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…)

James Turrell will unveil a new skyspace in the Colorado town of Green Mountain Falls. The work will go on view this July. (more…)

Agnes Martin, The Distillation of Color (Installation View), via Art Observed

Marking the most recent in its exhibitions from the estate of Agnes Martin, Pace Gallery’s The Distillation of Color delves back into the artist’s tightly-honed minimalism to explore her nuanced investigations of color, allowing subtle bands and hints at varied shades to pervade her works. For Martin, painting was defined by an ongoing exploration of its capacity to express a vision of beauty born of intuitive inspiration. In this most recent show, the gallery takes this concept and pushes it into the very notion of color as sensation.  (more…)

Rachel Libeskind at Signs and symbols, via Art Observed

After a year off, the New Art Dealers Alliance has relaunched its ongoing New York exhibition project, the third edition of NADA House, returning to Governors Island with 66 galleries, non-profits, artist-run spaces, and curators, presenting over 100 artists. The collaborative, public exhibition, now open and running through to August, continues in an expanded format, with gallery presentations in over 50 rooms in three neighboring turn-of-the-century colonial revival buildings.

Ken Grimes at Ricco/Maresca Gallery via Art Observed

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Wangechi Mutu (Installation View), via Gladstone

Entering Gladstone Gallery in New York, artist Wangechi Mutu’s surreal, serpentine sculptures greet the viewer with a mixture of minimalist, elegant beauty and unnerving, otherworldly poise, somewhere between lyrical, classical sculpture and the surreal forms of H.R. Giger. Drawing upon her sculptural practice, a core aspect of her work, this installation brings to life otherworldly alternatives to the systemic modes of representation portrayed throughout global traditions in art. Through an incisive re-examination of relations between the body, the natural world, and social forces, the works in this exhibition represent a new kind of hybridized humanity and iconography through the artist’s intuitive and forward-thinking eye.

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Rashid Johnson at Hauser & Wirth, via Art Observed

Over a year since the last iteration of the Frieze art fair took place in Los Angeles, and coming down on the other side of the turbulence of the last year under the Covid-19 pandemic, Frieze New York has touched down at The Shed on Manhattan’s West Side, a re-entry into the annual run of blue-chip events that have been few and far between, or confined to an online edition for the last year. Here, with an abundance of caution and a range of measures put in place to limit the number of attendees in the space at a given time, the fair still made something of a return to its old form.  (more…)

A 1917 Egon Schiele restituted by Museum Ludwig in Cologne will go on sale at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern sale May 12th in New York, with an estimate of $2.5 million–$3.5 million. (more…)