The Swiss-born, New York-based artist Tobias Madison has pled guilty to charges of domestic assault, Art Newspaper reports.“The People believe that each of the charged crimes in this case, and their underlying facts as articulated in the criminal complaint, can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Assistant District Attorney Kirstie Raffan. (more…)

Brooklyn gallery Koenig & Clinton is closing Art New reports. Dealers Leo Koenig and Margaret Liu Clinton said in a statement that they “remain grateful to the many: artists, collaborators, colleagues, critics, and patrons that enriched the gallery’s mission of organizing museum-quality exhibitions that were made accessible to so many publics.” (more…)

German art dealer, collector and socialite Angela Gulbenkian is facing a lawsuit over the sale of a Warhol print on behalf of its owner and allegedly keeping the profits. “The dispute lies in whether [the adviser] and Gulbenkian had the authority to sell the picture,” says Chris Marinello, the chief executive of Art Recovery Group. (more…)

Mark Dion, Bureau of Censorship (1996/2019), via Art Observed

The year 2020 is being heralded as a crucial moment for society, a moment to respond to massive political upheaval and environmental crises. With immigration on the rise around the globe, and social tensions inflamed over crises of leadership at the heads of global superpowers, the world is at a crossroads. This concept sits at the core of Songs in the Dark, a group show currently on at Tanya Bonakdar that illustrates how artists deal with the world at its tipping point; how artists find beauty in the darkness of their own times, how they straddle the personal and political in their work, and how they make art as activism. (more…)

The latest round of coveted United States Artists Grants have been announced, including Nari Ward and Cameron Rowland. “Artists like Cameron [Rowland] and Martine [Syms] are winning a lot of things at the same time,” organization president Deana Haggag says, “We’re just trying to give a chance to have some sense of spaciousness, and young people, in particular, don’t know the first thing [they] would do with a lump sum. We’ve seen it make a pretty big difference for artists in that stage.” (more…)

Performance Space New York has announced a radical, artist-led restructuring process.  “The artists have received keys to the spaces, have moved into our business offices, and will move into our theaters next month. … Our total annual production budget is at the artists’ full disposal to pay themselves a wage and develop their programmatic platforms,” reads a letter signed by executive artistic director Jenny Schlenzka and Sarah Michelson, a celebrated choreographer leading the artist-led cohort in a project called “02020.” (more…)

Artist Ann Hirsch saw videos of hers removed from Vimeo this week, only to be reinstated a few hours later.  The works were originally removed over content the site said could “sexually stimulate” viewers.  “For everyone talking about feminism and #MeToo and the rediscovery of women artists, it’s frustrating,” she says. “They’re also forgetting about the people making work now and their voices are being lost. It’s happening now to me and so many other women.” (more…)

The latest edition of the Made in L.A. Biennial has announced its artist list for this year, including Kahlil Joseph and the late Nicola L. as well as Aria Dean and Jill Mulleady. (more…)

Patrick van Maris is leaving his position as president of The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) at the end of May, Art Newspaper reports.  “I am proud of the changes accomplished together,” he says of his work with the fair. (more…)

Issy Wood, Slouching towards the maxillofacial unit (2018), via JTT

Issy Wood’s paintings and sculptures carry a peculiar cultural charge, moments of collision and fusion that mark her objects with both the signifiers of the art historical and with the banal moments of daily life. For her current show, daughterproof at JTT in New York, the artist continues this process, putting forward a selection of works that seem to mark the passage of culture and time against the body itself.   (more…)

CNN has a piece this week on the business behind removing and selling street art murals, and the legality that drives who can remove and sell a piece. “Generally, when you purchase a building, you own the fixtures within the building, whether they’re ceiling fans or [a] fine art mural painting on a wall,” says Paul Cossu, a partner at legal firm Pryor Cashman and part of the firm’s art law group. “Of course, what an owner can do with a fine art mural after acquiring the building will depend, in part, on whether the mural is protected by the Visual Artists Rights Act.” (more…)

Two men have confessed to stealing the Gustav Klimt recently discovered in the wall of a Piacenza gallery, as well as to returning the work. “They said they returned the painting four years ago,” says Guido Gulieri, the pair’s lawyer. “But we don’t yet know the details of how it came to be [in the recess] and what exactly happened to the painting in the intervening years. They had confessed before but were not believed.” (more…)

The inaugural edition of Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia has announced its artist list, including work by Lita Albuquerque, Wael Shawky, Superflex, and more. This edition of the event has earned strong condemnation for its part in the country’s push to rebrand itself as open and free after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.  “Unless artists are willing to make their host’s state control of expression an explicit subject of their work, those who participate cannot escape compromise from the polluted context,” says critic Christopher Knight. (more…)

UK Universities are reporting a 28.5% drop over the past decade in Art History class enrollment, Art Newspaper reports. “It is important that we do not lose sight of the humanities which are absorbing and important areas of study and can also lead to excellent career options,” says Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. (more…)

Collector Isabel Dos Santos, the daughter of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos, gets a profile in the NYT this week, detailing her global holdings in property and art, and underscoring how she maneuvered her proximity to power to build her global empire. “We have there some situations of money laundering, some of them of doing business with herself,” Hélder Pitta Grós, Angola’s attorney general, said in an interview. (more…)

Ai Weiwei has a piece in The Guardian this week, discussing his recent move to the UK, and the racism he experienced while living in Berlin. “In Britain they are colonial. They are polite at least,” he says. “But in Germany, they don’t have this politeness. They would say in Germany you have to speak German. They have been very rude in daily situations. They deeply don’t like foreigners.” (more…)

Simone Leigh will head to Hauser & Wirth, Art News reports. “We are delighted and honored to have started working with Simone at the end of last year,” says Cristopher Canizares, a partner at Hauser & Wirth. “Hers is a powerful, profound, original voice, and we are looking forward to her first exhibition with the gallery in London in the fall during Frieze.” (more…)

The Wall Street Journal looks at the opening of The Momentary, a multidisciplinary arts space that is set inside a former Kraft cheese factory, and which serves as a satellite to the nearby Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. “We would love to create an art place…that talks about living artists, that doesn’t feel like a museum at all,” says director Lieven Bertels. (more…)

A major work by artist Joseph Wright of Derby, Two Boys with a Bladder (1769-70), will leave the UK for the J. Paul Getty Museum after a buyer was unable to be found. “We look forward to sharing this spectacular painting with our visitors and scholars in the context of our other 18th-century collections,” says director Timothy Potts. (more…)

A gloomy portrait in the national collection of Norway has been authenticated as the work of Vincent Van Gogh, The Guardian reports. “The Oslo self-portrait depicts someone who is mentally ill,” a statement from the Van Gogh Museum reads. “His timid, sideways glance is easily recognizable and is often found in patients suffering from depression and psychosis.” (more…)

A dentist in Neuss, Germany is accused of trying to present 20 fake Picasso works as authentic, using fake certificates to sell them to auction houses. “If you see the Picasso estate and tell them these works fell from the sky or you picked them up from the bric-a-brac market, there is little chance anyone will believe you,” says a lawyer for Picasso’s son Claude Ruiz-Picasso. (more…)

The Guggenheim will open a major retrospective of the the work of Alex Katz in 2022, Art News reports.  The show will be organized by Katherine Brinson, curator for contemporary art at the Guggenheim; Nancy Spector, artistic director and chief curator; and Levi Prombaum, a curatorial assistant who worked on the two part Robert Mapplethorpe show last year. (more…)

Ugo Rondinone, thanx 4 nothing (A Tribute to John Giorno) (Installation View), via Gladstone

When the poet John Giorno passed away late last year, he left behind a lifetime of artistic adventurism and exploration, a reputation for his tireless support of the arts and his energetic commitment to collaboration, connection and creativity.  It makes sense then, that one of the first shows to celebrate the artist since his passing would be a collaboration with his husband, artist Ugo Rondinone, at Gladstone Gallery.  Open now, the show features the artist’s captivating 2015 video piece thanx 4 nothing, (more…)

A painting discovered inside the walls of an Italian art gallery has been confirmed as a Gustav Klimt. “It’s with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic,” Piacenza prosecutor Ornella Chicca said in a statement. (more…)