Dickinson would bring up a late Lucian Freud A portrait of billionaire property developer Pat Doherty to Frieze Masters, which will sell for around £15mn. „Profile Donegal Man” (2008) was on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 2016 to 2021 and was shown recently Lucian Freud: New Perspectives The exhibition began at London’s National Gallery before moving to Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
According to Milo Dickinson, the gallery’s executive director, Doherty spent about 300 hours sitting in 85 sessions. The work will be a highlight of Dickinson’s booth dedicated to „artists in Soho,” which will also include works by Thomas Lawrence, Edward Burne-Jones and Frank Auerbach. Doherty, who sells the work through Dickinson, is known to have another portrait of Freud in his collection.
This week, Frieze announced some of the highlights of its London and Masters exhibitions, which take place between October 11 and 15 in Regent’s Park. Some of these coincide with city exhibitions: Julianknxx, Edel Assanti’s booth at Frieze London, on view at the Barbican Centre; El Anatsui, which opens in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall on 10 October, will have a solo booth in the Jack Shainman Gallery at Frieze Masters. ArtAncient’s collection of 73 Stone Age prints is priced from £500 to £250,000.
Luxembourg + Co Gallery, New York has opened an exhibition dedicated to non-existent works. Man Ray’s „objects” were conceived by the artist between the 1910s and 1930s, but never built. Instead he later made copies of the „originals” and corrected them each time. “Everyone understands Duchamp’s great revolution by his ready-mades. But Man Ray also made a radical gesture, questioning our obsession with the original,” says gallery partner Alma Luxemburg. „In the digital age, when we are constantly taking photographs, such questions are even more relevant.”
Variations on the man ray have evolved over 50 years, Luxemburg notes. For example, the so-called „gato” – a ready-made iron with sharp nails created in 1921 – was created with haberdashery technology. A photographic eye attached to the needle of a metronome, now known as an „object immortal” (although this title has also evolved), became the artist’s romantic liaison.
The exhibition aims to chart such evolutions through five objects and around 25 works. A limited number of pieces are for sale, priced between €80,000-€800,000 (until December 2).
Art Basel has strengthened its governance Hayley Romer was hired as chief development officer — a new role and a job title you don’t hear about every day — and Craig Hepburn as chief digital officer. Romer, who joins this month, was previously publisher and chief revenue officer of The Atlantic magazine, while Hepburn will join European soccer body UEFA next month, where she was most recently head of digital.
Noah Horowitz, who became Art Basel’s chief executive last year, explains that Romer’s role is to focus on the development of its brand outside the fair, such as partners and marketing. And those appointed in 2022 will focus on events. Romer and Hepburn’s experience from outside the art world was part of the training to „raise all of our skills with really talented people,” says Horowitz.
Meanwhile, Mark Spiegler, who was Art Basel’s global director, has joined the board of SuperBlue, a platform for immersive, experiential art. Spiegler, who advises audio business Kef on its artistic strategy and is a visiting professor at Milan’s Bocconi University, says he is „developing a portfolio of projects”.
Anyone interested in the nuances Art majors may want to search Business Galleries: Bricks, Clicks and the Digital FutureLund Humphries and Sotheby’s Institute of Art’s latest book Hot Topics in the Art World Cont. (Disclosure: I’ve written a book in this series.) Written by Henry Little, art consultant to the Fine Art Group and co-founder of Breeze Little Gallery (now closed), this book offers insights into a field that curates. Be quick to change and be stubbornly quiet.
Digital advances during the pandemic have given artists and the industry around them a new level of popularity (a wealth of data on current and potential buyers). Despite such progress, „expensive, complex, or intellectually rarefied art will always resist easy digital consumption . . . we can safely assume that today’s commercial gallery model, with all its digital irony, will remain, if not deliberately conservative.”
There are some memorable turns of phrase, not comparing some of the biggest galleries to „bloated food hogs” when looking for new artists, while I agree with Little that „if the super-rich visited more often we’d see a gallery on the moon. Enough.”
Finally, the dinosaurs are back – At least in the art market. The frenzy was temporarily halted last year when a T-rex, nicknamed Shen, fetched $15mn-$25mn from a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong after concerns were raised that its bones were insufficient.
Now we have a five-meter-long Jurassic Iguanodon Barry, about 150 million years old, unearthed in Wyoming in 2000. It is for sale at Giguello & Associates in Traut, Paris, with an estimate of €800,000-€1.2 million. On October 20. Auctioneers insist that their specimen contains a high percentage (more than 80 percent) of original bone, more than 90 percent of its skull.
In 2020, Christie’s set a record for a dinosaur skeleton due to be completed by the end of 2025 when it sold a 12-meter-long T-rex for $31.8 million (with fees) to Abu Dhabi’s Natural History Museum. .
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