An iconic still life by Vincent Van Gogh, painted only a few years before the end of the artist’s life, is anticipated to sell for $30 to $50 million at Sotheby’s in New York this November, a figure that indicates strong competition for the work. The piece could very well see fierce bidding to break the artist’s record of $82.5 million, set in 1990. (more…)
A trailer has been released for the film Mr. Turner, an upcoming biopic that centers around the life and work of Joseph Mallrond Turner. The film is directed by respected British filmmaker Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Naked) and earned lead actor Timothy Spall a Best Actor award at Cannes for his performance. Mr. Turner opens in the US this month at the Telluride and New York Film Festivals. (more…)
Artist David Hockney is the subject of a new biography by author Christopher Simon Sykes, who has chronicled some of the artist’s least known and most peculiar stories in a new book, A Pilgrim’s Progress. The book includes a number of Hockney’s famous feuds with artists and actors like Dennis Hopper and Rudolph Nureyev, whom Hopper once fired from a collaborative project. “Well, Rudi, it’s obvious that we are not going to be able to work together, so I’m afraid it’s all finished,” Hockney reportedly said. (more…)
Jeremy Deller, English Magic (2012), All images courtesy of Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Jeremy Deller’s English Magic has come to the United States this summer. The artist’s video and installation work, created specifically for the British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, addresses British society and politics through a complexly intertwined mythology and cultural iconography. It’s the latest participant in the Hirschhorn’s Directions series, an on-going program which has been running since 1979, and which has seen the likes of Tacita Dean, Juan Munoz and Pipilotti Rist bringing works to the Hirshhorn, aiming to engage with emerging and established artists showcasing both new and old works. (more…)
Following a Florida court’s $24.6 million decision in favor of several Rauschenberg Trustees for services preserving the artist’s legacy, the Rauschenberg Foundation has filed an appeal, claiming that the sum originally awarded to the three trustees would hamper its charitable work for the arts community. (more…)
Dahn Vo, We the People (Detail) (2011-2013), all images courtesy Farschou Foundation Beijing
On view currently at Farschou Foundation in Beijing is a sculpture-based exhibition from the young Danish artist Danh Vo, featuring the key work “We The People (Detail),” which is a 1:1 copy of the Statue of Liberty, which is currently distributed across globe for exhibitions in New York and China. The exhibition will remain on view through August 24, 2014.
Curators, artists and museum directors are preparing to open the 2014 Pittsburgh Biennial this month, a 10 month long event focusing on Pittsburgh-based artists and special events at many of the city’s arts organizations. “We want to show how rich an environment this is for artists,” says Laura Domencic, the director of the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. (more…)
The “Art Everywhere US” project, which will cover billboards, bus stops and other public spaces with art, is set to get underway this August, with 58 works to go on display after a public vote. Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks was the leading vote-getter, and will join works by Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman, among others. The project begins August 4th in Times Square, when digital billboards will display all the works. (more…)
The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the collection of Leslie Wexner, who has shifted from being a major collector of a number of blue-chip 20th Century artists to exclusively focusing on the work of Pablo Picasso. “My feeling was, and still is, that when you look at Picasso, you realize that he was the true founder of modern and contemporary art,” Wexner says. (more…)
Portrait of Dirck van Os, a 1658 painting long discredited as a Rembrandt copy, has been returned to public view at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha as an officially authenticated portrait by the Dutch master. “People here sensed the underlying quality,” says Joslyn executive director, Jack Becker, “but you need the scholarly community to rehabilitate a picture like this.” (more…)
The New York Times reports on a tax loophole regarding several states where art purchases can be awarded tax-free status if the newly gotten works are first lent to an art museum. The tax loophole explains why Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, the most expensive work ever sold at auction, was first exhibited at the Portland Art Museum after its record-setting purchase last year. “It is an amazing opportunity for these smaller cities to show these works,” says Mack McFarland of the Pacific Northwest College of Art. “But one does have to wonder, doing a cost-benefit analysis on a more global scale, whether or not the tax break for these wealthy collectors is worth it.” (more…)
This spring, three shows of work by artist Ai Weiwei are opening in London, Berlin and New York, with a major retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, an exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London, and the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date at the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin. The exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum includes the artist’s S.A.C.R.E.D. works, half-sized dioramas depicting his 81-day imprisonment that commanded major critical attention at the Venice Biennale last year. The exhibitions come with a hope that Chinese tourists may be exposed to Ai’s work outside his own country. “Because my work is banned from being shown inside China, the only way they can become aware of it is from the outside,” he said. (more…)
Glenn Ligon is interviewed in The Independent this week, as the artist prepares to open a new show at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, and recounts an experience meeting President Barack Obama, in which the president told the artist he owned several of Ligon’s works. “I thought to myself, ‘the President of the United States knows what’s in his house,'” he says. “It’s not just decoration. He looks at it and knows when it’s not there. It was touching to realize that visual art is an integral part of his and his family’s life. It’s not just window dressing, not something you have to talk about because people expect you to. It was a really great way to meet him.” (more…)
The New York Times has a published a preview piece on next week’s opening for the Whitney Biennial, which will open concurrently with Armory Week next Friday. The 77th edition of the event will be the last in the Whitney’s current home before it moves to its new location in the Meatpacking District, and features the collaborative vision of three separate curators, each of which are occupying a single floor of the museum. “It’s as if you’re on your laptop and have three windows open,” said Stuart Comer, one of the curators and the head of media and performance at MoMA. “It’s not a collaboration but a conversation, a dialogue.” (more…)
Daniel Loeb is pushing for three seats on the board at Sotheby’s, preparing for a proxy fight to wrest additional control of the company for his Third Point Hedge Fund. “All shareholders will benefit from further depth of experience in Sotheby’s key business building block: luxury customer relationship development,” Third Point said in its regulatory filing this week. (more…)
U.S. Lawmakers have put forth a proposal that would pay 5% of any auction proceeds to the creator of the work on sale. The royalty proposal looks to bring U.S. art auction procedures in line with those of the European Union, and would cap royalties at $35,000 for a work. “Just as our copyright laws extend to musicians and authors to encourage their artistic creativity, they should also apply to our visual artists,” sponsoring Senator Tammy Baldwin says. “The ART Act is a common-sense measure that helps protect the intellectual property of our artists.” (more…)
Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue seeks an experience akin to the slow trawls of internet message boards, Wikipedia pages, and Google searches that mark the contemporary search for information, a compartmentalized seeking after discrete bits of data. Running from image to image, many culled from the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Henrot’s project offers a condensed experience of information overload, cramming the story of the earth’s creation into 13 minutes.
Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed (more…)
The FIAC Art Fair will launch a Los Angeles edition in April of 2015, bringing the organization to the US for the first time. The inaugural fair will include about 150 exhibitors, and chose Los Angeles for its “extremely dynamic” location and proximity to Asia and Latin America, according to director Jean-Daniel Compain. (more…)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Appearance of Collage #6 (2012), Courtesy Pace Gallery
Though Soviet-born artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are New York-based, they were little known in the New York art scene until this Fall season. Popular in Europe, their 2013 New York tour started with their successfully-launched, 8th rendition of the floating installation, “The Ship of Tolerance”, at the Dumbo Arts Festival. Ilya Kabakov, a former childrens’ book illustrator and graphic artist did his conceptual art work in secrecy until he accepted a grant to work in Austria and grew to prominence in Europe. Upon arriving to New York, he reconnected with his distant cousin, Emilia, a former pianist and linguist, and presently an art advisor and curator. She helped him navigate the arts scene in New York and the two soon began collaborating. They married in 1992 and have been sharing credits ever since on everything they have produced with the exception of several of Ilya’s paintings. (more…)
Robert Indiana, The American Gas Works (1962), Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art
Robert Indiana‘s lasting fame in the canon of American post-war modernism will forever belong to his iconic LOVE sculpture—that immediately recognizable logo of stacked letters animated by it’s slanting O, which graces merchandise as ubiquitous as the US postage stamp. This beautifully simple graphic, originally conceived as a design for a Christmas Card for MoMA, has in fact so eclipsed Indiana’s expansive career that his name has become synonymous with its text. And yet this fall’s large retrospective at the Whitney, Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE, plumbs the depths of his oeuvre to present an artist far more complex than those four well-worn letters. Curated by Barbara Haskell, the exhibit presents paintings and sculptures by the pop artist that highlight Indiana’s sociopolitical conscience as boldly as their hard-edged execution, and traces his developing formal vocabulary of language and abstraction, from biting political commentary, to personal biography, to literary allusion, Indian’s broad selection of works on view dispel any notion of the artist as one-hit-wonder. This exhibit demonstrates the thematic expanse Indiana pursues “beyond Love”, including American identity, the American Dream, and the politics of race and sexuality. Rife with literary references to American authors and indebted to artistic predecessors such as Charles Demuth, the textual program is often as radical as his post-painterly abstraction.
Robert Indiana, LOVE (1961), Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art (more…)
President Barack Obama’s administration has announced the winners of the 2012 National Medal of Arts, including Ellsworth Kelly on the list of recipients. Kelly, who turned 90 this year, is currently in the spotlight for a trio of New York shows this spring and summer, spanning the range of his career, and will accept the award tonight in Washington, DC. Other recipients include landscape architect Laurie Olin. (more…)
The sale of Pablo Picasso’s 1909 work Compotier et tasse has been blocked by U.S. authorities at the request of the Italian government. The painting’s current owners, Gabriella Amati and her late husband, Angelo Maj, are being charged with embezzling $44 million from the city of Naples, and the work is suspected to have been purchased with the stolen money. Immigration and Custons Enforcement director John Morton said: “Restraining this valuable artwork is an effort to help recover some of the estimated $44 million that this couple stole from the tax-paying citizens of Naples.” (more…)
Jean Dupuy, Performances/Bouffe Théâtre d’en face (1979) (detail), via Galerie Louevenbruck
Galerie Louevenbruck Paris is currently exhibiting Jean Dupuy: the collective years (1973-1983), a first time retrospective of the artist’s “collective” period during the late 20th century. This period of work was developed after Dupuy left Paris for New York in 1967. Having begun his art career as a painter, he infamously threw his old works into the Seine before heading off to America, where a year later his Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust) sculpture became his introduction to the notions of the collective. Shortly after its creation the piece had already been exhibited at both the Museum of Modern Art and the Brookyln Museum, and its success launched the artist into his 40 year study of “techno-sensual” techniques and collective art practice.
Jean Dupuy, The Collective Years (Installation View), via Galerie Louevenbruck
