Washington City Paper spotlights the current construction underway at the Corcoran Gallery and George Washington University Art School, and the issues it has caused for current students, some of whom accuse the institution of endangering their health.  “In terms of this being an environmentally safe place to be, it is, and if it were not, I would shut it down,” said Darell Darnell, senior associate vice president for safety and security at the George Washington University. (more…)

Artforum’s new editor David Velasco is profiled in a piece at SSENSE today, spotlighting his vision for the magazine and his path forward following the resignation of Knight Landesman. “I can’t disappear anymore,” he jokes. “I used to love disappearing. Now I have to walk through the whole office to get to my corner. It’s more of a display.” (more…)

Global auction sales grew 25% last year, reaching $11.21 billion, according to a new report by ArtTactic. New York continued its domination of the global market, with its market seeing 41.7% jump in overall sales, boosting market share to 48.7%.  (more…)

Dis Magazine has relaunched its website after a pivot to video, and features new work by Darren Bader, Casey Jane Ellison and more. “People want information and knowledge, but the way it needs to be delivered is changing. We saw a real gap in the market — creating new languages, culture, talking about the most recent thing hasn’t been translated to video,” Dis co-founder Lauren Boyle says. (more…)

Serge Alain Nitegeka, Colour & Form XL (2017), via Marianne Boesky

Since joining Marianne Boesky several years ago, the Johannesburg-based painter Serge Alain Nitegeka has explored a series of ever-changing, constantly evolving approaches to a familiar construct. Blocks of color and stark, geometric forms dominate his pieces, always interested and invested in the way their application is capable not only of dividing up the space of his panels, but equally in how the viewer’s comprehension of space is shifted in turn. For his most recent exhibition at the New York Gallery, Nitegeka brings a selection of striking new paintings that continue this array of interests, applied towards increasingly impressive ends.

Serge Alain Nitegeka, Colour & Form XLVIII (2017), via Marianne Boesky

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Los Angeles gallery Freedman Fitzpatrick is opening a new location in Paris, Art News reports. “Paris is really similar to L.A. in that way,” Robbie Fitzpatrick says. “A lot of artists are moving there from all over. It’s manifesting itself as a dynamic city that has a lot of possibility to explore, on top of already being an incredibly important city for culture, historically.” (more…)

Katherine Bernhardt, Siesta (2017), via Canada Gallery

Katherine Bernhardt’s work is nothing if not repetitive, producing colorful, swirling landscapes of repeated graphic motifs, often using variations on a theme to produce a sort of constellation of the everyday.  For her most recent show at Canada Gallery, she returns to this mode of practice. Cigarettes and Nike logos are a frequent occurrence, as are pizza, tropical fruits and even the occasional insect.  The show, which draws its name and inspiration in part from the classic Charlton Heston futuristic nightmare film Soylent Green, is equally invested in a sense of societal decline, pushing the artist’s own approach to figuration to stranger heights, twisting bodies ever further and images into an even more bizarre state of juxtaposition.  The same ideas are present to be sure, but the artist’s use of this same repetitive motif, one she has used over the past several years since debuting the approach at Canada three years ago, has been pushed to intense new vistas. (more…)

The New York Times takes a look at recent blockchain authorization technology, and fine art projects that have explored the blockchain as both a performative space and a place for authenticating ownership for work. “It’s early days, but this could happen in the blossoming art space as well. The blockchain is an entirely new medium for art,” Mack Flavelle, a developer and artist behind one project called CryptoKitties.  (more…)

A group of art world professionals have penned an open letter over Kassel’s plans for the future of Documenta, expressing concern over the resignation of director Annette Kulenkampff.  The letter challenges the assertion that there “has been no proof whatsoever of (Kulenkampff’s) culpability” for the program’s budget deficits “which arose through a program concept for which all parties shared responsibility.” (more…)

The Tate and the National Galleries Scotland have suspended their relationships with dealer Anthony d’Offay over accusations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior. “In light of these allegations, Tate and NGS have decided that it is appropriate to suspend any further contact with Mr D’Offay until these matters have been clarified,” the organizations said in a joint statement. (more…)

The fallout of the disputed Modiglianis from a show at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa has led to visitors filing lawsuits demanding their admission tickets be refunded. “If the court report is reliable, we are victims of fraud,” Pietro Da Passano, director of the Palazzo Ducale, said.  (more…)

The Basel Art Museum is currently reconsidering demands it return a art historian Curt Glaser’s collection to his descendants, works which are believed to be Nazi loot. “On the outcome, it’s really an open process,” says Felix Uhlmann, president of the Basel museum’s art commission. “Otherwise, we would not do this.” (more…)

David Lamelas, The Other Side (Installation View), via Maccarone

The current exhibition at Maccarone Gallery in Los Angeles is something of a subdued affair, a pair of works by David Lamelas erected on either side of the gallery’s main, bisecting wall. The show, Lamelas’s third with the New York/Los Angeles gallery, is executed in conjunction with the current iteration of Pacific Standard Time, which included a body of the artist’s works. (more…)

David Kordansky Gallery is now representing painter Michael Williams, Art News reports. The artist will continue to show with his other galleries, including Gladstone. “Each work is an existential conundrum,” Kordansky says of the artist’s work, “situated not only between abstraction and representation, oil paint and digital printing, but also skepticism and belief. You see and feel him thinking through each painting, dissecting it, taking it apart—by its basic tenets—and putting it back together again.” (more…)

Pace Gallery is preparing to open a second gallery in Hong Kong, Art News reports. “The arts renaissance that has been underway in Asia for the last 30 years or so has triggered a global shift and brought new energy to artists, collectors, and institutions across the art world. It has been a privilege to play a role in that evolution for the last decade,” President Marc Glimcher says, “particularly to work with many of the artists who have shaped that renaissance, and our engagement with the Asian market continues to inform the way we see and work around the world.” (more…)

The Jean-Michel Basquiat work that smashed records for the artist’s work at auction will get a one-painting show at the Brooklyn Museum, suitably titled One Basquiat. “I am thrilled to be sending Basquiat’s masterpiece home to Brooklyn,” owner Yusaku Maezawa said in a press release. “It is my hope that through the exhibition and extensive programming accompanying it, the young people of the borough will be inspired by their local hero, just as he has inspired so many of us around the world.” (more…)

A collection of works thought to be by Amedeo Modigliani, which were previously shown at Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale, have been declared fake. “Finally it’s come out into the open,” says expert Carlo Pepi. “I’ve been fighting against fake Modiglianis for years. The situation is grotesque – it sometimes seems that he painted more when he was dead than when he was alive. This is just the tip of the iceberg.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper has a piece on how various artists are responding to a Trump presidency, including how they see their work responding to the current state of the U.S.  “I have no illusions that the power of ridicule in the halls of the coastal elites will have any real-world impact, but it seems that it’s the least I can do,” says artist Jim Shaw. (more…)

Influential curator Kynaston McShine, the organizer behind landmark conceptual shows like Information and Primary Structures, as well as a number of major exhibitions at MoMA, has passed away at the age of 82. (more…)

Artist Sanford Biggers gets a profile in the New Yorker this week, as the artist reflects on his recent work, and his challenges to the racist undertones of American culture. “Some of this might be my own historical sense of restriction, but the work has to do so many things when it comes from a person of color,” he says. “And comedy can be misread, and misinterpreted, and become problematic. But that’s what art does: it problematizes things. So I think I’m finding more comfort in that.” (more…)

Elizabeth Murray, Painting in the 80s, via Art Observed

Walking into Pace Gallery’s expansive exhibition hall on 25th Street in Chelsea, one is greeted by heaving masses of material, great swollen lumps of paint and canvas, bent and twisted into explosively animated forms.  These are the works of painter Elizabeth Murray, a pioneering abstractionist whose intuitive work with cut and shaped canvases has underscored her place among the lead voices of post-war painting in the US.  At Pace this winter, the gallery has turned its attention to a small body of paintings from the artist’s work during the 1980’s as a continuation of her last show, the fittingly titled Painting in the ‘70s.

Elizabeth Murray, Painting in the 80s, via Art Observed (more…)

Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) (2016), via LACMA

What makes an artwork truly original? What does intellectual property ownership look like? For over four decades, celebrated American multimedia artist Richard Prince has been investigating these questions through his unflinching conceptual works, most notably through collections of photography highlighting the myth of the cowboy and the American West through repurposed, rephotographed, and cropped Marlboro ads from the 1980’s and 1990’s. Currently, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is exhibiting Richard Prince: Untitled (Cowboy) featuring not one, but two previously unseen photography projects of this nature from the 2010s. (more…)

Gina Malek, Truth in Timbre (2017), via E. Tay Gallery

Painter Gina Malek brings a body of new paintings to E. Tay Gallery this month, assembling a series of the artist’s intuitive interactions with the canvas through a range of different scenes and situations. Teasing out various modes of linguistic understanding and interpretation through her loosely rendered canvases, Malek’s work in the show plays with the act of speech, and the vagaries of expression that so often spring from the inexact moments of vocalization.  (more…)

As he celebrates his gallery’s 25th year of operation, David Zwirner is planning a $50 million, five floor gallery in Chelsea. “As fortune favors the brave, we are looking back exactly when we’re opening in Hong Kong and looking forward,” Mr. Zwirner said. (more…)