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The Headlines
THE WAR IN UKRAINE. US prosecutors have subpoenaed auction houses, including Sotheby’s and Christie’s, as part of an effort to track artworks that sanctioned Russians could use to evade sanctions, Bloomberg reports. Among the high-profile art patrons reportedly named in the subpoenas are Viktor Vekselberg and Roman Abramovich; they have not been accused of wrongdoing, nor have the auction firms. Meanwhile, police in Russia confiscated work from an anti-war exhibition in St. Petersburg by artist Elena Osipova, saying that the materials “possibly contain false information about the Russian armed forces,” the AFP reports. Under a new law in the country, publishing information about the Russian military that is deemed false can result in a prison sentence of up to 15 years.
LIVES OF THE ARTISTS. The sculptor Brandon Ndife, who conjures macabre and discomfiting sights, is now represented by New York’s Greene Naftali gallery, per ArtDaily. Painter Cy Gavin, who has been making abstracted views of nature, opens a show at Gagosian in Manhattan today, and was profiled in the New York Times. The seemingly indefatigable multi-medium phenom Nicolas Party has a show up at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, and spoke to Ocula. And the National Gallery of Australia said that it will stage a Jordan Wolfson solo exhibition—his first Down Under!—in December that will include a new animatronic work. Buckle up.
The Digest
NADA New York will this year move to West Chelsea, at 548 West on West 22nd Street. Some 88 exhibitors are lined up to participate. [ARTnews]
Lisson Gallery’s forthcoming Los Angeles branch, originally scheduled to open last fall, will now open in April, due to construction delays. First up: a Carmen Herrera solo show. On February 14, it will stage a pop-up Ryan Gander exhibition in the city at designer Dries Van Noten’s Little House gallery. [Financial Times]
Jenny Moore, who stepped down as director of the Chianti Foundation in Marfa, Texas, last summer, after nine years, has been named founding director of Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana. Tinworks, which was established four years ago, presents arts programming in a sprawling former warehouse complex. [Artforum]
The first section of Destination Crenshaw, the $100 million project to create a public space filled with art along a 1.3-mile stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, is set to open in the fall with work by Kehinde Wiley, Maren Hassinger, and more. [Los Angeles Times]
A new documentary about artist Robert Irwin, Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling, will screen at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in mid-March. Its producers include the Light and Space legend’s longtime dealer, Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher. [Deadline]
An exhibition at the LGDR & Wei gallery in Hong Kong is focused on pioneering modern painters from Singapore and Vietnam. “The works reflect the complicated relationship the artists had with national identity,” according to the show’s curator, Karin Oen, who heads the department of art history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. [South China Morning Post]
The Kicker
TAKING THE TEMPERATURE. In the New York Times, journalist Alex Marshall has a look at how some museums are relaxing their strict climate-control regulations in order to cut energy costs. The Guggenheim Bilbao, for one, is set to save more than $20,000 a month. Still, many loan agreements carry tight temperature and humidity clauses, and some. museum professionals are hesitant to make such changes. As one sustainability consultant told the Times, “You don’t want to be the conservator who says it’s OK to flip the switch, and all of a sudden your Picassos are melting.” [NYT]