The Met’s Facade Commission to feature new work by Carol Bove

February 23, 2021

Four new sculptures created by American artist Carol Bove for The Met Fifth Avenue’s facade niches will be on view from 1 March, 2021. The Facade Commission: Carol Bove: The séances aren't helping is the second commission to be featured on the facade of The Met. Originally scheduled to go on view in September 2020, the commission was delayed due to the global pandemic. The séances aren't helping will be on view through the fall of 2021.

Born in 1971 in Geneva, Carol Bove was raised in Berkeley, California, and studied at New York University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Known for works that incorporate found and constructed elements with a unique formal, technical, and conceptual inventiveness, Bove consistently challenges and expands the possibilities of formal abstraction. For The Met commission, Bove will offer a striking series of commanding nonrepresentational forms that resonate with modernist styles such as Art Deco and abstraction.

Hauser & Wirth Menorca set to open in July with Mark Bradford exhibition

February 19, 2021

Lehmann Maupin announces the representation of Los Angeles-based artist Calida Rawles

February 18, 2021

Rawles has gained widespread recognition for paintings that merge hyper-realism with poetic abstraction. Situating her subjects in dynamic spaces, her recent work employs water as a vital, organic, multifaceted material, and historically charged space. Ranging from buoyant and ebullient to submerged and mysterious, Black bodies float in exquisitely rendered submarine landscapes of bubbles, ripples, refracted light, and expanses of blue. Rawles will have her first solo exhibition in New York at Lehmann Maupin in September 2021, and will debut a permanent installation in fall 2021 at the new Hollywood Park/SoFi Stadium campus in Inglewood, California.

Version 3 of ArtPassport out now

February 17, 2021

South London Gallery unveils Lawrence Weiner’s 1999 work on the Fire Station annexe

February 16, 2021

AT A DISTANCE TO THE FOREGROUND, 1999, has been acquired for the South London Gallery’s permanent collection, and its installation on the Fire Station follows that of another work by Weiner, ALL IN DUE COURSE, that was temporarily shown on the façade in 2014 as part of his solo exhibition of the same name. Lawrence Weiner is one of the most important artists of his generation, known since the 1960s for his engaging and influential work presenting art as a language form. He does not identify himself as a conceptualist but rather as a sculptor whose medium is “language + the materials referred to”. The idea of acquiring the work for the SLG came about before lockdown and social distancing had even been considered in the UK, so the contemporary resonance of the work is both coincidental and poignant.  

Teresa Burga, one of the most important conceptual artists in Latin America, has died at 85

Skarstedt announces KAWS: WHAT PARTY, an upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

February 12, 2021

For twenty-five years, KAWS has bridged the worlds of art, popular culture, and commerce. Adapting the rules of cultural production and consumption in the twenty-first century, his practice both critiques and participates in consumer culture. KAWS: WHAT PARTY is a sweeping survey featuring more than one hundred broad-ranging works, such as rarely seen graffiti drawings and notebooks, paintings and sculptures, smaller collectibles, furniture, and monumental installations of his popular COMPANION figures. It also features new pieces made uniquely for the exhibition along with his early-career altered advertisements.

Robilant+Voena now represents painter Stephen Appleby-Barr in London, Paris, and Milan

February 10, 2021

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

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.

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.