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epodium gallery at Art Basel on Thursday, 19. June 2014. For appointments call +49/(0)176/57010689.

(via The New York Times)

 The Brooklyn Museum has received a $5 million gift from the Leon Levy Foundation to endow the position of director, the museum is expected to announce on Tuesday. The gift is the largest the museum has received from a donor who was not a member of its board of trustees. Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the museum since 1997, will become, formally, the Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum.

Shelby White, for whom the position is partly named, is a founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, which was established in 2004 from the estate of Mr. Levy, an investor and philanthropist, with the goal of supporting “scholarship at the highest level.” Its other recent programs include fellowships in neuroscience and support from digital archiving and cataloging programs that include the New York Philharmonic’s digital archives and a digital version of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

 “I grew up in Brooklyn,” Ms. White said in a statement, “and I remember taking class trips to the museum to look at the Egyptian collection. I didn’t realize, until much later, that it was one of the greatest museums in the world.”

By SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP

(via The New York Times)

A still from the film „Doing It With Mrs. Kwan… Making Pepper Spray,“ a satirical commentary on urban life and television cooking shows that will be shown at Art Basel in Hong Kong. CreditCourtesy of Kwan Sheung Chi and Gallery EXIT

Li Zhenhua is a writer, curator and multimedia artist who divides most of his time between Beijing and Zurich. In 2006 he founded Beijing Art Lab, a platform for art and research. This year he is curating the inaugural film section at Art Basel in Hong Kong, a three-day program of screenings. He is also an adviser for the “Digital Revolution” exhibition opening at the Barbican Center in London on July 3.

Mr. Li spoke recently with Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop about the state of new media art in Asia.

Q. The legitimization of video as an art medium in Asia is often attributed to the South Korean artist Nam June Paik in the early 1960s. When was video art embraced in China?

A. It really started in 1988 with Zhang Peili’s work “30 x 30,” which depicts, from a static point of a view, gloved hands breaking a mirror, gluing it back together and then breaking it up again. The performance went on for three hours.

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Hotel and Tree in Winter, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 40″

May 15th, 2014 – June 1st, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, May 16th, 7-9pm

The Lodge Gallery proudly presents “Margins,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Frank Webster. Webster’s paintings depict post-industrial landscapes drawing on the aesthetic traditions of minimalism and realism. Summoning a sense of apocalyptic abandonedness, Webster’s compositions pair high-rise buildings with similarly scaled trees, liken barbed-wire fences and electrical wires to the creeping vines that entwine them, and present an urban ecosystem curiously devoid of inhabitants.

Grounded in reality, the paintings abstract the ordinary: the everyday world is made transcendent and strange, imbued with an ethereal and melancholy beauty. The sharp juxtaposition of built environments and romanticism are evocative of the moment in which we find ourselves presently. His work contemplates the paradox of this co-existence.

“Webster’s conveyance of physical and psychological isolation conjures the despair of Hopper’s solitary figures in spare settings, an impression reinforced by Webster’s palette of subdued grays, blues and yellows. The austere depiction of architecture echoes the deadpan cool of Ed Ruscha’s paintings of buildings, minus the ironic humor.” – Amanda Church, Art in America

Uros Island in ARQTIST magazine app is now available in Apple store! You can download it for free in your iPad here.

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(via Hiscox)

New research explores online art buying trends – what people are buying, how much they are spending and the barriers to purchase – and reveals growing confidence in buying art ‘sight unseen’

• A future generation of art buyers is likely to make their first art purchase online, with almost 25% of 20 – 30 year olds surveyed saying they first bought art online without seeing the physical piece.
• Although 39% of respondents said they find buying art online less intimidating than via a physical gallery or auction, having a bricks-and-mortar presence drives confidence – with 90% of online buyers purchasing from a physical space before buying online.
• Limited edition prints are a popular entry point for online art buyers –55% of those surveyed had purchased a print directly via an online platform in the last 12 months.
• 44% of buyers said they had spent more than £10,000 purchasing art and collectibles online so far, with 21% of this group saying they had spent in excess of £50,000.
• Not seeing the physical object remains the biggest hurdle – 82% of those surveyed said the most difficult aspect of buying art online was not being able to physically inspect it.

To read the report in full press here