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Hope you are enjoying the New York sales this week. Here’s a round-up of the art trade’s comings and goings:
Tina Kim Gallery to Represent Estate of Kim Lim: The gallery will show work by the Singaporean British sculptor and printmaker at Art Basel in June, ahead of a 2027 solo show—the first-ever US presentation of her work.
Yinka Shonibare Joins Mennour: The Paris gallery will stage its first solo exhibition of the interdisciplinary British artist in October.
Pace Gallery to Represent Brâncuși Estate: The gallery will serve as the estate’s global representative and stage an exhibition of the Romanian modernist’s work in London this fall. The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is currently surveying Brâncuși’s art.
Clarissa Morales Named Chief Operating Officer of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: She joins from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where she has served as deputy director since 2023 and helped lead the 58th and 59th editions of Carnegie International. She begins July 1 as the first COO in the museum’s history.
Big Number: $181.2 M.
Could it be anything else? That’s the total, with fees, for Jackson Pollock’s 1948 drip painting Number 7A, 1948, once owned by media magnate S. I. Newhouse. The sale smashed the artist’s previous record of $61 million, set at Sotheby’s New York in 2021, and was, by far, the top sale of the week. The winning bid went to Christie’s global president Alex Rotter, on behalf of an unnamed buyer, after a spirited 10-minute bidding war.
Read This
In “blink and you’ll miss it” news, Elon Musk’s X proved that it still has the juice to stoke the internet’s ire earlier this week. A user by the handle of SHLOMS posted a cropped image of a Monet painting with the caption, “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.” The ragebait had the intended effect, going viral as users explained why the Monet work was not, in fact, by Monet. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, more than a few eagle-eyed art historians spotted the gambit and called it out, not that they were believed. In any case, Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré has a full rundown of the tempest in a teapot, with all the best posts from the fracas in one place.
