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…)

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…)