Art Market Recap: Catch up with all things Museum, Auction and AI related!
Damien Hirst has harnessed the power of AI technology in his latest NFT drop, a rare porcelain bowl with a sister piece at the British Museum has made auction records in Hong Kong, a major Warhol-Basquiat exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton has opened and more!
Damien Hirst has evolved his NFT practice once again and has provided the opportunity to create your own spin paintings through AI technology. Hosted through Heni Editions, the drop allowed users to choose from a selection of styles and colour palettes to digitally construct artworks in 25 unique styles. Heni describes the process as using “A variety of techniques including WEBGL shaders, Perlin noise and trigonometric functions are used to create paint layers that mirror the defined yet unpredictable motion of paint as it moves across a canvas.”
Users were able to generate a work and order either a physically printed work or NFT minted on the Ethereum blockchain with canvases priced at $1,500, $3,000, $4,500 and $6,000 depending on the size, plus any applicable taxes. The NFT was priced $2,000 plus any applicable taxes. Works also bear the artist’s signature in paint pen along the lower edge.
“I have always believed that everything done well is art and there are no boundaries,” Hirst said in a statement. “For me, The Beautiful Paintings and the Spin Paintings are about that. No boundaries. Art that makes you go, ‘wow!’ And you can get lost in it.”
“The Beautiful Paintings by Damien Hirst” ran through until April 10 on HENI with final physical artworks set to be sent to their owners in approximately 6 months depending on production and logistics timelines.
A Roman mosaic, buried for more than two hundred years, was uncovered outside a shop in a shopping center in the city of Colchester, England. The ancient work of art was first found in the 1980s but was soon covered back up. A special project led by the shopping center and Colchester City Council is now working to uncover and display the work to local residents beneath a protective glass cover.
“We’re uncovering what’s already been found and we’re also exploring further,” revealed Lion Walk’s center manager, Martin Leatherdale, about the dig, which is being carried out in partnership with Colchester Archaeological Trust.
Excavation and research into how much of the mosaic may be buried and intake is underway which has garnered much attention from the community. Large crowds in support of the excavation have formed in the area with council remarking on the increased engagement and inquiries on the project.
Colchester in Essex was the capital of Britain during Roman times with over 40 mosaics having been recorded there, perhaps more than anywhere else in the U.K. This particular work is set to be completely unveiled and ready for display by the end of summer 2023.
An 18th century striking example of Falangcai (“foreign colors”) porcelain, considered to be among the rarest and most valuable materials of the Qing dynasty, has set a new auction record selling for $25 Million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. The cream-white bowl depicts intertwined apricot and willow trees and a pair of swallows with a poem inscribed on one of the walls reads: “Scissors of jade cut through the flowers / Like rainbow garments brought back from the moon”. It is speculated that the poem was commissioned by the Wanli Emperor, who reigned from 1573 to 1620.
The rare object was once part of a pair, but it and the other bowl were divided and sold for £150 each in 1929, according to CNN. The sister bowl is now housed at the British Museum, in London. Hong Kong-based art collector and philanthropist Dr. Alice Cheng has been identified as the consignor. Cheng had purchased the object at a 2006 Christie’s auction for HK$151 million ($19 million)—a record price for Chinese art at the time.
The “Dr. Alice Cheng Falangcai Bowl” has been reportedly purchased by a private, unnamed Chinese collector for just under its pre-sale estimate of $25.4 million US.
“To reaffirm Sotheby’s continuous leadership in Chinese Art, and witness some exceptional results this season, feels particularly poignant amidst a year in which we celebrate our 50th anniversary in Asia,” said Nicolas Chow, Sotheby’s chairman of Asia. “When we first entered the region in 1973 we did so with sales in this category and they have remained at the forefront of our business ever since.”
Rescuers had to help a man trapped inside of a public artwork after he slipped and fell into the large piece installed in Edmonton, Canada. It took three teams of emergency responders—including a technical rescue team from the fire department—about an hour and a half to extricate 26 year old Wakeem Courtoreille from “Talus Dome”, which is made from 1,000 handmade stainless steel spheres. The man explained that he had climbed the sculpture and slipped and fell into the opening at the top of the sculpture.
“It was kind of like watching a mouse fall into a bucket,” Connor Schwindt, a local resident who witnessed the incident while out running, told CBC. “He was just kind of running around inside of it, starting to freak out because he couldn’t get out.”
The work was created by the Ball-Nogues Studio, a collaboration between California artists Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues and was created for the city’s Percent for Art initiative, in conjunction with the Edmonton Arts Council. The 2013 work cost $600,000 to build and is part of the City of Edmonton Public Art Collection.
“The surface of ‘Talus Dome’ takes on different colors with the changing seasons and hours of the day as it literally reflects its surroundings,” the artists’ website explained, adding that it was purposely designed with a void in its center.
Rescuers had to cut into the structure and remove one of the balls in order to free the trapped man, who was immediately arrested. Courtoreille allegedly damaged the work while scaling the sculpture. It is unclear what the plans for restoration of the work are, however Courtoreille was fined $5,000 and charged with one count of mischief.
An enormous show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton showcasing Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s collaborative works has opened in Paris entitled “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands”. The works first debuted at Tony Shafrazi’s New York gallery in 1985 but were met with lukewarm responses from the artworld.
The duo worked together on around 160 paintings between 1983 and 1985. 80 jointly signed canvases are included in the Paris exhibition, which is the largest number ever to be exhibited together. The exhibition also includes archival documents from the artists and their peers, providing additional depth and complexity.
The large scale of the works produced in this period speak to Warhol’s fascination with cinema and the ‘larger than life’ quality of celebrity culture coupled with Basquiat’s street art roots and experience painting on walls. “Here, they can breathe, they can explode in their intensity,” said art historian Dieter Buchhart, who co-curated the exhibition with Anna Karina Hofbauer in partnership with the foundation’s in-house curator Olivier Michelon.
Works by Futura 2000, Michael Halsband, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and Kenny Scharf among others are also included in the exhibition to provide context and energy of the New York art scene.
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