The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Friday, September 15, 2023



 
A Picasso masterpiece that visitors can finally photograph

A section of the gift shop displaying merchandise featuring Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” at the Reina Sofía museum, in Madrid, Spain on Sept. 13, 2023. The Reina Sofía museum in Madrid has lifted its ban on photographing “Guernica,” saying it hopes to enhance the experience for those viewing the antiwar painting. (Ben Roberts/The New York Times)

by Francheska Melendez and Kathleen Massara


MADRID.- “No foto!” was long the refrain from guards at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid if a visitor dared to attempt to take a picture of “Guernica,” Pablo Picasso’s 1937 antiwar masterpiece. But as one couple took a selfie Wednesday and another woman adjusted her hair while smiling shyly into her phone’s camera, those guards were relaxed, offering tips about audio guides rather than yelling. The museum lifted its longtime ban on photos of “Guernica” this month, belatedly joining the Instagram era. Still prohibited in Room 205.10 are the use of flash, tripods and selfie sticks, out of concern that the 25-foot oil painting could be damaged. “Allowing photographs to be taken of ‘Guernica’ is intended to enhance the experience of viewing the painting, bringing it closer to the public and allowing what has been possible in other museums for a long time,” a Reina Sofía spokesperson wrote in an email. The spokesperson added, referring to a ... More


The Best Photos of the Day
Best Photos of the Day
Installation view of Hamed Ouattara's Bolibana. Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Fernando Laposse. Photography by Timothy Doyon.





Jim Nutt's art remains a mystery. Even to him.   William Monk now presenting first solo show in LA since 2015 at Pace   Rare career retrospective for Mexican Modernist Abraham Ángel premiered at Dallas Museum of Art


Jim Nutt in his studio in Wilmette, Ill., on Aug. 25, 2023. On the wall is a photo of his wife, and fellow artist, Gladys Nilsson. (Nathan Keay/The New York Times)

by Max Lakin


WILMETTE, ILL.- They look at you from behind inscrutable eyes, aloof and moderately annoyed, jaw lines jutting like ice floes. The faces are at once classically familiar and deeply strange, like Northern Renaissance portraiture pushed through a cubist sieve, Hans Memling’s “Portrait of Barbara van Vlaendenbergh” worked over with a tire iron. Artist Jim Nutt has been making a version of this imagined portrait for the last 40 years, a mode that has dominated his practice. It is in fact his entire practice, the only variable being whether he’s working in paint or pencil, an extended inquiry into form that has yet to be exhausted. They reappear again across 19 graphite drawings on view at David Nolan Gallery, the first show of new work by Nutt in New York in over a decade, although time rarely enters into his pictures. His women never age, never seem ... More
 

William Monk, Son of Nowhere IV, 2023. Oil on canvas, 270 cm × 255 cm (8' 10-5/16" × 8' 4-3/8"). © William Monk, courtesy Pace Gallery.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- Pace is pleased to present West of Nowhere, an exhibition of new works by William Monk, on view at its Los Angeles gallery. The exhibition will mark the artist’s first solo show in LA since 2015. Monk’s recently released catalogue—produced by Pace Publishing on the occasion of his 2022 exhibition The Ferryman at the gallery’s New York space—will be available to view and purchase on-site at Pace in LA. Monk is known for his atmospheric, vibrant compositions that feature mysterious and otherworldly forms. The artist’s semi-abstract paintings are deeply engaged with the rich tradition and history of the medium. He frequently creates works as part of different series, drawing on various sources of inspiration connected to his own experience. West of Nowhere, focusing holistically on notions of transience and liminality, will spotlight two new bodies of work by the artist: large-scale landscapes that rela ... More
 

The Family, 1924. Installation view of Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction. Courtesy Dallas Museum of Art.

DALLAS, TX.- Since September 10, the Dallas Museum of Art is presenting Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction, the first major survey of Ángel’s work in more than 35 years and the first dedicated showing of his paintings in the United States. The exhibition spotlights the singular artistic style Ángel cultivated during his brief three-year career, successfully capturing the rapidly changing society and culture of Mexico City in the 1920s. Organized thematically, Ángel’s paintings are shown alongside a selection of works by his contemporaries, including his mentors Adolfo Best Maugard and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, contextualizing his artistic practice within the broader narrative of Mexican modernism. "We are thrilled to present the first full retrospective of a magnificent artist whose life was cut tragically short just as his works were taking the Mexican art scene by surprise in the 1920s," said Dr. Agustín Arteaga, the DMA’s Eu ... More


Philbrook acquires major work by renowned artist Nick Cave   Tenth solo exhibition by Alex Katz now on view at Richard Gray Gallery   The legacy of writer and painter Leonora Carrington on view at The Dalí Museum


Nick Cave (American, b. 1959). Soundsuit, 2021. Mixed Media (vintage ceramic birds, wire, beads, fabric, metal, and mannequin), 98 1/2 × 46 × 42". Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Museum purchase, Taber Art Fund, 2022.3 a-f. © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

TULSA, OK.- Philbrook has announced a spectacular new acquisition by groundbreaking Black American artist Nick Cave. Cave’s Soundsuit, 2021, is a signature work by an artist world-renowned for sculptural forms based on the scale of his body. His Soundsuit series was initially created in response to the 1991 police beating of Rodney King. The colorful, mixed-media sculpture Philbrook acquired features a mannequin body wrapped in crocheted flowers and a head enveloped in an orb made of beads, wires, and ceramic birds. Soundsuit camouflages and protects, concealing race, gender, and class. “Nick Cave’s Soundsuit, standing at more than eight feet tall, is a signature work by a leading Black artist of our time,” says Dr. Kate Green, Chief Curator ... More
 

Alex Katz (b. 1927), Field's End 4, 2022. Oil on linen, 132 ¼ × 72 ¼ inches; 335.9 × 183.5 cm. Courtesy GRAY Chicago/New York. Artwork © Alex Katz Studio / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.


CHICAGO, IL.- Alex Katz: Autumn is the artist’s tenth solo exhibition at GRAY and the first exhibition of large-scale landscapes since 2018. The exhibition follows his lauded career retrospective, Gathering, which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the fall of 2022. As Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson described: “[One] might be surprised by the unbound rapture of the landscape paintings that have consumed much of the artist’s still-considerable energy in recent years. But [these works] are in fact the culmination of a lifelong artistic project that aspires to compress everything into ‘a single burst of energy… to paint it wide open.’” 1. Alex Katz has painted figures and landscapes in equal measure throughout his career. Expressed at great scale and in vivid color, the paintings exhibited in Autumn present enveloping ... More
 

Leonora Carrington, "Down Below," book cover. Published by The New York Review of Books, New York, NY, 2017. Collection of The Dalí Museum Library & Archives.

ST. PETERSBURG, FLA.- During her lifetime, Leonora Carrington produced more than 2,000 paintings and authored several notable written works, earning the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement award in 1986. The Dalí Museum is now exhibiting “Leonora Carrington: Writer, Painter, Visionary,” in The Museum’s Raymond James Community Room. The exhibition will highlight Carrington’s personal life, her written work and her visionary images. Celebrated for her mystical, fantastical and often dark work, Carrington (1917-2011) was raised in a strict household in England and expelled from two Catholic schools before attending art school where she flourished. As a young woman, she found herself surrounded by prominent surrealist figures, including André Breton and Max Ernst — the latter with whom she was romantically involved and inseparable from for several years. During her time with Ernst, she began developing ... More



The San Francisco Museum Modern Art to open 'Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Strips of Stripes' tomorrow   Sullivan + Strumpf present 'Emotion Harvest: An exploration of AI, art and emotion' in Melbourne   Three Schiele works believed to be stolen are seized from U.S. museums


Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Joseph Becker, 2023; photo Nellie King Solomon.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The San Francisco Museum Modern Art announced Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Strips of Stripes, a dynamic site-specific commission that will transform Schwab Hall—the museum’s free, public second-floor space—starting tomorrow with playful designs from the nonagenarian San Francisco-born artist, designer, writer and architect. Stretching from floor to ceiling, Stauffacher Solomon’s commission will welcome visitors to the museum with her “supergraphics,” large-scale, cascading designs that blend typography and wayfinding with the building’s architecture. Widely known for her pioneering “supergraphics” at Northern California’s coastal development The Sea Ranch, Stauffacher Solomon made design history in the 1960s by creating a new form of environmental graphics that integrate with their surroundings and respond directly to the architecture in which they are located. Stauffacher Solomon has ... More
 

Sam Leach, fruit preservation, 2023. Oil on linen, 250 x 180 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf. Photo, Alberto Zimmermann.

MELBOURNE.- One of Melbourne’s most celebrated artists, Sam Leach’s work is informed by the canon of art history, science, and philosophy, often referencing Dutch paintings of the 17th century as well as elements of formalist paintings from the 1960s and 70s. His focus is on the intersections between science and nature, combining the poles of the metaphorical and the empirical, the analogous and the objective, in an ongoing investigation of the relationship between humans, machines and animals. Leach’s most recent bodies of work – developed over the past five years, since 2018, incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), fusing the tropes and gestures of paintings with the mechanics and gaze of the future. In Emotion Harvest, opening at Sullivan+Strumpf Melbourne Thursday September 14, he brings together a collection of paintings and interactive artworks in an exploration ... More
 

The Art Institute of Chicago. View of Michigan Avenue Entrance. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

by Tom Mashberg


NEW YORK, NY.- New York investigators on Wednesday seized three artworks from three out-of-state museums that they said had been stolen from a Jewish art collector killed during the Holocaust and rightly belonged to the Nazi victim’s heirs. The Manhattan district attorney’s office issued warrants to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio, for works by 1900s Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. According to the warrants, “there is reasonable cause to believe” that the works constitute stolen property. Prosecutors say the artworks rightly belong to three living heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a prominent Jewish art collector and cabaret artist killed at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1941. The office refused to comment on the seizures, saying they were part of an ongoing investigation into about a ... More


Museum of Contemporary Art Australia now opening "Tarek Atoui: Waters' Witness"   Behold: New York City's trash can of the future   Academy Art Museum announces new atrium commission by Marty Two Bulls, Jr.


Tarek Atoui, I/E Elefsina - Recording sessions, Elefsina, 2015. Photo: Alexandre Guirkinger.

SYDNEY.- Waters’ Witness is based on Tarek Atoui’s ongoing project documenting the acoustic identities of port cities that are deeply connected to their harbours. Connecting docks and waterfronts from Athens to Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut, Porto, Istanbul and now Sydney, Waters’ Witness is an immersive sonic landscape that is reimagined in a different format for each presentation. Live performances by Atoui and guests are programmed within the exhibition, together with a series of sound-based educational workshops. Tarek Atoui (born 1980, Beirut) is an artist and composer whose practice investigates the medium of sound. His work considers how sound can be experienced across multiple senses, the ways it acts as a catalyst for social interaction, and its relationship to place, history and ecology. Known for his collaborative performances and installations using handcrafted musical ... More
 

Three of the new litter baskets designed for New York City at a popular selfie spot in Brooklyn, Sept. 11, 2023. The new receptacle, which will replace the green wire mesh litter baskets seen across the city, has three parts: a concrete base (so it’s tough to tip over); a hinged metal lid; and a removable, relatively lightweight plastic basket that sanitation workers will lift and empty. (Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet/The New York Times)

NEW YORK, NY.- Coming to a street corner near you: a sleek new litter basket, the latest weapon in New York City’s generationslong war on trash. The new receptacle, which will replace the green wire mesh litter baskets seen across the city, has three parts: a concrete base (so it’s tough to tip over); a hinged metal lid; and a removable, relatively lightweight plastic basket that sanitation workers will lift and empty. “The wire litter baskets are iconic, but they are well past their useful life in New York City,” said Jessica Tisch, the city’s sanitation commissioner. “They are vestiges of a different time.” Tisch noted that the wire baskets were made up of a series of holes: ... More
 

Marty Two Bulls, Jr.

EASTON, MD.- The Academy Art Museum is welcoming its new exhibition Marty Two Bulls, Jr.: Dominion. South Dakota-based Oglala Sioux artist Marty Two Bulls, Jr. will transform the Museum’s Saul Atrium Gallery with a site-specific installation. His work critiques consumption culture, using the metaphor of the American Bison, one of the first American resources consumed almost to extinction. The amorphic Bisons emerge from a mess of detritus: paper and Tyvek cutouts, soda cans, milk jugs, and more. Two Bulls, Jr. reflects on consumerism by creating a wasteland resulting from a disconnection with nature and ancestral forms of knowledge. “We are looking forward to welcoming visitors to Two Bulls, Jr.'s Atrium commission, which serves as a layered acknowledgment of the oppression Native American people have endured in their homelands as well as a critique of consumer culture. The breadth of Two ... More




Judy Pfaff | Contemporary Art from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection



More News

Mark Steven Greenfield challenges perceptions and celebrates black identity at the Monterey Museum of Art
MONTEREY, CA.- Monterey Museum of Art is now conducting the exhibition Mark Steven Greenfield: Hagiography, featuring a remarkable collection of recent works by the Southern California-based artist. Hagiography, deriving from the Greek words "hagio" (meaning "saintly" or "holy") and "graphy" (meaning "to write"), serves as the title for the upcoming exhibition of Mark Steven Greenfield’s work at the Monterey Museum of Art. Fittingly, the exhibition features selected works from two iconic series, Black Madonna and Halo. Drawing inspiration from traditional Byzantine iconography, Mark Steven Greenfield adeptly subverts expectations and expands our understanding of history and identity. Greenfield reimagines historical depictions of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus in the Black Madonna series, infusing them with contemporary meaning ... More

Eversley's first public artwork in New York explores new dimensions and perspectives
NEW YORK, NY.- Public Art Fund unveils Fred Eversley’s mesmerizing 12-foot tall sculpture at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park. Eversley’s powerful new magenta-tinted cast polyurethane work, titled Parabolic Light, offers visitors a captivating experience of perceiving the surrounding environment, others, and themselves through the artist’s “lens”. Simultaneously reflective and transparent, the luminescent parabolic form—a tapered cylinder—serves as a focal point of serenity, transcendence, and exploration of new dimensions and perspectives. The exhibition reflects Public Art Fund's ongoing commitment to creating public exhibition opportunities for advanced career artists and artists of color, particularly those who may not have received widespread recognition earlier in their careers. Eversley’s presentation represents ... More

'Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire and the Chinese Art Trade' explored at Harvard Art Museum
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Today, the Harvard Art Museums opens an exhibition that explores the entangled histories of the western sale of opium in China in the 19th century and the growing appetite for Chinese art in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Opium and Chinese art—acquired through both legal and illicit means—had profound effects on the global economy, cultural landscape, and education, and in the case of opium on public health and immigration, that still reverberate today. Objects of Addiction: Opium, Empire, and the Chinese Art Trade, on display in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on Level 3 of the Harvard Art Museums, looks critically at the history of Massachusetts opium merchants and collectors of Chinese art, as well as the current opioid crisis. A range of accompanying public programs will encourage community ... More

American presidents as bibliophiles at the Grolier Club
NEW YORK, NY.- Currently, the Grolier Club in New York City is hosting an exhibition exploring America’s presidents as bibliophiles, readers, and writers. On view in the Grolier Club’s second floor gallery, Presidents and Their Books: What They Read and What They Wrote features books from all 45 men who have held the office of President of the United States of America, from George Washington through Joseph R. Biden. Co-curated by Grolier Club member Susan Jaffe Tane and her teenage grandchildren Natalie Flaxman and Spencer Flaxman—the youngest-ever curators at the Grolier Club—the exhibition is drawn from Tane’s collection. “Book collecting always represents a connection between the past, present, and future, and this collection illuminates both our nation’s shared history and the personal history of a family of collectors ... More

'Ghosts of Our Towns' by Fernando Laposse is being shown at Friedman Benda NY
NEW YORK, NY.- Friedman Benda has welcomed Ghosts of Our Towns, Fernando Laposse’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Known for questioning the ethics of agriculture and production via its waste products, Laposse focuses on three materials for this exhibition: corn, agave, and avocado. Following extensive research on the repercussions of collective patterns of trade and consumption on small farming communities in Mexico, his work draws an arc between disruption and restoration, dissolution and hope. For him, “to get to the root, one must go to the soil,” and to work with fibers is to engage with all the complexities around them: environmental crisis, loss of biodiversity, community disintegration, and forced migration. The works in Ghosts of Our Towns speak of a landscape that keeps changing and a social fabric that keeps tearing ... More

Prodigy frontman Maxim to exhibit in Athens at The Blender Gallery
ATHENS.- The Blender Gallery and Varvara Rozza Galleries are going to present ‘Infinite Drama Athens’, a solo show by prolific musician and artist Maxim starting tomorrow. The exhibition duration is from the 16th of September till the 4th of November 2023, whilst the much-anticipated opening will take place on Saturday the 16th of September at 20.00, at The Blender Gallery (Zisimopoulou 4, Glyfada). A live anti-violence art performance, inspired by the sculptural piece ‘Balaclava Ballerina’ will take place at 21.00. Fresh from his Athens appearance with award-winning band The Prodigy (June 2023) the artist and musician will exhibit paintings and sculptures at The Blender Gallery in autumn 2023. This series of retrospective work was presented at Miart Gallery in London in 2022. Maxim is known for his haunting, mixed media artworks that explore ... More

German art duo Layer Cake brings 'The Versus Project IV' to Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Subliminal Projects will be opening The Versus Project IV, an international traveling group exhibition co-curated by the German artist duo Layer Cake, individually known as graffiti veterans Patrick Hartl and Christian Hundertmark (C100). Challenging the well-known Graffiti rule: never paint over other writers, Layer Cake invites the broader graffiti and street art community to do just that. Starting with a canvas, the duo creates an unfinished base that is then sent to a guest artist, beginning a non-verbal collaborative process until the work is complete. The works result in layers of each artist’s contribution that both blend and highlight their personal styles. After two well-received exhibitions at Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art (UN) in Berlin in 2019 and 2022, and at the Museum of Graffiti in Miami earlier this year, The Versus Project makes its fourth stop at Subliminal Projects, continuing this ... More

Egos! Drama! Desmond Child, a pop hitmaker, is telling his story.
NEW YORK, NY.- Any fan who’s scanned the credits of some of the most stadium-friendly hits of the last 30 years — Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” and Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” not to mention fist-pumpers by Kiss, Cher and Katy Perry — will recognize Desmond Child’s name as a writer. Yet barely two minutes went by in a recent interview before the musician emphatically stated that his key contributions to those hits have often been misunderstood, downplayed or even denigrated — at times by his starry collaborators. “When Steven Tyler wrote his memoir, he completely diminished me by saying, ‘Well, everything was already written,’ and I just added a few words,” Child, 69, said of Aerosmith’s 1987 hit. “When Joe Perry wrote about ‘Dude’ in his autobiography, he said, ‘Well, Desmond just came up with the title.’” That wasn ... More


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Gabriele Münter

TARWUK

Awol Erizku

Leo Villareal


Flashback
On a day like today, Italian-French businessman Ettore Bugatti was born
September 15, 1881. Ettore Arco Isidoro Bugatti (15 September 1881 - 21 August 1947) was an Italian-born French automobile designer and manufacturer. He is remembered as the founder and proprietor of the automobile manufacturing company Automobiles E. Bugatti. In this image: "1925 Bugatti Brescia, Chassis no. 2461 Engine no. 879". Photo: Courtesy Bonhams.

  
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