Art News

Wayne Thiebaud's 2001 acrylic painting Ponds and Streams shows the tainted beauty of California's Central Valley.

Now in its 19th year at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, SCOPE is renowned for bringing cutting-edge contemporary artists and movements to the forefront. With 60 international exhibitors, talent from around the globe will be on show from March 7-10 in New York. Here is a sampling of 10 artists on the rise at this year’s SCOPE.

There is much to celebrate about the life and work of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, the famed Dutch master. Prolific and ground-breaking in drawing, printmaking and painting, Rembrandt was adept at any of the subjects he tackled, from portraits, to still lives, landscapes and Biblical scenes. The Dutch are especially proud of their countryman, who despite never having left the Netherlands in his lifetime, has had a global influence.

On February 27, Freemans’s sold a rare work by the Master of the Embroidered Foliage for an impressive $2,470,000, setting a new world auction record for such a work. One of only 10 works attributed to the Master, the “Nursing Madonna” generated a great deal of inquiries from around the world.

This photograph of young farmers on their way to a dance was taken in Germany in 1914 by August Sander. Except they weren't farmers. And the dance they were on their way to was World War I.

A monumental Hans Hofmann exhibition opens at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) this week, marking a comprehensive reevaluation of one of the twentieth century’s most influential abstract painters. With nearly seventy paintings—including works from private collections that have never been exhibited in a museum setting—Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction presents an unprecedented and fresh look at Hofmann’s studio practice, focusing in particular on his continuously experimental approach to painting and the expressive potential of color, form, and space.

For more than 15 years, Andrew Wyeth created 250 secret paintings. He hid them from everyone—including his wife, who was also his business manager—in the loft of a millhouse near his home in rural Pennsylvania. When they were discovered, in 1986, they generated a media frenzy that extended well outside the art world. The Helga paintings, as they came to be called, all depicted a single subject: Helga Testorf.

The Photography Show, presented by AIPAD, has announced a program of 12 AIPAD Talks during the Show, which runs April 4 through April 7, 2019 at Pier 94 in New York City. Prominent curators, collectors, artists, and journalists will discuss thought-provoking ideas, new trends, and unique processes involved in photography. AIPAD Talks speakers will include Vince Aletti, Harry Benson, Dawoud Bey, Chris Boot, Malcolm Daniel, Sarah Greenough, Deana Lawson, Sarah Hermanson Meister, Corey Keller, An-My Lê, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Carol Squiers, and Martha Wilson.

Glamour, snubs, surprises, tears, laughter—emotions and stakes run high at the Academy Awards. Now the exclamation point at the end of a long awards season, the Oscars have represented the pinnacle of achievement in the American film industry for over ninety years. The ups and downs the Academy faces in our broad cultural consciousness demand that we take a step back to reexamine what the Academy Awards are and why they still resonate as a symbol of artistic excellence.

Opening this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago is the first major survey of acclaimed photographer Laurie Simmons. Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera encompasses four decades of her work, including film and sculpture, in addition to her photographs. Known for her close-up images of the world of dolls, Simmons has long used her lens to critique gender roles and idealized visions of American prosperity and domesticity.