Art gallery

On Tuesday, Phillips’s “New Now” sale in London generated a total of £3.8 million ($5.1 million) across 172 lots, landing at the low end of the pre-sale estimate of £3.7 million–£5.5 million (with premium) and realizing a 76.6 percent sell-through rate. The total was a disappointment when measured against the hopes of the estimates but not against the history of these sales. The £3.8 million marks the house’s highest total achieved for its “New Now” iteration in London.

The “New Now” sales showcase Phillips’s prowess in creating markets for emerging artists. With speculative buying returning to the forefront of collecting (as opposed to a flight to blue-chip quality) the series in London and New York continues to gradually expand. Last year’s equivalent sale brought in a total of £3.7 million, though that 2019 sale’s top lot was a work by an established mid-career artist, William Kentridge; it realized the … Read the rest

Robert Lynch, the president and CEO of Americans for the Arts (AFTA), a prominent arts advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., will take a paid leave of absence amid allegations that he and his colleagues fostered a hostile workplace environment. Lynch has led the organization, which facilitates a series of highly regarded awards and helps initiate fundraising and research, for 35 years.

Lynch is currently in the Biden-Harris transition team’s arts and humanities group. ARTnews has reached out to the Biden-Harris transition team to learn whether Lynch’s leave impacts his position there. Previously, the Washington Post reported that Lynch was rumored to be under consideration for chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, though he has said he is not actively seeking the position. (The NEA’s current chair Mary Anne Carter was appointed in 2019 to a four-year term.)

Multiple former AFTA employees made their allegations about Lynch … Read the rest

Christie’s has announced a 25 percent drop in annual sales overall, but has forecasted a total of £987 million ($1.2 billion) in annual private sales for the year of 2020.

Total sales for the house are projected at £3.4 billion–£3.5 billion ($4.6–$4.7 billion), according to Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti’s statement in a press briefing. “It was expected since we entered in the Covid-19 situation and is in line with our forecast around mid-year,” said Cerutti. Referring to a decline of around 25 percent compared to 2019, he added, “The biggest part of this drop is with live auctions.”

Conversely, the annual private sale result surpasses the houses’s 2019 total by 56 percent and marks the highest historic annual private sale total. Sixty-two percent of that total was generated during the second half of the year.

Cerutti confirmed the London-based house sold 3 works for prices above $100 million and 12 … Read the rest

A former tobacco factory will soon host a major art space from one of Greece’s top collectors. NEON, a foundation run by Dimitris Daskalopoulos, will work together with the Hellenic Parliament to help turn the Athens structure into a site for presenting contemporary art exhibitions, making it one of the most notable spaces of its kind in the Greek capital. That venue will open in 2021, to tie in with the 200th anniversary of Greece’s liberation from the Ottoman Empire.

NEON and Daskalopoulos, who is a mainstay on ARTnews‘s Top 200 Collectors list, will fund all of the costs associated with the revitalization project, which are set to total up to €1 million (or around $1.21 million). The art space housed within the structure will operate alongside the Hellenic Parliament Library and Printing House, which has been based there since 2009.

First up at the new art … Read the rest

Tatsuo Ikeda, who created intricate, otherworldly drawings informed by his experiences during World War II, died in November at age 92. The news was announced by Ikeda’s gallery, Fergus McCaffrey, which has locations in New York, Tokyo, and St. Barth.

Ikeda’s early drawings from the early 1950s, which are rendered in black-and-white and muted colors, reflected the artist’s anti-war perspective. They depict strange, threatening creatures alluding to the atrocities of war and the corrupting powers of nationalism.

Born in Saga Prefecture, Japan, in 1928, the artist was selected as a kamikaze pilot in 1943, though he was not sent on a suicide flight before the end of World War II. Ikeda subsequently moved to Tokyo to study at Tama Art University, where he was associated with Taro Okamoto and Kiyoteru Hanada’s Avant-garde Art Study Group.

The United States military’s use of beaches in the Japanese village of Uchinada as … Read the rest

Some artists train their eye on the small things of life. Teresita Fernández isn’t one of them. Her art, she said, is driven by a desire to know more about the human condition and the ways in which the past continues to impact the present. “I’m curious always just for myself: Where am I? What is this place? So many of us don’t even know our own history,” she said.

Over the course of her career, Fernández, who was born in Miami to Cuban parents in exile, has taken it upon herself to learn her own cultural lineage, focusing on the Caribbean and its intellectuals like Cuban poet and philosopher José Martí, Jamaican novelist Sylvia Wynter, Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, and Martiniquan-born philosopher Édouard Glissant. “It’s an ongoing research project to learn about who I am,” she said, “as well as the underlying Indigenous erasure around the Caribbean.”