May 2018 Art News

Christie's started off a big week of auctions with a bang last night. Their 19th & 20th Century Art Evening Sale, the first in a series of auctions of the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller, totaled over $646 million dollars. Touted as the most valuable collection ever offered at auction, all proceeds will go to some of the many charities the Rockefellers supported.

The Design Museum in London presents Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier, a major exhibition exploring the late designer’s unique creative talent and the timeless beauty of his work. Envisaged and curated by Monsieur Alaïa and Mark Wilson, Chief Curator of the Groninger Museum, the exhibition comprises designs stretching throughout Alaïa’s career from the early 1980s to his last creations. The display provides a unique examination of the designer’s personal approach that defied the rules of fashion. Alaïa would work on certain pieces for years at a time and would display his creations when they were ready, not when the fashion season dictated.

The seventh annual Frieze New York Art Fair, which ran May 4-6, featured more than 190 galleries, curated awards and special sections, a robust talks schedule, and vibrant performance art. The fair, just one in Frieze’s multinational series that includes both a masters and contemporary edition in London and a new iteration in Los Angeles, was housed in a redesigned, labyrinthian temporary structure that stretched across New York City’s Randall’s Island Park.

New York - On May 22, Bonhams Modern & Contemporary Prints & Multiples Sale will offer a rare impression of M.C. Escher's most famous print, "Relativity," 1953 (estimate: $15,000-20,000). "Relativity" is one of Escher's most popular examples of his "impossible constructions" where faceless inhabitants ascend and descend seven stairways, apparently oblivious to the scientific impossibility of their activities.

Philadelphia, PA—Premiering May 6, 2018, at the Barnes Foundation—home to the world’s largest collection of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir—is a major exhibition examining the artistic exchange between the renowned impressionist painter and his son, celebrated filmmaker Jean Renoir. Renoir: Father and Son/Painting and Cinema brings together over 120 works,including paintings, films, drawings, ceramics, costumes, photographs, and posters—many never before shown in the US—for an illuminating

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art, a groundbreaking exhibition of both historical and contemporary Iranian works that highlight ways in which artists have used and continue to use the past as a metaphor for the present day. This notion is revealed in art and literature in which ancient kings and heroes are used in later contexts as examples of virtue or as objects of derision, while long-gone Shi‘ite saints are evoked as champions of the poor and the oppressed.

Chun Kwang Young’s solo show, Aggregation, opened May 3rd at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York. Chun’s otherworldly assemblages incorporate both sculpture and painting. His freestanding sculptures and low-relief wall hangings are crafted of triangular cones of antique mulberry paper, or hanji, tinted with tea or pigment.

London, 4 May – Painted during Pablo Picasso’s ‘year of wonders’, this monumental, yet remarkably tender and intimate, painting of Marie-Thérèse absorbed in the act of writing evokes a private moment from the artist’s clandestine relationship with his most beloved muse.

DALLAS, Texas — Hobby-changing discoveries of World and U.S. coins paced Heritage Auctions' late April Chicago Coin Expo (CCE) & Central States Numismatic Society (CSNS) auctions to $38,150,247, registering a 99 percent sell-through rate by value and lot for U.S. Coins.

 

A review of lots available at Heritage Auctions' upcoming Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction.

To learn more, visit http://www.HA.com/7187

Art and Object Marketplace - A Curated Art Marketplace