…)

A Mexican man has been arrested for allegedly selling fake works by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, “As alleged, Angel Pereda attempted to sell forgeries of artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, among others, as genuine,” says Manhattan U.S. attorney Audrey Strauss. (more…)

The Siberian industrial center of Norilsk, consider one of the “most depressing cities in the world,” will get its own art museum, Art Newspaper reports. The Arctic Museum of Modern Art “will focus on an Arctic theme and will inspire global reflections not only on Norilsk but the north of Russia as a whole,” says Natalia Fedianina, the director of the Norilsk Museum Exhibition Complex. (more…)

As protests roll through Cuba, the Art Newspaper looks at the group of artists, including Tania Bruguera, who have been protesting against the government in hope of change for years. “People just got tired of being afraid,” Bruguera says, “they realized that this government only cares about staying in power.” (more…)

David Smith, Follow My Path (Installation View), via Hauser and Wirth

In a 1952 lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts, sculptor David Smith described the inspiration behind one of his recent sculptures, saying “My wish is that you travel by perception the path which I traveled in creating it. That same wish goes for the rest of my work.” Welcoming the viewer to follow that same path, Hauser & Wirth is currently presenting a body of the artist’s work at its uptown exhibition space in New York, inviting viewers to explore the artistic processes by which Smith reshaped sculpture’s form and function, embarking on new terrain in the field of abstraction. (more…)

Shirazeh Houshiary, Pneuma (Installation View), via Lisson

For the artist’s 13th exhibition with Lisson Gallery, and her first at the gallery’s Cork Street location, artist Shirazeh Houshiary is  a new body of work, the first in over a decade to exclusively focus on the artist’s paintings. Unified under the title Pneuma, the show brings together a body of works that mine both haptic and optic illusions, filling the surface of each work with a palpable energy drawn from the artist’s careful study of kinetics. (more…)

Land artist Nancy Holt’s archives have been acquired by the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives for American Art. “The depth of historical material solidifies Holt’s position as a pioneer of the movement, revealing the complex research and organizational labour involved in realizing her works, while her writings, interviews and correspondences demonstrate how Land Art was as much a discursive and media practice as a sculptural one,” says Jacob Proctor, the Smithsonian’s Gilbert and Ann Kinney New York Collector. (more…)

Damien Hirst gets an interview in The Guardian this week, as he unveils a series of new paintings. “I think the idea of being a painter has always appealed to me,” he says. “I suppose it’s that old story of Turner being strapped to a mast during a storm so he could paint it – it’s a romantic thing.” (more…)

A stolen Sigmar Polke painting has been found in a Mainz apartment. Details surrounding the work’s theft have “not yet been conclusively clarified” according to German police. (more…)

Andrew Cranston, It was your birthday (and a seagull shat on your head) (2021), via Karma

This month, Karma presents a body of recent works by the British painter Andrew Cranston, marking his first solo exhibition in New York. The artist, who creates transportive images that destabilize the viewer’s sense of time, and invite them to explore a space between nostalgia and dream, relies on dense marks of oil and subtle washes of distemper, using the material to guide the viewer through a series of relationships in space and depth. (more…)

The newest iterations of London’s Fourth Plinth installation have been announced, with a sculpture by artist Samson Kambalu, based on a 1914 photograph of the preacher and advocate for African independence John Chilembwe. The work will go on view in 2022, and will be followed in 2024 by a sculpture by Teresa Margolles that features the faces of 850 trans people, an “anti-monument” as the artist describes it, which references the violence and cultural erasure  against trans individuals worldwide. (more…)

Tom Sachs, Ritual (Installation View), via Thaddaeus Ropac

“As I create, I meditate, and the lust of acquiring a product is replaced by the love of making it.” So reads a quote by Tom Sachs as the intro to his most recent exhibition of works at Thaddaeus Ropac in London. Ritual, an exhibition of new works never previously seen in the UK, reflects this notion, bringing forth four new sculptures conceived for the exhibition in order to demonstrate the comprehensive spectrum of Sachs’ distinctive sculptural practice. Displayed on bespoke pedestals inspired by modernist shapes, each sculpture is characterized by the same bricolage aesthetic that has long defined the artist’s work, and underscores his unique sense of interrelation with the language of modern urban culture, conceptual assemblage, and the history of the avant-garde. The sculptures bear traces of their making, becoming vehicles for reflection on the creation of value and human labour. (more…)

Jonas Wood, Wimbledon with Bball Orchid (2021), via Gagosian

Just in time for Wimbledon, painter Jonas Wood has installed a selection of new works at Gagosian, paying tribute to the highest honors of the tennis circuit, the four major Grand Slam courts, and the disparate landscapes on which aspiring champions are pitted. On view through July 16th at Gagosian’s Madison Ave. exhibition space, Four Tennis Courts forms a Grand Slam of its own, in which the rigors of professional athletic competition are displaced by deft visual play. (more…)

Long-missing paintings by Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso have been found in Greece, after their disappearance from Greece’s National Gallery in 2012. “Two and a half months later, the Gallery heals its greatest wound, the wound of 2012,” Lina Mendoni, Greece’s Minister of Culture and Sports, says. “The work of the great painter, a gift to the Greek people, returns to a new Gallery that has nothing to envy from the respective museums of other European capitals.” (more…)

James Cuno will step down from his position at the head of The J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles. “It has been my honor to serve this tremendous organization, and to play a small part in expanding its mission to broaden and deepen our understanding of the human experience through the visual arts,” Cuno says of the Getty in a statement. (more…)

Jon Pylypchuk, Untitled (2021), via Petzel

How does one contend with loss? When a close friend or relative passes on, the sensation of loss seems to pervade objects, moments in time, spaces, bound up in memory and personal reflection. This sense seems to flow from the recent work of Los Angeles-based artist Jon Pylypchuk, who presents What have we missed, a solo exhibition of new sculptures at Petzel Gallery’s Uptown New York space this month.  (more…)

Karyn Olivier, PARALATUVIER (EXPANSION) (2021), via Tanya Bonakdar

Currently on at Tanya Bonakdar in New York, the gallery has opened a debut solo show by artist Karyn Olivier, At the Intersection of Two Faults. Olivier’s artistic practice merges multiple histories and collective memory with present-day narratives, manipulating familiar objects and spaces, to re-contextualize the viewer’s relationship to the ordinary. The show, featuring a range of recent works, asks the viewer to reconcile memory with conventional meanings, ultimately revealing contradictions and dualities as well as new possibilities and ideas. (more…)

Kati Heck, Macht, los (2021), via Sadie Coles HQ

In her second exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ, artist Kati Heck has brought forth a new group of paintings and drawings centered around the horse, using the animal as both historical interpolation and metaphor for human psychology.  (more…)

Jim Shaw has moved on to Gagosian, finding a new home after Metro Pictures announced its closure.

The Pompidou has tapped Laurent Le Bon, president of Musée Picasso in Paris, as the its new president. Le Bon will oversee the museum’s new outpost being built in Jersey City.  (more…)