The Guggenheim Museum has received a $10 million grant from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation in Hong Kong to comission new works from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.  The move comes as the museum continues to expand its global view of contemporary art.  “This is all part of our global narrative,” says Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. “For years people have asked what we are doing about China. This is a crucial next step.” (more…)

Julie Mehretu, Mind Breath and Beat Drawings (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris is currently exhibiting a new series of works by painter and illustrator Julie Mehretu. in a show which Mehretu described as a ‘self-ethnographic project,’ involving a dissection of her identity as an artist through a free abstraction of her personal creative practice. The show is Mehretu’s first solo exhibition in France.

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Gabriel Orozco, Astroturf Constellation (2012), courtesy The Guggenheim Museum

Having just ended its opening run at the Guggenheim Deutsche in Berlin earlier this year, Gabriel Orozco‘s two-part set of taxonomic installations, collectively titled “Asterisms,” is now on view at The Guggenheim in New York City.  The eighteenth and final project in the Guggenheim’s commission series, the piece continues Orozco’s ongoing exploration into the nature of environments, and the interactions of humans with these spaces, as well as with each other. (more…)

Gabriel Orozco is profiled in the Wall Street Journal, as his show, Asterisms, opens tonight at the Guggenheim. The show contains photographs and sculptural vignettes of thousands of pieces of debris collected by the artist from the wildlife reserve Isla Arena in Mexico and from Pier 40 in Manhattan. “It’s amazing how the nature, and the accident, and the sand, the elements make them look very—they’re very suggestive of things you know,” he said.

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Since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra has been creating photographic and cinematic portraits that expose, examine, and celebrate humanity. It is a rare occurrence when one bears witness to the complexities and nuances of life epitomized in a fleeting gesture or facial expression. It is even more rare to capture these gestures or expressions on camera. Dijkstra’s work is devoted to a fascination with these possibilities found within the miracle of physical embodiment.

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Jackson Pollock, “Ocean Greyness” (1953), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

This summer, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates a groundbreaking period in its history with “Art of Another Kind,” an installation featuring works collected primarily from 1949-1960. This era began with Solomon R. Guggenheim’s passing. The movement caught fire under new director James Johnson Sweeney’s affinity for the explorative and abstract work of artists he referred to as “tastebreakers,” and ended soon after the museum’s 1959 relocation to Frank Lloyd Wright‘s iconic white structure docked in the Upper East Side.

Judit Reigl, “Outburst” (1956), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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‪‬Helsinki city board rejects Guggenheim Museum proposal, which was supported by Mayor Jussi Pajunen, at eight votes to seven, with no reason yet provided

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‪‬BMW Guggenheim Lab changes plans on six year tour to not include Berlin district of Kreuzberg due to anti-gentrification protests [AO Newslink]

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Moto (1963). All photos on site for Art Observed by Elene Damenia.

John Chamberlain: Choices opened at the Guggenheim on February 24th, and will remain on view through May 13th, after which it will travel to Bilbao, Spain. Chamberlain was preparing for the current Guggenheim retrospective from his studio in Shelter Island when he passed away this December, aged 84. Although the exhibition officially began to coordinate in 2010, Senior Curator Susan Davidson told the press conference that the idea had been brewing for over a decade. The museum currently showcases almost 100 works from a lifetime of aesthetic development, garnered from private collections in America and Europe, as well as more recent works by the artist before his death.

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Paul Cézanne, Card Players, Qatar, via Vanity Fair

The royal family of Qatar has just publicized its $250-$300 million purchase of Card Players by Paul Cézanne. The work is one in a series of five, but until now was the only one remaining in private collection. Previous owner, Greek shipping mogul George Embiricos, became receptive to the sale just prior to his death in 2011. Vanity Fair reports that William Acquavella and Larry Gagosian were outbid for Card Players, at comparable amounts rumored up to $220 million.  Even the low estimate of $250 million, factoring in exchange rate and tax fees, marks the highest sum in history ever paid for a single work of art in either auction or private sale by double.

Paul Cézanne, Card Players, Metropolitan Museum of Art, via New York Times

As the title indicates, the series depicts two low-brow card players in Aix-en-Provence. The peasants idealize an old world culture, nostalgic even to the middle-aged artist when he painted from his family’s country estate in the 1890s. At the time, Cézanne was working alone, and his isolation reflects in the sparing surfaces and minimal compositions of the varying card scenes. Only the subtlest of changes differentiate one painting from the next: most notably, the cards themselves change as the games progress, while the faces and suggestively sluggish interactions do not.

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‪ Abu Dhabi’s Louvre, $27 billion Zayed National Museum, and Guggenheim openings delayed to 2015, 2016, and 2017 respectively from their 2013-2014 previous deadlines, though substantial work has been completed. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Guggenheim and city of Helsinki conclude study for possible waterfront site for €140 million ($179 million) museum, to feature “a stronger focus on architecture and design than other Guggenheim affiliates” [AO Newslink]

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Vasily Kandinsky, Painting With White Border (2008)

Several rooms at The Guggenheim are devoted to Vasily Kandinsky’s works this season. The artist’s personal renaissance—an abandoned legal career, a relocation from Moscow to Munich—yielded iterations of nascent abstractionism that in turn contributed to a rebirth for the artistic community, cementing his place among the eminent artists and thinkers of the early 20th century.

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Zachary Concepcion.

Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is the artist’s first and last retrospective—and should not be missed—according to Cattelan. Long thought of as both prankster and genius, Cattelan is known for his subversion of authority, and fittingly his retrospective challenges the traditional museum exhibition. His hyperrealistic statues and taxidermied animals question the norm with heavy and often humorous irony, while also carrying darker, more serious undertones, hanging like a gallows from the ceiling of the Guggenheim.

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‪‬Guggenheim Foundation announces six finalists for $100,000 2012 Hugo Boss Prize [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Guggenheim teams up with Vermont-based paint company to introduce 2 lines of house paints based on the colors of classic paintings this fall [AO Newslink]

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