Katharina Fritsch, Skull (2017), via Art Observed

Compiling a range of new works from the artist’s enigmatic sculptural practice, Matthew Marks Gallery has brought a show by Katharina Fritsch to Chelsea, the artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York since 2008. The show, which continues the German artist’s practice in a ground-level engagement with both the forms and images of our everyday lives, as well as the mythologies that animate our daily relationships and cognitive practices, consists of a small series of new sculptures, spread throughout the gallery’s three rooms.  (more…)

Arshile Gorky, Painting (1947-1948), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

Hauser & Wirth’s first exhibition for Arshile Gorky, the seminal Armenian-American painter of Abstract Expressionism, focuses on a four-year period in his life, beginning with his stay at Crooked Run Farm in Virginia, and concluding around the time of a series of unfortunate events in 1947, a year prior to his passing. Already an established artist as a key figure in non-figurative painting during the mid 1940’s, Gorky retreated to his wife’s parents’ farm in search of creative stimuli that would augment his interest in fluid nonlinear forms and subliminal themes. His isolation from the New York art scene—a network the artist always chose to remain distant from while his peers Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning dominated the social circle—ultimately manifested itself in contemplative and personal narratives and natural colors. (more…)

The annual Condo gallery exchange project has announced the lineup for its next iteration in London, with Société, Misako & Rosen and 25 other galleries from around the globe coming to the British capital.   (more…)

The heirs of investment banker Kurt Grawi, are demanding the city of Düsseldorf hand over a 1913 painting of foxes by Franz Marc that they claim was taken from Grawi as Nazi loot. “My husband’s family had to sell everything of value in Nazi Germany in order to pay for the discriminatory and confiscatory charges on Jews and for the costs of their emigration,” says Ingeburg Breit, Grawi’s Hamburg-based daughter-in-law. “That is how the painting was lost.” (more…)

Artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto has been hired to redesign the lobby and interior entrance of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.  “The lobby was always thought of as a light box by [original designer Gordon] Bunshaft,” says Museum director Melissa Chiu. “We gave Sugimoto the opportunity to think of the Hirshhorn not just as a museum space but also as a public space.” (more…)

Richard Prince, Untitled (#109) (2016-2017) all images Copyright Richard Prince Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Richard Prince returns to Gladstone Gallery after a prolonged absence with his new body of work, Ripple Paintings, a series of large scale inkjet prints that riffs on the painted medium with both its title and process. An avid collector of vintage Playboy imagery, Prince uses Whitney Darrow Jr. watercolor drawings published by the magazine between 1967 and 1970 to create his swirling collages. Pages from different issues he acquired on eBay provides Prince new surfaces to paint onto, while the caricatures’ sexist and vulgar language gets blanketed by watercolor paint in bright hues and fluid forms. Placing pages he torn out of various issues flat onto floor, Prince loosely pours watercolor paint and lets the liquid meander on each page. After an overnight drying process, each work gives a unique and uninterrupted silhouette of paint with traces of the cartoon behind. (more…)

W Magazine has an interview with designer Miuccia Prada this week about her recent collaboration in Miami with Carsten Höller, and her passion for collecting.  “It’s difficult to summarize a life interest in a few words, but, of course, art has been part of the search and truth in my life,” she says. (more…)

The NYT spotlights a new exhibition project in Antwerp, a disused brewery taken over by dealer and designer Axel Vervoodt. “It’s about creating the best place for art,” he says. “I fell in love with the distillery building. Industrial architecture is real, and it just wants to be useful. It’s very spiritual, intimate and religious, but I don’t know what religion.” (more…)

San Francisco has announced the shortlist for a series of installation commissions on Treasure Island, with Ai Weiwei, Antony Gormley and Hiroshi Sugimoto among those being considered. (more…)

Beth Rudin DeWoody gives the New York Times a tour of her new project, The Bunker Artspace, which has made its home in West Palm Beach. “I’m just a hopeless and perpetual collector and I know I’ve overdone it,” DeWoody says, “but it’s just very hard for me to say no.” (more…)

Damien Hirst is featured in a lengthy profile this week in The Times of London, as he looks back at his exhibition in Venice this year, and its reception. “I only ever did one show where I got slagged off and I agreed with it and felt terrible,” he says. “I think you’ve got to be in a strong position to deal with the barrage of negative press.” (more…)

Michael Krebber is featured in the latest installment of a Bloomberg series spotlighting young artists with strong market potential this week. “I find the group of collectors who buy his work are incredibly devoted,” says adviser Eleanor Cayre. “This group only seems to be getting larger and larger, particularly now as we’re seeing many museums and institutions joining the fray.” (more…)

The Tate Modern is embracing works dealing with forced migration and sexual brutality in its new Tanks space, unveiling a pair of works by Emeka Ogboh and Amar Kanwar. “You also want your art shown properly and Tate can do that,” Ogboh says of his monumental piece. (more…)

Ellen Gallagher, Whale Falls (2017) © Ellen Gallagher, Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth

Accidental Records, now showing at Hauser & Wirth LA, is Ellen Gallagher’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The collection of paintings, drawings and collage on view includes both new and recent works, which tread familiar conceptual territory while expanding upon themes from her rich and evolving oeuvre. The show’s title reflects the breadth of referential material that substantiates Gallagher’s work—from the literary to the musical, the psycho-theoretical to the culinary. In this erudite exploration of the Middle Passage—the deadly intercontinental journeys of slave ships—Gallagher excavates the depths of black history as well as the oceanic context in which so many slaves died. Known for her minimalist, pop-inflected collages that meditate on the African American body in history and culture, Gallagher focuses her lens upon the Black Atlantic.

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The shortlist for the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize has been announced, including Bouchra Khalili, Simone Leigh, Teresa Margolles, Emeka Ogboh, Frances Stark, and Wu Tsang among its list of nominees. “The Hugo Boss Prize remains a cornerstone of the Guggenheim’s contemporary programming, and we are thrilled to highlight the work of these six deserving artists, who are working at the vanguard of contemporary art practice, exploring urgent social issues, and providing new artistic vocabulary through which to examine personal and universal themes,” says Guggenheim artistic director Nancy Spector. “We are pleased to join with Hugo Boss in this long-term commitment to celebrating the most important and impactful artists of their time.” (more…)

A recent survey by the Art Newspaper has found that sales by women artists at auction tend to make 47.6% less than those by men. “Male buyers are a driving force of the auction market and yet we see that they are also more likely to think that women’s art is inferior,” says researcher Roman Kräussl. “Our research adds to the mounting evidence of discrimination towards women that is systemic in so many industries.” (more…)

Canada has selected Inuit video-production team Isuma to represent the country for the 2019 Venice Biennale. “Since the mid-1990s the Isuma collective has been challenging stereotypes about ways of life in the North and breaking boundaries in video art, including the first video-based work to win a major film award at the prestigious Cannes film festival,” says Marc Mayer, director of the National Gallery of Canada. (more…)

Dean Levin, Arches (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Returning to Marianne Boesky for his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Dean Levin has brought together a more ambitious and, paradoxically, more understated body of work than in his prior Boesky show, A Long, Narrow Mark. Through the series of sculptural installations and series of paintings assembled here, Arches takes Levin’s architectural interests and focuses them on the curved construct of an arch. (more…)

Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go (Installation View)

Almine Rech Gallery, one of Paris’s foremost galleries, opened its first New York location more than a year ago on the Upper East Side, bringing with it a unique program that mixes a strong artist roster with a consistently adventurous curatorial project.  For its most recent venture, the gallery has brought together key figures from the canon of 20th century Western art for Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go. Adapting its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the exhibition investigates ways artists use text as an allegorical element. Serving as a chronological and thematic starting point to the exhibition is Être ou ne pas être, Picasso’s 1912 painting considered as one of the foremost examples of appropriation of text in modern painting. Declaring “to be or not be” in French with gouache on paper, Picasso not only pays homage to one of the most emblematic texts ever written, but he also questions the mimetic essence of a painting. Can a painting of words serve to depict an image? (more…)

Clearing Gallery has opened a new space in New York City, setting up a second location at 43 East 78th Street. “We have private dealers, galleries, and museums around, so it’s a super location,” says gallery owner Olivier Babin. “As much as Bushwick is off the beaten path, this is in the center of everything. I mean, we’re across the street from the Carlyle!” (more…)

Haim Steinbach, Untitled (fins, dolphin, seahorse) (2017). All images via White Cube Gallery.

Now through January 20th, 2018, White Cube is presenting jaws, a series of new works by Haim Steinbach at Mason’s Yard, featuring a new series of shelf works and the major installation Design #15–Design for a Yogurt Bar, first conceived in 1981 and reconfigured for the gallery space. Centered around ideas of leisure and health, Steinbach’s works in the show draw on cultural models from the 1970s and 1980s to reveal novel and unexpected meanings through juxtaposition.

Haim Steinbach, starbucksroast (2017)

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A new study finds that few American art collectors sell their works once they have purchased them, the New York Post reports. “Collectors don’t apply the same principles to buying art that they would to a typical investment portfolio of stocks and bonds,” says John Mathews, head of private wealth management and ultra-high net worth at UBS Americas. “It is important, however, to institute management structures to ensure their legacy remains protected, correctly valued and insured.” (more…)

The Getty has survived a week of chaotic wildfires, keeping its collection intact while flames raged around the museum by wetting the surrounding hills with water and closing off all air intake valves. “By putting all these bells and whistles in, we are able to wet down our hillsides, close intake valves and keep smoke and debris out,” says Linda Somerville, assistant director of insurance and risk management for the J. Paul Getty Trust. (more…)

The Frick Collection has acquired its first work since 1991, a 7-feet-tall portrait of Prince Camillo Borghese by François-Pascal-Simon Gérard, Artforum reports. “The last opportunity the Frick had to purchase a major French School painting was nearly thirty years ago, with the acquisition of [Jean-Antoine] Watteau’s Portal of Valenciennes,” director Ian Wardropper says. “Today, it is deeply rewarding to have the rare opportunity to bring to the museum such an important work as this one, a historic portrait we feel would have compelled Henry Clay Frick. While the portrait has been shown in Rome, it has never been seen publicly in America.”

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