The Guggenheim Bilbao is crowdfunding €100,000 to restore Jeff Koons’s sculpture Puppy.  “The museum has chosen to enlist the collaboration of society to ensure that this beloved and representative work will remain in great condition for the next 25 years,” a museum statement reads. (more…)

Paul Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (2017), via Nathalie Karg

Opening a new summer group show centered around self-portraiture, Nathalie Karg’s Mirror, Mirror executes a series of explorations on perceived identity as a slippery experience, an unreliable form or concept that is constantly challenged and reified within the photographic medium. Featuring new and recent works of self-portraiture by Whitney Hubbs, Tommy Kha, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Ilona Szwarc, the show explores self-presentation as self-creation, a hallmark of the social media age.  (more…)

Alice Neel, Andy Warhol (1970), via Art Observed

Over the course of her career, one might say that Alice Neel did her best to paint everyone, embracing a wide-ranging and exploratory approach to portraiture that invited countless figures up to her home in Upper Manhattan. Capturing neighbors, friends, art world luminaries and other figures, Neel’s work brought the full spectrum of New York’s residents into a single body of work. Now at The Met, the artist’s work, and the city that birthed it, gets their due attention. (more…)

Peter Fischli, RELIEFS (Monkey 21) (2021), via Spruth Magers

In his wide-ranging oeuvre, artist Peter Fischli carefully observes and draws from the everyday world to create sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that address similar concerns to those explored as part of his collaborative practice with his late collaborator David Weiss. The artist’s work, so often centered around often overlooked, quotidian aspects of everyday life, sees him posing that same in an experimental and humorous way. For his most recent show, Fischli takes that interest towards a pair of specific models.  (more…)

After delays, Christo’s ambitious wrapping project for the Arc de Triomphe will launch in September. “More than a year after Christo’s death, Paris is continuing the work of this great artist,” says Says Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo. “It is an opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to him and to defend our attachment to contemporary creation.” (more…)

Interpol has launched a new app to help identify stolen art.  “It’s a concrete tool for police and customs—and for museums and private individuals,” says Corrado Catesi, who heads Interpol’s Works of Art Unit. “It is not the panacea, but it can really help.” (more…)

Artist Dorothea Rockburne is suing her upstairs neighbor, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo over irreparable damage to a series of her early works, after Costolo’s leaky plumbing flooded into the artist’s loft. “I watched helplessly as the water poured down over the cabinet and onto my early work,’’ she says. (more…)

Phyllida Barlow has been awarded damehood during the Queen’s annual Birthday events in the UK, Art Newspaper reports. Ceramicist Edmund de Waal was also awarded a CBE. (more…)

Hauser & Wirth will open a second Los Angeles space in West Hollywood, the LA Times reports. “Since the beginning, we always thought of L.A. as a city where we would love to have more than one location,” says President Marc Payot. “We really expect L.A. to come back to its full bloom after the pandemic, and this is really the next step for us. It’s first and foremost a commitment to L.A.” (more…)

The 2022 Venice Biennale will take the title “The Milk of Dreams,” taking its name from work by the writer Leonora Carrington. “Carrington’s stories describe a world set free, brimming with possibilities,” says curator Cecelia Alemani says. “But [the book] is also the allegory of a century that imposed intolerable pressure on the individual, forcing Carrington into a life of exile: locked up in mental hospitals, an eternal object of fascination and desire, yet also a figure of startling power and mystery.”  (more…)

The future of a Keith Haring mural painted in a former nightclub is unclear as the owners plan a demolition to build an elderly care facility. “This painting should stay where it is,” says DJ Cesar de Melero. “First it was in a night club, then a billiard hall, now a care home. Why not?” (more…)

Satoshi Kojima, Catch Me if You Can (2020), via Bridget Donahue

Painter Satoshi Kojima has returned to Bridget Donahue this month for another exhibition of his strange, ephemeral compositions, a series of surreal, swirling landscapes and figures suspended in a bold, cartoonish world. Welcoming strange engagements with the fabric of the everyday, the artist opens the door on a new way of experiencing reality, twisting urban landscapes and historical constructions into each unique canvases.  (more…)

A piece in Art Newspaper details the Italian Carabinieri’s use of drones to prevent theft of cultural and heritage works. Italy is currently reporting a drop in stolen works due to new efforts and to the recent pandemic.  (more…)

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will launch a $125 million plan to help support and aid the arts economy in New York. “The artists whose work helps to sustain us have faced particularly devastating circumstances resulting from unemployment, underemployment, and a lack of predictable paid incomes,” Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander said in a statement. “It’s critical for the vibrancy of our cities that we recognize that making art is work.” (more…)

The Centre Pompidou is opening its first North American satellite in Jersey City, the NYT reports. “Our idea is to be confronted with what is very different,” says president Serge Lasvignes. “For us, it’s a way to learn — to learn new circumstances, a new way of presenting art, a new way of presenting exhibitions.” (more…)

Artist Bridget Riley gets an interview in the BBC this week, as the artist turns 90. “I held a mirror up to human nature and reported faithfully,” she says. (more…)

Ai Weiwei will open a major show in Lisbon this year, and is making plans to move to the city permanently, the AP reports. “I have a great feeling” he says. “This is a place I’m staying.” (more…)

Art Basel will return this September, the Swiss fair has confirmed, with VIP services that include video tours of the event. “It is a bespoke 1:1 service. The Show Experience Assistant arranges a zoom, or other communication channel depending on the VIP, and helps them view specific works and discover artists and presentations, as well as facilitate introductions to specific galleries,” a spokesperson says. (more…)

Gerhard Richter, Cage 4 (2006), via Gagosian

Currently on view at Gagosian’s New York exhibition space, Gerhard Richter reprises his series of Cage paintings, previously shown at the gallery’s Los Angeles exhibition space, and in his expansive Met Museum retrospective, Painting After All. Throughout his career, Richter has navigated between naturalism and abstraction, painting and photography, exploring the conceptual, historical, and material implications of various mediums without ideological restraint. For this body of works, first painted in 2006, the artist renders a series of immense works created using his pioneering squeegee techniques.  (more…)

Artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara was released from a Havana hospital this week following a hunger strike. “After a month in the hands of the beast, we’ll see how things go in the streets to continue the struggle,” he said.  (more…)

Sunjung Kim, head of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, will leave the organization after a labor dispute. “Contrary to the international reputation of Gwangju Biennale, the staff has been suffering from the president’s lack of leadership, the lack of principles and transparency in operations, as well as the abandonment of duty and abuse of authority by the head of the HR team,” a union rep says. (more…)

A new survey of museum directors shows that 15% of museum directors have said there is a significant risk of closing permanently. “The museum field will take years to recover to pre-pandemic levels of staffing, revenue and community engagement,” says Laura Lott, president and chief executive of the American Alliance of Museums. She continues: “far fewer museums than expected are in danger of permanent closure.” (more…)

The Whitney has formally recognized its union, Art News reports. “I do think that the Whitney is genuinely trying to create a community of people that want to be there,” says union leader Karissa Francis. “But a lot of what you think you’re doing right as a company doesn’t work for your employees. Unionizing allows for a reshuffling of priorities for these institutions and [shines] a light on some blind spots that they maybe didn’t even realize they had.” (more…)

Julie Curtiss, Lobby (2020), via White Cube

Joining White Cube for her first exhibition in London, painter Julie Curtiss has brought forth a selection of new compositions, sculptures and works on paper that emphasize the artist’s artful and attentive sense of composition, using framing and cropping to accentuate her cinematic, and often humorous sense of the absurd. Drawing on saturated colors, crisp detail, and scenarios which are at once banal and bizarre, her pieces exude a dreamlike quality, and make for a fitting introduction to the artist’s work. (more…)