Tschabalala Self, Carpet (2020), via Eva Presenhuber

Currently on view at Eva Presenhuber’s New York exhibition space, American artist Tschabalala Self presents Cotton Mouth, her debut solo exhibition with the gallery.  (more…)

A piece in the Guardian this week documents Ai Weiwei’s newest film, Cockroach, which documents last year’s fierce protests in Hong Kong, and how the city has changed. “They are heroes because they were fighting for democracy and civil society with no real hope that they would achieve their aims. They are clear, well educated and above all sincere,” he says. “They were fighting not for jobs or money but things that seem to be abstract. It is about human dignity. I really think I am one of them.” (more…)

France’s National Assembly has passed a unanimous vote to return 27 colonial-era artifacts to Benin and Senegal, Art Newspaper reports. “France supports the initiatives of these two countries in favor of heritage, well beyond just restitution,” says French culture minister Roselyne Bachelot. “This text is a true act of friendship. It will allow the Beninese and Senegalese peoples to reconnect more directly with their past and access the constituent elements of their history, as our own collections allow us to do.” (more…)

Carroll Dunham, Big Men (1) (2019-2020), via Gladstone

Marking a continuation and expansion of exploration of visceral states and fluid body movements across a series of new canvases, Carroll Dunham returns to Gladstone Gallery this winter, exhibiting a group of “wrestlers,” engaged in physical struggle. Dunham’s newest groups of wrestling matches are set amidst barren landscapes, deserted for all but one single tree, wherein the aggressive men are locked into differing moments of struggle. Employing formal techniques developed throughout his career, the works exemplify Dunham’s unique ability to continually recontextualize his distinct visual language through new and recurring modes of art making.  (more…)

A piece in Bloomberg this week asks if 2020 has actually changed the art market for the better. The piece notes that the pandemic “has accelerated changes in every industry, and maybe the art market more than any other,” according to Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti. “The speed and magnitude of changes we’ve seen—no one could have predicted it.” (more…)

A New York Court has dismissed a court case over a Rudolf Stingel that never went to auction at Phillips due to cancelled sales during Covid-19. “It cannot be seriously disputed that the COVID-19 pandemic is a natural disaster,” the ruling reads, pointing to the auction house’s force majeure clause. “One need look no further than the common meaning of the words natural disaster.” (more…)

The private art collection of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude will go on sale next year at Sotheby’s, the WSJ reports. “It’s the intimate universe the artists lived in, not their public persona,” says Sotheby’s expert Simon Shaw. “Every wall of their studio refracts elements we see in their practice.” (more…)

The dispute over a Nazi-looted work by Camille Pissarro will head to mediation, following a court order this week in Paris.  The representative for the plaintiff in the case, Ron Soffer called the move “an important step in what has always been a matter that should be decided in France, since it concerns an event that occurred during the occupation of France by the Nazis.”  (more…)

Fredrik Værslev, World Paintings (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps

Artist Fredrik Værslev operates at an intriguing intersection of formalist and minimalist concepts, drawing on cultural signifiers, semiotic assumptions and linguistic fragments to explore the edges of painting, that space where the canvas becomes a stand-in for something larger than just a picture.  For his most recent show at Andrew Kreps Gallery, the artist continues that practice with World Paintings. (more…)

Robert Lynch, the head of arts advocacy organization Americans for the Arts (AFTA) will take a leave of absence after allegations of a hostile work environment.  “Immediately after the George Floyd murder, AFTA’s leadership expressed their commitment to Black and Brown lives in an Instagram post,” says Quanice Floyd, a member of the organization’s Arts Education Advisory Council. “However, since then, members of AFTA have demanded transparency and accountability on multiple occasions only to be given the runaround from senior leadership.” (more…)

A Dutch court has ruled that the Stedelijk Museum can keep a Wassily Kandinsky painting that it acquired during World War II from a Jewish collection. “We are well aware that this is disappointing for the claimants,” says Touria Meliani, Amsterdam’s alderwoman for culture. “This painting will forever be linked to a painful history. The relationship of our collection with the Second World War will always be important; we will continue to show information about this to the public, online and also in the gallery.” (more…)

Organizers for the 2021 edition of Art Dubai are saying that the fair will open as planned. “While the past year has shown the market’s capacity to adapt and innovate,” says fair artistic director Pablo del Val, “we continue to believe in the importance of bringing communities together at physical events”. (more…)

London’s Courtauld Institute has received a £10 million gift from collector Leonard Blavatnik, meant to fund a renovation of its galleries. “The opening of the Courtauld Gallery will be a cultural highlight of 2021, bringing our unique collection back to public display,” Lord Browne of Madingley, the Courtauld’s chairman, said in a statement. “It is the first step in a contemporary transformation of The Courtauld, at a time when we are more aware than ever of the contribution of the arts to our wellbeing and the economy.” (more…)

A piece in The Guardian this week reviews the work of Victor Burgin, posing the artist’s work as increasingly vital in the current era, and reflecting on the publication of his 1986 book Between. “A job the artist does, which no one else does, is to dismantle existing communication codes and to recombine some of their elements into structures, which can be used to generate new pictures of the world,” the artist said of his work. (more…)

A piece in the Guardian this week speaks with sculpture Maggi Hambling over her nude sculpture of feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft, and her vision for the work, defying those criticizing her nude depiction.  “The figure had to be nude because clothes define people,” she says. “Put someone in country tweeds and they become horsey. Put someone in period dress and they become part of history. I didn’t want to do that to her.” (more…)

A $340,000 Yves Tanguy work was rescued from an airport dumpster in Dusseldorf this week, after a German businessman accidentally left it behind while flying to Tel Aviv. After several calls, the work was located by the local sanitation company. (more…)

Christie’s has reported a considerable 25% drop in sales for 2020, while setting a new record for private sales of $1.2 billion for the year.  “It was expected since we entered in the Covid-19 situation and is in line with our forecast around mid-year,” says CEO Guillaume Cerutti. Referring to a decline of around 25 percent compared to 2019, he added, “The biggest part of this drop is with live auctions.” (more…)

Artist Amalia Ulman will premiere her first feature-length film at Sundance in 2021, Indie Wire reports.  The initial slate describes her film El Planeta as such: “amidst the devastation of post-crisis Spain, mother and daughter bluff and grift to keep up the lifestyle they think they deserve, bonding over common tragedy and an impending eviction.” (more…)

A piece published by the Isamu Noguchi museum documents the efforts by the artist to preserve his work after his death, and the pieces which have nevertheless been altered or destroyed in the years following.  The publication offers an interesting look at the situations and conditions for their change, and the impacts on the artist’s work. (more…)

David Hockney has rendered a roaring winter fire for this week’s New Yorker cover, part of the artist’s ongoing series of iPad drawings, created with his custom build program. “In 2018, Jonathan Wilkinson, my technical assistant, said he could make a new app with a mathematician in Leeds,” he says. “It was rather good, and then I got six or seven new brushes custom made.” (more…)

A number of posters have popped up in Poland surrounding the nation’s ongoing Pro-Abortion protests, among them a reproduction of Barbara Kruger’s Your Body is a Battleground.  “The need to control minds and bodies and to destroy difference has been horrifically acted out across centuries and continents,” Kruger said of the renewed interest in this work. “Contestations around gender, race, and class loom larger now than ever.” (more…)

Public museums and galleries in London will close this week, part of the UK’s new phase 3 COVID-19 restrictions. (more…)

The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach will sell a number of works from its collection to fund acquisitions of modern and contemporary work by Latin American, Chicanx and Latinx artists. “MoLAA has a responsibility in terms of representation of Latin American and Latinx art,” says Chief curator Gabriela Urtiaga.  (more…)

Arthur Jafa gets a profile in the New Yorker this week, as he discusses his work and his vision for Black visual arts. “Something I’ve pointed out a million times is that, if you look at Black folk and our visual expressivity, it’s very, very undeveloped in comparison to what we’ve been able to achieve in music,” he says. “It’s undeveloped despite the fact that we come from a visual tradition that’s just as rich as the musical one. There is no contemporary art without African descent. Cubism is Picasso trying to understand African artifacts.” (more…)