After 11 years, David Lewis Gallery will cease operations, joining the slew of galleries across Manhattan to shutter its doors this year.

“I entered the gallery world as a wide-eyed academic, and, after over a decade of professional growth, it feels right to come full circle (Francis Picabia loved composing with circles!),” founder David Lewis wrote in an email blast, referencing the gallery’s current group exhibition “Everyone Loves Picabia” (on view through July 19).

He continued, “I’m bringing to a close this iteration of my gallery with a celebration of artists, creative communities, and innovative, even transgressive ideas. It has been the honor of a lifetime to work with such brilliant artists. It’s time now for a new chapter, which will further develop these collaborations and commitments.”

Lewis, an art historian and critic, opened his eponymous gallery in 2013 at 88 Eldridge Street, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Early programming centered around emerging talent, such as well-reviewed presentations of painter Lucy Dodd and performance artist Dawn Kasper. The gallery eventually expanded its roster with historical and under-studied artists, including Barbara Bloom, a photo-conceptualist from the Pictures Generation, and Mary Beth Edelson, an influential feminist activist and artist whose renown had waned.

In 2018, the gallery began working with the estate of Thornton Dial (1928–2016), a self-taught artist from rural Alabama whose intimate works on the legacy of slavery and sharecropping in America had begun to find success in mainstream art institutions. Speaking to Cultured in 2021, Lewis called Dial “a giant art-historical challenge.” 

There are no shortage of exhibitions dealing with KAWS and Andy Warhol individually, but there haven’t been many that contend with the two artists together. This unusual focus forms the subject of a new exhibition that recently opened at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 47 works by both artists are now on view.

Loosely, the pair has been brought together the shed light on the darkness of their oeuvres. But KAWS and Warhol share commonalities beyond that: works by both have infiltrated the public consciousness, and collaboration with big brands is also responsible for some of their art.

ARTnews recently spoke with KAWS about the exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum, his thoughts on selling out, and his favorite pieces by Warhol. This interview has been edited and condensed.

ARTnews: The new show at the Warhol Museum features works from his “Death and Disaster” series, silkscreened paintings from the 1960s that feature appropriated pictures of car crashes and other violent imagery that Warhol repeated many times over. What relation does your work have to those paintings?

KAWS: The “darker themes” angle was something that [outgoing Warhol Museum director] Patrick Moore really wanted to explore. It’s funny how putting pieces in proximity to each other can really kind of shift the context. Companion (2020) was a sculpture I created thinking that it was just really representative of that year and exhaustion. But when placed under the Warhol’s Ambulance Disaster (1963–64), it suddenly feels much more tragic.

Aboriginal readers are warned that this article includes the name of a dead person.

Destiny Deacon, an Aboriginal artist who drew out forms of racism that are endemic to Australian society, often with a heavy dose of humor, has died at 67. Her death was announced on Friday by her gallery, the Paddington-based Roslyn Oxley9, which did not state a cause.

A descendant of the KuKu and Erub/Mer people, Deacon used her art to parody stereotypes used to subjugate Indigenous people like herself. Although her photographs and installations showed up frequently in international biennials, she was not fond of using art jargon to discuss them.

Among those biennials is the current Biennale of Sydney, where she is showing Blak Bay (2023–24), photographs of Black and Brown dolls that she posed for her camera. The dolls belong to her collection of paraphernalia that she called “Koori kitsch”: objects depicting Aboriginal people meant for mass consumption.

“They sort of represent us as people, because white Australia didn’t come to terms with us as people,” she told the Guardian in 2020, adding that the dolls are “objects, and that’s the way that white Australia saw us: the flora, the fauna, and the objects. And I just thought, well, they’ve just as much to say.”

A painting by Francis Bacon that was stolen in 2015 has been covered in Madrid by Spanish police. 

The recovered painting is one of five portraits of the Spanish banker José Capelo that are collectively worth €25 million ($27.1 million). The paintings were stolen nine years ago, in what is believed to be the biggest heist in Spanish history.

Three of the five stolen paintings were recovered in 2017. Since the theft, 16 people, including the person thought to have orchestrated the crime, have been arrested. Authorities are still looking for the remaining missing work.

“Investigations are continuing to locate the remaining work and arrest those in possession of it, with the focus on Spanish nationals with links to organized groups from Eastern Europe,” a statement released by the Spanish police said.

Bacon is one of the most influential painters of the 20th century. His work has achieved incredible sums at auction, with his tryptic Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) selling for more than $142 million at Christie’s New York in 2013. At the time, it was the most expensive painting ever sold. More recently, at Sotheby’s New York in May of last year, Bacon’s 1966 painting Portrait of George Dyer Crouching sold for $27.7 million.

AKNEYE, a visionary in the fusion of traditional art and digital innovation, is pleased to announce its presence in Venice during the highly anticipated 60th Venice Biennale, where it will unveil the AKNEYE Phygital Space by ftNFT. This installation, situated adjacent to the Arsenale venue on Ramo de la Tana, offers a selection of AKNEYE’s ever-growing collection of non-fungible token (NFT) artworks that bridge the gap between physical and digital art.

Related Articles

AKNEYE aims to harmonize the tangible aspects of traditional sculpture with the virtual dimensions of NFTs by creating a novel platform for artistic exploration and collaboration. Artists from Armenia and around the world have crafted original artworks on eye-shaped wood or resin sculptures. These forms serve as the raw canvas upon which the artists, typically employing traditional methods such as paint or mixed media, realize their creations.

These sculptures are then scanned in painstaking detail and rendered digitally, essentially creating a digital twin of the physical version. This virtual proxy is then displayed as an NFT artwork in AKNEYE’s digital gallery hosted on Fastexverse, a navigable, 3D metaverse platform that enables users to participate in events, engage in commerce, and interact with other users in an immersive digital environment.

In Venice, the AKNEYE Phygital Space installation brings the relationship between tangible and digital art full circle by creating a real-life environment for viewers to interact with the art. The Venice site, established in partnership with Fastex’s NFT marketplace ftNFT, joins a growing roster of ftNFT Phygital Spaces in Dubai and Yerevan, Armenia, which also serve as outlets to purchase artworks.

“The Phygital Space is not just any digital space; it is a vision of the future of art, where boundaries are blurred and new connections are formed between the artist, the observer, and the medium,” says Vigen Badalyan, founder of AKNEYE.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

THE HEADLINES

LOST, NOW FOUND. Spanish police have recovered a stolen Francis Bacon painting worth an estimated $5.4 million. The 1989 portrait of Bacon’s friend, the banker José Capelo, is one of five works by the Dublin-born artist, robbed from Capelo’s Madrid home in 2015, worth over $27 million all told. Three other paintings from the same loot were recovered in 2017, and two suspects reportedly helped investigators find this most recent, fourth missing painting. They are among a total of 16 other suspects arrested in connection to the major 2015 theft, which also included a snatched safe of jewelry and coins. As for the last missing painting, investigators said they were “continuing to locate the remaining work and arrest those in possession of it, with the focus on Spanish nationals with links to organized groups from Eastern Europe,” reports the BBC.

RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE. French investigators suspect Moscow may have given orders for the recent vandalism of Paris’ Holocaust memorial. Using video surveillance, authorities have identified three suspects who came from Bulgaria and allegedly painted over 30, large, red hands on the Wall of the Righteous, located on the northern side of the museum, in the Marais district.The investigative journal Canard Enchaîné first reported French intelligence services have “privileged the hypothesis” that Russian influence is behind the incident, and other French media have since corroborated the scoop. The memorial wall lists the names of thousands who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi extermination, and is part of the museum. French foreign minister Stéphane Séjourné linked the incident to multiple Star-of-David tags found on Paris buildings after October 7, which were also reportedly tied to Russian sources. Both are cases of individuals being “paid to destabilize and trigger divisions in French society,” he told BFM TV.

THE DIGEST

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her former name, having exhibited in major group shows like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In 30 some paintings and mixed-media works, many of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending with her new life. We see her newly subject to the leering gaze of construction workers, and getting accosted by a white woman for using the women’s bathroom at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of the show’s best works, a 2024 canvas titled I am a work in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, painting a vision of a woman of her own making, as she now wants to be seen. Next to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming medications. Behind him a woman, the artist’s mother, dusts off one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this year, the artist began painting scenes from her transition directly onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this series is titled shot day (all works 2024); it is a tender self-portrait showing the artist injecting her abdomen with hormones. The piece, measuring just over 3 by 6 inches, is painted directly onto the flattened box of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her legal name partially visible. This work joins about a dozen other small drawings of Gomez at various stages in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of found cardboard recalls an earlier series, begun in 2013, in which Gomez painted Latinx domestic workers—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto magazine pages displaying beautiful mansions that they keep pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings up to David Hockney-esque paintings. Her objective then as now is to show those who have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Under Construction,” she gives her own process of transitioning a rare kind of visibility, carving an ideal image of herself while also grappling with how the world sees her. But she doesn’t stop there: she also honors the enormous contributions that trans women of color have made toward civil rights for queer people. These women have often been, until recently, intentionally erased from history; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans women of color that includes Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen specializes in the kinds of lengthy shots that brand themselves upon your brain: a house that nearly falls onto a person, the Statue of Liberty filmed from a whirring helicopter, the attempted lynching of a Black man shot via long take. But no longer does McQueen seem so interested in creating images like those.

Occupied City (2023), his four-and-a-half-hour documentary about Amsterdam during the Holocaust, seems most telling about his priorities right now. In this film, a narrator outlines the disenfranchisement of Jews across the city, but McQueen’s footage of the present-day Dutch capital never testifies to what is described. His camera drifts through apartments, down museum corridors, and across canals. More often than not, he doesn’t show us anything of much interest. At a time when images of police brutality and suffering have become pervasive, McQueen has moved away from representing violence altogether.

With his latest work, he shows us nothing at all. McQueen has parted ways with moving images entirely for Bass (2024), a new installation that fills the 30,000-square-foot basement of Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley with sound and light. The only objects on view are 60 boxes hung on the ceiling that slowly change their hue, turning the space a succession of vibrant colors, from the retina-burning red of a horror movie to the orange glow of a sunset.

The title of Bass is the giveaway: the focus is sound, not sight. The sounds were produced by five musicians, all belonging to the African diaspora, who performed together in Dia’s columned basement this past January. McQueen was there to act as conductor, not that these musicians really needed it—mainly, they just improvised. He has presented all 189 minutes of their music largely unedited.

This quintet—Marcus Miller, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, Laura-Simone Martin, and Meshell Ndegeocello—appears to have played as a unified whole, not as five soloists. It is difficult, for example, to discern which sounds were produced by Kouyaté, playing a West African instrument called a ngoni, and which were produced by Miller, a bassist who’s worked with many jazz greats. Together, the musicians have created a symphony of rumbles, bowed strings, and plaintive hums, some of which McQueen has arrayed across space so that they appear to echo across this vast gallery.

This June, Germany’s Ketterer Kunst auction house will mark 70 years in the auction business. To celebrate, the house has announced an evening sale of German Expressionist work, one of its specialties, along with a collection of American Pop art works on June 7.

Leading the sale will be Alexej Jawlensky’s Spanische Tänzerin (1909) with an estimate of €7 million – €10 million ($7.57 million – $10.81 million). The picture has been out of the public eye for more than 90 years and has only ever been photographed in black and white, robbing afficionados of German Expressionism that opportunity to admire its rich blue and vibrant red hues.

The sale with also feature Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1911 work Tanz im Varieté, which has been held by the same family for 80 years and carries an estimate of €2 million – €3 million ($2.16 million – $3.24 million).

The German artists in the sale will also include Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Konrad Klapheck, Georg Baselitz, and Gerhard Richter.

The sale will also highlight works by American Pop Art masters James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. A rare full set of 10 brightly colored screenprints from Andy Warhol’s Flowers series from 1970 will be included in the sale with an estimate of €800,000 – €1.2 million ($865,000 – $1.3 million), as will Rosenquist’s risqué large-format picture Playmate (1966), which carries an estimate of € 1,000,000 – €1.5 million ($1.08 million – $1.62 million).

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office recently announced the return of 133 antiquities “collectively valued at $14 million” to Pakistan after being seized as part of multiple investigations of trafficking networks.

The press release specifically mentioned Subhash Kapoor and Richard Beale, both of whom have been previously charged with trafficking artifacts. The items were returned during a ceremony with Consul General Aamer Ahmed Atozai and a special agent from the New York office of Homeland Security Investigations.

“These artifacts are now being returned to where they belong. This repatriation is more than the return of physical objects; it is the restoration of a part of Pakistan’s soul and identity,” Atozai said in a press statement.

Among the items being returned is a Gold Strato I Coin from circa 105-85 B.C.E. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, Beale tried to smuggle the coin into the US through John F. Kennedy airport, resulting in its seizure in 2023. Beale was arrested in New York last January on multiple charges relating to the sale of a multimillion-dollar ancient coin. Prior to his arrest for the “Eid Mar” (Ides of March) coin, Beale was the owner and managing director of Roma Numismatics, a London-based auction house that dealt in ancient coins. Beale and Italo Vecchi were convicted of crimes related to antiquities trafficking in August last year.

The other highlighted item being returned to Pakistan is an elaborately carved stone head of a Bodhisattva wearing a headdress featuring a lotus flower from the 2nd or 3rd century. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office said the stone head was recovered from a storage facility “allegedly hidden by Kapoor.”

5 min read

This photo depicts the 1605 Oxford city charter in which ‘for the first time the constituents and powers of the council were defined, and its election procedures described’.[1] As a result of this charter, Oxford became a corporate, free city, and as such, Oxford city  corporation had the power to make by-laws, punish breaches by fine or imprisonment, sue and be sued in the corporate title, and be able to hold or dispose of property under a common seal.[2] This charter served as the foundation of civic governance in Oxford until 1835.

Oxford City Charter granted by James I, 1605. Reproduced by permission of Oxford History Centre. Photo taken by the author.

The 1605 charter is adorned with decorative borders that highlight the strong connection between the city corporation and the crown. Upon closer inspection, this charter does not just assert the authority of the crown but also appears to have been used as a heraldic device by the corporation to assert the authority and power of civic government.  While the borders feature various symbols that promote the corporation’s ties to the crown, such as the harp, the city’s coat of arms is equally prominent. The coat of arms depicts a shield with a red ox, which symbolises courage and valour, especially in public office. Therefore, the symbolism within the coat of arms may have been a way for the corporation to assert its authority to the public. Further examination highlights that the charter is decorated extensively with what are called heraldic colours, including red, black, and yellow which were used not necessarily to reinforce the power of the crown but rather the civic virtues of the city government as in the case of black which often symbolised constancy and which it can be argued that the corporation expected the townspeople to emulate.

During the early seventeenth century, this document was employed by the corporation to strengthen its authority against objections from the university. By the 1630s, this document had become particularly significant as it enabled the corporation to challenge both the power of the university and the crown. It also helped establish the corporation’s authority over the townspeople, at least the freemen. This was a crucial objective for the corporation since the civic authorities were responsible for ensuring that the city was free from public disorder and unrest.

An example of how the charter was used to support the corporation’s authority can be found in the corporation minutes of 1636. At this time, the corporation refused to pay the full costs of accommodating the crown’s officers during the royal visit. The corporation’s minutes record that if this decision was challenged, they would display the charter in parliament and use it to support the mayor’s decision.[3]This refusal may have been due to the changing relationship with the crown in the 1630s, in which the corporation saw the gradual erosion of the liberties that had been granted in 1605 and was fighting to restore many of them.

April 4 – May 18, 2024

April 6 – May 18, 2024

March 21 – May 17, 2024

April 13 – May 17, 2024

March 16 – May 18, 2024

March 30 – May 18, 2024

April 11 – May 18, 2024

April 24 – May 18, 2024

April 13 – May 18, 2024