Carla Accardi, Grande Rosso Scuro (1974), via Art Observed

Embracing a unique conversation around texture and perception, 55 Walker, a space shared by Bortolami Gallery, Andrew Kreps and Kaufmann Repetto, presents an impressive dual artist show around the works of Carla Accardi and Elisa Sighicelli.  Mixing media and approach to impressive effect, the show marks an engaging exploration of varied approaches and presentations of shared aesthetic concerns.   (more…)

The UK is considering laws to protect statues from being removed from public spaces.  “Our view will be set out in law, that such monuments are almost always best explained and contextualized, not taken and hidden away,” says Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick. (more…)

A piece in the New York Times looks at the work Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer by Frans Hals, and looks into why the work has been stolen three times from its place of exhibition.  “It’s really that painting for some reason, and I don’t know why,” says Christa Hendriksen, an alderman in charge of culture in Leerdam, the Netherlands. (more…)

A 16th-century copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi  stolen from a museum in Naples has been recovered by Italian police, the Art Newspaper reports. (more…)

The NYT has a piece this week on Donald Trump’s attempts to defund the NEA, and the resultant push by both parties to keep the organization funded. “The years and years of work that we had done to create a pro-arts Congress, whether Republican or Democrat, really came through,” says Nina Ozlu Tunceli, executive director of the Americans for the Arts Action Fund. “Congress became a firewall to prevent that termination from happening.” (more…)

The Castello di Rivoli will become the first museum in Italy to function as a Covid-19 vaccination site. “Art has always helped, healed, and cured—indeed, some of the first museums in the world were hospitals,” said Castello di Rivoli director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in a statement. “Now we are repaying the favor, so to speak, and opening Castello di Rivoli’s galleries for the vaccine effort.” (more…)

Mernet Larsen, Astronaut: Sunrise (after El Lissitzky), (2020), via James Cohan

For over six decades, artist Mernet Larsen has created narrative paintings depicting hard-edged, enigmatic characters that inhabit an uncanny parallel world filled with tension and wry humor.  Employing a wry approach towards constructing spatial systems and relations between objects and bodies on the canvas, her pieces combine reverse, isometric, and conventional perspectives to pose everyday scenarios in a vertigo-inducing version of reality akin to our own. For her new exhibition at James Cohan Gallery in New York, the artist returns to her diverse array of graphical influences, drawing on the languages of art of the past as springboards for uniquely spatial figure-paintings that speak to the anxieties of the present. (more…)

The Brooklyn Museum will install Nick Cave’s piece Truth Be Told outside the museum, which generated controversy last during its installation at the Jack Shainman space in Kinderhook, NY.  “Museums are being called on to tell the truth, from the painful to the celebratory,” says museum director Anne Pasternak. “We can invite a constructive conversation.” (more…)

The Guggenheim has appointed Naomi Beckwith, formerly senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as deputy director and chief curator. “If you look out over the cultural landscape — particularly in the U.S. — she is quite obviously one of the outstanding leaders of today with a huge potential as well,” says museum director Richard Armstrong. “She’s very adept at issues of identity and, particularly, multidisciplinary art. We have to think about the Guggenheim’s growth over the next few years, so it needs to be a person with enormous capacity.” (more…)

A piece in Bloomberg charts the rush by galleries to move works out of the UK before Brexit goes into effect. “The higher up the market, the more global it is,” says Anthony Browne, chairman of the British Art Market Federation, regarding the challenges posed by shipping more works outside of the UK borders. “It’s the smaller galleries and dealers and mid-market ones that have buyers in the EU that will be mostly affected.” (more…)

Hank Willis Thomas’s 22-foot-high bronze memorial honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King’s commitment to racial equity will go on view in Boston Commons. “At this moment in 2021 we are asking: What would it be for Boston to be the epicenter of civil rights? And of economic and racial justice?” says Imari Paris Jeffries, executive director of King Boston. “We want to imagine that and do that.” (more…)

Curator Chris Sharp, part of the team behind Mexico City’s Lulu has opened his own space in Los Angeles. The space opens Jan. 23rd with a show of work by Emma McIntyre. (more…)

Teresita Fernandez, Rising (Lynched Land) (2020), via Lehmann Maupin

Taking over Lehmann Maupin’s New York exhibition space, artist Teresita Fernández’s new show, Maelstrom, focuses on a new series of monumental sculptures and installations that unapologetically visualize the enduring violence and devastation ignited by colonization.  Turning particular attention to the Caribbean archipelago, the first point of colonial contact in the Americas, Fernández challenges the viewer to consider nuanced readings of people and place, looking beyond dominant, continental narratives to instead consider the region as emblematic of an expansive and decentralized state of mind. (more…)

A collection of drawings, collages and studies held for years in Kara Walker’s personal archives will go on view thus summer at Kunstmuseum Basel.  “I invited Kara Walker to do an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel and proposed a focus on her drawings rather than her cutouts,” says curator Anita Haldemann. “She has hidden these drawings from the public and sometimes also from herself because they were either too intimate and too painful or too shocking to face them herself or to confront the audience with them.” (more…)

Rachel Eulena Williams, Tracing Memory (Installation View), via Canada

Currently on view at Canada Gallery in New York, Tracing Memory, the debut exhibition by artist Rachel Eulena Williams sees the artist striking a balance between painting and sculpture, reveling in the structure and propositional space of painting while working freely against easy classifications or limitations.  Discarding a reliance on stretchers in favor of works that roam freely across the walls and set up unique geometric conversations in space, the artist’s work is a fascinating first offering at the gallery. (more…)

A piece by Jason Farago in the New York Times this week calls for a New Deal for the Arts as a way to rehabilitate the currently struggling arts sector during the pandemic. “Not since 1945 has the United States required catharsis like it does in 2021,” he writes. (more…)

Germany has returned the last of the 14 works from the Gurlitt Collection that could be authenticated as looted, DW reports. “We cannot make up for this severe suffering, but we are trying with the appraisal of Nazi art looting to make a contribution to historical justice and fulfill our moral responsibility,” says Culture Minister Monika Grütters. (more…)

Jannis Kounellis will receive the first major retrospective of his work in the US in 35 years, opening a major show at the Walker Art Center in 2022. “Jannis is an artist that moved all his life from one country to another to fulfill his dream of being an artist,” says curator Vincenzo de Bellis. “His works speak to memory, history, and migration—things which are very important today.” (more…)

The Smithsonian will partner with PBS this year to launch a series of online education programs, the Washington Post reports.  “The Smithsonian has so many resources, but even we don’t have broad enough shoulders to do all of this,” says Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III. “The pandemic has given us the opportunity to fill a void. It has accelerated where we wanted to go. [PBS] gives us a great portal to do that.” (more…)

Kamel Mennour has ceased its relationship with artist Claude Lévêque over a string of allegations of sexual abuse of minors.  The gallery stated its decision was made “in order to allow the judicial authority to carry out the necessary investigations.” (more…)

Raphaela Simon, Model mit Dresserin (2020), via Max Hetzler

Walking into Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris, one is presented with a particularly intriguing scene, more akin to the interiors of a luxe fashion shop than a gallery: walls are covered with minimal, cool paintings depicting various designer goods and signifiers of upper class recreation and lifestyle, while a series of mannequins snake throughout the gallery, bearing aloof facial expressions and clothed in handmade fashions.  The show, fittingly titled The Fashion Show, is a presentation of new work by the artist Raphaela Simon, a coy commentary on consumer goods made for the center of the fashion world, Paris.

Raphaela Simon, Fleischwurst (2020), via Max Hetzler

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Following the third suicide at its site, The Vessel in Hudson Yards has been closed until new safety measures can be put in place. “Because the Vessel’s chest-high barrier is all that separates the platform from the edge, the likelihood of a similar, terribly sad loss of life cannot be ignored,” says Related Companies board chairman, Lowell Kern. (more…)

Jack Whitten, My Argiroula: For Argiro Galeraki 1981-1995 (1995), via Hauser & Wirth

Currently on view at Hauser & Wirth New York, the gallery is presenting a dynamic show of rarely seen works by American artist Jack Whitte, focusing in particular on the artist’s practice from 1991 through 2000, a period of intense experimentation during which, deeply affected by tumultuous world events, he strove to incorporate a full emotional spectrum into his work. Blurring the boundaries between sculpture and painting, and between the studio and the world, the multidimensional works on view combine geometric abstraction and found objects to mine spiritual and metaphysical thematic veins. (more…)

A string of new art spaces are set to open in Australia this year, Artforum reports, including a series of new renovations and new non-profit centers opened country-wide. (more…)