Displaying items by tag: gouache

A collection of rarely seen works by Marc Chagall have gone on show in London for the first time.

The 26 works, which include paper gouaches and oil paintings, span Chagall’s career from 1913 to 1984, showcasing the Russian-French artist's distinctive folk-inspired, playful style.

None of the paintings were exhibited in the recent Chagall retrospective at Tate Liverpool last year, with just “Dos a dos” having been on show before to the British public at the Royal Academy in 1985.

On Thursday, May 22, “Tara Donovan: Untitled” opened at Pace Gallery’s pop-up in Menlo Park, California. It will be the final exhibition held at the Gallery’s temporary West Coast location. Prior to the Tara Donovan show, Pace presented an exhibition of stabiles, bronzes, standing and hanging mobiles, colorful gouaches, and wearable jewelry by Alexander Calder. Pace, which specializes in contemporary art, has permanent spaces in New York, London, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

“Untitled” surveys work by the Brooklyn-based artist Tara Donovan from 2000 to the present. Donovan is best known for her large-scale installations and sculptures made from manufactured materials, such as Scotch tape, Styrofoam cups, paper plates, toothpicks, and plastic drinking straws. Donovan creates her process-driven works by repeatedly layering a single material until an everyday object is transformed into a complex, otherworldly work of art. Donovan also plays with perceptual phenomenon through light and scale, using a variety of materials and three-dimensional forms to create captivating optical effects.

Pablo Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, will raffle off Man in the Opera Hat (1914) to raise funds for the International Association to Save Tyre. The Lebanese city of Tyre is a UNESCO World Heritage site whose history goes back to ancient Phoenicia.

Picasso will sell 50,000 raffle tickets for $135 a piece and a winner will be drawn during an event at Sotheby’s in Paris on December 18. The market value of the small Cubist gouache is said to be around $1 million. The raffle money will go towards creating an arts center and educational institute in Tyre, which has been severely damaged by decades of military conflict.

Picasso will travel to New York in December with the work to promote the raffle. To date, 40,000 raffle tickets have been sold. 

The Louvre’s new outpost in Abu Dhabi, which is slated to open in 2015, has assembled the 130 paintings, miniatures, sculptures, and other artworks that will form its permanent collection. Museum officials allowed reporters a sneak peek of the works including paintings by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Édouard Manet (1832-1883), and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). The entire collection will be on view from April 22 to July 20, 2013 as part of the exhibition The Birth of a Museum at a gallery on the island of Saadiyat, close to where construction for the new museum is currently underway.

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s collection is comprised of numerous works from private collections, many of which have never been on public view before. Highlights from the museum’s holdings include Picasso’s gouache, ink, and collage work on paper Portrait of a Lady (1928); Gauguin’s Children Wrestling (1888); and Paul Klee’s (1879-1940) Oriental Bliss (1938).

The Louvre’s new venue, which was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, is the museum’s first branch outside of France. The venture is expected to bring the Louvre and its French partner museums approximately $1.31 million over 30 years. The Louvre also has an offshoot location in the northern city of Lens.

Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Femme Assise Prés D’une Fenêtre (1932) sold for nearly $45 million at Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern evening sale on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 in London. The coveted portrait of Picasso’s lover and muse, Marie-Therese Walter, came from a private collection and was last seen on the market in 1997 when it sold for $7.5 million. The portrait was guaranteed to sell due to a third-party “irrevocable bid” and while the buyer remains anonymous, some believe it was the guarantor, represented by Patti Wong, the chairman of Sotheby’s Asia.

The auction, which totaled $190 million, also included a separately catalogued section of 21 Surrealist works. All but three works sold, adding $26 million to the overall sale. Highlights from this section included Joan Miro’s (1893-1983) Femme revant de l’evasion (1945), which sold for $13 million and also carried a third-party guarantee.

Another considerable sale of the night was a series of three drawings by Egon Schiele (1890-1918), which brought $22 million. The works were put on sale by Vienna’s Leopold Museum. Another Schiele work, a pencil, gouache, and watercolor piece completed in 1915, sold to Wong on behalf a client for $13 million.

The sale was Sotheby’s second highest for an Impressionist sale in London.