News From Around the Art World: April 14, 2020
In Locked-Down Berlin, Creatives Installed Art on Their Balconies During a 48-Hour Showcase to Combat Isolation
While much of the art world uploads its content online, a curatorial initiative in locked-down Berlin has asked artists and cultural producers to put up art on their balconies instead, prompting viewers to put down their phones and go outside for a walk.
Some 50 Berlin creatives showed their works on balconies and windows on Sunday and Monday as creative messages of solidarity during the coronavirus lockdown. The spontaneous DIY project, called “Life, art, pandemic and proximity” was organized by curators Övül Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza.
By Kate Brown, Artnet News
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Suellen Rocca, founding member of Chicago’s Hairy Who, dies at 76
Suellen Rocca, a founding member of the short-lived but influential 1960s Chicago art group the Hairy Who and a fiercely original artist whose hieroglyphic, phantasmagoric work poked a finger in the eye of late-20th-century modernist purities, died on March 26 at a hospice in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She was 76.
At a time when the deadpan consumer imagery of pop art was giving way to the restraint of minimalism and conceptualism, Rocca and five former classmates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago came together under the sway of influences as disparate as Dubuffet, Native American art, hand-painted store signs, the Sears catalog and the natural-history displays at the Field Museum to create a rambunctious form of painting and sculpture that tacked hard against prevailing orthodoxies.
By Randy Kennedy, Chicago Tribune
Christie’s Faces $16.7 Million Fine Over Tax Violations
Following a years-long investigation, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced on Thursday that it has reached a settlement with Christie’s over the auction house’s failure to register to collect New York and local sales tax on purchases made in or delivered to the state between 2013 and 2017. As part of the deferred prosecution agreement, Christie’s London, Christie’s Private Sales, and other affiliated Christie’s entities will pay up to $16.7 million in sales tax, penalties, and interest to the state of New York over a two-year period.
Via Artforum
Coronavirus drives Chicago artists
The pandemic is showing up in all sorts of ways in the work of Chicago artists.
By Mitch Dudek, Chicago Sun Times