Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has named Melissa Chiu, veteran director and senior vice president for global arts and cultural programs for the Asia Society Museum in New York, as its new director.

The Australian-born Chiu, 42, who will assume the position Sept. 29, succeeds former director Richard Koshalek, whose tenure was marked by controversy over funding for his signature Seasonal Inflatable Structure proposal. He announced his resignation a year ago.

On July 5, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) will unveil a new gallery filled with objects that have been acquired through the institution’s Rapid Response Collecting initiative. The new collecting approach strives to help the museum engage in a timely way with important global events that shape, or are shaped by design, architecture, and technology.

A decidedly historic institution, the V&A’s new gallery will feature an ever-changing display that illustrates how design reflects and defines how we live together today.

This past November, Francis Bacon’s triptych portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, setting an artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Less than a month later, the massive contemporary masterpiece turned up on loan, not at a modern-day art mecca like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (as Edvard Munch’s The Scream did), but on the opposite end of the US, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The painting, which remained on view there through early April, was loaned by its new owner Elaine Wynn, ex-wife of casino mogul and top collector Steve Wynn. Mrs. Wynn, a resident of Nevada, was reportedly entitled to save more than $10 million in taxes by first parking the painting at the Portland Art Museum before bringing it to her home state.

 Financier, philanthropist, and art collector Eli Broad is suing a German sub-contractor that was hired to create a unique, latticed facade for his forthcoming flagship museum. The Broad Collection, or The Broad for short, was slated to open in downtown Los Angeles by the end of 2014, but officials announced in February that the date had been pushed to 2015 due to construction delays. The $140-million institution will house approximately 2,000 contemporary artworks, including pieces by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Mark Grotjahn, from the collection of Broad and his wife, Edythe.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, May 30 in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Seele Inc., an architectural engineering and fabrication firm based near Munich, of numerous infractions, including breach of contract, fraud, deceit, and unfair competition. Seele was brought on by Broad and the museum’s general contractor Matt Construction in late 2011 to create the institution’s “veil” -- a honeycomb-esque facade that wraps around the building’s exterior and is expected to be one of The Broad’s most distinctive features. Seele has helmed numerous projects in the U.S., including creating striking exteriors for the Seattle Central Library and the New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters.

The National Academy Museum and School has let go several members of its staff, including both its registrars, the marketing director, the building manager and senior curator Bruce Weber. Dr. Marshall Price, the museum’s contemporary curator, left on his own volition in March to become a curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. According to sources with knowledge of the situation, the National Academy’s director, Carmine Branagan, told the museum’s board that the reason the employees were let go was financial, but the real reason stems from disagreements within the institution over its future direction—namely, the promotion of Maurizio Pellegrin, a member of the school’s faculty, to the powerful position of creative director of both the National Academy School and its museum, which are located in a townhouse on Museum Mile.

While it seemed like Frieze was snagging all the satellites this year, at least one fair is moving its date back to align with the Armory Show. Pulse New York has just announced that it will move to March for the 2015 edition of the fair, which also happens to be its 10th anniversary. From March 5 to 8, during Armory Arts Week, Pulse will set up shop at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea.

Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on light ground) by Francis Bacon is to go under the hammer in Sotheby's Evening sale of Contemporary Art in London . The painting depicts the man who was the love of Bacon’s life at the moment when they were most deeply involved, this exceptionally rare lifetime depiction of Dyer is full of the painterly exuberance that marks out Bacon as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. An outstanding example of Bacon at the height of his powers, this museum- quality work is also of critical importance because it is, in all likelihood, the first painting for which Bacon used the legendary photographs by his friend John Deakin as source material for a painting. An outstanding example of Bacon at the height of his powers, this exceptional work has only rarely been seen in public. Having remained in the same collection since 1970, it now comes to auction for the first time ever with an estimate of £15-20 million.

Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s Senior International Specialist in Contemporary Art, said: “Painted less than a year after their first encounter, Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer marks both the height of Bacon’s affair with Dyer and the zenith of his achievement in portraiture. Full of the painterliness, chaotic brushstrokes and raw emotion that make Bacon such a giant among artists, we expect it to create great excitement at auction, coming at a moment when the market for works by Bacon is at an all-time high.”

Ileana Sonnabend was one of the greatest and most influential discoverers of artistic talent of the late 20^th century, known and appreciated for her intuition, strength of character, ground-breaking vision and for that eclecticism of taste and thinking that enabled her to understand and promote all that was new in American and European art. Created over many years and a material reflection of her commitment to supporting young artists and the avant-garde movements of the 20^th century, her extraordinary collection now finds a “European home” in the splendid monumental rooms on the second floor of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna at Ca’ Pesaro.

The exhibition marks the first step in a long-term collaboration with the Sonnabend Collection and Sonnabend Collection Foundation, and offers an extraordinary opportunity to enrich the city’s 20^th-century art collections and the permanent displays at Ca’ Pesaro, which thanks to the works from the Ileana Sonnabend collection, will be able to offer its visitors a more comprehensive itinerary with plenty of masterpieces from the history of art of the whole of the 20^th century. The Sonnabend Collection picks up exactly at the point in which Ca’ Pesaro ended its collecting spree and relationship with the Biennale, and will lead the visitor past a series of works of the highest artistic quality forming part of the principal experimental schools of the late 20^th century through over 70 iconic works of the period.

A boys' club who had a rare piece of Banksy artwork left on their front door have had it valued on the Antiques Roadshow for £400,000.

The work, called Mobile Lovers had appeared overnight on a plank of wood screwed to a wall close to the Broad Plain Boys' Club in Banksy's home town of Bristol.

Dennis Stinchcombe from the club, became involved in a row with the local council after removing the artwork put on a public wall near the youth club.

The Museum of Contemporary Art took the next step in rebuilding its staff and programming, appointing Helen Molesworth of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston as its new chief curator.

A scholar, art writer and curator, Molesworth has been at ICA/Boston since 2010. Before that she headed the department of modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museum and served as the museum's Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art.

She will start Sept. 1.