Tacita Dean has an interview in The Guardian this week, detailing her recent work and time during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Well, you have all this free time,” she says, “and you think, ‘How am I going to use it? Am I going to be one of these people who makes a drawing every day?’ And of course I wasn’t. I was useless!” (more…)

Sprüth Magers now represents the estate of John Baldessari, the gallery announced this week.“Monika [Sprüth] and I had the unique pleasure of working with John since the late 1980s, and his work has remained a cornerstone of Sprüth Magers’ presentations of cutting-edge international artists for over thirty years, cementing his crucial importance both to our work and to global audiences,” says Philomene Magers. “As we established our Berlin, London and Los Angeles galleries, we regularly presented his ever-evolving and inventive projects.”” (more…)

Brooklyn Museum employees are moving towards a vote on forming a union, adding the institution to a list of museums with ongoing unionization efforts. ““Unionizing is an extension of our existing institutional commitment to nurturing a diverse community of talent,” says Akane Okoshi, a researcher at the museum, said. “Our ability to advance the Brooklyn Museum’s professed institutional goals of creating a more connected, civic, and empathic world is contingent on the passion and labor of workers.” (more…)

Laurence des Cars will become the first female president of The Louvre this year, the New York Times reports. “A great museum must face history, including by looking back at the history of our own institutions,” she says. (more…)

François Pinault gets a profile in the New York Times this week, as he opens his Bourse de Commerce museum in Paris, and reflects on his long patronage of contemporary art.“It’s impossible that we have become so stupid today that there are no human beings alive capable of creating tomorrow’s masterpieces,” he says. (more…)

Paloma Varga Weisz, Bumpman on Tree (2021), via National Gallery

As the summer months begin in earnest, the newest iteration of proposals for London’s Fourth Plinth Art Installation have gone on view, with a series of six maquettes going on view at the National Gallery as well as online, with organizers welcoming the public to share their views and opinions on the options put forth.

Teresa Margolles, Improntas (2021), via National Gallery

The works range in concept and materials, subject matter and politics, and explore a range of both specific situations and fantastical other worlds. There’s the sobering sculpture presented by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, a series of casts of the faces of trans women, representing the plight of sexual violence and murder that has threatened so many. Arranged on a rack structure resembling a Mesoamerican Tzompantli (which displayed human skulls), the work makes plain histories of violence that threaten marginalized voices around the world. Another work proposing specific historical scenarios, On Hunger and Farming in the Skies of the Past 1957-1966 by Ibrahim Mahama presents a model of former grain silos constructed by eastern European architects in Ghana during the early 1960s, hearkening back to an era of new promise for the country prior to the violent overthrow of its government.

Samson Kambalu, Antelope (2021), via National Gallery

Other works offer a more otherworldy point of entry. Polish artist Goshka Macuga, for instance, has created a giant rocket  sculpture,  encouraging viewers to look up towards outer space, and to remember a basic human drive towards inquiry and understanding. Somewhere in the middle is the work of Nicole Eisenman, a lumpen iteration of a jewelry tree, covered with mementoes that reference both the UK’s own politically fraught history, and a surreal environment of her own making, colliding on a surface that repositions Trafalgar Square’s plinth as a dresser-top for the world around it.

Ibrahim Mahama, On Hunger and Farming in the Skies of the Past 1957-1970 (2021), via National Gallery

Other works come from the Malawi-born Samson Kambalu, whose work restages a photograph of John Chilembwe, a Baptist pastor who led an uprising against colonizers in his home country,  while the German artist Paloma Varga Weisz also poses a monumental tribute, albeit to a body not yet envisioned, a figure called Bumpman that draws on the idea of human insecurity and frailty.

The selections will be announced later this year, with options picked for both 2022 and 2024.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
The Fourth Plinth [Exhibition Site]

The estate of Robert Ryman will join David Zwirner, the gallery announced this week. “Ryman, to me, is a singular artist, among the most important of his generation,” Zwirner said in a statement. “I am looking forward to presenting his work in the context of our program.” (more…)

Cuban artists have asked that their works shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana be covered in protest against the arrest of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. A statement reads that the the group is “alarmed by the fact that Luis Manuel has been held incommunicado for more than three weeks, hospitalized against his will, without access to telephone or visits from relatives he is close to, as well as friends, and colleagues.” (more…)

The Canadian National Gallery has received an anonymous $3 million donation to help maintain its pavilion at the Venice Biennale. “The donor wanted the focus to be on Dr. Thomson and Dr. Thomson’s time at the gallery,” said Barbara Stead-Coyle, director of the National Gallery Foundation. “They felt if their name was released the story might become about them.” (more…)

David Zwirner Gallery has launched Platform, an online art sales platform offering work by younger and upcoming artists and smaller galleries following a click to buy model.  “We learned there is a real place in the art world for e-commerce,” Zwirner said in a recent telephone interview. “There is an audience out there we did not know existed. They don’t go to galleries necessarily and they don’t really go to art fairs. They look at things online.” (more…)

The Broad Museum is planning to reopen with a showing of all its collected Basquiat works. “To know they’re going to have them all out is exciting for young people,” says curator and former Broad tour guide A.J. Girard. “Eli should be super-celebrated. He had the works and exhibited the works.” (more…)

Romanian politicians are fighting to curb copyright restrictions on the work of Constantin Brancusi, seeking to place work in the public domain so as to earn the country profit on likenesses and images of the artist’s works. “Although Romania acceded to the European Union in 2007, the legislator also took into account the provisions of [the EU’s 1996 law, including] the existence of the protection period of 70 years, calculated from 1 January of the year following the one when the death of the author occurred,” reads a court filing. (more…)

TEFAF Maastricht has cancelled its 2021 edition, the fair announced the week. “TEFAF is focused on gathering our community of dealers, collectors, and vendors for our signature fair experience in a physical setting as soon as circumstances allow,”  says chairman Hidde van Seggelen. “In the meantime, we are excited to present a new and improved edition of TEFAF Online this September, and look forward to coming together in Maastricht for TEFAF’s 35th anniversary next March.”

Artist Theaster Gates will be the first non-architect to design the Serpentine Pavilion next year. The artist has not yet released a design concept, but will be unveiling his work as part of the museum’s ongoing summer series. (more…)

A Wassily Kandinsky work lost for 70 years will go on sale next month in Germany. “Many Kandinsky experts did research into the work, however, its exact appearance and whereabouts remained a mystery for decades. The only hint came from the catalogue raisonné of Vivian Endicott Barnett: a tiny sketch made from memory inscribed ‘Location: Unknown,” says auctioneer Robert Ketterer. (more…)

With the reopening of museums in Paris, François Pinault’s long-awaited Bourse de Commerce museum has opened to the public. “Now it’s a much more balanced art scene, it’s a kind of ecosystem in which private and public can work together,” says director Martin Bethenod of the private museum. (more…)

Georg Baselitz, Springtime of the Black Mountain Lake (2020), via Gagosian

Throughout his career, Georg Baselitz has combined a direct and provocative approach to making art with an openness to art historical lineages, pulling together a range of art historical signifiers from the history of both modernism and postmodernism, and unifying a range of expressive techniques in the depiction of the body and the experience of paint on canvas. Continually revisiting his iconic inverted figure, the artist’s work has repeatedly explored reinvention and renewal, and takes on that same thematic in his new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery. (more…)

Employees at the Whitney Museum have filed a petition requesting a union vote, the NYT notes. “We believe in the institution,” says Karissa Francis, a visitor services assistant and union organizer. “And we believe that if our voices are heard the quality of our lives will be better.” (more…)

Frieze will launch a new fair in Seoul, the institution announced today, confirming a long-rumored move to the South Korean capital. “Seoul is a natural home for Frieze with its extraordinary artists, galleries, museums and collections,” says Board Director Victoria Siddall. “I am thrilled that it will be the location for our new fair, Frieze Seoul.” (more…)

Sotheby’s has moved  two of its top specialists, Alex Branczik and Max Moore, to new positions at the house’s Hong Kong location. “Asia is our highest growth region at Sotheby’s, and there is immense potential for further expansion in Modern and Contemporary Art,” says Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart. (more…)

Damien Hirst, Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures (Installation View), via Gagosian

Kicking off the run of Damien Hirst projects at Gagosian’s London space on Britannia Street, the latest iteration, Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures presents Hirst as artist and curator, presenting this deeply personal series of work through his own eyes, and exploring a diverse range of subjects and concepts that have run through the series and subjects of the artist’s career. Balanced in the middle of a perpetual confrontation between the contrasting systems of belief that define human existence, from common trust in medicine to the seduction of consumerism, Hirst’s work feels particularly timely in the midst of the ongoing challenges and trauma of Covid-19.  (more…)

With Metro Pictures closing, Pace Gallery will now represent Robert Longo in the United States and Europe, showing his work in conjunction with Thaddaeus Ropac. “Robert speaks in the language of memory, marked down in velvet in sheets of charcoal and iconographically reconstituted in brilliant Black and White,” says Marc Glimcher. (more…)

Pedro Reyes, Tlali (Installation View), via Lisson

Pedro Reyes returns to Lisson Gallery in New York this month with Tlali, an impressively dense and exploratory exhibition that a new series of sculptures and works on paper drawn from the language and symbols of Pre-Columbian civilizations. Drawing on the history and social economies of the Aztec language Nahuatl, the show turns a local historical and linguistic thread into a broader reflection on the state of the world and the broader political and social landscape of modernity.  (more…)

The Guardian interviews Tracey Emin this week, as the artist showcases a series of new works she made while undergoing cancer treatment. “I say something and it’s considered to be ‘a confession,’” she says. “I’m not confessing that I had cancer, I’m not confessing that I’ve got a urostomy bag. I have had cancer and I have a urostomy bag. It’s a statement.” (more…)