Chinese artist Jia Aili is now represented worldwide by Gagosian Gallery, Art News reports. “Having followed Jia’s artistic journey thus far, we are very pleased to establish a working relationship with him, and we look forward to his first exhibition with the gallery,” Larry Gagosian said in a statement. (more…)
The Art Newspaper reports on the current blockage of Qatar, and its impact on the nation’s arts scene. “Doha is now completely isolated. Doha now needs to take serious steps very rapidly to placate not only its neighbors but also its allies around the world,” says Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi, the founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation. (more…)
Artist Grayson Perry is interviewed in the New York Times this week, as the artist elaborates on his recent exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London. “I make the work I like,” he says. “But a nice spinoff benefit of that is that I bring a kind of audience that isn’t necessarily solely into difficult, conceptualized 21st-century art. Formally, my work is very conservative.” (more…)
Frieze New York is reportedly lowering the prices on its booths in the Frame section, which spotlights young galleries established in or after 2010. The fair also announced that it has added Andrew Bonacina, chief curator of the Hepworth Wakefield, as one of its co-curators for the event. (more…)
The Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, UK has won the 2017 Art Fund Museum of the Year award for its dynamic programming and leadership. “The Hepworth Wakefield was a powerful force of energy from the moment it opened in 2011, but it has just kept growing in reach and impact ever since,” says Art Fund director Stephen Deuchar. (more…)
Anselm Kiefer, The Painter’s Studio (2016), via Art Observed
Artist Anselm Kiefer returns to New York this month, bringing with him a dense and wide-ranging body of oil paintings, books, watercolors and assemblages to the expansive halls of Gagosian’s Chelsea exhibition space. Marking a continued engagement with the process and materiality of painting, rather than a direct engagement with a selected end subject or image, the artist’s works here reflect his continued interest in the alchemical potentials for painting, and the broad vocabulary he has developed over the course of his career. (more…)
London Mayor Sadiq Khan spoke out against continued cuts to the city’s arts funding this week, claiming that funding to the nation’s capital benefits the whole country. “The arts in London impacts arts across the country,” he says. “It’s not a zero-sum game. I’m not saying we deserve a bigger slice of the cake for the sake of it. I’m saying that actually, if the arts in London does well, the whole country benefits.” (more…)
Artist Olu Oguibe has received the Arnold Bode Prize, the highest award for work in this year’s edition of Documenta. “For almost four decades Olu Oguibe has been working as a conceptual artist and thinker with an interest in wide-ranging themes, including social and formal issues,” the City of Kassel said in a statement. “Although the Igbo system of thought and existential principles play a critical role in Oguibe’s creative endeavors—dictating his approach to conceptualism, abstraction, and the form of the art object—the vital force behind his art is his experiences as a child in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s.” (more…)
Artist Bosco Sodi, in collaboration with Paul Kasmin Gallery, is preparing for a new installation in New York’s Washington Square Park, a massive wall which visitors will be able to tear down piece by piece. “I wanted to create a wall made by Mexicans with Mexican earth,” he says. “Then the disappearance of the wall will be by the community and all kinds of people who visit the park.” (more…)
The increased aggressiveness of Donald Trump’s immigration policies is having an adverse impact on the ability for foreign artists to travel to the United States, lawyers are claiming. “We have to call it what it is, which is a problem,” said Brian Goldstein, co-founder of GG Arts Law, which represents arts organizations and foreign artists. “There’s no conspiracy. There’s no one out there saying we’re going to stop artists. It’s basically much broader than that and artists they consider collateral damage.” (more…)
The New York Times reports that, despite budget shortfalls and postponed construction on a new wing for the Leonard Lauder collection at The Met, the cosmetics tycoon and philanthropist remains committed to donating his landmark holdings to the museum. “There is no issue with my gift,” Lauder told the newspaper. “We are aligned and I am confident that the Met will present the collection in a manner that is consistent with the excellence for which it is known.” (more…)
The New York Times has a lengthy piece profiling Santander, Spain’s new Centro BotÃn, the Renzo Piano-designed building recently completed in the city, and the institution’s efforts to reinvigorate the Spanish city as a cultural hub. “I’m sure that the BotÃn Foundation will guarantee continuity here and not do anything suicidal,” said Vicente TodolÃ, a former director of the Tate Modern in London and head of the BotÃn’s visual arts advisory committee. “You don’t invest in a Formula One car and then not have it compete.” (more…)
Sophie Calle is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as the artist explores her relationships to her work, and her perspective on her recent installation at Greenwood Cemetary in New York. “What the work teaches me is not important. It’s what people take from it,” she says. “I found the people incredibly fragile. It seems the really tough things made people suffer less than the small things. Maybe because for the tough things you are in a group, with more people and it becomes a fight. The little thing that someone says to you happens in solitary.” (more…)
Artist Chris Ofili has agreed to let the Tate Britain fly his ‘Union Black’ flag, which replaces the Red, White and Blue of the UK’s Union Jack with a pan-African Red, Green and Black. “The flag may have added resonance for Londoners in these times, but it is important anyway in a wider framework because it speaks to the international makeup of a city where so many people of African descent live and work,” said Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain. “It has something to say about British identity and about our colonial past, as well as about our artistic place in the world.” (more…)
The American Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD)’s 2017 Salary Survey has been released with figures that bode quite well for museum employees, showing annual increases in salary consistently above national job force averages. “As a [museum] director, this survey is invaluable,” says Lori Fogarty, the director of the Oakland Museum of California and the president of the AAMD. “There are very few surveys that are as comprehensive.” (more…)
Simon de Pury is currently embroiled in a lawsuit seeking a $10 million commission to secure the sale of Paul Gauguin’s Nafea faa ipoipo (When will you marry?) to the Qatari Royal Family, the Telegraph reports. The sale was first listed as being made for $300 million, which would have made it the most expensive art sale in history, but recent court filings list the work at $210 million. The lawsuit alleges that de Pury convinced owner Rudolf Staechelin to sell the work, but never received a commission from Qatari representative Guy Bennett, who de Pury claims he had a spoken agreement with on the commission price. “For the avoidance of doubt, there is nothing surprising in these matters being resolved without the use of a written agreement,” says Jonathan Cohen QC, counsel for Mr de Pury. “It would be unusual to find some types of contract made orally, but that is not true of the art market, which continues to operate in a gentlemanly manner, based on mutual trust.” (more…)
Serpentine Pavilion, via Iwan Baan for Serpentine Galleries
The move into summer months in the city of London brings with it the opening of a new Serpentine Pavilion commission, the ongoing architectural program in Hyde Park which sees architects from around the globe submitting groundbreaking and adventurous designs for the museum’s temporary outdoor structure. Used as an open-air locale for talks, screenings, performances and other parts of the Serpentine’s summer programming, the pavilion is one of the enduring projects of the institution. (more…)
An Austrian court has ruled in favor of the family of Franz West, concluding that a foundation established days before the artist’s death was created without a proper contract. The decision grants the rights to the artist’s work, and his estate, to his children, rather than the foundation. “It would have been really unfair for the children to not only lose their parents, but also all their inheritance rights,” says Christoph Kerres, the family’s lawyers. “But the legal order is back and, though the children are too young to realize it, this is the decision that will probably most affect the rest of their lives.” (more…)
Alexander Calder, Portrait for Joan Miró. Private Collection; 2017 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Successió Miró, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris 2017.
Calder/Miró: Constellations, on view through June 30, 2017, presents the work of Alexander Calder and Joan Miró at Pace Gallery and Acquavella Galleries, respectively, a two-venue exhibition aiming to present the distinct bodies of work and complementary concepts shared between the two artists while they were separated on either side of the Atlantic during World War II. Presenting approximately 60 sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, the show presents a dialogue highlighting formal, social and political concerns informing the processes of both artists at a distinct conceptual and aesthetic high point for both their careers. (more…)
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (682-4) (1988) Final Price: £2,389,000, via Phillips
Marking the final night of auctions before the market’s slow summer months, Phillips Auctions in London capped a buoyant sale that served as an emphatic close to two weeks of sales in the British capital. Moving gradually through a 31-lot sale with slow, steady bidding, many works hung on the auction block for some time, coaxed up to estimate or beyond, with only 3 works going unsold, ultimately bringing the evening to a close on a figure of £24,373,000. (more…)
Hedge Fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen has donated $50 million to help fund MoMA’s capital campaign for new its exhibition space. “Steven and Alex Cohen are incredible philanthropists, whose longtime generosity to the museum exemplifies their deep commitment to sharing the art of our time with the widest possible audience,” director Glenn D. Lowry said in a statement. “This gift will have an extraordinary impact on our ability to present exhibitions at a scale that is virtually unprecedented.” (more…)
The New York Times profiles The Whitney Museum’s new Alexander Calder exhibition, and the logistics behind getting the artist’s moving sculptures and mobiles properly activated. The museum is currently employing its art handling team to occasionally step out from behind the scenes to set the works in motion. “You’re actually holding something that has this almost spiritual quality to it,” says Tom Kotik, one of the workers charged with moving the pieces. “It does have this playful side to it, but then again, you think about it in terms of the cold and the snow, and there’s almost a — I wouldn’t say grittiness, because snow is not gritty — but there’s a yin and a yang.” (more…)
NPR has a piece on the ongoing conflict between gallery owners and neighborhood residents in East Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, where fears of “artwashing” and gentrification have led to fierce clashes between each party. “Put in an art gallery with paintings that cost tens of thousands of thousands of dollars and the audience that comes to this place starts looking for other kinds of amenities,” says community organizer Leonardo Vilchis. “They look for the brewery, for the coffee shop for the place to hang out. All of those things increase the cost and the value of the local neighborhood. “
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