Displaying items by tag: stone

Four rare artworks believed to have been stolen are being returned to India by an Ohio art museum.

Director Brian Kennedy recently announced that the Toledo Museum of Art made arrangements with the Embassy of India to return the objects, including an 11th-century bronze sculpture depicting the deity Ganesh and a carved stone.

Jeff Koons is ramping up operations at his high-tech stone workshop in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, where his sculptures are carved almost entirely by machines. This suggests that the artist may be developing new bodies of work in the medium. Since opening Antiquity Stone in 2012, Koons has more than tripled its production capacity; it now has 12 computer-operated stone-cutting machines, two robots and around 30 employees. The facility, which exists solely to fabricate Koons’s work, now bills itself as “the most advanced stone fabrication operation in the world”, according to a job advertisement it posted in January, seeking a supervisor for its Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines.

How would a guy make a quilt?" Joel Otterson asked himself when he began his foray into the craft. "He would make it out of concrete and stone," he answered. And so he did.

Otterson's "quilts" consist of interlinking blocks of concrete, stone and ceramics that are meant to be walked and danced on rather than slept under. One is 19 by 22 feet and made from six tons of concrete and 500 dinner plates cut into 4,000 pieces. There's even a "crazy quilt" made from the scraps of his concrete projects.

Otterson is one of eight artists involved in "Man-Made: Contemporary Male Quilters," opening Jan. 25 at the Craft & Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles and curated by CAFAM Executive Director Suzanne Isken.

A flawless fancy vivid pink diamond sold for a record $17.7 million in Hong Kong late Tuesday, Sotheby's said.

The auction house said the internally flawless 8.41-carat stone had been expected to go under the hammer for up to $15.5 million.

Quek Chin Yeow, deputy chairman of Sotheby's Asia, said the pear-shaped stone had "attracted keen competition before fetching a wonderful price of HK$137.88 million (US$17.77 million) and setting a world auction record for a fancy vivid pink diamond."

First, there was light. Then, a night sky filled with stars and a luminescent moon. Soon after? Art.

Since ancient times, communities have used art to relay stories and make sense of the world around them — particularly when interpreting the heavens and giving form to perceived deities ruling the forces of nature.

A new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "African Cosmos: Stellar Arts," showcases 40 rare objects in gold, silver, bronze, stone, beads and wood that collectively illustrate the history of African cultural astronomy, from ancient Egypt to the present day.

Padua’s celebrated Scrovegni Chapel, which houses exceptional frescoes by trecento painter and architect Giotto, was struck by a bolt of lightning on August 9.

The iron cross on the facade was seriously damaged and subsequently removed. The entire electrical system was temporarily knocked offline. The Gazetta del Sud also reports the damage of outside stones.

According to Il Secolo XIX, the news was broken almost three weeks after the event by the local association “the Amissi Piovego.” The group raised the alarm before any statement from city hall was released.

A Chinese organization has appealed to Japan's Emperor Akihito to return a 1,300 year-old stele taken from China over a century ago, state media reported.

The Honglujing Stele was "looted by Japanese soldiers early last century from northeastern China", the official Xinhua news agency said, and now sits in "virtual seclusion" in Tokyo's Imperial Palace.

The stone monument, 1.8 metres (six feet) tall and three metres wide, shows that the first king of the northeast Asian Bohai kingdom was given his title by a Chinese emperor from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the report said.

The Israel Antiquities Authority announced that police have arrested a group of suspects accused of stealing ancient Jewish burial caskets from a cave near Jerusalem. The thieves were caught with 11 decorative stone ossuaries, or ancient coffins, that the Jewish people used for burial in the Second Temple period, 2,000 years ago. Some of the ossuaries still contain the bones of the deceased.

The suspects, from the West Bank, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, were arrested on Friday, March 28, as they met prospective Jewish clients at the Hizma checkpoint north of Jerusalem. The ossuaries, which are covered in Hebrew inscriptions and traces of paint, were seized by investigators with the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery.

The Israel Antiquities Authority released a statement saying, “There is no doubt that the ossuaries were recently looted from a magnificent burial cave in Jerusalem.” Officials did not reveal how many suspects were arrested or what charges they may face. 

The Boxer at Rest, an ancient bronze sculpture from the Hellenistic period, is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is the first time the work has been exhibited outside of Europe as it typically resides at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome. The sculpture is on view in the Met’s Greek and Roman Galleries as part of the initiative 2013 – Year of Italian Culture in the United States, which is spearheaded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

 The Boxer at Rest was discovered on the Quirinal Hill of Rome in 1885 and displayed alongside another Hellenistic bronze in the Rotunda of the Baths of Diocletian. The sculpture, which features a boxer in repose, is believes to be from somewhere between 350 B.C. and 50 B.C. It was made section-by-section and later welded together; it features copper inlays to depict the boxer’s wounds, drops of blood, and lips. The ancient bronze statue sits atop a modern stone base that is a close approximation of what the ancient base looked like.

The Boxer at Rest is one of very few original Greek bronze sculptures preserved from antiquity. The work will be on view at the Met through July 15, 2013.

A flawless D-color diamond weighing 101.73 carats will be offered as part of Christie’s International’s jewelry auction at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues in Geneva, Switzerland on May 15, 2013. The pear-shaped gem, which is the largest colorless diamond of such high quality to appear at auction, is estimated to garner about $20 million. An anonymous client is selling the rare stone that was recently cut from a rough diamond weighing 236 carats found at the Jwaneng mine in Botswana. Workers spent 21 months polishing the jewel.

While colorless stones tend to be less desirable than their colored counterparts, the record price for a colorless stone at auction is $21.5 million, which was set by the 76.02 carat cushion-shaped Archduke Joseph Diamond that sold at Christie’s in Geneva in November 2012. The diamond heading to Christie’s in May is not only the largest colorless stone but also a chemically pure Type IIA diamond, which accounts for less than 2% of the world’s diamond production.

The buyer of the pear-shaped diamond will have the honor of naming the extraordinary jewel, securing its identity among the most desirable diamonds in the world.