Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

Sotheby’s has announced that it will be selling Jasper Johns’s "Flag" (1983) during the November 11 Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York. This particular example of "Flag," which is relatively small at approximately 11 x 17 inches and done in encaustic on silk and collaged onto canvas, carries a price estimate of  $15 million to $20 million. (or about $1 million a square inch.) Before the sale, it will go on something of a grand tour, being showcased to collectors in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and London.

In 2010, Christie’s sold a larger version of a Johns flags, nearly 17 x 26 inches, which was also painted much early, circa 1960-1966, for a record price of $28.6 million.

Christie’s has announced that it will offer eleven works from Cy Twombly’s personal collection during its upcoming sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York. The works, which are being offered by the Cy Twombly Foundation,  were all created between 1961 and 1967 by artists represented by the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery -- Twombly’s dealer for over four decades. The collection is expected to fetch around $15 million.

Twombly, who is best known for his calligraphic, graffiti-like paintings, collected works by his friends and contemporaries, including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, and Claes Oldenburg.

American installation artist Robert Irwin will create a major piece for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, the foundation announced on Thursday.

The project has been in the works for 13 years, Irwin said.

"I'm not going to count my chickens before they hatch," he joked. "I'll believe it when I see it."

He'll have to wait a couple of years until then. Construction on the installation will begin next year and isn't slated to be completed until 2016.

Russian socialite and art collector Dasha Zhukova announced that the new Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will open in Moscow in June 2015. The Garage, which was founded in 2008 by Zhukova and her billionaire boyfriend Roman Abramovich, is currently located in a temporary, Shigeru Ban-designed building in Gorky Park. The institution features an extensive program of exhibitions, events, education, research, and publishing that focuses on current developments in Russian and international culture, creating opportunities for public dialogue, as well as the production of new work and ideas in Moscow. The museum’s collection is the first archive in the country related to the development of Russian contemporary art from the 1950s through the present.

The new space, which is in the same neighborhood as the museum’s current location, is being designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).

The Italian nonprofit arts organization Depart Foundation, which exhibits contemporary emerging and mid-career artists from around the world in Rome, is expanding its footprint, debuting a West Hollywood space Wednesday night with a show by Italian artist Gabriele De Santis.

Since launching in 2008 with the dual mission of adding to the Italian contemporary art scene as well as sparking an international art dialogue, Depart has premiered work by artists Sterling Ruby, Oscar Murillo, Nate Lowman, Frances Stark, Sam Falls, Amanda Ross-Ho and Lucien Smith, among others.

Get ready for a new public installation. A monumental sculpture featuring the animal heads of the traditional Chinese zodiac will be unveiled on September 17 outside the Adler Planetarium. “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Bronze” is by Ai Weiwei, a leading figure in the contemporary art world and China’s most outspoken political artist.

China considers Weiwei such a threat to its national security that they revoked his passport several years ago, and he is not allowed to leave the country.

Art Moscow, Russia’s longest-running contemporary art fair, has been canceled this year because of international tensions and a virtually nonexistent local market, its founder and organizer, Vasily Bychkov, has announced in an interview with "The Art Newspaper Russia."

He had already warned in August that sanctions were prompting foreign participants to pull out of other exhibitions organized by his company, Expo-Park, according to "The Art Newspaper Russia."

The Texas Department of Transportation has reached an agreement with the foundation Ballroom Marfa to preserve Elmgreen & Dragset’s iconic conceptual installation “Prada Marfa.” Ballroom Marfa, a non-profit organization that doubles as a contemporary cultural arts space, has been battling to preserve the sculpture for nearly a year. The government threatened to shut down the life-size replica of a Prada store, which stands on a deserted stretch of West Texas highway, because it could be considered an illegal roadside advertisement under state law.

To resolve the problem, Ballroom Marfa decided to lease the land underneath “Prada Marfa” and register the site as an art museum. Elmgreen & Dragset’s building will be the museum’s sole art exhibit.

The Portland Art Museum announced this morning that Bruce Guenther, the chief curator and Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, will retire on October 20.

Since joining in 2000, Guenther has been a driving force in the art museum's artistic mission, growth, exhibition curation, and role in the regional (and sometimes international) art scene.

On Wednesday, September 11, 2014, the Board of Trustees of the Dia Art Foundation announced that it has chosen Jessica Morgan, a curator at Tate Modern in London, to be its new director. Morgan, who has held her current position at the Tate since 2010, was previously the chief curator at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art as well as a curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Morgan will make the move to New York in January 2015.

Dia, which turned forty this year, has offices in Manhattan’s artsy Chelsea neighborhood as well as a sprawling exhibition space in Beacon, New York -- an up-and-coming town about 90 minutes north of New York City.