Sigmar Polke, Untitled (1985), via Michael Werner

Marking a timely overlap with the artist’s February 13th birthday, Michael Werner Gallery is currently showing a series of paintings from Sigmar Polke’s Pour series, delving into the artist’s relentlessly inventive and exploratory approach to the canvas.  Primarily focused around works from the later years of the artist’s career, particularly the late 1990’s, the gallery exhibition also welcomes a deeper engagement with time, offering several early works drawing on techniques that Polke would later expand on, underlining his expansive and often self-reflective inclinations towards his own body of work.

Sigmar Polke, Pour Paintings on Paper (Installation View), via Michael Werner

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Protests are taking place at MoMA this week, as a group of activists seek to unseat BlackRock CEO and Trump adviser Larry Fink from his seat on the museum board.  “Fink is not in Bannon’s camp.  He’s a liberal. He was talked about as a potential Clinton treasury secretary. But now he’s on Trump’s team,” the group said in a statement.  “And because Trump is waging a war of hate and lies against Muslims, Immigrants, women, LGBTQ, disabled, and the planet itself, one cannot reasonably advise or do any kind of business with this regime. To advise this regime is to normalize White Supremacy.” (more…)

As Argentina invests more in cultural development, the Art Newspaper traces an increasing presence of its artists on the world stage, including an impressive number of galleries at this year’s ARCO Madrid fair.  “One of my main objectives,” says Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, the president of Buenos Aires, “is to promote what I call the creative or ­talent-based industries.” (more…)

Met Director Thomas Campbell has an op-ed in the New York Times this week, rallying against proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts.  “Eliminating the N.E.A. would in essence eliminate investment by the American government in the curiosity and intelligence of its citizens,” he writes.  “As the planet becomes at once smaller and more complex, the public needs a vital arts scene, one that will inspire us to understand who we are and how we got here — and one that will help us to see other countries, like China, not as enemies in a mercenary trade war but as partners in a complicated world.” (more…)

Gustav Klimt,  Bauerngarten (Blumengarten) (1907), via Sotheby’s

Moving away out of the depths of winter and towards the spring market rush, Sotheby’s and Christie’s will kick off their respective sales of Surrealist, Impressionist and Modern works this coming week, marking the first major auctions of 2017, and signaling the first real test of a market dealt the lion’s share of uncertainty in the past six months.  Taking place in London, the week’s sales will offer a first look at how recent shakeups at both auction houses, and attempts to broaden their respective scopes, will fare with works on the block.

Paul Gauguin, Te Fare (La maison) (1892), via Christie’s

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Artist Geoffrey Farmer will take over the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, exploring relationships between images, human relations, and the political situations that bind them.  “In his Venice project, Geoffrey once again finds a world enclosed inside an image and an image giving rise to a world,” says Kitty Scott, a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the organizer of the pavilion. (more…)

The Iraqi Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale is set to show a series of ancient artifacts from the National Museum of Iraq in conjunction with contemporary artists.  The exhibition is curated by Tamara Chalabi of the Ruya Foundation, in collaboration with Paolo Colombo. (more…)

Vjeran Tomic, the burglar nicknamed “Spider-Man” for his daring art heists, has been sentenced to eight years behind bars for the theft of five paintings worth over €104 million.  The thief’s haul included Matisse’s Pastoral, which he stole as he claimed it “embodied my youth.” (more…)

The New York Times spotlights Damien Hirst’s highly-anticipated exhibition in Venice this spring, taking over the Pinault Collection’s two locations at the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana, a selling show that will show whether or not the artist can boost a somewhat lagging market.  “He’s certainly confounded the market before. It depends on how successful the work is,” said Marc Porter, a chairman of Sotheby’s fine art division. “He’s taking on Venice and that’s audacious.” (more…)

The Telegraph has an early preview on the upcoming March auctions this week, noting high expectations for the Impressionist and Modern Sales, while the Contemporary category is likely to see a battle over market share continue with high guarantees and third-party bidders underwriting the proceedings.  Of particular note is the figure that Sotheby’s has guaranteed 43.5 percent of its estimated sales price. (more…)

Art dealer Michael Werner will receive France’s Legion of Honor this month in recognition of his contributions to the arts, including a donation to the Musée d’Art Moderne that its director, Fabrice Hergott, called “the most significant enrichment of the museum’s collection since the bequest made by Dr. Maurice Giradin in 1953, which led to the creation of the institution.” (more…)

The New York Times reports on one surgeon’s ongoing investigations into the death of Andy Warhol following gallbladder surgery, and notes the complicating factors in the surgery that have long been left out of the story behind the artist’s sudden death.  The compiled research shows the physical strain Warhol’s injuries from a 1968 murder attempt (from which he never fully recovered), and a severely infected gallbladder, as additional complications in his surgery. (more…)

Los Angeles–based artist Max Hooper Schneider has won the BMW Art Journey award, and will use the funding for an exploration of global coral reef sites.  The project will spotlight “pilgrimage sites seminal in the development of the coral imaginary in science and art: Cocos Keeling Islands, where Charles Darwin conducted fieldwork for his 1842 treatise, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs; and the Bahamas, to which André Breton traveled on an imaginary voyage via readymade photographic representations of Bahamian coral in order to document nature’s surreality. (more…)

The Art Newspaper profiles New York collector Thomas Kaplan, who currently holds one of the largest private collection of Rembrandt works, possessing 11 of the 35 works currently outside of institutional collections.  Kaplan is currently touring large portions of his collection globally as a way to build cultural connections.  “We, as collectors, are American,” he says. “We can use Dutch art, with an exhibition starting at a French museum, to build bridges between the West and China. Then, at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the paintings will be down the road from Mosul and Palmyra.” (more…)

John Armleder, Jasmine West (2017). All images courtesy David Kodansky Gallery.

Now through February 25, the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles hosts new work by Swiss artist John Armleder. This is the artist’s first show in the city in over 15 years and presents an array of wall paintings, several types of painting on canvas, and “installation-based gestures made in response to the overall effect produced by the other objects”, according to the press release. The show coincides with another exhibition of Armleder’s work in New York City at the Almine Rech Gallery. (more…)

Gallerist Andrea Rosen has announced that she will be closing her gallery to focus on representing the estate of Felix González-Torres in collaboration with David Zwirner.  “While the gallery will continue to exist, with selective activities, like the representation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, I will no longer have a typical permanent public space and therefore no longer represent living artists,” she said in a statement.  “This transition will transpire over the next few months.” (more…)

Susan Greenberg Fisher has been appointed as director of collections at the Brooklyn Museum.  Fisher previously worked as the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation’s executive director in New York.   (more…)

Francis Kéré’s design for the Serpentine, via The Guardian

The Serpentine Galleries will host architect Diébédo Francis Kéré (founder and head of Kéré Architecture) as this year’s Serpentine Pavilion designer, making the architect the first African designer invited to work with the British Institution’s annual project.  Kéré, who splits his time between Berlin and his home city of Gando in Burkino Faso, has created a massive elevated canopy, much like the stretching branches of a tree, under which the Serpentine will host its annual series of talks, performances and other events.   (more…)

A rendering of Lumen by Jenny Sabin, via Archinect

The Ithaca-based Jenny Sabin Studio has won this year’s edition of the MoMA Young Architect’s Program with her design Lumen, a robotically-knitted canopy made from photoluminescent textiles that both absorb and diffuse light.  The work, which is made from recycled materials and also features a misting system, will hang over the courtyard of MoMA PS1 this summer, as the museum embarks on its annual Warm Up concert series.   (more…)

The Royal Academy of Art has embarked on a partnership with over 60 London Galleries to rebrand the Mayfair Art Weekend with a three-day calendar of exhibitions and events.  “Our aim is to open up our schools, the collection and our buildings and make them all more accessible to the public,” says Kate Goodwin, the RA’s curator of architecture. (more…)

Paper Magazine has a piece on painter Alex Becerra, as he prepares new work for the LA Art Book Fair this week.  The artist, who works out of a 1,700 square foot studio in Inglewood, gives the magazine a tour of the space as he discusses his work and the the U.S.’s current political climate.  “My studio is a creative hub, not for this kind of politics,” he says.  “My attitude hasn’t changed, it is more of a question of how can I stay positive in these times.” (more…)

Artnet examines the market for Raymond Pettibon, as the artist’s New Museum retrospective renews interest in his dauntingly massive body of work.  “Pettibon’s works are extremely collectible,” says Alexander Berggruen, specialist for post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s. “They brilliantly tread the line between house-able and viscerally pleasing, while also irreverent, provocative, and challenging in many others ways.” (more…)

The New Yorker has a piece this week on various museums’ gestures of resistance against the Trump White House, including rehangs of work to emphasize foreign artists, and a seven-hour reading of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” at the Brooklyn Museum.   (more…)

The Gurlitt Art Trove will finally go on public view at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany, the New York Times reports.  The collaborative exhibition will focus both on the Gurlitt collection and more broadly on themes of looted art in Europe.   (more…)