Displaying items by tag: Gallery

All sorts of paths can lead to an art career—and a nation-wide media frenzy never hurts. Francesca Grillo hit the headlines last year, when she was accused, alongside her sister Elisabetta, of defrauding über-collector Charles Saatchi and his former wife Nigella Lawson of £685,000 ($1,140,500) with company credit cards. The sisters were found not guilty in December 2013.

One might have thought that Francesca had seen enough of the art world at the Saatchi-Lawson residence to want to start afresh somewhere else. Quite the opposite. She has teamed up with another former Saatchi employee, Sharrine Scholtz, to launch a gallery-without-walls, Laissez Faire Art.

The fall gallery season is almost upon us and on September 11, Gagosian will kick off its 980 Madison Avenue venue with a series of early paintings by postwar abstractionist Helen Frankenthaler. “Composing with Color: Paintings 1962-1963” is the first exhibition of Frankenthaler’s work collaboratively organized with the recently established Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

“Gagosian Gallery was delighted to cooperate with the estate of Helen Frankenthaler in organizing an exhibition of her 1950s paintings last spring,” John Elderfield, curator of the exhibition, told Artinfo.

The Frick Collection announced the launch of a new mobile app, which provides instant access to content related to every work of art in the Frick’s permanent collection. Via this new platform, users can browse for information about particular objects and search the collection by artist, genre, gallery location, and audio stop number. Works of art can be saved as favorites to enjoy offline or share via email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+. The app connects to The Frick Collection’s database (collections.frick.org) to provide continually updated information.

Also available to users is audio commentary (in English) for select works of art, as well as audio guides to the galleries in six languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Japanese). Visitors can listen to audio content, with headphones, on their own smartphones. Access to free Wi-Fi is available in the museum. Additionally, an interactive map allows app users to navigate the galleries and a comprehensive, up-to-date events calendar lists upcoming gallery talks, lectures, and special events.

Officials from the Museum of Fine Arts are investigating after they discovered spray painted images of Homer Simpson and other graffiti on the exterior walls of the building, as well as on the base of the statue that greets visitors at the main entrance.

A groundskeeper who asked not to be identified said she was “bummed” when she walked around the art museum on Friday morning and found the graffiti, which included phrases like “tell the truth” and Homer Simpson’s face, on the outside of the Japanese Garden, the front and back entrance to the gallery, as well as on the foundation of a prominent statue, called “Appeal to the Great Spirit,” which depicts a Native American riding atop a horse that welcomes guests coming in from Huntington Avenue. The actual statue was not damaged.

London’s Mayfair is set to get another new addition come September. Former directors of Haunch of Venison Ben Tufnell and Matt Watkins announced on Monday that they will open Parafin gallery in September 2014. The gallery will be located at 18 Woodstock Street, just off of New Bond Street.

Tufnell and and Watkins are joined by Nicholas Rhodes in opening Parafin. Rhodes was formerly the director of gallery and publisher Master Piper and a director at Albion Gallery.

Everyone knows by now that rents across Los Angeles are shooting up wildly, but the story with the nonprofit Santa Monica Museum of Art at Bergamot Art Station is something else altogether: the museum's landlord has more than tripled the rent because he disagrees with their employees about a major redevelopment of the site. Per Santa Monica Next, the museum currently rents its space from a nearby gallery owner, who is not just the building's owner but was also, until a few weeks ago, part of one of the three teams vying to give Bergamot a major overhaul. SaMo's economic development department recommended a competing plan that happened to also receive a glowing endorsement from the SMMoA's director. Now the museum's rent has increased to $22,000 a month (it had been $7,000 rent) and the landlord is asking the museum for $53,000 in back-rent as well, "in response to what he considers its disruptive and unneighborly vision for Bergamot Station," the LA Times reported.

On a Saturday afternoon in Chelsea, a group of a few dozen people milled around the International Print Center New York, drinking Champagne and making small talk about the show New Prints 2014/Winter. But this wasn’t a gallery opening, nor was it an artist’s talk. Rather it was a salon by Gertrude, a new company organizing events to discuss art.

The company is named for the writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, who was well known for the gatherings of artists and writers she organized in her apartment on the Left Bank of Paris.

Is the Whitney set to supplant MoMA as New York’s go-to modern art museum? The institution will begin moving into its new Renzo Piano building later this year, with the Meatpacking District location opening to the public about one year from now. It’s hard to say how exactly the new building and location will change the dynamic among New York’s top tier of art museums, but a look at the numbers makes it clear that the Whitney’s move is literally and symbolically huge, and will put it in more direct competition with the Museum of Modern Art.

The Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue is much smaller than most people realize. At just 85,000 square feet, it is markedly smaller, for instance, than the new 100,000-square-foot Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery in Los Angeles—which, to be fair, is an exceptionally huge gallery.

Sotheby’s London is offering as a highlight of the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on Monday 23rd June 2014 Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (Water Lilies) of 1906, estimated at £20-30 million/ $33-50 million. Instantly recognisable and revered the world over, Claude Monet’s Nymphéas are among the most iconic and celebrated paintings of turn of the century. The profound impact the series has made on the evolution of modern art marks them out as Monet’s greatest achievement.

This painting was selected by the artist to be exhibited at his seminal exhibition held at the Galerie Durand- Ruel, Paris, in 1909 to unveil his Water Lily paintings in a show dedicated purely to this subject. It had also been singled out and acquired by Paul Durand-Ruel - the legendary art dealer who championed the Impressionists and represented Monet, among many other of the greatest artists of his time – and it remained in his personal collection throughout his lifetime. The painting has since been widely exhibited at some of the world’s most prestigious international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, and since 2011 has been on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It is this painting, together with the others in this series, that eventually led to Monet’s Les Grandes décorations which were painted between 1914-26, now in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.

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.