Displaying items by tag: David Hockney

Anniversary celebrations can easily turn vaguely sentimental, but the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is closing out its 50th year with a lineup of events more forward-looking than nostalgic. On November 7 the museum holds its annual Art + Film gala—hosted by trustee Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio—honoring artist James Turrell and filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu and featuring a performance by Sam Smith. Now in its fifth year, the event raises funds to increase film-related exhibitions on such notables as David Hockney, Christian Marclay, Tim Burton, and German Expressionist filmmakers.

Artists Antony Gormley and Grayson Perry, Art Fund director Stephen Reuchen and Innocent drinks co-founder Richard Reed were all gathered at Waterloo station yesterday morning to celebrate the launch of Art Everywhere 2014. First launched in 2013, this edition is bigger and better, the project will last six weeks. Mounted all over the UK, displaying 30,000 artworks on billboards and poster sites to share the nation’s favourite art. As the UK’s largest outdoor exhibition, the project aims at engaging with the country’s population: curated by different art professionals and creatives, 25 artworks out of 70 were selected by the public trough a vote gathering 38,000 participants via Facebook. The most popular works were Hockney’s My Parents (1977), Dora Carrington’s Far mat Watendlath (1921), Laura Knight’s Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring (1943) followed in 4th position Grayson Perry’s The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal (2012).  In London, Waterloo Station and Piccadilly Circus are the major spots where you will be able to admire these pieces.

When David Hockney started spending more time in his native Yorkshire after 2005, he began painting the landscape in all its seasons. These pictures have been acclaimed by critics, including me, as a burst of brilliance from a mature artist. Hockney is so skilled at drawing and painting that it did not seem like good news to hear that he had turned his attentions to the iPad. The artist has a lengthy history of embracing technology including the Polaroid camera, photocopier and fax machine. As of 2009, he started iPhone drawings, then iPad drawings and now paintings. His early iPad drawings and paintings were sketchy, a bit rudimentary, more in keeping with what one might expect from a high tech Etch-a-sketch. Still, his iArt found its way into his lavish retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last year and now the iPad paintings are here at L.A. Louver Gallery through August 29.

The biggest museum fundraising campaign in San Francisco history is nearing its $610 million goal two years before the opening of a new wing that will more than double the space for artworks by Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and David Hockney.

About $570 million, or 94 percent, has been raised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its 235,000-square-foot (21,800-square-meter) expansion and to add $245 million to the museum’s endowment. The $305 million wing designed by the Snohetta architecture firm is rising behind SFMOMA’s current home, opened two decades ago in the technology-heavy South of Market area, or SOMA.

The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, announced that it has received a significant gift from the estate of May Gruber, a legendary New Hampshire businesswoman and civic leader. Included in the donation are works by Rembrandt, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Pierre Bonnard, James McNeill Whistler, David Hockney, and Jim Hodges. many of the works are currently on view in the museum’s European, Modern, and Contemporary art galleries.

Gruber, the former head of Pandora Industries, a Manchester institution that created iconic sweaters and knitwear in the city from 1940 until 1983, helped found Child Health Services and the Manchester Community Music School. Gruber and her first husband, Saul Sidore, began collecting art in the 1960s based on advice from Charles Buckley, then director of the Currier.

Susan Strickler, the director and CEO of the Currier, said, “May Gruber felt strongly about giving back to the community that helped her company to grow. Her tastes were eclectic and wide-ranging, as is evidenced by the works she gave to the Currier. Because of her bequest, the region has an even more exceptional collection of art to cherish.”

Founded in 1929, the Currier Museum of Art’s collection includes European and American paintings, decorative arts, photographs, and sculpture.

A documentary about the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) has been acquired for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics. Tim’s Vermeer, which was directed by Teller of the illusionist duo Penn & Teller, features Tim Jenison, a Texas-based inventor who explores how Vermeer created his shockingly photo-realistic paintings a century before photography existed.

At one point during his ten-year investigation, Jenison traveled to Delft, Holland, where Vermeer worked, to meet with the British artist David Hockney, who had also questioned how Vermeer and his contemporaries created their breathtakingly realistic paintings. Using 17^th century technology such as lenses and mirrors, Jenison eventually figured out the technique used by the Dutch master “supporting a theory as extraordinary as what he discovers,” Sony Pictures Classics said in a news release.

Sony Pictures Classics will release Tim’s Vermeer in 2014.

Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary evening art auction garnered over $127 million on February 14, 2013, the highest total ever for a February sale of its kind at Christie’s London. Out of the 72 lots presented, 65 were sold; the auction total cruised past the pre-sale estimate of $86.8 million to $120.8 million.

The top lot of the night was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s (1960-1988) text-laden acrylic, oilstick, and paper collage on canvas titled Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) (1983), which sold for $14.5 million. French collector John Sayegh-Belchatowski purchased the work, which carried a third-party guarantee. In 2012, Museum Security was pulled from a Christie’s New York auction after a legal dispute between an owner, the British aristocrat Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill, and dealers, Gerard Faggionato and Alberto Mugrabi, broke out. The case was settled out of court and the work was re-offered at Christie’s last night.

Other highlights from the blockbuster sale include Gerhard Richter’s (b. 1932) Abstraktes Bild (889-14) (2004), which sold to a telephone bidder for $13.2 million; Francis Bacon’s (1902-1992) Man in Blue VI (1954), which was also snapped up by a telephone bidder for $7.8 million; and David Hockney’s (b. 1937) figurative painting Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head from Thebes (1963), which went for $5.5 million.

Basquiat, Bacon, and Richter garnered major sales at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s, who’s contemporary sale the night before brought $116 million, proving that the category has not lost its edge in the art market.

Taking over two galleries at New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum, Dürer to de Kooning: 100 Master Drawings from Munich, spans the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The show includes rarely seem works by old masters such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Raphael, and Rubens as well as nineteenth century sheets by van Gogh and contemporary works by Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, and Georg Baselitz. The drawings, which are on loan from the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, have never before been on view in the United States.

Comprised of a complex of buildings on Madison Avenue, the Morgan began as the private library of the financier Pierpont Morgan. In 1924, eleven years after Pierpont’s death his son, J.P. Morgan, Jr., turned the library into a public institution.

100 Masters will be on view through January 6, 2013.

It is the finest collection of modern art anywhere outside Europe and the US, boasting works by Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Edvard Munch, René Magritte and Mark Rothko.

But the pieces have been stacked in the basement of Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art for more than 30 years, gathering dust in storage. Censors in Iran classed some as un-Islamic, pornographic or too gay, and they have never been shown in public. Others have been displayed only once or twice.

But now a number of the collection's paintings are on show for the first time in Tehran as part of the museum's Pop Art & Op Art exhibition, featuring works by Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Victor Vasarely, Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns.

"Many of the works in the exhibition are shown for the first time," Hasan Noferesti, the museum's director for art programmes, told the Mehr news agency. "The exhibition aims to show the evolution of these artistic movements."

More than 100 pieces from the museum's remarkable collection are on display, according to Mehr, along with a series of works from Mexico that have been dedicated to the museum in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution and the 200th anniversary of the country's independence.

James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Larry Rivers and RB Kitaj are among other artists whose works are in the exhibition, which runs until mid-August.

Iran's unique hidden treasure was bought before the Islamic revolution, under the supervision of Farah Pahlavi, the former queen of Iran, who fled the country with the late shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

The 38-year reign of the shah, self-proclaimed kings of kings, came to an end after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran receiving a hero's welcome and founded the Islamic republic.

The collection includes Pollock's Mural on Indian Red Ground, considered to be one of his most important works and estimated to be worth more than $250m, as well as important pieces by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler and Marcel Duchamp.

There are even pieces by artists whom the former empress met in person, including the Russian-French painter Marc Chagall and the English sculptor Henry Moore. The collection is thought to be worth more than $2.5bn.