China’s economic slump and campaign against graft has many forecasting slow sales in the country’s once thriving art market, the SCMP reports, although those outside the secondary market remain optimistic.  “Now in fact is a better time because the speculators go away and we can focus on working with seasoned collectors and find new clients,”says Andy Hei, co-chairman and director of Fine Art Asia. “Prices will be more rational.” (more…)

An historic drought in Utah has brought water levels around Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to their lowest point since 1963, a point which many familiar with the work state is part of the work’s execution.  “The current thinking by most is that Robert Smithson would have loved to see the environmental changes that occur around his artwork, so there is no real talk of intervention,” Bonnie Baxter, the director of the Great Salt Lake Institute. (more…)

Bloomberg looks ahead to the coming November auctions in New York, and previews the ongoing position battles the auction houses are taking as the secondary market continues to skyrocket.  “It is ruthless out there,” said Wendy Cromwell, an art adviser. “You need to do what you need to do in order to get the consignments you want.” (more…)

Soho nonprofit gallery Artists Space will temporarily suspend exhibitions while it sorts out a dispute with its landlords over construction work.  “The underlying agenda is to bully us until we move out,” says gallery executive Stefan Kalmár. “But that is not going to happen.” (more…)

Trevor Paglen, NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, New York City, New York, United States (2015), via Art Observed

Continuing his investigation of covert military and intelligence operations, Trevor Paglen returns to Metro Pictures for his second exhibition with the gallery, charging his work with the intricacies of research and formal explorations of color and abstraction, while focusing particularly on the geography and aesthetics of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance programs.

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Cheim & Read Partner Adam Sheffer has been appointed as the new president of the ADAA.  “As Chairman of The Art Show, Adam has been an especially important force in shaping the high standard of artistic quality and connoisseurship that distinguishes our fair each year,” said Linda Blumberg, ADAA’s executive director said in a statement. “And through his renowned leadership of Cheim & Read’s rigorous and dynamic program, Adam commands a great deal of respect from his colleagues, making him an ideal successor to Dorsey Waxter’s terrific work.” (more…)

The Whitney’s move to the foot of the Highline has resulted in double the number of visitors during the four month span than the museum saw in the previous year.  “People feel so strongly about the Whitney because it’s a museum that is very much in and of New York,” Museum President Adam Weinberg said. “The Whitney is a spirit, not a place.” (more…)

The French government has thrown its hand in the ring for the purchase of one of the two Rothschild Rembrandts currently offered for sale, part of an effort to split the works between the Netherlands and France, despite the Netherlands seeming desire to take both pieces.  “I’m still confident that we’re heading in the right direction,” says Dutch parliament leader Alexander Pechtold, who is working to secure the pieces. “The seller wants to keep them together and made an arrangement with the Rijksmuseum, so that’s the phase we’re in now.”
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Song Dong, Waste Not (2005), photo courtesy Groninger Museum

The Groninger Museum in the Netherlands has gained an enormous installation, filling up much of their open space with the household items and various collectibles of Waste Not, the collaborative installation created between Chinese contemporary artist Song Dong and his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan.  The work is centered around the artist’s mother, who dealt with numerous hardships during her upbringing in China, and how she began to cherish and hoard all of the objects, detritus and material she acquired during the course of her lifetime. (more…)

Anthony Caro, Sunshine (1964), via Sotheby’s

Curated by Royal Academy Artistic Director Tim Marlow, Sotheby’s  tenth edition of its outdoor sculpture exhibition at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, titled Beyond Limits, swings for the fences with its studious and somewhat understated take on the impact and influence of Britain’s sculptural greats over the past 65 years.  Tracing lines of exchange and dialogue from the formal innovations of the 1950’s and 60’s through the irreverent inversions of the YBA’s during the 1990’s and on to the present, the exhibition is an intriguing examination on Britain’s own sense of the art historical as much as it is a review of its products. (more…)

Piet Mondrian, Ovale Komposition mit Farbflächen (1914), photo courtesy Martin Gropius Bau © Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Nie-derlande

With his famous works focusing on geometric lines and primary colors, Piet Mondrian’s history as an artist is often obscured by his iconic later output.  Yet, the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin is exhibiting work by Piet Mondrian in an exhibition entitled The Line, taking the artist’s creative evolution and exposition as its starting point.  Initially starting his career painting in the Impressionist style, this exhibition of Mondrian’s work dedicates itself to showcasing the artist’s career and subsequent development of his unique stylistic innovations.  With over 50 drawings and paintings, the journey through Mondrian’s career is exposed through his many lenses and creative phases, and is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in Berlin since the opening of the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1968.

Piet Mondrian, Komposition mit rot, schwarz, gelb, blau und grau (1921), photo courtesy Martin Gropius Bau © Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Nie-derlande

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The estate of Philip Guston is now represented by Hauser and Wirth, the New York Times reports.  The gallery will open its first show of the artist’s work in the spring, and was selected “especially because Iwan Wirth has been such a Guston enthusiast for years,” says Musa Mayer, Guston’s daughter. (more…)

An article in Fortune notes the increasing difficulty to authenticate works in the current market, as more and more collectors are willing to resort to litigation to intimidate and block the process.  “One year our legal bill ran up $7 million,” says Joel Wachs, the Warhol Foundation’s director. “The cost to defend them became so great, we got tired of giving money to lawyers. We’d rather be giving it to artists.”  (more…)

Hartwig Fischer has been appointed the new Director of the British Museum, making him the first foreign director in over 200 years.  He will replace the outgoing Neil MacGregor. (more…)

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is offering grants to artists for projects addressing the issues of mass incarceration in the United States.  Almost half the 2.2 million people in American prisons are African American, the foundation cited in a statement, making as incarceration rate increase of over 500% in 30 years.  “One in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime,” the foundation continues. “This constitutes an epidemic.” (more…)

The Guardian details the story and industrial efforts behind the move of Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn installation from the English Lake District to Newcastle, featuring the original news article detailing both the creation and movement of the work.  “Today and tomorrow all 23 tons of it will be eased on skids down a 150-yard slope to the road and loaded on to a transporter which will take at least two days to cover the 120 miles to Newcastle,” the article reports. (more…)

Kara Walker has been named the Tepper Chair of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.  “If anything, I can foster an environment of openness and maybe willingness to live with contentious images and objectionable ideas, particularly in the space of art,” Walker said in a statement. “For me, it gets us to a place where we can talk to those concerns and how as artists we can creatively solve problems when problems arise.” (more…)

The heirs of Peggy Guggenheim have lost their case against the Guggenheim Foundation, seeking to prevent the organization from changing how works are hung at its Venice exhibition space.  The Foundation issued a statement claiming it was “proud to have faithfully carried out the wishes of Peggy Guggenheim for more than 30 years by preserving her collection intact in the Palazzo, restoring and maintaining the Palazzo as a public museum.” (more…)

The ongoing conflict between Dmitriy Rybolovlev and Yves Bouvier takes a new twist this week, as Rybolovlev prepares to return a pair of Picassos he purchased from the dealer in 2013, but which have since been disputed at the property of Catherine Hutin-Blay, the artist’s step-daughter.  Hutin-Bly had been storing the works in one of Bouvier’s warehouses, a move critiqued by Larry Gagosian.  “I’d consider it a terrible conflict of interest and would never keep art long term in the warehouse of a dealer,” he says. (more…)

Anish Kapoor has covered the graffiti on his work Dirty Corner with strips of gold leaf, refusing to remove the graffiti as a French court had ordered, while still concealing it.  The artist noted that the new action turned the piece into “something else, a room still with a painful past, but a piece that first claims the beauty of art”. (more…)

Ron Nagle, Skin Grift (2013), via Art Observed

The walls of Matthew Marks Gallery are dotted with miniature vitrines for the gallery’s most recent show, a combination of new and historical work by Californian artist Ron Nagle that embraces the material and structural execution of sculpture at its most scaled-down.

Following up on its impressive summer exhibition, What Nerve!, the gallery pushes deeper into the roots of one of the show’s subjects, the San Francisco bay’s iconic “Funk” movement, and the sculptural lineage that artist and California College of the Arts professor Peter Voulkos left in his wake.  Having taught both Nagle and Ken Price (both represented by the gallery), the artist’s impact was instrumental in helping to shape some of the tenants that would define Californian sculpture over the next decades.  Yet where Voulkos’s work often used size in conjunction with his vivid shapes and colors, Nagle’s work turns towards carefully shaped interactions in micro.

Ron Nagle, Untitled (2015), via Art Observed

The artist’s miniature sculptures are evocative in their minimal elements and carefully considered choices, teetering between pure abstraction and impressively subtle tableau that carry a wealth of narrative potential.  In some works, the forms call to mind beds, trees or busts, always twisted towards the surreal by the artist’s careful tweaks to the lines and curves of his pieces. Yet as much as the artist’s figurative experiments carry the works, they equally stand on their own for their masterful use of color, particularly in his most recent works; vividly colored and masterfully shaped pieces that make the most out of their material grounding.  In Handsome Drifter, for instance, Nagle’s resin-soaked glaze smolders with a gentle variation in reds and yellows, offset by the single dollop of twisted black ceramic that sits atop it.  A masterful study in balance and counterpoint, the viewer may find themselves floating in and out of a perception of the concrete in these pieces.

Ron Nagle, The Temperamentalist (2015), via Art Observed

The exhibition also includes a series of Nagle’s bronze works from the early 1990’s, exercises in the interplay of material and utility that define the cup as a tool of modern life.  Pushing his works towards jagged, almost fragmented surfaces, Nagle places his pieces in this series as a continuum of early tool construction, while emphasizing the surface of each piece, not least due to its preservation under a glass vitrine.  Joining these are some of the artist’s recent drawings, playing on the materiality of lined paper or surface texture to explore the act of drawing at a nearly atomic level.

Ron Nagle, Mutha Fakir (2015), via Art Observed

Nagle’s work seems obsessed with this brief moments of encounter between his work and the materials he executes them in, and the pared-down scale of the pieces seems to focus these moments at single points.  Always focusing themselves around balance and restraint, the artist underscores his aesthetic interests in conjunction with his own economies of form.

Offering a studious counterpoint to the Funk works explored in the gallery’s previous exhibition, Nagle’s exhibition is a striking look at the possibilities for ceramics on a micro-scale, one where strength of message is rarely sacrificed for delicacy of execution.

Ron Nagle, Lotta Wattage (2015), via Art Observed

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Ron Nagle: “Five O’Clock Shadow” [Matthew Marks]

Frieze London has announced its series of artist commissions for the 2015 edition of the fair next month in Regent’s Park, including Brazilian artist Tunga’s recreation of a 1987 work, Siamese Hair Twins, featuring a pair of young girls joined together by their hair.  “It is quite extraordinary, a sight to behold,” says Victoria Siddall, the director of the fair. “There is something ethereal and wonderful about it. People who have seen it when it was originally created say it was something special.” (more…)

The Detroit News has a story on Geoff George this week, the owner of the building Shepard Fairey’s offending artwork appeared on earlier this year, noting the problems of fines and unwanted public attention that the art has brought to his real estate.  “The artist in me was just thrilled. But, almost immediately the building owner side of me kicked in,” George says. “I started to worry … is the city going to hit me with a blight violation? How badly is my building going to be targeted?” (more…)

The Musée D’Orsay closed today following a worker strike, protesting a proposal to keep the museum open to the public seven days a week, beginning this coming November.  A decision will be reached in the coming day whether or not the strike will continue. (more…)