Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

The former director of the Barnes Foundation is crossing over to the commercial side of the art world. Derek Gillman, who led the Barnes’s controversial move from its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania to downtown Philadelphia, joined Christie’s on January 5 as chairman and senior vice president of Impressionist and Modern art, the Americas.

Gillman joins the auction house in the midst of a management shake-up. Last month, Christie’s chief executive officer Steven Murphy was replaced by Patricia Barbizet.

Damien Hirst’s forthcoming art complex, The Newport Street Gallery, is slated to open in south London this summer. Located in the up-and-coming Vauxhall district, the gallery will boast over two-thousand modern and contemporary artworks drawn from Hirst’s personal collection. In addition to works by such luminaries as Jeff Koons, Pablo Picasso, and Francis Bacon, the gallery will also display taxidermy, anatomical models, and a selection of historical objects. According to The Art Newspaper, the complex will have a changing program of exhibitions rather than a fixed installation.

Hirst enlisted the Zurich and London-based firm Caruso St John Architects to construct the gallery. The firm, whose past clients include Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council of England, and the Gagosian Gallery, is celebrated for its contemporary projects in the public realm.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is about to go over a minor cliff in terms of special exhibitions.

"Forbidden Games," the big fall show on Surrealist photography, comes down Jan. 11. The exhibition on the Toussaint L'Ouverture series of Jacob Lawrence ends Sunday. And the museum's exploration of Frederic Edwin Church's "Twilight in the Wilderness" and his love of Maine closes Jan. 25.

Never fear. The museum is bridging the impending gap in exhibitions with two fresh offerings in its photography and video galleries.

The Syndicat National des Antiquaires (SNA) -- or the French National Union of Antique Dealers -- announced that it will launch a new fair aimed at young collectors this spring. Paris Beaux-Arts, which will be held at the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground center adjacent to the Musee du Louvre, will complement the SNA’s prestigious Biennale des Antiquaires.

The long-running Biennale des Antiquaires, which is celebrated for its elegant atmosphere, blue chip offerings, and elite guest list, specializes in rare antiques, fine art, jewelry, silver, and porcelain. The SNA intends for Paris Beaux-Arts to be equal to the Biennale in quality and range, but with a stronger emphasis on modern and contemporary art.

"Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015" is a major new exhibition tracing a century of Abstract art from 1915 to the present day, and is to open at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The exhibition brings together over 100 works by 100 modern masters and contemporary artists including Carl Andre, David Batchelor, Dan Flavin, Andrea Fraser, Piet Mondrian, Gabriel Orozco, Hélio Oiticica, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rosemarie Trockel, Theo Van Doesburg and Andrea Zittel, taking over six exhibition spaces across the gallery.

The show is curated by Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director, and Magnus af Petersens, Curator at Large, Whitechapel Gallery, "Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015," is international in its scope.

Abstract paintings and sculptures were once the gold standard of Modern art. They spoke of adventurous aesthetic expeditions into hitherto unexplored visual realms.

Since the 1950s the figurative banner was held high by marvelous painters such as David Park in San Francisco, Jane Freilicher in New York and many others, but abstraction, nonetheless, ruled. By the late 1970s, though, change was underway.

Sometimes big artists work on a small scale, especially when it comes to season’s greetings. The exhibit “Handmade: Artists’ Holiday Cards from the Archives of American Art” at the Morgan Library in New York showcases nearly 60 holiday cards created by major modern and contemporary artists, from Alexander Calder to Saul Steinberg.

Dan Byers is leaving as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art to join the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston as senior curator.

Mr. Byers co-curated the 2013 Carnegie International and organized “Ragnar Kjartansson: Song,” which was on view at the ICA in Boston from December 2012 to April 2013.

He led the department of contemporary and modern art at the Carnegie beginning in 2009, and was appointed the Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2012.

Laumeier Sculpture Park in Saint Louis, Missouri, has successfully completed a $200,000 conservation project for Donald Judd’s “Untitled” (1984). The two-year project was funded by a $100,000 Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), with a 1:1 match by Laumeier. According to the NEA’s website, Art Works grants are reserved for projects that “are likely to prove transformative with the potential for meaningful change, whether in the development or enhancement of new or existing art forms, new approaches to the creation or presentation of art, or new ways of engaging the public with art; are distinctive, offering fresh insights and new value for their fields and/or the public through unconventional solutions; and have the potential to be shared and/or emulated, or are likely to lead to other advances in the field.”

Judd, one of the most significant American artists of the post-war period, is often regarded as a Minimalist -- a classification he denounced based on its generality.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has appointed Stephane Aquin from the Montreal Museum of Fine Art as its new chief curator.

Museum director Melissa Chiu announced the appointment Tuesday. Aquin is the second major hire for Chiu, who became director in September. She previously hired Gianni Jetzer as Curator-at-Large.

Aquin will lead a staff of six curators responsible for planning the exhibitions at the Smithsonian museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art. Aquin succeeds Kerry Brougher, who  served as the museum’s interim director before leaving in May to become director of the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum in Los Angeles.