Displaying items by tag: mark grotjahn

Sotheby’s has announced that its upcoming spring auctions of Contemporary Art in New York will feature a selection of works donated by artists in support of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. While the list of donations has not yet been finalized, approximately 35 works will be offered in Sotheby’s evening and day sales on May 12, 2015, and May 13, 2015. Proceeds from the auction will benefit MOCA’s endowment.

All of the artists who have donated works to the sale, including John Baldessari, Mark Bradford, Mark Grotjahn, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Ed Ruscha, have strong ties to MOCA.

This past November, Francis Bacon’s triptych portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, setting an artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Less than a month later, the massive contemporary masterpiece turned up on loan, not at a modern-day art mecca like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (as Edvard Munch’s The Scream did), but on the opposite end of the US, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The painting, which remained on view there through early April, was loaned by its new owner Elaine Wynn, ex-wife of casino mogul and top collector Steve Wynn. Mrs. Wynn, a resident of Nevada, was reportedly entitled to save more than $10 million in taxes by first parking the painting at the Portland Art Museum before bringing it to her home state.

 Financier, philanthropist, and art collector Eli Broad is suing a German sub-contractor that was hired to create a unique, latticed facade for his forthcoming flagship museum. The Broad Collection, or The Broad for short, was slated to open in downtown Los Angeles by the end of 2014, but officials announced in February that the date had been pushed to 2015 due to construction delays. The $140-million institution will house approximately 2,000 contemporary artworks, including pieces by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Mark Grotjahn, from the collection of Broad and his wife, Edythe.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, May 30 in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Seele Inc., an architectural engineering and fabrication firm based near Munich, of numerous infractions, including breach of contract, fraud, deceit, and unfair competition. Seele was brought on by Broad and the museum’s general contractor Matt Construction in late 2011 to create the institution’s “veil” -- a honeycomb-esque facade that wraps around the building’s exterior and is expected to be one of The Broad’s most distinctive features. Seele has helmed numerous projects in the U.S., including creating striking exteriors for the Seattle Central Library and the New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters.

Three of the four artists who resigned from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ board in 2012 are returning in support of the institution’s new director, Philippe Vergne. John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, and Catherine Opie will be joined by the board’s newest member, the Los Angeles-based artist Mark Grotjahn. Ed Ruscha, who also resigned in 2012, is currently serving on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s board. Ruscha did join Baldessari, Kruger, and Opie as a volunteer on the search committee that MOCA formed to find a successor to Jeffrey Deitch, the former New York City art dealer who announced his resignation from his post as the museum’s director in July 2013.

Deitch’s tenure at MOCA was plagued by criticism. After firing longtime chief curator Paul Schimmel in 2012, Baldessari, Kruger, Opie, and Ruscha resigned from the board, leaving it void of artist representation. While the museum was in poor financial standing when Deitch came on board, the museum continued to fall into financial despair during his time as director.

Vergne, who comes to MOCA from the Dia Art Foundation in New York, has an extensive background in museum administration both in the U.S. and Europe. When the museum announced Vergne’s appointment back in January, Baldessari, Kruger, Opie, and Ruscha all expressed enthusiasm for the hire. In addition, his appointment came on the heels of the museum’s announcement that it had reached its goal of a $100 million endowment, most of which was raised in the past year.

Vergne said, “For me it is extremely important to have artists represented on the board. MOCA was founded by artists, patrons and civic leaders as the artist’s museum, and its incredible collection and record of groundbreaking exhibitions pay testament to that. It is a privilege to join MOCA with our new and returning trustees at the moment when MOCA is stronger than ever before.”

MOCA has included artists on its board since 1980, a year after the museum’s founding.