October 2021 Art News

 

Emily Bahret, production assistant on MoMA's Creative Team, talks about her first encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s "To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour" (1918), and how randomness and chance can bring beauty and unexpected delights.

Johannes Vermeer, born in October 1632, grew up and spent most of his life in the Netherlandish city of Delft. Though his name faded after his death in 1675, his work was ‘rediscovered’ in the nineteenth century and has remained popular ever since. His uncanny ability to capture light—from the glow of sunshine behind a curtain to the sharp glimmer of precious stones—remains particularly striking nearly 500 years after the artist’s life. So too has the artist's masterful use of composition, contrast, and allegory continued to inspire.

Members of The ADAA, the nation’s foremost nonprofit organization of leading art dealers, return together this fall for The Art Show to showcase their dynamic programs—featuring more than 40 solo presentations, as well as an array of dual, thematic, and group exhibitions. This year’s fair sees the launch of an accompanying online hub or collectors and the public to engage with The Art Show.

National tour of Companion Species—an insightful and timely exhibition that places works of art from Native and non-Native artists in conversation with each other—kicks off at the Chazen. Its centerpiece is Marie Watt’s vibrant textile "Companion Species (Speech Bubble)" of 2019, in which community members stitched meaningful words.

It is an understandable human instinct to treat any crisis as if it were the first of its kind. A century ago, those fears revolved around a widening gap between rich and poor, a global pandemic, and a growing loss of community. Sound familiar?

The auction of a Roman Villa—known as Villa Aurora or Casino Dell’Aurora—has recently been announced and set a stir within the art world. Why? Because it contains the only known ceiling mural executed by the legendary artist Caravaggio.

Created between 2020 and 2021, Katz’s White Coat paintings are based on the likeness of Vivien Bittencourt, a photographer and filmmaker, and the artist’s daughter-in-law. Across these eleven portraits, Katz paints Vivien in a variety of dynamic compositions unified by a brilliant light blue ground color.

Teens, who grew up on social media and meme culture, have taken to the online art world organically, where NFTs are like physical collector’s items only digital: instead of an oil painting to hang on the wall (or a Pokémon card to hold in their hand) the buyer gets a digital file and one of a kind identifying code that is recorded on a blockchain. Only one person has exclusive ownership and therefore digital bragging rights.

The Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) recently acquired a major work by legendary contemporary artist Nick Cave. “Soundsuit 8:46” (2021), a mixed-media mannequin of vintage floral textiles and sequined appliques, is a response to recent police violence against people of color.

In this new body of work, Fallon—known for his striking images of ambiguous figures that both draw on and challenge existing traditions of portraiture—explores how the practice of collecting shapes the fashioning of domestic space. From the most lavish to the most impoverished of circumstances, the spaces of human habitation take form through the amassing of objects.