March 26 – October 9, 2022

August 26 – October 9, 2022

Fashion's most dramatic colour signifies power, rebellion, death, sex and more

Including Marvel horror Werewolf by Night and the return of The White Lotus

A biopic of Emily Brontë and a romcom starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts

The chilling power of controversial documentary-horror Häxan, 100 years on

The 'fiction based on real events' is flawed

Move over mid-century modern, French Art Deco is the interiors trend to watch

The Power Plant, a leading contemporary art space on Toronto’s waterfront, has lost nearly its entire board of directors, with 24 out of 27 of its members resigning en masse earlier this week. The members who resigned have done so due to objections to the institution’s management by an affiliated nonprofit organization, the Harbourfront Centre, and have called for the institution to be held “accountable.”

The news, which was first reported by the Art Newspaper, comes less than a month after the Power Plant’s director and artistic director, Gaëtane Verna, departed to lead the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University. Verna had been director at the Power Plant for ten years.

In a resignation letter that has circulated on social media, 15 board members, including the Indigenous artist Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabe-kwe of Wasauksing First Nation) and actor Richard Lee, detailed their claims, specifically against the Harbourfront Centre, a separate nonprofit that appoints around half of the Power Plant’s board and manages the site of the contemporary art space’s current location.

The letter reads, “Due to Harbourfront’s actions and our current impasse, we have concluded we can no longer fulfill our commitments and duties owed to the Power Plant’s stakeholders, including government stakeholders, funders, artists, the arts community at large and individual supporters of the Power Plant. The independent directors of the Power Plant have no choice but to resign because of the actions taken by Harbourfront.”

According to the letter by the resigning board members, on June 2, shortly after the Power Plant hosted its 35th-anniversary gala, the Harbourfront Centre sought to terminate 12 of the Power Plant’s board members “and replace them with its own slate of directors from its own board or staff. This decision was made without consulting the Power Plant, nor was any compelling rationale provided.”

September 5 – October 23, 2022

September 4 – October 3, 2022

Works by Vincent van Gogh, Lucian Freud, Jasper Johns, Gustav Klimt, Georgia O’Keefe, and other major artists have been revealed to be part of the $1 billion collection of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen that will be auctioned at Christie’s this fall.

News of Allen’s estate coming to auction was first reported in August. The tech mogul, who died in 2018 at the age of 65, was notoriously discreet about his collection. Details of Allen’s art holdings and where the collection would eventually end have long been shrouded in mystery. Now, Christie’s has revealed the top works that will be sold as part of the tranche of 150 works from Allen’s collection in November.

In what is billed to be the highest valued single-owner collection sale to ever come to auction, the works will be sold across multiple sales in New York that will take place on November 9 and November 10. Proceeds from the auctions will go to philanthropic efforts led by a foundation Allen set up during his lifetime. The collection is being sold by the executor of Allen’s estate, his sister Jody Allen.

Among the valuable works that will be auctioned range from those made by Old Masters to modern and contemporary artists. Two works produced in 1888: Georges Seurat’s Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), a figurative scene in the artist’s signature Pointillist style, and an orchard landscape scene, titled Verger avec cyprès by Vincent van Gogh, are each estimated to fetch in excess of $100 million.

Gustav Klimt’s Birch Forest from 1903, a landscape scene featuring a wooded area covered in orange leaves that was once owned by Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, is another of the high-valued works, estimated at more than $90 million. Allen paid $40 million for it in 2006. Claude Monet’s lavender riverscape, Waterloo Bridge, soleil voile (1899–1903), is expected to bring in an excess of $60 million. Also on offer is Lucian Freud’s Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), from 1981–83, that carries an estimate in excess of $75 million.

New York City mourned when famed rock club CBGB closed in 2006. The legendary home of rock and roll, punk, and dance, CBGB was where Johnny Rotten went to cope with the breakup of the Sex Pistols and where the Police and Patti Smith began their careers, often singing for a mostly empty club. When the space was taken over by men’s clothing brand John Varvatos two years later, many New Yorkers saw it as emblematic of the endless gentrification of the East Village.

But rejoice!

Art gallery Spazio Amanatia will soon open at 313 Bowery in a reinvention its founders hope will bring the famed venue to its roots. CBGB’s space was originally home to art gallery 313 Gallery. Spazio Amanita, which already has a space in Florence, is inaugurating the New York space with “Place Holder” featuring works by emerging Italian painter Leonardo Meoni opening on September 29.

Amanita is the brain child of two art world heirs: Caio Twombly, grandson of Cy Twombly, and Tommaso Rositani Suckert, whose great-uncle, Curzio Malaparte, was a leading Italian artist, writer, and filmmmaker who became a war correspondant and diplomat during World War II. 

“I came to here to become a lawyer, but America brainwashed me to become an entrepreneur,” Rositani Suckert told ARTnews over coffee this week. 

The Guggenheim Museum in New York will no longer award the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize, the museum told ARTnews Friday. The closely-followed biennial award has elevated the profile of numerous artists and comes with a $100,000 monetary prize and often an exhibition at the museum.

The Hugo Boss Prize was established in 1996 by the Guggenheim Museum in partnership with the fashion brand Hugo Boss to honor “outstanding achievement in contemporary art, celebrating the work of remarkable artists whose practices are among the most innovative and influential of our time,” according to the museum’s website.

The award has been given to 13 artists since its founding and it has catapulted artists already at the top of the game to even further heights in the art world. The winners for the prize have been Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Marjetica Potrč (2000), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Tacita Dean (2006), Emily Jacir (2008), Hans-Peter Feldmann (2010), Danh Vo (2012), Paul Chan (2014), Anicka Yi (2016), Simone Leigh (2018), and Deana Lawson (2020). Lawson’s win, announced in October 2020, was considered major at the time as she was the first photographer to win the award.

Each of those artists was selected from a shortlist of other artists. Those rosters have been often star-studded, including artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Kevin Beasley, Cai Guo Qiang, Laurie Anderson, Maurizio Cattelan, Vito Acconci, Tino Sehgal, Damián Ortega, Patty Chang, Camille Henrot, Laura Owens, Wu Tsang, Teresa Margolles, and Ralph Lemon, who was announced as the winner of the Whitney Museum’s $100,000 Bucksbaum award earlier this week.

Just as with the artists, the jury for the prize over the years has been equally star-studded, with some of the world’s most influential curators making the final decision, including Bisi Silva, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Okwui Enwezor, Robert Rosenblum, Christopher Y. Lew, and Naomi Beckwith, the recently appointed chief curator of the Guggenheim. The museum’s former artistic director and chief curator Nancy Spector chaired the jury for each edition of the prize.

Deborah Roberts, a well-known collage artist based in Austin, Texas, is suing artist Lynthia Edwards, who is based in Birmingham, Alabama, and her Brooklyn gallery, Richard Beavers Gallery, as well as the gallery’s owner Richard Beavers, for copyright infringement. Roberts has alleged that Edwards deliberately copied Roberts’s artistic style to create work that would confuse potential buyers.

In the complaint, Roberts alleges that Edwards and her gallery engaged in “willful copyright infringement” related to the “unauthorized preparation, reproduction, public display, advertising, and public distribution of collages that are copied from and substantially and confusingly similar to several series of original Deborah Roberts collages.”

Roberts filed the complaint in August in United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, based on where Richard Beavers Gallery does business. Luke Nikas, the attorney for the defendants, filed a letter with Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall on September 22, notifying the court of its intention to file a motion to dismiss the suit, which Nikas described as “suffer[ing] from numerous legal deficiencies” in the letter.

In addition to seeking injunctive relief and damages in excess of $1 million, Roberts is also seeking that all works by Edwards (referred to in the suit at the “Infringing Collages”) be impounded and subsequently destroyed by the courts.

In a statement, Roberts’ attorney, Robert W. Clarida, said, “Deborah Roberts is undertaking a legal case regarding copyright infringement and related claims against Lynthia Edwards, Richard Beavers and Richard Beavers Gallery. This is now a matter for the US judicial system to determine.”

The Ukrainian Museum in New York announced Friday that Peter Doroshenko will be its new director.

Prior to his appointment at the Ukrainian Museum, Doroshenko served as the director of the Dallas Contemporary, a contemporary art museum in Dallas, Texas, for 11 years. Doroshenko has also served as director at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in the United Kingdom, the Institute of Visual Arts in Milwuakee, and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, Belgium.

Doroshenko also served as the founding president of the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, Ukraine, a private art museum founded in 2006 by Ukrainian-born billionaire Victor Pinchuk to showcase contemporary Ukrainian artists. Pinchuk, the second wealthiest person in Ukraine, appeared on ARTnews list of Top 200 Collectors from 2008 to 2015. The Pinchuk Art Center, which closed shortly after the Russian invasion in March, reopened in July with an exhibition of photographs documenting the war.

“With my steadfast commitment to the Ukrainian art scene since 1993, I have seen the progression of both artists and institutions throughout Ukraine. I am excited about the important history and great potential the Ukrainian Museum holds and how it can be a mirror to the rich cultural activities in Ukraine,” Doroshenko said in a statement.

He continued, “In these tragic and unsettling times—with the horrific war—the world now knows more about us, and our culture should continue to create a context for what it means to be Ukrainian today.”

‌We're happy to present documentation of documenta 15 in the Library!
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We had intended to feature a selection of shows on Contemporary Art Daily, but after visiting Kassel in person in August, we realized how interwoven the works are and decided it would be more appropriate to offer the archive as a whole. We hope you are able to get a sense of this extraordinarily complex exhibition.

Archaeologists in the Czech Republic have discovered a 7,000-year-old circular structure measuring approximately 180 feet in diameter, Radio Prague International reported earlier this month.

The structure, known as a roundel, dates to the Neolithic period and archaeologists believe it was constructed between 4900 B.C.E. and 4600 B.C.E. The roundel, and others like it in Europe, are considered to be the oldest massive structures in Europe.

For comparison, construction on Stonehenge is believed to started around 3100 B.C.E., while the famed Pyramids of Giza are thought to have been erected around 2600 B.C.E. at the earliest. That makes the roundel at least 1,000 years older than Stonehenge and several thousand years older than the pyramids.

This roundel was uncovered in Vinoř, a district on the outskirts of Prague. Around 200 roundels have been discovered across Europe, with 35 of them found in the Czech Republic.

Researchers are still working to understand what the purpose or significance the roundels held for Stone Age peoples.

8 min read

England’s oldest surviving municipal seal

In the sealed charter of 1191, Oxford donated the island of Midney or Medley (‘with all those things pertaining to it…’) to the Church and Canons of St Mary, Oseney. It was the final episode in a decades-long spat with the Priory of St Frideswide about the right to occupy the island, probably now known as Fiddler’s Island, and to charge rent for its use. The charter and the seal are on display in the Museum of Oxford.

It’s a small matter, but the significance of the charter, carrying the Common Seal of Oxford, is the assertion of municipal [1] identity and authority – and among the earliest of its kind that has survived (Exeter’s has been dated to around 1180).

A contentious path

In 1147 the citizens of Oxford had made the original gift to the friendly Abbey, conferring perpetual use of the land for an annual fee of half a mark [2]. The charter for this gift carried the personal seal of Alderman William de Chesney (who was also a baron and the City’s Governor) at a time when there was no common seal for the citizens of Oxford (though they describe themselves as a ‘commune’ – in the old sense of a formal and legal assembly of citizens).

However, in 1139, by command of King Stephen, the island had already been handed over to St Frideswide’s, as compensation for the loss of revenue after the forced removal of their market stalls from the centre of the town. Appeals to King Stephen and the Archbishop of Canterbury by the citizens of Oxford, various royal interventions, and some humiliating concessions by Oxford, resulted in 1191, in a royal writ returning Midney/Medley to St Frideswide’s, but allowing citizens to rent it for eight shillings a year [3] (an increase from the previous annual rent of 6s. 8d.). Those concessions were formalized in a charter, carrying the (now lost) common seal of the citizenry. The basis of the authority for this seal is not clear, but evidently St Frideswide’s accepted its legality.

To say Mexico City is a great place to experience art would be a substantial understatement. Not only has it produced one of the world’s most beloved painters, Frida Kahlo, but it has consistently stood at the forefront of various international art movements for more than a century.

But the city’s artistic standing — as well as that of Mexico in general — suffers from misapprehensions derived largely from the region’s rather notorious reputation. At best it’s often considered a destination that offers little more than beaches and booze and, at worst, it’s assumed to be too dangerous to visit, great art notwithstanding.

Having spent most of the the past six years living in Mexico City and the rest of the country, I can report that both assertions are inaccurate. While the country has undoubtedly suffered issues with crime, Mexico is safe for visitors, with Mexico City in particular undergoing rapid shifts in recent decades to become a safer and ever-more artistically vibrant city. The city overflows with an artistic abundance that stacks up against any other great art city of the world. To that end, here’s a selection of the city’s standout art experiences, from its most renowned museums to under-the-radar spots that only locals know to visit.