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Foundwork is pleased to announce the open call for the 2024 Foundwork Artist Prize, its annual award for emerging and mid-career artists working in any media. The honoree will receive an unrestricted $10,000 grant and remote studio visits with each of the esteemed jurors. The honoree and three shortlisted artists will also be invited for interviews as part of the Foundwork Dialogues program.
2024 Jury: Rachel Uffner, founder of Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; Olivia Aherne, Curator at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Monsieur Zohore; multidisciplinary artist based between Richmond, New York, and Abidjan; Mohamed Almusibli, Director and Curator of Kunsthalle Basel; and Lorraine Kiang, cofounder of Kiang Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong.
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Farhad Moshiri, one of Iran’s most influential contemporary artists, died on July 16 at 61. The Third Line gallery, the Dubai gallery that represented him, confirmed his death.
“Our journey with Moshiri began in 2006 with New Paintings by Farhad Moshiri at our first space in the UAE. Since then, we’ve cherished witnessing his ever-evolving practice,” the gallery wrote on Instagram. “Our thoughts are with his family. Farhad Moshiri will be deeply missed, remembered as both a friend and artist. May his soul rest in eternal peace.”
Moshir was renowned for his marriage of Persian visual traditions and Pop art sensibilities. American consumerism and advertising, pop music and comics mingled with Persian embroidery and calligraphy. His work sparkled, literally: beads, glitter, and faux gems often embellished his figuration, subverting subtle indictment with a precious levity.
“He not only established the first wave of contemporary art post 1979, but also became one of the rare artists who radically, and successfully, brought all of the great craftsmanship, iconography and storytelling inherent in Persian culture and history into his contemporary practice,” Sotheby’s director for Middle Eastern and contemporary art Ashkan Baghestani told the National. “The breadth, diversity and scope of his output in this sense was unparalleled.”
Moshiri was born in 1963 in Shiraz, Iran, to a family that owned cinemas. Speaking to Artnet News in 2017, he recounted a childhood watching American films. The cinema was left amid the Iranian Revolution, when his family immigrated to Los Angeles, where he earned a fine arts degree from California Institute of the Arts in 1984. His explorations in installation, video, and painting coalesced around his great influences: Pop art and conceptualism. (He was sometimes called “the Middle East’s Andy Warhol,” a cliched moniker that has been applied in many variations to artists of the Global South.)
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If you’ve ever wondered how noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo—famously depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa—lived, look no further than a historic 700-year-old villa outside Florence, Italy, that recently hit the market.
The estate, now on sale for $19.6 million, is located on 66 acres among the Scandicci countryside. The villa was constructed around 1300 and by 1498 was owned by the Giocondo family, not long before Leonardo painted Lisa. It eventually passed to the Antinori family, from which it derives its name as the Villa Antinori di Monte Aguglioni.
Complete with four floors, the villa is roughly 43,000 square feet, including 14 bedrooms and 15 full baths. An entrance through an iron gate leads to a cypress-lined path into the garden and service entrance. It also boasts an entrance hall, five lounges, a dining room, a library, and an at-home gym, as well as also staff quarters, an elevator, a second floor terrace, and an antique iron veranda.
Though there have been renovations over the centuries, the residence still maintains many period details, among them a polygonally planned private chapel which serves as a “clear example of seventeenth-century religious architecture,” according to the listing.
Additional buildings on the property include a caretaker’s house, an orangery, a greenhouse, and varied agricultural buildings.
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