Ousted MOCA curator Helen Molesworth will give the commencement address for UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture this year, the LA Times reports. “It is in the times that are most challenging that we, as artists, must engage the world with our greatest passion, clarity and forward-thinking vision,” says Dean Brett Steele. “To be an artist in an uncertain future, you must be brave, you must be bold, and you must strive for excellence.” (more…)

A rare Peter Paul Rubens oil sketch on paper, Head of an African Man Wearing a Turban, has had an export ban placed upon it by the UK Government, after being offered for sale for upwards of £7.7 million.  “This powerful sketch is not only a stunning example of his work but hugely important as a rare representation of an African man in Europe at this time. I hope that a buyer can be found so that this outstanding item can be kept in the UK for future generations to enjoy,” says arts minister, Michael Ellis.  (more…)

Toronto police are on the hunt for a woman spotting stealing a stone from a Yoko Ono installation at the Gardiner museum.  According to police, the suspect “just picked it up and walked away with” the stone, valued at $17,500. (more…)

The Public Art Fund’s summer season has been announced, including a public project by Erwin Wurm that will feature a bloated bus serving free hot dogs to hungry New Yorkers. Other projects from Tauba Auerbach and B. Wurtz are also slated for the summer months. (more…)

Robert Irwin at Sprüth Magers (Installation View), via Art Observed

Few artists have left such a remarkable imprint on the art and art history of Southern California in the way that Robert Irwin has done over the past 50-plus years. Pioneering a mode of practice that slowly but deliberately broke ranks with the painterly abstraction and object-based practice of the era to develop a mode of art-making that embraced light, form and space as free-floating, conceptual tools.  As a native Californian, Irwin’s work drew heavily from his experience of its delicate nuances in light and tone, the massive expanses of the California desert, evolving into complex geometric arrangements of space using scrim and paint to create shiting densities of light. (more…)

Liu Shiyuan, Isolated Above, Connected Down (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar

The 33 year old Chinese-born artist Liu Shiyuan’s solo exhibition Isolated Above, Connected Down at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery introduces not only six mashups of curated photography compositions in the second floor main gallery, each called Almost Like Rebar, but also two large-scale creations: a substantial cinematic work shown in a sprawling but comfortable first floor “rec room,” more playpen for grown ups than video installation, and upstairs, another literally “soft” environment: a felt-carpeted room installed in the project space supplemented with found furniture and coffee smells. (more…)

Printed Matter has appointed Sonel Breslav as its new director of fairs and editions, Artforum reports. “We are thrilled to have Sonel taking up the fair leadership—her long commitment to artists’ publishing and experience working closely with artists makes her remarkably well-suited for the role,” Printed Matter’s executive director Max Schumann says. (more…)

Documenta’s newly founded Documenta Institute is looking to hire a group of professors to research the past editions of the fair in Kassel. “This expertise will keep alive the history and success of this global art exhibition outside the actual five-yearly exhibitions themselves,” says Boris Rhein, the Hesse minister for culture and science. “Together with the Documenta archive, the Documenta Institute and its research will turn the 60-year history of the exhibition into a slice of art history.” (more…)

Stan Douglas, Loot (2017), via Art Observed

Continuing his practice of blending the hyperreal and the inherent materialities of photographic production, artist Stan Douglas has returned to David Zwirner this month for a show of new works from two divergent modes of practice.  The show, titled DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout, mixes together Douglas’s ongoing practice of detailed, involved portraiture, staged scenes that incorporate both specific time frames/locations into a freewheeling riff on the construction of reality, and a body of work that uses computer algorithms to deconstruct the image.  Throughout, Douglas’s interest in the construction of the image, and the narratives (or lack thereof) that emerge from the surface is at center stage.

Stan Douglas, Stranded (2017), via Art Observed

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Suki Seokyeong Kang, Jeong 井 (Installation View)

For her first exhibition with Tina Kim Gallery, Seoul-based artist Suki Seokyeong Kang has orchestrated a three-stage installation of sculpture, film and painting, offering a glimpse of her complex artistic practice prior to her US museum debut at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in late April. Here, she utilizes the gallery’s spacious sequential architecture to engage with the audience in a succinct narrative on cultural identity, memory, and art-making. The exhibition title Jeong 井 refers to a Korean musical notation system, Jeongganobo, that differs from the Western system of coding music in structure and form. Comprised of squares situated in a grid-like format, this musical system values time and suggests the next note through a lettering system in vertical sequence. Similar to notes that inform the musician through a score, Kang’s installation guides its audience through a set of visually subtle, yet conceptually robust steel and wood sculptures. (more…)

The Frick has announced the latest iteration of expansion plans, designed by the architect Annabelle Selldorf, which keeps the museum’s famed garden as part of its plans. “Gardens are works of art,” says Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture. “This one is in perfect condition by Russell Page, one of the pre-eminent garden designers of the 20th century, and it should be respected as such. It’s as important as a tapestry or even a painting, and I think the museum is obliged to recognize its importance.” (more…)

The Victoria and Albert Museum has opened the conversation the return of Ethiopian treasures looted by British troops in 1868, the Art Newspaper reports, taking a step in the direction of France’s newly open policy towards restitution of looted artifacts. “It behoves an institution like the V&A to reflect on this imperial past, to be open about this history and to interpret that history,” says V&A director, Tristram Hunt. “We should not to be afraid of history, even if it is complicated and challenging. As an institution, we should have the bravery to deal with it.” (more…)

Dan Flavin, Untitled (To Helen Winkler) (1972), via Art Observed

During the early years of Dan Flavin’s career, the artist was known to experiment in particular with fluorescent lights as much for aesthetic potential as for the economics of their procurement.  Easy to access in any hardware store (and often just as easy to return after a show), Flavin embraced the cheap materials of home improvement projects and industrial construction as an essential part of his practice.  Yet what Flavin achieved with his pieces is equally significant, creating stately, somber interrogations of space and perception with these simple materials, often using simple patterns and accumulations of material that tied him to other masters of the burgeoning school of minimalist practice developing around him in New York. (more…)

The Condo Gallery Share Program has announced the participants for its 2018 event in Mexico City, the Art News reports. The project will see 22 galleries in the Mexican capital hosting 49 from around the globe.  (more…)

Rikrit Tiravanija has been tapped for the latest flag commission in Creative Time’s Pledge of Allegiance project. The flag is a white version of the American flag with the words “FEAR EATS THE SOUL” emblazoned on its surface.  (more…)

The Met is embarking on an ambitious overhaul of the skylights in its European paintings galleries, the New York Times reports.  “This is all about the light,” says Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the European paintings department.  (more…)

Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at The Guggenheim, artist Danh Vo’s major retrospective invites a swirling, multi-faceted experience of the world and its political/social hierarchies over the past 40 years. Investigating moments and memories from the artist’s own life in Europe after his family fled Vietnam in the wake of the war during the mid-1970’s, his pieces move between assembled objects (documents, photos and journals) from participants in various parts of the war era, other iterations and moments of conflict and co-existence between Asia and the West, and his own memories and experiences. Presented here, the exhibition offers a striking opportunity for the viewer to explore a wide body of the artist’s output, which only amplifies his creative and political vision.

Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

Ryan Gander (Installation View), via Lisson Gallery

The passage of time is at the center of artist Ryan Gander’s current solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery’s 67 Lisson location in London.  Marking the artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery, Gander’s show has pulled a particularly simple, yet tellingly even-handed quote from his father as the inspiration for the show: “let the world take a turn.”  Taking his father’s words to heart, Gander encourages spectatorship, welcoming the viewer to allow time to take its course within the gallery, and to allow it to work its healing, transformational capabilities to work throughout the show.

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Isa Genzken, Untitled (2018), via Art Observed

With a career spanning over four decades, German artist Isa Genzken has constantly worked along the shifting fault-lines of art and design, architecture and media, technology and the individual.  With a body of work that constantly seems to absorb and incorporate the physical materials in her close proximity, assembling them through a range of techniques and practices that flirt with any medium that may cross her mind, from sculpture, painting and collage, to drawing, film, and photography.  Deeply attuned to both the legacies of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the materials and forms of twenty-first-century global society, Genzken’s work interrogates the impact of our increasingly commodified and interconnected culture on our everyday lives.

Isa Genzken, Sky Energy (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

Robert Gober, Untitled (2000-2001), via Matthew Marks

Recalling the title of Robert Gober’s 2014 MoMA show, The Heart is Not a Metaphor, the artist’s current show at Matthew Marks presents an embedded perspective, a uniquely engaged perspective, into Gober’s own internal world. His father built his childhood family house, and, in a similar sense, Gober was also a house-builder, starting his life of art making creating miniature dollhouses.   (more…)

The Art Newspaper publishes piece on the ongoing efforts to cultivate a market for Picasso in Asia, as a major portrait tests the market in Hong Kong this weekend.  “In recent years, most of Picasso’s major portraits and figurative works, in particular those from the 1930s, at auction [worldwide] have gone to private collectors in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong,” says Jasmine Chen, a specialist at Sotheby’s who is at the center of these strategies. (more…)

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2018), via The Guardian

With spring now in our midsts, the string of public art projects targeted towards tourist-heavy summer seasons are opening across the world’s major urban metropolises, each seeking to turn heads while also offering a unique comment on public space and perhaps public discourse.  This year, the biennial sculpture project has opened its newest iteration, Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s striking re-creation of a lamassu, the winged creature of ancient Assyrian myth that guarded the gates of Nineveh.

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Sotheby’s is offering a $30 million Jackson Pollock drip painting for its May Post-War and Contemporary Sale in New York, Art Newspaper reports, a work similar to one that set Pollock’s auction record at $58.4m in 2013. “These works come up at auction from time to time, but this one is most akin to the one that made the record price,” Lisa Dennison, chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America, says. “It’s a very full drawing, and it’s one that goes edge to edge, which is what you really look for in Pollock. They’ve been described as having no limits, just edges. He manages to maintain it as a discrete entity, rather than looking like a fragment, but convey the idea of the infinite as well.” (more…)

Willem de Kooning at Lévy Gorvy, via Art Basel

Marking the second major international art fair of this month, the global arts community has headed east, touching down in the towering metropolis of Hong Kong for the sixth edition of the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair.  Marking the continued shift of focus on the highest end of the global market towards China and its neighbors, the fair has slowly but surely developed into an economic powerhouse for the market, and one where some of the largest deals seem to happen in an open selling environment.  As blue-chip dealers and gallerists increasingly focus on the city and surrounding regions for well-heeled buyers, the fair has taken up a place as a major meeting place for the international art cognoscenti and a group of collectors with an increasingly honed taste for Western art.

Anicka Yi at 47 Canal, via Art Basel

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