Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

The Guggenheim announced that Paul Chan is the winner of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize. Chan is the tenth artist to win the biennial $100,000 art prize, which is administered by the Guggenheim Foundation, and singles out an artist whose body of work is considered an outstanding contribution to contemporary art. "The prize is firmly established as one of the art world's most resonant accolades, honoring contemporary practices of enduring power and influence," noted museum director Richard Armstrong.

"It reflects our understanding of what are the most trenchant issues in contemporary art… It's like a Biennial in a way," added deputy director Nancy Spector.

On November 19, during the Whitney Museum of American Art’s annual fall gala, director Adam D. Weinberg announced that the institution’s long-awaited downtown location will open on May 1, 2015. The Whitney closed the doors of its Brutalist Marcel Breuer building last month, following a wildly successful Jeff Koons retrospective. The building, which was the Whitney’s home for nearly fifty years, will be leased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the next eight years, with the possibility of extending the agreement for a longer term. The Met plans to present exhibitions and educational programming in the iconic building.

The Whitney’s new home will be located at 99 Gansevoort Street in New York City’s vibrant meatpacking district, between the High Line, an elevated linear park, and the Hudson River. Designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, the new building will roughly double the Whitney’s exhibition and programming space, allowing the first comprehensive presentation of its collection of modern and contemporary American art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla is planning to expand its museum space to make room for more art.

The museum’s current building is big enough to exhibit 50 to 75 works of art. Close to 4,000 pieces in its permanent collection sit in storage vaults. The proposed expansion would triple the exhibition space to 30,000 square feet.

The firm chosen to design the expansion, Selldorf Architects, is led by German-born, New York resident Annabelle Selldorf, who was in town this week to meet with museum staff and give a lecture about her work.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College has received a gift of 75 works of contemporary art from the collection of the computer programmer and philanthropist Peter Norton. This is the first in a series of gifts to university art museums and teaching museums throughout the country—drawn from Norton’s personal collection—to support the integration of the visual arts in higher education, foster creative museum practice, and engage diverse audiences with contemporary art.

Norton initiated his first large donation project in 2000, gifting over 1,000 pieces from his collection to 32 select institutions. His gift to the Tang Teaching Museum represents the inauguration of his second major donation project.

A familiar face in the Southern California museum world will soon be returning to the area.

Elizabeth Armstrong has been named the new executive director of the Palm Springs Art Museum, leaders announced on Friday. Armstrong, who will begin her new job in January, comes from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which she joined in 2008 and where she held the title of founding curator of contemporary art.

Before that, Armstrong was the acting director and chief curator at the Orange County Museum of Art, where she initiated the California Biennial, and organized such popular shows as "Birth of the Cool: California Art."

She was also a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and put in 14 years as a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

New leadership is on the way at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

John B. Ravenal, currently the curator for modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, will take the helm as new executive director in mid-January. Interim director Katy Kline has been in place since the departure of Dennis Kois at the end of April. The Lincoln museum, which has an annual budget of about $5 million, was set to announce Ravenal’s appointment on Monday.

Kois left after a six-year tenure that was seen as a time of growth for the deCordova, overseeing enhanced fund-raising efforts and a sharper curatorial focus on sculpture, as well as a five-year strategic plan that went into effect in 2011.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known for daring installations that can stretch as long as a football field, will announce Monday a group of long-term projects with some of the country’s most prominent living artists, including Laurie Anderson, James Turrell and Jenny Holzer, as well as a partnership with the foundation of the late post-abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg.

When the roughly $55 million project is completed in 2017, Mass MoCA will be the largest contemporary art museum in the country, with more than 250,000 square feet of gallery space. It will also be one of the most eclectic, with a campus that features everything from rock and bluegrass festivals to dance premieres and a 27,000-square-foot building devoted to the drawings of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.

The $1.36 billion auction week of postwar and contemporary evening sales in New York had its low-key finale at Phillips on Thursday, turning in a solid though hardly exceptional $51,964,750. The decent tally fell close to midway between pre-sale expectations of $45,760,000-67,790,000 million, though estimates do not include the buyer’s premium pegged at 25 percent up to an including $100,000, 20 percent up to and including $2 million, and 12 percent for anything above that.

Eight of the 47 lots offered failed to sell for a workmanlike 17 percent buy-in rate by lot.

On Wednesday, November 12, Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York netted a whopping $852.9 million -- the highest-ever total for an auction. Filled with blue-chip works by modern masters, including Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and Gerhard Richter, the sale soared past its estimate, which hovered around $600 million. Brett Gorvy, Chairman and International Head of Postwar and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, said, “This was a sale of extraordinary quality and range, with every major artist represented by at least one masterwork. The landmark sale result achieved tonight is a reflection of both growing global enthusiasm and demand in this category and a virtuous cycle of confidence in the art market that brings a fresh supply of exciting, high-quality works into the market with each new season.”

Jasper Johns’ seminal “Flag” painting sold for $36 million on Tuesday, November 11, at Sotheby’s Contemporary and Postwar Art sale in New York. The work, which carried a presale estimate of $15 million to $20 million, eclipsed the artist’s $28.6 million auction record, which was set by a different “Flag” painting at Christie’s in May 2010. The iconic encaustic was offered by Johns’ former studio assistant Mark Lancaster, who acquired the work directly from the artist in 1983, the year it was made.  

The Sotheby’s sale was anchored by the collection of Pierre Schlumberger, an aristocratic French oil-industry tycoon, and his beautiful Portuguese wife, São. Two of the most visionary collectors of the twentieth century, the Schlumbergers’ collection comprised over ninety modern and contemporary masterworks.