The Prix Marcel Duchamp, the annual French award that carries a €35,000 purse, has revealed its shortlist for 2019, with a winner to be announced at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in October.  Nominees include Eric Baudelaire, Katinka Bock, Marguerite Humeau, and Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille. (more…)

New Museum staff is making efforts to unionize, making the move public after several months of planning and deliberation. “Forming a union will enable us, as well as future New Museum employees, to effectively advocate for changes in staff conditions that will make the New Museum a stronger and more sustainable institution,” the group said in a statement. “We believe in the New Museum and its mission; we want it to succeed. But we also recognize a need for critical changes at this moment in the museum’s growth.” (more…)

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has appointed Kyu Jin Hwang as its associate director for Asia, part of gallery plans to more aggressively target Asian collectors.  “I am absolutely delighted to join Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, whose team I had the pleasure of working with in my previous roles, having been drawn to the outstanding artists represented by the gallery,” Hwang said in a statement. (more…)

James Welling, Chemical (2018), via David Zwirner

Over the course of the last decade, photographer James Welling has branched out into a series of more experimental modes of image production, often welcoming degrees of abstraction and indeterminacy into the creation of his photographic images.  Using unorthodox photographic procedures in conjunction with varied processes that see his works moving between abstraction and representation, his recent series of work are emblematic of the breadth of his ongoing experimentation with the conventions and materials of photography. (more…)

The Joan Mitchell Foundation has announced its 2019 artist residencies in New Orleans, where each participant will receive a private studio space as well as access to programming at the center. “We look forward to engaging with our artists-in-residence and to seeing the exciting and unexpected ways the space and time can impact their work,” says Foundation CEO Christa Blatchford.  (more…)

The Andy Warhol Foundation will give $100,000 to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian for a traveling Oscar Howe retrospective, ending an eight-year funding ban originally installed after the Smithsonian removed a David Wojnarowicz work from a show in 2010.  “We believe that the ban has had its intended effect of promoting freedom of artistic expression at the national level,” says Foundation head Joel Wachs. “The Smithsonian has also demonstrated a strong track record of highlighting underrepresented artists over the past eight years, which aligns well with the foundation’s core values. While Wojnarowicz and Howe were very different artists working in different circumstances, both fiercely advocated for the visibility and inclusion of marginalized perspectives in contemporary art discourse.” (more…)

London’s National Gallery will send Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and 60 other paintings on a tour of two Japanese Museums next year in celebration of the Tokyo Olympics. “By sharing the treasures from our world-leading museums and galleries, we can promote the very best of Britain to the globe,” says Jeremy Wright, the UK’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. (more…)

Richard Deacon, House & Garden (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

Drawing together a body of new photographs, ceramics and sculpture from the past year of artist Richard Deacon’s ever-evolving studio practice, the current solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery, House & Garden, explores relationships between materials and processes, representing innovations in Deacon’s thinking about sculpture, and the relationships of image to surface, object making to the pictorial, and sculpture to the plinth, all notions that have been present in his work and are at the nexus of his steadfast interest in a multiplicity of modes of production. (more…)

Kehinde Wiley is profiled in The Guardian this week, as he reflects on his recent work and the impact of his creative project. “The great heroic, often white, male hero dominates the picture plane and becomes larger than life, historic and significant,” he says. “That great historic storytelling of myth-making or propaganda is something we inherit as artists. I wanted to be able to weaponize and translate it into a means of celebrating female presence.” (more…)

The Met achieved record attendance last year, up 5% to 7.36 million visitors, despite challenges the museum faced over its new admission policy.  “Surprisingly, when we made this change, New Yorkers recognized that the Met needed to shore up its revenues to stay healthy, and they increased the amount of money they contribute on each visit,” said Daniel Weiss, chief executive of the museum. (more…)

New York’s anticipated exhibition and performance space The Shed finally has an opening date: April 5th. “We wanted this to be a building that could bring parity across pretty much all art forms,” says Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director and chief executive. (more…)

The art dealer Anatole Shagalov is suing New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery for $8.5 million in damages over the sale of Frank Stella’s La Scienza della Fiacca, of which Shagalov alleges the gallery claimed partial ownership. “The lawsuit will allege that when Paul Kasmin Gallery falsely claimed to own an interest in Shagalov’s painting, it knowingly defamed Shagalov, it negatively impacted the value of the painting itself by baselessly casting doubt on its title, and it interfered with Shagalov’s contractual relations with a key lender,” the dealer’s lawyers said in a statement.  (more…)

Lawyers for dealer Mary Boone, the veteran art dealer facing potential prison time for tax evasion have asked that the judge grant leniency based on her traumatic childhood. “Behind the facade of success and strength lies a fragile and, at times, broken individual,” the lawyers wrote in the filing. (more…)

Hilma af Klint, Paintings for the Future (Installation View), via Art Observed

It’s been a long time coming for the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint.  Born in 1862 in Stockholm, her works during the years leading up to and after the turn of the 20th Century marked an increasingly surreal departure from the studied realism of her peers, and into a state of abstraction the made her a leading voice in the development of the language and practice of modernism. Yet af Klint’s work is also frequently held aside from her peers of the era, that is, until now, with an ambitious and thrilling Guggenheim exhibition aiming to put her work back into its proper historical and aesthetic context. (more…)

The British Museum is planning a major retrospective of the print works of Edvard Munch, Art Newspaper reports, making it the UK’s largest exhibition of Munch prints for nearly 50 years. The show will be held in collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. (more…)

The Italian Government will block a loan of works by Leonardo da Vinci to the Louvre for an exhibition dedicated to the artist, underscoring the government’s populist turn. “Leonardo is Italian; he only died in France, says Lucia Borgonzoni, the undersecretary for the Italian ministry of culture. “Giving the Louvre all those paintings would mean putting Italy on the margins of a great cultural event.” (more…)

The US Supreme Court will not hear a case over the return of paintings from the Hungarian Government seized during World War II. The family of Baron Mor Lipot Herzog will continue to pursue a case in the United States against three museums and a university in the country. (more…)

Artadia and the Marciano Art Foundation will join together for the Marciano Artadia Award, a $25,000 annual prize for a Los Angeles–based artist.  “Artadia is thrilled to partner with the Marciano Art Foundation. We share a common goal of supporting the diverse Los Angeles artistic ecosystem,” Artadia’s executive director, Carolyn Ramo says. “As L.A. increasingly becomes a city for artists, we are pleased to be recognizing and providing vital funds and validation to the talent found here.” (more…)

The Architectural Digest this week profiles the recent push by Miami’s Aventura Mall to become a major site to view art, with works by Lawrence Weiner and Carsten Höller on view . “We feel we’ve invested wisely,” real-estate developer Jackie Soffer says of the property’s collection.  (more…)

As it celebrates its 200th Birthday this year, Madrid’s Prado Museum and director Miguel Falomir Faus look back on the history and mandate of the institution this week in Art Newspaper, particularly in the years before it earned a degree of autonomy from the Spanish state. “The Prado was sometimes a weapon,” Falomir says, “used by one political party against the other” (more…)

Sean Kelly Gallery in New York has added four new partners; Cecile Panzieri as senior partner and Janine Cirincione, Lauren Kelly and Thomas Kelly (the latter two are his children) as partners. “I’ve built the business to the point where I felt it was a good idea to bring partners in who have a vested interest in furthering the business,” Kelly himself said in a statement. “Two of the newly appointed partners are my children, but all of them are my professional family. I could not be more proud to have such distinguished Partners.” (more…)

Michael Heizer (Installation View), via Gagosian

Spanning the breadth and depth of the artist’s work in both sculpture and land art, Gagosian’s Paris in Le Bourget is currently presenting a body of work by Michael Heizer that moves from 1968 to the present.  Over fifty years, Heizer has redefined the very idea of sculpture in his explorations of size, mass, and process. His earth-moving constructions, paintings, and drawings explore the dynamics of positive and negative space.  With this show, the magnitude and nuance of his work is allowed to breathe at scale, presenting a body of works that underscore his evolution and incorporation of increasingly complex methodologies into his practice. (more…)

Robert Rauschenberg, Palladian Xmas (Spread) (1980), via Ropac

Over the course of his career, Robert Rauschenberg occupied an almost innumerable series of critical and theoretical positions in the practice and production of art objects, often bounding from material to material and technique to technique in bounds that often moved beyond the scope of any single artists entire oeuvre.  His relentless interest in particular with the picture plane itself, and its capacity for interruption or disruption through the inclusion of ready-made objects, collaged pieces and even the scraps of other paintings, Rauschenberg produced what could best be considered as a career in a constant state of flux caused by its own movements.
Robert Rauschenberg, Rodeo Palace (Spread) (1976), via Rauschenberg Foundation

This winter, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London is presenting the artist’s iconic Spreads series, reflecting on the artist’s work pioneering new ways of painterly construction while remaining focused on his own painterly language.  The large-scale Spreads encapsulate many of Robert Rauschenberg’s best-known motifs and materials, and the twelve works from the series―the largest of which stretches to over six metres wide are presented alongside a series of paper collages from the same era.  In the Spreads the artist’s familiar motifs from his object-laden Combines is reprised, incorporating car tires, doors, bedding and other materials in conjunction with fabric materials and canvas, all conspiring to create a dense, multilayered series of materials that challenges and reframes the canvas as a collecting pool for both materials and ideas, reference systems and the objects that contain them, all negotiating within the canvas as one potential conclusion of the project of the 20th Century avant-garde.
Robert Rauschenberg, Rumor (Spread) (1980), via Ropac

Rauschenberg himself was well aware of these conversations of object and image, referring to the “Spreads” as both a negotiation of history and “something you put on toast.”  The language of his materials laid across the canvas negotiate with their mode of presentation, ultimately creating even more dense linguistic networks alongside the concepts explored within the works themselves.  Rather than a purely retrospective exercise, the development of his Spreads is also suggestive of a more complex relationship between past and present, integrating not only elements from his earlier work but also reflecting changes in his life, his practice and in contemporary art at the time. Rauschenberg’s use of fabric color blocks in his Spreads not only represented a shift in his color palette from the urban experience of New York to the bright oranges, pinks and yellows of life in Florida, but also engaged with recent artistic developments such as Color Field painting and Minimalism, incorporating references to a new generation of artists.

Robert Rauschenberg, Spreads 1975-1983 (Installation View), via Ropac

This series of works, a vast trove of historical touchstones and concepts united by Rauschenberg’s hand, makes for a striking investigation of the artists’s work, and his vantage point from the vanguard of 20th Century art.

The show closes Janaury 26th.

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Thaddaeus Ropac [Exhibition Site]

The Guardian profiles a recent project by artist Emma Stibbon, whose work documents the results of climate change on landscapes previously depicted by famed landscape artists like JMW Turner. “When we think of the Alps,” she says, “we think of iconic white peaks. By the end of this century, there probably won’t be any snow.” (more…)