Arts news

• Tobias Rehberger shows Basel the birds and the bees

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  The sculptures, paintings and installations of the German artist Tobias Rehberger are impossible to pigeonhole, often blurring the boundaries of art, design and architecture. Rehberger won the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Biennale for his Op art-style cafeteria and brought a vertiginously striped replica of his favourite Frankfurt bar to New York in 2013. His “dazzle” camouflage graphics have adorned a British First World War ship.
  At the weekend, Rehberger stepped outside the whi
  
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• Three to see at Manifesta in Zurich

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  Mike Bouchet, The Zurich Load (2016)Anyone who excreted faeces in Zurich on 24 March contributed to Mike Bouchet’s site-specific sculpture made with human waste. The artist created the pungent piece in the Werdhölzli wastewater treatment plant. Philipp Sigg, an engineer at the plant, described the work as “spectacular”.
  • Löwenbräukunst
  
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• Slot machine mobster’s confiscated collection goes on show in Reggio

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  The southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria opened a permanent public display last month of works confiscated from the collection of the mafia boss Gioacchino Campolo.
  The “video poker king”, who made a fortune by tampering with slot machines, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for extortion and association with the mafia, among other crimes, in 2011. The state seized assets worth €330m, including paintings by Salvador Dalí, Lucio Fontana and Giorgio de Chirico.
  After
  
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• Silk Road leads to Los Angeles as Getty show recreates Mogao Grottoes

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  The Mogao Grottoes, a collection of more than 500 ancient Buddhist temples carved into the cliffs near Dunhuang in north-western China, were a key stop for the intrepid travellers who exchanged goods and information on the Silk Road—the ancient equivalent of the information superhighway. Dunhuang was one of the first trading cities in China encountered by Western merchants, and the final supply stop for those making the long push westward, so travellers visited the richly decorated temple
  
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• Scream seller’s space to open in 2017

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  A private museum funded by the 2012 sale of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1895) is due to open in Norway next year.
  The institution was originally scheduled to launch in 2013 to coincide with Munch’s 150th birthday. The Norwegian shipping heir Petter Olsen sold The Scream for $120m to finance the museum, which will show other works by Munch from his collection.
  The museum is in Ramme, south of Oslo, on a property that once belonged to the artist himself. A spokesman for the projec
  
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• Pope L. performs in a gorilla suit plus more Basel gossip

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  Cutting-edge fairHopefully, the fragile of psyche will not be encouraged to do anything rash when they visit Tokyo’s Aoyama/Meguro gallery at the art fair Liste, where one of the interactive pieces in the solo show of works by Satoshi Hashimoto suggests that “you can cut yourself”—and provides a lethal-looking knife for the purpose. Visitors are also greeted by a provocatively noose-like rope that hangs in a doorway, its function left up to the imagination. Certainly many
  
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• Oscar Tuazon goes off-grid in Basel

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  “What does a house do? Can a house be a sculpture? Can you live inside an artwork?” These are just some of the questions that the Los Angeles-based artist Oscar Tuazon is posing with the cavernous, honeycomb-shaped wooden structure he has erected on the Messeplatz in Basel. Zome Alloy (2016) is a pared-down version of Steve Baer’s Zome House (1972) outside Corrales in New Mexico, where the beatnik solar engineer and architect still lives with his wife, Holly.
   
  Baer devel
  
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• Need a biennial curator? Call an artist

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  Christian Jankowski, the German artist-curator at the helm of Manifesta 11 in Zurich (until 18 September), which opened just before Art Basel, is among a small but growing number of contemporary artists who are organising major biennials worldwide. The Delhi-based artist group, Raqs Media Collective, were appointed earlier this year as curators of the 11th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (11 November-12 March 2017), while the New York-based art collective DIS has organised the nin
  
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• Meet the man at the centre of the Cranach mystery

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  Hardly anyone in the art world had ever heard of Giulano Ruffini. Until now. Born in France to a family of Italian immigrants, Ruffini, 71, says he once owned paintings that were subsequently sold for millions by dealers and auction houses in London, Paris, New York or Milan. One of them is the Venus with a Veil (1531) attributed to Lucas Cranach. It was seized at an exhibition in the south of France on 1 March, on suspicion that it is a forgery.
  
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• Manifesta 11 works hard, plays hard

  13-06-2016 23:00
  
  The artist Christian Jankowski, the curator of the roving European biennial Manifesta 11, which opened in Zurich at the weekend, has taken the concept of art in the community to a new level. Dentists, doctors, spa managers, boatmakers, dog groomers and transgender escorts in the Swiss city have agreed to “host”, or collaborate with, 30 artists for Jankowski’s exhibition, What People Do for Money: Some Joint Ventures (until 18 September).Visitors to Art Basel who plan to head t
  
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• Herzog & de Meuron: six degrees of separation from Tate Modern

  13-06-2016 23:00
  This week, the Basel-based architects Herzog & de Meuron’s latest museum building opens—a £260m brick-clad ziggurat that extends Tate Modern, the former power station they transformed in the late 1990s to widespread acclaim. Here, we trace six degrees of separation between the new, expanded Tate Modern and some of the architects’ landmark art spaces.
  Goetz Collection, Munich, 1992
  Hats off to the art collector Ingrid Goetz for spotting the architects’ potential
  
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• Rachel Harrison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

  13-06-2016 22:41 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Flying Suitcases, Mimes, and a Collector’s House: A Quick Spin Through the Unlimited Section at Basel

  13-06-2016 20:32 via artnews.com
  The Unlimited sector of Art Basel is devoted to large-scale installation and works that “transcend the classical art show stand.” The name is a hyperbole—as it does contain walls at some point—but it can really appear endless when you first … Read More
  
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• Galerie Perrotin Is Moving to the Lower East Side

  13-06-2016 19:52 via artnews.com
  The news today from the seemingly endless game of musical chairs among New York’s commercial galleries is that Galerie Perrotin will be leaving its Madison Avenue digs for the Lower East Side. The gallery will move to a 25,000-square-foot space … Read More
  
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• Economist Clare McAndrew lured away from Dutch fair Tefaf to crunch numbers for Art Basel

  13-06-2016 19:00
  
  The art economist Clare McAndrew, who has crunched the art market’s annual numbers on behalf of the Tefaf, Maastricht art fair for eight years, will now work with Art Basel instead. The first Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report is due be published to coincide with the fair’s next Hong Kong edition (23-25 March 2017).The look and feel of the report for Art Basel will be “very different” McAndrew says, though the broad methodology and data gathered will still form t
  
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• Smithsonian scales back London plans at Olympicopolis

  13-06-2016 18:39
  
  The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC has scaled down plans to set up a London base. It had been considering an ambitious venture to establish an outpost in a new cultural quarter on the site of the 2012 Olympic Games in Stratford, east London—dubbed Olympicopolis. Instead the Smithsonian is now going for a more modest scheme, using space in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new building, which will be known as V&A East.On 13 June, the Smithsonian’s secretary Davi
  
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• Lucian Freud childhood drawings and unseen sketches go on display

  13-06-2016 18:16
  
  The archive donated to the National Portrait Gallery in lieu of £2.9m inheritance tax also includes artist notesDrawings going on display for the first time at the National Portrait Gallery really do look like a child did them, albeit a talented one.“They are really accomplished,” said the gallery’s curator Sarah Howgate of the lively drawings by a possibly seven- or eight-year-old Lucian Freud. “The colour is so vivid.” Continue reading...
  
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• The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, review: 'Not enough courage in its own mission'

  13-06-2016 17:45
  
  The 248th Summer Exhibition features works by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Gilbert and George, and the Chapman Brothers
  
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• Galerie Perrotin heads to the Lower East Side

  13-06-2016 17:00
  
  Galerie Perrotin is relocating its New York gallery to 130 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. Originally constructed in 1902, the building formerly served as a fabric factory in the 1940s and still has the painted signage on its façade. The American architecture firm Peterson Rich Office is slated to retrofit the space, which is due to open in the spring of 2017, a spokeswoman says.
  According to a statement, Perrotin’s new 25,000 sq. ft gallery will be eight times the size of i
  
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• Welcome to the LOLhouse: how the Berlin Biennale became a slick, sarcastic joke

  13-06-2016 16:57
  
  In the hands of New York fashion collective DIS, one of Europe’s biggest exhibitions is now a feeble blancmange of ads and avatars – where is the art?A recent newspaper cover of Die Zeit featured a wrenching story about the 880 refugees who, on a single week in May, went to their deaths in the Mediterranean. It contrasted the increasingly hardline politicians of EU nations, in particular the rising Alternative für Deutschland party, with the rescuers who had to fish bodies from
  
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• In Basel, Liste Gets Older, But the Artists Stay the Same Age

  13-06-2016 16:48 via artnews.com
  Liste, the satellite fair that had its VIP opening this morning in Basel, Switzerland, calls itself “The Young Art Fair in Basel,” and it goes to great pains to legitimize this claim. For instance, not only do baby-faced dealers populate most corners of … Read More
  
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• Morning Links: Art-Fair Economics Edition

  13-06-2016 14:43 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• New museum openings lead Beirut’s renaissance

  13-06-2016 11:00
  
  New museums and galleries in Lebanon’s capital are being matched by new design boutiques, bars and restaurants in its bohemian districtsDespite being in a conflict zone, Beirut is somehow rising like a phoenix from the ashes. The past 12 months have seen the reopening of the Sursock Museum, a contemporary art gallery supervised by renowned French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, and the inauguration of Aishti, a cutting-edge art foundation that rivals the Punta della Dogana in Venice. In Se
  
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• Back from the dead: the photographer turning forensics into portraiture

  13-06-2016 10:00
  
  Arne Svenson spent years crossing America and Mexico photographing forensic reconstructions of nameless victims’ facesOn 25 February 1988, a boy playing football with his friends near Philadelphia’s Central high school tripped over a decomposed body. When police forensics arrived at the scene, they found the remains of a young woman clad only in a blouse. Unable to identify her or determine the date and cause of her death, they commissioned a forensic artist to construct a likeness o
  
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