Elmgreen & Dragset, The Stag, 2012, courtesy Victoria Miro

Elmgreen & Dragset’s Harvest is a unique twin exhibition divided into two coexisting halves, presented on the upstairs and downstairs of the Victoria Miro gallery in London.

The lower half of the gallery presents a banal, almost “mock tranquillity”, exhibiting sheets of paint that have been carefully peeled from notorious art galleries from all over the world and are named retroactively. The works both pay homage to the galleries’ ability to facilitate the work, yet simultaneously mock the uniformity and pedantic nature of art culture. The installation on this floor plays on the irony of a modern art exhibition space: consistent, precise, conforming; yet the works that lie within are anything but.

To reinforce the subliminal jest upon which Elmgreen & Dragset have built their career, the upstairs of the installation is completely paradoxical to the work from which it ascends. What can only be described as a barn awaits the unaware viewer, the immediate submergence of hay forcing him to interact with the installation.

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Forbes interviews Lisson Gallery‘s Nicholas Logsdail about the gallery, the market and the exhibition in London of new works by Anish Kapoor, marking 30 years of the partnership between the gallery and the artist. He says Kapoor’s work is special because “in very simple terms, his work is profound, beautiful, timeless and outside of politics or national boundaries. It is about the very essence of our being – the body, and the human psyche”. (more…)

The New York Times reports on the rising wealth in Singapore and its interest in arts and culture; a particular example at the Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore. Over 4,200 paintings and sculptures are on view to the public in the hotel. “Moby Dick,” a fiberglass sculpture the hotel commissioned by Frank Stella, hangs in the lobby. The corporate collection includes work by Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Henry Moore. The four Kwee brothers, whose company owns the hotel, are known to be one of Singapore’s wealthiest families. They started by displaying their private collection in the hotel and then went on to commission 350 artworks for the site. (more…)

London auction week ended with a £12.2 million sale at Phillips de Pury & Co., below the total presale estimate of £15m-£22 million. In other news about the auction house, several newspapers also reported that it plans to move its headquarters into 30 Berkeley Square as a tenant to the new owner, Mercury, a Russian luxury goods company which reportedly paid £100m in the sale of the property. Phillips, however, has not issued any statement about the move. (more…)

Image: Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1994 via Sotheby’s
Estimate: £9,000,000 – 12,000,000
Sold for: £21,321,250

Sotheby’s just concluded its evening Postwar & Contemporary sale in London on October 12th with a sale total of £44,146,350 ($70,793,087),  the highest total of the three auction houses this week.

Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild, 1994 from the collection of Eric Clapton set a record price at £21,321,250 ($34,297,363). Alongside this work, the second cover lot of the sale was Yves Klein’s RE 9-I from the artist’s most sought-after series: the Relief éponge, which sold for  £3,737,250 with premium.

Image: Yves Klein, RE 9-I, 1961 via Sotheby’s
Estimate: £2,000,000 – 3,000,000
Sold for: £3,737,250

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Josef Albers, Color Study for White Line Square, Courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum

Now on view at the Morgan Library & Museum are German-born American artist and educator Josef Albers’ studies and sketches for his most well-known series of work, Homage to the Square. Approximately eighty oil sketches on paper show Albers’ artistic process, thoughts and reasoning behind the iconic paintings.

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Toby Ziegler‘s The Cripples, image via Art Observed

Back in 2003 in Frieze’s first year, no major international art fair had ever been hosted in London before. Frieze Art Fair, organized by Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, has helped take London from being a city without a focused art scene to its current state at the center of the European art market. Now in its tenth year, Frieze Art Fair in London’s Regent’s Park has seen around 60,000 visitors, with 264 dealers from 35 countries hoping to sell work (valuing an estimated  £230m) created by more than 2,400 artists within 175 of the world’s leading galleries.

An Aaron Young motorcycle burn out work at Massimo de Carlo in Milan, photo via Art Observed

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The Wall Street Journal interviews Larry Gagosian as Gagosian Gallery prepares to open a 17,760-square-foot space near Le Bourget airport in northern Paris, designed by Jean Nouvel.  He discusses the gallery’s expansion and the state of the market: “I don’t feel like we’re in a bubble, but the nature of bubbles is that you never see them.” (more…)

Galerie Perrotin and Dominique Levy announced separately that each will open their respective galleries at 909 Madison Avenue in 2013.  Galerie Perrotin has a 10-year lease on 4,300 sq feet of the former Bank of New York building on Madison and 73rd Street. Dominique Levy, co-founder of L&M Arts, will open her own gallery focusing on postwar and contemporary art. Levy said in a press release that her gallery space will occupy the second, third and fourth floors. Other galleries that have recently expanded include Gagosian in a suburb of Paris; Pace, Zwirner and Michael Werner in London and Lehmann Maupin in Hong Kong. (more…)

Image: Sand of the Cosmic Desert in Every Direction, James Rosenquist, 2012. Art © James Rosenquist / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Spending much of his career exploring cultural and political themes, James Rosenquist takes an introspective approach in his show Multiverse You Are, I Am at Acquavella Galleries through October 13th.  Deeply affected by the brush fire that destroyed his Florida studio and personal collection in August 2009, the event acts as a catalyst for the exhibition. “There is no geometry in fire, only wildness and no logic,” states Rosenquist, whose works on display reflect a fascination with time, space, and chaos.

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Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), 5 Türen II (5 Doors II) via Christie’s
Sold for: £2,169,250 ($3,466,462)
Estimate: £1,500,000 – £2,000,000 ($2,397,000 – $3,196,000)

Postwar & Contemporary Evening Sale
Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction on October 11th realized a sale total, including buyer’s premium, of  £23,177,900 ($37,158,809) with 47 of 64 lots sold. The Evening Auction featured three artists whose work has not previously been included in an evening sale: Idris Khan, Rebecca Warren and Jonathan Wateridge.  It also included a group of important self-portraits by Martin Kippenberger that include his seminal work on canvas Untitled (from the series Hand-Painted Pictures), twelve self-portraits on paper and his sculpture Immer an der Wand Beißen bei Susan.  Also notable was Gerhard Richter’s 5 Türen II (above), a masterwork from 1967 which has never been at auction or offered privately. 5 Türen II is related in theme to 5 Türen I (1967), which is at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.  The auction also highlighted figurative sculpture from the early 80s onward.

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Image:  Peter Doig, Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.), 2010-2012, Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery

In the inauguration of Michael Werner Gallery’s new location, an exhibition of new works by Turner Prize nominee and Wolfgang Hahn Prize recipient Peter Doig opened on September 27th (his first solo exhibition in London since 2008) at 22 Upper Brook Street in Mayfair, London.

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Image: Richard Tuttle, Systems, VIII-XII (Installation View), Courtesy Pace Gallery

Richard Tuttle’s series of “Systems” sculptures is an ongoing project, an attempt at expanding the physical scope of Tuttle’s past sculptural works, while striving to maintain a sense of intimacy throughout.  Assembled out of wood, cloth, metal, wool and Styrofoam, Tuttle’s sculptures constantly play with the familiarity of the subject matter, tweaking familiar shapes and textures with flourishes of the surreal to create a startlingly fresh visual language.  (more…)

The Art Institute of Chicago is selling about $100 million of taxable and tax-exempt bonds to meet pension obligations, refinancing its debt and re-examining its capital structure. The Museum, under Morgan Stanley, will issue about $61 million of tax-exempt debt as $40 million of taxable bonds, which will mature from 2013 to 2040. The funds will be used “without limitation” to finance “accelerating funding to the Institute’s unfunded pension-benefit obligations”, said the museum. (more…)

Image: Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1977
oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in
ESTIMATE £2,500,000 – 3,500,000
SOLD AT £2,449,250

Phillips de Pury & Co. realized £12,223,600 ($19,565,094) in its Contemporary Evening sale in London on October 10th, with 24 of 37 lots sold. Notable sales were a Basquiat entitled Big Joy from 1984, sold just above its low estimate at £2,617,250 including premium ($4,189,170), and a Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild from 1977, which sold for £2,449,250 ($3,920,269), with a presale estimate of £2,500,000-3,500,000 ($4,001,500 – $5,602,100). (more…)

Magnus af Petersens will take the post of chief curator of Whitechapel Gallery. Petersens has served as head of exhibitions at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm for the past 6 years. He also notably curated the Nordic Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Petersens will replace Achim Borchardt-Hume, who will take on the role of head of exhibitions at the Tate Modern. (more…)

Restoration has been scheduled to begin on the Carracci Gallery in the Palazzo Farnese, a Baroque masterpiece primarily executed by Annibale Carracci. The monumental frescos and stucco frames date to the early 17th century. Restorers are now bidding on the project, which is scheduled to start in January and take one year to complete. The joint Italian-French project, expected to cost about $1.5 million, was funded by the World Monuments Fund and other arts patrons. (more…)

One of Monet‘s Waterlilies paintings from 1905 will be auctioned at Christie’s on November 7th, with a presale estimate of $30 – $50 million. The piece is being auctioned by the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, NY with the help of Herb Allen, whose father  had donated the piece to the school (his alma mater). The school will also consign paintings by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, bequeathed to it by the Allen family. Christie’s expects to bring in at least $2.5 million each for the Pissarro and Sisley pictures. (more…)

Julian Weissman, who settled a lawsuit for selling a fake Motherwell last year is once again being sued for a sale of another allegedly fake painting by the same artist from the same consignor – Glafira Rosales. Weissman sold the piece in 2004 to Sheikha Paula Al-Sabah of Kuwait, who claims that Weissman told her the previous owner was an anonymous Swiss-Jewish collector. The sheikha paid $350,000 for the painting and is seeking $3 million in compensatory damages and have not specified the amount in punitive damages. (more…)

Image: Installation shot, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, “Wild Mood Swings,” 2009-10 – Nihilistic Optimistic, all images courtesy of the artists and Blain|Southern, Photographer: Peter Mallet

After the private viewing this evening in London, Nihilistic Optimistic, a sculptural illustration of oppositional and complementary forces by Tim Noble & Sue Webster – their first major solo exhibition in London since 2006 – will open to the public on October 10th  at Blain Southern Gallery in London’s Hanover Square. Six large-scale sculptures constructed from wood scraps and other discarded materials, “fracturing things up – splintering things. So the mind has to wander in a different way…” continues the artists’ “investigation of self-portraiture.”

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Sotheby’s Hong Kong autumn sales saw a 37% decline from the same period last year as the Chinese economy slows. 27% of lots in the Contemporary sale went unsold. China accounted for almost 44% of global auction revenue last year, as both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have heated up the market in Hong Kong. Sotheby’s recently announced that it was given the green light to open on the mainland in partnership with a Chinese auction house. Bejing had higher total revenue than London or New York for art and collectibles last year with sales volume of 6.4 billion euros ($8.30 billion).
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The Wall Street Journal provides a comprehensive outlook on the state of the art market, from Old Masters to Contemporary as dealers head into Frieze and auction week in London. There is a certain polarization with multi-million dollar pieces in high demand and emerging work less so. The article discusses how the most speculative sector of the art market is work from 1945-onward, which saw a 66% drop during the recession but has rebounded, especially in the case of artists like Gerhard Richter. (more…)

Ukranian billionaire steel magnate and art collector Victor Pinchuk has commissioned a permanent installation by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in the city where Pinchuk was raised.  The work will be installed in his Interpipe Steel Mill in Dnepropetrovsk, and will include a 60 meter high artificial sun, which will dominate the skyline of the city.  Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, was previously a manufacturing center for ballistic missiles and only in 1991 opened to foreign visitors. (more…)

Image: Ai Weiwei: According to What? Installation View: Coca Cola Vase, New York Photographs, Moon Chest, Courtesy The Hirshhorn

The first U.S. survey of the work of Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. Beijing, 1957) opened on October 7th at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. It takes its inspiration from a 2009 exhibition at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, but has been adapted for U.S. audiences  incorporating the artist’s re-examination of the work in the context of his personal experiences over the past few years.

Image: Ai Weiwei Courtesy The Washington Post

Mr. Ai, 55, has personally experienced many changes since 2009: he was detained for 81 days last year and was found guilty of tax evasion in China, owing $2.4 million in fines. The Chinese government shut down his business and has not allowed him to leave the country, which prevented him from attending the opening for his retrospective in Washington.

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