Andrea Zittel and Tom Burr, Concrete Realities (Installation View), via Art Observed

Over the course of their respective careers, Andrea Zittel and Tom Burr have both negotiated an enigmatic and thorough interest in the built environment, addressing questions of site-specificity, subjectivity, and the body through spaces and environments that pull lived space and imagined realities into a shared domain.  This month at Bortolami, the pair’s respective visions will also share a common site, grappling with similar visual languages and interests in text, assemblage and architecture to challenge readings of space, and the strategies we employ to exist within our given environments.  (more…)

Florence’s Uffizi Gallery has been forced to close its doors as a result of a sweltering heatwave currently hitting the city.  Problems with the institution’s air conditioning led to unsafe conditions for visitors, and create complications for preserving paintings in the museum galleries. (more…)

London’s National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery are currently in the middle of a conflict over an expansion project at the National Gallery that its neighbor argues will obscure its views of the city. “We have not received a briefing on the scheme from the National Gallery, but would welcome the opportunity to work collaboratively with them to address our concerns,” a statement from the National Portrait Gallery reads. (more…)

 Collector couple Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova have split, the New York Post’s Page Six reports. “We are committed to jointly raising our two children. We will also continue to work together as co-founders of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and the New Holland Island cultural center in Saint Petersburg,” the couple said in a joint statement. (more…)

Ai Weiwei, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Hansel and Gretel (Installation View) at Park Avenue Armory. Photo by James Ewing

Exploration of surveillance and its corresponding limits has long remained a prominent thread in Ai Weiwei’s aggressively political multimedia practice, particularly following his detainment and imprisonment by Chinese authorities in 2011 due to his vocal dissent of the country’s governmental policies on human rights. Hansel & Gretel, Weiwei’s Park Armory tour-de-force in collaboration with architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, furthers his past surveillance-themed projects such as 2012’s WeiweiCam, for which the artist had installed fifteen cameras around his Beijing residence to stream a 24-hour live footage of his home. Coinciding with the one year anniversary of his detention by the Chinese government, the comparison the artist built between actual imprisonment and systematic violation of privacy echoes with his current occupation of Park Armory’s Guild Hall, transforming the column-free exhibition space into a pitch black zone of uncertainty and peril. (more…)

Julie Mehretu is profiled in the New York Times this week, as the artist takes the paper to view the monumental new commission for SFMoMA she is currently working on in an abandoned Harlem church. The piece was inspired by early American landscape painting. “I was attracted to these landscape paintings that were trying to describe a really intense moment historically, of what this country was becoming, on all these different levels,” she says. (more…)

(more…)

Robert Longo, Untitled (Bodyhammer: 9mm) (2008), via Art Observed

Few writers have walked such a fine line between coy observations of modernity and the possible dystopian future that lay just under the surface of daily life in the way that writer J.G. Ballard had over the course of his more than fifty years of writing.  Mixing a playful sense of imagination with dark and disturbing meditations on the state of the world, the writer’s work continues to serve as a major inspiration for artists and philosophers in the 21st century, just as some of the futuristic conditions he so often described have begun to manifest themselves in the real world. (more…)

MoMA has promoted Michelle Elligott to serve as chief of archives, library, and research collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a position that sees Elligott continue a long and prestigious career as an archivist at the museum. “The breadth of the extraordinary research collections that document the history of modern art and diverse artistic practices [at MoMA] are a vital resource for museum staff and researchers from around the world,” she said in a statement. “It is my great privilege to lead the efforts to promote this unique content and cultivate scholarship, while at the same time working collaboratively to dramatically increase access to these resources for the general public alike.” (more…)

Despite strong auction outings and a major record auction for Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sotheby’s posted quarterly earnings for Q2 that were down 14% from last year. “Overall, the quarter was solid and I’m confident more growth will come both as the market improves and as our investments begin to yield returns,” Sotheby’s CEO Tad Smith said in a call to investors. (more…)

Continuing a string of defaced works and thefts at Skulptur Project Münster, technical equipment related to the work of artist Koki Tanaka was stolen from a building housing his work in the city. “As soon as new technology can be installed, the location will be reopened,” the organizers said in a statement. (more…)

Harold Williams, who served as founding president of J. Paul Getty Trust, has passed away at the age of 89. Williams was instrumental in the Trust’s growth over its first 17 years, and remained an instrumental force in the Los Angeles arts community for years after leaving his post. “The Getty today — its global reach and its Southern California presence — is a legacy of Harold M. Williams,” says Maria Hummer-Tuttle, chairwoman of the Getty Trust’s board of directors. (more…)

The Met Museum has turned over an ancient bull’s head that was on loan to the museum, after prosecutors alleged that the work may have been looted from a Lebanese storage area in the 1980’s during the country’s civil war. “Upon a Met curator’s discovery that this item on loan may have been stolen from government storage during the Lebanese civil war, the museum took immediate action,” the museum said in a statement.  “We contacted the Lebanese government and the lender, we took the item off display, and we have been working with federal and state authorities, which recently involved delivering the head of the bull to the Manhattan D.A. upon its request.” (more…)

Satoshi Kojima, Last Dance (2016), via Art Observed

Now through August 4, Bridget Donahue in New York presents an exhibition by painter Satoshi Kojima, his first ever North American show. The artist’s pastel-hued paintings offer a view into alternative histories, realities, and even other planets, executed with an updated Surrealist sensibility.  Kojima’s paintings invite the viewer into multiple different worlds of unfolding weirdness and intrigue, all through the softness of his color palette, in conjunction with the bizarre worlds he envisions. (more…)

The Indonesian-Chinese collector Budi Tek has been awarded with France’s highest honor, the Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, for serving as a vital cultural link between France and China. Tek’s Yuz Museum has frequently worked as an advocate of Asian art in French institutions, and sponsored Zeng Fanzhi’s solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2013. (more…)

As the Crystal Bridges Museum turns five, Art News speaks to its staff, and profiles the museum’s plans for the coming years, especially that of Lauren Haynes, a former curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and specialist in African-American modern art.  “We’re definitely in a growth mode, and I think we’ll develop an innovative interplay between these projects and those in the new industrial facility. It’s understood in all of this that I’m very committed to artists of color, and to telling a broader story of America as seen through the visual arts,” she says of her work. (more…)

The Bass Museum in Miami Beach has acquired a fossilized gas pump by American-Cuban artist duo Allora & Calzadilla, the first major installation by the group in a Miami art museum.  “I saw one of their petrol pumps a few years ago and was struck by how timely the work was. It discusses issues that the whole world is going through,” says Silvia Karman Cubiña, the director and chief curator of the Bass. (more…)

Leo Villareal, Ellipse (2017), via Art Observed

Marking his first exhibition with Pace since joining the gallery this past year, artist Leo Villareal has opened a show of new works at the gallery’s 24th Street exhibition space. Villareal, whose twinkling, shifting LED light installations are iconic parts of the urban landscape from New York to San Francisco and around the globe, has built a reputation for his nuanced understanding of public space, and the capacity for simple light arrays to transform its environment, and brings a series of new installations, light panels and video to the gallery. (more…)

Christie’s is holding its first Modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art sale in London this fall, as it looks to expand the market for Middle Eastern work on a global scale.  “Moving to London will help engage a wider audience, particularly on the contemporary side,” says Michael Jeha, managing director and deputy chairman, Middle East. “Stylistically, Modern art tends to appeal more to regional collectors.” (more…)

Adam Lindemann is planning a massive development in Los Angeles’s Arts District, a 12-story mixed use building with live-work spaces and street-level retail and art spaces. The space, located at 641 South Imperial Street, will continue Lindemann’s engagement with Los Angeles’s East Side.  (more…)

Painting the wall at Watermill Center, via Art Observed

The 24th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit & Auction took place this past Saturday evening, returning to Robert Wilson’s expansive performing and interdisciplinary arts campus with a new selection of performances and installations laid out across the grounds. Honoring performer Laurie Anderson and actress Isabelle Huppert this year, the event also served as a tribute to the late artist and musician Lou Reed, while also serving to benefit the Watermill Center’s continued residency and research projects. Anderson and Reed previously performed a work together, The Wildebeests, at the event in 1997, reprised this year as a culmination of the evening’s proceedings.

(more…)

Mark Grotjahn’s work is profiled in the New York Times this week, and the artist’s aggressive business strategies that have kept his works consistently in-demand. “He’s probably an artist who’s in more demand today than any other,” says Alberto Mugrabi. “He’s so good that he controls everything. He controls when galleries make shows, he controls who they sell a painting to — he’s on top.” (more…)

Musa Mayer, daughter of painter Philip Guston, is interviewed in The Telegraph this week, as she reflects on her father’s expansive and innovative body of work, and the toll it occasionally took on her family. “My father was never overtly cruel,” she says. “He was just largely absent, working. From an early age, I was given to understand that I was not to disturb his important work.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles the growing trend in  New York condo developments to incorporate monumental pieces of art into the project’s building plans, as new buildings commission pieces from Yayoi Kusama and other artists. “10 years ago, I thought we were pioneers to incorporate an artist into the design,” says developer Izak Senbahar. “But since then, it has become a little more common.” (more…)