Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

Whitney Museum of American Art Director Adam Weinberg spoke with The Chronicle while visiting the Bay Area for the opening of "Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection," a major show at the San Jose Museum of Art of contemporary works on loan from the New York museum.

Like the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection sampled in "Modernism from the National Gallery of Art" at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Landau Collection includes works by many names considered safe, if not already canonical: Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, James Rosenquist, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin.

Banksy paintings on canvas bought during his 2013 'residency' in New York are to go under the hammer at Bonhams London. Purchased for just $60 apiece they will feature in their next sale of Contemporary Art on July 2nd for a price which reflects their true value.

Estimated at £50,000 – 70,000 and £30,000 - 50,000 Kids on Guns and Winnie the Pooh were both acquired from Banksy's Central Park stall where an unassuming trader sold his paintings to passing tourists.

Film footage shows Banksy's immediately recognizable black and white stenciled canvases stacked on a trestle table or suspended on the stall's makeshift metal framework. One canvas was stenciled with a discount store label announcing the price of each work as $60. The following day the event was documented on the artist's website: "Yesterday I set up a stall in the park selling 100% authentic original signed Banksy canvases. For $60 each."

The trial continued Thursday in a lawsuit brought by three trustees of the Robert Rauschenberg Revocable Trust, who are suing the artist's foundation for $60 million in fees for services rendered.

The worth of Rauschenberg's work was again the focus.

The trustees are Bennet Grutman, who was also Rauschenberg's accountant; Darryl Pottorf, close friend and companion and executor of the artist's will; and Bill Goldston, who partnered with the artist for a fine art print publishing company.

The National Gallery of Art has acquired 16 works, including its first by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, a mid-15th-century group of Nottingham alabasters, a winter scene by Dutch master Jan van Goyen and a 61-minute video homage to New York City.

The spring acquisitions “constitute a broad span of subject matter across a range of mediums, schools and eras,” Gallery Director Earl A. Powell III said in a statement. “We have enhanced our collection of medieval sculpture, enhanced our Dutch collection, and bolstered our collection of 20th- and 21st-century art by living artists.”

London’s Tate Modern has received one of its “most generous gifts ever” thanks to a donation from the late American artist Cy Twombly. Twombly, who is best known for his calligraphic, graffiti-like paintings, expressed his wish to make the donation to the Tate following a major retrospective at the museum in 2008. The gift includes three large paintings, all titled “Untitled (Bacchus),” created between 2006 and 2008, and five bronze sculptures dating from the period 1979-91. The trove is worth around £50 million.

Twombly’s “Bacchus” paintings are an extension of a series of eight works created in 2005 and inspired by Homer’s “The Iliad.” The sculptures, all bronze casts of everyday objects collected by Twombly, are meant to represent classical artifacts. The bronze lends a permanence reminiscent of ancient sculpture to otherwise ephemeral objects. All of the paintings and sculptures are currently on view at the Tate Modern.

The title of this exhibition is adapted from the phrase “the sight of a reason,” a line in Gertrude Stein's groundbreaking prose work Tender Buttons (1914). In her collection of “portraits” of everyday phenomena, Stein employed experimental syntax to free language from established usage and to “create a word relationship between the word and the things seen.” Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions begins with an ongoing work by the Los Angeles–based artist Eve Fowler (American, b. 1964), which appropriates phrases from Tender Buttons and Stein's How to Write (1931) in commercially printed posters originally intended for public display—for instance, stapled to telephone poles or fences. Stein’s probing of the correlation between language and the physical world—and Fowler’s act of recontextualization—exemplify a set of concerns shared by the works presented here.

British sculptor Antony Gormley has taken his exploration of the human body to a new level. The Turner Prize-winning artist has created a huge sculpture of a crouched figure that doubles as a luxury hotel suite. The work sits on the facade of London’s forthcoming Beaumont Hotel, which is slated to open later this year. 

Gormley was commissioned to create the sculpture by the Beaumont’s founders, restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, in 2008. The artist said, "I take the body as our primary habitat. ROOM contrasts a visible exterior of a body formed from large rectangular masses with an inner experience. The interior of ROOM is only 4 metres square but 10 metres high: close at body level, but lofty and open above. Shutters over the window provide total blackout and very subliminal levels of light allow me to sculpt darkness itself. My ambition for this work is that it should confront the monumental with the most personal, intimate experience."

Storm King Art Center, a sprawling sculpture park in New Windsor, New York, has acquired three contemporary works through major long-term loans. The sculptures include “Source” (1967) by American minimalist Tony Scott, “Royal Tide 1” (1960) by monochromatic master Louise Nevelson, and “Broken Obelisk” (1967) by Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman.

Guests who enter through the Center’s Museum Hill entrance are greeted by “Source,” Smith’s monumental black painted-steel sculpture. First exhibited at Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany, in 1968, “Source” is among Smith’s most dynamic large-scale sculptures and exemplifies the painted black outdoor works for which he is best known.

Frieze London has announced the details of the 12th edition of their contemporary art fair to be held in Regents Park.  The fair unites over 160 of the world’s leading contemporary galleries under one roof. New for 2014 is a restructuring of the sections for participating galleries, introducing ‘Live’, a showcase for performance-based installations dispersed throughout the fair.

Frieze London will take place 15–18 October 2014 and is sponsored by Deutsche Bank for the 11th consecutive year. Frieze London is one of the world’s leading contemporary art fairs and brings an international art audience to the UK capital every October. For the third year, Frieze London will coincide with Frieze Masters, a fair that gives a contemporary perspective on historical art, which also takes place in Regent’s Park, London. Together the two fairs bring an unrivalled range of art together with an international art audience and benefit from a crossover of visitors.

Internationally acclaimed gallery Hauser & Wirth is teaming up with respected curator Paul Schimmel to launch a multidisciplinary arts center in downtown Los Angeles. Operating under the name Hauser Wirth + Schimmel, the joint venture will transform a 100,000-square-foot flour mill complex into a contemporary art mecca.

The seven-building compound, which includes a Neoclassical bank building, a five-story mill structure, and a sprawling interior courtyard, will open in January 2015. Hauser Wirth + Schimmel will debut with a two-month pop-up group show before closing for extensive renovations.