Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is finally leaving its Greenwich Village headquarters, and moving uptown to a former brewery on 126th Street in Harlem. “In other cities people travel to see art,” Brown says. “I’m not so far from the Upper East Side.” (more…)
Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh has stated his fears that more art is missing from the Boston Public Library collection following the disappearance of two prints valued at $600,000. “I think the lack of security with these two prints and (more) … really, really concerns me greatly that there’s other things missing,” Walsh said in an appearance on Boston Herald Radio. (more…)
Last night’s Party in the Garden at MoMA was marked by vocal protests from museum staff, following museum proposals to reduce health care coverage during ongoing contract negotiations. “A lot of us here are professionals,” says Luke Baker, an architecture and design curatorial assistant. “We’ve got master’s degrees. You know, we’re here for the long haul. We really want to make sure that working here, and giving as much as we give to the museum, that this is a tenable position for us and that we’re able to stay here.” (more…)
Fotografica, all photos via Sabrina Wirth for Art Observed
Every two years during the first week of May, Bogotá, Colombia launches its Fotografica Bogotá, the biennial photography exhibition now in its 10th edition. “Bogotá is photographic,” says Gilma Suarez, the powerhouse curator and photographer who founded the event. Indeed, from May 2nd to June 15th, the city turns itself into a public museum, with images of the artwork on display for anyone to enjoy, while hosting concurrent events at universities, galleries, museums, and foundations, also open to the public. The event gives photography enthusiasts the chance to meet with the exhibiting photographers from around the world to either listen to their lectures or participate in portfolio reviews. (more…)
The retrospective of Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch’s work, previously pulled from Mexico City’ s Museo Jumex this past year, has found a new home at Palermo’s Museo Zac. “Everybody who knows me, knows that I am an animal protector,” says Nitsch, responding to accusations of animal cruelty that some feel were responsible for closing the show. “From my point of view, factory farming is the biggest crime in our society.” (more…)
The WSJ looks at the recent focus on algorithms as hot items on the art market, as collectors purchase classic codes and objects emblazoned with famous code. “It is a whole new dimension we are trying to grapple with,” says Cooper Hewitt curatorial director Cara McCarty. “The art term I keep hearing is code.” (more…)
Coloring Book, a monumental new sculpture by Jeff Koons, has sold for €12 million euros at a Cannes charity auction that ultimately brought in more than €33 million to fund AIDS research through amFAR. (more…)
The Whitney has named Scott Rothkopf, the man behind last year’s Jeff Koons retrospective, as the institution’s new chief curator, taking over for Donna De Salvo as she assumes the new position of deputy director. “Now that the institution has grown, we need more firepower at the top,” says President Adam Weinberg said, adding: “I wouldn’t say so much that it’s a generational change but it is about bringing that next generation into the curatorial and programmatic leadership.” (more…)
Nina Beier, Female Nude (2015), all images via Art Observed
Metro Pictures’s airy gallery is currently open to artist Nina Beier’s plotted sculptures that map the conceptual revisions of objects and their representation. Interposing sculptural still lives with flattened three-dimensional picture hangings, the artist presents crisply-laundered down comforters and jackets, flattened as a backdrop for wigs and fashionable ties, while nearby, burrowed coconut forms perched on lush soil. In another room, gigantic stemware houses familiar objects, introduced by the gallery as an effort in problematizing representation and depiction.
A new British £20 note has been announced this week, and this time, a creative figure from British history will replace economist Adam Smith, the New York Times reports. “Banknotes are the principal way the Bank of England engages with the British public,”Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England. “These sparse pieces of paper from the 17th century have developed over the years to become the small works of art that are in everyone’s wallets. There are a wealth of individuals within the field of visual arts whose work shaped British thought, innovation, leadership, values and society and who continue to inspire people today.” (more…)
The court case over the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice has begun, a lawsuit by the collector’s grandson to prevent the Guggenheim Foundation from showing any works not in the collection within the museum space, “alleging it breaks with the original arrangement that Peggy wanted and which should be respected after her death,” according to plaintiff Sandro Rumney. (more…)
Continuing her fundraising quest through the sale of her grandfather Pablo Picasso‘s estate, Marina Picasso is selling her inherited villa in Cannes, La Califnornie, a space she has already seen a €150 Million offer for. “Of course I’m selling,” she says. “But it’s also a way to share.” (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…)
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…)
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…)
William Pope L., Trinket (Installation View), via MOCA
Inside the MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary building in Downtown Los Angeles, an immensely oversized American flag endlessly flutters in a synthetic breeze, held aloft by a series of industrial grade cooling fans. The breeze is intense, and the force exerted on the delicate stitching holding the iconic stars and stripes together is gradually tearing apart, a powerful metaphor in a time when the nation is riddled by high levels of police brutality, harsh military involvement overseas and increasingly vitriolic partisanship. (more…)
Adrian Ghenie will now be represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, with the news coming shortly before the artist opens his solo exhibition at the Romanian Pavilion. Ghenie will open his first exhibition at Ropac’s Paris Marais gallery this October. (more…)
Market Watch has an interesting article this week on the tax status of Nazi-looted paintings returned to their rightful owners, noting the tax-free status of reparations payments from the German government, particularly in the case of Maria Altman’s reception of the Gustav Klimt masterwork Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I, and attorney Randol Schoenberg’s move to get sales proceeds from the work equal status. (more…)
The annual BP Portrait Award has announced this year’s shortlist, featuring artists from the UK, Israel and Spain. “It was good to see even more international artists entering and my fellow judges and I were impressed by the different styles of portraiture, some quite new to the exhibition, and intrigued by the stories behind the portraits,” says Pim Baxter, the deputy director at London’s National Portrait Gallery. (more…)
Against the backdrop of critical backlash over MoMA’s recent Björk exhibition, The Art Newspaper sits down with Glenn Lowry for a frank and lengthy interview, charting his vision for the museum, and his acknowledgement of issues of overcrowding often leveled on the museum. “My background is as a historian of Islamic art, so of course I lament the loss of solitude,” Lowry says. “But I am also a pragmatist; solitude is probably gone regardless. Had our attendance grown by 25% or 30%, which is what we figured it would with the 2004 expansion, you would still have had those moments. Will the [next] expansion solve all those problems? No, it’s not going to solve everything, but it will enable us to show a great deal more of our collection and in many different ways.” (more…)
A pair of Francis Bacon self-portraits that have been considered missing since they were painted in the mid-1970’s have been found, and are going on sale at Sotheby’s this July in London, estimated at £15 million each. “Marlborough Fine Art kept a photographic archive and so both of these paintings appeared in a book on Bacon’s self-portraits but, apart from being reproduced in books, they’ve not been seen,” says Sotheby’s Oliver Barker. “We knew of the existence of the paintings but simply had no idea where they could be.” (more…)
Lauren Cornell, the Curator of this year’s New Museum Triennial, is interviewed in Dazed this week, reflecting on her origins in experimental film, her work with Rhizome, and her work in addressing gender and sexuality as a curator. “I think it seems especially hard or frustrating to come up as a young artist now in an art world that seems to think of itself as ‘over’ inequality, while consistently rewarding white men more than anyone else,” she says. “In this context, it’s important to create spaces for ongoing inequalities to be named and dealt with constructively.” (more…)
A new study on the use of digital technologies in American art museums is set for release this week, an in-depth study that looks at museum projects nationwide and their effectiveness in incorporating new immersive media. The study covers 41 museum projects, from a “digital census” of French sculpture at Dallas’s Nasher Center to new iPad based wall labeling at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. (more…)