Elmgreen & Dragset, Past Tomorrow (Installation View)

Currently on view at Galerie Perrotin is Past Tomorrow, Elmgreen & Dragset’s second installment of their ongoing tale focused on the life and loves of imagined architect Norman Swann.  The project that, in its core, is an unrealized play by the Berlin-based Scandinavian duo, had its inception at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013 exhibition, titled Tomorrow, turning the museum’s galleries into Mr. Swann’s residence.  The narrative resumes as their protagonist migrates to a studio apartment in New York’s Upper East Side neighborhood, after he consumes his entire family inheritance and vacates his London house in South Kensington. (more…)

Josh Reames at Johannes Vogt, all photos via Art Observed

NADA New York returned to the edge of the Lower East Side, drawing a diverse, hip crowd to the Basketball City complex. Free in price, NADA once again brought high-quality exhibitors and young artists, combining art from regional and international galleries alongside NYC Downtown heavy hitters.  This year’s preview event was an engaging alternative to the bright lights and high prices of Frieze. Embodying the social, communal nature of the city’s young arts scene, NADA’s Preview day was filled with with conversation, friendly jokes and familial reunions.  Maintaining the lightness of art openings opposed to the serious air of sales oriented art fairs, the galleries, their friends and artists will spend this weekend sipping drinks out of plastic cups while a roster of interdisciplinary performances, conversations and events take place. (more…)

Galeria Franco Noero, via Art Observed

The doors are open on Frieze New York, marking the early days of the summer art season with a major art event up the East River on Randall’s Island.  Returning for its fourth year, the fair has come into its own as a dedicated staple in the New York Art Calendar, and its presentation this year seems to echo it, with a stripped back tent design that seemed to stretch out much longer than in previous years, but distilled the experience down to only three rows of booths, with the occasional inlet allowing for an enjoyable wander through the space.  The VIP opening launched Wednesday morning for a quiet preview where a number of major collectors and celebrities strolled the aisles, among them Neil Patrick Harris, Mike Meyers, Uma Thurman, Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Gere and François Pinault. (more…)

Santa Maria della Misericordia church converted in THE MOSQUE: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice (2015) by Christoph Büchel, all photos by Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Historically, there have been no mosques in the city of Venice.  Despite the port city’s history as an open gateway to the East and a point of trade that facilitated new cultural, artistic and scientific developments to spread across Europe from trade with the Ottoman Empire and beyond, the city has never permitted the construction or reconstitution of a site of worship for its Muslim population.  Today, in the heated political climate that surrounds international conflicts, not to mention the recent Italian (and, at large, European) controversy regarding immigration from Syria, Lebanon and other regions in North Africa and the Middle East, the prospects for a dedicated Islamic worship site seems even less likely.  For the time being, however, the Venice Biennale has changed this scenario, as the Swiss-born, Iceland-based artist Christoph Büchel opened his frankly-titled installation THE MOSQUE: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice this month. (more…)

A piece in the Financial Times notes that the value of the global art market topped €51 billion last year, an astounding figure that comes as Christie’s topped a $1 billion in sales this week alone.  Featuring in-depth analysis, the article notes the U.S. and China as the top shareholders in market value, and as well as the interesting detail that most dealer inventory rarely moves in under 6 months, despite that current clamor for works on the market.    (more…)

NPR has a profile on painter Elaine de Kooning (wife of Willem de Kooning) this week, focusing on the artist’s interest in portraiture as a retrospective of her work opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., including her famous depiction of John F. Kennedy.  “The idea of a man who happens to be president of the United States — well, that’s already, right there, he’s bigger than life,” de Kooning said in 1976. “I was scampering up and down the ladder to do this painting.” (more…)

In a perhaps unprecedented move, the entire first year class at USC’s Roski School of Arts MFA Program have dropped out of the program, protesting moves by Dean Erica Muhl to overhaul the department’s structure and funding models.  “Whatever artistic work we created this spring semester was achieved in spite of, not because of, the institution,” the seven students wrote in an open letter announcing their withdrawal.  “Because the university refused to honor its promises to us, we are returning to the workforce degree-less and debt-full.” (more…)

In a single week, Christie’s has sold over $1 billion in art, a daunting feat that signals a new level for the global market perhaps never seen before.  “It’s a spectacle of excess at the highest level,” says Abigail Asher of Guggenheim Asher Associates Inc. “The last few years have been building up to this moment. A new class of buyer has entered the market and they’re prepared to pay staggering sums for trophy pictures.”   (more…)

Francis Bacon, Seated Woman (1961), via Phillips

The Phillips Contemporary Evening sale has concluded, bringing to a close a week full of fireworks and smashed records with a relatively lackluster sales event that saw several impressive sales, countered by a number of less than exceptional performances.  Of the sale’s 71 lots, 14 went unsold, and few others managed to surpass high estimates, bringing the final sales tally to a respectable $97,100,000.   (more…)

Two of the most valuable works from the Cornelius Gurlitt collection, Woman with a Fan, (1923) by Henri Matisse, and Two Riders on a Beach (1901) by Max Liebermann, will be returned to the families of their original owners.  “Thankfully Gurlitt liked our Liebermann and kept it prized on his wall,” says Mr. Matteis, the lawyer representing David Toren, heir to the Liebermann work. (more…)

The Shortlist for the 2015 Turner Prize has been announced, featuring a diverse body of artists and practices that diverges wildly from last year’s heavily video and film-centric affair.  The 2015 Prize exhibition will be staged this year at the Tramway arts venue in Glasgow.  The Turner Prize, a £25,000 award, is Britain’s most prominent recognition in the arts, and this year will go to either London artist Bonnie Camplin, German-born artist Nicole Wermers, London-based arts collective Assemble (which adopted an abandoned housing estate and converted it into a new community space), or artist Janice Kerbel.  Working in a wide variety of media, social practice and community milieu factor heavily into the pieces on view this year.

The Turner Prize exhibition will open this October in Glasgow. (more…)

W Magazine takes a look inside the home of Frieze director Victoria Siddall and her partner, gallerist François Chantala this week, just in time for the opening of the organization’s New York edition.  “Our work and social lives are totally continuous and intertwined,”Siddall says.  “But when we’re in the same city, it means that at least we get to see each other in the evenings. The art lot always knows how to put on a great party.” (more…)

The New York Times visits Michael Heizer at his Nevada ranch and studio, and explores his ongoing project City.  “It epitomizes a fusion of ancient and modern forms,” Heizer says.  “It’s huge in size, but antimonumental in its relentless horizontality and its sinuous, continuous curves. It’s also unphotographable and impossible to capture in its totality. It has to be experienced in time and space — over time, and distance.” (more…)

Artist and dealer Dorothee Fischer, who headed the Konrad Fischer gallery in Düsseldorf, and advocated for artists like Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, and Blinky Palermo, has passed away at the age of 78.  Fischer’s tireless, focused work in conceptual and minimal art built a dedicated group of artists around her, and she in turn built an impressive collection of 250 works, alongside her gallery archives, both of which were purchased by the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen for over $1 million.   (more…)

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Rêvolutions (2015), French Pavilion, via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Running concurrently with the Central Pavilion’s curated exhibition, the respective National Pavilions on view at the Giardini and Arsenale are one of Venice’s defining aspects.  Featuring important solo exhibitions for both emerging and career artists, carefully-curated group shows and special projects, each pavilion’s focus allows the international perspective of the Biennale to truly take shape. (more…)

The endlessly prolific Hans Ulrich Obrist has a new book out this week, titled Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, tracing a series of the artist’s ongoing conversations with artists and designers over the course of his career, including pieces with David Hockney and Marina Abramovic. (more…)

An article in The Guardian looks at the current art community in Los Angeles, and asks if perhaps the Californian metropolis now offers better opportunities for artists than New York City’s vaunted art scene.  There’s a lot of people helping each other out here,” says artist David Flores. “And there’s a lot more room to play with, more elbow room.”  (more…)

French art dealer Olivier Thomas is under investigation after Catherine Hutin-Blay, the step-daughter of Pablo Picasso, filed charges accusing him of allegedly stealing artworks he was meant to be transporting and storing for her.   (more…)

Leo Fitzpatrick, the former star of Larry Clark’s film Kids, and longtime director of the Nate Lowman project space Home Alone 2, will join Marlborough Chelsea as a gallery director.  “I’m very proud of what I was able to accomplish with Home Alone over those three years, but generally it was me taking art on the subway, trying to put on these shows,” Fitzpatrick says. “I’m really excited about having help, and people to bounce ideas off of. We can really do big things. If I was able to do so much with so little, imagine what I can do here.” (more…)

London’s Royal Academy of Art has unveiled a £50 million expansion plan that will link the institution’s two buildings in the British capital’s Mayfair district.  “You will be able to go from an exhibition in Burlington House to a lecture in Burlington Gardens through the vaults of the building,” says Sir David Chipperfield, who designed the project.  “You will see the cast corridors, you will see where the schools have been all this time. It’s a small amount of architecture for a profound result.” (more…)

Richard Tuttle, Aspect XII (2015), via Pace

As the New York art world returns home following the Biennale previews last week, the first days of the Frieze Art Fair are set to get underway.  Opening its doors to VIPs this Wednesday, May 13th, the fair brings a number of events, openings and exhibitions along with it, marking the last major fair week in the U.S. for several months, and penultimate major fair week internationally before the slow summer months. (more…)

Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes D’Alger (1955), via Art Observed

The crown for the most expensive artwork at auction has returned to the master, as Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes D’Alger lived up to its lofty expectations at auction this evening, as Christie’s “Looking Forward to the Past” exhibition kicked off Frieze Week (and a week of Contemporary Sales in New York) in grand style, tallying a massive $705,858,000 for a 35-lot offering that saw numerous records fall by the wayside, and only one lot going unsold, on the way to Picasso’s triumphant evening. (more…)

Cecily Brown is profiled in New York Magazine this week, as the artist opens an exhibition of new work at Maccarone Gallery in the West Village, smaller works that mark a shift in her career after ending her relationship with Gagosian Gallery.  “People would see them and say, ‘Are they studies for the big ones?’” Brown says.  “I joked that the big ones had become studies for the small ones. The big ones seemed very fast and loose, and the small ones were very neurotic. There was a while I called them ‘The Neurotic Paintings.’ They were so intense, very painterly, the paint got thicker. You have to believe the viewer has a more intimate relationship because you have to get up close.” (more…)

The Renzo Piano Workshop has unveiled a handbag design collaboration with fashion designer Max Mara, taking the facade of the Whitney Museum as its inspiration.  Proceeds from the bag’s sale will go to benefit the Renzo Piano Foundation.  “We tried to maintain a simple, pure design,” says the architect, “working only on the details by applying a creative use of technology and placing the accent on respect for the materials.” (more…)