The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Friday, December 15, 2023



 
British Museum details extent of stolen and damaged items

Chidi Nwaubani, who set up the artist collective Looty, with a display of Benin bronzes at the British Museum in London, July 25 2023. Looty creates virtual replicas of looted treasures, digitally reclaiming them from Western museums to give people from former colonies a chance to learn about their stolen heritage. (Tom Jamieson/The New York Times)

by Alex Marshall


LONDON.- Four months after the British Museum fired a curator suspected of stealing gems, jewelry and semiprecious stones, the London institution on Tuesday released further information about the fate of the missing items. Officials assume that around 1,500 artifacts were stolen or are otherwise missing from its Greek and Roman stores, the museum said in a news release. Another 350 items have been damaged, the statement added, including by gold having been removed. Those gold parts were “likely to be unrecoverable,” the museum said, and were probably sold to scrap metal merchants. Another 140 items that remain in the museum’s possession “have been damaged by tool marks,” the news release added. Of the missing 1,500 items, just over 350 had been returned, a British Museum spokesperson said in an interview. Another 300 items had been identified but not recovered. ... More


The Best Photos of the Day
Best Photos of the Day
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) opened Tacita Dean, its major summer exhibition, featuring the work of one of the most important living artists of our times.






Anselm Reyle's 'Solo Disorder' opens in Antwerp   Tammy Nguyen, maximalist at play   Major Caspar David Friedrich anniversary exhibition to show iconic works by Friedrich and new responses in art


Anselm Reyle, Mystic Silver, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. (detail)

ANTWERP.- TICK TACK is opening “Disorder”, a total take-over by the world-renowned contemporary German artist Anselm Reyle. Reyle is known for incorporating the vocabulary of European Modernism into his expansive repertoire of large-scale paintings, neon installations, and sculptures. Recurring materials include colored foils from shop window displays, mirrors, automotive lacquer and discarded everyday garbage found in urban areas. With TICK TACK's brutalist monument and a grand glass facade as his bold canvas, Reyle is about to present a metamorphic experience — reshaping the raw essence of the space into an unparalleled total installation with both a day and night scenario. Disorder challenges the boundaries between ‘high art’ and ‘low culture’, inviting you to enter an explosive visual scenery featuring a curated selection of works spanning from 2008 to the present forms an institutional overview. ... More
 

Tammy Nguyen in her studio in Easton, Conn., on July 19, 2023, while making paintings for her ICA Boston show. (Natalie Ivis/The New York Times)

by Siddhartha Mitter


NEW YORK, NY.- Artist Tammy Nguyen was visiting a small island in Indonesia a few years back when she came across the Jesus statues. There were 14 of them, decaying in the jungle on Galang Island, the site of a camp for refugees who fled Vietnam by boat — at great peril — after the Communist victory in 1975. Nguyen’s parents had transited there before she was born. It was not a subject they brought up. The camp, she realized, had been a large settlement with dwellings, schools and other facilities. But it was the statues of Jesus on the Stations of the Cross that got her thinking. They communicated so much history — how the French brought Roman Catholicism to Vietnam; how the war and its aftermath upended lives and scattered refugees — and how Nature had the last word, overwhelming them in vegetation. For ... More
 

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1817. Oil on canvas, 94.8 x 74.8 cm On permanent loan from the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen. © SHK / Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk Photo: Elke Walford.

BERLIN.- The Hamburger Kunsthalle is marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich (1774 Greifswald–1840 Dresden) with a celebratory exhibition. CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH: Art for a New Age. It is the biggest review of work by the exceptional Romantic painter for many years. It centres on a themed retrospective with more than 60 paintings, among them many major iconic works, and about 100 drawings. Also featured are selected works by Friedrich’s colleagues, notably Carl Blechen, Carl Gustav Carus, Johan Christian Dahl, August Heinrich and Georg Friedrich Kersting. The relationship between people and nature, which found novel expression in Friedrich’s landscapes, is a key thematic strand. His treatment of this subject was an essential factor, during ... More


Nara Roesler announces the representation of Rodrigo Andrade   Museum of Vancouver releases interactive online catalogue about history of beer culture in Vancouver   Group exhibition highlighting the work of seven young artists from US and Europe opens at Pace


Rodrigo Andrade at his studio in São Paulo, 2023. Photo: Flavio Freire.

NEW YORK, NY.- Nara Roesler announced the representation of artist Rodrigo Andrade (São Paulo, 1962), who will present his first exhibition at the gallery's Rio headquarters in November 2024. Andrade began his career at the end of the 1970s, a time in which he trained at Sérgio Fingermann's studio for printmaking. From 1982, alongside Fabio Miguez, Paulo Monteiro, Nuno Ramos, and Carlito Carvalhosa, he joined the collective studio Casa 7. During this period, his work, like that of many painters of this generation, was marked by a neo-expressionist influence. The group took part in the 18th São Paulo Biennial, which became notorious for highlighting the revival of painting. In the following decades, his work moved between radical abstractions and different strands of figuration. While in the early 1990s his research brought to painting the dark universe of the engraver Oswaldo Goeldi, from the late 1990s onwards, the artist began directing his w ... More
 

Stanley Park Brewery beer bottle, 1896-1905 Museum of Vancouver Collection: H990.320.1.

VANCOUVER .- The explosion of craft breweries in Vancouver over the past decade is not the first wave of breweries to operate in the city. From the 1880s until the 1910s, a number of small breweries produced beer for Vancouver’s thirsty population— which is explored in Home Brew, the Museum of Vancouver 's online catalogue on the history of Vancouver's beer culture. This catalogue is not an exhaustive history of these breweries, but a brief consideration of the many factors—human, ecological, geographic, etc.—that continually influence our evolving relationship with this complicated brew. Though beer is something enjoyed leisurely, it is not a passive thing. Beer influences tastes, revitalizes urban spaces, and inspires social and sustainable innovation. It is a driving force. This catalogue features many pieces from the Museum of Vancouver collection, all accessible virtually through our on ... More
 

Katja Farin Lost Keys, 2023. Oil on canvas 60" × 48". © Katja Farin, courtesy of the artist and In Lieu Gallery.

HONG KONG.- Pace Gallery is now opening All Walks of Life, a group exhibition highlighting the work of seven young artists from the United States and Europe, at its Hong Kong gallery. The show will feature new and recent paintings by Anthony Cudahy, Katja Farin, Aubrey Levinthal, Laurent Proux, Daisy Sheff, Sarah Slappey, and Fabian Treiber. Organized by independent curator William Zhao, All Walks of Life meditates on the nuances and subjectivities of daily life in the face of globalization. The vibrant works in the show—which range from figurations to landscapes to semi-abstract, lyrical tableaus—explore what it means to be an individual, both bodily and spiritually, in the present moment. Offering a focused look at contemporary painting, this exhibition centers on collisions of uncanniness and familiarity in experiences of people, places, and things. Included in All Walks of Life are two new paintings by Farin ... More



Clars Auction Gallery starting two day event today from fine art to Chinese robes   New Australian archive preserving the histories of Western Sydney hiphop   Victorian Radicals: Birmingham's world-famous Pre-Raphaelite art collection to go on display in home city


Bob (Robert Louis) Thompson (American, 1937–1966), “Portrait of a Lady,” 1959, oil on canvas, 24" x 20". Estimate: $15,000–$20,000.

OAKLAND, CA.- Starting today Clars Auction Gallery is holding a two-day sale of a selection of works from a variety of subjects. On day 1 Winter Furniture, Art and Jewelry launch the event, and on day 2 Fine Asian Art & European Décor Auction. Furniture and Decorative Arts: The auction will showcase a diverse range of items, including Mayan style carved vessels, Native American pottery, Patriano Barela carved sculptures and Kachina figures. Additionally, English and German sterling silver, gold and silver coins, fine porcelain dinner services, and glass stemware and vases from renowned makers and artisans such as Moser, St. Louis, Michael Nourot, and Marialyn Hawke will be featured. The auction will also present a variety of antique decorative arts, furniture, and rugs, as well as a contemporary furniture collection from an exclusive St. Helena winery. To round out the holiday ... More
 

Sharline 'Spice' Bezzina

SYDNEY, AU.- Powerhouse Parramatta, Blacktown Arts and Vyva Entertainment in partnership with Western Sydney’s HipHop communities today announce the establishment of the Western Sydney HipHop Archive. It acts as a meeting ground and a space where community, industry and education converge to create unique opportunities for the growth and preservation of HipHop culture, professional development and industry sustainability. The Western Sydney HipHop Archive is a major new initiative within Powerhouse Parramatta’s Foundational Cultural Partnership with Blacktown Arts and Blacktown City Council. Powerhouse Parramatta and Blacktown City Council have recently formed an innovative five-year partnership that will see both cultural institutions co-invest into the growth of the creative industries to ensure new pathways for both emerging and established artists and communities across Western Sydney. Vyva Entertainment is run by Vyvienne Abla, ... More
 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Donna Della Finestra [The Lady of Pity], 1881. Unfinished oil painting.Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CC0


BIRMINGHAM.- Birmingham’s world-famous collection of Pre-Raphaelite art will go on display in the city for the first time in more than five years in a special homecoming exhibition.
The Gas Hall, part of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, will reopen on February 10, 2024, for ‘Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement’. Three generations of British artists, designers and makers revolutionised the visual arts in the second half of the 19th century. The Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and his circle and the men and women of the Arts and Crafts movement transformed art and design. Victorian Radicals gives visitors the chance to discover the story of the Pre-Raphaelites – Britain’s first modern art movement – and their influence on artists and makers well into the 20th century. Selected ... More


Field of Light at Freedom Plaza to officially open to the public today   High-grade early American cents from collector Walter J. Husak on tap at Heritage's US Coins Auction   Now open: Ulrike Müller's Monument to My Paper Body at Ludwig Forum Aachen


Bruce Field of Light, Uluru.

NEW YORK, NY.- Field of Light at Freedom Plaza, a highly anticipated public art installation by internationally acclaimed artist Bruce Munro, officially opens to the public today. Made possible by the Soloviev Foundation, Field of Light at Freedom Plaza welcomes guests of all ages free of charge and present meaningful opportunities for community engagement and educational programming. Encompassing more than six-acres from 38th to 41st Street east of First Avenue, Field of Light at Freedom Plaza feature an array of 17,000 lowlight, fiber-optic stemmed spheres. Guests will be fully immersed in the installation as they are invited to walk the winding path framed by the city’s iconic skyline and the East River waterfront. Field of Light will be open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings from 5pm to 9pm. Visitors are encouraged to visit fieldoflightnyc.com to schedule their complimentary timed ticket, and to explore volunteer opportuni ... More
 

1793 S-1 R4 CHAIN AMERI. AU58 PCGS, CAC Approved.

DALLAS, TX.- When in doubt, under-promise and over-deliver. That likely wasn’t the intent of renowned collector Walter J. Husak, but it ended up being the result. Having already assembled a nearly complete collection of large cents by Sheldon numbers, he was well on his way to completing a second Sheldon-numbered collection when he died in December 2022. He had told his friends that his second collection would focus largely on attractive middle-grade coins ... but he outdid himself, saying, “I just can’t help myself.” He assembled another collection of exceptional, high-grade early cents that will cross the auction block January 4 in Heritage’s Collection of Walter J. Husak and The Liberty Cap Foundation US Coins Signature® Auction - Orlando FUN. “Walter Husak already assembled an extraordinary collection, which we sold in 2008,” says Todd Imhof, Executive Vice President of Heritage Auctions. “So when he embarke ... More
 

Ulrike Müller, 2023. Photo: Mareike Tocha.

AACHEN.- The point of departure for the New York-based artist Ulrike Müller’s exhibition Monument to My Paper Body was the invitation to conceive a site-specific intervention for the two walls that face each other in the Light Tower of Ludwig Forum Aachen, each nine meters in width and fourteen meters in height. Her murals Paper Body (ghost), and Paper Body (pointer), both 2023, are temporary monumentalizations of two small-scale collages, which, enlarged to the scale of the architecture, were transferred to the wall as abstract colored forms, partly applied using a sponge technique. A selection of collages, a group of enamel pendants, the Miniatures, 2014, a fabric pattern developed for the exhibition, and the architectural model of the museum together set in motion a complex play with scale relationships and translations between materials which continues in the adjoining rooms. Monument to My Paper Body presents the variety of paint ... More




A Drink With a Living Legend | Winemaker Lamberto Frescobaldi | Sotheby's



More News

Most recent paintings by Canadian artist Corran Brownlee being presented in first solo exhibition at GR gallery
NEW YORK, NY.- GR gallery is opening ‘FORGE’, the first solo presentation of Canadian artist Corran Brownlee in New York and with the gallery. The exhibition showcases 15 recently completed paintings, including 5 from last year which provided the genesis of the new pieces. Ranging from medium to large-scale, and using oil, acrylic and inks, Brownlee is investigating moments of profound change –internal and external, private or public – that affect all of us. This event marks a new departure for Brownlee, as is always the case with his practice: growth is an essential part of his process. Until now, he has used only black and ... More

Michael Blakemore, single-season double Tony winner for directing, dies at 95
NEW YORK, NY.- Michael Blakemore, an acclaimed stage director in Britain and the only one in Broadway history to win Tony Awards for both best play and best musical in the same season, died Sunday. He was 95. His death was announced by his agents Tuesday. It did not say where he died. Blakemore was nominated seven times for Tonys, notably for his productions of Peter Nichols’ “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” in 1968 and Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off” in 1983. But it was the flair and care he brought to a revival of “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter show about a troupe of players presenting a musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and to a later Frayn play, “Copenhagen,” that won him the unique double of best direction of a musical and best direction of a play in 2000. (“Kiss Me, Kate” garnered five Tonys ... More

Hettie Inniss joins GRIMM
AMSTERDAM.- GRIMM announced the international representation of British Caribbean artist Hettie Inniss (b. 1999, Hackney, London, UK), whose work responds to multi-sensory influences and bodily experiences, capturing and preserving a moment inflected by scent, light, sound and memory. A recent graduate from the Painting MA course at the Royal College of Art, London (UK), Inniss was awarded the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship in 2022. GRIMM will host Inniss’ first solo exhibition at the London gallery in May 2024. Inniss is an artist whose practice questions the stability of self. Her distinctive canvases seek to create spaces with their own physics, their own truths and their own multidimensional perspectives. Inniss’ vibrant colour palette allows her to articulate memory and the act of remembering – capturing the afterburn ... More

Second-finest Charles II 'Petition' Crown makes its case at Heritage's NYINC Platinum World & Ancient Coins Event
DALLAS, TX.- A rare coin’s beauty sometimes can overshadow its significance in numismatic history. But a magnificent 17th-century British coin that will be available January 8 in Heritage’s NYINC Platinum Session World & Ancient Coins Signature® Auction - New York stands among the elite in both criteria. The second-highest graded “Petition” Crown by Thomas Simon can be traced back to one of Britain’s most tumultuous eras, was struck just after the English Civil War and is among the most coveted types in silver. The Charles II silver Pattern “Petition” Crown 1663 MS62 NGC was engraved by Thomas Simon, one of the most celebrated medalists and engravers of 17th-century England. The “Petition” ... More

'Buena Vista Social Club' review: Bringing a classic record to life
NEW YORK, NY.- The boleros, sons, danzóns and other popular Cuban song forms captured on the hit 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club” — and in a 1999 Wim Wenders documentary about the musicians who made it — are a marvel: diabolically catchy, lively yet poetic, mesmerizingly complex beneath their seeming simplicity. Those are qualities that few jukebox musicals have going for them. Usually, if the borrowed tunes are catchy, they’re prosaic. Or if poetic then dreary. Or if complex then irrelevant. But the full-of-riches jukebox musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater, avoids all those problems. Particularly in its rendition of the “Buena Vista” songbook — including eight numbers from the original album and seven from later iterations — the production, directed by Saheem Ali, enhances ... More

Mort Engelberg, producer of hit films and presidential campaigns, dies at 86
NEW YORK, NY.- Mort Engelberg, a movie producer behind such hits as “Smokey and the Bandit” and “The Big Easy,” who drew on his Hollywood expertise to stage-manage appearances for politicians, notably a bus tour for Bill Clinton and Al Gore following the 1992 Democratic convention, died Saturday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 86. His brother, Steven Engelberg, said the cause was lung cancer. Mort Engelberg toggled between film and political advance work, setting up campaign trips meant to produce photo-ready moments and drawing on the tropes of road movies to help invent the modern presidential bus tour. It featured the gregarious Clinton and his sidekick Gore on a journey through Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and other heartland states. “Mort came in with basically the same formulation as the Hollywood buddy ... More

A lost Raymond Chandler work is found. It's a poem.
NEW YORK, NY.- He was famous for his cynical, hard-drinking gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, and lines like: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” But detective novelist Raymond Chandler also tried his hand at the more refined art of poetry, and one of his previously unpublished poems will appear this week in The Strand, a crime and mystery magazine. The poem, titled “Requiem,” was written around 1955, and it reveals “a more sentimental, more mystical Raymond Chandler than we’re used to,” said Andrew Gulli, managing editor of The Strand. “We know the wisecracking Philip Marlowe, but Chandler is more complex than we expected.” The poem had been kept in a shoe box before the Chandler family donated it, along with other papers, to the Bodleian Library at the University ... More

Guillaume Bresson's new series of eight paintings subjects of exhibition at Galerie Nathalie Obadia
PARIS.- Galerie Nathalie Obadia is currently hosting Guillaume Bresson’s new series of eight paintings. This is his fifth exhibition at the gallery since 2010. Considered one of the leading figures in figurative painting, the artist who now lives in New York, is known for his resolutely contemporary scenes, reinvesting a mode of representation derived from classical painting, which had been cast aside until the beginning of the 21st century. The artist thus paints a contemporary history painting leveraging a mode of reconstruction of reality through the prism of his own time. An architect of choreographed mises en scènes, Guillaume Bresson uses body language and movement as keys to reading his paintings. Guillaume Bresson’s system for making his works remains unchanged: he begins with preparatory photography sessions with models ... More

Who or what is the enigmatic 'girlchild'?
LONDON.- Sarah Kravitz is now showing girlchild, a solo exhibition by Warsaw-based painter Helena Stiasny curated by Elaine ML Tam. Who or what is the enigmatic 'girlchild’? She is an issue of feminism, the victim of misogyny, an instance of culture, the fiction of women, the dysphoria of gender. However, she eludes a fixed archetype or recognizable identity, as the girlchild defies definition, expressing herself through an infinite array of forms and emotions.What is unequivocal is her impossible youth, a defining characteristic that accentuates the term's excessiveness and redundancy. Transformed into consumable fantasy, the girlchild serves as a poignant reflection of insatiable desire and unfulfilled yearning, wherein her innocence becomes a twisted manifestation of perversion. ... More


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Flashback
On a day like today, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer was born
December 15, 1907. Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (December 15, 1907 - December 5, 2012) - known as Oscar Niemeyer - was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York.

  
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