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…)
Barbara Kruger has moved to David Zwirner, Art News reports. “Her work has become even more essential in the decades since, speaking truth to power and transitioning from the museum into mainstream culture,” Zwirner says. “We are honored to represent her and look forward to exhibiting her work.” (more…)
New court filings alleged that London dealer Inigo Philbrick could hold upwards of $70 million in assets. Philbrick is accused of failing to deliver works he sold and inflating the prices of other pieces. “We have only seen the tip of the iceberg; there’s no question that this has impacted far more people than simply those who already have filed suit,” says lawyer Judd Grossman. (more…)
Jeremy Corbyn has promised £1 billion in arts funding if Labour is elected to lead the U.K., Art Newspaper reports. The party’s plan calls for a Cultural Capital Fund “to transform libraries, museums and galleries across the country.” (more…)
Karen Kilimnik (Installation View), via 303
Comprising her 12th solo show with 303 Gallery, artist Karen Kilimnik returns to New York with a new body of works, snaking through a range of materials and techniques that touch on painting, photography, collage, sculpture and video, all displayed in the Petersburger exhibition style.
Karen Kilimnik, the sports car rally + and the treasure hunt, england, Steed, Emma Peel, assorted villains + the butler – bentley (2007), via 303
Amid escalating protests, Hauser & Wirth has postponed shows in Hong Kong, while Art Basel HK is planning to remain open. “Some of you might be wondering if Art Basel is making an unconsidered decision by continuing to plan on holding an art fair in March amidst the unrest that we are witnessing in Hong Kong,” says Adeline Ooi, the director, Asia for Art Basel Hong Kong. “The answer is: we are not. The decision to continue with the show is made in support of everything you, we, our partners, the local art scene, art collectors from Asia and beyond have invested into Hong Kong, our fair and Asia in general over the years.” (more…)
The New York Times has a piece on the theft of Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet, noting that the work is still missing, and spotlighting a number of locals’ thoughts on just where the work might be. “It’s on a building site,” says taxi driver Susan Hughes, “that’s my theory.” (more…)
Oscar Tuazon’s “hippie outlaw architecture” gets a profile in the LA Times this week, and how he has applied his work towards conversations and critiques of current policy around water and other environmental issues. “Ideas and conversations around water rights and indigenous histories is also this really powerful part of the story,” he says. “And it shapes the way the design is evolving now — to take this structure and break it into its constituent parts and think about how it could work in different landscapes. It’s trying to kind of absorb and learn from those places.” (more…)
Techno artist Carl Craig has been commissioned to create a new work in the spacious basement of Dia:Beacon. “The kind of space we’re working with at Dia, there are tons of abandoned spaces I’ve been working with my whole lifetime,” Craig says. “The fall of the automotive industry in Detroit left all these factories that turned into party spaces—and a lot of them are still there.” (more…)
The Manchester Museum has repatriated 43 objects considered sacred to four indigenous groups in Australia, Art News reports, making it the first institution in the UK to embrace a repatriation program. “We’ve always known that during the process of colonization, which is continuing today in various respects, that our cultural heritage items were removed from us, were stolen from us and taken from us,” says Mangubadijarri Yanner, who received the objects in Manchester for the Gangalidda Garawa people. “With these specific items, I can say with authority that they were taken without permission.” (more…)
Christie’s will look to sell the first mixed-reality artwork at auction next year, offering Marina Abramović’s The Life, which was on view at The Serpentine earlier this year. “As the technology around AR and VR evolves at an incredibly fast pace, the market is evolving and adapting to the demand,” says Christie’s specialist Stefano Amoretti. “Christie’s is in an avant-garde position by offering this to the market and we look forward to the response.” (more…)
Lisson Gallery will represent the estate of Hélio Oiticica estate worldwide. “My father, Nicholas, saw his show at Whitechapel [Gallery in London] in 1969, two years after the gallery opened,” Alex Logsdail says. “He was somewhat intimidated by him at the time—he was a wild guy. So, it’s been a long time.” (more…)
France‘s top appeals court has upheld a two-year suspended jail sentence for the former electrician of Pablo Picasso and his wife, who kept 271 of the painter’s works in a garage for upwards of 40 years. “It is a triumph of truth and marks the end of a cover-up”, said Jean-Jacques Neuer, the lawyer for Picasso’s son Claude Ruiz-Picasso. (more…)
A collection of works by Anselm Kiefer, Renate Graf, and Markus Lüpertz, said to be worth €300 million, has disappeared somewhere in China, according to a report by Art News. “This is unique to the art market,” says Wenzel Jacob, curator and former artistic director of the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. “I have not encountered such a criminal case in my career.” (more…)
The Met has hired Denise Murrell as associate curator of 19th and 20th Century Art. Murrell gained recognition for her show “Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today,” which re-centered black subjects in modern painting. “If you have one of the greatest collections you almost have an obligation to recontextualize it in regard to the narratives it provides,” says museum head Max Hollein. “I want to make sure it’s not only one voice but multiple voices.” (more…)
Matthew Barney, Embrasure (Installation View), via Gladstone Gallery
Artist Matthew Barney’s victory lap continues after the 2018 release of his latest film Redoubt, a wolf hunt in Idaho’s rugged Sawtooth Mountains that continues the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with landscape as both setting and subject. For his current show in New York, on view at Gladstone Gallery, the artist presents a set of new drawings, etchings, and sculpture that draw from the film, and expand on its allegorical and cosmological themes. (more…)