Displaying items by tag: sculpture

The first thing you see in “Sturtevant: Double Trouble,” the Museum of Modern Art’s taut and feisty retrospective of the American artist Elaine Sturtevant, is work by artists far better known than Ms. Sturtevant herself.

Right at the start is the familiar 1972 photographic portrait of the German Conceptualist Joseph Beuys, in his porkpie hat and flak jacket, striding toward the camera. A bit farther on you’ll find Jasper Johns’s 1955 “Target With Four Faces,” a combination of painting, collage and sculpture and a MoMA treasure. Near it is Eliot Elisofon’s classic 1952 time-lapse photograph of Marcel Duchamp descending a staircase.

Hollywood has had HIV and Darfur, fashion has breast cancer, and music now once again has Live Aid, but the art world – as moneyed as any of them – has never had a charity cause to call its own.

Enter Project Perpetual, who on 9 November auctioned off a specially commissioned sculpture by pop artist Jeff Koons for $4m, benefitting the United Nations Foundation. The piece, based on Picasso’s "La Soupe" and titled "Gazing Ball (Charity)," stands six feet tall and is slung with donated Hermès handbags. The animated Phillips auctioneer Simon de Pury pointed out that Koons had made three of each of the 17 pieces in his "Gazing Ball" series – but that this one was in a unique single edition.

The lone bidder who spent $101 million at Sotheby’s last Tuesday night for Giacometti’s “Chariot,’’ a 1950 sculpture of a spindly woman riding atop a chariot, was the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, experts with knowledge of the sale said Monday. The sculpture, which came from the collection of Alexander Goulandris, a member of the Greek shipping family, is considered among the artist’s finest.

“It’s one of the great 20th-century sculptures,’’ said William Acquavella, the Manhattan art dealer.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s marble sculpture "Adam" by Tullio Lombardo (ca. 1455–1532) will return to public view on November 11, following a tragic accident in 2002 and an unprecedented 12-year conservation project. It is the first life-sized nude marble statue since antiquity and the most important Italian Renaissance sculpture in North America. Tullio carved Adam in the early 1490s for the monumental tomb of doge Andrea Vendramin, now in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, and it is the only signed sculpture from that iconic monument. The sculpture and its restoration will be the focus of Tullio Lombardo’s "Adam: A Masterpiece Restored," the inaugural installation in the Museum’s new Venetian Sculpture Gallery.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum, said: “We are proud to return this great Tullio sculpture to public view in a beautiful new gallery. Our extraordinary conservators collaborated with a team of experts over 12 years to pursue this extremely challenging work. The results of their care and innovation are stunning.”

The V&A have announced the re-launch of  the newly refurbished Italian sculpture Cast Court. Measuring 24 meters in height, the two galleries house some of the V&A’s largest objects and are among the most visited galleries in the museum.

Collecting plaster cast reproductions and electrotypes reached the height of popularity in the mid to late 19th-century when few people could afford to travel abroad. The South Kensington Museum (as the V&A was then known) was at the forefront of this enthusiasm, enabling visitors to admire and study faithful reproductions of important European monuments and works of art.

American artist Jeff Koons opened his first major solo exhibition in Asia at Gagosian Hong Kong on November 6.

Deftly interposed between his major career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York earlier this summer and another large-scale exhibition at the Pompidou Center scheduled to open later this month, “Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis” showcases precision-machined bronze sculptures from his ongoing series that are inspired by inflatable figures of the popular comic book character, transplanted into a three-dimensional format.

The colonial-era statue of a woman caressing a gazelle has mysteriously disappeared from a busy roundabout in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, "Art Daily" reports.

The historic bronze was removed in the early hours of Tuesday by “unidentified men who were probably offended by its nudity for religious reasons," a witness told AFP. Although the authors of the removal remain unknown, many locals blame Islamist militias.

This is not the first attack directed towards the iconic statue, which was sculpted by an Italian artist in the early 1930s, when Libya was an Italian colony.

Works by American artist Frank Stella are currently being featured in three exhibitions organized by leading galleries. Dominique Lévy is inaugurating her London outpost with the show “Local History: Castellani, Judd, Stella,” which is complemented by a partner exhibition of the same title at her Manhattan gallery. Meanwhile, Marianne Boesky Gallery is hosting a show of Stella’s sculptures in New York. Stella is co-represented by Lévy and Boesky.

Stella, who has been a dominant figure in abstract painting since the early 1960s, is best known for his Minimalist works and post-painterly abstractions. He gained immediate recognition in 1959, thanks to his “Black Paintings” -- a series of precisely-striped canvases that were created according to a predetermined, circumscribed system conceived by the artist.

The Portland Museum of Art placed the Robert Indiana sculpture “Seven” in front of the museum Monday morning. The steel sculpture, which announces the museum’s presence at 7 Congress Square, will be celebrated at 5:30 p.m. Friday as part of the city’s First Friday Art Walk.

Indiana, 86, lives on Vinalhaven off Rockland. “This is a public announcement that 7 Congress Square will always be a place for art,” said chief curator Jessica May. She called Indiana “one of the state’s most beloved artists,” and said placing art outside the museum is part of a larger effort to engage with the public whenever possible.

For its third edition (though the first to take place in March), Art Basel Hong Kong has racked up 231 galleries hailing from 37 countries — over half of them with spaces in Asia and Asia-Pacific. New additions include Paris’s kamel mennour, Zurich’s Mai 36 Galerie, Berlin’s Mehdi Chouakri, and New York’s Andrea Rosen Gallery, among others. Running from March 15 to 17, 2015, the fair will consist of five sections: “Galleries,” featuring 177 of the exhibitors; “Insights,” dedicated to 34 galleries with Asia-Pacific spaces; “Discoveries,” featuring one- and two-person emerging artist showcases from 20 galleries; “Encounters,” for large-scale sculpture; and the “Film” section, which debuted last year, and will be curated again by Li Zhenhua.