Emmanuel Perrotin is profiled in W Magazine this month, underlining the gallerist’s penchant for risk-taking, and his adventurous spirit in regards to his relationship with his artists.  “There are a lot of dealers in Europe who just want to complain,” Perrotin says. “I’m rather positive and energetic. But it’s true that the bigger you get, the more you start to worry and to ask yourself how well you’re really doing.” (more…)

Outside the 2014 Armory Show, via Art Observed

The doors of The Armory Show opened this morning for its VIP preview, welcoming collectors and press from around the world to Piers 92 and 94 on Manhattan’s West Side.  This year, the fair welcomes 205 galleries to its annual selling event, down again from last year’s 214 in what seems to be a running trend to trim the fat at the larger fairs worldwide.

Armory Show (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

Cornelius Gurlitt, the German man at the center of the controversy over thousands of Nazi-looted artworks found in his Munich apartment, has launched a website in an attempt to tell his side of the story.  “Some of what has been reported about my collection and myself is not correct or not quite correct,” Gurlitt says on the site. “Consequently my lawyers, my legal caretaker and I want to make available information to objectify the discussion about my collection and my person.” (more…)

Marianne Boesky is profiled in the WSJ this week, spotlighting her reputation for risk-taking, including showing a never-before-seen South African artist in her booth at the Armory Fair next month, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and her early gamble on Japanese art-star Takeshi Murakami. “I couldn’t even give his work away,” she says. “I could even go so far as to say I was mocked for showing it.”
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Larry Gagosian is featured in the Financial Times’ How to Spend It section this week, recounting his personal style inspirations, and his current reading list.  “I tend to mix it up, so I might read a biography and then follow it up with a page-turner,” he says. “I used to read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, but now I stick to contemporary fiction and books related to current events.”  (more…)

Collector and dealer Asher Edelman has filed a lawsuit claiming he has been victimized in a fraudulent deal for the sale of more than 100 works claimed to be by Picasso, Matisse, and more.  The lawsuit states that Swiss company Artmentum convinced Edelman’s company that a Japanese museum was seeking to sell $400 million in art, a statement that Edelman claims was wholly false.  “Each defendant, acting individually and in concert with each other, participated in an elaborate, fraudulent scheme in the guise of an international art transaction designed to deprive ArtAssure of hundreds of millions of dollars,” the lawsuit says. (more…)

The New York Times publishes a feature on LES Gallery owner Lisa Cooley, as she discusses her work in the New York Art World, the current show on Ileana Sonnabend at MoMA, and her the long history of prominent female art dealers.  “There have always been women dealers,” Cooley says. “It is a profession that has always attracted women. Women have relatively easy access to the field.” (more…)

New York Times Magazine profiles the Retrospective Gallery, which just opened last Saturday in Hudson, N.Y.  The space, founded by dealers Zach Feuer and Joel Mesler, is looking to experiment in the upstate city, trying new events and strategies “outside the pressure cooker,” as Feuer says.   (more…)

With counterfeit dealer Glafira Rosales cooperating with federal authorities, the investigation into the sale of a number of counterfeit artworks has shifted towards Rosales’s partner Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, the Spanish dealer who may have served as a key figure in the creation of the counterfeit art ring around the Knoedler Gallery.  Diaz, who has not been reached in several months, has yet to be charged. (more…)

Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s Chairman of Postwar and Contemporary Art Development, has announced that she will be leaving the company this February to work as a private dealer.  Cappellazzo joined the auction house in 2001, and is frequently touted as the reason Christie’s has experienced such profound success in the past years, but has decided to focus on more private sales and transactions.  “When I think about private sales,” she said in 2012, “I think about matchmaking—it’s literally about arranging love.”  (more…)

The Art Show, the annually presented fair taking place concurrently with The Armory Show has announced its 26th edition, featuring 72 booths that include 34 solo artist booths and 38 thematic exhibitions.  Highlights include a show of new works by Jacob Kassay at 303 Gallery, and holographic works by James Turrell at Pace.  (more…)

The New York Times has published a profile on Salon 94 owner Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, and her quiet influence on the contemporary art landscape in New York.  “The interesting thing about Jeanne is how involved she is in the ‘becoming’ of an artist’s creations,” says artist Terry Adkins. (more…)

The family of sculptor Alexander Calder have filed a complaint that Klaus G. Perls, the artist’s longtime dealer and friend, held onto tens of millions of dollars of the artist’s art after his death, and sold forgeries of the artist’s work.  The Perls family has asked that the claims be dismissed.  “It gives me no pleasure to talk about this,” said Calder’s grandson, Alexander S. C. Rower, but “there is just example after example after example after example of misdeeds.”   (more…)

In a recent article for New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz critiques the effects of the mega-galleries on their artist rosters, and asserts that the galleries often encourage artists to overproduce critically weak work in favor of sheer salability.  ” By now, these galleries are essentially exploiting the potential of artists who have been carefully nurtured for years by other galleries. And often ruining them.”  He writes. (more…)

The nomadic pop-up gallery Shoot the Lobster has announced plans to open a permanent space in Luxembourg.  The gallery has put on shows in both Europe and the U.S., with works by painter Henry Codax, photographer Ryan Foerster, Agnes Lux and Servane Mary.  “The opportunity to work with several artists I know from the area was too good to pass up.”  Owner Jose Martos says.  He is also looking for exhibition space in the Lower East Side. (more…)

A Chicago gallery owner has been sentenced to a 6 month prison sentence, with an additional 6 months of home confinement for the sale of fake artworks.  Alan Kass, 76, was also ordered to pay his buyers restitutions of up to $350,000.  “I misled people who, like me, enjoyed art,” Kass said in his court statement. “I disappointed my customers who put their trust in my knowledge. For this I am sincerely sorry.” (more…)

A recent article in The Economist analyzes Amazon’s entry into the art marketplace, pointing out the ongoing history of art sales online, and the still paltry percentage of the market’s total sales (less than 2% according to insurer Hiscox).  Noting a desire for face to face interaction in high price sales, the magazine points out that large scale sales often happen as a result of longtime client-dealer relations, instead of broad demand for a more accessible purchasing platform. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports on the recent opening of Galerie Perrotin’s New York space, which shares the building at 909 Madison Avenue (a former Bank of New York branch) with Dominique Lévy Gallery.  With three spaces in Paris, and one in Hong Kong, Emmanuel Perrotin’s growing gallery network has finally found root in New York’s fertile art world. “For many artists around the world, their New York show is their most important,” He said.  It is, according to him,  “the dream of every ambitious gallerist, because within one kilometer of this gallery, you have more collectors than anywhere else in the world.” (more…)

The 27 year-old, Columbian-born Oscar Murillo is the focus of a spotlight in Bloomberg, detailing his recent addition to the David Zwirner roster, and the quickly rising prices for his works.  “He’s had the quickest upward trajectory for his age of any artist I’ve seen in 25 years,” said dealer and writer Kenny Schachter. “There’s a lot of money to be made trading Oscar Murillo at this point.” (more…)

Los Angeles collector and patron Eli Broad is at the top of a new list detailing the top art collectors around the world, titled Larry’s List.  Contrasting with the annually published ARTnews assessment, Larry’s List ranks collectors based on Internet presence, institutional engagement, art fair participation, communications platforms, and the physical visibility and scale of their collection.  A full 60-page report will be published later this year. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports on the burgeoning contemporary gallery scene, and the numerous large-scale shows foregoing museum exhibitions in favor of names like Gagosian, Zwirner and Hauser and Wirth, many of which are opening museum-sized spaces of their open.  However, these new spaces aren’t only about space to exhibit.  “The mega spaces project what they need to—a level of power and gravitas.”  Says collector Dennis Scholl. (more…)

Artist and dealer Margaret Lee is interviewed this week in New York Times Magazine, discussing her busy schedule as an artist, owner of the 47 Canal gallery, and the solitary studio assistant for Cindy Sherman.  “It was good for me to see that you can be this amazing artist and not be an ego-driven, horrible monster,” she says. (more…)

The Museum of Modern Art has announced a new show, opening this December, focusing on the life and patronage of collector Ileana Sonnabend, a Romanian emigré who at one time was married to Leo Castelli, and presided over the New York art world, eventually developing a collection valued at well over $900 million, and championing artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Mario Merz.  “For us, the emphasis will clearly be on the history she made.” Says Chief Curator Ann Temkin. (more…)

Gallery mogul David Zwirner has been featured in Bloomberg’s Businessweek, discussing his early aspirations as a jazz drummer, the increasingly wealthy art market, and his thoughts on the impact of the internet on the techniques and approaches to the aesthetics of contemporary art.  “It changes the way they interact with the world.”  He says.  “I’m starting to see work where there’s something radically new in the way images are produced. Some of it’s in film and video, some of it’s in photography, some of it’s in sculpture. But we’re on the cusp of something. The emotional quality around the Internet is nonexistent—that cold, cold, cold energy I’ve seen in some works of art recently.” (more…)