Category: visual

“A new wave of artists and curators have relocated to South Florida. Dealers and fairs have followed suit and infused Miami with the promise of becoming a capital of contemporary Latin American art.”

The European Fine Art Fair opens in Maastricht with 200 of the world’s most prestigious galleries in attendance. “The art and antiques for sale are breathtaking, and are estimated to be worth a total of about £600 million this year. Some 60 per cent of the world’s currently available supply of good-quality Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings are on show.” But dealers are worried what impact an Iraq war will have. “Maastricht airport once famously ran out of parking space for private jets during the fair, but this year there are fears that there may be plenty of spare tarmac alongside the runway.”

The Art Newspaper is reporting that the Guggenheim has made a deal to open a branch in Rio de Janeiro. “The so-called Guggenheim Rio will be the New York-based foundation’s first outpost in South America, augmenting a global network that presently includes the Frank Lloyd Wright flagship in Manhattan, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas. The city-run museum will be housed in a striking new building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and set within the waters of beautiful Guanabara Bay, affording sweeping views of the picturesque harbour whose entrance is marked by the famous ‘Sugar Loaf’. Construction is to begin this summer with completion scheduled for late 2006.”

“The legal battle over ownership of a $10 million Picasso masterpiece looted by the Nazis during World War II may shift from Los Angeles to Chicago if a tentative ruling issued Thursday by a California judge becomes final and survives appeals.”

Daniel Libeskind’s design for the World Trade Center site, which he calls ‘Memory Foundations’, “epitomises American society’s current morbid preoccupation with death and conflict. Several architecture commentators have pointed out that the subjective nature of Libeskind’s work is something new among architects, who rarely express their own feelings and tend to be more comfortable talking about the functional and technical aspects of buildings. The difference between Libeskind and a cool, rational architect such as Norman Foster is something like the difference between Princess Diana and a regal head of state.”

A new website will show detailed images of prehistoric rock art in the UK, cataloguing work that is thousands of years old. “The website will include global positioning system readings – highly accurate positions of the artwork compiled using satellites – and digital drawings and photographs.”

For the second year in a row, Sydney artist Jan Williamson has won the Archibald packers’ prize for portraits with a picture of actor/writer Rachel Ward. “Williamson, a full-time painter and mother of nine, took out the packing room prize last year with her painting of singer-songwriter Jenny Morris.”

Canada’s National Arts Centre “is expected to collect at least $500,000 from the sale of the estate of James Wilson Gill. He died in December after a long fight with cancer, leaving his Ottawa home and his extensive and valuable art collection to the centre… He was unknown to most NAC patrons, including many of those heavily involved in fundraising for the centre… The precise value of Mr. Gill’s estate will not be known until his house and art collection are sold, a process that could take several months.”

How did a valuable Andy Warhol painting on loan for a traveling Guggenheim exhibition in 1998 end up in the collection of a Guggenheim trustee a year later? The painting’s lender is crying theft.

“One of the most successful – if bizarre – cases of overpainting a great artist’s picture came to light earlier this week, when it was disclosed that a Rembrandt self-portrait had been hidden under layers of concealing paint for 300 years. An unnamed pupil changed the 28-year-old Rembrandt into a flamboyantly dressed Russian aristocrat in a red hat, earrings, long hair and dashing moustache. For the next three centuries it was regarded as a portrait by an anonymous minor Dutch artist.” These things happen more often than one thinks. How?