François Pinault is reportedly looking to Paris for the potential site of a museum housing his collection of art, WWD reports. “He has met with [Paris mayor] Anne Hidalgo, who expressed her interest,” says a source close to Pinault. “They are looking together.” (more…)
Artist Cady Noland has repudiated another one of her past works this month, sabotaging a $1.4 million sale for Log Cabin Blank with Screw Eyes and Cafe Door, a work which she denounced after learning of the new owner’s plans to restore the piece’s rotted wood. “Noland angrily denounced the restoration of the artwork without her knowledge and approval,” a complaint collector Scott Mueller filed in New York Federal Court this Monday. “She further stated that any effort to display or sell the sculpture must include notice that the piece was remade without the artist’s consent, that it now consists of unoriginal materials, and that she does not approve of the work.” (more…)
The New York Times looks at the contemporary performance art scene in Belgrade, Serbia, where a group of young artists are continuing the city’s rich history in the medium, centered around the Galerija 12 Hub. “The way they work with the artists, how they present the artists and how they think about the common good of the independent sphere is what I think makes a huge difference between the Hub and other spaces,” says choreographer Acin Thelander. (more…)
Georg Baselitz, Glastrinker Beckmann (1981), All images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.
The prolific German artist Georg Baselitz is the subject of Skarstedt’s current show with two series of paintings from the 1980’s. Entitled Drinkers and Orange Eaters, the exhibition is composed of two series that the adept Neo-Expressionist created as a study on representation and pictorial narrative. Accentuating the gallery’s minimal but elegant townhouse space, these vibrant paintings, emanating from Baselitz’s gestural brushstrokes fervidly reclaim the legacy of oil on canvas. (more…)
Paul Cézanne’s Vue sur L’Estaque et le Château d’If has been placed under export bar in the United Kingdom this week in an attempt to keep the work in the nation. “I hope that the temporary export bar I have put in place will result in a UK buyer coming forward and that the painting will soon be back on the walls of one of our great public collections,” says minister of culture Ed Vaizey. (more…)
The Guggenheim has selected the design for its proposed Helsinki location, a series of interlocking pavilions unified by a single tower, designed by Moreau Kusunoki Architectes. “Our approach was to try to make a building that is closely linked with the city, with the way people use it,” says architect Nicolas Moreau, who runs the firm with his wife Hiroko Kusunoki. (more…)
The New Museum has appointed Lauren Cornell, who recently co-curated the 2015 Triennial alongside artist Ryan Trecartin, as Curator and Associate Director, Technology Initiatives. “Through her work at the New Museum and at Rhizome first, Lauren Cornell has been tracking the influence of technology on art and culture at large,” says Massimiliano Gioni, the Museum’s Artistic Director. “In her new position, she will help the Museum take an even more active role in engaging with the present and the future.” (more…)
The once rigid boundaries between commercial galleries and museum exhibitors are quickly diminishing today, The New York Times notes, as top galleries turn towards high profile museum curators to create historically and culturally resonant shows. “I think galleries do it for prestige,” says John Elderfield, a former MoMA curator who has done independent work for Gagosian. “It burnishes their image. Of course, when one gallery does it, another one wants to do it.” (more…)
David Salle, Yellow Fellow (2015), via Art Observed
Painter David Salle is currently presenting a new body of work at Skarstedt’s Chelsea outpost, returning to his previous Product Paintings series in a set of vividly rendered prints and paintings that seem to address not only the artwork as object and commodity, but also that relation to the Post-War canon. (more…)
Richard Prince, Original (Installation View)
Richard Prince’s Original series is currently the subject of a new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, nestled at the gallery’s Upper East Side bookstore showroom, and using Prince’s ‘arrangements’ of soft-core adult novels with artworks created for their covers, showing the next step in the artist’s fascination with collecting, ownership and presentation. An ardent, perhaps even obsessive collector himself, Prince often mines and unfolds worn and sometimes clandestine images, not only from vintage pulps, which serve for the selection here, but also from copies of influential literary pieces, a pattern the artist has studied throughout his career of media appropriations. A devoted member of a group of artists who started experimenting with appropriation in the ‘70’s, Prince usually employs minimal alteration to his subject matter; rearranging, editing and sometimes even rephotographing what already exists. (more…)
Former banker Jonathan Weal is facing prison time after allegedly withholding information on his art collection during bankruptcy proceedings, a collection that included a work recently authenticated as a J.M.W. Turner seascape. “Mr Weal was required by law to declare all property that he owns but failed to do so,” says prosecutor Klentiana Mahmutaj. (more…)
As the Broad Foundation prepares to open its Los Angeles Museum, its founders are on a major buying spree, buying about one work per week to bulk up its collection. The museum already holds the world’s largest collection of works by Cindy Sherman, and is noted as having more Roy Lichtenstein works than anyone else outside the artist’s own foundation. (more…)
Artist Marlene Dumas has been commissioned to paint an altarpiece for St Anne’s Church in Freiberger Platz, Dresden, replacing the current work, which was damaged in WWII. “They are giving me a lot of freedom. I can choose the form. The theme is also open,” Dumas says. “The only ‘restriction’ is that [my painting] should not be too depressing. It should offer some hope.” (more…)
Jake and Dinos Chapman are profiled in The Guardian this week, discussing their sprawling Hell installation, and the countless horrors occurring across its expanse of miniature figures, and the first draft of the work’s destruction in a massive warehouse fire. “We heard the Momart warehouse was on fire and drove up to have a giggle because we thought it was full of other YBA art. Then we got a call saying Hell was in there,” Jake Chapman says. “We just laughed: two years to make, two minutes to burn. A smart-assed journo phoned up and said: ‘Is it true that Hell is on fire?’ It was fantastic – like a work of art still in the process of being made, even as it burnt.” (more…)
In the Courtyard of Messe Basel
As the opening previews draw to a close in Basel today, the 46th edition of Switzerland’s massive art fair and exhibition is well underway, capping two initial days of strong sales and attendance during the VIP Previews that have set a brisk tone for the week’s proceedings. (more…)
Lucas Samaras, XYZ 1700 (2015), via Pace Gallery
On view at its 25th Street galleries, Pace is currently presenting Lucas Samaras’s exhibition Albums 2, featuring over 700 digitally enhanced photographs and a mirrored room installation. Samaras’s exhibition showcases his continued exploration of manipulated imagery as a way of plumbing his own existence, this time playing through his autobiographical accounts with digital technologies. (more…)
Lee Ufan, (Installation View), via Bria Cole for Art Observed
If tranquility could serve as a physical construct, rather than a state of mind, then a state of calm could perhaps be considered as a reconditioning of vision, a way to perceive extended relations of time, material and space. This sense of the perceptual retooling, and its effects, is one reading offered by Lee Ufan’s continuous series Relatum and Dialogue, the most recent version of which is currently on view at Pace Gallery. The artist tends towards a relationship between philosophy and the objects he creates with artistic significance, in order to provoke subtle perceptual reconsiderations, as proposed in his writings and contributions to the Mono-ha school of artistic practice.
Artist Bernar Venet’s Venet Foundation and Museum in Le Muy, France, is the subject of a New York Times profile this week, documenting the artist’s impressive collection of major American artists, including Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, which the artist often secured through barters or purchases on “friend rates.” “Our works had no commercial value,” Mr. Venet says of the works he often traded his own pieces for. “We produced more than we sold.” (more…)
Bloomberg looks at the popularity of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms among collectors, and its prominence in a number of major museum collections, including the recently opened Garage Center in Moscow. “Russians loved Kusama,” says collector Inga Rubenstein. “The work is easy to understand because it’s so beautiful.” (more…)
Climate change activists have concluded a 25-hour long protest against the Tate Modern’s sponsorship by British Petroleum, writing messages and critics on the Turbine Hall floor after facing down a potential use of police force that was not acted upon. “It’s a back-down,” says Liberate Tate member and writer Mel Evans. “Maybe it’s a sign of how much the groundswell of public opinion has shifted that the Tate doesn’t feel like they can shut down this discussion.”
Cecily Brown, The English Garden (Installation View), Rachel Williams for Art Observed
Currently at Maccarone Gallery are a set of intimately-sized canvases by painter Cecily Brown. Aggressively captivating beyond their small boarders, the artist’s works here ignite a series of personal experiences as viewers stand inches away from canvases no more than 18 inches in height or width. Organized by novelist and art writer Jim Lewis, The English Garden contains garden scenes rather than traditional landscapes. Sharp lines inside Brown’s expressionist marks create additional horizons that depict mysterious and often open-ended garden scenes. (more…)
Outside Art Basel, via Art Basel
The doors are set to open at Messeplatz in Basel, Switzerland this week, for the 46th edition of the Art Basel art fair, the massive fair exhibition that has come to define the early summer months in Europe. Bringing the massively international scope of the world’s elite galleries, this year’s Art Basel promises another strong outing. (more…)
Artist Mark Bradford is profiled in the New Yorker this week, discussing his work, his early life growing up in Los Angeles, and his recent adventures into performance and stand-up comedy. “I’d seen so many black male comics, with their untouchable heterosexual superiority,” he says. “I thought, well, why not do a piece where we shake that up a little bit?” (more…)