Earlier this year, Rajaratnam announced that she would leave her role as partner at Mnuchin Gallery after 15 years. During her tenure there, she was known for staging groundbreaking exhibitions of artists who had long been overlooked by the mainstream art world, including Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Alma Thomas, Betty Blayton, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and David Hammons, whose five-decade retrospective in 2016 is still on one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of the elusive artist ever mounted. In the process, she also helped to build up markets for these artists.

In a statement, White Cube founder Jay Jopling said, “I have closely followed Sukanya’s exhibition programming over the past years and consider her to be one of the most outstanding market-makers in the art world. I am delighted that she has chosen to join White Cube and I look forward very much to working with her.”

Based in New York, Rajaratnam’s new role, according to a release, “will focus on market-making and exhibition-making” across White Cube’s various locations, which currently includes permanent ones in London, Hong Kong, and Paris, as well a seasonal West Palm Beach space.

In a statement, Rajaratnam said, “I admire the curatorial integrity that White Cube brings to its artists and estates and am excited to be able to contribute to that across a global platform. We may be at an inflection point in the market and I believe it is imperative for galleries to add value through exhibition programming and content.”

White Cube will also open its first New York location later this year and hired Courtney Willis Blair, a former partner at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, to lead the space last November. Located at 1002 Madison Avenue in New York’s Upper East Side, the space’s inaugural exhibition, organized by Willis Blair, will be titled “Chopped & Screwed.” Exploring “the idea of distortion as both a formal and conceptual tool used to examine and subvert well-established narratives or systems,” per a release, the show will include work by artists like Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Christian Marclay, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

In addition to news of Rajaratnam’s hiring, White Cube also announced that it will expand to Seoul, which was first reported by the Financial Times. Citing the success of the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul last September, the new ground-floor, 3,230 square-foot space will consist of exhibition spaces, a viewing room, and offices. Located in the capital city’s Gangnam-gu district, it will be in the same building as the private museum Horim Art Centre, which focuses on Korean antiquities and modern art.

In the past two years, numerous Western galleries have expanded to Seoul, including Gladstone, Esther Schipper, Perrotin, and Thaddaeus Ropac, which recently announced that it will add another floor to its Seoul location. Two galleries, Pace and Lehmann Maupin, that had established presences in the city slightly earlier also recently grew their footprint. And in March, the Centre Pompidou confirmed rumors that it would open a branch in Seoul, tentatively scheduled to open in 2025.

The Headlines

ON THE PENINSULA. In recent years, galleries from the United States and Europe, like Gladstone and König, have been opening outposts in Seoul, hoping to tap into South Korea’s burgeoning art market. Now, Melanie Gerlis reports in her weekly Financial Times column, White Cube is joining them. It plans to open a location in the city’s Gangnam district this fall. The London-based firm is apparently in expansion mode, as it also plans to open a New York branch in the fall. Peres Projects recently inaugurated a grand new gallery in the South Korean capital, and rumors persist about other dealers that might soon take the plunge. Gerlis also reports that Thaddaeus Ropac, which has had a Seoul venue since 2021, is taking on more space.

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR. Almost exactly a year after the National Gallery of Canada’s previous leader, Sasha Suda, announced that she was decamping to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Ottawa institution has a new director and CEO: Jean-François Bélisle. He is currently the director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec. The national museum has faced criticism of late, following the dismissal of four senior staffers amid an effort to reach a more diverse audience, as the Global and Mail reports. “I believe that art can change society, and look forward to collaborating with the gallery’s staff, as well as artists from across the country, to ensure our institution continues to be a fantastic force for good,” Bélisle said in a statement.

The Digest

Artist Sterling Wells has created a modestly size barge that is now floating in Los Angeles’s Ballona Creek. Wells is planning to paint aboard the craft for the next month, and will open a solo show at Night Gallery in the city on July 8. [Fox 11 Los Angeles]

The billionaire former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has given $130 million to the under-construction Perelman Performing Arts Center (more than its namesake, art-collecting businessman Ronald O. Perelman, donated). Bloomberg’s totals to the multifarious Shed also now total $130 million. [The New York Times]

As dangerous wildfire smoke gripped parts of North America on Wednesday, some galleries closed their doors or canceled openings and other events. Among them was Pace, which shut down in the middle of the day due to the air quality. [Pace Gallery/Instagram]

Lehmann Maupin global comms director Sarah Levine and photographer William Jess Laird were married in beautiful Marfa, Texas, with Levine wearing a Vera Wang dress inspired by the work of artist and noted Marfa resident Donald Judd. [Vogue]

New York City filed suit against architect Steven Holl and his namesake firm, arguing that their acclaimed design for a Queens library does not meet the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act. A company spox noted that the city approved the project and said, “Accessibility is a core value of our work.” [The New York Times]

Archaeologists excavating a former temple complex on the Greek island of Kythnos found more than 2,000 clay figures, apparently left there to worship the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. The area is believed to have been inhabited from the 12th century B.C.E. to the 7th century C.E. [The Associated Press]

The Kicker

THE MAJOR LEAGUES. The artist Rick Lowe just opened two exhibitions of his scintillating paintings in Athens, at the Benaki Museum and Gagosian. When T: The New York Times Style Magazinecaught up with Lowe in advance of those shows, he said that he was working as many as 16 hours a day, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. “You know, I feel like this moment right now for me, getting ready for these shows in Athens, this is like my N.B.A. playoffs,” he told the magazine. “There’s no stopping. As Kobe [Bryant] once said, ‘You rest at the end.’ ” Do what you’ll love, as they say, and you’ll never work another day in your life. [T]

Courtney Willis Blair, a former partner at New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, has been appointed the senior director of White Cube’s space in the city. Starting in January, she will oversee the gallery’s strategy in the U.S. and its programming in New York.

White Cube, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary next year, gained its reputation for showing Young British Artists, offering Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, and others some of their first major exposure. In recent years, its reach has grown to include a range of closely watched young artists, from Michael Armitage to Ilana Savdie.

In an interview, Willis Blair said she was looking forward to bringing the gallery’s legacy to the U.S. and continuing White Cube’s reputation of supporting artists from the starts of their careers onward.

“White Cube has always stood a very particular ground, in terms of working with artists from the beginning,” she told ARTnews. Referring to White Cube founder Jay Jopling, she continued, “Jay, of course, is intimately tied to the YBA artists, and that felt really important, that it wasn’t a matter of going with the tide but instead really being a part of the development and longevity that these artists have been able to attain.”

At Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Willis Blair earned a reputation in New York for working with a spread of boundary-pushing artists, among them performance art pioneer Pope.L, painter Gideon Appah, and video artist Jacolby Satterwhite. Those last two had been lured to the roster by Willis Blair herself.

In 2020, when Willis Blair was named a partner at Mitchell-Innes & Nash after having been a director for several years, she became one of the few Black dealers to hold that title at a white-owned U.S. gallery. She also served as senior director there.

A less frequently discussed, though equally important, part of Willis Blair’s career has been Entre Nous, an organization she founded in 2016 that regularly convenes Black women dealers. Among those known to have taken part are Ebony L. Haynes, Kyla McMillan, Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, and Nicola Vassell, all of whom now rank among New York’s top dealers.

Willis Blair said she would continue to be involved in Entre Nous, even with her new position.

“As the members grow in their professional lives, it becomes ever more important,” she said. “We were in touch through quarantine, we are in touch now. It’s an organization that was important when it started, and it’s ever more important now.”

White Cube, which also maintains spaces in Hong Kong, Paris, and West Palm Beach, Florida, is opening during a moment that Willis Blair described as an uncertain one for the art market. Yet she seemed confident in her latest move.

“It’s a time where there’s a lot of questions about what does the future hold in terms of inflation, supply chain demand,” she said. “The health of the business is allowing for White Cube to do this at this time that will be incredibly critical.”

The inauguration of the New York space will coincide with the 30th anniversary of the founding of White Cube, which has helped launch art stars like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. News of the expansion was first reported by the Baer Faxt, a market-oriented industry newsletter.

The gallery also represents figures such as Juliet Curtiss, Theaster Gates, Julie Mehretu, Bruce Nauman, and Park Seo-bo. It currently operates two galleries in London and another in Hong Kong, as well as an office in Paris.

“I have wanted to open White Cube in New York for some time and we have now found the perfect location in this remarkable city,” Jay Jopling, founder and CEO of White Cube, said in a statement. “The year 2023 marks White Cube’s 30th anniversary, which is a timely moment to embark on this exciting new chapter in our history.”

The news confirms a plan that had been rumored for years. In 2018, White Cube opened an office in New York, though it had not until now not detailed any plans to open a full-scale gallery in New York.

A White Cube spokesperson did not specify a square footage for the New York gallery, which will be set across three floors of a building at 1002 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. The location means the gallery will be situated not far from blue-chip enterprises like Acquavella Galleries and Galerie Buchholz.

They weren’t the only ones thinking of the Pointillist masterpiece in the context of the pandemic and the isolation it brought about. For her first show at London’s White Cube gallery—it opened last Thursday—painter Julie Curtiss did her own riff on La Grande Jatte with a painting called Le Futur (2021). In it, she weaves in references to at least one other Seurat painting and infuses the image with her signature Surrealist touches, all in an effort to convey some of the feelings she herself has experienced during lockdown. Curtiss, who grew up in Paris, is currently based in New York. She got on a Zoom call with ARTnews last week to talk about Le Futur, La Grande Jatte, and the complex themes behind her new body of work.

ARTnews: At first glance, your painting Le Futur looks like a riff on Seurat’s Grande Jatte. But when you examine it more closely, you see there are references to other paintings, including another famous one by Seurat, Bathers at Asnières (1884). What was your thinking, as you began this painting?

Julie Curtiss: I like doing this pastiche kind of thing—not like the movies or remakes but overtly, and with no shame. I’ve done my take on Courbet’s The Origin of the World [1866], for instance. Le Futur was the last painting I thought about for my White Cube show. I work very intuitively—the show kind of makes itself. I follow one branch, and it branches out somewhere else. Eventually I went into this theme of dyads and monads. And that’s when I started to make all the tondo-shaped [circular] canvases [and diptychs]. I wanted a conversation between the singular shape, and the double—the opposite.

I think it came from the longing of wanting to see nature and the outside and being free after a year of being confined. Then remembering the beautiful Seurat painting La Grande Jatte, and thinking of leisurely Sunday afternoons and parks. I don’t even remember when I decided to make half of the figures naked. But I was thinking a lot about the circle in art. My husband was reading this book about the archetypes of numbers in science, nature, and art. And there is this painting—when the book explains the monads—that’s actually in the Met, of Adam and Eve being chased from Eden.

Georges Seurat, Baigneurs à Asnières, 1884.

That painting—Giovanni di Paolo’s The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, from 1445—is fascinating.

It almost looks like Hilma af Klint. So I saw that painting and I was thinking of the painting I was making as a kind of Eden, a paradise. And I was thinking of Seurat. It was an interesting period of history when he painted, when there were new ideas about leisure and the class system. The really posh part of Paris, utopia with urbanism and nature, the balance between the two. In my painting, that half of the people are naked and half are dressed is a bit like the original sin. Within that monad, within that perfect image of paradise, there is a split in two, which is where the dyad comes in. The painting kept opening up. I put these buildings in back that reminded me of the Williamsburg waterfront [in Brooklyn]. Gentrification. So it looks on the surface like a very positive painting, and it’s called Le Futur, but it’s actually dystopic, much darker, and about a shift that divides an impossible unity, and a longing for nature and freedom. There’s a shady character in the back that represented, for me, a little shadow within the painting.

Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445.

In La Grande Jatte, the couple in the foreground, seen in silhouette, is so formal and stiff. In your painting there is the same formality, but the woman is naked. Were you interested in the humor of it? You’ve also said in interviews that you are interested in depicting the world from a female perspective.

I much prefer painting naked women, so that’s why it is her that is naked, not him. I purposely wanted to paint the figures not as nude but as naked. The woman has a little pearl earring. One of the dudes in the forefront has a watch and one has red sneakers. It’s the idea of you wearing just one thing and that making you look more naked. It’s also the dream where you realize you aren’t wearing pants. I wanted the nakedness to be a kind of allegory, about what is conscious or less conscious. It may not be visible to the naked eye, but is actually is there. It’s a [Luis] Buñuel, farcical kind of thing.

As an artist, what do you take from Seurat? What is your thinking on him and his work, and La Grande Jatte in particular? It’s one of those paintings that has been reproduced so widely that, in a way, we don’t see it anymore, that is, its nuances.

Seurat considered himself as almost like a scientist working on the perception of light and what it means to look, to perceive. And, the opposite of most Impressionists, he didn’t paint outdoors. Even though he was really studying the light, he really composes this picture, in the very classical sense of the term, and everything is very deliberate. The figures are so unemotional, and the reserve of it all makes it so much more emotional in a really weird way. There’s this reserve that allows for so much projection into the paintings, and onto the figures. It’s very intimate, even though it’s set outdoors. And there are social indications that are very subtle.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884.

You lived in Chicago briefly. Was La Grande Jatte, housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, a touchstone for you?

It was not. I spent like six months in Chicago, and as a French person, I was more interested in discovering American culture. Classic French painting I could have seen every day in Paris. When I did go to the Art Institute of Chicago and saw La Grande Jatte, I thought, “Oh, that’s here?”

After his own death, Seurat went out of style for a time, then in the 1920s was rediscovered. The post World War I elite, according to art historian Kenneth Silver, saw in Seurat’s work “an image of the world that they found reassuringly ordered, geometric, and much like the world that they themselves hoped to reconstruct.” And in fact, as you said, you were thinking of Seurat in something of a nostalgic mode.

The Seurat painting is definitely a commentary on society. It’s truly a social painting, and that’s why when I was thinking about it as an Eden, this human construct of nature. And, yes, it’s a kind of naïve longing for being together, fusing together, creating a form of togetherness. You have these opposite desires and tensions, dynamics between nature, city, culture, men, women, different classes—the urban dream. In Williamsburg, they are creating this fancy waterfront where everybody can enjoy the view of Manhattan, public space, but it’s almost like a form of, not propaganda but—

A beautification effort that creates a veneer over gentrification.

But at the same time it really does fill a need. And it is very popular, and it is creating a place of being together in congregation. But it’s a double-edged sword.

People tend to associate your work with the Surrealists and you’ve talked about taking inspiration from them. André Breton actually considered Seurat to be a kind of proto-Surrealist—reflecting the chaos of dreams—even Seurat was being interpreted by others as a kind of longing for a return to order…

My White Cube show is a reflection on order and chaos, a consideration of systems and things that are misplaced, which is Surrealism. As someone at the gallery pointed out, Surrealism is often about things being out of place, the throwing of a wrench into a perfect system. But chaos and order: one doesn’t exist without the other. That’s maybe my Asian take on it. The yin and yang take on it, where one needs the other to exist. I’m interested in representing that tension.

Your paintings often seem to be like a portrait of a psyche. I think that in lockdown, a lot of us were isolated and sort of thrown back on ourselves. We haven’t yet seen the full scope of what might ultimately be called the art of the coronavirus period, but your paintings in this show seem to capture the mood.

Julie Curtiss, Interstice, 2020.

The pandemic accelerated some of the themes of my new body of work. And I think it’s going to go there more and more. A lot of it had to do with the lockdown. The theme—dyads and monads—has to do with the atomization of society, how this is affecting us—the idea of control and of damage control. I needed to start working on it right away. I wanted to get all these things out of my head. But when I look at other figurative painting—in my circle of artists—I don’t see it yet. I think it’s this trauma and people have a hard time looking at it. Or maybe there’s a sense it’s not over yet. Or they need to keep their practice intact.

Seurat was said to have guarded his technique jealously. He didn’t want the secret getting out of how he created a coherent picture from all these tiny dots, using color theory and so forth. Do you think painters are still protective of their technique?

Yes, totally. Each artist is supposed to have his own voice. It’s the myth of individualism, the myth of originality, of being exquisite, unique individuals. So, people are very protective. It’s hard to develop a technique that is your own. Every time I’ve worked for an artist I’ve had to sign an NDA; I can’t share the secret of fabrication. At the same time, what’s really special about New York is how generous the artists are, giving each other studio visits and sharing information. Compared to Paris and Tokyo, where I’ve also lived, New York is special that way.

Art Dealers Association of America Names New Members
The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) has announced a new batch of galleries that have joined the industry group. Among them are Karma (New York); kurimanzutto (New York and Mexico City); Lisson Gallery (New York, London, Shanghai, and East Hampton); Sprüth Magers (Berlin, London, and Los Angeles); Various Small Fires (Seoul and Los Angeles); Jenkins Johnson Gallery (San Francisco and Brooklyn); and other enterprises.

Southbank Centre Names New Board Chair
London’s Southbank Centre, which is host to a museum and arts proramming, has named Misan Harriman as the new chair of its board of trustees. Harriman is the founder of the media content, tech, and commerce company What We See. Additionally, Luke Mayhew has been appointed as deputy chair of the board.

FDAG Galpão Reopens Following Renovation
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel Galpão in São Paulo has reopened to the public following a renovation. Launched in 2008, the space has been redesigned by architect Rodrigo Cervino of TACOA studios, and it now comprises two exhibition spaces and a large viewing room dedicated to works by artists from the gallery’s roster.

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, site of the next Felix Fair.

Thursday, May 20

Felix LA Reveals 2021 Exhibitors 
Twenty-nine Los Angeles galleries will participate in Felix LA 2021, which runs from July 29 through August 1 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. This year’s fair will be roughly half the size of the 2020 edition, which included 60 exhibitors. Returning galleries include Michael Benevento, Château Shatto, and Nicodim Gallery, while new ones include Blum and Poe, Francois Ghebaly, Gagosian, and David Kordansky Gallery. For the full exhibitor list, click here.

Lehmann Maupin and Carpenters Workshop to Open Aspen Summer Pop-up 
Lehmann Maupin, which maintains spaces in London, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, as well as an upcoming pop-up in Taipei, will return to Aspen this summer for a pop-up exhibition space in partnership with Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Located at 601 East Hyman Ave, the space will open on July 1 and present exhibitions through mid-September, showcasing art and design from both galleries. The inaugural exhibition, titled “Second Nature”, will feature artists including Mandy El-Sayegh, Teresita Fernández, and Rick Owens. It will be followed by the show “Material Space,” which opens August 5. Aspen collectors Amnon and Katie Rodan said in a statement,”Being supporters of the arts and the Aspen Art Museum, we are thrilled that Carpenters Workshop Gallery and Lehman Maupin are opening a collaborative space in Aspen this summer. Fusing traditional art and design objects creates a more dynamic and differentiated experience. This will enrich Aspen’s ecosystem and we are excited to welcome them.”

The exterior of the Aspen pop-up.

Magenta Plains Now Represents Jibade-Khalil Huffman
The artist and writer Jibade-Khalil Huffman has joined the New York–based gallery Magenta Plains, which is currently presenting the artist’s work on Platform, an online exhibition space established by David Zwirner. Huffman often incorporates found materials and ephemera in his practice, which spans installation, video, projections, photographic light boxes, and photo-collages. His work, which is the subject of on ongoing solo exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, explores visibility and memory.

LA Arts Recovery Fund Gives $36 M. to 90 Nonprofits
The LA Arts Recovery Fund, which supports small and mid-sized local nonprofits with an emphasis on Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous arts and culture organizations, has named 90 organizations that will receive a total of $36 million in funds. The operating support grants range from $5,000 to $2 million and are distributed over the course of two to three years. Among the grantees are Avenue 50 Studio, Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory, the Japanese American National Museum, the Museum of Neon Art, and the Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation. The full list of organizations receiving grants can be accessed here.

Wednesday, May 19

Magnum Gallery Opens New Paris Space
Magnum Gallery, a space that mounts exhibitions of works by artists in the famed photography collective, will expand to a new location in Paris. The gallery, located at at 68 Rue Léon Frot, will open this fall and replace the collective’s current offices at 19 Rue Hégésippe Moreau. The new gallery will feature exhibition spaces, a private viewing room, and a library on the ground floor.

Sydney Chatman, Daniel Minter, SANTIAGO
X, and Kameelah
Janan Rasheed.

Tuesday, May 18

Joyce Foundation Names 2021 Joyce Awards Recipients
The Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has revealed the 2021 recipients of its annual Joyce Awards, which support emerging and mid-career BIPOC artists and arts organizations in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis–St Paul. The awardees, who each get $75,000 grants for the creation and presentation of new site-specific works, are Sydney Chatman with the Congo Square Theatre Company, Daniel Minter with the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed with Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, and SANTIAGO X with the Chicago Public Art Group.

Institute of Museum and Library Services Announces Recipients of 2021 Awards
The Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, D.C., has announced the six recipients of the 2021 National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the top federal honor for institutions that provide outstanding programming and community outreach. The three winning museums are the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Ponce, Puerto Rico; the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon; and the Mississippi Children’s Museum in Jackson, Mississippi.

White Cube’s temporary location in Aspen.

Monday, May 17

White Cube Plans Aspen Outpost
White Cube, which has gallery locations in London and Hong Kong and offices in Paris and New York, will open a pop-up space in Aspen, Colorado, located at 228 South Mill Street. Over three months, the gallery will stage three group exhibitions under the moniker “Correspondences.” The exhibitions will run June 8–July 4, July 10–29, and August 3–September 5. The gallery previously hosted another seasonal pop-up location in West Palm Beach, Florida.

[Why the pandemic spurred galleries to open pop-up locations near collectors’ second homes.]

Expo Chicago Parent Company Plans Editions Fair
Art Expositions LLC, the parent company of the Expo Chicago art fair, will now mount a new fair in the city, Editions Chicago – The Print, Photography & Art Book Fair, focusing on artworks that exist in multiples. The inaugural edition of the fair runs September 23–26 at Navy Piers, the longtime home of Expo Chicago. Editions Chicago is being planned in partnership with the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) and the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD). In a statement, Tony Karman, the founder of Expo Chicago and president of Art Expositions, said, “With the increasing interest and scope of limited-edition prints, photographs, multiples, and art books, we felt that it was the right time to launch this fair to engage new audiences while developing an unprecedented collaboration between leading international associations.”

David Kordansky Gallery Adds Joel Mesler to Roster
Artist and former art dealer Joel Mesler is now represented by Los Angeles’s David Kordansky Gallery. In his art, Mesler often draws on his autobiography, design, and popular iconography to create paintings that are at once humorous and emotional. New work by the artist will be featured in the gallery’s booth at Art Basel in Switzerland in June. He has previously had exhibitions at Harper’s Books in East Hampton, New York, and Simon Lee Gallery in London.

Kenyon College’s Gund Gallery Names New Director
On June 1, Daisy Desrosiers will join the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College in Ohio as chief curator and director. Desrosiers currently serves as director of artist programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art, which is an incubator of research and artistic practice at the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine. She also has experience working as an adviser to private and public collectors.

Micha Serraf Awarded the Ritzau Art Prize 2021
Zimbabwe-born, South Africa-based photographer Micha Serraf has won the Ritzau Art Prize 2021, given by 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair and funded by Tauck Ritzau Innovative Philanthropy. The prize goes to outstanding emerging artists from the African continent. In their practice, Serraf deconstructs ideas of identity, belonging, and Black masculinity. They will participate in a three-month residency at International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York that includes a private studio and exhibition. Serraf will work on a new body of work exploring the idea of the “legal alien,” as a means of reaching out to people who have been labelled as such or made to feel othered, according to a press release.

Jay Jopling, the founder and chief executive of White Cube, said in a statement, “Isamu Noguchi’s extraordinary oeuvre places him among the masters of Modern sculpture.”

White Cube will show Noguchi’s sculptures and designs at this year’s edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, set to run from May 21–23. A two-person exhibition with Antony Gormley at White Cube’s pop-up space in Aspen, Colorado, in August. The artist’s first solo show with White Cube will take place in February 2022 in London.

Noguchi produced a prolific body of work that spanned—and often blurred the lines between—art, design, and architecture. His furniture, ceramics, lighting, sculptures, and gardens reflect a keen attention to nature and space.

[How Isamu Noguchi became a sculptor and visionary for the ages.]

Born in Los Angeles in 1904 to an American mother and Japanese father, Noguchi’s negotiation of these two cultures was a driving force of his art and activism. In 1942, Noguchi voluntarily entered the Poston internment camp in the Arizona desert. “Thus, I willfully became part of humanity uprooted,” Noguchi wrote in his 1968 memoir. He arrived with ambitious designs aimed to improve living conditions for the interned at Poston, including a botanical garden and a zoo.

Coming almost exactly a year since pandemic-related lockdowns went into effect in many parts of the world, this online event may seem a little late to a landscape that is now oversaturated with digital fairs. But it seems that in waiting to launch its OVRs—which feature 212 exhibitors from 28 countries—FIAC has learned from its competitors’ earlier hiccups. (A recurring complaint was that OVRs were, generally, difficult to navigate and glitchy.) Dealers widely praised FIAC’s easy-to-navigate interface and reported strong sales, beginning in the early hours of the first VIP day on Tuesday and through Friday.

“FIAC’s OVR is streamlined and intuitive and is a good antidote from those suffering from OVR OD,” Iwan Wirth, Hauser & Wirth’s president and cofounder, said in an email to ARTnews. “The ability to include dynamic video content helps to tell the story of the works and our presentation has resulted in more that $5 million of sales so far.”

Hauser & Wirth’s most expensive work on offer at fair was a recent George Condo painting, titled Two Hippies (2020), for $2.2 million, which sold on the first day. Other sales by the gallery included Charles Gaines’s 2020 mixed-media work Numbers and Faces: Multi-Racial/Ethnic Combinations Series 1: Face #16, Naoki Sutter-Shudo (Japanese/French/Swiss German) for $350,000, Louise Bourgeois’s 2009 drawing Pregnant Woman for $110,000, and an untitled 2001 work by Mark Bradford for an undisclosed price.

Hauser & Wirth also had on offer a 1971 untitled painting by Philip Guston for $1.7 million, David Hammons’s Body Print (1974) for $1.2 million, a Louise Bourgeois marble sculpture of a hand emerging from a coil for $1.5 million, and the maquette for Nicole Eisenman’s acclaimed Procession sculpture, which debuted in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, for just over $600,000.

The online edition has also strived to preserve the Parisian flair it typically offers in-person through its branding and easy navigation. For instance, visitors can explore the fair by various criteria, such as individual artworks, gallery locations, and price points, even allowing for the discovery of unfamiliar or unexpected pieces. But the OVRs’ most advanced feature is one that is new to those who have frequented virtual fairs over the past year. “Chance Encounter”—a nod to the Surrealist philosophy—allows users to click a button to see an artwork, selected at random from the entire showcase, as a highlight.

Taken together, the features mimic the serendipitous finds that are the hallmarks of art fairs. It’s a small but effective means of engagement that other fairs have lacked, FIAC’s director Jennifer Flay said by phone, adding, “We tried to make it dynamic and easy to use so that you never end up in a dead end.”

Flay continued, “We’re in very new territory. Our job as fair organizers is to create the conditions in which our galleries can meet their audience. … It’s known as a fair where you can do business at a very high level.”

Mega-gallery David Zwirner also saw early success during FIAC. The enterprise sold out its show of Luc Tuymans works within the first few hours of the online fair’s launch. Among the multimedia works sold were Orchid (Seconds IV), 2020, and Monkeys (2020-2021) for $150,000 each, and Reflection, Anonymous, and Library (all three completed in 2020) for $75,000 each.

Mona Hatoum, Projection (velvet), 2013.

Likewise the Brussels-based outfit Xavier Hufkens, which sold out its show of 10 works by Sayre Gomez within a few hours on the VIP preview day; those works were priced between $15,000 and $40,000. Hufkens told ARTnews that the gallery is continuing to field inquiries from top international collectors for additional works shown through the fair’s end on Sunday.

For her presentation, the dealer Almine Rech, whose eponymous gallery has locations in Paris, Brussels, London, New York, and Shanghai, offered work by various artists in the gallery’s program, including Taryn Simon, Artur Lesher, Tom Wesselmann, and others. Among the works that sold were Kenny Scharf’s Torna Doon (2020) in the range of $91,500–$122,000, Tarik Kiswanson’s Conductive Bodies (2019) in the range of $30,500–$61,000, and Thu Van Tran’s Rainbow Herbicides #2 (2019) for an undisclosed price.

“Even when you take away the iconic setting of the Grand Palais, FIAC is still a crucial platform and market—as soon as the OVR was launched we had immediate response and sales,” Rech said in an email. “The fair has also done a nice job developing an online presence which I think allows it to stand out in a busy landscape—as much as possible like the physical fair.”

Dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, whose gallery has spaces in London, Paris, and Salzburg, showcased works by artists from its 30-year anniversary exhibition, with Anselm Kiefer, Antony Gormley, Georg Baselitz, Rosemarie Castoro, Lee Bul, and Alex Katz included. He sold a large-scale, vertical Alex Katz canvas titled Vivien Vertical 1 (2020), depicting the artist’s daughter-in-law Vivien Bittencourt, for $650,000 and Antony Gormley’s 2018 Corten steel work OPEN INCH for £400,000 ($553,314).

White Cube, which has gallery spaces in London and Hong Kong, sold several works, including Theaster Gates’s Six Lines Black Patch (2020) for $375,000, Kenneth Noland’s Via Relay (1968) for $250,000, Mona Hatoum’s Projection (velvet), 2013, for £60,000 ($83,000), and two 2014 works by Tracey Emin, The Heart has its reasons and Grotto, for $100,000 each.

Blum & Poe, of Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York, presented the work of three artists from the gallery’s program, selling March Avery’s St Tropez Backsteet (2003), Theodora Allen’s Balance, No.2 (2020), and Anna Weyant’s Falling Woman (2020) in the price range of $5,000 to $28,000. For Matt Bangser, a partner at the gallery, these sales “reflect a deep and geographically diverse marketplace.”

Berlin’s Peres Projects brought to its virtual booth a group of four emerging international artists: Nicholas Grafia, Shota Nakamura, Stanislava Kovalcikova, and Paolo Salvador, all of whom have recently joined the gallery’s roster. “For us, FIAC and the Paris art market in general, has always been one that is marked by its openness to new artists and ideas,” the gallery’s founder Javier Peres said of the gallery’s presentation. He had managed to sell several works from these artists by Friday.

Elsewhere in the fair, New York’s Metro Pictures gallery sold André Butzer’s Untitled (2020) for €70,000 ($83,400), Camille Henrot’s My Kind of Meat (2020) for €22,000 ($26,200), and Robert Longo’s Study for Black Panther (2020) for $65,000. Brazil’s Galeria Nara Roesler, which recently expanded its New York presence, sold Abraham Palatnik’s W-533 (2014) for $100,000. Paris’s Galerie Chantal Crousel sold a Wolfgang Tillmans photograph for €100,000 ($119,000), a Jean-Luc Moulène painting for €55,000 ($65,000), and a David Douard sculpture for €15,000 ($17,800).

Alexandre Lenoir, Vietnam, 2018.

Jessica Silverman Gallery, of San Francisco, had work on offer by Judy Chicago, Conrad Egyir, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Dashiell Manley, Clare Rojas, and Catherine Wagner. The gallery was able to sell four works, with three others on hold, as of Friday. The works on offer ranged in prices from $12,000 to $45,000. The Amsterdam-based GRIMM gallery sold a Matthew Day Jackson painting for $225,000, two works by Rosalind Nashashibi in the range of $17,000 to $35,000, and a triptych by Dutch artist Tjebbe Beekman for $90,000 to a U.S.-based collector.

Emerging galleries also saw demand among top international buyers. The Paris-based Galerie Loevenbruck sold a work by Michel Parmentier to a prominent Asian collection for €30,000 ($36,000); a work by Frédéric Pardo to a European collector for €65,000 ($77,000); and a piece by Philippe Mayaux for €24,000 ($29,000). Exo Exo, a Paris gallery focused on emerging artists, sold 19 works at prices between €500-€5,000 ($595-$6,000). “[It’s] a turning point for us,” said artist and founder of the project, Antoine Donzeaud. For Flay, FIAC’s director, these sales exemplify how the democratic platform benefits small dealers.

Chicago’s Document gallery sold several photographs by L.A.-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya in the range of $9,000–$14,000 to European collectors who were new to the gallery. Works by the gallery’s artists were also featured in a number of VIP walk-throughs and highlighted on the website, which led to an “overwhelming amount” of serious inquiries, according to the gallery’s director Sibylle Friche, who added, “We’re ready to be back in a physical booth but we’re having a great experience during this particular OVR.”

The new American Embassy building designed by the great Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen had opened a few years earlier in 1960. Intended to project both an image of American power—the immense golden eagle over the façade—and contemporary American life—modern, informal, welcoming. Anyone could just walk into the building from the street. It housed a library and an art gallery that were open to the public. It was the very opposite of the barricaded fortress it became in later years or the moated bunker it is today.

That summer the exhibition at the embassy gallery was titled “Abstract Watercolors by 14 Americans.” I was naturally curious to see it. The exhibition was serious and substantial, put together with the assistance of MoMA, and with a short catalogue introduction by Frank O’Hara. Each artist—the best known of whom were Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner—was represented by four or five framed works. All the works were abstract, loosely painted and expressionist in style.

All but those of one artist—Al Held. His were comparatively simple and boldly geometric in form, with hard-edge bright flat color planes, striking illusions of shallow depth, and heavily painted in what was then the still-new medium of acrylic. Despite their modest size, their scale was immense, with small details animating implicitly vast planes.

So, unlike everything else in the exhibition, they were to me a revelation—I had never heard of the artist nor seen his work before. They spoke to me directly and I was captivated immediately.

You can imagine my astonishment when I arrived at Yale not long after only to discover that Al Held was to be one of my tutors. He turned out to be the best I ever had.

Initially I was in awe of Held—young people were more inclined towards awe in those days—but it was soon obvious we would get on well. He was in his mid-30s when we met. He looked like a tough guy, but by nature he was gentle, relaxed, generous and good humored, comfortable in his own skin. He had that sophistication and worldliness that comes not from money but hard-won experience. He could be a difficult taskmaster who expected our level of seriousness and commitment to match his own. Despite his lack of formal education, Held was highly intelligent, articulate and intellectually curious. He did not suffer fools, dilettantes, or laggards. If he came to one’s studio space and saw nothing new he would say “Same old shit” and leave without another word. He was open to work of any kind and of all our tutors the most supportive when we tried something new or unorthodox. He told me the work that interested him least was that which was in some obvious way like his own.

Al Held.

He and Alex Katz, his friend and New York contemporary, also teaching at Yale, expressed amusement that despite not having gone to university themselves they were now teaching at one of America’s great institutions.

Held came from an extremely modest background. Born in New York in 1928, brought up in the Depression, he dropped out of high school at 16 and served in the navy for two years. He began studying painting at the Art Students League in New York through his friend, the artist Nicholas Krushenick, and then in the early 1950s lived in Paris. There he discovered and joined a world of young American artists working and studying. Paris was still considered the place for artists to go. He enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and soon found himself a studio. He would later say that he needed to go to Paris to become an American artist. He made his first exhibition there in 1952 but the following year returned to New York, where there was a growing confidence that the torch of avant-garde art had passed from Europe to America, from Paris to New York, his personal trajectory mirroring that of this historic transition.

Like most forward looking New York artists of his generation his roots were in the world of abstract expressionism, and he was a regular at the Cedar Bar and the Artists’ Club, their highly charged meeting place on 8th St.

Despite the hard edge character of his work he was as instinctively painterly an artist as any of that generation. He was obsessed with the physicality of both the process and the object of his art. His paintings were heavily painted, often overpainted and overpainted until he found exactly the shape and edge he wanted. This belief in finding art through the act of painting and his commitment to abstraction most clearly connects him with the abstract expressionists. He was not a “cool” painter like the younger Frank Stella, but “hot” like ’50s jazz.

Al Held, Upside Down Triangle, 1966.

It is Held’s work of the late ’50s and ’60s that I know best because I had the opportunity to experience it directly. I loved the alphabet paintings and the immense geometric and occasionally biomorphic paintings that followed, and I still do. On one occasion in 1965 Held invited me to his immense 5th Avenue studio opposite the Flatiron Building to show me what he was working on. It turned out to be the extraordinary Greek Garden—at 12 by 56 feet still possibly the largest painting I’ve ever seen. I think it is safe to say its scale and physical impact had a powerful influence on my own practice many years later.

What interested me most about Held’s work was that he seemed to seek and achieve a kind of space no one else did. His work was always abstract but his paintings create a concrete and precise illusionistic space and presence that I recognize from sculpture but rarely see in painting. Always in Held’s work is the attempt to extend the notion of space beyond the surface of the canvas into that of the viewer. It would be fair to say that in all my drawings and paintings I have sought to achieve this kind of sculptural rather than painterly presence that I first experienced in Held’s work.

Michael Craig-Martin.

In the late ’60s Held changed the focus of his work from planes to lines and from color to black and white. By this time, I was already living in Britain and over the following years I came to know the development of his work primarily through reproductions in art magazines. Over the next decades one can see his growing understanding of the world he is exploring in the increasing complexity and subtlety of his paintings. Held saw these paintings as fundamentally different from what he considered his earlier “reductivist” works. To me, no matter how complex and contradictory his paintings become, they never lose their sense of precision and clarity—that physical articulation of space of his early work—but simply extend it to new territory.

In my final year at Yale, Held proposed a project where we would each choose a specific place to make an installation piece in the new and immensely complex Art and Architecture building by Paul Rudolf, where we were now working. This reflected a growing interest of his own and his recognition of younger artists’ increasing frustration with the limitations of painting at the time.

I think such a student project even today would seem quite radical for painting students. The project was intended to take us out of our comfort zone, to make us look at what we were doing in new terms. I made a work engaging two floors of a back staircase, involving black walls, white handrails and floor to ceiling vertical strips of mirror. I look back on it still with pride and satisfaction. It opened a door that I have kept open throughout my career.

To me Al Held is an artist who has never received the full international recognition he deserved. He was a maverick, not part of any movement or group, not easily categorized or pigeonholed. His work remained rigorous and uncompromising, challenging one’s perceptual pre-conceptions and intelligence, rather than conforming to received wisdom or flattering one’s good taste.

This essay is taken from Al Held, published by White Cube (releasing in February) to coincide with “Al Held: The Sixties,’’ on view at White Cube in London through February 27. Text ©Michael Craig-Martin.

Curtiss, who was included in a group exhibition at White Cube in 2017, is best known for her paintings that offer surreal close-ups of hair, often in forms where it seems to be braided. Sometimes, that hair is shown on the back of a woman’s head, or in a way where it seems to extend to form a row of hanging Peking ducks. Many of her images are infused with a sense of eroticism and also include glimpses of a hand with long, brightly painted acrylic nails. Curtiss’s work draws on the visual language of the Chicago Imagists from the 1960s, in particular the work of Christina Ramberg.

Last May, during a day sale of contemporary art at the Phillips auction house in New York, her 2016 painting, Princess, showing the back of a woman’s head, with her hair tied in large buns reminiscent of Princess Leia from Star Wars, sold for $106,250, well above its high estimate of $8,000. With that sale and a concurrent solo show on view at Anton Kern, Curtiss, who has not yet turned 40, became an artist closely watched by collectors and gallerists, even though her work has not been included in any major biennial exhibitions.

Curtiss, who was born in 1982, is one of the youngest artists to be added to White Cube’s list of artists, which includes Etel Adnan, Dóra Maurer, and the estate of Al Held. As of February 2020, the gallery only has three other artists under 40 on its roster: Michael Armitage, Ibrahim Mahama, and Eddie Peake.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Curtiss said of her approach to painting, “In my images, I enjoy the complementarity of humor and darkness, the uncanny and the mundane, grotesque shapes and vivid colors.”