The British artist David Shrigley has returned to his Midlands secondary school almost 40 years after graduating to unveil an animatronic sculpture of a giant praying mantis, in the hope that it will spark a nationwide conversation about the “vital importance” of arts subjects.
As the fair aims to strengthen its footing as an international art market destination, this edition features a special focus on Spanish and Latin American galleries, with several exhibitors from Argentina, Brazil and—primarily—Spain.
Visitors are greeted at the top of the escalators by an installation by the Toronto-based Chinese artist Sami Tsang (presented by the local gallery Cooper Cole)—a phantasmagorical piece that resembles a giant monster baby emerging from traditional pottery—and an accompanying large-scale painting depicting the same.
She identifies the high end of the market, "which was so pivotal in driving sales out of contraction in 2020", as thinning out considerably, "creating a drag on growth despite more positive performance in some other lower-priced segments."
He began his fine-arts career shooting in black-and-white, in the style of the Swedish master Christer Strömholm, but later switched to color, drawing inspiration from vivid, large-format scenes of everyday life by American photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston.
Since the Mosaic Rooms opened in 2008 it has been a consistent platform in the UK for major artists from the wider Arab region, such as Heba Y Amin, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, and Mohammed Omar Khalil.
The National Medal of Arts was first established by Congress in 1984. past recipients include the artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi, James Turrell, Maya Lin, Robert Rauschenberg, Jack Whitten, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly and Judith Baca.
A leak in one of the main storage rooms meant that gallery staff recently had to move part of the collection of works on paper before a storm to avoid damage, according to Ingibjörg Jóhannsdóttir, the museum’s director.
That includes, but is not limited to, bags, bubble wrap, disposable flatware and cutlery, six-pack can holders, prescription-medicine bottles, toy lightsabres, those little table things that keep your pizza from getting smushed, and plastic lawn flamingos.
One inspector noted that, in his assigned district, refuse filled gutters, blocked sewage culverts, and sent forth “perennial emanations which generate pestiferous disease.” Another observed that certain streets better resembled “dung-hills rather than the thoroughfares in a civilized city.” In response to the report, state lawmakers introduced legislation that led to the establishment, in 1866, of the Metropolitan Board of Health, one of the country’s first municipal public-health authorities.
“Lisa Schiff attempted to paint a picture of a successful fine-art advisory business, when in reality—as she admitted today—it was actually a multimillion-dollar fraudulent scheme,” the FBI’s James E. Dennehy said in a statement.
His photographic work Artificial Sun II (2024) has just been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is already all over the fair as the inspiration for the stylishly dotty Stone Island T-shirts being worn by the Frieze staff.
