Art Industry News: Meet the American Banker Who Just Bought Banksy’s $1.6 Million Brexit-Themed Work at Sotheby’s + Other Stories

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most
consequential developments coming out of the art world and art
market. Here’s what you need to know on this Wednesday, February
12.

NEED-TO-READ

Police Question Gallery
Owner’s Widow in Klimt Theft – The widow of a former
gallery director in Italy is under investigation after
Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady resurfaced in a nearby
garden 22 years after it was stolen. Prosecutors are
questioning Rossella Tiadina, the widow of Stefano Fugazza, who was
managing gallery Ricci Oddi at the time. The painting was found
hidden in a wall behind the gallery in January. In a diary entry
uncovered by investigators, Fugazza wondered if he should steal the
painting to promote a Klimt show he was planning. But later, after
the theft, he wrote: “The Lady has gone for good,
and damned be the day I even thought of such a foolish and childish
thing.” (Guardian)

Authorities Reject Plans for London Holocaust Memorial
Museum – Proposals for London’s
planned Holocaust memorial have suffered a major setback as Royal
Parks, the charity that oversees its site in the central
London park in Millbank, said it was opposed to the move. The
new memorial, which would also feature a learning center, had been
due to be erected in Victoria Tower Gardens, but the organization
said that it could not support the project “given the impact it
will have on a popular public amenity space in an area of the
capital with few public parks.” (Guardian)

Buyer of Banksy’s Brexit Work Unmasked
– The buyer of Banksy’s sardonic, Brexit-themed
work Vote to Love (2018), which sold on Tuesday night at
Sotheby’s for £1.2 million ($1.6 million) with fees, has
been identified as Bartow Morgan, the CEO of Brandbank, a
Georgia-based banking company. Why would an American want to own a
work about Brexit? “We’ve got Trump,” he said simply. But he
also had more personal motivations: “What can I say, my kids love
it.” The work, a Vote to Leave in which the “Leave” is
replaced by “Love,” was first shown in the Royal Academy’s 2018
summer exhibition. (The Art
Newspaper)

A $5 Van Gogh Could Sell
for $16 Million – In 1967, Peasant Woman in
Front of a Farmhouse was sold at  auction for just £4.
But now, it could fetch more than £13 million at the European
Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, where it will be offered by the
British gallery Simon Dickinson. After its initial sale in the late
1960s, the work was subject to X-rays that uncovered a sketch
underneath of a man ploughing with oxen. The composition was
similar to another famous work by Van Gogh, which allowed experts
to identify it as the handiwork of the 33-year-old artist. TEFAF
opens on March 7. (Daily
Mail)

ART MARKET

Chile Declines
Invitation to ARCOmadrid Amid Political Unrest at Home –
The Chilean Ministry of Culture has declined an invitation to
participate as a guest nation at the 2021 edition of ARCOmadrid,
citing “social unrest” at home. The decision has prompted an outcry
from the local artistic community, who see the move as a way to
silence artists who might speak out through work they show abroad.
“There is no doubt that the measure of declining ARCO’s invitation
is the result of the same repressive policy by the government,
which wants to posit itself as focused on real solutions to the
problems of the local crisis,” a group of Chilean artists wrote in
a collective statement. The country has seen ongoing
anti-government protests since October. (Hyperallergic)

Berlin Gallery Weekend
Improves Gender Imbalance – After last year’s event
was criticized for its lack of gender balance, Berlin Gallery
Weekend’s newly released artist list for 2020 seems to have
improved. The ratio is 29 female artists to 31 male artists. Among
the highlights: Loie Hollowell will show at König Galerie, Kaari
Upson will present works at Sprüth Magers, and Stanley Whitney will
curate a group exhibition at Nordenhake. (Monopol)

Asia Week to Proceed as
Scheduled in New York – The Asia Week New York Association
has confirmed that 37 of its shows, including gallery talks and
events, will take place as planned between March 12 and 19. Asia
Week’s auction house partners have, however, rescheduled their
March Asian art auctions to June due to the outbreak of the novel
2019 strain of coronavirus. (Artfix
Daily)

COMINGS & GOINGS

MoMA Acquires Gordon Parks Trove – New York’s Museum
of Modern Art has bought 56
works from Gordon Parks’s 1957 “The Atmosphere of Crime” series. As
the first African American staff photographer
for Life magazine, Parks took
the images of crime
scenes, police stations, hospitals, and morgues for a photo essay
addressing issues of race relations, poverty, urban life, and the
criminal justice system. A selection of the works will go on
view at the museum in May. (Artforum) 

The Rothko Chapel Will Reopen in June – The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, has
announced that it will reopen in June. The chapel commissioned by
patrons John and Dominique de Menil contains 14 monumental
paintings by Mark Rothko, and has been undergoing a $30 million
renovation. (Artforum)

Desert X Names Co-Curator for Its Next Edition –
The 2021 edition of the Desert X
biennial in the Coachella Valley will be co-organized by curator
César García-Alvarez. The Mexico-born, LA-based curator is the
founder of the LA nonprofit The Mistake Room. The sculpture
biennial is slated to run from February 6 to April 11, 2021.
(Artforum)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Madrid Will Open a Jewish Museum – Spain’s capital city, Madrid, is getting its
first Jewish Museum, which aims to cover 3,000 years of Jewish
history. Until the 1492 expulsion of Jews, the country had the
largest Jewish community in the world. The museum will open in
2022. (Jerusalem
Post)

Uli Sigg Shows His Chinese Art in Turin – Turin’s Castello di Rivoli will show selection
of works from the collection of Uli Sigg, the first entrepreneur to
travel to China in 1979 after the declaration of the Open Door
Policy. “Facing the Collector: The Sigg Collection of Contemporary
Art from China” will run February 25 through June 21.
(Press
release)

Behind the Scenes of JR’s Oscars Shoot for
TIME – Street
artist JR photographed stars celebrating their Oscar wins at an
afterparty thrown by Madonna and her talent manager, Guy Oseary,
for TIME. The party, officially dubbed (what else?) “The
Party,” had a strict no-social media policy, so the French artist’s
photos of celebrities hanging out with life-size black and white
portraits of themselves are the only shots of the event.
(TIME)

The post Art Industry News: Meet the American Banker Who
Just Bought Banksy’s $1.6 Million Brexit-Themed Work at Sotheby’s +
Other Stories appeared first on artnet News.