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Business Times
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Business Times
At Art Basel, dealers reap rewards by sidestepping politics and war
ABOUT halfway through the opening day of Art Basel's fair in Switzerland, the dealer Larry Gagosian was sitting on a bench near his booth. Crowds—incredibly thick when the art fair opened to VIPs at 11 am —had dispersed a bit as grandees shuffled into the convention centre courtyard for lunch, queuing up for sausages, oysters and ice cream cones. Gagosian, though, seemed content to stay inside, overseeing a presentation that included an early Cy Twombly painting priced at over US$30 million. 'We've sold quite a few things, considering the state of the world,' he said. 'I'm encouraged that initially we've been doing quite a bit of business. We live in a crazy time, and I think that a lot of people want to take refuge in some other universe.' (Art Basel's VIP days ended June 18; public days are June 19–22.) It's true that Basel's week of dinners and cocktail parties and talks and openings have felt a world apart from the current geopolitical realities plaguing most of the globe. That was the case at Unlimited, an exhibition sector adjacent to Art Basel's main fair where many of the massive artworks on display were pleasantly inoffensive; and it was particularly true in the main fair, where gorgeous abstract paintings sat easily alongside landscapes and portraits. Expensive or cheap, new or historical, it didn't matter: Nearly every artwork on offer at the fair was lovely and apolitical. Playing it safe 'I think people brought fairly safe material,' said the American adviser Suzanne Modica, who was walking down the aisles of Art Basel to meet a client. 'Obviously, people are bringing things to sell.' That's in large part because the art market slump has lasted so long that it's arguably a permanent condition. As such, dealers, seemingly desperate to turn a profit, appeared just as reticent to go out on a limb as their collectors. A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU Friday, 2 pm Lifestyle Our picks of the latest dining, travel and leisure options to treat yourself. Sign Up Sign Up 'There's a severe correction currently in the market, meaning that everybody just wants to keep it running,' said Loa Haagen Pictet, the chief curator of Collection Pictet, who observed a preponderance of feel-good paintings and sculptures. 'There's a lot of colourful and exuberant art, a lot that's sort of surrealist but joyful,' she continued. 'It's out there, trying not to bring us down.' As a result, the few artworks that took an overtly political stand stood out starkly. At the Liste fair, which traditionally has cheaper work from smaller, younger galleries, the Dutch artist Jonas Staal had filled Laveronica gallery's booth with pictures of burning yachts. Price: 10,000 euros (US$11,480) for smaller work; 19,000 euros for a larger light box depicting a fake still of CNN whose chyron read 'Jeff Bezos' Super Yacht Set On Fire'. 'It's a political statement,' said the gallery's owner Corrado Gugliotta. 'But on the other hand, I have understood after the many years that I've done things like this, the market is able to absorb everything.' And in the main fair, Sprüth Magers had a large piece by American artist Barbara Kruger titled Untitled (WAR TIME, WAR CRIME), which included the phrase, among others 'CLASS WAR, BIDDING WAR, TRADE WAR, COLD WAR' and sold on the first day for US$650,000. 'We didn't go the route of other galleries and bring safer works only,' said senior director Andreas Gegner. 'It's always tempting to do that, but I think it's more important to stick to your identity and bring works that are maybe, on the face of it, more difficult.' A very good start Before the first day was over, it seemed that for many galleries, a less combative strategy had paid off. David Zwirner sent out a release that it had sold 68 works ('so far'), including a hanging mesh sculpture by Ruth Asawa for US$9.5 million. Hauser & Wirth reported selling 33 pieces, including a mixed media work by Mark Bradford for US$3.5 million. Thaddaeus Ropac gallery reported more than 20 sales, including a US$1.8 million painting of two upside-down figures by Georg Baselitz. 'We've had a very good start,' says Hauser & Wirth's partner and president Marc Payot. 'It's fantastic to see such a resilient market in what's all and all difficult times.' But if you looked closely enough, reality had seeped ever so quietly into the fair after all. 'There are certainly clients of our clients who've not been able to travel in the last 48 hours from Lebanon and Israel, who'd been intending to come,' said Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz, speaking in a conference room above the fair. 'So that's material. But on the other hand, we've seen, yet again, the global art world coming around an event like Art Basel and celebrating art, and celebrating the privilege of being in this community.' BLOOMBERG
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
At Art Basel, Dealers Reap Rewards By Sidestepping Politics and War
About halfway through the opening day of Art Basel's fair in Switzerland, the dealer Larry Gagosian was sitting on a bench near his booth. Crowds—incredibly thick when the art fair opened to VIPs at 11 a.m.—had dispersed a bit as grandees shuffled into the convention center courtyard for lunch, queuing up for sausages, oysters and ice cream cones. Gagosian, though, seemed content to stay inside, overseeing a presentation that included an early Cy Twombly painting priced at over $30 million. 'We've sold quite a few things, considering the state of the world,' he said. 'I'm encouraged that initially we've been doing quite a bit of business. We live in a crazy time, and I think that a lot of people want to take refuge in some other universe.' (Art Basel's VIP days end June 18; public days are June 19–22.)
Vogue
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
In Galerie Sardine, a New Idea of What the Art Gallery Can Be
Last summer I kept getting emails about a new venue called Galerie Sardine. Who, I wondered, would want to name a gallery after a very small fish that travels in schools and is packed tightly in flat tins? The artist Joe Bradley and his irrepressible wife, Valentina Akerman, that's who. 'You can take it with you,' Akerman says, when I visit them in Bradley's vast Long Island City studio. 'It's also not a fancy fish, and we like that.' Neither of them had ever run an art gallery before, but they took over a 1701 farmhouse on Main Street in Amagansett, at the eastern end of Long Island, and put on several shows that attracted throngs of local and far-flung art lovers, including the biggest fish in the art world, Larry Gagosian, whose summer house is in Amagansett. 'Joe and I have been collaborating ever since we met,' Akerman tells me. Their backgrounds could hardly be more different. Akerman, dark-haired and vivacious, is from Colombia, born and brought up in Bogotá. Bradley, quieter but just as playful, grew up in a family of nine children (seven of them, not including Joe, were adopted) in the scenic little beach town of Kittery, Maine. His father was an emergency room doctor. Her now retired father was a professor of economics at the National University of Colombia and wrote a Sunday newspaper editorial on politics. 'He is an incredibly luminous person who's engaged with the world and loves art and music and everything else,' she tells me. 'My decibel of life comes from my father, and I can talk with him about anything.' Her mother, now an author, was a Freudian therapist who worked with children and adolescents. 'My schoolmates were scared of her.' They didn't want to go to her house because they thought she was 'like a witch,' Akerman says. 'She's mysterious and a bit cold and a bit alluring all at once.' ('She's a very glamorous woman,' Joe adds.) Akerman's parents divorced when she was 16, and her mother began writing books about her childhood in El Chocó, an extremely remote jungle on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Akerman studied architecture, came to New York to get her master's at Columbia University, then practiced for a few years at the high-powered Davis Brody Bond architectural firm in New York, but withdrew after she was diagnosed with metastatic thyroid cancer. She was working as a freelance art director when Bradley came into her life. Bradley's childhood love of drawing didn't fade as he grew up. He devoured underground comic books—R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, 'that sort of thing'—and pored over art books on Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Calder, Warhol, and Lichtenstein in Kittery's public library, and also spent time at the Portland Museum. 'But it wasn't until I got to the Rhode Island School of Design that I was bitten by the painting bug, and started seeing. All of a sudden, I was exposed to all of art history.' A fixation on a small Cézanne landscape, 'a ratty little painting' called On the Banks of a River (ca. 1904-1905) at the RISD Museum, struck him as 'kind of abject and punk rock,' and gave him the feeling 'not that I could understand it, but that I could read it.' (Bradley was once the lead singer of a punk band called Cheeseburger.) His career was just beginning when he and Akerman got together. His riotously colored paintings were already drawing attention—he had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art's PS1 in 2006, seven years after he graduated from RISD. Roberta Smith of The New York Times described his early work as 'ironic, anti-painting paintings…post-conceptual and challenging.' He has had New York galleries ever since—first the Canada gallery, then Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Gagosian, Petzel, and, since 2023, David Zwirner gallery. The vibrant new paintings all around us in his Long Island City studio are on view this summer, at Zwirner's London outpost. Akerman and Bradley met in the early 2000s at a loft party in Williamsburg. She had to run to a dinner, but the few minutes they had together intrigued her. 'It was a classic love-at-first-sight situation for me,' Bradley says. 'Valentina had this aura, a real glow about her, and I was totally attracted immediately.' They met again three days later, by chance, at an opening in Chelsea, and that was it. 'From that night on, we were never apart,' Akerman says. 'We were just magnetically together.' They married in the early aughts and had Leif, the first of four children, shortly thereafter. Basil, Alma, and Nova came along at five-year intervals.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Yahoo
American suspected of killing her newborn baby in Paris
An 18-year-old American student is in custody in Paris, suspected of throwing her newborn baby out of a third-floor window of a hotel, prosecution sources confirmed to CBS News on Monday. The prosecution sources said police were called to the scene in the 20th district, in eastern Paris, early Monday morning. The newborn was rushed to the hospital but did not survive their injuries. The police juvenile protection unit has been tasked with investigating the homicide of a child. Paris Match magazine reported that neighbors were awakened by screams at 6 a.m. local time and called emergency services. The prosecution sources confirmed that the 18-year-old student was taken to the hospital, where she was to undergo surgery related to the birth. She was placed in police custody there. Prosecution sources say they are looking into whether she had been in denial of her pregnancy. The sources say the young woman was part of group of young adults traveling in Europe. Holocaust survivors on bearing witness Behind the scenes of "Survivor" Season 48 Gallery owner Larry Gagosian on the art world's "blood sport"
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Yahoo
Over 1,000 women "lured to Spain" and sexually exploited, police say
Spanish police said Sunday they dismantled a human trafficking ring they said had exploited more than 1,000 women in the past year, mainly Colombians and Venezuelans. "The victims, mainly of South American origin, were lured to Spain with bogus job offers," police said in a news release, adding they had rescued 48 women in an operation that brought 48 arrests. Most of those detained, including the three alleged ring leaders -- two Colombian women and one Spaniard -- were held near the eastern city of Alicante. In addition to the three leaders, police said strip club managers and taxi drivers, who were in charge of transporting the women, were also implicated in the trafficking ring. The women were recruited in their home countries, "mainly in Colombia and Venezuela, with false job offers" in the cleaning or beauty sectors. On arrival in Spain, "they were transferred to clubs where they were sexually exploited" and "forced to work all hours," according to police. They were also only allowed to go out for two hours per day and otherwise kept under video surveillance, police said. Six of those arrested are being held in pre-trial detention, police stated. Police released a video showing officers raiding multiple locations during the operation. More than 100 officers participated in the operation to dismantle the trafficking ring, authorities said. Police said they searched eight properties, seizing multiple weapons, more than 150,000 euros in cash, three luxury cars, 26 grams of cocaine, 8.45 grams of crystal cocaine, 23.5 grams of pink cocaine, 20 pills of erectile dysfunction medication and several computers. Holocaust survivors on bearing witness Behind the scenes of "Survivor" Season 48 Gallery owner Larry Gagosian on the art world's "blood sport"
