French luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault is set to open a new museum in Paris, aiming to transform the former Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (close to his already operating Fondation Louis Vuitton museum) into a center for arts and crafts exhibitions. The space will be named La Maison LVMH/Arts, Talents, Patrimoine, and will be designed by Frank Gehry. (more…)
Gerhard Richter, Eisberg (1982), via Sothebys
The marathon weeks of March art sales have completed their run in London this evening, following a Sotheby’s outing this evening that concludes a trio of Contemporary and Post-War sales in the British capital. Challenging easy assumptions about a slumping art market, Sotheby’s indicated an early push for market share with this sale, carrying a daring 40% of its offerings this evening with guaranteed bids that seemed to pay off with consistently strong results. The auction house’s 64-lot outing managed to manage a number of impressive sales on top of a consistently comeptitive pool of bidders, resulting in a final sales figure of £118,015,150 with only a handful of unsold lots (4 total). (more…)
Swiss hotelier Urs Schwarzenbach’s Hotel Dolder Grand has been raided for unpaid taxes on a range of works including pieces by Miró, Botero, and Dubuffet, all of which were confiscated by authorities. Schwarzenbach has been accused of dodging taxes on works before, and authorities are now targeting his home offices in pursuit of other works. (more…)
Performa 17 has announced its first round of commissions for its fall performance biennial, including pieces by Yto Barrada, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu and Wangechi Mutu, among others. This year’s edition will focus on the centennial birthday of Dada “Performa provides an extraordinary platform for showing the important role of art in society,” says founder and director RoseLee Goldberg. “Through live performance we touch people directly, change their minds, and introduce them viscerally to the complicated emotional and aesthetic expressions of artists responding to the world that we inhabit.” (more…)
Christopher Wool, Untitled (1989), via Phillips
Taking its turn after a consistent offering yesterday at Christie’s, Phillips held its spring 20th Century Sale at its 30 Berkeley Square this evening, a 30-lot affair that saw a less measured evening by comparison, underscoring the auction house’s continued efforts to compete alongside the auction house giants, and the challenges it still faces in competing against these marquee sales . Scaling its offering back in comparison with full 60-lot offerings at the other sales, the house managed to move its premier works, while occasional struggles in placing lots overshadowed some of its larger successes. The sale saw 5 lots go unsold over the course of the evening, not counting two withdrawn lots, bringing a final tally of £14,660,000. (more…)
Mark Rothko, No. 1 (1949), via Christie’s
Following a few days pause for collectors to recover from the busy rush of Armory Week in New York, Christie’s has kicked off another week of major sales in London this evening, concluding its Post-War and Contemporary Evening offering with an unexpectedly energetic outing.
Critics and insiders watching the sale had said little on the auction house’s offerings this week, other than its focus in recent sales on Asian bidders, instead focusing primarily on the high percentage of guaranteed lots in Sotheby’s competing offering tomorrow night. Even so, Christie’s carried its own trove of guarantees, with at least 5 works promising third-party guarantees before the sale. The strategy seemed to pay off, as the evening’s lots moved swiftly and without issue, with only 3 lots failing to find a buyer, and ultimately bringing the sale to a final tally of £96.3 million.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Beautyful Ones (2012), via Christie’s (more…)
Art News has a piece this week on art world groups’ continued engagement and activism against Ivanka Trump, who has long collected contemporary works and often poses alongside new works after buying them. “They were like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t want to be represented like this,’” curator Alison Gingeras saidm, referring to artists horrified at how Trump represented their work. (more…)
The Washington Post has a piece on the length preparations involved in Yayoi Kusama’s landmark exhibition at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., including plans for building the exacting Infinity Room spaces and planning how to control the anticipated throngs of visitors. “The Kusama show is the culmination of two years of hard work that has not been visible,” says director Melissa Chiu. (more…)
Okwui Enwezor is currently dealing with an “infiltration” of Munich’s Haus der Kunst by a group of Scientologists, leaked documents from the institution allege. The museum is currently under investigation after one employee was fired for placing “psychological pressure” on fellow workers, with suspicious that there are more Scientology members currently working at the institution. (more…)
Nashville collector Spencer Hays, who had pledged his entire collection of works to Paris’s Musée D’Orsay, has passed away. Hay’s collection features over 600 works and is worth an estimated $381 million including works Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse and others. (more…)
The Telegraph examines last week’s Impressionist and Modern Sales, noting the pay-off in continued attention to the Asian market by both auction houses, and the increased number of guarantees used to keep works moving and prices strong. (more…)
The Financial Times has a piece on the recently released TEFAF Markets report, the first under economist Rachel Pownall after Clare McAndrew left the organization for Art Basel. Pownall has embraced a new strategy in this year, downplaying the number of galleries and focusing on narrow fields of information, with “the outcome that the industry estimates are smaller, yet we consider this to be more representative of the art and antiques market globally.” (more…)
Mark Rothko, No. 1 (1949), via Christie’s
With the proceedings of the Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale concluded this past week, attention turns to London’s Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sales, as a trio of auctions will look to test the waters in the early months of 2017. Boasting an impressively strong focus in particular on German art, the auction houses will seek strong results in a market that has seen noticeably turbulent, unpredictable results in the past months. Yet a recent bump in the London art market, driven by the weak pound, may see some unexpected results for the week’s offerings. Either way, the week should see each auction house battling it out for market share through aggressive guarantees. (more…)
Artist Adrián Villar Rojas will be the next artist invited to realize The Met’s annual rooftop sculpture commission, bringing around 20 works drawing on objects from the museum’s collection. “My assumption is they expected me to sort of activate the museum,” he says. “One of the first requests I made was I wanted to meet everybody.” (more…)
Despite a low earnings figure posted during last week’s call to investors, Sotheby’s stock has jumped 20% in the last week, Art Market Monitor reports. “Since the beginning of the current art market boom in 2004, BID has never sustained $50 as a price,” Marion Maneker writes. “So the most important question surrounding these earnings is whether the stock price is sustainable and what happens to Sotheby’s shares when the stock is concentrated among institutional, activist and strategic owners.” (more…)
Jenny Holzer has been invited to exhibit in Blenheim Palace, the 18th Century structure in Oxfordshire, UK, and will bring a new series of text works to the space. “My first visit to Blenheim Palace left me with too many ideas, on the complex past and its relevance to this knife-edge present,” Holzer said. (more…)
Catherine Opie is profiled in the New Yorker this week, as she reflects on some of her most powerful and controversial images, and the shared concepts of each of her diverse bodies of work. “There’s a certain kind of equality I’m trying to create, which is what I believe American democracy is about,” she says. “If I were to pass judgment on, say, football players—that they were the asshole kids who used to beat me up in high school—that’s not really looking.” (more…)
Tony Cragg is featured in The Guardian this week, as the artist installs a show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and reflects on his life in the UK. “This is what philosophers like Heidegger talk about,” he says. “Everything is material. But the material is so complicated. We’ve no idea what absolute reality looks like. I find that sublime and uplifting. It has a spiritual quality. I’m most interested in the emotional qualities of things. Every emotion has a material basis – run by hormones and nerves. But isn’t that magnificent?” (more…)
Declassified UK government papers reveal extensive campaigning by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to bring the Thyssen collection to Britain, the Art Newspaper reports. The article documents the extensive discussions and negotiations between the UK and Baron Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza before the works ultimately went to Spain. (more…)
NADA, via Art Observed
One could have been mistaken for assuming there wasn’t much a NADA New York fair during Armory Week could add to the already broad scope on both the city’s art scene and the international network that the week’s many fairs and openings already offered. Yet at the same time, NADA seems to have long prided itself on its surprises, and its first edition in Tribeca (away from its usual haunt at Basketball City on the Lower East Side) made for a timely update on the fair’s already sterling reputation in the art fair circuit.
Joani Tremblay at Projet Pangee, via Art Observed
Sascha Braunig, Hide (2015), via Art Observed
Currently on view on the ground floor of MoMA PS1, painter Sascha Braunig has compiled a body of work from the past five years of her practice, showcasing the range and depth of the artist’s investigations into the painted canvas, and her investigations into the act of portraiture. Working through a wide range of visual materials, Brauning’s swirling, twisting confrontations with the history portraiture, and modes of understanding the human form itself, open an intriguing dialogue with the Mark Leckey exhibition just upstairs, and underscore Brauning’s imaginative practice.
Sascha Braunig, Warm Leatherette (2015), via Art Observed
The Pursuit of It by Nicole Grammatico and Christina Papancolaou, via Art Observed
Marking a curator-first approach to the art fair format popping up around New York this week, the sixth installment of SPRING/BREAK Art Show opened Tuesday, February 28th at 4 Times Square, a departure from its usual space at the James A. Farley Post Office midtown. Drawing on a similar concept from last year, where rows of offices allow small-scale exhibitions spread throughout the fair, SPRING/BREAK continued the mission of its founders Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, a diverse, freewheeling look at the varied aspects of the city’s young arts community. (more…)
Richard Diebenkorn at Van Doren Waxter, via Art Observed
Returning to its home base at the Park Avenue Armory uptown, the ADAA’s The Art Show offers a moment to reflect amid the massive offerings of contemporary work spread out across the city. It is one of the few fairs dedicated not only to recent practices, but equally to a longer view of Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art in relation to even broader historical analogs. This focus, in combination with a more selective, curatorial approach to the fair itself, and the more restrained atmosphere of the location, gives the Art Show its own appeal, one that presents itself as equally withdrawn from the broader bustle of the art world outside its walls, and more richly engaged with the history of the field that has ultimately produced the work spread across New York this week.
Noam Rappaport at James Fuentes, via Art Observed
A group is preparing to open a an 110,000-square-foot art shipping facility, where works can be stored tax-free, in Harlem, the WSJ reports. A former parking lot will be transformed into Arcis, a space run by Tom Sapienza and Kevin Lay. (more…)