Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
The record price in the category, $13.8m- paid last year at Christies' in New York for a painting by the Mumbai-based Modernist M.F. Husain-is more than three times what it was 20 years ago.
Hong Kong's particular and seductive Metabolist city planning is an ode to consumption as a great totalizer of culture, and to contemporary art as merely a niche commodity form among many others.
March and April represent the pinnacle of our cultural calendar. The government's Hong Kong Mega 8 initiative brings together world-class events—from Art Basel and Art Central to ComplexCon and the Hong Kong Sevens. This powerful synergy across art, sports and pop culture transforms the entire city into an extended exhibition space.
Dealers like artists with established sales records because it lowers their already considerable financial exposure. Renting a gallery space in Tribeca costs anywhere between $8,000-30,000 a month on top of staff, marketing, and daily operations. With that kind of overhead, very few business owners can afford to take on the financial risk of untested artists.
Stephen Friedman was overdue filing when he went into liquidation on 2 February, closing his London gallery immediately (his New York venue shuttered around the same date). At the time of writing, invoices remain unpaid and artists unable to retrieve works from storage companies. In a statement, Friedman says 'all matters are now subject to the administrator's consideration'.
The terms are often conflated to portray an air of desirability and a limited opportunity. Rarity generally refers to the unusualness of an object—something that is infrequently encountered or 'rare to market.' With modern works from the past century, rarity can stem from limited original production, or the fact that many examples are held in museum or institutional collections, reducing their availability in the marketplace.
We're still the new kids on the block. But it feels like we're more on the map, more anticipated this year. This year at Post-Fair, his gallery is showing small works by Edgar Ramirez, who won the Frieze Impact Prize in 2023.
Under the terms of Sotheby's new fee structure, buyer's premiums for lots sold in New York are increasing from 27% on lots priced at or above $1m to 28% for all works sold for hammer prices up to and including $2m (£1.5m in London). The medium tier buyer's premium will remain 22% of the hammer price, but will be applied to lots sold for between $2m and $8m (£1.5m and £6m in London);
For some eminently wealthy individuals, amassing a first-class art collection is an ideal way to spend their money. And while some high-profile art collectors end up donating their collections to museums or other cultural institutions, others take a different approach, reselling their art after a certain amount of time. Which brings us to this week, when billionaire David I. Koch's collection of Western art hit the auction block at Christie's, setting a number of records in the process.
