Art gallery

NOVEMBER 27, 12:47 PM 

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It’s Black Friday, the start of the holiday shopping season! Many US retailers have marked down selected wares, including art and craft tools for kids. Any parents who have been living with children during quarantine know how important it is to have art materials on hand; to help you parse the offerings, we’ll be tracking some of the best deals on children’s art supplies, from watercolor pencils to cameras.

We will be updating this page today and over Black Friday weekend, so check in with us often. A word of advice: Move fast, as many of these products will sell out quickly. (Prices current at time of publication.)

BLICK ART MATERIALS

Blick—hit hard by the pandemic—isn’t having an official Black Friday sale. But they are … Read the rest

For nearly 10 years, the Warsaw-based artist Ewa Juszkiewicz has created paintings in style of 18th- and 19th-century European portraiture with a twist—her subjects’ faces are obscured. The faces of the women she paints are always covered, whether by arrangements of plants or fungi, intricate hairstyles, tightly wrapped fabric, or other means. On the occasion of the artist’s exhibition of new works at Gagosian’s Park & 75 space on New York’s Upper East Side, which runs through January 4 and is viewable through the gallery’s front windows, ARTnews interviewed Juszkiewicz about how she engages with and upends art historical conventions, the role contemporary fashion plays in her oeuvre, and more.

ARTnews: What first drew you to take portraiture—specifically historical European portraiture—as the inspiration for your own work? 

Juszkiewicz: I have been interested in portraiture since starting out on my artistic path. And because of this, going back into history … Read the rest

As the world came to a halt in the spring, I was reading two books simultaneously: How We Became Posthuman, a seminal work from 1999 by N. Katherine Hayles about transformation in the digital age, and Achille Mbembe’s Brutalisme, a philosophical volume on our tumultuous times that had just been published a few weeks prior. I opened both looking for material to back up some points in an essay I was writing. But I quickly realized that, taken together, they pointed to something crucial to an understanding of the workings of French institutions and how, in the art world, those institutions are positioning themselves in terms of exclusion, inclusion, and secession.

As France went into lockdown and resorted to a frenetic consumption of news, specific themes started to surface around questions related to what it means to be human and the long-debated concept of French universalism. … Read the rest

The seller of an allegedly forged Frans Hals portrait will have to reimburse Sotheby’s $5.37 million after a London appeal court decided to uphold a ruling issued less than two weeks ago, the Art Newspaper reports.

The investment company Fairlight Art Ventures, owned by American hedge fund manager and art collector David Kowitz, and London’s Mark Weiss Gallery bought what they believed was an authentic Hals from French art dealer and collector Giuliano Ruffini for €3 million in 2010. The team sold the painting at Sotheby’s for $10.75 million to Seattle collector Richard Hedreen in a 2011 private sale; Sotheby’s reportedly took a 5 percent commission.

Five years after the painting was bought, the work was deemed a forgery. In 2016 the auction house refunded Hedreen in full, and contacted Fairlight and Weiss with a request for them to repay their share. The two initially argued that they … Read the rest

Monday, November 23

Met Appoints First Chief Diversity Officer
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has appointed Lavita McMath Turner has been named the institution’s first chief diversity officer. McMath Turner joins the Met from Stella & Charles Guttman Community College in New York, where she served as assistant dean for equity, inclusion, and experiential learning. In her new role, she will oversee the implementation of the Met’s anti-racism and diversity plan, which includes new approaches to hiring and curatorial programming. She will begin at the Met in January. Daniel Weiss, CEO and president of the Met, said in a statement, “Turner has an exceptional record of success promoting equity throughout her career in cultural and higher education institutions, and she will be a key partner in helping The Met evolve into a more inclusive place to work, visit, and learn.”

MOCA Toronto Receives $1 M. Gift for … Read the rest

Last month, a prized David Hockney portrait from the holdings of the financially strapped London Royal Opera House brought in £12.8 million ($16.9 million) when it sold at Christie’s. Some mourned the fact that the work would now disappear from public view, but it now seems those concerns were misplaced.

A new Art Newspaper report reveals that the buyer of Hockney’s Portrait of Sir David Webster (1971) is David Ross, the cofounder of Carphone Warehouse—and the chair of the Royal Opera House’s board of trustees. According to the report, he will return the work to the opera house once the purchase is finalized. He also has plans to loan it to the reopening exhibition of London’s National Portrait Gallery, where Ross is a trustee, in 2023.

At the Christie’s London contemporary auction, which generated $65 million total, there were only two bidders competing for the work: its third-party guarantor, … Read the rest