David Rockefeller’s art collection is heading to auction at Christie’s, the WSJ reports, carrying a total estimate of over $700 million that would make it the most expensive single collection of art in auction history. “Because he was blessed with great wealth, he always felt a responsibility to give back to society,” says family spokesman Fraser Seitel. “He lived that credo every day of his life.” (more…)
Artist Glenn Ligon is profiled in the New York Times this week, as he prepares to unveil a new curatorial project in St. Louis, inspired by Ellsworth Kelly’s piece Blue Black. “When I was in the building, the Ellsworth Kelly is massive,” he says. “I had this very funny aural hallucination where I kept hearing Louis Armstrong’s voice singing ‘What did I do to be so black and blue?’” (more…)
London’s Victoria & Albert Museum has revealed plans for a photography center, the Art Newspaper reports. The Bern and Ronny Schwartz Gallery will open in the fall of next year, and will serve as the home for the institution’s expanded holdings in the medium, and also includes future plans for a darkroom and library. (more…)
Maria Balshaw has begun her tenure as the Director of the Tate, taking over from Nicholas Serota on June 1st. Balshaw will preside over the increasing scale and scope of the Tate’s varied exhibition spaces, and will push for a more events-driven schedule in the coming years. (more…)
Rashid Johnson is profiled in The Guardian this week, as the artist embarks on a residency at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset exhibition space. “Regardless of where you are, the psychological aspect of otherness will follow you,” Johnson says. “I’ve never seen blackness as a ghettoizing concept. I think it can be very empowering. It’s fed my understanding of culture, identity and presence, both socially and psychologically.” (more…)
Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Installation View), via Art Observed
After much anticipation, the crowds of the Venice Biennale have finally packed through the doors of the Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana to take their turn at the visual tour de force of Damien Hirst’s Treasures of the Wreck of the Unbelievable. The show, which opened last month at François Pinault’s pair of exhibition spaces in the city, has garnered considerable discussion over the past several months since its announcement, and with good reason. Hirst’s exhibition is a challenging, and often confounding experience, taking on the museum as a form, and pushing it to its symbolic limits.
Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Installation View), via Art Observed
The LA Times has a profile on Mexico City’s thriving arts scene, noting its continued growth even in the midst of the country’s occasionally fraught political landscape. “Carlos Monsivais once said that whoever was bored in Mexico City was bored of living,” says Kurimanzutto co-founder José Kuri. “The art infrastructure, the ecology, has become really developed. Galleries, artists, museums — everyone — is responding to the new reality.” (more…)
Los Angeles’s Acme Gallery will close after 22 years in business, the Art News reports, following the conclusion of its final shows on June 10th. Founders Robert Gunderman and Randy Sommer first opened the space in 1994. (more…)
The Frick Collection is moving its Pay-What-You-Wish Hours to Wednesday afternoon, moving away from its usual slot on Sunday mornings. The move comes alongside the announcement of a free program on Friday nights, which the museum will aim to pair with its new admission schedule. “By shifting our pay-what-you-wish period to Wednesdays, we hope to accommodate those audiences who aren’t able to take advantage of these free Friday programs,” Frick director Ian Wardropper said in a statement. (more…)
Dealer Timothy Sammons, a former director at Sotheby’s, is facing extradition to the United States to face trial for fourteen charges of grand larceny, the Times of London reports. Sammons is accused of stealing over $10 million from the sale of works by Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and Marc Chagall, among others. (more…)
The New York Times profiles the recently opened exhibition of works from New York’s Hispanic Society of America at the Prado Museum in Madrid, and the response the exhibition has already garnered among viewers. “When some of the society employees saw the exhibition for the first time, some of them started to cry,” said Miguel Falomir, the new director of the Prado and a curator of the show. “They felt such emotion to see their objects on display in a way they had never seen before.” (more…)
Dan Colen is set for his first major exhibition in London this fall at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery. The show opens in October, and according to Colen, will be “the first time I’ve been able to present the full range of my work and the wide-ranging ideas, crafts, materials, technologies and processes that I engage with. It will also include large-scale installations that have been specially reconfigured for the show.” (more…)
Artist Sheena Rose is profiled in the New York Times this week, taking the news on a tour of her home in Barbados, and reflecting on her performative and sculptural work in the past few years. “The trick is just to be honest,” she says. “People want to see themselves.” (more…)
SFMoMA has appointed Eungie Joo as its first curator of contemporary art, and will begin her tenure at the museum next month. “Eungie’s arrival signals a deepening of SFMoMA’s commitment to contemporary art. Her international experience in Asia, the Middle East, South America and beyond positions her to convene important conversations and create innovative projects that will help define the art of our time in the broadest sense,” says Ruth Berson, deputy museum director of curatorial affairs. “We look forward to seeing how her leadership in the field and the support of our community will help keep SFMoMA at the forefront of this dynamic field.” (more…)
The Whitney Museum has appointed Kim Conaty as its curator of drawings and prints this July. “Following a tremendous period of growth, the museum has broken new ground in its exhibition program while also making a decisive commitment to the care, research, and presentation of its collection,” Conaty says. “I look forward to collaborating with the museum’s exceptional team and to developing future projects and research initiatives that will highlight the richness and diversity of its extraordinary collection of drawings and prints.” (more…)
MoMA is preparing to unveil the final designs for its $400 million renovation project, with a distinct move toward more historically and thematically-oriented hanging strategies. “It’s a rethinking of how we were originally conceived,” director Glenn Lowry says. “We had created a narrative for ourselves that didn’t allow for a more expansive reading of our own collection, to include generously artists from very different backgrounds.” (more…)
Robert Longo, Untitled (Raft at Sea) (2016-17), via Art Observed
Several years ago, a lone Robert Longo piece left quite an impression at Art Basel Miami Beach. The subdued charcoal composition depicting several players from the St. Louis Rams posing in the iconic “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose that followed in the wake of the death of young Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in nearby Ferguson, Missouri was stark and imposing, a powerful reminder of the specter of police violence preying on black citizens in the United States. It made for a sudden rupture in the often buoyant atmosphere of the fair, and one that welcomed the turbulence of the outside world in. (more…)
Installation View. All images courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel.
Now through June 3rd, new work by Charline von Heyl will be on view at Capitain Petzel in Berlin, her second solo exhibition with the gallery. The German artist, who works with drawing, printmaking, and collage, has long drawn on this wealth of material in conjunction with a wide-ranging gestural vocabulary to create a densely layered body of works, shown here through a series of new canvases mixing various modes of illustration and painting.
The artist’s work functions not as a series of surfaces, but interlocking visual events, layering varied approaches towards repeating images or motifs which work in conjunction with her flowing brushstrokes and blurs of color. These colors and images shift depending on the time of day or the viewer’s perspective, their respective qualities marking a subtle environmental thread that balances against each work’s dynamic surface. Drawing is a significant part of the artist’s process, though any impression of line or form tends to hide beneath the unstable and heavy layers of charcoal powder, copper, aluminum flakes and dirty pastels.
Rememble (2016).
The exhibition brings together a selection of recent works, creating a continued sense of agitation and stabilization, tension and dissolution. These works produce stark visual effects and striking contrasts rather that depict any single subject, the artist’s hand playing on the act of painting in conjunction with selected models and repeated themes running throughout her works. This mode of action allows von Heyl to play on a sense of poetic depth and humor, a visual interrogation of painting by the act of painting itself.
In Local Yokel from Outer Space (2014), for instance, a globular, alien-like face seems to smile from its vantage point inside the frame. Composed of brightly colored points and dark accents, the painting is at once inviting and menacing. Considered in different orientations, the abstract subject morphs between readings as an animal, organic object, and the otherworldly. In Samurai Rabbit (2017), by contrast, the figure of a rabbit stalks across the frame, holding what appears to be a samurai sword. The red-splattered canvas gives the impression of the exaggerated gore and violence encountered on-screen. Paired with the gentle symbol of a rabbit walking through a pastoral background, this painting balances the explicit and the abstract in an interesting combination of fine art and entertainment.
Installation View.
Charline von Heyl’s stimulating work is hosted in Capitain Petzel’s open and airy gallery space, giving the viewer ample room to consider these images from afar and up-close. The artist’s dynamic and provocative pieces come together to demonstrate the pleasure in experience what can happen to a painting under an active gaze.
Her work is on view through June 3rd.
— A. Corrigan
Read more:
Exhibition Page [Capitain Petzel]
Tate Britain’s David Hockney retrospective has been tapped as the institution’s most popular exhibition, boasting attendance of nearly 500,000 viewers. “The response to this retrospective – the first in 29 years – has been incredible,” says Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain. “It is wonderful that so many people have had the chance to see it, and that they found the exhibition so exciting, thought-provoking and moving. We look forward to many more people seeing the exhibition when it travels to Paris and New York.” (more…)
As the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition opens at MoMA, the New Yorker looks back at one of the artist’s smallest works, a small thumbprint he made for the magazine in 1964. “’We must pay him something,'” writer Calvin Tomkins remembers his editor William Shawn saying of the piece. “‘What do you think? Would fifty dollars sound right?’”
Artist Grayson Perry is set to open a show of works at the Serpentine Gallery, cheekily titled The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!, and featuring a range of pieces exploring Brexit, modern politics, and other themes. (more…)
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is featured in the New York Times, discussing his decision to purchase a number of Jean-Michel Basquiat works for his private museum collection. “I want to show beautiful things and share them with everyone,” he says, adding that he plans on loaning his works around the globe. “It would be a waste just to keep it all to myself.” (more…)
Following several protests and vocal criticism, artist Sam Durant will remove a sculpture depicting a gallows from the Walker Art Center sculpture park. The work, originally conceived as a critique of racist executions and state-sponsored killings in the United States, particularly the execution of 38 Dakota men by the U.S. Government, saw fierce protest from Dakota residents in Minneapolis, ultimately leading Durant to dismantle the work. “Whites created the concept of race and have used it to maintain dominance for centuries, whites must be involved in its dismantling,” he said in an emailed statement. “However, your protests have shown me that I made a grave miscalculation in how my work can be received by those in a particular community. In focusing on my position as a white artist making work for that audience I failed to understand what the inclusion of the Dakota 38 in the sculpture could mean for Dakota people. I offer my deepest apologies for my thoughtlessness.” (more…)