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Wildenstein Tax Retrial Opens in Paris - Artforum International
Having been ordered in 2021 by France’s highest court to face a retrial after being twice acquitted of tax fraud, the members of the Wildenstein family, owners of one of the world’s largest collections of Old Masters, are back in court as of September 18. French American art dealer Guy Wildenstein; his nephew Alec Wildenstein Jr.; and Liouba Stoupakova, estranged widow of Guy’s brother Alec Wildenstein Sr.—collectively referred to in the French press as “les W”—could potentially pay $1 billion in taxes and fines if convicted by the Paris Court of Appeal on charges of money laundering and tax
New York’s Foxy Production to Close Permanently - Artforum International
Foxy Production, a contemporary art space in operation in New York for two decades, is ending its gallery program in October, Artnews reports, and pivoting to focus on “consultancy, curatorial, and production endeavors,” according to a gallery press release. An exhibition of photographs by Erin Calla Watson, currently on view, will be its last. No reason was given for the closure, but Foxy Production’s landlord sued the Chinatown gallery this past July, alleging $200,000 in unpaid rent dating back to February 2022; the gallery’s attorney has disputed the allegations. Foxy Production was founded
Alice Channer at Kunstmuseum Appenzell - Artforum International
The seductiveness of pollutant industries is both contested and adopted in Alice Channer’s ambitious two-part exhibition “Heavy Metals / Silk Cut”, which, in a historical first, spans both the Kunstmuseum and Kunsthalle in Appenzell, Switzerland. At the Kunsthalle, “Life Without Air,” 2022–23, a series of drawings in Silk Cut cigarette ash, each overlaid with tiny, fish-egg-like plastic microspheres, points to the artist’s memory of violet silk slashed Fontana style in a 1980s Saatchi & Saatchi advertising campaign for the tobacco brand. Cancerous forms of a different sort can be found in
Alex Reynolds at CaixaForum Barcelona - Artforum International
Alex Reynolds’s exhibition “¡Porque tengo lágrimas!” (Because I Have Tears!) is an essay on portraiture, intimacy, and intimidation. It offers a reflection on the gaze in two types of relationships: one close and affective, the other hierarchical, legal, and oppressive.The two main films of the exhibition produce tension between these dual registers. Segunda persona, tercera persona (parte 1) (Second Person, Third Person [Part 1], 2023) opens a window onto the bureaucratic universe of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons by isolating the questions posed by an
Emma Sarpaniemi at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte - Artforum International
Emma Sarpaniemi is not shy about where she finds her inspiration: with Self-portrait as Cindy, <em>2022, she connects her photographic series “Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower,</em>” 2021– , with the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman. Like the American artist, Sarpaniemi redirects the conventional gaze that would objectify a woman’s body, shifting the emphasis onto performance and play.Originally from Helsinki, Sarpaniemi studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. She emerged on the Finnish contemporary art scene a couple of years ago with group portraits in which all the sitters
Lee Miller at Bucerius Kunst Forum - Artforum International
Lee Miller’s Remington Silent, London, England, 1940, captures a smashed typewriter lying on shattered stone. The image dates to a time when the artist began documenting World War II for British Vogue. It clearly depicts what Miller successfully achieved in many of her pictures of war that would follow, revealing the macabre beauty of horror.Two years earlier, in the extended essay “Three Guineas,” Virginia Woolf claimed that for men there is a necessity and satisfaction in war that isn’t there for women. Surveying Miller’s wartime output—which forms the most impressive section of “Lee Miller.
Linda Simpson on Valley of the Dolls - Artforum International
For the third episode of “Interpretations,” New York City drag artist, performer, game-show hostess and downtown documentarian Linda Simpson, reflects on Jacqueline Susann's 1966 novel, Valley of the Dolls. Simpson confesses her love for the classic novel and challenges Mark Robson's campy on-screen adaptation from 1967.“Interpretations,” Artforum’s new video series, features celebrated critics, writers, and artists offering brief reflections on art and life. Contributors may set the record straight on their desired subjects, pose new questions about them, or simply find humor in the long-standing artistic and cultural tropes they inhabit.
Burnout, Low Pay Threaten to Decimate Museum Worker Ranks - Artforum International
Two-thirds of US museum workers are considering abandoning their jobs owing to high levels of burnout, low wages, and minimal opportunities for advancement, Julia Halperin reports in The Art Newspaper. Halperin, a coauthor of the Burns Halperin Report, which tracks Black representation at American museums, pointed to the inaugural report released this month by Museums Moving Forward (MMF), for which the advocacy group surveyed 1,933 employees from more than fifty arts institutions across the country. Millennial museum workers were especially dissatisfied, with 76 percent saying they were ready
Kenojuak Ashevak at English Harbour Arts Centre - Artforum International
Kenojuak Ashevak’s art is renowned for its iconic imagery. In Canada, the Inuit artist’s home country, Ashevak’s stylized prints featuring birds, fish, humans, and other animals are perhaps most widely recognized for their presence on postage stamps and currency. But Ashevak’s intense and imaginative visual language originates in larger-scale drawings, as well as soapstone carvings and textiles, that exemplify the incredible skill and creativity of the modern Inuit art movement based out of Kinngait—formerly Cape Dorset—that the artist helped found.“Kenojuak Ashevak: Life and Legacy,” a traveling
Fernando Botero (1932–2023) - Artforum International
Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, whose whimsical, ballooning figures gained him worldwide acclaim and elevated the global profile of Latin American art, died in Monaco on September 15 at the age of ninety-one. The cause, according to his close friend Mauricio Vallejo, a co-owner of Houston’s Art of the World gallery, was complications of pneumonia. Botero’s crowd-pleasing works typically played with volume and scale—a rotund woman might smoke a miniature cigarette through tiny pursed lips; a hugely curving mandolin might feature a diminutive sound aperture—and commented on subjects
Domenick Ammirati on Armory Week in New York - Artforum International
AUGUST WAS SLOW and dull and frustrating; I spent it trying to synthesize Craig Owens and Leo Strauss. The confluence of postmodernism and antimodernism would seem to explain our reactionary aesthetic substrate as well as anything at the moment. The transformation of the art object into a financial instrument: What does it look like? It remains terminally hard to say, since what it looks like doesn’t matter. We just feel like we’re being lied to all the time.An art fair, of course, is not the place to look for coherence or aesthetics. The Armory Show moved to autumn a mere two years ago and has
Kate Sutton around Frieze Seoul 2023 - Artforum International
IN THE 1930S, a savvy developer embarked on a real-estate venture in Samcheong, a neighborhood in the heart of Seoul that was once home to a six-hundred-year-old village. Using modern materials for an urban update to the traditional Korean building style, the company created the Bukchon Hanok Village, a tony residential area whose narrow winding streets are now firmly on the tourist map.On Monday of Seoul Art Week, Various Small Fires hosted a reception in one of Bukchon’s hanoks, whose basement had been retooled as a viewing room for a suite of painted prints by Kyungmi Shin. Those who snuck
The Otolith Group at HANGAR Centro de Investigação Artística - Artforum International
In the liner notes of their 1997 album, The Quest, the Detroit-based Afrofuturist electronic duo Drexciya (Gerald Donald and James Stinson) made known that their named referred to an underwater world populated by the descendants of the pregnant Africans thrown overboard by slavers during their transit across the Atlantic. According to legend, the unborn babies somehow developed the ability to breath liquid oxygen and thrive in the deep seas. This fictional survival, which inevitably takes a posthuman form, offers an allegory for the endurance of those who survived the horrors of the Middle
MMCA Names Kim Sung-hee as Next Director - Artforum International
The Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism on September 14 announced that Kim Sung-hee will be the next director of South Korea's National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). Kim will step into her new role on September 18. She takes over from MMCA's planning and general management chief Park Jong-dal, who has served as interim director since late April, when Youn Bum-mo departed the post twenty-two months before his contract expired. Youn, who assumed the role of director in 2019, had been appointed under the administration of left-leaning former president Moon Jae-in, under
Three Museums Forced to Part with Possibly Pilfered Schiele Works - Artforum International
The Manhattan district attorney’s office on September 13 seized from three US institutions a trio of works by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele that are believed to have been stolen during World War II and trafficked through New York. The New York Times reports that the Art Institute of Chicago gave up Schiele’s 1916 watercolor-and-pencil-on-paper Russian War Prisoner, valued at $1.25 million, while Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art parted with the 1917 pencil-on-paper Portrait of a Man, said to be worth $1 million, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio forked over
MoMA Jacks Admission to $30 Claiming Increased Costs - Artforum International
New York’s Museum of Modern Art has announced that it will raise admission prices effective October 16. Adult admission at the door will rise to $30 from $25, while seniors and visitors with disabilities will pay $22, up from $18 previously. Students will shell out $17 instead of $14. Those purchasing advance tickets online will pay $2 less than the amounts named above. Film admission will rise by $2 per ticket as well, with adults now paying $14, seniors and attendees with disabilities paying $12, and students parting with $10. Film tickets purchased online are subject to an additional $2
Art Basel Miami Beach Reveals 2023 Exhibitors List - Artforum International
Art Basel Miami Beach has named the 277 galleries participating in its 2023 iteration, slated to run December 8–10, with preview days on December 6–7. The number represents a slight dip compared to 2022, during which a record-breaking 283 exhibitors participated. This year’s iteration will focus on the Latin American and Caribbean diasporic scenes, and will feature galleries from Egypt, Iceland, the Philippines, and Poland. The fair is led by Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s director of fairs and exhibition platforms. Incoming director Bridget Finn, who will arrive to the organization this fall,
Jeremy Lybarger on Patric McCoy - Artforum International
Like many gay bars, the Rialto Tap in downtown Chicago was not so much a hole in the wall as a hole in the universe. You could fall in at 4 AM and find yourself in the boozy confidence of hustlers, dealers, drag queens, office drones, and faded Adonises. The fire code permitted a limited number of souls, but what multitudinous fantasies they imbibed alongside their rotgut! The Rialto was a pickup bar, a place to score drugs and work the dance floor. Its clientele was mostly Black men, and so during the bar’s heyday—the 1970s and ’80s—it was doubly estranged from the straight corporate world of
Vija Celmins, Olafur Eliasson, and Diébédo Francis Kéré Win Praemium Imperiales - Artforum International
Latvian American artist Vija Celmins has been named a winner of Japan’s 2023 Praemium Imperiale Award for painting while Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson received the honor for sculpture, and Burkinabé-German architect Diébédo Francis Kéré received the accolade for architecture. The international prize has been awarded annually since 1989 by the Japan Art Association, which is under the patronage of Prince Hitachi, and additionally encompasses the fields of theater/film and music. Robert Wilson and Wynton Marsalis won the awards in those respective categories. Each recipient of the honor
Peter Rostovsky’s graphic novel of hell and therapy - Artforum International
Damnation Diaries, by Peter Rostovsky. Uncivilized Books, 2023. 144 pages.AMONG THE BEST PARTS of Peter Rostovsky’s new graphic novel, Damnation Diaries, are the jokes about art and art school. With its title, paired with opening pages that offer lush, textured, shaded black-and-blue images of hell—dense and respectfully horrific—readers might wonder what angle this book is taking on the inferno. Thankfully, the narration quickly clarifies. Our first-person protagonist, condemned to hell, relates his regular menu of torture, each item accompanied by a panel that depicts it: “The eye gouging.
John Baldessari Estate Sues, Is Sued - Artforum International
The estate of late Pop Conceptual artist John Baldessari (1931–2020) is staggering under the weight of dual multimillion-dollar lawsuits, one of which it filed, and one of which it is facing, Artnews reports. The estate last autumn filed suit against Marian Goodman Gallery, which represented Baldessari for the two decades preceding his death, claiming that the gallery had injured fifty-five of the artist’s works via careless handling, dropping and scratching the pieces, and through improper storage, leading to water damage. Representatives for Baldessari contend that when estate staff went to
Purloined van Gogh Returned in Ikea Bag - Artforum International
A $6.9 million painting by Vincent van Gogh that was stolen in a 2020 smash-and-grab at a Laren, Netherlands museum, was handed over to a detective this past weekend in an Ikea bag. The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, an 1884 oil-on-paper work showing a figure surrounded by trees, was delivered to Dutch private art detective Arthur Brand on the Amstelveld, a public square in Amsterdam near the Prinsengracht Canal. Brand, known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world,” called the subsequent authentication of the painting “one of the greatest moments of [his] life.”The painting was swiped on
Chloe Wyma on J. C. Leyendecker - Artforum International
J. C. Leyendecker died in the summer of 1951, in Norma Desmond–like obscurity, on the grounds of his once-magnificent mansion in New Rochelle, New York. His Ivy League Adonises and Madison Avenue boulevardiers—definitive images of aspirational American manhood in the first three decades of the twentieth century—were long ago processed and extruded by the sausage factory of modern visual culture, their maker eclipsed by his onetime protégé (and soon-to-be pallbearer), Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker’s lover, Charles Beach—whose square-jawed good looks and Winckelmannian physique had inspired his
Andy Campbell on Judith Bernstein - Artforum International
Anyone who is wondering, “What the hell is Judith Bernstein’s problem?” need only look at the world around them.Since the late 1960s, Bernstein has channeled the sexually violent id of a puritanical nation—the United States—with imagery as crass as its ever-devolving politics. Bernstein’s enduring art serves to highlight misogyny’s metastatic persistence and influence on the daily lives of those navigating its effects and deprivations within the cacophonous morass that is America. Humor and gestural rigor are at the heart of Bernstein’s approach, which she has only sharpened through decades of
Mara Manus to Lead Pioneer Works - Artforum International
Brooklyn nonprofit Pioneer Works today announced Mara Manus as its next chief executive officer. Manus was previously executive director of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). In her new role, which she has already assumed, she will work closely with the cultural organization’s founder and artist Dustin Yellin; founding artistic director Gabriel Florenz; and chief science officer and astrophysicist Janna Levin. Manus will be in charge of strategic organizational planning, development and financial strategy, and will spearhead a capital expansion campaign aimed at giving New York City
Nicolas Rapold on the 80th Venice Film Festival - Artforum International
THE EIGHTIETH EDITION of the Venice Film Festival was stacked, strong, and, gratifyingly, a place where ambitious work was rewarded rather than the few white elephants. With awards chatter (somewhat) muted as the SAG-AFTRA strikes kept actors away, there was no choice but to pay attention to the films. The jury, a formidable group led by Damien Chazelle, awarded the Golden Lion to Poor Things—Yorgos Lanthimos’s gloriously ribald, eye-boggling voyage of discovery that, in its first minutes, would seem a long shot for the top prize. There was a bizarro-world aspect to the unanimous acclaim for
Harry Gruyaert at Le Bal - Artforum International
I have been standing before a photograph taken outside a Belgian café for an indeterminate stretch of time, hustling for language to explain it. On the surface, Antwerp, 1988, is simple enough: A woman, viewed through the café’s window, is reading a newspaper. But the window rails obscuring her face and the shadows partitioning her body stymie any conclusion as clear-cut as I am looking at a picture of a woman. This dance of apprehension continued throughout my visit to “La part des choses,” Harry Gruyaert’s exhibition at Le Bal, where I was stuck on the outside of a stealthy inside joke the
Curatorial Team Announced for 16th Sharjah Biennial - Artforum International
The Sharjah Art Foundation, which organizes the Sharjah Biennial, today revealed the five-person curatorial team that will shape the event’s sixteenth iteration. Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika, and Megan Tamati-Quennell will each organize distinct but intersecting projects for the Biennial, which will run from February to June 2025. Ginwala is artistic director of COLOMBOSCOPE, Colombo, and associate curator at large at Berlin’s Gropius Bau; Khalaf is director of programs at Cubitt and civic curator at the Serpentine Galleries, both in London. Öz is an independent curator
Nihaal Faizal at Chatterjee & Lal - Artforum International
In an update on the Pictures generation, Nihaal Faizal takes photographs of printouts of digital images to cheekily claim authorship of the background shots that became wildly popular with the launch of Windows XP. Within Faizal’s series of inkjet prints “Landscape Photos,” 2015, the camera registers in the moonlike flash reflected by each image. Altered by aspect ratios and the development processes, these pictures are no longer the same as the original but have been recalibrated to today’s time and technology in a bid to complicate ideas of originality, veracity, and provenance. Here, the copy
Investor Group in Talks to Buy San Francisco Art Institute Campus - Artforum International
A group of philanthropists and arts patrons are said to be looking into purchasing the recently bankrupted San Francisco Art Institute’s two-acre Russian Hill campus with the intention of reopening the school there. The campus is one of two belonging to SFAI, and is home to a $50 million Diego Rivera mural, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, 1931, which the group has said they will keep in place. The school’s second campus, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, a $15 million expansion described by SFist as “spectacularly unwise,” was completed in 2017 and is currently not
Shanghaied van Gogh Returned in Ikea Bag - Artforum International
A $6.9 million painting by Vincent van Gogh that was stolen in a 2020 smash-and-grab at a Laren, Netherlands museum, was handed over to a detective this past weekend in an Ikea bag. The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, an 1884 oil-on-paper work showing a figure surrounded by trees, was delivered to Dutch private art detective Arthur Brand on the Amstelveld, a public square in Amsterdam near the Prinsengracht Canal. Brand, known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world,” called the subsequent authentication of the painting “one of the greatest moments of [his] life.”The painting was swiped on
STEVE RODEN (1964–2023) - Artforum International
Minimalist artist Steve Roden, whose discipline-spanning work explored the interstices between sound, form, and color, died at home in Pasadena, California, on September 6 at the age of fifty-nine. He had lived with Alzheimer’s disease since 2017. Concerned with concepts of time and with the visualization of sound, Roden was profoundly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s notebook symbols and by the work of composer John Cage, whose 4' 33
Inside New York’s first “all-doll” pop-up strip club - Artforum International
“I WENT TO GREAT LENGTHS to find the top-shelf transsexuals,” Ruby Zarsky announced to a crowd of adoring chasers and twinks in black mesh tops.A few hours earlier, I’d arrived on time—I’m a Virgo with good-at-school syndrome. We waded through a thick mist of men only to wait for the doors to open a few minutes after eight. Of course my friend Frankie and I were the first to arrive. She wasn’t pleased I’d dragged her along so early. We took a few laps around the room and got a drink. We were at “All Dolled Up,” the all trans-girl pop-up strip club put on last Thursday by UNTER, Ruby, and Seva
Carlos Martiel Wins Museo del Barrio’s Inaugural Maestro Dobel Latinx Art Prize - Artforum International
New York’s Museo del Barrio and Mexican tequila brand Maestro Dobel have announced Havana-born installation and performance artist Carlos Martiel as the first winner of the newly established Maestro Dobel Latinx Art Prize. Martiel, who is based in Harlem, will receive a $50,000 grant and a solo exhibition of his work, to take place in El Museo del Barrio’s multidisciplinary space Room 110 in the spring of 2024. The prize, which is to be awarded biannually, is aimed at elevating the work of Latinx artists, who have been historically underrepresented in the art world, despite the fact that 62
Lorraine O’Grady, Carol Bove, Sonia Boyce Switch Galleries - Artforum International
Within days of the unofficial end of summer, marked in the US by Labor Day and in the UK by the passing of the August bank holiday, three closely watched artists affiliated with major galleries in these countries announced that they were switching allegiances. In the United States, conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady revealed that she would be leaving her longtime New York gallery, Alexander Gray Associates, for Chicago’s Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, while sculptor Carol Bove departed David Zwirner for Gagosian. Across the pond, Golden Lion winner Sonia Boyce, who earlier severed ties with London's
Artforum International
“Almost born in a concentration camp”I GOT TO KNOW JEAN-LOUIS IN THE SUMMER OF 1986 when we were both invited to a conference on the historical avant-garde in architecture at the Wissenschaftskolleg in West Berlin. I was young and writing the second chapter of my dissertation, a piece of which I presented there. He seemed much older, more accomplished, less lost, or rather, not lost at all. I think he had acted beyond his years from a very young age. At a certain point, the even older generation entered into a debate about whether one should engage in research on architects who had collaborated
Worcester Art Museum Loses $5 Million Roman Bust to Manhattan DA - Artforum International
Officials from the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office on September 1 seized an ancient Roman bust from the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) in Massachusetts. Thought to depict a daughter of either Marcus Aurelius or Septimius Severus, both Roman emperors, and dating to between 160 and 180 CE, the life-size bronze sculpture is estimated to be worth $5 million. WAM purchased the work in 1966 and at the time conducted research into its provenance, but admitted that they received little information other than that it had been found in southwest Anatolia (now Turkey)
Cape Town’s Southern Guild to Launch First US Gallery in LA - Artforum International
Cape Town gallery Southern Guild has announced that it will open a branch in Los Angeles, becoming the first South African gallery to establish a permanent US outpost (Goodman Gallery, which has branches in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and London, revealed last month that it would open an office and viewing room in New York). The gallery, which specializes in African art and design, will occupy a former Hollywood laundromat. Southern Guild cofounders Trevyn and Julian McGowan have hired Evan Raabe Architecture, who previously designed Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles outpost and Christie’s Beverly Hills,
Matts Leiderstam at Andréhn-Schiptjenko Stockholm - Artforum International
In this refined and subtle exhibition, Matts Leiderstam sets out with the stated aim of questioning Western art conventions from a queer perspective, focusing on the often invisible structures of grid and gaze. Beautifully crafted and fastidiously presented, the work consists of a group of numbered abstract paintings on poplar and oak panels, all titled Panel, 2017–23; a purpose-built cabinet stocked with small paintings (What Does the Grid Do? [Cabinet], 2022); and a series of prints and drawings, “Archived,” 2017–23. The wooden supports refer to early art of the Renaissance, when architects
Four-Dollar Thrift-Store Find Revealed to Be $250,000 N. C. Wyeth Painting - Artforum International
A painting purchased for a pittance at a New Hampshire thrift store has been identified as a work by renowned illustrator N. C. Wyeth worth up to a quarter of a million dollars at auction. The work was bought for just four dollars in 2017 by a woman browsing the home goods section at a Savers. Believed to be intended as a frontispiece for a 1939 edition of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Ramona, the painting garnered its current owner’s attention not for its stunning detail, rich hues, or emotional weight, but for the frame in which it was ensconced. Curious as to the work’s provenance, its new