‪‬Tracey Emin unveils British Airways A319 Air Bus Olympic-inspired ‘Dove’ plane artwork by Emin’s mentoree Pascal Anson [AO Newslink]

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Installation view of Heart to Hand. All photos on site for Art Observed by Douglas Cloninger.

Located in the former Deitch Projects building at 18 Wooster St., Swiss Institute‘s current set of exhibitions opened with a line out the door on March 7, running through April 15. Three shows are on view: Nicholas Party’s Still life, Stones and Elephants, Pati Hertling’s curatory project Heart to Hand, featuring work by Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Adam Pendleton and brothers and collaborators Oscar Tuazon and Elias Hansen, and downstairs Jimmie Durham’s Marquette for a Museum of Switzerland. Split between the several artists, the show begins with a colorful entrance, a large open main space split in two—half the floor raised, half reappropriated as sculpture—and a basement of semi-faux artifacts.

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Artist Elias Hansen at the opening

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‪‬Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani, head of Qatar Museum Authority, profiled in the Economist, works to better Doha, Qatar, with Museum of Islamic Art and record-price acquisitions “Art—even controversial art—can unlock communication between diverse nations, peoples and histories.” [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sotheby’s contemporary Chinese art auction sold several works above estimated prices in Hong Kong on Monday, top sale was Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘Bloodline: Big Family No. 2’ for US$6.7 million, other sales including works by Liu Wei, Wang Guangyi, Jia Aili [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Long Island dealer Glafira Rosales and companion Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz involved in FBI investigations regarding authenticity of several paintings by artists including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Jean-Michel Basquiat [AO Newslink]

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‪‬British tourist Andy Fields may have bought a 1930s signed sketch of American actor Rudy Vallee by a juvenile bed-ridden Andy Warhol for $5 from an unidentified man in Las Vegas who claimed his aunt once babysat the artist, value estimated at £1.3 million if authenticated [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Ai Weiwei voluntarily streams 4-camera home surveillance, with views of office overhead, computer, bedroom, and courtyard, with Twitter feed along bottom of site [AO Newslink]

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Kembra Pfahler and Spencer Sweeney. All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler have collaborated on a series of photographs in the French gardens of Claude Monet‘s Giverny estate, displaying the project within a thorough installation simulacrum thereof at The Hole Gallery in New York City. A pebble walkway through tulips and trees, around a lilly-padded pond complete with Monet’s famous Japanese bridge, guided the likes of Jeffrey Deitch, Terence Koh, Spencer Sweeney, Aurel Schmidt, and gallerist Kathy Grayson, among a full house Friday night. A clothed Pfahler—of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black (see video)—had an unclothed red ‘Femlin’ in tow, the artist’s strong feminist creature originally inspired by a character of Playboy.com, which happened to fund the entire exhibition.

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‪‬Doug Aitken’s ‘Acid Modernism’ house in Venice, California is profiled on NY Times, featuring ‘sonic’ tables and stairs, secret rooms, and a ‘light house,’ built on the same footprint from 2010 ‘House’ video piece, “The goal was to create a warm, organic modernism that’s also perceptual and hallucinatory” [AO Newslink]

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Thomas Ruff, 3D_ma.r.s.04 (2012). All images from ma.r.s : © 2012 Thomas Ruff/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Thomas Ruff exhibits for the first time with Gagosian Gallery presenting two exhibitions, ma.r.s. and nudes, at the gallery’s two London spaces on Britannia Street and Davies Street, respectively. Ruff’s unique style involves various photographic experiments, often working in series and using sourced imagery combined with an assortment of photographic tools and techniques: composite picture-making apparatus, star light system for night-vision, hand-tinting, stereoscopy, digital retouching, and photomontage. “The difference between my predecessors and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture. We all lost, bit by bit, the belief in this so-called objective capturing of real reality,” says Ruff in the press release.

Installation view. Photo: Mike Bruce

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‪‬Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) could sell for $45 million at Sotheby’s in May, perhaps the most important Rothko brought to auction since 2007. Additional lots in the sale include work by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬60 Minutes’ Morley Safer revisits his 1993 conceptualism question, “Is it Art?” tomorrow night, this time examining the role of art fairs in terms of Art Basel Miami Beach. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬MTV’s “Art Breaks” series from 1985 is set to air again this year. Once featuring Jean-Michel Basqiuat, Keith Haring, Richard Prince, and Kenny Scharf, it will now debut 30 up-and-coming artists, as curated in part by MoMA PS1. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Four stolen paintings by Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Fernand Leger, and Jean DuBuffet have been recovered in Cologne, Germany, now at an estimated value of $1 million. The six works were originally stolen in 1988 from Solomon Gallery in New York. When one by Karl Apfel and another by Motherwell were recovered previously in 2003 and 2012 respectively by art collectors, they prompted the now conclusive police investigation. [AO Newslink]

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All installation images via Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photos: Matteo Monti

Marcel Broodthaers. L’espace de l’écriture is the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s works to be exhibited in Italy. The Museo de Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo) has, with this exhibition, created an homage to Broodthaers highlighting the developments and achievements of his short artistic career. The works on view—all on loan from prestigious international collectors—provide an exceptional opportunity for the MAMbo to introduce a wider Italian public to nearly fifty works by the artist. The broad selection of work on display demonstrates the artist’s main themes, influenced by his years spent as a poet, such as the relationship between art and language, the status and cult of the artwork, and criticism of the museum. According to the press release, “The curatorial project of the exhibition is intended to verify how the relationship between image, object and word constitutes the central and constant theme of Marcel Broodthaers’ research and has strongly conditioned his entire creative process.”

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‪‬Vincent Van Gogh would celebrate 159 years today, born March 30, 1853 in Zundert, the Netherlands, later committing suicide at age 37 when he “walked into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest” and died two days later [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Knoedler Gallery in second recent lawsuit regarding artwork authenticity as a South Carolina family filed a $25 million lawsuit on Wednesday after paying $8.3 million for Rothko’s ‘Untitled 1956,’ which they claim to be “a canvas that is unsalable and worthless” [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Channel 4 in Britain to air TV program ‘Damien Hirst: Thoughts, Work, Life,’ the evening of April 3rd, “an intimate and revealing portrait” [AO Newslink]

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Urs Fischer, Problem Painting (2011). All images via Gagosian Gallery.

In his first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery Swiss-born, New York-based artist Urs Fischer presents a group of large-scale paintings and sculptures in the exhibition Beds and Problem Paintings. The installation at Gagosian is comprised of three parts: a series of paintings, a duo of fabricated beds, and a grouping of boxes reminiscent of the artist’s 2009 Service à la Française.

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‪‬Yayoi Kusama and Phyllida Barlow to create new works for first Kiev International Biennale, titled ‘The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art,’ to run May 24 through July 31, 2012, and also include works by Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Chapman Bros, and Paul McCarthy [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Financier and Dartmouth alum Leon Black donates $48 million to Dartmouth College to build new visual arts center featuring a commission by Ellsworth Kelly, “We hope this building fosters creativity among Dartmouth’s students and faculty — that it inspires them to dream big, be courageous, take artistic risks — and infuses them with the life-changing power of the visual arts,” [AO Newslink]

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Nir Hod and literary figure Salman Rushdie. All photos on site for Art Observed, at the opening by Samuel Sveen, studio by Jonathan Beer.

Nir Hod’s most recent body of work, titled Mother, opened last night at Paul Kasmin Gallery. The Israeli-born artist is known for creating work that is both strange and beautiful, sharing the sumptuousness found in glamour and fashion advertisements. This new series of paintings takes its inspiration from the widely discussed Holocaust photo “Boy from the Warsaw Ghetto.” History has mainly focused on unmasking the identity of the young boy, centered in the photo with his arms raised in surrender, leaving the matriarchal female figure to his immediate right largely unnoticed. In tribute Nir Hod has singled out the woman, depicting her repeatedly—ten times—in a variety of hues, in an effort to give her story new life. In a recent visit to the artist’s studio in Chelsea, Art Observed had the chance to discuss this new series with the artist.

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‪‬Socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor’s estate has been settled after five years, distributing approximately $100 million to education, culture, and parks, with $20 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Leonardo da Vinci’s original ‘Mona Lisa’ painting has been redated from 1503-6 to 1503-19, with the Prado’s version and ‘Virgin Child with St Anne’ also possibly redated, the Louvre verifying such based on recent scientific work and additional drawings [AO Newslink]

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