The death is announced of Dani Karavan

June 1, 2021

Dani Karavan has died, at the age of 90, on Saturday May 29 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1930, Karavan studied art from an early age and traveled to Florence in his mid-twenties to study Fresco painting at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, then on to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

In the early sixties he created a stone bas-relief in the assembly hall of the Knesset in Jerusalem as well as his first site-specific environmental sculpture – the Negev Monument, which became a landmark in Environmental Art.

Karavan represented Israel in the 1976 Venice Biennale and a year later participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel. He went on to create environmental sculptures in countries including Israel, France, Germany, United States, Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

“Karavan inscribes in landscape human signs, that is, those of both reason and sacredness” - Georges Duby

portrait of Dani Karavan @ Jeanne Bucher Jaeger

Simon Lee Gallery announces representation of Sonia Boyce

May 28, 2021

Artist and academic Sonia Boyce was born in London in 1962. She came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning Black Arts Movement of that time with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. In 1987, she became one of the youngest artists of her generation to have her artwork acquired by Tate and the first Black-British female artist to enter the collection. Since the 1990s Boyce’s practice has taken a significant multi-media and improvisational turn by bringing people together in a dynamic, social practice that encourages others to speak, sing or move in relation to the past and the present. Incorporating film, photography, print and sound in multi-media installations, Boyce’s practice is fundamentally collaborative and inclusive, fostering a participatory approach that questions artistic authorship and cultural difference. At the heart of her work are questions about the production and reception of unexpected gestures, with an underlying interest in the intersection of personal and political subjectivities.

Boyce was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s 2019 New Year’s Honours List, for her services to art, as well as an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art. She has been commissioned by the British Council to represent Britain with a major new exhibition at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022. Simon Lee Gallery’s inaugural exhibition with the artist will take place in London in Autumn 2022.

David Zwirner to represent the Estate of Robert Ryman and artist Merrill Wagner

May 26, 2021

American artist Robert Ryman (1930–2019) is widely celebrated for his tactile monochromatic works, which he executed using a range of painterly media on various supports, including paper, canvas, linen, aluminum, vinyl, and newsprint. Emerging in the 1960s, Ryman eschewed self-contained representational and abstract imagery, instead giving precedence to the physical gesture of applying paint to a support.

Since the 1960s, American artist Merrill Wagner (b. 1935) has created a distinctive body of work that is characterized by its expansive approach to abstraction and to painting. In its emphasis on the materiality and mutability of paint, her inventive work elides the categories of painting, relief, sculpture, and installation.

Ryman and Wagner were married in 1969, until Ryman’s death in 2019.

Shortlist for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth announced

May 25, 2021

Two designs, which will go on display in 2022 and 2024 respectively, will be chosen by the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group in late June. The six shortlisted proposals are GONOGO by Goshka Macuga, a giant rocket which encourages people to look beyond their immediate surroundings and up to outer space; Improntas (Imprint) by Teresa Margolles, which features casts of the faces of 850 trans people; On Hunger and Farming in the Skies of the Past 1957-1966 by Ibrahim Mahama, a grain silo like those used by Eastern European architects in Ghana in the early 1960s; Bumpman for Trafalgar Square by Paloma Varga Weisz, a figure inspired by the German Wundergestalt tradition and the spirit of German folklore; The Jewellery Tree by Nicole Eisenman, which features the household objects mixed with British military memorabilia; and Antelope by Samson Kambalu, which restages a 1914 photograph of Baptist preacher John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley.

The current artwork - Heather Phillipson’s sculpture THE END - will be on display until September 2022.

Karsten Schubert London now represents Cathie Pilkington

May 21, 2021

Cathie Pilkington is an artist whose work engages passionately and critically with the canonical history of figurative sculpture. Crossing the borders of traditional, modern and contemporary idioms, her work combines intensively modelled and painted sculptures within immersive installations comprising a diverse array of props, materials and studio furniture. Her site-responsive installations are balanced ambivalently between chaos and precision and have been described as a kind of art historical fly-tipping.

Pilkington studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1985–91) and the Royal College of Art (1995–97). In 2014 she was elected a Royal Academician and was awarded the Sunny Dupree Family Award for her work Reclining Doll. In 2016 she became Professor of Sculpture and in 2020 she was elected Keeper at the Royal Academy Schools.

Her work is held in the collections of Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester; The Hunterian, Glasgow; Omer Koc Collection and the David Roberts Art Foundation.

Pilkington’s solo exhibition Estin Thalassa opens at Karsten Schubert Room 2 on June 1.

Lisson Gallery, Maureen Paley, franklin parrasch gallery and Axel Vervoordt Gallery announced as participants of the 2021 Independent Art Fair

May 20, 2021

The 2021 edition of Independent, held for the first time at Cipriani South Street in the historic Battery Maritime Building in New York, from September 9 - 12, takes its inspiration from Independent Projects, a special edition of the fair at the former Dia Center for the Arts in 2014. Galleries have been invited to present specially commissioned, museum caliber presentations by leading artists that are both relevant and timely to our current moment.

From a network of over 250 galleries assembled since its inception, 40 galleries and institutions have been nominated for the 2021 edition, with 11 galleries making their Independent debut (*). The exhibiting galleries are: Adams and Ollman, Alexandre Gallery*, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, BROADWAY*, Matthew Brown Los Angeles*, CANADA, Creative Growth, Delmes & Zander, Downs & Ross, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Derek Eller Gallery, Fazakas Gallery, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Fortnight Institute, Gordon Robichaux, Higher Pictures Generation*, Karma, Lisson Gallery, MAGENTA PLAINS, The Modern Institute, moniquemeloche, Morán Morán, Mrs.*, Off Paradise*, Maureen Paley, Parker Gallery, franklin parrasch gallery, Peres Projects, The Ranch*, REGULARNORMAL*, Reyes | Finn, Ricco/Maresca Gallery, ross+kramer gallery*, Vito Schnabel Gallery*, Kerry Schuss Gallery, STANDARD (OSLO), Various Small Fires, Axel Vervoordt Gallery*, White Columns, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff.

Monet, Basquiat and Twombly headline a $702 million week of auctions at Sotheby’s

May 17, 2021

A week of auctions that brought together an array of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art was led by a three-auction evening on Wednesday 12 May, which realized a total $596.8 million. Conducted by Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker, the live-streamed event featured in-room bidders in New York, telephone bidders in London, Hong Kong and New York, and online bidders from around the world.

Starting off the evening was an auction of works from the collection of philanthropist and arts patron Mrs. John L. Marion. The sale represented the height of achievement in the American Abstract Expressionist and Pop art movements, including Richard Diebenkorn’s luminous Ocean Park #40, 1971, which sold for $27,265,500 – setting a new auction record for the California artist. New auction records were also reached for a work by Kenneth Noland, whose 1958 painting Rocker sold for $4,255,000, and Larry Rivers’s Africa I, 1961–62, which achieved $2,077,000.

Top lots from the Contemporary Art Evening Auction included Basquiat’s Versus Medici, 1982, which achieved $50,820,000 and Twombly’s Untitled (Rome), 1970, which sold for $41,628,000. Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, 1975, sold for $15,201,000, more than 16 times Colescott’s previous auction record of $912,500. Banksy’s Love is in the Air, 2004, was a world first for a fine auction house, with bidders having the option of making their payment in cryptocurrency.

Richard Nonas, leading artist of the Post-Minimalist generation, has died at 85

May 13, 2021

Nonas’ six decades-long career developed a body of sculpture that engaged with the perception of space, place, and time.

Born in New York in 1936, he studied literature and then social anthropology at the University of Michigan, Lafayette College, Columbia University and the University of North Carolina. Following his education, Nonas worked as an anthropologist for 10 years, doing field-work on American Indians in Northern Ontario, Canada, and in Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona. He turned to sculpture in the mid-1960s at age 30. His anthropological work left a deep imprint that affected his sculptural practice.

In the 1970s, Nonas and a group of intrepid artists began creating and showing works in alternative spaces, including the Clocktower and 112 Greene Street. Nonas was at the heart of this pivotal rethinking of how art could be shown and experienced.

In recent years, Nonas has exhibited worldwide with Fergus McCaffrey, New York, Tokyo, St. Barth; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna; OV Project, Brussels; Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris; P420 Galleria d’Arte, Bologna, Italy; Hill Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan; Galerie Pietro Spartà, Chagny, Bourgogne, France; and Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany.

"Sculpture—the object I make—is the way I define my own existent reality, the reality I try to communicate to you. It is how I grasp the contradictions of my world, find its submerged edges and discover the forces that hold it together at the same moment that they rip it apart. Sculpture is how I attempt to open the world for us both to see.”
—Richard Nonas, 1992

New Art Centre appoints Simon Hucker as Creative Director

May 12, 2021

Hucker joins the New Art Centre with a wealth of experience in organising and curating exhibitions and has written extensively on both Modern and Contemporary art – including a monograph on the sculptor George Kennethson, whose work he first saw at Roche Court over two decades ago.

He has worked in Modern, Post-War and Contemporary British Art since the late 1990s, most recently at Sotheby’s London where he was Senior Specialist and Co-Head of the Modern & Post War British Art department. Before joining Sotheby’s, Simon was a Director at Jonathan Clark Fine Art, where he worked closely with the estates and families of a number of leading 20th-century British artists.

Simon will join the team at the beginning of September.

James Cohan names David Norr as co-owner of the gallery

May 11, 2021

Norr, who served as James Cohan’s Senior Director from 2015 to 2018 and was made a Partner in 2018, joins founders James and Jane Cohan in steering the gallery, which operates two spaces in Manhattan: 48 Walker Street in Tribeca and 291 Grand Street on the Lower East Side.

Norr brought over two decades of curatorial and artworld experience to James Cohan when he joined in 2015, having previously served as Senior Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center of the Arts and Chief Curator at MOCA Cleveland. During this time, Norr curated exhibitions featuring the work of Katharina Grosse, Haegue Yang, Jacqueline Humphries, David Altmejd, William Villalongo, Janet Cardiff, and George Buress Miller, in addition to major surveys with James Cohan artists Trenton Doyle Hancock and Michelle Grabner.

Norr will ensure the gallery’s future by progressing the vision of its founders and focusing on the next generation of artists, building even greater diversity and international scope into the gallery’s program. The announcement comes after six years of remarkable growth at James Cohan spearheaded by Norr; the gallery has announced new additions to its artist roster, including Firelei Báez, Mernet Larsen, Teresa Margolles, Josiah McElheny, Eamon Ore-Giron, Grace Weaver, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, and most recently Naudline Pierre.

Petzel announces representation of Beijing-based painter Xie Nanxing

May 10, 2021

Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, Chongqing, China) has been refining his expansive approach to painting for over two decades, first drawing international attention when presenting at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, where he exhibited a series of particularly dramatic canvases, showing people in various vulnerable states, seemingly caught in moments of duress, partially naked and exposed to a gruesome gaze.

His first presentation at Petzel will be in a group show this summer, where he will show two paintings from his series titled The Dwarfs’ Refrain, a new body of work in which he develops and distorts a number of illustrations he commissioned his father to make.

In addition to Petzel, Xie is also represented by Thomas Dane Gallery in London and Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing.

Eric N. Mack announced as one of the recipients of the 2021-2022 Rome Prize

May 6, 2021

This year, the gift of ‘time and space to think and work’ was awarded to thirty-five American and five Italian artists and scholars. They will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome, starting in September 2021.

Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a national competition. The eleven disciplines supported by the Academy include: ancient studies, architecture, design, historic preservation and conservation, landscape architecture, literature, medieval studies, modern Italian studies, music composition, Renaissance and early modern studies, and visual arts.

Along with Eric N. Mack, the prize was also awarded to Firelei Báez, Autumn Knight, Daniel Joseph Martinez, La Nietas de Nonó (Mapenzi Chibale Nonó and Mulowayi Iyaye Nonó) and William Villalongo in the Visual Arts category.

Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) refers to himself as a painter, yet his works rarely observe the medium’s traditional canvas-to-stretcher format. Rather, his tactile assemblages, created from a dynamic combination of used textiles, worn clothes, moving blankets and torn rags, alongside photographs and pull outs from books and magazines, extend and transform the notion of painting. The artist is represented by Simon Lee Gallery.

Alison Jacques Gallery to host a virtual talk on Carol Rhodes

May 4, 2021

To coincide with the first exhibition of work by Carol Rhodes at Alison Jacques Gallery in London, artist Sara Barker, editor-at-large at ArtReview Oliver Basciano and editor-at-large at frieze Jennifer Higgie will discuss the artist’s life and work in a virtual talk on Tuesday 18 May at 6pm BST.

Throughout her career, Rhodes produced a highly individual body of paintings describing the encroachment of human activity and occupation upon ‘natural’ landscapes. Primarily adopting aerial viewpoints, Rhodes favoured what she called ‘hidden areas’ or ‘left-over land’: industrial estates, airports, motorways and reservoirs, unpeopled and existing at the margin of more defined (urban or rural) environments.

Carol Rhodes was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959; she died in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2018.

Almine Rech now represents Alejandro Cardenas

May 3, 2021

The paintings and sculptures realized by Alejandro Cardenas (b. 1977, Santiago, Chile) provide a vision of a post-human world wherein the relationship between human forms and the environment is one of unity and coexistence. Guided by his own imagination and inspired by a wide variety of influences ranging from Surrealism to Sci-Fi to magical realism, Cardenas immerses himself in the creation of surreal, post-human scenes of polished, gridded interiors populated by eerie, angular figures. Cardenas’ unique approach to figuration places his signature humanoids—narrow, wire-frame silhouettes wrapped in colorful patterns of zigzagging lines—calmly reclining, sitting, or standing within minimalist architectural environments. Unlike us, these faceless humanoids appear to lack all sensory organs, yet they are not deprived of their sensorial abilities. Instead, they convey emotion through body language, resulting in a wide variety of suggested emotional expression.

Almine Rech hosted the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition in New York in January 2021. His second solo exhibition, featuring new paintings and works on paper will take place at Almine Rech Paris, Matignon from June 30 to July 31, 2021.

Cardenas’ work is currently featured in a group presentation at Almine Rech New York, Salon de Peinture, on view from April 29 to June 5, 2021.

Sam Falls in conversation with Elizabeth Neilson

April 30, 2021

On the occasion of the Sam Falls’ current exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zürich, join the artist for a virtual conversation with Elizabeth Neilson, Director of the Zabludowicz Collection, on Thursday 6 May at 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm BST / 7pm CET.

Falls and Neilson will discuss Falls’ recent cross-country road trip, his commission for the Zabludowicz Collection in Sarvisalo, and his newest works on view in Zurich.

Concerned with the intimacy of time, the illustration of place, and the exploration of mortality, the American artist Sam Falls has created his own formal language by intertwining photography’s core parameters of time and exposure with nature and her elements.

Elizabeth Neilson is a curator based in London with a particular interest and specialism in nurturing emerging artists and their practices. Since 2006 she has been Director of the Zabludowicz Collection. Overseeing the strategy, acquisitions, and commissions for one of the world’s most risk-taking and ground-breaking contemporary art collections.

Female artists triumph at Bonhams Contemporary Art Sale in London

April 28, 2021

Held on Tuesday 27 April, the auction set new world records for works by the emerging young artist Flora Yukhnovich, and the New York-based Suzanne McClelland, best known for abstract work based in language, speech, and sound.

Among the highlights was a vibrant work by the 105-year-old artist Carmen Herrera, Untitled, completed in 2013, which achieved £187,750. Head of Sale, Cassi Young, commented: "Carmen Herrera is probably the world's oldest working artist, and yet it has taken an unforgivably long time for her to finally receive the recognition she deserves – having only garnered the attention of a male-dominated artworld in her late nineties. I'm absolutely delighted that her work Untitled achieved such an impressive result, especially alongside a number of other wonderful works by top female contemporary artists, including Rebecca Horn, Tschabalala Self, and Genieve Figgis – and record-breaking results for Suzanne McClelland and Flora Yukhnovich."

Gazelli Art House launches NFTuesdays

April 27, 2021

Each Tuesday the digital arm of the gallery, Gazell.io, will drop an NFT by past and present residents and represented artists including Brendan Dawes, Claudia Hart, Tupac Martir, Ben Wheele and Khaleb Brooks, amongst others, as part of the new NFTuesdays series.

To counter the energy used minting these NFTs, Gazell.io will be donating a portion of the profits to environmental bodies. Gibson / Martelli, the new media artist duo working across immersive installation, moving image, object, print, mocap will mint the inaugural NFT, Drawing Levels, on OpenSea on Tuesday 27 April.

Colnaghi to oversee the restoration, authentication and sale of the possible Caravaggio removed from a Madrid auction earlier this month

April 26, 2021

The work, entitled The Crowning of Thorns, was due to be sold at Ansorena auction house in Madrid on 8 April with a guide price of €1,500. Owned by the three children of Antonio Pérez de Castro, founder of Madrid’s IADE design school, and the artist Mercedes Méndez Atard, the painting had been attributed the circle of the 17th-century Spanish artist José de Ribera, before being withdrawn from the sale at the request of José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, the culture minister in Spain.

Colnaghi, one of the world’s oldest commercial galleries, will now oversee the restoration, authentication and subsequent sale of the painting, which some Old Master specialists say could be by the 16th-century artist Caravaggio.

“I am proud and honoured to have been entrusted by the Pérez de Castro Méndez family to provide the connoisseurship, research and authentication of this great work and to be managing its subsequent sale,” said Jorge Coll, the co-chief executive of Colnaghi, in a statement.