A minor fire erupted by a Mary Corse work at Dia:Beacon this week, causing an evacuation. According to a spokesperson, the piece is “currently undergoing a full assessment with our conservation team and we are further investigating what caused the element to overheat.” (more…)

Maya Lin gets a profile in the New York Times this week, as she opens a new show and commission at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y. “Maya is a continuation of great American artists who appreciate the beauty and power of nature,” museum director Miwako Tezuka says. “What better place to do that show than the Hudson River Museum?” (more…)

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has donated $5 million to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. “This extraordinary gift reinforces our work to add to our existing collections on underrepresented artists and enables us to share an ever more inclusive story of American art globally,” says Kate Haw, the director of the Archives of American Art. “The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation’s wonderful generosity will lead to further research in under-recognized areas of our field, future exhibitions, and publications, connecting people everywhere with the stories of a wider range of artists.” (more…)

Art Basel Miami Beach will phase out its Art Public sector this year, instead presenting a free Abraham Cruzvillegas performance inside the Miami Beach Convention Center’s new hall. “We’re obviously thrilled the renovation is behind us after several years working through that,” says Noah Horowitz, Americas director for Art Basel. “That’s what’s driving a lot of this. We looked at this as an extraordinary opportunity. We’ve never had anything to play with that’s connected to the (main exhibition) floor and that offers such a vast expanse of space.” (more…)

Phillips head Edward Dolman gets a spotlight in NYT this week, as his auction house continues an impressive growth he made a priority when he took his position four years ago. “I feel blessed to have been released from the pressure of these high-profile sales at auction that are so full of risk and so damaging to the shareholder value if they go wrong,” Dolman says. “I’m very pleased with the progress.” (more…)

Artist Mark Grotjahn gets a profile in the WSJ this week, as the opens a new show in Los Angeles. The piece also reflects on Grotjahn’s impressive degree of market freedom, showing with a range of galleries. “It doesn’t bother me,” says dealer Larry Gagosian. “We’ve developed a bit of a shorthand over the years for how he wants things handled.” (more…)

Artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian will represent Germany at the Biennale next year, working under the name Natascha Süder Happelmann.  The artist’s research-intensive work follows up the Golden Lion-winning pavilion by Anne Imhof in 2017. “Over a period of around thirty years, a collection of name variations has been accumulating in the artist’s memory and in other places. The different versions have arisen mainly as a result of misspelling and autocorrect when the artist was addressed by public authorities. . . . Following careful analysis of the variations available, a particular version of the name was selected,” a spokesperson says of the artist’s choice of names. (more…)

Carmen Herrera, Estructuras (Installation View), via Art Observed

Entering Lisson Gallery’s 24th Street New York space, visitors are greeted with a vibrant, colorful arrangement of works, geometric forms mounted on walls, arranged along the floor, and in some cases, even propped up on tables, creating the impression of momentary voids in the perception of the gallery space, or even that of the viewer’s own visual field.  The show is the first ever large-scale presentation of Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera’s Estrcuturas works, and underscores the artist’s ongoing contributions to the languages of minimalism and conceptualism. (more…)

Russia will show a selection of Wassily Kandinsky works from the State Russian Museum in Saudi Arabia, disregarding the current crop of countries and institutions fleeing the country following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Several works of famous avant-garde artists of the early 20th century from the collection of the Russian Museum have already arrived in the capital of Saudi Arabia,” for the Future Investment Initiative (23-25 October), the Russian Museum said in a statement on Tuesday. “A full-scale exhibition, which will likely be called ‘Kandinsky and Russia,’ will include not only the works of classics of abstract art, but also paintings of contemporary artists who develop on Kandinsky’s ideas in their work.” (more…)

A proposed work by artist Marc Quinn will exhibit two blocks of preserved blood outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, The Guardian reports. The two cubes will feature blood in one from celebrities, and on the other from refugees. “The fundamental point of the sculpture is that under the skin, we’re all the same,” says Quinn. “You will see two sculptures made from blood but you won’t know who they’re from.” (more…)

Rebecca Rabinow, director of the Menil Collection in Houston, has been named to the board of directors of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in Berkeley, California, Art News reports.  “An authority on the work of Henri Matisse, Rebecca has long been aware that the master artist was a lodestar for Richard Diebenkorn, holding for him the spark of modernity and lessons of pure painting,” says foundation president Steven Nash. (more…)

Emmanuel Macron has proposed a new approach to French cultural policy, pushing for a government that seeks to emphasize culture as a prominent part of society, and address the “political struggle we have today, fighting against obscurantism [extremism], and the marginalization of creation and culture.” (more…)

Tomas Saraceno gets a profile in the NYT this week, as he opens his new exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. “He’s a great artist, comparable to Marcel Duchamp or even Leonardo da Vinci, who always thought outside and combined disciplines,” says curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel. (more…)

Vilnius, Lithuania has opened the new, €15m MO Museum, housing the 4,000-work private collection of biotech entrepreneur Viktoras Butkus and his wife Danguole.  (more…)

A Jackson Pollock painting originally purchased for $306 in 1950 by Nelson Rockefeller is headed to Phillips in New York next month, carrying a $18 million estimate. “There’s a real magic to that provenance,” says Robert Manley, co-head of 20th century and contemporary art at Phillips. “They were the biggest collectors of their time. They had access and very good taste. People knew that much of their art will end up in major museums.” (more…)

Fausto Melotti, The Deserted City (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s expansive 22nd Street location in New York, a body of work by the Italian master Fausto Melotti spreads across the upper floors, a snaking, intricate series of pathways that draw the viewer into an intimate, almost theatrical relationship to the works on view. Presenting a series of varied scenes and arrangements of the artist’s delicate, surreal formal arrangements, the show is an exemplary demonstration of Melotti’s capacities to create other worlds and new sensations within the gallery. (more…)

Pope.L, Rebuilding the Monument (chicago version/the vitrine problem/one of three) (2007), via Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Currently on at both of Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s New York locations, artist Pope.L presents an exploration of various projects both current at historical at its Chelsea exhibition space and uptown gallery.  Pope.L’s practice often focuses on the uncertain but productive space between differences in language, class, race, and gender to create works that simultaneously enlist, mock and re-write convention. For Pope.L this gap is where ignorance, the unknown, or the unintended collides with human meaning and, even hubris to create fresh tensions around authenticity, self and icon. (more…)

Pierre Huyghe, UUmwelt (Installation View), Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (3 October 2018 – 10 February 2019). Copyright Ola Rindal. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries

Artist Pierre Huyghe is known for his complex immersive ecosystems, creating impressive arrangements of space and material that incorporate living organisms, active agents and forces that gradually transform or reactivate the gallery in which its placed.  For his new exhibition at The Serpentine Gallery in the UK, which opened during Frieze London this past month, the artist has turned the museum into a porous and contingent environment, housing different forms of cognition, emerging intelligence, biological reproduction and instinctual behaviors. (more…)

Simone Leigh was has won the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, given every two years to a contemporary artist. The prize includes a $100,000 check and an exhibition next April at the museum.  (more…)

A fine art consultant in New York and an interior designer in Florida are facing charges of fraud after allegedly using an elderly woman’s identity to buy a Mark Rothko for $6.4 million and an Ad Reinhardt work for $1.16 million at Sotheby’s, AP reports. “Our discussions with the purchasers raised significant suspicion and concern for the elderly client they purported to represent and we felt it was necessary to contact the FBI,” Sotheby’s said in a emailed statement. “We are pleased that the appropriate action has been taken and the victim has been protected.” (more…)

Jenny Holzer gets a profile in New York Magazine this week, reviewing her recent work and her approach towards creating her bracing, direct brand of text art. “I have made much of my work sex-blind and anonymous so that it wouldn’t be dismissed as the work of a woman,” she says. “I don’t want to be looked at or dismissed, or even attract anybody, as a female.” (more…)

Barbara Kruger will reprise her iconic installation Untitled (Questions) on the facade of LA’s Geffen Contemporary, the LA Times reports. “People in this city didn’t realize what a gem this building was,” Kruger says of the space. “It was able to shape-shift and be altered in brute, really material ways. It wasn’t a precious over-designed museum.” (more…)

Kassel’s controversial obelisk sculpture, installed during Documenta 14 last year, Monument to Strangers and Refugees by artist Olu Oguibe, will remain on view permanently in the city, following protests, defacement, and a temporary removal at the beginning of the month.  “There was no way that I could possibly agree with, or approve of, or be party to the removal of the obelisk from the Königsplatz, and it is my hope that the ugly event of October 3 will give Kassel’s leaders cause to revisit the violence that they’ve repeatedly done to artists’ works and visions, and finally put in place a decent policy to avoid such violence in the future,” the artist said in a statement. (more…)

Olafur Eliasson, Straight Back (2018), via Art Observed

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is currently presenting Olafur Eliasson: The speed of your attention, the first solo exhibition dedicated to Eliasson at the gallery’s recently inaugurated Los Angeles location. The phrase “the speed of your attention” was introduced to Eliasson by Joe Dumit, an anthropologist at UC Davis who conducted a movement experiment during a workshop at Eliasson’s Berlin studio this summer. Dumit learned the phrase from Nita Little—one of the pioneers of contact improvisation, a contemporary dance technique in which movements arise through contact between two or more dancers—in the form of the instruction to “move at the speed of your attention.” (more…)