A group of protestors dumped 88 pounds of animal dung on the steps outside of the Palazzo Grassi this week, protesting Damien Hirst’s use of animals in his works. “It’s an insult to a city of art, of real art,” the group 100% Animalisti wrote in a statement. (more…)
The Musée Rodin in Paris will put a never-before exhibited work by the artist on view as part of an exhibition by Anselm Kiefer at the institution. The work, Absolution, features a series of plaster sculptures with a cloth draped over the top. “I think it will be a surprise to most visitors as few people know about the piece. It hasn’t been published or exhibited before,” says Christine Lancestremère, head of collections at the museum. (more…)
A new Zaha Hadid-designed luxury condo complex in Chelsea has set aside space to accommodate 15 galleries within its structure, with Paul Kasmin Gallery signing up as one of the first to take up space within the structure. “It is a completely new-to-market concept that [will] allow domestic and international galleries to showcase their collections while we take care of all of the mundane details,” says Greg Gushee, the executive vice president of Related property company. (more…)
Sotheby’s has opened a new gallery and office in Dubai, Artforum reports. “As our company evolves to meet the needs of every aspect of the art and luxury market globally, we’ve seen particular traction with our Middle Eastern clients,” says Edward Gibbs, Sotheby’s chairman for the Middle East. “Our Dubai office enhances our ability to serve our fast-growing community of clients across the region and is geared to broadening the scope of what we offer to a whole new audience.” (more…)
Artist Ai Weiwei is set to unveil his newest installation piece in Prague, a massive lifeboat complete with passengers meant to illustrate the actual risks and human toll of modern humanitarian crises. “There’s no refugee crisis, but only human crisis,” Ai said. “In dealing with refugees we’ve lost our very basic values.” (more…)
Raymond Pettibon, A Pen of All Work (Installation View), via Art Observed
Over the past 50 years, few artists have produced a body of work as expansive, multivalent, and formally diverse as Raymond Pettibon, the longtime illustrator whose early work for the Los Angeles punk band Black Flag set the stage for his later career delving into the often elusive, twisting histories of American culture. Ranging from literary rumination on baseball, surfing and poetry through to comical interpretations of the dark history of the American counterculture, Pettibon’s endlessly evolving body of work, often executed in pen and ink, twists and turns varied histories into an endlessly flowing stream of images, one that often functions as an alternative to the prolific mass media systems of modern American culture. This restless approach to his craft is on view this spring at the New Museum, where his first major retrospective, A Pen of All Work, has brought hundreds of the artist’s works to bear on the walls of the institution. (more…)
The New York Times reports on comments by Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedelijk Museum, noting that the time may have come for museums to focus on more sustainable modes of growth and operation. “We always want as many people to see our exhibitions as possible,” she says, “but when we think specifically in terms of ticket buyers, that might have an impact on the decisions we make about quality.” (more…)
Pier Paolo Calzolari, Untitled (2014-2015), via Art Observed
Taking over both of Marianne Boesky’s exhibition spaces on West 24th Street in Chelsea, Italian artist Pier Paolo Calzolari is currently showing a wide range of works exploring his specific interpretation of the Arte Povera movement, and his engagement with a broad range of materials that lend each of his works a notable sense of diffusive agency, allowing his chosen materials to function as both subject and object.
Pier Paolo Calzolari, Untitled (Scarpetta) (1994), via Art Observed
B. Wurtz, Bunch #4 (1996), via Lulu Gallery
Opening in conjunction with the broad range of events and projects around the Zona Maco art fair this past week in Mexico City, the Cuauhtemoc-based gallery Lulu has welcomed New York-based artist B. Wurtz to present a body of new works, continuing the artist’s enigmatic engagement with the materiality of the everyday. The exhibition will remain on view through the middle of April.
B. Wurtz (Installation View), via Lulu Gallery
Terence Koh, Sleeping in a beam of sunlight (Installation View), via Art Observed
When Terence Koh announced his sudden return from Upstate New York for a show in Manhattan last year, few could anticipate the artist’s intricate clusters of collaged material, soundscapes, and of course, his Bee Chapel, an immense hive installed inside a wax structure viewers could sit inside and listen to the insects buzzing drones. So when the artist announced a second show in Los Angeles, and took up residency inside the rooms of Moran Bondaroff, one expected something of a second shock inside the sun-filled gallery space.
The estate of the photographer Jean-François Bauret has won its case in a French court against Jeff Koons, alleging that the artist plagiarized one of the Bauret’s photos for his sculpture Naked. Koons must pay $46,500 in fees and damages to Bauret’s estate. (more…)
A Turkish painter and journalist has been sentenced to two years in prison for painting the destruction caused by Turkish security forces in the Nusaybin district of the city of Mardin. Zehra DoÄŸan was covering the region for Kurdish news agency JINHA, and the Turkish government used the work to claim her connection to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which it labels a terrorist organization. “I was given two years and ten months only because I painted Turkish flags on destroyed buildings. However, they caused this. I only painted it,” she said. (more…)
Attendants at the Louvre have made good on their threats to strike, protesting poor management of the recently opened Vermeer show and the chaotic crowds that ensued. “It’s been a big mess,” says Françoise Pinson, the secretary general of a museum workers union. “The signage wasn’t good; the planning wasn’t good.” (more…)
Art advisor Lisa Jacobs has been ordered to repay $1 million she made off the sale of a Jean-Michel Basquiat work after a court set her fee at $50,000. “It was a textbook private art deal,” says Carter Reich of Nicholas Goodman & Associates, but nevertheless “puts private dealers and art advisers on notice to be careful.” (more…)
Private sales continued to grow against auction sales for the secondary market, the newly published TEFAF market report has shown. “Buyers and sellers alike are seeking privacy and opacity in their transactions,” says head researcher Rachel Pownall. (more…)
Recent research into cave paintings in southwest France has uncovered approaches to figuration similar to the late 19th Century technique of pointillism. “Imagine the first time a human convinced someone else that a line, or a group of lines is an animal,” says Randall White, an anthropologist at New York University, who led the research. “Today we live in an extremely visual culture, and we digest and interpret, on the run, a million different kinds of illusions that we take to be reality.” (more…)
The Mosse Art Research Initiative, a new project by the Freie Universität Berlin in partnership with German museums, university researchers and the descendants of publisher Rudolf Mosse, has been founded to aid in the research and return of Nazi-looted artworks in Germany and abroad. The group will coordinate among parties to facilitate locating and securing works, continuing efforts by the Mosse family to aid in broader restitution projects. (more…)
The New York Times spotlights one of Mike Kelley’s final projects, re-creation of the artist’s childhood home titled Mobile Homestead, which has become a project space and “unofficial town hall” since it was installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
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The Louvre is in the midst of chaos after a much anticipated Vermeer exhibition opened to faulty ticketing systems and threats of strike by security. “We should be happy to see that crowds can also show up for an Old Masters exhibition, and not just for contemporary shows,” a museum spokesperson said. (more…)
A recent panel discussion with Richard Gray Gallery director Andrew Fabricant featured some unexpected information on the current health of the market, including the note that many of the recent auction sales have been propped up by only two Asian buyers. “There are two Asian buyers who have basically saved these auctions,” he says. “One is Chinese and one is Japanese.” (more…)
The Batcave, a former power station turned punk squat in Gowanus, is set to be converted to a workshop and exhibition space for the neighborhood’s artists, designed by Herzog de Meuron. “The building has long been a destination for artists, and we wanted to keep it that way,” Katie Dixon, executive director of Powerhouse Environmental Arts Foundation, which is leading the project. (more…)
Documenta 14 will feature Works From Greece’s National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) on view in the German city of Kassel, shown alongside works for the exhibition at the Fridericianum in Kassel. “The EMST building and the museum’s collection are made public, though not simultaneously and not in the same space, in keeping with the conditions of displacement that both EMST and Documenta 14 currently work within,” a statement from Documenta says. (more…)
Christie’s will close one of its South Kensington location in London and scale back operations in Amsterdam, carrying layoffs of around 250 people. “The art market is fast-evolving,” company CEO Guillaume Cerutti says. “We have been looking at the globalization of the market in the last decade and need to be present and strong where the clients are.” (more…)