A New York Times article analyzes the work of artist Pei-Shen Qian, the painter behind the multi-million dollar counterfeiting ring that included the Knoedler Gallery.  Mr. Pei-Shen is well-regarded as a painter in China, but moved to New York in the early 1980’s.  Analyzing the artist’s early work in comparison with his more recent fakes, the article goes on to examine the interplay of supply and demand in the contemporary market as a potential cause of the artist’s shift to fraudulent works. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports on a lost painting by Magritte, which researchers claim was cut up into separate pieces and painted over.  While the practice is relatively common, the work in question, The Enchanted Pose, was exhibited on its own in 1927 before being reused.  Several parts of the piece have already been located, and museums around the world are searching for other missing pieces. (more…)

The New Museum has announced its 2014 schedule of exhibitions, prominently featuring a show by Polish artist Pawel Althamer, which will include a highly public, participatory aspect.  Alongside the artist’s immediately recognizable sculptural works, the show will also welcome visitors to paint the walls of the museum’s spacious lobby.  The show opens on February 12th. (more…)

Willem de Kooning, [no title] (1984), © 2013 The Willem de Kooning Foundation:Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Tim Nighswander: IMAGING4ART

The late works of Willem de Kooning represent a striking departure for the artist’s work.  Condensing his colorful, flowing style into a tightly controlled, minimalist series of patterns and movements, de Kooning’s paintings in the late years of his life, from the mid-1980’s onwards signal a new interest in negative space and light.  The collisions and grating proximity of forms of his definitive work during the 50’s and 60’s seems to dissolve into a mellow, effortless form, well-balanced and refined.

Willem de Kooning, Ten Paintings (Installation View), Courtesy Gagosian Gallery (more…)

Honoré Daumier, The Sideshow (Parade de Saltimbanques) (1865-66) Courtesy Royal Academy of Arts

On view at the Royal Academy of Arts is an exhibition of 130 works by 19th century artist Honoré Daumier, composed primarily of paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculptures, that strengthen the artist’s history as both a perceptive and nuanced painter, as well as a truly comic satirist.

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Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665), Courtesy of The Frick Collection

On view at The Frick Collection in New York is a traveling exhibition of beloved Dutch paintings selected from the collection of the Royal Picture Gallery Maurithuis in The Hague, the Netherlands. The paintings will remain on view to the public through January 19, 2014.

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Brendan Lynch, Coming Home (2013), via Art Observed

Located just off the main strip of Lincoln Road, the office building at 1632 Pennsylvania Avenue in Miami Beach has a lot going for it.  Gently curving walls, a white and teal color scheme, and ample space for movement and installation.  It was just this space that Brooklyn collective The Still House Group took over for its annual pop-up show during Art Basel Miami Beach.

Alex Perweiller and Zachary Susskind at Straight II DVD, via Art Observed (more…)

Another lawsuit has been filed against the now-closed Knoedler Gallery, this time alleging that its dealers willfully sold a Malibu couple a pair of paintings attributed to Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.  The federal suit is filed against the Knoedler Gallery, president Ann Freedman, chairman Michael Hammer and worker Jaime Andrade, along with dealer Glafira Rosales, who has just recently agreed to a plea deal in her criminal case.  “Defendants showed virtually no interest in the authenticity or origin of the works,” the lawsuit says. (more…)

David Shrigley, Life Model (2012), via Turner Prize

As the 2013 art calendar draws towards its conclusion this December, the annual Turner Prize exhibition has opened its doors, this time in the Northern Irish town of Derry-Londonderry, to four of Great Britain’s most prominent and talented artists: Tino Seghal, David Shrigley, Laure Prouvost and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.  The annual prize, which will be awarded today, December 2nd, opens to one of its most diverse sets of final entries in past years, spanning a complex body of work that includes performance, choreography, video, sculpture, drawing, and painting among a worldly group of artists that call the UK their home.

Tino Seghal, via Turner Prize (more…)

Sotheby’s first auction in mainland China closed today with an impressive final sales tally of over $37 million.  The final results included a record-setting $14,725,457 final price for Zao Wou-Ki’s 1958 canvas, Abstraction.   (more…)

Steven Parrino, Skeletal Implosion, 2001

Dedicated to the movement of abstraction throughout the past decades of art, and equally to the divisive concept of “the end of painting,” The Show is Over is an exhibition presented by Gagosian Gallery in London, combining works from a variety of artists to point to a single thesis: that painting as a medium of expression will never be quite be “over.”

Richard Prince, “Untitled,” 2012

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Balthus, Untitled (1990 – 2000) ©Harumi Klossowska de Rola.  Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Inaugurating a new ground-floor gallery at 976 Madison Avenue, Gagosian presents The Last Studies, a never before seen exhibition and the gallery’s first partnering with the Estate of Balthus – on display until December 21.

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The recent discovery of what may in fact be the last painting Jackson Pollock created before his untimely death has placed Pollock experts against forensic investigators, with many art historians debating the work’s origins.  “I don’t think there’s a Pollock expert in world that would look at that painting and agree it was a Pollock,” says Francis V. O’Connor, a co-editor of the definitive Pollock catalog.  (more…)

Lee Ufan, Dialogue (2013), all photos via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed unless otherwise noted

The work of Lee Ufan takes pleasure in simplicity.  Utilizing simple, geometrically-influenced forms, the artist walks a line between the classic theories and demands of post-war minimalism, and more nuanced, organic approach to the forms and materials of the everyday.

Lee Ufan, La peinture ensevelie…. (2013) (more…)

Vogue Magazine’s Genevieve Bahrenburg writes on a chance encounter with artist Chuck Close, and the artist’s process of capturing her on film for a painting, and the artist’s impressive perceptual capacities.  “I know from years of experience how the incremental units of the grid will fall on an image.”  Close tells her. (more…)

Painter David Hockney’s iPad influenced works are the subject of a short piece in Wired Magazine, describing the artist’s influences from Warhol to 19th century French painting.  Part of the artist’s broader interest in new media and potentials for composition, the works feature Hockney’s signature combination of vibrant colors and quick, steady strokes. (more…)

David Salle, Ghost 1 (1992), © David Salle, VAGA, NY. Courtesy, Skarstedt New York

Currently on view at Skarstedt Gallery’s uptown space is a series of 13 works by David Salle, from his Ghost Paintings series.  Executed in 1992, these busy, color-inflected works were created from a series of photographs, documenting improvised actions with an enormous white sheet.  Taken as a whole, the works create a dialogue on the image as the result of a series of practices, processes and flows, rendering a final piece that belies its mode of creation in subtle ways. (more…)

Georges Braque, Compotier et Cartes (1918), Courtesy Grand Palais

On view at Grand Palais, Galeries nationales in Paris is a retrospective covering the full life and output of French painter and sculptor Georges Braque’s career, beginning with Fauvism to his later works, particularly his birds series. The exhibition will continue through January 6th 2014.

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Lynette & Janette (2013). All images courtesy the Gagosian Gallery.

John Currin’s work is currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Paris through December 21^st. Currin is known for his seductive and, to some, lewd appropriations of sixteenth and seventeenth century European painting. His paintings pair explicit sexual representations with the extremely polished and delicate details of this classical style. The result is a fascinating, touching and often hilarious interpretation of the politics of visual representation and sexual provocation.  (more…)

The proceedings at Phillips with Alexander Gilkes at the rostrum, via Aubrey Roemer for Art Observed

Last night, Phillips auction house held their Contemporary Art Evening Sale art, in a packed salesroom. The sale exhibited a strong lead into the week of Contemporary art auctions, with 84% of lots selling by value, and 88% selling by lot. The 40 lots sold for a combined total of $68 million, including premiums, against an estimate of $65 – 97 million.

Kazuo Shiraga, Keishizoku (1961), via Ben Richards for Art Observed (more…)

Painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal’s “20 Odd Questions” section, including the answer to why the artist so often paints “Bez,” the name of the Happy Mondays musician across many of his canvases.  “Why not?”  He asks.  He goes on to discuss more of his life and art, including his influences and inspirations.  “One thing that I admire about Picasso was how he changed the way he worked so many times. So did Matisse, Magritte, de Chirico. They were looking for another version of themselves in other forms,”  he says. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed

One may recall the final room of The Whitney’s sprawling retrospective of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama last year, stacked floor to ceiling with bold, brightly colored canvases.  Flourishing tentacles, patterns of eyes and teeth, cartoonish faces and swirling animalistic forms dominated the work, all delivered with a wide-eyed enthusiasm that made them hard to ignore.

Yayoi Kusama, My Heart (2013), via David Zwirner (more…)

The founders of the Dia Art Foundation have filed a lawsuit against the organization, as well as auction house Sotheby’s, in order to keep the arts organization from selling parts of its collection this month.  The sales, set to take place this week in New York, include works by Barnett Newman, Cy Twombly and John Chamberlain, and are contested by the founders’s claims that the works were intended to remain publicly accessible.  “Dia’s proposed auction of the subject works would remove the works from public access and viewing in direct contravention of Dia’s entire intent and purpose and of plaintiffs’ arrangements and understandings with Dia,” founders Fariha and Heiner Friedrichs say in the complaint. (more…)

The hotly contested painting Red, Black, and Silver has been authenticated as the final painting from artist Jackson Pollock, given to his mistress shortly before his death in 1956.  The painting had long believed to have been a Pollock, but was blocked from authentication by Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, who held a personal vendetta against his mistress, Ruth Kligman.  That changes today, now that authorities have found strands of Pollock’s hair in the canvas, as well as sand unique to the beaches around his East Hamptons home.  “The world was flat. Now it is round. It’s Galileo. Science can now be used to authenticate the art.  We are [tracing] the painting back to where it was executed. It’s very CSI.”  Says artist and Kligman estate trustee Jonathan Cramer.      (more…)