Displaying items by tag: contemporary

Sotheby’s hosted a number of sales in Hong Kong this past week. On October 7^th, the Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian paintings sale achieved $15.5 million, soaring past the pre-sale estimate of $5.8 million. The sale achieved the highest auction total for this category and the painting Fortune and Longevity by Lee Man Fong, an Indonesian modern master, set a record for any Southeast Asian painting when it sold for $4.4 million. The final price for the painting was almost three times the pre-sale estimate.

The Contemporary Asian Art sale totaled $15.1 million and Tiananmen No. 1 by Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter, Zhang Xiaogang, was the top lot at $2.69 million. Liu Wei’s Revolutionary Family Series – Invitation to Dinner was the second highest sale at $2.24 million, a world record price at auction for the Beijing-based artist who works in various mediums including video, installation, drawings, sculpture, and painting.

The 20^th Century Chinese Art sale brought in $24.6 million and sold 90% by lot. Works from Europe, the United States, and around Asian sold well and many were above their pre-sale estimates. The top lot was Potted Chrysanthemums by the Chinese modern art pioneer, Sanyu, which sold for $3.99 million.

The following day, the Fine Chinese Paintings sale totaled $53.2 million, the highest of the four art auctions. Offering many works from private collections, the total sale was more than double the pre-sale estimate and sold 97.2% by lot. The two top lots at the auction, Zhang Daqian’s Swiss Peaks; Calligraphy in Xingshu and Fu Baoshi’s Lady at the Pavillion, both sold for $2,974,278.

Last year China beat out the United States as the world’s largest art and antiques market and the autumn sales reflect that power swap. There was a bit of controversy when a 60-year-old Taiwanese Buddhist sister demanded that a $1.65 million sale be halted at the Fine Chinese Paintings auction. Sotheby’s canceled the sale of a painting by Zhang Daqian after Lu Chieh-chien requested a court hearing to prevent bidding on Riding in the Autumn Countryside (1950) which she claims was the property of her family and had been consigned without consent.

Fake Cultural Development Ltd., the design firm of dissident Chinese artist, Ai Wei Wei, will have its business license revoked by Chinese authorities. It is rumored that the district commercial affairs department will pull the license on the grounds that the company failed to re-register. The 55-year-old artist is a designer at the firm while his wife serves as the legal representative.

Ai Wei Wei has been under fire by the Chinese government since officials slammed him with a $2.4 million (15m yuan) tax evasion fine in 2011. His subsequent appeal was shut down in July and a Beijing court rejected his challenge to that decision last week. Ai claims that the firm was unable to properly renew their license because officials had confiscated the documents necessary to re-register during the tax evasion investigation.

Mr. Ai, China’s most famous contemporary artist, promises that the license fiasco will not affect his art. A critic of Communist Party rule, Ai Wei Wei caught the media’s attention when he was detained without explanation for nearly three months in 2011. Upon his release he was hit with the tax evasion claim and fine. Ai Wei Wei says an application has been submitted for a public hearing in regards to the revoked license.

Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art moved into the digital realm on Monday with MOCAtv, the Museum’s YouTube channel devoted solely to contemporary art. In order to up the number of subscribers, MoCA will throw in a free three-month membership to the physical institution for anyone who subscribes to the channel between now and October 21^st.

MOCAtv offers viewers a glimpse into the artistic process via six mini-channels including Artist Video Projects, The Artist’s Studio, Art in the Streets, Art + Music, MOCA U, and YouTube Curated by. MOCAtv debuted with 10 short videos from artists such as Alexis Smith, Mark Bradford, and Robbie Conal that explore the artists’ relationships to their work as well as footage of them in the midst of creating. The Museum also plans to air interviews connected to upcoming exhibitions.

Peppered with advertising content from YouTube’s parent company, Google, MoCA will receive a chunk of the channel’s advertising revenue after Google takes back what the Museum owes them for the development, programming, and operation of MoCAtv.

MoCA and its director, Jeffrey Deitch, have suffered many woes lately. Critics claim Deitch has destroyed the Museum’s integrity during his two-year reign, focusing more on glitz and celebrity than the art itself. This past June curator Paul Schimmel left the museum after 22 years and took all of the artists on MoCA’s board with him including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Barbara Kruger. While many suspected MoCA’s end was near, it doesn’t appear that Deitch or the Museum have given up just yet.

When notable street artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, passed a spiral notebook back and forth with his high school classmates, he surely didn’t anticipate the collaboration being at the center of a heated lawsuit. Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson, Basquiat’s adolescent cohorts, are suing Yale University’s Beinecke Library to have their contributions to the “SAMO© high-school notebook” recognized.

 Diaz and Dawson claim that Yale has glossed over their roles in creating the notebook that is bursting with puns, notes, doodles, and scribblings, and are passing it off as a priceless piece of Basquiat’s oeuvre. The duo also claimed that the book was stolen from Dawson and somehow ended up in Yale’s library. The respected institution reportedly paid as much as $40,000 for the notebook.

The lawsuit raises a number of questions concerning artist ephemera, a notoriously difficult thing to trace. The fact that Diaz and Dawson had a falling out with Basquiat after the artist rose to fame also makes navigating the case difficult.

Peter Brant, chairman and chief executive officer of the White Birch Paper Co., has fallen from billionaire status and is turning to his contemporary art collection to help recapitalize the family newsprint business. An early patron of Andy Warhol, Brant recently pledged 56 works to the lending arm of Sotheby’s including works by Warhol, Richard Prince, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Brant also pledged pieces to a unit of the Deutsche Bank AG and his former business partner, including a Warhol from the early 1960s that is said to be worth around $35 million.

Ranked as one of the largest contemporary art collectors in the United States, Brant joins a number of wealthy collectors who have started taking out loans backed artworks to fund their ventures. It is rumored that Brant used his art collection to provide some of the capital needed to buy White Birch out of bankruptcy in 2011.

According to an annual report, Sotheby’s Financial Services provides consignment loans secured by artworks that borrowers have agreed to sell through the auction house, permitting them to get some of the proceeds as much as a year ahead of time. The auction house also makes term loans on works that clients aren’t planning to sell in order to solidify relationships with borrowers that will hopefully lead to future consignments.

On September 14^th, star bond trader, Jeffrey Gundlach, returned to his Santa Monica home to find his art collection, 2010 Porsche Carrera, watches, and rare bottles of wine missing. Two weeks later, police recovered the contemporary art trove. Including works by Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns, and Richard Diebenkorn, the collection totaled nearly $10 million. Gundlach had offered a $1.7 million reward for the collection’s safe return.

Santa Monica police arrested two suspects after officers received a tip that the stolen art was being held at an automobile stereo shop in Pasadena. After raiding Al & Ed’s Autosound, police recovered all but one of Gundlach’s paintings. The store’s manager, Jay Jeffrey Nieto, 45, was arrested on suspicion of possessing stolen property. A second suspect, Wilmer Cadiz, 40, was arrested on the same charges at his home. The final painting was recovered at a residence in Glendale.

The near-record reward is believed to have played a key role in the collections’ recovery. However, it is not clear whether the reward money will be paid to the person who provided the tip that led to the arrest of Nieto and Cadiz. Gundlach had offered $1 million for the return of the Mondrian painting, Composition (A) En Rouge Et Blanc. The offer is said to be the highest ever reward for a single painting.

The Museum of Craft and Folk Art (MOCFA) will be closing its doors on December 1, 2012, the date marking the institution’s thirtieth anniversary. Founded in 1982 by craft artist and well-known sculptor, Gertrud Parker, MOCFA is the only folk art museum in Northern California.

After three decades, the Museum’s overseers felt that their mission, to bring recognition and legitimacy to craft and folk art in the contemporary art arena, had been achieved. The poor climate for smaller art institutions was undoubtedly a contributing factor.

Although the art market and leading museums now embraces contemporary artists who borrow from craft traditions, the innovative and daring venues that helped these artists get there are suffering. For instance, this past summer amid financial troubles, the American Folk Art Museum in New York was forced to sell its building on 53^rd Street to the Museum of Modern Art and move to a smaller venue.

The MOCFA has exhibited hundreds of artists and significant local and national craft and folk art collections over the years. The Museum is devoted to collaborating with artists on commissions of new work as well as promoting artist-led projects and public programs. MOCFA has worked ardently to provide a place for makers and artists to come together and create, discuss, and learn. The Museum’s final exhibition, Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers, will be on view from now until December 1.

Starting in the 1950s, Rudolph and Hannelore Schulhof began building a 20^th century art collection that has become the source of much speculation after the widowed Hannelore died this past February. Boasting nearly 350 works in total, Christie’s will auction 63 pieces from the collection including works by Joan Miro, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Indiana as part of its Impressionist and Modern Art Works sale and its Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in November. The sale is expected to bring in about $25 million. Christie’s will open the doors to the Schulhof’s Long Island mansion on Saturday, September 21 and Sunday, September 22 from 10AM to 5PM. Visitors will get a glimpse of an extraordinary, museum-quality collection. In fact, 100 of the works had previously been promised to three museums including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice as well as the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

The Sculhofs met in Vienna right before the start of World War II and married in Brussels in 1940. After traveling to the United States with extended family, Rudolph launched what would become a fine art reproduction company. When the couple first started collecting they tended to go after established names but were cajoled by the art dealer, Justin Thannhauser, to consider the art of their own time. As the Schulhof’s company had an office in Milan, they would frequent the city’s galleries as well as the Venice Biennale on their visits to Italy. It was on one of these trips that the Schulofs met the prominent American art collector, Peggy Guggenheim. A longtime friendship ensued, resulting in rapports with the artists themselves and the couple’s generous posthumous gift of 83 works to Guggenheim’s Venice institution. Another 200 artworks will remain in the Schulhof’s home and the family will decide on distribution in the future.

Known for his massive environmental works of art that interact with the natural landscape, the Bulgarian artist, Christo (b. 1935), has been ordered by a federal judge to halt the installation of his latest project until a lawsuit involving the work reaches a conclusion.

Created by Christo and his late wife, Jeanne-Claude (they worked collaboratively under the moniker Christo), Over the River involves hanging long stretches of translucent fabric for two weeks above various parts of the Arkansas River in Colorado. Girded by steel cables that will be anchored on either bank, the project will consume almost seven miles of the river.

The environmentalist group Rags Over the Arkansas River Inc. (ROAR) brought the lawsuit against Christo as they fear the project will affect local fisheries and natural habitats and disturb the locals. Although the Bureau of Land Management approved the project in 2011, Christo will serve as a co-defendant alongside the Bureau in order to uphold his and Jeanne-Claude’s vision.

The couple’s iconic body of work includes The Gates, which was installed in New York City’s Central Park in 2005, and Running Fence, a 24 mile-long artwork that ran through California’s Sonoma and Marin counties in 1976. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects often stirred up controversy based on their sheer scale, but it is also this otherworldliness that makes them visually unforgettable.

Eric Clapton is selling a painting by Gerhard Richter valued at $20 million -- almost 20 times what he paid for it in 2001.

The 1994 oil-on-canvas “Abstraktes Bild (809-4)” is one of a series of three Richter paintings bought by the U.K.-born rock guitarist for $3.4 million in total at Sotheby’s (BID) New York in November 2001. At the time, this was an auction record for a lot containing abstracts by the German artist.