Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

Virginia Commonwealth University announced today that it will break ground in June on the Institute for Contemporary Art, a combination exhibition and performance space, laboratory, and incubator for the presentation of visual art, theater, music, dance, and film by nationally and internationally recognized artists.

The ICA, anticipated to open in 2016, is being built at the prominent corner of Broad and Belvidere streets within Richmond’s newly designated Downtown Arts District. Designed by Steven Holl Architects, the ICA will be a non-collecting institution that will present an array of different media and practices, mirroring the cross-disciplinary approach at the VCU School of the Arts.

On Wednesday, May 14, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York garnered $364 million, falling well within the auction’s pre-sale estimate of $337 million to $474 million. Of the 79 lots offered, 12 failed to find buyers. While the auction fell short of Christie’s monumental $475 million sale, which took place the evening before, new records were set for twelve artists at Sotheby’s, including Julian Schnabel, Wade Guyton, Rosemarie Trockel, Dan Flavin, Matthew Barney, and Keith Haring.

The top lot of the night was Andy Warhol’s “Six Self-Portraits,” which had resided in a private collection since its creation in 1986. The portraits, which are among the last works created by the pioneering Pop artist, sold for $30.1 million (estimate: $25 million to $35 million). The Warhol works were trailed by Gerhard Richter’s oil-on-canvas painting “Blaud” (1988), which sold to a telephone bidder for $28.7 million (estimate: $25 million to $35 million) and Jeff Koons’ mirror polished stainless steel sculpture with transparent color coating titled “Popeye” (1988), which fetched $28.2 million (estimate on request). The 6 ½-foot tall sculpture was purchased by billionaire casino tycoon and art collector Steve Wynn, who plans to display the work in his Las Vegas casino.

On Tuesday, May 13, Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art evening sale in New York achieved a jaw-dropping $745 million -- the highest total for a single auction in art history. The sale exceeded the auction house’s results in November of $691.6 million as well as last May’s total of $495 million for postwar and contemporary artworks.

The auction, which carried a pre-sale estimate of approximately $500 million, was brimming with top-notch material. Out of the 72 lots offered, only four failed to find buyers. New auction records were set for a spate of high-selling artists, including Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Barnett Newman, and Frank Stella.

A billion pound collection of modern masterpieces which has languished in a storeroom bunker under Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran may finally see the light of day, under changes in the new government's policy. Paintings by Picasso, Miro, Calder, Bacon, Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Van Gogh and Monet have languished in a storeroom beneath the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art since the  Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The collection was put together in the 1960s and 1970s by Queen Farah Pahlavi, the wife of the last shah of Iran. Fearing that they would be destroyed by the religious turmoil that gripped the the country, the works were carefully packed up, crated and removed from public view.

The Tacoma Art Museum is counting to the opening of its new wing and renovations of its exisitng space, now scheduled for public debut on Sunday, Nov. 16, 2014.

According to the museum's Juliana Verboort, the project’s centerpiece is the new Haub Family Galleries, showcasing the Haub Family Collection of Western American art. The collection places the museum among a select few in the United States, and the only museum in the Pacific Northwestern region, with a Western American art collection of this caliber.

Scratch an art dealer, and you’ll often find a curator. That’s the case with Craig Starr, who seems to operate in the secondary art market mainly to support his persistent curatorial itch. For nearly a decade, he has been mounting sharp-focus shows of historical works by prominent American postwar artists in his jewel-box gallery on the Upper East Side.

Mr. Starr’s latest effort — one of his best — is “Robert Rauschenberg: The Fulton Street Studio, 1953-54.” With 15 works borrowed from private collections, this exhibition delves into a formative period in the development of Rauschenberg (1925-2008), when he was in his late 20s and moving fast. It presents his sensibility in a nutshell, his broad aesthetic range, omnivorous curiosity, playfulness and intuitive elegance.

There is an air of frenetic activity in and around the glassy headquarters of Paris’s Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. Heavy trucks are delivering strange and hefty packages to the door. Inside the gallery, a giant black question mark is suspended in the air, next to a sleek aircraft that looks like it has made a day trip from the next century. Why are we here, the first work seems to ask? Whatever, I can get us out super-quickly, replies the second. Existential questions get short shrift in the hyper-velocity of today’s contemporary art scene.

The atmosphere is frisky: a birthday is being celebrated. It was 30 years ago that the foundation opened its doors to the public for the first time. It was immediately, and notably, successful. The popular appeal of contemporary art may be a cliché of today’s cultural landscape but it was not so straightforward in 1984. “It was a very different world,” says Alain Dominique Perrin, then-president of the renowned jeweller Cartier International, who masterminded the project.

Now that the first week of the big spring auctions is over, Sotheby’s is wasting no time touting its sales in London next month, hanging highlights in its York Avenue galleries for collectors to peruse during the contemporary-art previews this weekend.

Knowing that today’s appetite for prime abstract paintings appears boundless, Sotheby’s expects a 1927 Mondrian that has not been on the market since the 1950s to be a star of its June 23 auction. This stark canvas, “Composition With Red, Blue and Grey,” was first owned by Harry Holtzman, an artist who helped found the American Abstract Artists Group, an influential organization that espoused the principles of European Modernism, and who was a friend of Mondrian’s and an expert on his work.

The highly-anticipated contemporary art fair Frieze New York is currently underway on Randall’s Island in Manhattan. A spin-off of Frieze London, which launched in 2003, Frieze New York includes a full roster of workshops, lectures, and satellite fairs. Now in its third year, Frieze New York features over 190 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries, with 53 participants from the fair’s host city.

A vibrant mix of established and emerging dealers, Frieze allots two sections, Focus and Frame, to rising galleries. Focus galleries are less than ten years old and exhibit curated projects conceived specifically for Frieze New York. The Frame section, which is dedicated to galleries established less than six years ago, presents solo shows and is overseen by Berlin-based curator and art writer, Raphael Gygax, and Tim Saltarelli, who is a New York-based curator and writer. Industry heavyweights, including David Zwirner Gallery, Gagosian Gallery, and Thaddaeus Ropac, are exhibiting works by minimalist Donald Judd, Pop artist Ed Ruscha, and German painter Georg Baselitz, respectively.

The 30th Turner prize will be contested by four artists who are almost impossible to pigeonhole, using techniques that include film, storytelling, installation and screenprinting.

The shortlist, announced on Tuesday at Tate Britain, is made up of Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards and Tris Vonna-Michell.

All four are in a sense collagists, often using images and films they have physically discovered or found online. They also explore subjects that are more their parents' history than their own.