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Bonhams to present Picassomania, a new auction showcasing the diversity of Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre
February 8, 2021
Pablo Picasso is the most celebrated artist of the 20th Century and though he is most famous for his paintings, he was a versatile artist who experimented with every possible medium, from traditional painting and printmaking techniques, through to pottery and jewellery. Offering a curated selection of significant artworks and objects Picassomania will take place in London at the Bonhams flagship New Bond Street saleroom on 23 March, 2021.


Sélavy by Di Donna announces Palm Beach residency at Sotheby’s gallery at The Royal Poinciana Plaza
The collaboration will bring together the legacy of the historic auction house and the ethos of Sélavy by Di Donna, an online salon of art and design with a storefront vitrine in Southampton, founded last year by Christina Floyd Di Donna and Emmanuel Di Donna. The Sélavy at Sotheby’s Palm Beach salon will be available to explore and purchase online and in person at Sotheby’s gallery at The Royal Poinciana Plaza from 13 February to 5 March, 2021.

Ai Weiwei in conversation for Hawai’i Contemporary Art Summit
February 5, 2021
The inaugural Hawai’i Contemporary Art Summit will take place from 10-13 February 2021, bringing together renowned keynote speakers, artists, curators, and thinkers from Hawai‘i and around the world for educational programming focused on art and ideas, as a thematic precursor to the Hawai‘i Triennial 2022 (HT22). On Wednesday 10 February at 10am HST/3pm EST, Ai Weiwei will discuss his art and activism in the Summit’s first Keynote Conversation with HT22’s curatorial director, Melissa Chiu. This multi-series, virtual Summit will premiere online and will be available for free to registered viewers for on-demand viewing.


Maureen Paley announces representation of Hannah Collins
February 4, 2021
Hannah Collins’ large format black-and-white photographs brought her to prominence during the 1980s and she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993. Her work draws attention to historical and social frameworks, addressing this through a wide range of subjects and geographical locations with images of interiors, exteriors, interactions and specific objects. Examples of her work are held in many collections including the Dallas Art Museum (USA), MACBA (Spain), Pompidou Centre (France), Reina Sofia Museum (Spain), Sprengel Museum (Germany), Tate (UK), and Walker Art, Center (USA) amongst others. The gallery builds upon an early connection with the artist having first shown her work in an exhibition Evidence in the Streets – War Damage Volumes in 1984.

Sterling Ruby debuts his first haute couture collection
February 3, 2021
Created at the invitation of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode in Paris, the collection, entitled APPARITIONS, explores the intersection of fashion, art, craft and culture, and expands the idea of the artist’s studio as atelier. The collection was launched as part of Haute Couture Week Spring/Summer 2021 (25 - 28 January, 2021), with the show featuring figures walking like specters in a post-apocalyptic landscape imagined from footage filmed by Ruby in an empty paintball park in Southern California.


Hedda Schattanik and Roman Szczesny join Sies + Höke
February 2, 2021
Hedda Schattanik (b. 1992 in Westerstede) and Roman Szczesny (b. 1987 in Bensberg) interweave cinematographic elements with surreal animation, literature, drama, sculpture, photography and drawing in video installations. Both artists graduated from the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie and have been working together since 2014. Their main artistic practice expands the traditional boundaries of art-making, while reflecting the perceptions, preconceptions and contradictions which characterize our existence in the world. The artists‘ first solo exhibition at Sies + Höke, loom, is on view from the outside of the gallery‘s main window until 27 February 2021.

Simon Lee Gallery announces representation of Erin Shirreff
February 1, 2021
With her multimedia practice that includes photography, sculpture and video, Erin Shirreff (b. 1975, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada) raises questions about the experience of three-dimensional sculptural form in an age of digital dissemination, inviting her audience to decelerate observation. Shirreff’s interest in the relationship between an object and its representation explores fine art photography as part of a wider culture of images, which exposes the slippage between an understanding of an object in real space and its mediation in two dimensions. The gallery will present its first exhibition of Shirreff’s work in London in 2022.


The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York receives a gift of Georg Baselitz paintings
January 28, 2021
The museum announced today that the German artist Georg Baselitz and his wife, Elke, have gifted six landmark paintings by the artist to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in honor of its 150th anniversary in 2020. The portraits, made in 1969, are among the first that Baselitz created using the radical strategy of inversion, in which the pictorial motif is literally turned upside down, enabling the artist to focus on painting's possibilities, rather than the image of the sitter in direct relationship to the viewer. The six paintings will remain on view in Georg Baselitz: Pivotal Turn in The Met's Robert Lehman Wing through 18 July, 2021.

Independent announces new dates and a new venue for 2021
Scheduled to take place from 9 to 12 September, this year’s Independent art fair will feature approximately 40 leading international galleries, each invited to present specially commissioned, museum caliber presentations by leading artists that are both relevant and timely to our current moment. The fair will be held at Cipriani South Street in New York City, a landmark building due to fully launch later this year. The 2021 edition of Independent takes its inspiration from Independent Projects, a special edition of the fair at the former Dia Center for the Arts in 2014, which at the time was praised by The New York Times as a “welcome mutation” to the traditional art fair format.


Gagosian highlights Nathaniel Mary Quinn as part of the gallery’s Artist Spotlight series
January 27, 2021
In his composite portraits derived from sources both personal and found, Nathaniel Mary Quinn probes the relationship between visual memory and perception. Fragments of images taken from online sources, fashion magazines, and family photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that are at once Dadaesque and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter. The gallery will unveil a new painting by the artist on Friday 29 January at 6pm EDT.

Edmund de Waal donates “library of exile” to the Mosul University Library in Iraq
January 25, 2021
Following presentations in Venice, Dresden, and London, British artist and author Edmund de Waal will donate almost 2,000 books from his acclaimed installation library of exile to the Mosul University Library in Iraq to help rebuild its collection which was almost destroyed in 2015 by the group calling itself the Islamic State. The Mosul University Library will be the final home for the library’s collection recently on display at the British Museum, and features the work of writers from over a hundred countries in dozens of languages from antiquity to the present day by over 100 writers from across the world who have experienced exile, loss and displacement. Following its presentation at the British Museum, the external walls of the library of exile - painted with liquid porcelain and inscribed with the names of the great lost libraries of the world - are being gifted to The Warburg Institute, London, by the artist and will be incorporated into the institute’s redesign, due to be completed in 2023/24.


Cristea Roberts Gallery launches a new podcast series exploring the relationship between artists and printmaking
January 22, 2021
The first episode of Making a Mark explores the work of Richard Hamilton. Michael Bracewell, cultural critic and writer and the author of Modern World: The Art of Richard Hamilton, and gallerist and art dealer Alan Cristea, who worked with Hamilton for 35 years, discuss the art and ideas of an artist whose achievements and legacy remain unparalleled today. Contributors include the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones, writer and curator Gill Hedley, and art director and graphic designer Peter Saville.

Art Basel postpones Basel show to September and announces three Online Viewing Rooms for 2021
January 21, 2021
Due to the ongoing impact of the pandemic and travel restrictions worldwide, the 2021 edition of Art Basel will now take place at Messe Basel from 23 to 26 September, with preview days on 21 and 22 September, 2021. This year, the fair will also present three Online Viewing Rooms, to which all galleries accepted to Art Basel's shows between 2016 and 2021 will be invited to apply. ‘OVR: Pioneers’, taking place from 24 to 27 March, will be dedicated to artists who have broken new grounds aesthetically, conceptually, or socio-politically. A second thematic Online Viewing Rooms will take place from 16 to 19 June, with the fair's curators determining themes and helping to select the participating galleries. At the beginning of November, ‘OVR:2021’ will exclusively feature artworks created this year.


galerie frank elbaz announces the selection of Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2021
January 20, 2021
Among 11 projects shortlisted for the 2021 prize, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili's work will be on display at the next Rencontres d'Arles, an annual summer photography festival founded in 1970 by photographer Lucien Clergue, writer Michel Tournier and historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette, scheduled to open in July.

Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) presents an Online Masterclass on Japanese Post-War Photography
January 19, 2021
The first in the series of three masterclasses will be presented by Simon Baker, director of the MEP, on Thursday 21 January at 6.30pm CET, and will cover the rise of documentary practice following the atomic bombings, to the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. MEP is celebrating Japanese photography this year with Moriyama – Tomatsu: Tokyo, a historic exhibition of two masters of Japanese photography.


Gagosian to host a conversation between Giuseppe Penone and Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London
January 18, 2021
On Tuesday 26 January at 1pm EST, the pair will discuss the artist’s practice, which is deeply engaged with nature and time, as well as his outdoor installation in San Francisco. Two large-scale bronze sculptures cast from trees—La logica del vegetale (The Logic of the Vegetal) (2012) and Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone) (2004)—are dramatically installed in Fort Mason’s Great Meadow, overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, through March 2021.

The John Giorno Foundation Announces the First Posthumous Presentations of the Artist’s Work in Spring and Fall, 2021
January 15, 2021
Recognized as one of the most innovative poets and artists of the 20th Century, John Giorno’s (1936-2019) kaleidoscopic work fused and furthered poetry, visual art and activism, pushing text off the printed page and into the social realm. Following the formation of the John Giorno Foundation in 2020, the artist’s work will be jointly represented by Sperone Westwater and Almine Rech, alongside Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Sperone Westwater, New York will mount an in-depth presentation of Giorno’s work from March through May 2021, showcasing the range of Giorno’s artistic production and collaboration, incorporating several series by the artist, some of which have never been exhibited. This will be followed by an exhibition at Almine Rech, London in the fall, focusing on the final painting series created by the artist, titled “Perfect Flowers,”and marking the debut of this series in the UK and Europe.


Fabrice Gygi awarded the Prix de la Société des Arts of Geneva
Fabrice Gygi is one of Switzerland’s leading artists of his generation. Marked by nomadism, his career as an artist has made him carry out a constantly renewed formal research. For more than thirty years, he explored the ambivalence of artefacts he made — at the crossroad of practicality and art. This orchestrated ambiguity enabled him to free himself from a normative society obeying logics of power.

Hollis Taggart announces representation of Suchitra Mattai and Alexandros Vasmoulakis
January 14, 2021
Both artists were featured in group exhibitions at Hollis Taggart in 2020. Mattai was included in the two-person exhibition History Reclaimed in March as well as the summer group presentation Look Again, while Vasmoulakis’s work was shown in the exhibitions Perceived Realities in June and Remix in the fall. The gallery is currently scheduling solo shows for both artists for after 2021. It will share representation of Mattai with the Denver-based gallery K Contemporary and grayDUCK Gallery in Austin. Hollis Taggart will represent the Athens and Windsor-based Vasmoulakis in the United States.


Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam to receive a library of Surrealist works
The gift from the collectors Laurens Vancrevel and his partner Frida de Jong includes monographs, catalogues and literature on Surrealism, ranging from poetry and prose to essays, published in several languages. More than four thousand, mostly unique, titles from the beginnings of Surrealism up to the present day will be transferred to Boijmans, meaning that the museum will have a very extensive Surrealism library in the future. With this in mind, the museum has conceived the idea of opening a study centre to focus on Surrealism, which will be the first in the world.