Perrotin is moving its Hong Kong exhibition space to the Kowloon neighborhood. “The move has nothing to do with the umbrella [anti-government protests],” Perrotin says. “This is an earlier project which came to a head when we decided to open a large space in Shanghai [late 2018] where we can organize several shows at the same time.” (more…)
Artist Tal R has won a court case against watch designers who wanted to cut up the artist’s work to make a collection of watches.“We hope it will mark the end of this case and that it will mean that Tal R and his fellow artists may avoid similar disputes in the future,” says the artist’s lawyer, Jørgen Permin. (more…)
Elmgreen & Dragset, Before the Storm (2019), via Kukje
With the conclusion of another year, the art world has once again turned its attention to the bustling Miami cityscape for another year of of the Art Basel fair franchise on the tip of the Florida peninsula. Bringing together the global art community for a week of fairs, exhibitions and parties on the streets of Miami and Miami Beach, the fair and its satellites will look to further its influence and footprint in the city. (more…)
David Zwirner has a piece in Art News this week, discussing his vision of a thriving Hong Kong art market despite the widespread protests in the city. “I had a gallery in New York after September 11, and though the world came to an end, I really felt that people very much appreciated our effort to bring culture into that moment. I feel that’s what’s happening now in Hong Kong,” he says. “The art market is very much alive and well.” (more…)
Academic staff at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art have gone on strike over “income and borrowing invested in property and other capital assets rather than on the human resources that are the foundation of student learning,” Art Newspaper reports. (more…)
Artist and musician Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) will create a new sound installation at the Brooklyn Museum, after meeting and working with Dubai’s The Third Line. “I gave him my card, and thought nothing of it,” says gallery co-founder Sunny Rahbar. “The next day, he comes back to the gallery, and asks, ‘Do you want to do this with me?’” (more…)
Art Basel‘s parent company has cancelled Art Basel Inside, a three-day event slotted to run next year in Abu Dhabi. “Art Basel Inside in Abu Dhabi in February 2020 was always an ambitious project on quite a short timeline,” a statement from the company reads. “Despite a lot of excitement for the project, support from our partners, and incredibly hard work by the team, we were not able to move forward with Art Basel Inside.” (more…)
Anish Kapoor, New Born (2019), via Lisson
Currently on at both of Lisson Gallery’s New York exhibition spaces, artist Anish Kapoor orchestrates a striking investigation of perception, space, time and movement through a selection of new works. This is Kapoor’s first show with Lisson in the U.S., an impressive note considering his nearly forty years with the gallery. (more…)
Roger Cardinal, a writer and critic who helped coin the term “outsider art” while working with Jean Dubuffet, has passed away at age 79. “A lot of outsider art rotates around issues of personality, of asking who I am, which means going deep into the inner self of an individual,” he once said. “So this kind of research could be dangerous, provocative, and damaging to you in such a way that you may never be able to write a book again.” (more…)
Keith Sonnier gets an interview in Art News this week, reflecting on his early work and his life growing up in Lousiana. “I sought out unusual people,” he says. “It was part of my nature. I think when you grow up in the middle of nowhere and you do nothing all day but sit up in a chicken tree and watch birds, you don’t have much else to do.” (more…)
Saskia Noor van Imhof, #+40.00 (Installation View), via Art Observed
Making for the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City, artist Saskia Noor van Imhoff has orchestrated a captivating, otherworldly environment in the basement of Grimm Gallery downtown. The artist, who frequently works with ideas of “hidden” or obfuscated practices and points of origin for her work, here creates a space that defies easy categorization, instead challenging the viewer to pass through the spaces and observe the works, coaxing a narrative out of their beguiling arrangements. (more…)
Ai Weiwei has joined the board at the Public Art Fund, alongside jewelry designer Ellen Celli, art collector Andrea Krantz, and financier Ruthard Murphy. “As we think about the future of art in public space, it is essential that our board leadership reflect all the aspects of our mission,” says Nicholas Baume, the group’s director and chief curator in a statement, “and we’re thrilled that these four thoughtful, passionate, and engaged members of our community will work with us to further our vision to present boundary-breaking art experiences to all, for free.” (more…)
Nairy Baghramian and Maria Hassabi have won the fifth edition of Performa’s Malcolm McLaren Award. “At this Performa biennial, we encountered the work of familiar artists, whose careers we’ve long followed, and of artists who were new to us,” says curator Nikki Columbus. “[The pair’s work] TOGETHER, in particular—performed by Hassabi and OisiÌn Monaghan—marked a new level of achievement: While continuing Hassabi’s movement technique, the piece was about care and community, long-term relationships, and love.” (more…)
Victoria Miro has announced representation of artist MarÃa BerrÃo, the gallery announced in a statement today. (more…)
Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, One Last Trip To The Underworld (Installlation View), via Tanya Bonakdar
Marking their first exhibition in New York in over 5 years, the artist duo of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg have touched down in New York City for an expansive solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar’s expansive Chelsea exhibition space. The show, which marks the world premiere of four new video works, continues the pair’s collaborative vision and surreal landscapes, which explore the shadows of human subconsciousness. Using sculpture, stop-motion film, sound, and immersive installation the artists construct narratives that speak to emotional tension, confliction, sexual impulse, and violence.

The show is rife with dark humor and absurdity. Large-scale flower sculptures dot the floors of the space, each accented with a range of grotesque details and bizarre creatures flitting across their surfaces in mid-pollination. Countered by immense, full-wall videos, these pieces seem to create the landscape against which this action on-screen plays out. The gallery becomes a playing field for the subconscious, hints of tension and violence, desire and sexual aggression, all writ large on the walls as these sculptures translate that same energy into three dimensional space.
Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, One Last Trip To The Underworld (Installlation View), via Tanya Bonakdar
Rashid Johnson gets a profile in The Guardian this week, as the artist reflects on his new pieces, and the mechanics of walking under the modern condition. “We think of the grace of it, but also, the obstacles,” he says. “I think of my body moving while being followed by the police, the robotic movement. Not trying to move quickly. Not making reactions. That isn’t graceful in those terms, it isn’t beautiful or rhythmic.” (more…)
Artist Pope.L gets a profile in the New Yorker this week, following the artist’s mass “crawl” this year, and his retrodspective at MoMA. “People ask me what all this support will do for performance art,” he says. “They say, ‘Oh, wow, the problems for performance are over. Modern has come to our rescue! I don’t have to worry anymore.’ But I think performance always needs to be troubled. It needs to have its problems. That’s what gets work done.” (more…)
A massively-scaled exhibition responding to a world in flux following the fall of the Berlin wall to today will open at Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery next year, Art Newspaper reports. “It’s hard for me to even recall something of comparable scale,” says Zelfira Tregulova, the director of the Tretyakov. “This exhibition will present a totally unique slice of Europe’s contemporary art, moreover Europe not just in the sense of the European Union, but Europe in a much broader sense of the word.” (more…)
Restoration of Michelangelo’s Pietà at Florence’s Museo dell’Opera del Duomo will take place in full public view, Art Newspaper reports. “We’re making the restoration part of the visitor’s experience,” says director Timothy Verdon.
Thieves have stolen three collections of jewelry from the royal house of Saxony, held in a Dresden Museum, in a heist labelled the most prominent and expensive since WWII. “Nowhere else in Europe has any other collection of royal jewels been preserved in this form and quality and quantity,” Dirk Syndram, director of the Green Vault said. (more…)
Around 50 workers at Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles are trying to form a union. “We recognize that management has identified a need to shift workplace culture in order to make equity, diversity, and accessibility a greater priority,” the group says. “So far, however, this has been a top-down structure that has involved spending undisclosed amounts of money on external consultants who speak on behalf of the entire staff. Instead of looking outside of the museum for answers, we ask that leadership listen to its own workers and hear our needs directly.” (more…)
The Whitney Museum has received a $1 million grant from the Keith Haring Foundation to complete the construction of David Hammons’s Day’s End. “For a museum of our scale, it’s a heavy lift, no pun intended,” says curator Scott Rothkopf. “This is definitely one of the largest gifts toward the realization of this project.” (more…)
Van Gogh’s iconic Sunflowers (1888) will head to Australia next year for a show at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, traveling from London’s National Gallery. (more…)
Dr. Oetker, a German food company, has returned a painting by Carl Spitzweg to the heirs of a Jewish tobacco dealer killed at Buchenwald concentration camp. “This settlement with a private collection on the basis of a solution that is both amicable and equitable is exemplary,” Gunnar Schnabel, the lawyer representing the heirs of collector Leo Bendel, said in a statement. “Unfortunately such solutions are still the exception to the rule.” (more…)
