Williams College is receiving an impressive gift of contemporary works from the collection of anti-virus software developer Peter Norton, a trove of 68 works including pieces by Tracy Emin, Allan Ruppersberg, and Christopher Wool, among others. (more…)
The Public Art Fund and Brooklyn Bridge Park will host an exhibition of public works by Danish artist Jeppe Hein this summer, the New York Times reports. “One of the brilliant things about Jeppe’s work is he can engage you no matter what your background or experience or age in a very direct way,” says chief curator Nicholas Baume. (more…)
The Whitney has announced the details for its first exhibition at its newly completed Meatpacking District location. America Is Hard to See will open on May 1st, showing off the vast new exhibition spaces of the Renzo Piano-designed building, and traces the history of the museum alongside the development of American art in the 20th and early 21st century. “The game changer is the space,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator. (more…)
Ed Ruscha is bringing his Cactus Omelette recipe to the Barbican this year, serving up portions of the recipe to festival-goers at London’s installation of Doug Aitken’s Station to Station project. “It’s essentially an artwork, says curator Leila Hasham. “It’s edible cactus art.” (more…)
The New York Post reports on a recent tour of artist Jeff Koons’s 29th Street New York studio, by painter Alex Gardega, in an article that offers some interesting, and occasionally bleak snapshots from the artist’s high-precision production methods. “They have lasers printing holes in paper, so they make thousands of pieces of paper with holes in it, and these artists sit all day long and take one stencil, dab paint over it, take the next over that,” he says. “Hundreds of times a day — all for a 5-inch section.” (more…)
Matthew Darbyshire, CAPTCHA No.24 – David (2015)
Lisa Cooley is currently presenting British artist Matthew Darbyshire’s first U.S. solo exhibition, Suite, featuring eleven life size sculptural pieces, that utilize polycarbonate, a material that can be described as a type of thermoplastic polymer known for its practical commercial usage. Composed of narrowly piled half inch sheets of semi-transparent layers, these neatly arranged forms deliver juxtapositions of certain commercial mundane objects and a replica of Michelangelo’s David. (more…)
The Battersea Arts Center has received a £1 million grant from the United Kingdom following a massive fire at the South London institution that destroyed its Grand Hall. “The arts center is having to divert all its available resources into dealing with the aftermath and so I am pleased to be able to confirm that the government will provide £1 million towards the ongoing redevelopment work to help get this south London venue back on track,” says Culture secretary Sajid Javid. (more…)
New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched an investigation into the financial decision-making at Cooper Union in New York, where protests and lawsuits erupted following the school’s decision to charge tuition after nearly two hundred years of offering free college education to admitted students. (more…)
John Baldessari is featured on Vogue this week, discussing the formal and thematic concerns he reads in Philip Guston’s Stationary Figure, part of The Met’s new series featuring contemporary artists discussing their favorite works from the museum collection. “He’s almost a dumb artist, and I’m using dumb in a good way,” Baldessari says. “It’s seemingly clumsy but very sophisticated brushwork. I guess it comes out of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of old boots: you don’t need to paint a cathedral, you just need to be an interesting painter.” (more…)
The design for the Serpentine’s annual summer pavilion has been announced for 2015, a colorful, cocoon-like structure by the architectural collaborative Selgas Cano that celebrates the program’s 15th anniversary. Selgas Cano “sought a way to allow the public to experience architecture through simple elements, [a] journey through the space, characterized by color, light and irregular shapes with surprising volumes.” (more…)
The New York Times notes the city of Malaga’s recent push to become a new hotspot for art in Spain, as the city opens its arms to out of country spaces run by the Centre Pompidou and the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. “One of the cancers of Spain is that culture is seen as a public good that can’t somehow generate real revenues and be turned into a profit center,” said Salomón Castiel, the director of La Térmica, an arts center in the city. (more…)
An El Greco from the collection of industrialist Julius Priester, and seized by the Gestapo during WWII, has been returned to its rightful owners. Portrait of a Gentleman has traveled widely since its confiscation in 1944, turning up in galleries in Stockholm, New York and London before a European Commission for Looted Art claim led to its return. “The story of the seizure and trade of this painting shows how much the art trade has been involved in the disposal of Nazi-looted art and how difficult it is for those who have been dispossessed to find and recover their property,” says Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission. (more…)
A painting recently authenticated as the work of Peter Paul Rubens is set to go on view at the Rubenshuis Museum in Antwerp. The work, Portrait of a Young Girl, was purchased $626,500 in 2013, and was confirmed as authentic shortly after. (more…)
The continued instability of Ukraine has led to cancellation of the second Kiev Biennale, the New York Times reports. The 2014 edition had been postponed due to conflict, and the ongoing military confrontation in the eastern portion of the country has ultimately led to the event’s cancellation. “Due to the fact that the armed conflict in the East of Ukraine does not stop,” a release from the organization says, the event has become “absolutely impossible.” (more…)
Roy Lichtenstein’s The Ring (Engagement) will be one of the top prizes at Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Sale this May in New York, the Wall Street Journal reports, with initial estimates placing the work’s sale price at about $50 million. That figure nearly matches Lichtenstein’s $56.1 million record set in 2013. “I think it’s so sexy how he takes this quiet moment of a proposal and turns it into an exciting crash,” says Chicago plastics magnate Stefan Edlis, the work’s current owner. “Clearly, the woman accepted.” (more…)
Blinky Palermo, Wooster Street (1975), all images via David Zwirner
In collaboration with the Palermo Archive, David Zwirner presents an exhibition of rarely displayed works by Blinky Palermo at its 537 West 20th Street gallery. The works on display in this exhibition were made by the artist from 1973 to 1976, and range from objects to paintings and large-scale drawings. Following two years after David Zwirner’s exhibition of Palermo’s works on paper from 1976–1977, this show further explores the artist’s short but influential career, which is largely associated with abstraction, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, but also extends beyond these realms. These pieces are being presented together for the first time since their installation in Heiner Friedrich, New York in 1974.
Blinky Palermo, Objekt mit Wasserwage (Object with Spirit Level, 1969–1973) (more…)
A recent 13D filing from Mark McGwire’s Marcato Capital in the past week states that the hedge fund now holds stocks in three Sotheby’s funds amounting to about 9.5%, equivalent to Daniel Loeb’s Third Point, and requests that the company release previously withheld information around the company’s recent dealings. “The redacted material goes to the very heart of the parties’ dispute in this litigation – the conduct and competence of Sotheby’s board of directors in adopting a poison pill,” Marcato states in its filing. (more…)
Daniel Keller, Stack 1 (2014), via Max Hetzler
Presenting a selection of artists working at the bleeding edge of social and economic critique, Max Hetzler’s exhibition Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism easily clocks in as one of the season’s most unexpectedly energetic exhibitions. Curated by Lisa Schiff, Leslie Fritz and Eugenio Re Rebaudengo, and spread between the gallery’s Paris and Berlin locations, the show places post-capitalist theory and economic transition as its central conceit, examining the material and social costs of contemporary life within systems of capital exchange. Pulling from the works of writer Jeremy Rifkin, the exhibition explores a historical juncture at which the traditional modes of national economic and political systems are slowly giving way, and a new, digitally-accelerated model of consumption and distribution is swiftly establishing itself.
Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism (Installation View – Paris), via Max Hetzler (more…)
Tomi Ungerer, All in One (Installation View)
The Drawing Center is currently honoring pioneer illustrator Tomi Ungerer, with an ambitious look at his expansive career of diverse themes and motifs. Born in Alsace shortly before World War II tore through Europe, Ungerer moved to New York in 1956, where he published his first series of works. Although his divergent artistic interests led him to compile a comprehensive oeuvre from advertisement campaigns for publications including the New York Times to graphically striking illustrations criticizing the politics of his time, Ungerer came to prominence in the U.S. as a children’s books author. His objection to this type of categorization eventually led him to move to Nova Scotia with his wife, later followed by another relocation to Ireland, where he currently resides. (more…)
Pierre Le Guennec, the electrician accused of stealing over 200 Picasso pieces from the artist years ago, has been handed a suspended two year sentence for his possession of the works, and has been ordered to return the works by a Parisian court. (more…)
303 Gallery has announced plans for its own publishing imprint, appointing former Fulton Ryder director Fabiola Alondra as the head of the wing. which will feature “limited edition artist’s books, ephemera, and all manner of printed materials in collaboration with gallery artists,” according to the gallery. (more…)
Gabriele Finaldi, the deputy director of the Prado museum in Madrid, will take over for Nicholas Penny as the head of the UK’s National Gallery this August. “I feel deeply honored to take on the directorship of the National Gallery after Nicholas Penny,” Finaldi, who formerly worked as a curator at the museum from 1992 to 2002, says. “This is a world-class collection in a world-class city and I eagerly look forward to working with trustees and the staff to strengthen the gallery’s bond with the public and its international standing.” (more…)
Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Sales in New York this May will be lead by a series of works from the art collection of the late John Whitehead, former chairman of Goldman Sachs. Whitehead built a museum-quality collection over the course of his career, and will offer works from Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani and Pierre Bonnard, among others, anticipated to bring over $40 million. “I remained enough of a financier that I took an interest in the prices, and I tried to predict what price an individual piece would go for at auction,” he wrote in his biography. (more…)
MoMA has acquired the iconic Jasper Johns’s work Painted Bronze, a work that has sat in the Philadelphia Museum of Art for three decades, and which was purchased recently by collectors Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis. Kravis, who serves as MoMA’s Board President, gifted the work shortly after purchase directly from the artist’s personal collection. “It’s not easy to convince someone who’s kept something for himself for more than 50 years,” says dealer Matthew Marks. “It’s a big deal for him, emotionally. And one can imagine all the people over all the years who have asked, all the institutions, all the collectors who have been told no, since I was a kid.”