9 Artists on the Books They’re Reading This Summer https://ift.tt/cbFYjKI

Summer brings its own rhythm to the art world. Many galleries turn to group exhibitions, international shows draw audiences to scenic seasonal destinations, and the art fair calendar quiets until September. For artists, that change of pace can also create something increasingly rare: sustained time to read for pleasure.

Books, of course, are often inseparable from an artist’s practice. A memoir can offer a new way of thinking about a life; an unexpected case study can open up a line of research; a collection of essays can sharpen, complicate, or unsettle an idea already taking shape in the studio. Reading may be especially pleasurable in summer—on a beach, in a park, during a quiet stretch at home—but it is rarely only a diversion. Books can become sources, provocations, and points of departure, sometimes feeding directly into new bodies of work or exhibitions.

With that in mind, Artsy asked a group of artists with busy months ahead what they are reading this summer. As they prepare for solo and group exhibitions, biennial and fair participations, they share the books currently sitting on their desks, nightstands, and daybeds.

Ali Banisadr

B. Tehran, 1976. Lives and works in New York.

Reading: Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, 1966

“Books often become companions in my studio. This summer, I’ve been returning to Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory.

I’ve long admired Yates’s writing and have read her other books over the years, but this one has taken on a particular resonance while preparing for my upcoming exhibitions, ‘Talisman’ at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris and my exhibition at the Musée Gustave Moreau, also in Paris, opening this September.

“What fascinates me is her idea that memory images become ‘inner talismans’—images that are internalized and continue to shape how we see and understand the world. I’ve realized this is also how I read: I read, reflect, return to passages repeatedly, and then let them rest. During that process, ideas become images, connecting with memory, dreams, music, and lived experience until they eventually reappear in my paintings.

“Perhaps this is why I paint—to better understand the strange life of images, how they are remembered, transformed, and rediscovered across time. I am spending most of my time this summer in the Forest, Hudson Valley, New York.”

Dominic Chambers

B. St. Louis, Missouri, 1993. Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut

Reading: Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, 1982

“I’ve been reading Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, by sculptor Anne Truitt. This book has been more of a thought companion than a source of inspiration that directly influences my work.

“More precisely, this book is about the life of an artist—her meditations on form and color, her doubts and wit, and the pendulum between motherhood and solitude, and so on.

Body Shimmer (Bright Thoughts #1), 2026
Dominic Chambers
Lehmann Maupin

“Reading about the lives of other artists always fills me with courage. It is difficult to make work against the backdrop of our dismal political, social, and economic background. Reading Daybook has given me a reprieve in spiritual conversation and, when played aloud as an audiobook, has been a stimulating voice to produce work with.”

Hew Locke

B. Edinburgh, 1959. Lives and works in London.

Reading: V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street, 1959

“The book I plan to reread is Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul. There is a darkness in this book, alleviated by an equally dark humor—my mother read this to my brother and sister and me as a bedtime story, which in retrospect was quite an unusual, almost adult choice of book. I have read it several times but not for a number of years, so I am looking forward to picking it up again.

Kings & Queens 3, 2025
Hew Locke
Cristea Roberts Gallery

“As I get older, I see more and more in the book. It is a pleasurable read and is, in essence, a collection of beautifully written short stories about a boy growing up in Port of Spain in Trinidad during World War II, and in each chapter Naipaul brings to life one of the street's inhabitants in a short story. They are tragic—disturbing often—but also funny, such as Man Man, who lives on the street and declares himself the new Messiah.

“The characters remind me of people I saw around me when I was growing up in Georgetown, neighboring Guyana. And this book has always been at the back of my mind for my whole career, for example in a new series of paintings of Knights Errant that I have been making recently.”

Paula Siebra

B. Fortaleza, Brazil, 1998. Lives and works in Fortaleza.

Reading: Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, 2018

“The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi captivates me with the sincerity and delicacy of the author, who is an artist and collector of Japanese folk art.

“The book is a collection of essays in which the author analyzes various types of traditional items, highlighting the sophistication in these everyday objects—bowls, small plates, and fabrics for kimonos made from banana leaves—especially when crafted by ordinary people.

“He lavishes praise on the simplicity of these sturdy objects made to last, with little or no ornamentation, which we sometimes carry with us throughout our entire lives. I found it an essential read for reflecting on how a people’s identity is tied to a few motifs that recur across generations, and how beauty resides in everyday objects. The author writes in a very heartfelt and sincere way, and it’s a charming, light read to take with you on a trip to the beach, or to enjoy under a shady tree.”

Andrew Kuo

B. New York, 1977. Lives and works in New York.

Reading: Han Kang, The White Book, 2016

List (12/13/14), 2014-15
Andrew Kuo
Rago/Wright/LAMA/Toomey & Co.

“Han Kang’s The White Book has been my summer read, in pieces. Her writing fades in and out, like visiting an album or playlist, and her words on death, life, conflict, and peace through the color white feel both heavy and free. Like my favorite artworks, this book is kind of strange and definitively moving, though it has zero jokes, sadly.”

Alia Farid

B. Kuwait, 1985. Lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico.

Reading: Hilda Hilst, With My Dog-Eyes, 1986

“I am reading a couple of books this summer, but the one I will share is With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst. I don't remember how this book came into my possession or who might have recommended it. But I love the title.

“I’ve had it in my studio for a while now and picked it up this summer in search of something different and short, so that I could momentarily tap out of my work. I find Hilda’s irreverent style refreshing, a reminder that whatever appears most normal is most ideological.”

Curtis Talwst Santiago

B. Edmonton, Canada, 1979. Lives and works in Potsdam, Germany.

Reading: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993, and Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 2008

“I’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower alongside Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems. Meadows gives language to something I keep circling in the studio—feedback loops, thresholds, what gets amplified versus what quietly disappears—close to what’s happening in ‘worlds, worlds, worlds,’ my upcoming show at Contemporary Calgary, where cardboard packaging becomes structure and horns and channels act as apparatuses of transmission and interruption.

“Butler’s ‘Earthseed’ philosophy—‘God is Change,’ the idea that change is the only constant, something to be shaped rather than feared—feels close to how I think about working with discarded, unstable materials: not resisting flux but building form out of it. Reading them together this summer feels right for where the show is landing.”

Vuslat

B. Istanbul, 1971. Lives and works in Istanbul and Los Angeles.

Reading: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 1983

“The last book I’ve been reading—re-reading, really—is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, which has stayed with me in an intimate way.

“Hyde reflects on art in relation to giving and receiving, and this resonates with my ongoing exploration of the Turkish concept of emanet, which is entrusted care, responsibility, the invisible threads that connect us.

“The book has given form and language to an intuition I have been working with for years. For Hyde, a gift stays alive only as long as it keeps circulating. That has given me a new perspective on my site-specific installation for the 2026 Biennale of Contemporary Ceramics, currently open in Rhodes, Greece. Titled May We Meet In The Silence Of Our Souls (2026), the work consists of ceramic forms shaped through breath—they are small offerings entering a shared space, where they are received, held, and carried forward by those who encounter them.

“Since we’re on the subject of books, I would be remiss not to say that my monograph of the same title comes out in America next month from the University of Chicago Press. In May We Meet In The Silence Of Our Souls, Hyde and I enter into a dialogue around these ideas, considering how art can hold and transmit what is entrusted to us. I spent my summer at our family house in Bodrum, on the south coast of Turkey, where three generations of our family come together each summer. It is a time to reconnect with family and friends, share time, and simply enjoy togetherness. To Bodrum, I brought my newly converted tiny house, which serves as my mobile studio. I was also able to continue making art while being surrounded by people I love. For me, it was a beautiful balance between family, friendship, and my practice.”

Sarah Blaustein

B. San Francisco, 1982. Lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Reading: Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000

“I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft while I make work for an upcoming group presentation at Untitled Houston for early October with Library Street Collective.

“I love the way King describes the process of uncovering one’s story—that’s how I feel I make my own images, by excavating them one studio session at a time. King compares having great, sober sex to the act of writing. He asks why writers can’t stay sane and go completely nuts (creatively) at the same time. That’s how I like to feel in my studio: both ecstatic and entirely clear-sighted.”

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First Fernando Botero show in London for over a decade to open in October 2026. https://ift.tt/reFYVMv

Opera Gallery London will open “Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World” on October 12th, marking the first solo exhibition of the Colombian artist’s work in London since 2015

Coinciding with the opening of Frieze London, the show continues through November 12th, and brings together paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Works on view will span nearly six decades, from the mid-1960s to the final year of Botero’s life before his passing in 2023.

The exhibition, with scenography by designer Cécile Degos, argues against reading Botero’s signature style as caricature, framing volume instead as the artist’s central subject. Rather than simply enlarging his figures and objects, the gallery says, Botero “amplified” them, using shifts in proportion to intensify their physical presence. That approach traces back to a 1957 realization: while painting a mandolin, Botero found that shrinking its rosette made the instrument’s body appear far larger. He later credited that discovery with unlocking his entire visual language.

The show also underscores Botero’s lifelong engagement with art history. He worked as a copyist at the Museo del Prado in Madrid in his youth, selling copies of paintings by Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya to support himself, and the exhibition traces a continuing dialogue in his work with those artists as well as Piero della Francesca and Pablo Picasso.

“Fernando Botero created a visual language that is instantly recognisable yet endlessly nuanced,” Opera Gallery founder Gilles Dyan said in a statement. “Bringing together works across more than six decades, this exhibition highlights the remarkable consistency of his artistic vision and the diversity of his achievements.”

Botero has seen his market grow substantially since his death. According to the Artnet Price Database, total auction sales of his work reached an all-time high of $53.8 million in 2024, the same year his auction record was set at Christie’s with the $5.1 million sale of his 1979 painting The Musicians.

The London show will follow “Botero in New York,” an exhibition organized with the Botero family on view at Sotheby’s Breuer building this summer, through September 7th. That show traces how the artist’s years in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and ’60s helped shape the voluptuous, flattened style that would become known as Boterismo.

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How to Choose Art for Your Home Office https://ift.tt/ML05RHn

Ferris Wheel Through Time and Space, 2023
Jesse Meserve
TAG The Art Gallery

While the days of COVID-19 lockdowns are behind us, remote work has become a fixture of many jobs. As people find themselves working from home, they are paying greater attention to their home offices, brightening and refreshing domestic spots to suit their professional needs and personal taste.

“The demand for artworks for home offices has increased, driven by the need to make offices more soulful or simply more entertaining during video calls,” Jane Corkin, founder of Corkin Gallery, told Artsy. “They are looking for works that empower and invigorate. We are seeing bold choices and deeper works that bring a layer of introspection rather than mere decoration.”

Whether you’re buying art for the first time or expanding your collection, here are tips from leading galleries and designers on purchasing art that fits into your home working setup seamlessly.

Start with the room, not the art

Happy Place #9, 2021
Leslie Kerby
FROSCH&CO

Like any form of purchasing art, deciding what to buy for your workspace requires consideration about where and how you want the art to live.

In addition to being heavily used rooms, home offices have to be practical and fit the needs of your job. It’s important to think first about the room and how you use it, assessing the physical constraints—size, layout of furniture, and things like the dominant light source and its direction. North-facing rooms tend to have cooler and more even light, while south-facing rooms are warm and shift through the day. This can change how an artwork appears and create glare, depending on how you frame it.

“If a home office gets a lot of natural light, works behind glass—such as photography, drawings, or works on paper—can create reflections that become distracting during the workday, even if they’re barely noticeable in the evening,” said Sarah Sargeant, founder and principal at the New York–based firm Cochineal Design. “It’s worth thinking about the room’s lighting conditions before deciding on framing or medium so the artwork can be enjoyed comfortably throughout the day.”

Red Yellow Black White (from Standing People), 2020
Julian Opie
Robin Rile Fine Art

The overall palette and material feel of the room is also important to consider. A dark space with warm surfaces like leather will need different artworks than a minimal setup with white walls. While your workspace may have specific needs, it’s still a part of your home.

“I think an office should feel like a natural extension of the rest of the home, rather than a space with an entirely different look and feel,” Sargeant added. “I always prefer to propose artwork that complements a home's broader collection and design story. That said, every client is different.”

What artworks tend to work for home offices, and why

Still In The Game , 2022
Yoon Hyup
APC Gallery

Yo Ho Ho , 2008
Todd James
aous

Once you’ve understood the requirements of your space, you can start to think about what will work for your home office. For many people, the wall behind a desk is the best place to hang artwork. Some might find it better to have a single piece proportioned to their room and furniture, but what works for one person might not be best for another.

In his own home office, Mohamed Benhadj, director and curator of Al-Tiba9 Gallery, has a variety of pieces, including a sculpture, photograph, and a neon installation. “I enjoy living with different materials and different artistic languages throughout the day,” he said. “The neon wall installation offers me a new atmosphere at night and keeps me inspired. I always encourage collectors to be creative in their choices and not limit themselves to a single artwork or a single medium.”

Indeed, when you spend hours in the same room, it’s important to think about how you’d like to feel in the morning as well as after a long day of work.

You may have to be flexible as you start to live with your artwork. “We’ve worked with collectors who relocate works from living and dining rooms into their home offices because they realize those are the pieces they want to spend the most time with,” said Emily Siekkinen, director of Octavia Art Gallery.

I Love Liberty, 1982
Roy Lichtenstein
Robin Rile Fine Art

In terms of cost, works on paper, prints, and photography can be more accessible and are easier to hang and move around as you decide on an arrangement.

“A home office is a smaller and more intimate space, and prints tend to work beautifully at that scale—they don’t overwhelm the room the way a large unique painting might, and they let you live with a serious artist’s work without needing museum-sized walls,” said Elisabetta Setzu, senior director of print specialist Gemini G.E.L. “There’s also something appropriate about prints for a workspace: They represent the artist’s hand and process in a very direct way.”

“We’re seeing strong interest in artists whose prints reward close, sustained looking,” added Setzu. “Vija Celmins’s drypoints, Richard Tuttle’s hand-drawn works, and Ed Ruscha’s word-based prints all come up often for home offices specifically, since they're contemplative rather than purely decorative.”

Size, placement, and the video call factor

My Desktop 我的書桌, 2018
Guanyu Xu
Galerie du Monde

Ultimately, the artwork you choose needs to suit your profession. If your office blurs the public-private boundary and you have visitors or are often on video calls, you might have to be more deliberate about what you hang on your walls.

“A therapist, for instance, may want to create a space that feels welcoming, calming, and conducive to vulnerability,” Rachel Vincent-Clarke, director of Galerie Robertson Arès, said. “An entrepreneur might choose works that embody the values, creativity, or visual identity of their business.”

Dealers also suggest artwork that rewards slow viewing, given the amount of time you will spend with it. “One of our collectors shared a photograph of a recent acquisition from our gallery, newly installed in her home office: a subtly hued embroidery on raw canvas by Montreal-based textile artist Cyndie Belhumeur,” Vincent-Clarke added. “The work explores our relationship with the digital world, reflecting on the overwhelming flow of information that surrounds us while reminding us of our capacity to pause, step back, and recalibrate. I think that’s a particularly resonant theme for a home office.”

Practically speaking for video callers, your camera position should be considered when judging where to hang something behind you. If a work is too large, it might not translate well through a screen.

Common mistakes

Westie at Work, 2026
Scott Reeder
Saenger Galería

While keeping these more practical tips in mind can help you choose the best artwork for your home office, there are additional caveats. People can spend hours on end in their workspace, so dealers caution against buying something you think will look good, but isn’t what you really want.

“Only purchase artwork that you’ll want to live with, not just look at occasionally,” said Siekkinen. “A home office is one of the few places where you engage with the same artwork every day, so choosing something that will continue to hold your interest is important.”

Still, a piece should be interesting without being diverting. An eye-catching work could be a good conversation starter or could become a distraction. People who give group presentations might find it challenging to keep their audience’s attention.

Moreover, what’s hanging on the walls might become a distraction to you. “An artwork that makes you feel motivated to work is very different from one that constantly makes you dream about going on holiday or taking a day off,” noted Benhadj.

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Black Mid-Century Artist Felrath Hines Is Finally Getting His Due for His Luminous Abstractions https://ift.tt/9fuDnIj

He was a member of the Spiral Group, the pioneering collective of African American artists in the 1960s, and an artistic peer to Romare Bearden and Emma Amos. Georgia O’Keeffe so admired his talents that she hired him as a personal conservator to her paintings.

But, today, artist Felrath Hines, who died in 1993, is largely unknown—even in the art world.

“Hines was strongly devoted to abstraction and pursued it with a very independent and persistent attitude,” said Andrew Schoelkopf, the owner and founder of New York’s Schoelkopf Gallery. Right now, the gallery is presenting an intimate showcase of Hines’s works, on view through August 21st.

The exhibition includes five key paintings by the artist from the 1950s and ’60s, decades when he produced evocative abstractions painted in bold but sensuous brushstrokes. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s ongoing effort to shine new light on Hines’s career, and builds on a 2022 solo presentation of his work at ADAA: The Art Show in New York.

The jewel of this exhibition is The Bush from 1962, a gestural abstraction painted in foggy passages of greens, purples, and grays, like a landscape seen in the distance of a misty shore. The work is emblematic of Hines’s best paintings of the 1960s. “You can see how his brushwork is the work of an adept painter. It’s rich and layered, which creates a certain luminosity in the surface. I also find his sense of color to be tremendously skillful and alluring,” said Schoelkopf.

Bouquet, 1957
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Landscape, 1953
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

The gallery first became interested in Hines’s works while researching the Spiral Group, a collective of African American artists who explored the role of art in relation to society and the Civil Rights Movement. “As a member of the Spiral Group, he was a prominent figure in the New York City art world and the Black creative scene of the time,” added Schoelkopf. Still, unlike other Black artists of the era, such as Bearden or Jacob Lawrence, Hines’s story has remained largely untold.

Born Samuel Felrath Hines Jr. in Indianapolis in 1913, the artist had his first forays into art as a teenager, after receiving a scholarship for classes at the John Herron School of Art Saturday School. Following high school, he worked as a firefighter, and as a railway waiter, earning money to support classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. By 1946, he had moved to New York where he studied with the Russian-born American painter Nahum Tschacbasov, while also taking classes at New York University and Pratt.

By 1951, Hines had started working at a frame shop in the city. His skill as a painter and his knowledge of framing eventually led him into a career as a conservator at New York’s Fine Arts Conservation Laboratories.

His career as a conservator and his practice as an artist were side by side for most of his life. Over the years, he took major positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Early in his conservator career, he helped conserve one of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” paintings for MoMA, an experience that informed his own luminous palette and layered approach to abstraction (the influence is evident in a work like The Bush). Later, Georgia O’Keeffe would bring on Hines to lead the conservation of her personal collection, as well as the care of her works in private and museum collections during the 1970s.

Distant View, 1962
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Sea Shell, 1962
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Hines’s painting style continued to evolve. His gestural abstractions, now on view at Schoelkopf Gallery, later gave way to geometric abstractions influenced by De Stijl and Piet Mondrian. While Hines was an active participant in the Spiral Group, he always maintained a very individualized artistic vision.

“Despite his predilection for looking at art in exhibits and galleries, he never painted with other artists,” wrote historian Rachel Berenson Perry in her defining monograph of the artist, The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light.

The artist wasn’t one to seek the limelight, either. “He was a regular social presence in the New York art world, especially in Black creative circles, but he didn’t like to draw attention to himself,” said Schoelkopf.

Throughout his career, Hines also resisted being classified primarily as a Black artist and believed his work, and abstraction, were universal languages in their expression and reach. As such, he turned down invitations to exhibit in shows focused on the work of Black artists alone, including the major exhibition “Contemporary Black Artists in America” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. These decisions may have contributed to his relative obscurity.

His career as a conservator, at times, detracted from his art practice, too. “He was very dedicated to his work, but he went through long periods of time where his ‘day job’ as a conservator prevented him from spending any time working on his personal creative practice,” said Schoelkopf. A 1979 article described Hines as having “two careers: executing his own art and repairing the art of others.”

In 1984, he retired as the chief conservator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and devoted the last years of his life entirely to painting, creating some of the most significant works of geometric abstraction in his career. He continued to believe in the power of art, despite never reaching widespread fame. In 1983, he said in an interview, “In my view, an artist’s work is to rearrange everyday phenomena so as to enlarge our perception of who we are and what goes on about us.”

Today, Hines’s reputation is steadily growing (Schoelkopf Gallery has placed his works with institutions including the Cincinnati Art Museum). Schoelkopf says that with Hines one can’t help but notice “how razor-thin the margin is between the type of success Georgia O’Keeffe had” and that of “an artist as well educated, well trained, intelligent, and important as Felrath Hines.” The art world, he thinks, may soon be catching up.

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Prado Museum digitally transforms masterpieces by Velázquez, Rubens, and others ahead of August solar eclipse. https://ift.tt/xEeY8aI

The Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid has released an AI-assisted video, titled “The Prado by the Light of the Eclipse,” that digitally alters 11 paintings in its collection to show how their scenes might look under the dimming light of a solar eclipse. The one-minute piece, soundtracked by “Summer” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, is timed to Spain’s total solar eclipse on Wednesday, August 12th. The eclipse—which will also pass over parts of the Northern Hemisphere—will be the first to cross Spain in more than a century, with totality expected to last under two minutes.

The video opens with Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) swept into shadow, and goes on to darken Francisco Goya’s El Quitasol (1777) and La pradera de San Isidro (1788), Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder’s La Vista (1617), and Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait, among other works by José de Ribera, Corrado Giaquinto, Claude Lorrain, José Casado del Alisal, and Carlos de Haes. In a statement, the Prado described Las Meninas’s spatial complexity as owing partly to “the multiplication of the light sources,” while El Quitasol points to Goya’s “mastery at painting light and shadows,” the same qualities the new video sets out to manipulate.

The project was produced by the Madrid studio AMB Piensa, which combined AI video-generation tools with traditional animation and manual review. According to the museum, the technology was used to simulate the eclipse’s gradual darkening, along with shifting shadows and reflections across each painting’s figures, landscapes, and architecture. Every sequence was checked and adjusted by hand to preserve the works’ original composition and technique. The Prado has also framed the effort as a tool for cultural outreach, aimed particularly at audiences who don’t typically visit museums.

This week’s eclipse is the first of three (two total, one partial) forecast to cross Spain and Portugal between now and January 2028, drawing tourists to the Iberian Peninsula for what astronomers describe as a rare run of visibility. It also continues a long tradition of art responding to eclipses. In 1918, the American painter Howard Russell Butler was commissioned by the U.S. Naval Observatory to capture an eclipse on canvas, working from mere seconds of direct observation. Eclipses have also featured in Christian iconography for centuries, tied by some biblical interpretations to the crucifixion.

The Prado’s works span several Old Masters traditions, from Velázquez’s Spanish Golden Age portraiture to Rubens’s Flemish Baroque and Dürer’s Northern Renaissance printmaking. The museum’s eclipse video underscores how radically shifting light can transform even familiar paintings.

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Indian Gallerist Sundaram Tagore Credits Friendships for His International Success https://ift.tt/J1Y78p6

“Art is wealth we must share,” said Sundaram Tagore. “And that has been my mission for the last 25 years: to find artists and share them with the world.”

Tagore founded the eponymous Sundaram Tagore Gallery in 2000. It now has spaces in New York, Singapore, and, most recently, London. But his career has always extended beyond the gallery: He is a writer, scholar, collector, filmmaker, and above all, a friend to art and artists. “I don’t follow the market,” he added. “I follow instinct. And friendships.” His faith in friendship—and in art as something carried between people—began long before he opened a gallery.

Born in 1961 into one of India’s most culturally influential families, Tagore grew up around Jorasanko Thakur Bari, the family’s ancestral home in Kolkata, eastern India, before moving between the towns of Santiniketan and Delhi. Jorasanko was also the birthplace of his great-granduncle Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, educator, and painter who, in 1913, became the first Asian and first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Kolkata, once the capital of British India, was exceptionally cosmopolitan,” Tagore recalled. “Not many people know that the first Bauhaus exhibition outside Europe was staged in the city in 1922, with works by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky shown alongside leading modern Indian artists.” His childhood home drew a steady procession of intellectuals, political activists, and cultural leaders.

His father, Subho Tagore, was part of that world. “He was a poet, a painter, and a rebel of a kind,” Tagore said. In 1943, Subho helped form the Calcutta Group, an early modernist art collective that rejected Romanticism in favor of a more urgent, socially engaged visual language. Its artists sold work to raise funds amid World War II, India’s independence movement, and the Bengal famine of 1943—a catastrophe, exacerbated by British colonial policies, that killed millions.

“There was always an understanding that whatever resources you possessed, whether money, education, influence, or knowledge, you had a responsibility to use them in the service of others,” Tagore noted.

The lesson stayed with him. Drawn to art from an early age, Tagore studied in the United States before pursuing doctoral research at Oxford University on how modernism traveled between cultures. “Unlike European modernism, Indian modernism did not reject tradition. We went back to it,” he said. “We didn’t reject figuration for abstraction; we embraced it.” Indian modernists including Amrita Sher-Gil, M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, and F.N. Souza absorbed international styles and movements while remaining rooted in their own histories. “We found a synthesis,” he added. “That has been our greatest civilizational strength.”

Yet when he moved to New York in the ’90s, working on exhibitions and later joining Pace Gallery, Tagore became increasingly aware that modern and contemporary art in the West was still presented as a largely European and American story dominated by white men. He opened his own gallery on Greene Street in SoHo as an experiment in synthesis—a place where artists across countries, movements, and generations could be brought into conversation.

Early exhibitions championed Indian-born artists and Minimalists including Sohan Qadri and Natvar Bhavsar alongside overlooked women of the New York School, such as Susan Weil, Merrill Wagner, and Joan Vennum. Tagore formed close friendships with artists, gaining a deeper understanding of their work. By sharing that understanding, he helped them claim space in art historical conversations on their own terms. Weil, for example, was often known primarily as Robert Rauschenberg’s wife, but she herself was a master of mixed-media painting. “She had an extraordinary ability to make time visible, to hold movement, memory, and the passage of a single moment within one composition,” he said.

The same instinct led him to show works by Japanese artist Hiroshi Senju after encountering his monumental waterfall paintings at the Japan pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale. He later added Pakistani American artist Anila Quayyum Agha, known for elaborately patterned steel cubes that transform entire rooms through shadow and light, and American painter Judith Murray, whose large, colorful abstractions combine raw energy with a sense of the sublime. The gallery was already internationalizing the New York art world, carrying forward the cross-cultural curiosity and adventurous spirit of Tagore’s childhood home. “I was interested in artists who expanded my understanding of the universe,” Tagore said.

After several years in SoHo, the gallery moved to its current Chelsea home on West 26th Street. Tagore opened a Hong Kong outpost in 2007, which ran until 2020, followed in 2012 by a space at Singapore’s Gillman Barracks, where it became the district’s first New York gallery. A permanent London presence followed, and a new space in the upscale district of St. James’s opened earlier this year.

The gallery’s expansion coincided with the rapid globalization of the art market. “I showed at art fair after art fair. It was the most democratic way to understand which artists and ideas audiences and collectors resonated with,” he said. From Art SG, Kiaf SEOUL, Zona Maco, and EXPO Chicago to Art Mumbai and Abu Dhabi Art, Tagore built relationships with an increasingly nomadic collecting community moving across the global cultural calendar. Only around 10 percent of his collectors, he said, are Indian. The rest are spread across the United States, the United Kingdom, Asia, and the Middle East.

But that globalization, particularly from the 2010s onward, brought its own excesses. “There was a time when New York galleries stayed open until midnight on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, or when the street outside a Jasper Johns exhibition would be packed,” Tagore said. He remembers an art world in which artists, gallerists, and collectors “experimented more,” and gallery-going was part of the city’s social and intellectual life. “It’s a lot more commercialized now,” he said, adding, “including friendships.”

Still, Tagore remains rooted in the values that brought him this far. Beyond exhibitions, the gallery hosts poetry readings, films, musical performances, book launches, and conversations, programmed “not to please, but to connect with purpose.”

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BBC launches art-dealing TV competition series featuring Artsy. https://ift.tt/ZQlphB0

U.K. TV channel BBC Two will premiere a new six-episode competition series centered on art dealing this week.

Titled The Big Deal with Steph McGovern, the show will air on Thursday, August 13th. The premise pits 14 contestants with little to no art-market experience against one another as they try to turn a profit dealing contemporary art. Presented by broadcaster Steph McGovern, the series airs at 8 pm on BBC Two and the streaming platform iPlayer, with an earlier premiere on BBC Northern Ireland on August 12.

Artsy features prominently in the fourth episode, in which contestants source artworks from two emerging artists in Berlin—Argentine painter Celeste Najt and duo 44flavours—and sell them via an Artsy Auction. Artsy vice president of marketing Ani Petrov is a judge on the episode.

The Artsy auction is one of six real-world sales challenges contestants face in the series. Other episodes send contestants to auction off work by Royal College of Art graduates, furnish two luxury homes to a client brief, and sell prints and limited editions in Margate alongside artist Margo McDaid. They are also tasked with curating a collection for the cabaret bar aboard the cruise ship Queen Anne, pitching a high-end sculpture to industry insiders at Frieze London, and selling at the Affordable Art Fair.

The winning pair will take home some £50,000 ($67,520) worth of art. Other judges throughout the series judging contestants’ efforts are series expert Cordelia de Freitas, alongside guest specialists including gallerist and curator Matt Carey-Williams, McDaid, and Petrov.

McGovern, a business journalist known for hosting daytime talk show Steph’s Packed Lunch and news program BBC Breakfast, has described the format as “The Apprentice for the art world, but the deals are all real, and it’s as much about the hustle as it is about art.” She has a personal connection to the subject: her father is an artist and a graduate of the Royal College of Art. “My dad was the first person I called when I got this job,” she said.

BBC Arts head Suzy Klein said the series aims to “pull back the curtain” on the art market, offering “a fresh insight into how art is discovered, bought, and sold.”

The show is produced by Stellify Media, the Belfast-based company behind the project since it was first announced under the working title The Art Game at the 2023 Belfast Media Festival. It was co-commissioned by BBC Arts and BBC Northern Ireland as part of the Hot House initiative, with support from Northern Ireland Screen.

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