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The Headlines

DEALER KAVI GUPTA’S LEGAL TROUBLES. Chicago dealer Kavi Gupta, who has championed many artists featured in major international exhibitions, is facing lawsuits and claims of mismanagement, reports Brian Boucher for Artnet News. Artist Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the US at the Venice Biennale, filed a suit against Gupta’s gallery in 2023 alleging unpaid sales proceeds to the tune of nearly $640,000. The gallery responded at the time that those funds were spent on production expenses, per their contract with the artist. Then, dealer Thomas McCormick also sued Gupta in June 2024, alleging the misuse of funds from a refinanced loan on their co-owned building at Gupta’s main location on West Washington Blvd, in addition to falling behind on rent. Gupta’s lawyer has denied those allegations. But several people familiar with the gallery’s operations told Artnet News anonymously that the gallery and Gupta’s troubles go far deeper and the alleged practices far more widespread than previously known.

IN MEMORIAM. The artist Raquel Rabinovich, known for her land art and monochromatic paintings, has died at age 95. Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, she studied in Europe before moving to the US, where Rabinovich became an active member of the Hudson Valley artistic and Buddhist communities, reports Hyperallergic and Artnet News. “To me, when I see something—say, the world around me, art, or people—I realize that’s not all there is,” she said in 2021. “There is something behind, something beyond. Because it’s not obvious or visible, I feel inclined to explore it and discover what is there.” Her work is in collections such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet observers say she has not received deserved recognition. “She leaves behind a rich legacy as a visual artist built over more than seven decades of rigorous practice,” stated the Raquel Rabinovich Art Trust, which also announced her death after a short battle with cancer.

The Digest

The National Museum in Damascus has reopened in Syria, following the fall of President Bashar Assad. The museum, which houses ancient archaeological artifacts, closed a month ago as a preventative measure against looting during the rebel takeover of the city. “Thank God, we did not suffer any serious damage, but there was more fear than damage,” said Rima Khawan, chief curator of the museum. [The Associated Press]

For the final weekend of the National Gallery in London’s blockbuster Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibit, visitors will get to soak in the Post-Impressionist’s paintings all night long. The museum will be open 24 hours, with the extra time slot starting from 9pm on Jan. 17 until 10 a.m. on Jan. 18. What could be more romantic? [The Guardian]

From literary debuts to the return of big names

Hephaestus Analytical, a London-based tech company that authenticates artworks by using a combination of AI, provenance research, and advanced chemical analysis, has acquired scientific art analysis firm ArtDiscovery.

ArtDiscovery’s pigment database, spectral libraries, and team of conservators will enable Hephaestus “to unlock new possibilities in art authentication, making it more precise, accessible, and impactful than ever,” the merged companies’ CEO, Denis Moiseev, told ARTnews.

He said the merger will lead to the “world’s highest evidentiary standards in art authentication.”

Founded in 2009, ArtDiscovery has worked with the FBI, Sotheby’s, museums, and art dealers to verify artworks.

“Joining Hephaestus feels like we are catching up with the digital world,” Nica Gutman Rieppi, ArtDiscovery’s managing director, said in a statement. “Working with Hephaestus does not so much alter our rigorous application of scientific standards as it accelerates them. We are now able to research across our vast provenance, imaging and pigment libraries, conduct chemical analyses, and provide our customers with definitive answers, all in less time and with even greater accuracy than before.”

Hephaestus, which is also headquartered in New York, specializes in the Russian avant-garde, an umbrella term for modernism that flourished in other Soviet nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Moiseev demonstrated the company’s authentication technology as part of the 2024 BBC documentary The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection. He previously told ARTnews that more than 95 percent of the Russian avant-garde paintings brought to him are fake.

“The market is so saturated with forgeries that it’s impossible not to talk about it,” Moiseev said. “We believe our technology can clean up the market. It is a solvable problem. The issue is that there’s an adversarial component to the Russian avant-garde market—there are so-called experts who are authenticating or contributing to the authentication—of forgeries. There are people who say things are real and actually, they’re not. This is what makes this market so complicated, but it really shouldn’t be.”

Hephaestus is also developing blockchain technology to increase security surrounding authentications and creating products for art finance and securitization.

“Our commitment to eliminating forgery from the art markets led us to develop our proprietary AI protocols [Pictology] and blockchain-secured records,” Moiseev added. “When presented with the opportunity to integrate this service with the decades-long research on pigments maintained by ArtDiscovery, we realized this was a win-win situation for the art world. We are redefining the standard of certainty for art collectors, galleries, museums, and even law enforcement worldwide.”

Mark Dion, an artist who has long worked with archives as a motif, recently established one of his own. The work, titled Mrs. Christopher’s House (2024), is one of four houses comprising the Troy Hill Art Houses in Pittsburgh; each residence constitutes a single work of art. Dion’s name is bringing new attention to the project that, since 2013, has remained discreet, with little to visually distinguish the “art houses” from other homes in the neighborhood.

Inside, Dion finds a permanent home in which to gather a number of his signature strategies, especially his engagement with the ordering and arrangement of collections ranging from the natural historical to the truly eclectic. Almost all the displays can be traced to past exhibitions. An attic filled with hundreds of small boxes, available to the visitor to open and peruse, harkens back to Memory Box (2015). A 2012 installation in New York’s Explorer’s Club becomes Pittsburgh’s own “Extinction Club”—visitors are made members upon entering the small room, where they are invited to sit down in the clubby chairs among half-smoked cigars and illustrations of extinct species papering the walls. A taxidermied bear was brought from Dion’s work at Storm King Art Center (2019).

Even an office is labeled with the title of one of his volumes, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism And Its Legacy (2005). Here and throughout Dion’s work, the real and the fictional blur. Taxonomic charts on the walls borrow the aesthetic of science but are populated with terms from the history of art and absurd twists: a bird is labeled with the names of 20th-century avant-garde movements, a shark is juxtaposed with a rolling pin and a cola bottle.

In the project’s self-referentiality, the way it archives Dion’s own career, Mrs. Christopher’s House echoes the concerns of another Troy Hill Art House, that of the Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski. In Kunzhaus, Kuśmirowski combines excerpts from his exhibition history with the history of the house’s past inhabitants, namely the Kunz family who rented rooms in the building beginning in the late 19th century. (Dion’s own project is likewise named after his house’s most well-known inhabitant).

Kuśmirowski’s practice engages Cold War legacies and retrofuturism, two aesthetics that today have a decidedly nostalgic feel at home in this domestic environment. Think a basement filled with transistor radiators and darkroom equipment, and a kitchen-cum-science lab, with text-based computer systems installed on countertops and coils of recording tape retrofitted into an electric stove. The ties to history here are evocative but thin, loose gestures at lost pasts. The same can be said for Darkhouse, Lighthouse, in which Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis reflect on a far more distant past—the Mesoproterozoic-era inland sea where the city of Pittsburgh now stands.

Gurr Johns, an art advisory and appraisal firm with offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, has appointed Maarten ten Holder to the newly-created role of Chief Executive Officer of its North American division as it places a bigger focus on clients in the US.

Based in New York, ten Holder will oversee the company’s US advisory services, reporting to Gurr Johns’s co-founder and executive chairman, Harry Smith, who is based in London. He joins a full-time staff of around 25 people, excluding outside consultants.

In a recent interview with ARTnews, Smith said that the US holds the most financial opportunity compared to other parts of the world. “We never want to underestimate the wealth of America. It is so much bigger than everywhere else, where they’re barely on the same planet, and they’re solid.”

Gurr Johns values around $12 billion worth of art and collectibles each year, according to Smith.

Ten Holder’s appointment comes as the advisory group has been expanding its reach towards finance. The company oversees nine subsidiary companies, including an art financing branch it launched in 2022 and the recently acquired UK auction houses Dreweatts and Forum. In April 2024, the art lending arm, Gurr Johns Capital, reported raising $9.5 million in capital for art financing, according to publicly available financial documents.

The Dallas Invitational Art Fair is set to return for its third edition, running from April 10–12 and marking a new chapter with a venue change to the historic Mansion on Turtle Creek. Previously, the fair was held almost directly across from the Dallas Art Fair, at the Fairmont Hotel.

“As the Dallas Invitational enters its third year and continues to grow, a change of venue to the iconic Mansion Hotel seemed like a natural progression,” said the fair’s founder, James Cope, who runs an eponymous Dallas gallery. “The new venue will help with audience engagement having the capability to host events such as panel discussions and evening events.”

The fair remains an invite-only event and has assembled a roster of participating galleries from major art hubs, including Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Dallas itself. Notable exhibitors include Bel Ami, François Ghebaly, Hannah Hoffman, and Night Gallery. 

The fair has also established a five-member advisory council comprising of art dealers James Cope and Hannah Hoffman; Melissa M. Ireland, former director of the Rachofskies’ TWO x TWO auction; art adviser Adam Green; and philanthropist Jessica Nowitzki. Green told ARTnews the council aims to shape the fair’s strategic direction and contribute to its growing reputation.

Additionally, this year the fair has partnered with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to create the Dallas Invitational Acquisition Fund for the Modern. The fund will allow the museum to acquire select artworks exhibited at the fair for its permanent collection.

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