David Wojnarowicz, Americans Can’t Deal with Death (1990), via Art Observed

Few artists have managed to fly so consistently under the microscope of the art world’s fascination with downtown New York in the way that David Wojnarowicz has for so many years. Beginning in the late 1970s, the artist created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes, yet his body of work has long been held off from the more hallmark names of the era in terms of impact and historical resonance.  This month, The Whitney seeks to remedy this situation, granting the artist his first major museum retrospective, and turning its focus on a body of work that has long shone brightly even away from the limelight. (more…)

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A museum dedicated to the work of Old Master Pieter Bruegel the Elder has been put on hold due to Belgian laws on over-spending.  “The project is not abandoned but for the moment it is on hold,” says Samir al-Haddad, a spokesperson for the Royal Museums. “It is not that we are begging for money. The strange situation is that we have €5m in our reserves, but with this financial regulation we cannot dig into those reserves.” (more…)

The Uovo Art Storage company will open a new space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Crain’s reports. “Since opening Uovo in 2014, we have seen an unprecedented demand for our integrated art storage and services,” founder Steven Guttman said in a statement. “Opening Uovo: Brooklyn is our latest contribution to supporting New York’s cultural community.” (more…)

James Turrell, Logos (97) Medium Glass Circle (2017), via Kayne Grifffin Corcoran

Kayne Griffin Corcoran Los Angeles is currently exhibiting a selection of new and historic works by James Turrell, including four unique glass works, together with his Autonomous Structures series, a as well as models and prototypes of architectural spaces made between 1989 and 1991. The works on view epitomize his ongoing conversation with light in a retrospective that looks back on the last fifty years through a focused group of pieces. Light and space become a mode of understanding space and time, echoing the circumstances of perception, and building an architecture in its own right. The viewer perceives his sites only through consciousness, with light functioning as an interior mirror reflecting the spatial and temporal depths of one’s seeing, and the presence within space. “I’ve always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream,” Turrell says. “Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people…we don’t normally see light like that. But we all know it.” Turrell does not aim at bringing the viewer to a dazed, exotic zone; he wants to recall this other dimension we know innately.  (more…)

A portrait of Prince Camillo Borghese by the French painter François Gérard, purchased by the Frick last year, is currently the subject of controversy after Italy revoked an export license on the work, and demanded that the Frick return it to the nation. (more…)

Nicholas Hlobo, Phantsi Komngcunube (2017), via Lehmann Maupin

Artist Nicholas Hlobo’s work has long explored the potentials for using various material sources and referential systems, using a range of elements like metal piping and fabric stitching to create elegant, arcing forms and figures that operate as self-contaned metaphors of sorts.  Free-flowing and adventurous, the artist’s work allows him to work instinctively while drawing his forms directly onto canvas from his subconscious, a mode that invites both critical participation and quick impulse at the same time. His work is presented in some sense as a catharsis or exorcism, purging from himself the indoctrination of cultural dichotomies that set boundaries of either/or, where Hlobo wishes to portray the multitude. (more…)

Julia Phillips, Failure Detection (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on at MoMA PS1, New York-based artist Julia Phillips makes her solo museum debut with a show of tense, stimulating sculptures that explore both the presence and absence of the human form.  Featuring six newly commissioned major works alongside existing sculptures, Phillips’s work dives into the space around the body as reflective of the internal, and external politics shaping the world beyond its limits.

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Artist Bjarne Melgaard has been denied by local councils in Norway from building an ambitious home and sculpture near Edvard Munch’s Oslo studio. “We want the site where the death house was intended to be placed to remain a green area for the benefit of the local population, and we encourages Bjarne to find a new site for the project,” city councillors from the Labour, Socialist Left, Green, and Progress Party said in a joint statement. (more…)

Collectors Manfred and Ingrid Rotert have donated their collection of one hundred and fifty works by Joseph Beuys to the Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History in Münster, a major gift consisting of many of the artist’s small-scale “multiples” and film reels. “We were never so ambitious to own everything made by Beuys, but from our first purchase on, we knew: That’s it,” Rotert said. (more…)

Yasuaki Ishizaka has been appointed chairman & managing director for Sotheby’s Japan, Art News reports. “We are delighted to welcome Aki back to Sotheby’s,” says Kevin Ching, CEO of Sotheby’s Asia. “Not only is Aki an art world veteran with over three decades in the field, he also has extensive experience in both auction and private sales businesses.”  (more…)

Roya Sachs is taking over as curator for the Lever House Art Collection, and will open the fall art season with a two floor installation in the space by Peter Halley next month, Art News reports. “There’s something really quite inexplicably magic about this building, because its interior and exterior are in constant dialogue with one another,” Sachs says. “It’s public, but it’s private. It’s a lobby, but it’s also a glass box.” (more…)

Subodh Gupta, Adda/Rendez-vous (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view through the end of the summer at the Monnaie de Paris, Indian artist Subodh Gupta has orchestrated a series of large scale installations and sculptures spread throughout the halls of the famed Parisian institution, a body of work that runs throughout the artist’s focused and expressive sculptural practice. Selected pieces will be on display in conversation with the Monnaie’s permanent collection of metal artifacts to encourage reflection on the medium of metal both in terms of its symbolic value as well as the technical and artistic skill required to manipulate and bring meaning to it. (more…)

France is developing a new “culture pass” app, which will aim to improve access to arts and culture for young people across the country.  “No cultural or artistic offering will be excluded,” says France’s culture minister, Françoise Nyssen. Every organization active in the cultural arena will be welcome on the pass – public or private, physical or virtual.” (more…)

Zona Maco’s sister fairs, Zona Maco Salón and Zona Maco Foto will return this month  after cancellations last September over the earthquake that ripped through Mexico City. The fairs open tomorrow, August 22nd. (more…)

A visitor to an Anish Kapoor show at the Serralves museum in Porto was injured after falling into one of the artist’s works, an 8-foot deep hole titled Descent into Limbo. The visitor is believed to have slipped and fell, although an investigation is still underway.  (more…)

The New Yorker has a piece this week on Alex Katz, and his impressive influence on the field of painting, despite remaining relatively overlooked by the art market’s blue-chip buyers.  “I never fit in,” he says. “I’m not a Pop artist, and people can’t see my work as realistic, either.” (more…)

Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (1975), via Art Observed

Featuring one hundred artworks by Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeu de Paume anchors its summer offering with a show dedicated to the artist’s equally enigmatic and engaging practice, one that worked through principles of urban encounter, agency and abstraction with a unique sense of humor.  The show, titled Anarchitect explores the importance of Matta-Clark’s practice towards a rethinking of architecture after modernism. Embracing a diversity of media that include photography, film and printmaking, the exhibition features a number of works related to contemporary urban culture that further contextualize Gordon Matta-Clark’s compelling critique of architecture. (more…)

New Met Museum Head Max Hollein gets a profile in Vogue, exploring his leadership style and vision for the storied institution. “Max likes to run things,” Dede Wilsey, the main patron of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco says. “He’s always way ahead of everybody in his thinking. So if he’s decided this is going to work at the Met, he’s figured out how it’s going to work.” (more…)

Gagosian Gallery has hired dealer Andrew Fabricant after his departure from rival Richard Gray Gallery. “Gagosian’s global platform and broad embrace of both historical and contemporary artists was inspirational and important to me in this decision,” Fabricant said in the statement. “The gallery’s international profile has influenced and informed the tastes and interests of both a seasoned and new generation of collectors.” (more…)

Research into the current state of the arts in Berlin shows that the city’s artists face frequent challenges of poverty, gender pay gaps and minuscule pensions.  “Most of the numbers were expected, but I was alarmed by how low the pension expectancy of artists actually is,” says researcher Hergen Wöbken. (more…)

MoMA Local 2110 union has reached an agreement for a new contract with management at the institution. “We attribute the museum’s retractions in no small part to the dedicated efforts and perseverance of our members, who have spent months volunteering their time to our activism and turning out in record numbers to participate in collective actions, as well as to the resounding vocal support from our colleagues, friends, and the public at large,” says Maida Rosenstein, the president of United Auto Workers Local 2110. (more…)

Peter Paul Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents will travel to the Rubenshuis museum in Antwerp this fall from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Newspaper reports.  The painting, last sold in 2002 for £49.5 million, will be a part of research projects during its loan. “We can imagine with disbelief that he painted as much as he did within that relatively small space over a relatively short period of time… He establishes what is arguably the most productive artistic studio of all time to date in that space,” says Sasha Suda, the AGO’s curator of European art. (more…)

Nicole Eisenman and Anton Kern, have agreed to significantly reduce the price for the fountain sculpture requested by the City of Münster, putting the city’s fundraising efforts much closer to completion. “We wanted the bulk of the funding to come from Münster citizens,” says dealer Maria Galen, who has led the push for the sculpture. “But we have also applied to some foundations, and we don’t yet know what we will get. We are very confident.” (more…)