Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is beefing up its glass collection with a gift of 44 works by the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa from the collection of David Landau and his wife Marie-Rose Kahane. The donation is expected to have a “transformative impact on our holdings of 20th-century glass and design”, says Sheena Wagstaff, the museum’s chairman of modern and contemporary art, in a statement.

Scarpa created the objects during his 15-year collaboration with Venini Glassworks in Venice between 1932 and 1947. Together, the architect and Paolo Venini, the founder of the glass company, modernised glassblowing and pioneered innovations in color, form and technique. The 44 works from the Landau and Kahane collection made their US debut earlier this year in the Met’s exhibition “Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932-1947.”

The Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, France, is currently hosting the exhibition “ArtLovers: Stories of Art in the Pinault Collection.” The show features forty works from François Pinault’s illustrious collection, including more than a third that have never been displayed in previous exhibitions of the Collection. Thirty-three artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Dan Flavin, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and Rachel Whiteread will be represented.

The Pinault Collection, which features paintings, sculptures, installations, video, drawings, and more, was assembled by the French businessman François Pinault. Pinault is the founder of the holding company Artemis S.A., which owns Christie’s auction house as well as a number of luxury brands. Pinault currently owns one of the biggest collections of contemporary art worldwide and in 2006, he acquired Venice’s Palazzo Grassi Punta della Dogana to display his collection. The exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum was curated by Martin Bethenod, the Director of the Palazzo Grassi.

The 20th edition of the Pittsburgh Biennial will begin this month, bringing into focus Pittsburgh’s potential as a viable arts hub. The event, which started at the city’s Center for the Arts, continues to grow in scope and location and is now the largest survey of regional contemporary art in Western Pennsylvania. Highlighting established and emerging artists, between 50 and 60 artists will be featured in this year’s Biennial.

With opening events taking place throughout the summer and fall, the Biennial will continue through the new year with final events wrapping up in May 2015.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s iconic “Empire,” the experimental film will be shown continuously in the Fifth Avenue lobby of New York City’s Empire State Building. The screening, which will take place throughout the month of July, will be complemented by images of Warhol’s art and details of his life and filmmaking.

“Empire” is a silent black-and-white film that consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building. Filming began on the night of July 25-26, 1964, from 8:10pm to 2:30am from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building in the Rockefeller Foundation office. Punctuated by the Empire State Building’s changing lights and the sky above, “Empire” is hailed as an avant-garde masterpiece, challenging viewers with its daunting running time, yet raising profound questions about time, subject, and personal reflection. When explaining the film, Warhol said, “I never liked the idea of picking out certain scenes and pieces of time and putting them together, because...it’s not like life...what I liked was chunks of time all together, every real moment.”

Kara Walker’s sugar-covered sphinx drew more than 130,000 viewers during its two-month run at the Domino sugar factory, with an average attendance of 5,000 a day on the weekends it was open, according to Creative Time, the public-art organization that commissioned the work.

Attendance surged to 10,000 a day on Saturday and Sunday, the last two days that the artwork, titled “A Subtlety,” was on display.

Louisville's Speed Art Museum has hired a veteran curator from New Orleans to manage its contemporary art collection when it re-opens in spring 2016. Miranda Lash, who currently works as the curator of contemporary works at the New Orleans Museum of Art, will start her new job next month, according to the Speed Art Museum.

The Speed is currently undergoing a $60 million renovation and expansion project, which has closed the main museum building for construction until 2016.

A court here on Wednesday issued a ruling that permits the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to display art as it sees fit in the Venetian palazzo given to it by the wealthy collector Peggy Guggenheim.

In a 16-page decision, the Paris tribunal rejected legal claims made by a group of her descendants that the foundation was bound to display Guggenheim’s vast collection of modern art the way she had originally presented it in her home.

Her family — seven grandsons and great-grandsons based in France — vowed to appeal after the tribunal dismissed their demands to revoke Guggenheim’s donation to the foundation unless the displays of Cubist, Surrealist and abstract postwar art were returned to their original state without additions of contemporary works.

Brazilian customs authorities were in for a surprise on Monday. Upon inspecting a shipping container sent to Rio de Janeiro from the US, they found 20 works of contemporary art worth an estimated $4.5 million, the AP reports.

The two containers were marked as containing the belongings of a 75-year-old Brazilian woman. They had been shipped from Florida. Brazilian authorities don’t buy the front, however, alleging instead that a company was using the woman’s move to evade import and sales taxes on the artworks.

Among the 20 pieces are works by Rio de Janeiro–based artist Beatriz Milhazes and São Paulo–based street art duo Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo (better known as Os Gêmeos). The only work on which an estimated monetary value has thus far been placed is a sculpture by noted Rio-based postwar artist Sérgio de Camargo, who died in 1990. The unidentified piece is valued at $900,000.

A self-portrait of Andy Warhol in a spiky fright wig sold for 2.9 million pounds ($4.98 million) at Phillips yesterday in London, concluding the spring auction season in Europe.

This week’s evening sales of contemporary art at Phillips, Sotheby’s (BID) and Christie’s in the U.K. capital produced a total of 202.4 million pounds, a 28 percent jump from the tally at equivalent events last year. New buyers from China and other international markets are boosting prices for top postwar and contemporary artists, as the works are being increasingly seen as strong investments.