Ten Pablo Picasso works are among the pieces discovered during a reappraisal of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s holdings, the Art Newspaper reports.     (more…)

Sculptor B. Wurtz is featured in the NYT this week, discussing the selection of Eames chairs he has collected and restored over the course of his life. “I have this fascination with Eames because I associate them with California, which is where I grew up,” he says. “And because they wanted to make nicely designed furniture that people could afford.” (more…)

The Kunststiftung NRW foundation in Germany has named the shortlist for the 2018 Nam June Paik Award, which includes a €25,000 prize. The nominees are Andreas Angelidakis, Melanie Bonajo, Antoine Catala, Hanne Lippard, and Sondra Perry.  (more…)

Sotheby’s has reported a $57.3 million net income in the second quarter of 2018—a decrease of $19.6 million from last year, it noted in its call to investors this morning. “Overall,”CEO Tad Smith said, “these results were lower than we expected. At the same time, management and the board are excited as ever about the company’s prospects going forward.” (more…)

The Bass in Miami Beach has acquired major work by Sandford Biggers, Lawrence Weiner, and more, Artofurm reports. “Continuing to grow and expand The Bass’s permanent collection is a vital part of our commitment to presenting international contemporary art to our audiences,” says director and chief curator Silvia Cubina. (more…)

The Mechanics of Fluids (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Currently on view at Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea exhibition space, the gallery’s entry in the annual string of summer group shows dives into the work of artist-turned-curator Melissa Gordon. Gordon, whose work explores shifting, ever-changing experiences in texture and materiality, turns her aesthetic sensibilities towards a broader selection of women artists, charting a broad trajectory of voices and strategies including work by Lynda Benglis, Helen Frankenthaler, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman and others, all set set off by an architectural intervention of Gordon’s own design. (more…)

Alex Da Corte, Slow Graffiti, 2017.©Alex Da Corte. Courtesy the artist

David Zwirner’s summer group exhibition, This Is Not a Prop brings together aesthetically slick and conceptually witty works by an intergenerational group of artists working in a variety of media. The thread weaving through the show is questioning of bodies’ relationship to objects, both in harmony and discord, as most vividly manifested in two Franz West sculptures from the ‘90s spearheading the exhibition. (more…)

Munich’s Haus der Kunst has cancelled its exhibition of the touring Joan Jonas retrospective, citing financial difficulties. All attempts at securing last minute funding have failed, leaving the institution without the resources to open the show.  (more…)

Nicole Eisenman has won the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize, which includes a $200,000 cash award. “I would describe her as being one of the most important painters of our generation,” says Louis Grachos, the executive director and chief executive of the Contemporary Austin. “Part of the excitement we have for this prize is it’s so focused on the artist’s ability to create new work.” (more…)

Josh Kline, 10% Tip (Applebee’s Waitress’ Hand and Foot) (2018), via Metro Pictures

Currently on view at Metro Pictures, and continuing a trend this summer towards artists taking the curatorial reins for the summer group shows across the city, Josh Kline has pulled together a body of work for the Chelsea exhibition space under the title Evidence. Featuring the work of seven artists, Evidence investigates the nature of documentation and reality in post-truth America, posing the state of modern political discourse as an opportunity to reframe and rethink the act of expression. (more…)

Sedrick Chisom, Fragile Narcissus’ Expulsion and Regurgitation of White Bile Into an Echo of His Belated Self (2018), via JTT

Drawing on the writings of the late theorist Mark Fisher as a starting point for broader explorations of modern artistic practice and its possibilities in challenging the status quo of the global capitalist landscape, Dan Herschlein has dipped his toe into the world of curating, organizing an exhibition around the work David Altmejd, Adam Putnam, Elizabeth Jaeger, Gil Batle, and more at JTT.  Using varied approaches and modes of creative making, including illustration, sculpture and even graphic novels, Herschlein’s show delves into the idea of just how modern practice might be able to work around “culturally sanctioned ideals” or to explore how the human mind may be able to sustain itself beyond these ideals. (more…)

Cheim & Read will host a fundraiser for NY gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon on August 14, Art News reports. “We believe in Cynthia Nixon’s platform and would like to lend our support at this critical time in American politics,” the gallery told says. (more…)

Simon Shaw has been named vice chairman of Sotheby’s global fine art division, Art News reports. Shaw was behind the record $157.2 million sale of Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917 painting Nu couché (sur le côté gauche). (more…)

Shirin Neshat, Mickalene Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others, will create a series of video works for Planned Parenthood’s new campaign, Unstoppable. “In the darkest hours, the struggle is to keep on pushing, to keep on advancing, to rebel and to protest, to lift our voices against all forms of injustice as we attempt to address the wrongs of the past, to move to higher ground and to hold on tighter to hope, to one another and to love,” Weems said in a statement. (more…)

Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery has clamped down on “illegal” tours of its halls, with a side effect being museum guards reprimanding everyday visitors discussing the works. “We were exchanging views about the paintings, naturally we asked each other questions,” says University professor Maxim Shevchenko. “Suddenly we were approached by a guard who said it was prohibited to lead tours without accreditation.” (more…)

An artwork featuring a list of 34,361 refugees and migrants who have lost their lives trying to reach Europe has been destroyed in the city of Liverpool. Artist Banu CennetoÄŸlu has produced this list for several years, with this iteration installed for the Liverpool Biennial.  “It is timely and important to make The List public during a global refugee crisis,” the exhibition organizers said in a statement. “We were dismayed to see it had been removed on Saturday night and would like to know why. The List has been met with critical acclaim and we are doing everything we can to reinstate it.” (more…)

In a major announcement, Klaus Biesenbach will head west to serve as the next director of MOCA Los Angeles, the LA Times reports. “He’s a total visionary,” MOCA board president Maria Seferian said. “He’s an incredible museum executive. He’s innovative. He’s done it all.” (more…)

Robert Indiana’s estate is the subject of an in-depth piece in the NYT this week, examining the influence the late artist’s caretaker has exerted over the control of his works and images, and may have driven the production of a series of works attributed to the artist that have raised questions over their authenticity. “I would be surprised,” says scholar John Wilmerding, “if any serious and informed Indiana critic or writer would accept these works, in my opinion.” (more…)

The Guardian notes that the Trump Administration has still not named its pick for next year’s Venice Biennale, and looks at the consistently icy relationship between the President and the art world. “Trump seems utterly confused in even defining the word culture,” says Virginia Shore, former chief curator of the state department’s Art in Embassies program. (more…)

Los Angeles–based dealer and collector Stefan Simchowitz will open a semi-permanent exhibition space in a former newsstand in the city, Art News reports. “Newsstands are all going out of business,” Simchowitz says. “It’s kind of tragic, because a newsstand, if you think about it, is almost like the last holdout of cultural diversity and complexity. It’s an environment where you have special interests and different interests represented, different subcultures represented, and they’re just going out of business, effectively.” (more…)

The New York chapter of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) staged a protest at The Whitney this week, accusing the museum’s show on David Wojnarowicz of overly historicizing the AIDS Crisis rather than addressing it as an ongoing issue.  “The more this vital subject can be brought front and center, the better,” the museum said in a statement. “We completely agree that the AIDS crisis is not history.” (more…)

Leidy Churchman, Paradise 8 & 9 (2018), via Matthew Marks

Following past iterations in 1998 and 2008 iterations, Painting: Now and Forever, Part III occupies the gallery spaces of Matthew Marks Gallery and Greene Naftali spread across Chelsea. Spanning five spaces in total, the ambitious checklist includes an impressive roster of over forty artists. While loosely grouping the show around style and visual vocabulary in each space, the exhibition more broadly tackles the stylistic and thematic concerns contemporary painting—mostly figurative–over the past decade.

Nicole Eisenman, Luck Lines (2018), via Greene Naftali (more…)

Carol Bove, The Romance of Black Money (2018), via David Zwirner

Currently on view at David Zwirner’s 24 Grafton Street location in London, artist Carol Bove has erected a series of her recent sculptures, exploring the artist’s continued practice combining tightly orchestrated references to the canon on modern sculpture with her own enigmatic interpretations and spatial innovations.  The show, which closes at the end of the week, marks a another chapter in Bove’s impressive vision, as her brightly colored, monolithic works continue to shift and evolve in vision and scope. (more…)

Marta Gili will resign from her position as director of Jeu de Paume in Paris, the institution announced. Gili will leave the museum to take on a “a large number of contemporary art projects” in Barcelona.  (more…)