Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

A painting from Cy Twombly’s celebrated “blackboard” series could set a record for the artist at auction. “Untitled” (1970) is expected to fetch between $35 million and $55 million on November 12 at Christie’s in New York. Before being offered to buyers at the auction house’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, the work will be exhibited in London and San Francisco.

Twombly, who is best known for his calligraphic, graffiti-like paintings, executed his “blackboard” series  between 1966 and 1971. Using contrasting lines against a light or dark background, these rhythmic works feature geometric shapes, words, letters, and numbers, calling to mind a classroom blackboard or a pupil’s notebook. With its swirling landscape of loops drawn in white crayon against a dark gray background, “Untitled” is hypnotic, entrancing the viewer with its formulaic loops.

Frieze Week, a seven-day concentration of art events, is currently underway in London. Between auctions, selling exhibitions, and a swath of fairs, approximately $2.2 billion worth of art will be up for grabs.

The epicenter of the event, the Frieze Art Fair, will open to VIP guests on Tuesday, October 14. Now in its twelfth year, the fair will present contemporary offerings from 162 international dealers, including Gagosian Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Casey Kaplan, Lehmann Maupin, Pace Gallery, Galerie Perrotin, Sprüth Magers, White Cube, and David Zwirner. Located in a bespoke structure in Regent’s Park, the Frieze Art Fair features a number of unique sections.

At its recent meeting, the Stanford University Board of Trustees took an early evening stroll among the modern and contemporary American paintings and sculptures in the new Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

Their visit followed an in-depth presentation by Alexander Nemerov, a Stanford scholar of American art, on Jackson Pollock's "Lucifer," one of its most important works, and a talk by Jason Linetzky, the inaugural director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, on the history of the collection, which includes more than 100 works of art.

An art collection amassed by the late movie star Lauren Bacall, including eight sculptures by Henry Moore, will go under the hammer next year in New York, Bonhams auction house said on Friday.

Bacall, the husky voiced actress who was married to and appeared with Humphrey Bogart in films such as "The Big Sleep" and "Key Largo," died in August in New York at the age of 89.

The Bacall Collection, estimated to be worth $3 million, will be sold at Bonhams in March 2015.

After seven years in New York, Pinta, the Modern & Contemporary Latin American Art Show, is relocating to Miami to set up shop during Art Basel from December 3 to 7.  The Related Group, a South Florida real estate development firm founded by Jorge Perez (of Perez Art Museum Miami fame), will present the fair.

It will be housed in a tent on the undeveloped future site of the Hyde Midtown Miami (a Related Group development project).

Cardi Gallery, the Milan-based modern and contemporary art gallery, presents "Louise Nevelson: 55-70," an exhibition of over thirty important collages and sculptures created between 1955 and 1970 that reveal the formalist achievements of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), an icon of the Feminist art movement and one of the most significant American sculptors of the 20th century. "Louise Nevelson: 55-70," is on view through December 20, 2014.

"Louise Nevelson: 55-70" features works created between 1955 and 1970, a period when the artist’s signature modernist style emerged, with labyrinthine wooden assemblages and monochrome surfaces, and evolved, as Nevelson incorporated industrial materials such as Plexiglas, aluminum and steel in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently hosting Frank Gehry’s first major retrospective in Europe. Gehry, who is best known for his expressive, sculptural buildings, is one of the most influential figures in contemporary architecture. Since opening his first office in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, Gehry has revolutionized architecture’s aesthetics, its social and cultural role, and its relationship to urban environments.

Shortly after opening his own office, Gehry fell in with the California art scene, befriending important artists such as Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Claes Oldenburg. Gehry’s relationships with these artists helped him develop his unique ability to bridge the gap between art and architecture. Additionally, Gehry’s encounter with the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns paved the way for a reconfiguration of his style all together.

 As anticipation of the upcoming fall auction season continues to build, Sotheby’s has announced that it will offer the illustrious Schlumberger Collection during its Evening and Day Sales of Impressionist & Modern Art and Contemporary Art on November 4-5 and November 11-12, respectively. The collection, which brings together over ninety modern and contemporary masterworks from the twentieth century, is expected to fetch over $85 million.

Pierre Schlumberger, an aristocratic French oil-industry tycoon, and his beautiful Portuguese wife, São, are considered two of the most visionary collectors of the twentieth century.

American artist Jeff Koons, who is best known for his reproductions of banal objects, has had a monumental year. In addition to a major installation (which closed last month) at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, Koons is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art -- the institution’s final exhibit before moving to its new location in the Meatpacking District. The exhibition has been so popular, that the Whitney will stay open for 36 hours before the landmark retrospective closes on October 19. After its run at the Whitney, the Koons retrospective will head to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it will coincide with a display of works at the Musée du Louvre that will include examples of the artist’s “Balloon Rabbit,” “Balloon Swan,” and “Balloon Monkey” sculptures.

Beyond the museum world, the Koons craze is now spilling into New York’s fall auction season.

As auction houses gear up for the major fall sales, news of several blockbuster consignments is starting to trickle out. Following the revelation from Sotheby’s last week that it has secured a rare Vincent van Gogh still life that is expected to sell for between $30–50 million, the house has revealed it will offer two extremely rare and iconic sculptures—by Amedeo Modigliani and Alberto Giacometti—that have never appeared at auction before and will undoubtedly be among the leading lots at the November 4 evening sale of Impressionist and modern art.

Giacometti’s "Chariot" (conceived and cast in 1950) is a unique painted cast depicting a goddess perched  atop a chariot with large wheels.