Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

Today, artist Richard Serra will receive France's highest honor, the insignia of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, "The Art Newspaper" reports.

The prestigious award—created in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte to reward outstanding services rendered to France—celebrates the close relationship of the American artist with French art institutions and galleries, as well as his great contribution to contemporary art.

The National Gallery of Art has acquired works by three contemporary female artists and a Chicago outsider artist using funds from the museum’s Collectors Committee and other donors.

Cecily Brown’s painting “Girl on a Swing,” Martha Rosler’s photomontage “Cleaning the Drapes” and Roni Horn’s cast-glass sculpture “Opposite of White, v. 2” were added to the collection at the museum’s board meeting May 1.

After a year of world domination—having taken three of the top five spots in the most visited contemporary art shows of 2014—the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is due to bring her popular polka dot art to northern Europe. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark will host “the first Kusama retrospective in Scandinavia,” says Marie Laurberg, the curator of the show.

"Yayoi Kusama: Towards Infinity" (September 17-January 24, 2016) will display works that have “rarely or never been shown since [Kusama] first made them.”

The almighty dollar is the lingua franca of the international art market. But the dollar was also a favorite subject of Andy Warhol and other notable contemporary artists. An upcoming sale from a private collection will seek to wed art and commerce on the glittery altar of the greenback.

A collection of 21 pieces of contemporary art, all depicting the U.S. dollar in some way, is expected to fetch as much as $93 million when it heads to a Sotheby's auction in London on July 1.

Opening this weekend at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art is the first major one-man exhibition in Japan of Cy Twombly, featuring some 70 drawings, paintings, and monotypes culled from a fifty-year period from 1953 to 2002.

First held in 2003 at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where the museum’s first non-Russian curator Julie Sylvester organized the exhibit, the show was notable for the way in which the artist himself participated in the selection of the pieces.

Christie’s Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art realized $202,608,000 (£128,721,728/ €178,022,150) with sell-through rates of 93% by lot and 99% by value. Bidders from 34 countries competed in the room and on the phone for works by Impressionist and Modern masters, including Piet Mondrian, Chaïm Soutine, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger. Bidding on Modern works was particularly active, a testament to the energy brought to the market by crossover collectors and the success of Christie’s curated week of sales spanning both Impressionist & Modern and Post-War and Contemporary categories.

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden this summer might suppose at first that the maintenance crew has been tearing up the terrace’s paving stones in search of a leak. Displaced slabs are stacked next to rectangular cavities exposing underlying dirt where puddles and rivulets have gathered. In fact, the apparent disarray belongs to an installation by the French Conceptualist Pierre Huyghe, an untitled work commissioned by the Met for its annual Roof Garden show.

Sotheby’s sold a yellow-and-blue Mark Rothko abstract from 1954 for $46.5 million on Tuesday. The following night, archrival Christie’s International hollered back by selling a rust-colored, rectangular version that Rothko painted four years later for $82 million.

Dealers said Christie’s Rothko, “No. 10,” was prized in part because its blurry brown and black hues famously matched the somber mood of the artist at that time in his career. It sold to a telephone bidder.

Frieze New York, one of the world’s most anticipated contemporary art events, will open on Thursday, May 14, in a distinct serpentine structure overlooking the East River. Located in Randall’s Island Park, the fair is a spin-off of Frieze London, which launched in 2003. Since its inception, Frieze New York has...

To continue reading this article about Frieze New York,  visit InCollect.com.

To a medley of whoops, hollers and gasps on Monday night, Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” sold for $179.4 million including fees at Christie’s “Looking Forward to the Past” sale of artworks spanning the 20th century. The price was the highest on record for a work of art sold at auction, the company said, and was well over its estimate of $140 million.

Once the bidding reached $120 million, the Picasso was pursued by five clients on telephones, often in agonizingly slow, $1 million increments, before finally being sold to a buyer represented by Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international head of contemporary art.