Tag: artnews.com

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SOTHEBYS2026_0514_182642-2431_ALIVE.jpg?w=1024″] Good Morning! Sotheby’s kicked off the May marquee auction season with a $433.1 million result at its modern and contemporary art evening sales. Australia’s Yindjibarndi Ngurra Aboriginal people say a $107 million payout from a recent land title compensation ruling, which recognized damage to their cultural heritage sites, is not enough. The…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/DSC_6410-1024×682-1.webp?w=1024″] A room sits empty, save for a lone chair and a shaft of golden light. Yet in the details—a patterned marble floor, blue Delft tiles, a stained-glass window pane—the setting for George Deem’s painting Extended Vermeer (2000) is unmistakably a 17th-century Dutch home. What other period’s interiors have become so immediately legible,…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SOTHEBYS2026_0514_182642-2431_ALIVE.jpg?w=1024″] At its Madison Avenue headquarters, Sotheby’s kicked off the May auction season early, smack in the middle of the opening of art fairs all around Manhattan, with a solid if unexciting$433.1 million sale of modern and contemporary art, led by an $85.8 million canvas by Mark Rothko. Major auctions at Christie’s and…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/spruth.png?w=1024″] Far from the hubbub of Frieze’s monster midtown affair sits Independent, newly relocated to Pier 36, a 70,000-square-foot venue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It remains the most refined offering in New York Art Week’s buffet of fairs, though the term “boutique” may soon feel strained: the new location is more than…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Rothko-e1632761738617.jpg?w=1024″] Mark Rothko’s abstractions, recognizable for their rectangularly shaped floating forms and thin washes of color, have been said by critics and historians to invoke the metaphysical. The Russian-American painter relied on these formal elements to imbue his canvases with grand meaning. He famously remarked his works comprise the basic tenets of human…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274075496.jpg?w=1024″] A Mark Rothko painting formerly owned by the influential art dealer Robert Mnuchin sold at Sotheby’s on Thursday night for $85.8 million, just barely failing to re-set the Abstract Expressionist’s auction record. Still, the painting is officially the second-most expensive Rothko ever sold at auction. Rothko’s Color Field paintings of the postwar…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/1380cf14-02f2-faf0-07c7-37941a25d29f.jpg?w=1024″] Valie Export, whose groundbreaking work questioned the very nature of art and cinema, all through an explicitly feminist lens, has died at 85. The news was confirmed by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, which represents her. Her death on May 14 came three days before her 86th birthday, according to AFP. “VALIE was one…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2218459996.jpg?w=1024″] A letter signed by such luminaries as environmental activist Greta Thunberg and artists Tracy Emin and Peter Doig is presently circulating in support of Misan Harriman, chair of the London-based arts organization Southbank Centre, reports theGuardian newspaper. The letter asserts that Harriman is the victim of what it calls a “dishonest smear…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/BFA_54356_7920694.jpg?w=1024″] The New Art Dealers Alliance opened the 12th edition of NADA New York on Wednesday, coinciding again with the start of Frieze just five blocks north. Those who made the trip to Chelsea’s Starrett-Lehigh building on West 26th Street and 11th Avenue were greeted by not just NADA, but also 1-54, which…

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DSC_7704.jpg?w=1024″] The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair is back at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea—just a few blocks from Frieze New York and in the same building at NADA—with more than 20 galleries from the continent and other ports of call for the “ever-expanding narratives of the African diaspora,” as fair director Touria…