Displaying items by tag: Art Gallery

Graduates of Goldsmiths, University of London who have become household names in contemporary art, including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, Yinka Shonibare and Michael Craig-Martin, are donating works to raise funds for a new art gallery at their old art school. Sam Taylor-Johnson, Julian Opie and Steve McQueen, whose "Twelve Years a Slave" won an Oscar last year, have also given pieces.

The works, including a spot painting and a swirl painting by Hirst, a bronze by Lucas, and one of Gormley’s cast iron standing men, are expected to raise most of the £2.8 million cost of the gallery at a Christie’s auction next month.

The Swiss art gallery named as the sole heir of reclusive German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt is to accept his bequest of masterpieces which include works looted by the Nazis from Jews, a Swiss paper reported on Sunday.

Gurlitt, who died in May aged 81, had secretly stored hundreds of works by the likes of Chagall and Picasso at his Munich apartment and a house in nearby Salzburg, Austria.

The collection, worth an estimated 1 billion euros (0.78 billion pounds), contains an as yet undetermined number of works taken by the Nazis from their Jewish owners during World War Two.

A Scottsdale art gallery sold an Andy Warhol "Red Shoes" painting it was storing for a couple despite being told it could not sell the piece, the couple claims in court.

Amy Koler and Stephen Meyer sued American Fine Art Editions, Phillip Koss, Jacqueline Carroll, and Jeff Dippold in Maricopa County Court, alleging conversion and breach of fiduciary duty.

Koler and Meyer say they bought the Warhol from American Fine Art Editions in 2005 for $65,000.

Private equity titan Leon Black and his wife Debra, a Broadway producer, melanoma survivor and leading force behind the Melanoma Research Alliance, are buying 19 E. 70th St., the former Knoedler & Company art gallery, which shuttered following a major art fraud scandal in 2009 that is still under investigation.

London developer Christian Candy bought the 30-foot-wide, 17,000-square-foot, 104-year-old Italian Renaissance-style townhouse for $35 million in 2013.

This is not good news: The Museum of Contemporary Art has lent a major painting from its permanent collection to a newly opened exhibition at a prominent Culver City art gallery, raising serious questions of conflict of interest.

A museum loan to a commercial enterprise is highly unusual, since the arrangement is typically irrelevant to a museum’s educational mission. Given MOCA’s recent history of troubling mercantile involvements, the gallery loan is disheartening.

The Walters Art Museum announced Monday that it's been awarded $913,000 in grants to support renovations and exhibitions at the museum, including a special show on Islamic art scheduled to open next year.

That sum is made up of six individual donations — four from government agencies and two from private foundations — Walters spokeswoman Mona Rock said in a news release.

The bulk of the money, $500,000 will be used to support "Pearls on a String: Art and Relationship in the Islamic World," which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2015.

BRIC, a Brooklyn-based not-for-profit organization that presents contemporary art, performing arts and community media programs, will open a 40,000-square-foot complex in the borough on October 3, 2013. The $35 million project transformed the historic Strand Theatre into a contemporary art gallery, a performance space with seating for 240-400 patrons, a public access TV studio, a glass-blowing studio and more.

BRIC’s new building will also include the BRIC House Fireworks Residency, an initiative aimed at facilitating collaborative projects by artists working in different media; the program is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund.The exhibition Housewarming: Notions of Home from the Center of the Universe will inaugurate the building’s brand new, 3,000-square-foot gallery. The group show will present works that explore the concept of home.

Leslie G. Schultz, BRIC’s president, said in a statement, “Since 1979, BRIC has used many wonderful spaces in Brooklyn to present artistically excellent and highly accessible programming. The essence of this building’s design – an inviting public cultural space and a welcoming home for the artists in Brooklyn – is entirely consistent with, and indeed was inspired by, the mission of our organization to serve artists and the public in a welcoming and informal environment.”

After three years at the helm of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), former New York art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, is expected to resign as director. Deitch announced his intention to leave the institution to MOCA's trustees and board. He is currently in the middle of a five-year contract with the museum.

Prior to joining MOCA in 2010, Deitch ran the Deitch Project, a massively successful and pioneering contemporary art gallery in Manhattan. He also served on the authentication committee of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of Deitch’s close friends.

Deitch’s tenure at MOCA has been plagued by criticism. After firing longtime chief curator Paul Schimmel in 2012, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger resigned from the museum’s board, leaving it void of artist representation. While MOCA was in poor financial standing when Deitch came on board, the museum continued to fall into financial despair during his time as director. The museum is just starting to regain its footing after fundraising efforts by board members garnered over $75 million in donations.

A meeting is schedule for MOCA’s board on Wednesday, July 24, 2013. A search committee is expected to form shortly after.

Online retail giant Amazon is expected to launch a virtual art gallery later this year. The website is planning on offering over 1,000 objects from at least 125 galleries. It has been rumored that the online seller of books, electronics and apparel already has over 100 galleries on board. The Seattle-based company has been approaching a litany of galleries across the U.S. in recent months.

The virtual art gallery will follow a similar model as Amazon Wine, which debuted last fall and works with over 400 vineyards and winemakers across the country. Amazon will take a commission from all sales on its art site instead of charging galleries a monthly service fee. Commissions will range from 5% to 15% based on the work’s sale price.

Online art galleries are not unheard of in today’s web-dominated world. Costco currently runs a virtual art gallery that offers prints by artists such as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Marc Chagall (1887-1985) as well as original works by lesser-known artists.    

With years of music experience under his belt, Tommy Mottola, the former head of Sony Music Entertainment and a mentor to such talent as Carly Simon, Mariah Carey (his second wife) and Jennifer Lopez, has ventured into new terrain.

This weekend he opened an art gallery on Main Street in a space that formerly housed an Hermès boutique. Gallery Valentine, named after a supposedly prestigious Manhattan gallery, is a joint venture with Mr. Mottola's friend, Ryan Ross, who has run Arcature Fine Art on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach for a decade or so.

At its opening Saturday, Valentine had a slightly unfocused cross section of new work and blue-chip art on its walls, priced $5,500 to $3.5 million. Several paintings belonged to Mr. Mottola, including a Warhol he isn't sure he's ready to sell, given to him by the artist. There were pieces by de Kooning, Alex Katz, Leger, Rauschenberg and Sam Francis as well as a few prominently hung paintings by Mel Bochner. One read "Blah, blah, blah," another read "Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch." These are two things that people like to say and/or do in the Hamptons, but, in a conversation just before the opening Saturday, Mr. Mottola wasn't complaining.

This is an exciting time. Mr. Mottola's wife, the Latin pop star Thalia, gave birth to a son last weekend, and he was eagerly showing off an Anne Geddes-like photo on his iPhone of 7-day-old Matthew wrapped in a blue bow. "I saw the picture and I said to her, 'What are you doing to my son?'" Mr. Mottola laughed.

Mr. Mottola said that the idea for the gallery came together in late spring when he and Mr. Ross were "hanging out in Palm Beach."

"There's never been a serious gallery out here in the Hamptons," said Mr. Mottola, who explained that in the past several years he's grown "more serious about art collecting." "It's funny, because all the dealers live out here. I know all of them and I'm a people person. I thought, with my knowledge and experience, I'd like to try my hand at it."

The pair hope the gallery will be a year-round institution with branches in Miami and Manhattan, though initially, when Mr. Mottola found the location, he signed a six-month lease. "I won't say it was a whim, but I think it's a seed for something great." The gallery director is Alexandra Fairweather, the stepdaughter of artist John Chamberlain, a friend of Mr. Mottola's. Several pieces by Mr. Chamberlain are for sale at Valentine.

Mr. Mottola said his background in music will help him in the new arena. "The music business, as far as the sale of physical music, is at the end," he said. "People's appetite for music, however, is probably more insatiable than ever before, but they just don't want to pay for it." The art business, "will never be at the end. That's the beauty of this," he continued, gesturing to the walls. "You can't download this." He said that the skills he learned as a mentor can only help.