A Banksy painting “self-destructed” following its sale at Sotheby’s in London this week, after being sold for over £1m. Following the final hammer, an alarm sounded, and the painting began shredding itself as it slid through its frame. “We have not experienced this situation in the past . . . where a painting spontaneously shredded, upon achieving a [near-]record for the artist. We are busily figuring out what this means in an auction context,” says Alex Branczik, senior director at Sotheby’s. (more…)

Calvin Marcus, Blue Devil (2018) at David Kordansky, all images by Diletta Fenicia and Quincy Childs for Art Observed

Opening its doors this week for its 16th edition, Frieze London 2018 has once again turned the art world’s collective eye towards the British capital for the next week, as sales and installations across its spacious halls make for a fitting center to one of the city’s busiest art events. With 160 galleries from around the globe showing at the Regent’s Park exhibition space, the rest of the world seems to have come along for the ride.

Daniel Arsham, Patch 5 (2018) at Perrotin

Antony Gormley, FRONT (2016) and Alvaro Barrington, A Straight Face (2018) at Thaddaeus Ropac

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Jenny Saville, Propped (1992), via Sotheby’s

With the conclusion of the week in London, a trio of auctions have painted an unclear picture of the Post-War and Contemporary Market in Britain, as a series of sales at the major houses saw particularly mixed results over the past two evenings.  With a number of high-profile works going unsold, and a somewhat unsteady level of interest among paintings as a running theme, the sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips saw several strong outings as well as a few notable disappointments, summarized below.

Jeff Koons, Cracked Egg (Blue) (1994-2006), via Christie’s (more…)

The Guggenheim has returned an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting Artillerymen (1915) to the heirs of one of previous owners, art dealer Alfred Flechtheim. The work was shown to have been taken from the family by the Nazis during the Holocaust. (more…)

Frieze London has awarded Blank Projects of Cape Town, South Africa its Focus Stand Prize, while Sprüth Magers took home the fair’s main Stand Prize, while artist Wong Pong was awarded the Camden Arts Centre Emerging Arts Prize.   (more…)

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder has returned to the walls of Spain’s Museo del Prado, following a lengthy restoration. “The work required a complete cleaning, which was particularly complex because of the thinness of the original layer of paint compared to the thickness of the retouches—a real crust,” says lead conservator Maria Antonia López de Asiain. (more…)

Real estate investor and developer Lawrence B. Benenson has donated Do Ho Suh’s 2003 installation The Perfect Home II to the Brooklyn Museum, Art News reports.  The work re-creates the artist’s former apartment on West 23rd Street in Chelsea. “The work addresses loss and memory on several levels—the personal, the local, and the global—making it an ideal piece to initiate a range of fascinating conversations with our diverse audiences,” says Eugenie Tsai, the Brooklyn Museum’s senior curator of contemporary art. (more…)

Sotheby’s has unveiled its marquee works for its November Impressionist and Modern Sale in New York, works from a private European collection that totals $90 million, and features a trio of Wassily Kandinsky paintings with a combined low estimate of $55m. ““Infused with an intensity of color and expression, this collection of works provides a rare and exciting opportunity to acquire several exceptional examples of early-20^th Century Art,” says Helena Newman, Head of Sotheby’s Worldwide Impressionist & Modern Art Department. (more…)

Collector Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas is seeking the termination of his loan of 700 drawings to the Serralves Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, following the censorship of a show of Robert Mapplethorpe works. (more…)

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev has filed a $380 million lawsuit against Sotheby’s, claiming the auction house’s involvement in the purchase of a series of works from Yves Bouvier.  Rybolovlev claims the auction house “materially assisted the largest art fraud in history.” (more…)

David Hockney is interviewed in the NYT this week, as the artist prepares to unveil a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and reflects on his decision not to paint the Queen. “I’m not sure how to paint her, you see, because she’s not an ordinary human being,” he says. (more…)

A Paris court has decreed that a Pissarro painting stolen from a French Jewish family during the German occupation must be returned to the family, The Guardian reports. The work, seized from a Jewish collector, Simon Bauer, in 1943 by the Vichy government, was currently in the collection of American collectors Bruce and Robbi Toll.  (more…)

More than 140 artists and professionals from Documenta 14 have sent two letters to Greek officials yesterday, protesting over the murder of LGBTQI+ activist and drag performer Zak Kostopoulos, who was attacked during a performance and died from his injuries. “The public killing of Zak Kostopoulos bears strong resemblance to lynching,” the letters read.  (more…)

A French research claims he has identified the sitter of Courbet’s Origin of the World, claiming withe near certainty that the painting is of Constance Quéniaux, a dancer at the Paris Opera. “My only contribution was to make this object a subject,” says historian Claude Schopp. “Now she’s something else besides flesh. I wanted to restore a person.” (more…)

Frieze London, via Art Observed

Frieze London returns to Regent’s Park this week, bringing with it its reputation for presenting the best of international contemporary art by emerging and established artists, and its signature program of dynamic commissions, talks and films, all unified under the fair’s bespoke tent design at the heart of the British capital.  Opening Wednesday, the fair will offer a unique look at the state of the British art market, and that of the EU more broadly, while providing a platform for artists in Europe and abroad to explore and express new concepts and ideas in art practice. (more…)

The New Art Dealers Alliance has named the winners of this year’s NADA Miami International Gallery Prize: London’s Arcadia Missa and Tokyo’s Asakusa. “The International Gallery Prize was founded to provide galleries from outside the U.S. an opportunity to participate in a NADA fair—which often happens to be their first American fair—in a way that both minimizes the financial risk and encourages experimentation. It has been a great way for us to direct attention to the quality of programs from galleries around the world,” says Heather Hubbs, NADA’s executive director.  (more…)

The Financial Times looks at recent curatorial and exhibition ventures by galleries, and asks if commercial spaces are leading the intellectual charge in the current art landscape. “The nature of collecting and connoisseurship in the 21st century, and in doing so,” Sean Kelly says, “to inspire a new generation of collectors and individuals committed to making a meaningful investment in our shared cultural future.” (more…)

New York’s Spring/Break Art Show will return for its eighth edition next year, running from March 6th – 11th, and centered around the theme “Fact and Fiction.”  “We thought, ‘Well, since high stations of office are calling into question what most people would consider factual, maybe it’s a good time to explore how artists inhabit paradoxical spaces,’ ” says co-founder Andrew Gori. (more…)

Art dealer Phyllis Kind, who supported a range of artists formative in the landscape of post-war contemporary art in Chicago, has passed away at the age of 85. “In the mid-’70s she was pretty much ‘the only game in town’ for the Chicago artists she represented,” says artist couple Lorri Gunn and Karl Wirsum. (more…)

Rachel Whiteread has an interview in The Guardian this week, as the artist opens her first permanent sculpture in the UK, and reflects on leaving her longtime home and studio in Shoreditch. “We couldn’t stand Shoreditch any longer,” she says. “It’s just a hellhole. I know we artists contributed to making it that way [gentrified, expensive, noisy], but it had become monstrous. Everybody I know has left: every good artist.” (more…)

Jeff Koons, Cracked Egg (Blue) (1994-2006), via Christie’s

With the opening of the doors for this year’s edition of Frieze London, the opening notes of the fall auction season can’t be far behind.  This week, the major auction houses will get their chance to make a mark on the fall calendar, launching a series of Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sales that will see a number of marquee works trade hands, and offer a first perspective on just how the auction houses are responding to a particularly turbulent global political picture.  As London braces for an increasingly cloudy Brexit outlook, the market conditions in the capital could definitely be better, but tricky economics have been bucked by eager buyers in the past, and the series of works on hand this year could in fact do well to staunch the bleeding caused by a border between the UK and EU that seems to be getting harder by the minute.   (more…)

Danny Lyon, Wanderer (still) (2017), via Gavin Brown’s

In 1970, photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon left his home in New York City, and moved out to the small village of Llanito, New Mexico, in the Rio Grande Valley, north of Albuquerque. Shortly after arriving, he began making photographs and films of his neighbors, their children, and the local labor force, all undocumented workers from Mexico. Years later, Lyon is still working in the regions of New Mexico and Arizona, exploring the tightly-knit communities of migrant laborers and their families from a directly engaged perspective.   (more…)

Antoine Catala, Puzzle Piece 1 (2017), via Marlborough Contemporary

Currently on at Marlborough Contemporary’s newest location in London, artist Antoine Catala’s new work  brings together both new and existing works to form a kinetic installation, exploring emojis and text messages and the effects of new communication technologies on society.  Catala, whose work is invested in the intriguing cultural effects and aesthetic possibilities of the new language and modes of meaning that have emerged from widespread digital communication technologies, here orchestrates an ever-evolving, uniquely arranged body of works that change and move in the same way that language itself seems to online.

Antoine Catala, I Am Here For You (Sock Orange) (2018), via Marlborough Contemporary

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A new Broadway musical will focus on the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, composed by Jon Batiste, the bandleader and musical director of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “Over the years, many people have approached us about telling our brother’s story on stage, but having discussed this project with the (producers Alan D. Marks and Barbara) Marks over many months, our interest was piqued once we understood that their approach to telling our brother’s story treats his life, his art and his legacy with respect and passion,” says Basquiat’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Basquiat in a statement. “With Jon Batiste and John Doyle leading the creative team, we are thrilled with the possibilities. We cannot wait to begin the developmental process. Broadway is a new world for us, and we looking forward to sharing our brother’s life and art.” (more…)