The Museum of Modern Art has officially filed its $1.6 million plan to demolish the former home of the American Folk Art Museum to expand its midtown campus. The announcement comes almost a year after the Museum announced its initial plans to raze the building, after purchasing the building in 2011 for $31.2 million. (more…)
An agreement between Cornelius Gurlitt and the German government was announced on Monday, which gives state-appointed investigators one year to analyze the works seized from Mr. Gurlitt’s home. The deal bypasses the German statute of limitations for stolen property (30 years), and shows the government’s increased willingness to deal with claims over works looted during the Nazi era. “We are dealing with a top-class team of experts, and given Mr. Gurlitt’s advanced age and frail health, it can be expected that they should be able to complete their work within this time frame,” says spokesman Stephan Holzinger. (more…)
More information is being released on the upcoming Damien Hirst biography, the Art Newspaper reports. The book, which will see release next year, will include a look at Hirst’s early work curating the now famed show Freeze in London’s docklands, and the Sensation show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. (more…)
The Guardian has published an imaginative profile on Marcel Duchamp, noting some of the artist’s quirks and passions, including his avid chess-playing, his daring transportation of his art materials out of Nazi Germany posing as a cheese vendor, and his takes on quickly produced artworks: “Quick art, that’s been the characteristic of the whole century from the cubists on, ” he once said. “The speed that’s being used in space, in communications, is also being used in art. But things of great importance in art have always to be slowly produced.” (more…)
Damien Loeb, Tycho (2013), via Acquavella
Acquavella is currently showing a rare exhibition of new works by painter Damien Loeb, featuring a series of paintings and sketches created over the past year, and focusing on Planet Earth’s unique position in the solar system. Titled SOL-D, the series of oil paintings and sketches take their inspiration from a series of photographs Loeb made over the past decade, digital images captured on airplane flights, stargazing, and satellite images that document the celestial atmospheres of Earth and beyond. (more…)
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has named Tom Finkelpearl, current executive director of the Queens Museum, as the city’s cultural-affairs commissioner. “He’s a visionary museum director,” says Robin Cembalest of ARTnews magazine. “You need an advocate to come out to explain how art can help people, create communities. He totally fits.” (more…)
Artist Bridget Riley has revealed a special painting commission for the Imperial College Healthcare Charity Art Collection, painting the 10th floor hallways of the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother hospital building in London with her signature parallel lines and bright colors. “It reminds patients that theirs is a transitory state,” Riley says. “That they are there to recover and rejoin life – that life goes on, and life is outside, and they feel reassured.” (more…)
Haim Steinbach, basics (1986), All Images Courtesy Serpentine Gallery
The Serpentine Gallery in London is currently presenting once again the world is flat., an exhibition celebrating Haim Steinbach’s forty-year career as a multimedia artist. Born in Israel and living in New York, Steinbach has presented a distinctive artistic practice by redefining what ‘collecting’ is, arranging familiar daily objects in his own methods while attributing further content and ground, allow the artist to invite viewers into extended readings on what is visible, but also on what lies beneath the surface of the work. (more…)
Sotheby’s saw impressive results this weekend at its Modern and Contemporary Asian Art auction in Hong Kong, with total sales topping $86 million. World Record prices were achieved for 8 artists up for bidding that night, including a $12.1 price tag for Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline: Big Family No. 3. (more…)
Artist Xu Zhen is profiled on Nowness this week, following the artist’s commission at the Armory Show last month. Giving a rare tour of his studio, Xu offers a perspective on his working style and his company, MadeIn, which produces the artist’s work as part of a broader creative project. “I’m not confined to working in any specific medium,” Xu says. “I think concept is more important.” (more…)
The Park Avenue Armory will extend its annual residency program this year, dedicating 10 rooms on its second floor to a group of artists including New Yorker writer Sasha Frere-Jones, percussionist Ulysses Owens, Jr., dancers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey, and artist/choreographer Jason Akira Somma, among others. “We are thrilled to be able to expand our program and to dedicate our entire second floor to our Artist-in- Residence program, allowing artists working in such a rich variety of genres, and at different points in their career, to explore and present new ideas,” says President and Executive Producer Rebecca Robertson. (more…)
The New York Times has published an expansive gallery guide for the spring art season, profiling a selection of new shows, young galleries and interesting works across Brooklyn, Chelsea, Soho and both the Upper and Lower East Side. Among the editors picks are Clearing Gallery in Bushwick, Participant Inc. downtown, and Franklin Parrasch uptown. (more…)
He Xiangyu, Wisdom Tower (2012-2013), all images courtesy White Cube Bermondsey
At White Cube Berdmonsey’s North Galleries is the first UK exhibition of work by Chinese artist He Xiangyu, composed of installations and multimedia sculptures meant to express cultural and social concerns while maintaining an ongoing interest in the body and its place in exchanges between the two.
Claes Oldenburg, Model for a Mahogany Plug, Scale B (1969), via Art Observed
On view through April 12 at Hauser and Wirth Gallery’s 18th Street location is a selection of works collected by Reinhardt Onnasch, one of the first German art dealers to open a gallery in New York after World War II, and a skilled curator who helped to launch the career of a number of New York’s most definitive post-war artists. Re-view: Onnasch Collection provides a glimpse into the work done by this collector and enthusiast, reflecting overlapping art movements that bridged the American and German art worlds of the time.
Cosmopolitan Casino in Las Vegas will be showing a selection of LED installations by Tracey Emin, featuring animated versions of the artist’s illuminated text works scrawling themselves across the building’s enormous screens. “It’s fantastic that the hotel wants to do this,” Emin says. “It’s not about selling things. It’s about love.” (more…)
Following the resolution of his court case against photographer Patrick Cariou, Richard Prince’s Canal Series will return to Gagosian Gallery this May. The last showing of the works, in 2008, generated more than $10 million in sales, and Larry Gagosian will look to achieve high sales again. “Because of the litigation, everything was frozen,” Gagosian said in a telephone interview. “The art had to be put in storage. We couldn’t sell the catalog. But now that the air has cleared, it seemed like a good moment to take another look at the work.” (more…)
Angolan millionaire Rui Costa Reis has reportedly made a offer to purchase the nation of Portugal’s collection of works by Joan Miró, making a 44 million euro offer for the collection of 85 paintings. The works were previously made for sale in February, but the offering was canceled after strong protests in Portugal. Barring a sale, the works will reportedly be on the auction block at Christie’s in London this June. (more…)
Amalia Ulman, Used & New (Installation View), via LTD Gallery
Used & New, the Argentinian-born Amalia Ulman’s current solo show at Los Angeles gallery LTD, explores the slippery relations between consumerism, gender and class. A participant in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s and Simon Castets’ 89plus initiative, the young artist has quickly become known for an art practice that, with a deceptive slightness, investigates the way in which objects are mobilized towards shaping and maintaining social status. By paying close attention to the aesthetic patterns of consumer stratification from the vantage point of economic lack, Ulman’s work proposes a way of looking at the impact that the design, contour and flow of cheap, globalized production have on the gendered construction of the self.
Amalia Ulman, Accepting Donations (Thank you) (2014), via LTD Gallery (more…)
The Guardian has published an in-depth look at the early work of Thierry Noir, one of the first graffiti artists to paint on the Berlin Wall during the 1980’s. In the profile, Noir recounts his taunting of West German guards, his developing style, and his meeting with Keith Haring, who painted over one of Noir’s works. “I talked to Keith and he was embarrassed and apologized,” Noir writes. “He said: ‘In New York you can get killed for that’. He was invited over and the section of Wall had been pre-prepared for him. The yellow was very transparent so you could see my statues through it. I was angry, but it was not his fault.” (more…)
Robert Longo is profiled in the Wall Street Journal this week, in advance of the artist’s pair of upcoming shows in New York, on view at Petzel and Metro Pictures. “The shows are interconnected in lots of personal ways—and lots of socially and politically relevant ways,” he says. “They’re more about drawing than anything else. In the past, many of my drawings were displayed behind glass, so a lot of people think they’re just photographs. This time, without the plexiglass, you can see the drawing more.” (more…)
Walead Beshty, Selected Bodies of Work (Installation View), all photos by Brian Forrest, all images Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Currently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles is an exhibition of new work by L.A.-based English photographer, writer and sculptor Walead Beshty, featuring photographs, sculptures, ceramics, and collages surrounding a theme of bodies and labor, specifically in relation to the physical process of art making.
A new lawsuit in the ongoing Knoedler Gallery investigation has drawn Swiss art historian and curator Oliver Wick of the Kunsthaus Zurich into the fray, holding him allegedly responsible for the sale of a $7.2 million forged Rothko to casino owner Frank J. Fertitta III. Wick was paid a $300,000 consulting fee by the Gallery for his opinion that the work was original, and also showed the piece at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, where he was working at the time. (more…)
Matthew Barney is in the Spring issue of BOMB Magazine, speaking with Director Gaspar Noé about the pair’s shared love of Kubrick, comparisons between past work and their latest projects, and their interests in realism versus spontaneity. “The aspect of filmmaking that I’m most interested in has to do with creating a live condition,” Barney says, “where something is actually happening in real time, and then filming in response to that… It’s not a very economical way of making a film—to set those situations up and shoot them in real time and then edit it all down.” (more…)
The plans seem to be moving forward for the Helsinki branch of the Guggenheim Museum, as the institution is reportedly launching an open competition to design the new space, co-organized with the Finnish Association of Architects. (more…)
