Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

FIAC, France's most important contemporary art fair has announced their new showcase for emerging international galleries.The official satellite event will present some 60 galleries from 12 countries specialising in contemporary art. (OFF)ICIELLE at FIAC will highlight new territories: young galleries and newcomers to the international art scene; emerging artists and those whose historic contribution has been overlooked. The venue Les Docks will contain a space spanning 3,700 m2.

The event will provide visitors with the opportunity to discover galleries whose exhibition programs demonstrate a particular aptitude for decoding the language of contemporary creation and a gift for revealing talents, old and new.

 New York-based gallerist Dominique Lévy announced that she will open a London outpost this fall. Dominique Lévy London will be located at 22 Old Bond Street within a 19th-century building constructed by the Duveen family. Just steps from the city’s elegant Mayfair district, the building was designed to resemble a Venetian palazzo.

Much like Lévy’s eponymous New York gallery, which is located in a designated landmark building on Madison Avenue, Dominique Lévy London will focus on European and American postwar and contemporary art with curated exhibitions devoted to historical figures as well as living artists. The gallery will also specialize in private sales in the secondary market; produce original scholarship and publications; provide advisory and collection management services; and participate in international art fairs.

In her 21 years leading the Wexner Center for the Arts, Sherri Geldin has stretched the contemporary art center’s reach beyond the Ohio State University campus on which it’s located. Geldin has elevated the institution’s national profile and positioned it as the center of contemporary culture in Ohio’s capital city.

Geldin’s successful staging of the first-ever exhibition of portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz’s Master Set in 2013 exemplified both her influence and aspirations as director of the Wexner Center.

Scholars tend to seek out the Morgan Library & Museum’s archives as a place to research old masters and 19th-century drawings, or to peek at the letters that modern masters like Chagall and Dubuffet wrote to the art dealer Pierre Matisse. But a recent gift from the Roy Lichtenstein estate will now make the Morgan a destination for classic contemporary artists, too.

While organizing the Morgan’s 2010 exhibition “Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968,” Isabelle Dervaux, curator of modern and contemporary drawings, and William M. Griswold, the Morgan’s director, got to know Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow. It is because of that friendship, Mr. Griswold said, that Ms. Lichtenstein recently donated a group of sketchbooks and drawings from her husband’s estate to the Morgan.

The world’s largest museum devoted to contemporary art from Africa is under construction in Cape Town. The $50 million Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) will be housed in a disused, colonial-era industrial structure consisting of 42 towering, nine-story-tall grain silos on the waterfront in Cape Town.

“It has been my life dream to build a contemporary art museum in Africa,” Mark Coetzee, the former director of Miami’s Rubell Family Collection and executive director and chief curator of Zeitz MOCAA, told the AFP.

Moti Shniberg shuffles through the lobby of the trendy Manhattan building where his company is based to a quiet corner table. A boyish 41-year-old with red hair and a soft Israeli accent, he’s slightly out of place among the dressy-casual office workers who weren’t yet in high school when he launched the Artist Pension Trust, which may hold the largest private collection of contemporary art on the planet.

“Look around,” Shniberg says, gesturing to the walls. “You see all the art there? All of these are APT artists.” And who created the video installation in the corner? “I’m not sure,” says Shniberg, half sheepish, half defiant. “We have so many artists.”

The Aspen Art Museum is getting ready to attempt the art-world equivalent of a double black diamond.

After three decades of shoehorning contemporary-art exhibits into a former power plant on the outskirts of this wealthy Rocky Mountain enclave, the museum plans to triple its footprint. It will relocate in August to a new home designed by Pritzker prize winner Shigeru Ban in the center of town—a move that illustrates the growing clout and ambition of Aspen's stewards.

Mr. Ban, who is known for using unconventional materials like paper and cardboard tubes, has created a three-story building that resembles an enormous wooden crate. The 33,000-square-foot facility, which opens Aug. 9, has walls of wood veneer planks woven into latticework. The grid covers a glass wall, giving passersby a glimpse inside.

Tom Gilmore, the developer who helped wake the sleeping giant Downtown 15 years ago with his multi-building Old Bank District project, makes things happen. So his proposal for a contemporary art museum in the heart of the Historic Core should have legs—he's already working with SCI-Arc professor/architect Tom Wiscombe on designs for the Old Bank District Museum, which will occupy basements, rooftops, and mezzanines of the Hellman Building, Farmers and Merchants Bank Building, and the Old Bank Garage, all at Fourth and Main. Gilmore is also shoring up financing on the project with business partner Jerri Perrone. And art is arriving already, the Downtown News reports, with a two-and-a-half-ton sculpture that was moved from the Arts District to the roof of the Old Bank Garage a few months ago; it now anchors the home of a forthcoming sculpture garden.

Records tumbled this season in the highest-grossing flagship summer auctions that Sotheby’s London has ever seen. Together, sales in the four key categories of Old Masters, Impressionist & Modern, Contemporary Art and ‘Treasures’ totalled a record £360 million - with top estimates repeatedly smashed and record numbers of participants engaging in the sales.

The strong results were fuelled by a burgeoning interest from collectors from the new markets - many of whom are making their presence ever more strongly felt in Sotheby’s London salerooms, their interest constantly expanding into an ever broader range of fields.

Contemporary artist Damien Hirst is blocking the sale of an early spot painting that he executed directly on the wall of a London house in 1988. The painting was a birthday present for the home’s former owner, Jamie Ritblat, now a successful property mogul, from his parents Sir John and Lady Ritblat, both well-known art collectors and Hirst enthusiasts. “Bombay Mix” remained in the house when the current owners, Jess Simpson and her husband Roger, purchased it in 2005. Two years later, Simpson removed the painting, mounted it on an aluminum backing board, and had it framed in hopes of selling it.

Since Hirst’s company Science Ltd. still holds the painting’s original certificate of authenticity, it is claiming ownership of the work and prohibiting Simpson from selling the piece.