Wet Paint: Artists Say Team Gallery’s Owner Stiffed Them, Kendall Jenner Goes Shopping at Art Basel, & More Juicy Art-World Gossip

Every Thursday afternoon, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint,
a gossip column of original scoops reported and written by Nate
Freeman. If you have a tip, email Nate
at nfreeman@artnet.com.

NO TEAM PLAYER (ANYMORE)

After years of rumors that José Freire,
proprietor of the small but potent Team Gallery in
SoHo, occasionally falls short of ensuring his artists get
adequately paid, a bombshell dropped this week. Alex
Bag, the pioneering video performance artist who is
enjoying a vogue due to a show at the Whitney, had
been alluding on Instagram to some of her art being “held hostage”
by Team. Then, earlier this week, she posted a picture of herself
at the dinner for her last show at Team, in 2016, holding her son.
Under the picture, the artist wrote: “Ummmm, Single mom… owed. 16k…
‘Team.’” The implication was clear to the followers of her private
account, and the comments section filled up with notes of
encouragement from the likes of Chateau Shatto founder Liv Barrett
and Fernando Mesta, founder of Mexico City gallery Gaga. Artists
Spencer Sweeney, Eli Hansen, and Jason Yates chimed in with
comments suggesting that they, too, had endured financial
misadventures with Freire.

After the Instagram post went live, multiple sources with
intimate knowledge of Team’s coffers—all of whom requested
anonymity—reached out to Wet Paint to say that the money owed to
Bag is just the tip of the iceberg. For years, former employees and
gallery artists attested, Freire’s operation has struggled to
deliver payments to its artists, with some allegedly short hundreds
of thousands of dollars. The inability to balance a budget, they
continued, was one of the reasons the gallery stopped doing art fairs
altogether after decades of appearing in the main sector of
Art Basel, among other major expos. Recent years
have seen significant turnover in both Team’s sales staff and
artist roster, and visitors to the gallery’s two small project
spaces in Venice Beach, California, have found
them to be closed as of late.

Fresh artist defections now include Parker Ito
and Sam McKinniss, both of whom are said to be
owed money, while longtime Team stalwart Cory
Arcangel has become represented in New York by both
Lisson and Greene Naftali, and by
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac internationally. We
hear the gallery also owes payment to artists still listed on the
roster, with those artists angling to leave once they get paid. But
while all admitted that Team’s veteran proprietor lacks financial
acumen, many were full of praise for Freire’s renowned ability to
discover artists, saying they had a lot of respect for him as a
gallerist. He has certainly proven his mettle—and good will—over
the years, building the careers of such stars as Ryan
McGinley, Banks Violette, and
Stanley Whitney and supporting the underappreciated
artist Steven Parrino until his premature
death in a motorcycle accident.

Despite that legacy, however, we hear he’s currently dug himself
into an unrealistic economic scenario—and sources say it may spur
more artists to leave, and prevent others from joining. In an email
to Wet Paint, Freire would not address the allegations of financial
turmoil, saying his “only comment” was that Bag’s claim was “not
true.” He added: “She has also claimed on IG that her art is being
‘held hostage.’ We would like nothing more than to return her work
but our requests to do so have so far been ignored. Maybe now this
situation can be resolved.”

KEEPING UP WITH THE ART FAIRS 

One could be forgiven for thinking that when model and reality
TV star Kendall Jenner goes to Art
Basel Miami Beach, she’s not there just to take
in the art. During the fair in 2016, she partied with A$AP
Rocky at the strip club E11EVEN, and,
just last week, Jenner… partied at the strip club E11EVEN, this
time with Bella and Gigi Hadid
together with that model-loving rapscallion Leonardo
DiCaprio, who showed up at 4:30 a.m. with dealer
Helly Nahmad in tow. But never underestimate a
Jenner. Sources say that the 24-year-old supermodel has become
serious about collecting, and was actually in Miami to buy
work—ending up making a purchase at the fair.

Her new connoisseurial assurance may be traceable to the fact
that, six months ago, she started working with the art advisor
Meredith Darrow, who is renowned in Miami for
helping to build the collection of the Key
Biscayne couple Rosa and Carlos
de la Cruz. (Darrow has also long advised Jenner’s
half-sister Kourtney Kardashian.) At Art Basel,
Jenner was seen weaving through the aisles with Darrow, checking
out artworks at David Zwirner and Blum &
Poe—while her on-again, off-again boyfriend, the rapper
Travis Scott, was spotted by spies eyeing a
Tom Sachs work at the Acquavella
booth.

CONDO OFF THE MARKET

One would think that the biggest Hauser & Wirth
news of the week came when the gallery announced Thursday morning
that they had signed
Avery Singer, the in-demand young artist who
had been courted by David Zwirner and Gagosian as
well. While the news was no surprise to Wet Paint readers—who
learned of the rumored move in this column a week
ago—it was still a coup for the gallery. But it looks like
Hauser & Wirth has an even bigger representation announcement on
the horizon. On Thursday, Artnet News scribe Kenny
Schachter tipped Wet Paint that George
Condo—who is coming off a year of getting the star
treatment at the Venice Biennale and seeing his
auction prices continue their run in the healthy
mid-seven-figures—will be the latest to join the voracious Swiss
mega-gallery. After the initial tip, two other sources connected to
dealerships that have shown Condo in the past confirmed that they
heard the same rumor. Condo’s lawyer, Richard
Golub, did not deny the news when reached on the phone,
offering to talk more tomorrow. Condo didn’t reply to an email, and
a Hauser & Wirth rep said there was “nothing to report” at the
moment. Emails to Per Skarstedt, who currently has
a show of Condo paintings and drawings at his grand 64th Street
gallery, also did not respond.

ARTISTS GET INIGO’D

Last week in Miami, a few nosy art-worlders stopped by the
now-shuttered space once run by Inigo Philbrick,
the infamous dealer who has
allegedly defrauded clients to the tune of tens of million of
dollars, and is currently on the run from the law. The gallery,
which as recently as August was hosting a two-person show of work
by Bridget Riley and Jeff Elrod,
is now a stripped-bare husk of a space, with boxes and a few stray
swivel chairs. There’s also a sign alluding to something that now
will never happen: “The gallery is closed for a show change. We
will reopen soon with a solo presentation of: Jana
Euler. Please visit us then!”

That in-demand German artist—who was recently picked up for
representation by Greene Naftali—will not be
showing with Philbrick anytime soon, and neither will the next
artist who was slated on the program: Joel Mesler,
the artist-turned-dealer-turned-artist-slash-dealer who is the
proprietor of Rental gallery in East Hampton. When reached on the
phone, Mesler said that Philbrick told him until just a few days
before the scandal broke that he was selling Mesler’s work, and
that the activist investor Dan Loeb had
commissioned a painting. Then, a concerned friend called Mesler and
cryptically told him to not send Inigo any art, and by all means
not cash any of his checks. Two days later, news about the first
lawsuit hit the internet, and Mesler had the rude awakening that
his show had been vaporized. Thankfully, the Belgian gallery
Patrick de Brock will now display the paintings
Mesler made for the show—which display words written on a sandy
beach in what appears to be urine—at Art Brussels
in 2020.

FLIPPED FRANCO FLOPS AT PHILLIPS

The New Now sales at Phillips are meant to
nurture the markets of young artists, and they often serve as a
platform for these talents to make their secondary-market debut on
the auction block. But one up-and-coming artist in Thursday’s New
Now sale is hardly an ingenue: James Franco.
The
actor-slash-director-turned-author-slash-artist-slash-actor-slash-director—who
for a period early this decade bewitched certain members of the
art-world cognoscenti into thinking he was one of them—made his
debut at a major auction house when a 2015 painting of a bird came
up for sale at Phillips London. Back then,
Franco—who is now being sued by two
former students for alleged sexual harassment—was on fire: he was
listed on Pace’s artist roster, had a show at
Gagosian, and charmed his way into participating in a show at
MoMA PS1 and Performa. Then, as
his art-world dalliance was waning in 2016, Andreas
Siegfried, a London-based art adviser, gave him a show at
Chalet Mittelgässli in a small Swiss city near
Gstaad. The paintings were offered at the time for
between $8,000 and $10,000, and recently one of the eight suckers
who bought one somehow convinced Phillips to take the consignment.
On Thursday, it was offered without a reserve and, after no bids
came in at £1,000, auctioneer Sam Mansour dropped
the price down to £500, where it sold on a single bid.

WE HEAR

… that the MoMA holiday party was
“Miami-themed” because most staffers weren’t sent down for Basel…
that (another Kenny Schachter tip) the Ferttita
brothers—who were the underbidders on that record-breaking $100
million Basquiat that sold at
Sotheby’s in 2017—bid through Brett
Gorvy to win
the Warhol portrait of Muhammad
Ali for $10 million at the Christie’s
evening sale in November… that Michael
Walker, formerly of Hauser & Wirth, will join Gagosian Art
Advisory, the private consulting arm of the gallery
run by Laura Paulson… that the
Whitney will exhibit Darren
Bader‘s fruit-on-pedestals work in January—which is great
news for those who thought Maurizio
Cattelan’s world-famous banana was just a less witty
Darren Bader (who is an artist that Cattelan collects in bulk, just
saying)… that the Instagram account
@itstimetostopnow claimed that Jerry
Saltz ran his finger up and down the bare leg of a female
dealer in her booth—a claim that was corroborated to Wet Paint by a
witness who saw it happen at NADA Miami.

SPOTTED

*** Journal Gallery founder Michael Nevin
holding the first-ever dinner at Mina’s—the
scrumptious new restaurant at MoMA PS1 run by Mina
Stone, who used to be Urs Fischer‘s
in-studio chef—in honor of Chloe Wise, who has a
show up at the gallery’s Tribeca space that opens Saturday
*** Jeff Koons at the annual David Zwirner
holiday party, held at the dealer’s multistory Annabelle
Selldorf-designed East Village mansion that has a
permanent Doug Wheeler installation built inside
it *** Quentin Tarantino crashing the
Absolut Art event at the
Metrograph theater, en route to secret screening
of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” upstairs.

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Artists Say Team Gallery’s Owner Stiffed
Them, Kendall Jenner Goes Shopping at Art Basel, & More Juicy
Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet News.