Daily art news

LONDON.- This morning at Sotheby’s in London , ten prints by Paul Gauguin from the Collection of Stanley J. Seeger, sold for £1.54 million ($2.47 million), almost four times the pre-sale low estimate for the group. A new auction record for a print by Paul Gauguin was achieved when Crouching Tahitian Woman Seen From The Back sold for £577,250 ($924,466), over three times the estimate (£180,000-220,000). The traced monotype, or ‘printed drawing’, was fiercely contested by a number of determined bidders, finally selling to a private collector on the telephone after a five-minute battle. Earlier in the sale, there was much excitement surrounding a pair of rare woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer – widely considered the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance. The earliest printed star charts, A Map of the Northern Sky and A Map of the Southern Sky, sold for £361,250 ($578,542) to Daniel Crouch Rare Books, over three times the low estimate. The price achieved established a new record for a woodcut by Dürer at auction. 

PARIS.- Gagosian Gallery presents “Richard Prince: de Kooning” an exhibition of paintings and works on paper. This coincides with “Richard Prince: American Prayer" at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, an exhibition of American literature, ephemera and artworks from Prince’s personal collection. Prince’s “de Kooning” series is a process of interaction with the canonic imagery of the Abstract Expressionist idol Willem de Kooning. The idea for these edgy Oedipal works came to him when he was leafing through a catalogue of de Kooning’s Women series. He started sketching over the paintings, sometimes drawing a man to de Kooning’s woman. As time went on, he began applying fragments of male and female torsos, genitalia, thighs, and facial features, cut and pasted from catalogues and vintage porn magazines, as well as drawing with graphite and oil crayon, adding outlines, silhouettes and textures to the original figures that further blur the distinction between de Kooning’s imagery and Prince’s own. 

MELBOURNE.- Opening 31 March, the National Gallery of Victoria will present Top Arts: VCE 2010, a celebration of the skill and imagination of emerging Victorian artists. Now in its seventeenth year, Top Arts will display 55 works by 53 students from government, Catholic and independent schools from across Victoria. Exemplary drawings, photography, paintings, sculpture, ceramics, books, short films and textiles will be represented in this year’s exhibition. Works have been inspired by a wide range of themes, including responses to the natural and urban environment, family relationships, and consumerism. Responses to art movements and historical events are also explored with one student depicting her grandmother’s five years in Auschwitz and another drawing the brutality of the Russian Revolution. Merren Ricketson, Top Arts Coordinating Curator said: “Each year Top Arts highlights the unlimited creativity unleashed in art classrooms across the state.