Bruce Nauman speaks with The Guardian this week, as the artist prepares to open a major retrospective at Tate Modern. “I remember someone coming to the studio and saying, ‘You must be very depressed,’” he notes. “I said that I didn’t think so, otherwise I wouldn’t be making work. A lot of things got worked out through the work. Different kinds of anger and frustration.” (more…)
Pat Steir, Untitled (2008), via Levy Gorvy
Taking over Lévy Gorvy’s New York exhibition space this fall, artist Pat Steir has compiled a selection of works from her ongoing series of Waterfall Paintings, this time focusing in particular on her pieces executed on paper. Walking a fine line between the grand scale and gesture of her paintings on canvas as well as the more intimate sizes of the works here, the show traces a unique aspect of Steir’s engagement with the form. Working on paper has been a quintessential aspect of Steir’s practice since the 1970s, producing a body of work that often saw prints and drawings coming out of the same conceptual exercises as her large-scale canvases. As the show press release notes, these pieces have rarely been seen outside of museum collections, with Steir’s own personal holdings unseen for many years. For this show, the artist pulls back the veil to explore the ways in which her practice is informed by these pieces on paper. (more…)
Following Paddle 8’s bankruptcy, the company’s bankruptcy trustee Megan Noh has filed suit against former board member John Textor, alleging “reckless disregard” for the company, and seeking $6 million in damages. “Neither I nor the companies mentioned have been involved in quite some time, though it is standard practice for a trustee to cast a wide net in filing speculative claims for recovery,” Textor claims. (more…)
Auction houses are reporting massive upticks in online sales as galleries and auctions shutter due to Covid-19. “No longer will we have the joy and pain of crowded art fairs and gallery openings,” says Robert Head of the Hiscox agency. “Dealers will have to find new ways to create the buzz that makes us have to buy now, lest we dwell and lose yet another treasure that we can’t live without.” (more…)
David Zwirner Gallery has appointed Ebony L. Haynes, formerly of Martos Gallery, as the head of a new gallery space in Manhattan, which will employ an all-black staff. “While you could argue that strides have been made on the artist side, the art world acts almost shamefully on the employment side,” Mr. Zwirner says. “Something has to happen.” (more…)
Controversy is mounting over the decision by four major museums to shelve a show of works by Philip Guston over his depiction of figures in Ku Klux Klan robes, with many in the art world, including the show’s curator, condemning the move. “As art museums, we are expected to show difficult art and to support artists. By cancelling or delaying, we abandon this responsibility to Guston and also to the artists whose voices animate the catalogue such as Glenn Ligon [and] Tacita Dean,” says Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey, who was set to organize the show at the museum. (more…)
Michele Abeles, 10/28/19, 5:00PM (2020), via 47 Canal
Upon entering the doors of 47 Canal Gallery, one is immediately greeted by a strangely familiar, and oddly timely series of images. Skeletal hands, ghoulish visages and ghostly figures dance across a series of photos, while other frames bear the image if close up novelty gravestones and other Halloween decorations. One month out from Halloween, the exhibition, presented by artist Michele Abeles, turns these familiar features into a meditation on commercial iconographies, capitalism and the spiritual undertones that these systems draw on, always centering the body in these conversations on space and time, the body and mortality. (more…)
Kelly Akashi, via Tanya Bonakdar
The fall art season is in full swing, at least in name, with galleries cautiously reopening, and a tense consideration for ways forward currently in the air, all serving as a fitting backdrop for the second iteration of Art Basel’s Online Viewing Room program. Filling in for the cancelled Basel and Miami Beach editions of its fair program, the recently opened OVR:2020 invites a select group of artists and galleries to make up some lost ground in their seasonal calendar, and to offer works for sale, amplified by the fair’s global reach. (more…)
Carmen Herrera, Painting in Process (Installation View), via Lisson
Since her time in post-war Paris when she first developed her signature hard-edged style, painter Carmen Herrera has instilled a rigorous practice to create her distinctive body of work, culling together a range of various color structures and elusive geometric arrangements to arrive at her engaging and unique constructions. Now, the artist is opening a show of recent works at Lisson, bearing the title Painting in Process, exploring her construction and exploration of her works before their final form. (more…)
The Guggenheim has received Maurizio Cattelan‘s iconic banana work Comedian, shown last year at Art Basel Miami Beach, as an anonymous gift. “We are grateful recipients of the gift of ‘Comedian,’ a further demonstration of the artist’s deft connection to the history of modern art,” says museum director, Richard Armstrong. “Beyond which, it offers little stress to our storage.” (more…)
Gerhard Richter has created a series of impressive stained glass windows for Tholey Abbey in Germany. “Abstract art is not normally my thing,” says Abbot Mauritius Choriol. “But you don’t need to be an art expert to appreciate the qualities of these.” (more…)
ReneÌe Green, Excerpts (Installation View), via Art Observed
Entering Bortolami Gallery for its first show of the fall season, one is immediately greeted by a flurry of color. Bright banners hang from the ceilings, adorned with dazzling fluorescent pairings that emphasize the fragments of text that dot each piece, and which find a fitting counterpoint in a ring of framed pieces encircling the gallery walls. The pieces are the product of artist Renée Green, whose body of new works returns to an ongoing interest in the concept of color and language, text and space, perception and understanding. Spanning the artist’s three decades of working with color’s polyvalent effects, the works in Excerpts manifest her open-ended questioning of invented yet established taxonomies, in order to play with and to displace designations that may seem to be known. (more…)
As the museum plans to reopen, the Guggenheim Museum has laid off 24 employees, with an additional 8 taking separation agreements. “The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Guggenheim has been devastating to our finances,” said museum’s director, Richard Armstrong in a letter to employees. “I am deeply saddened to say that the museum will not have the ability to support our previous number of staff members.” (more…)
In the midst of COVID-19-related financial pressure, the Brooklyn Museum will sell off 12 works from its collection to fund maintaining the rest of its holdings. “We expect this consignment to generate considerable interest from collectors who will not only respond to the paintings’ great quality, but will also be reassured by their distinguished provenance,” says Joshua Glazer, Specialist of Old Master Paintings at Christie’s New York. (more…)
Cosima Von Bonin, HETERO (2020), via GAGA
Returning to Los Angeles for a second show with GAGA and her first in the gallery’s LA space, artist Cosima von Bonin has installed a body of new works, merging together her signature selections of pop cultural iconographies, material inversions and surreal interpolations of the gallery space, united under the title HETERO. Using the gallery as a framework on which to explore and elaborate her unique formal investigations, the artist explores the idea of extended, and often distended, narrative flows. (more…)
Banksy has lost a court case against a greeting card company this month, with the court putting the artist’s copyright at risk over his anonymity. “Banksy has chosen to remain anonymous and, for the most part, to paint graffiti on other people’s property without their permission, rather than to paint it on canvases or his own property,” the panel said. (more…)
David Zwirner has brought on former Gavin Brown Director Kyla McMillan as director, focusing on sales and artist management. “At Gavin Brown’s Enterprise I worked with so many artists who will forever inform how I think,” she says. (more…)
Christie’s is selling Picasso’s Femme dans un fauteuil (1941) as the leading lot in its merged 20th/21st Century sale this October, with the lead lot tapped to fetch $20 million–$30 million. “By turns anguished and lyrical, aggressive and despondent, the works all share an urgency, making them as much expressions of Picasso’s state of mind as portraits of Dora,” says Conor Jordan, Christie’s deputy chairman of Impressionist and modern art. “Sequestered in the cool light and pressing angles of the attic space, Dora is depicted on a grand scale as proud and unbending, an image of stately defiance, a modern Marianne.” (more…)
Dealer Max Levai has filed suit against his former colleagues at Marlborough Gallery, alleging a scheme to discredit him and take over his personal Instagram account. “The Company and defendants Bergman and Plutschow’s defamatory statements have harmed [Levai] by causing, among other things, third parties to refuse to engage in any new business dealings with plaintiff, lost revenue and profits, increased expenses, legal fees, and costs expended to mitigate the impact of the Company and defendants Bergman and Plutschow’s dishonesty,” the suit reads. (more…)
Damien Hirst and Fondazione Prada are launching a round of print sales to benefit an international nonprofit dedicated to providing free access to educational, economic, and healthcare opportunities to children. “COVID-19 has been devastating for many people and families all over the world and lockdown has been really difficult, but especially difficult for children who haven’t been able to go to school,” Hirst said in a statement. “I wanted to find a way to raise money to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds who have been most affected by school closures and the support they provide.” (more…)
Erich Marx, a collector whose holdings stand as the basis of the Hamburger Bahnhof museum of Modern art has died at the age of 99. “Without him, the Hamburger Bahnhof would not exist,” says Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. “Erich Marx was a great man who was also modest. He undertook everything with great passion—including his love of art and collecting.” (more…)
The FIAC Art Fair has been cancelled after a spike in Coronavirus cases in Paris. “Despite its deep determination to organize FIAC–this unique rendez-vous bringing together specialists in the field of modern and contemporary art—in 2020, and its efforts to overcome the difficulties caused by the health crisis, the fair is not in a position to organize an event that meets the legitimate expectations of its exhibitors,” said the organizers, who are refunding all fees already paid by exhibitors. (more…)