LEONORA ENKING/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Venice
The 58th Venice Biennale opens this week, and in the exhibition Christoph Büchel will show a fishing boat that sank in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015, killing hundreds of migrants. [ARTnews]
And here’s a history of the Biennale, which included 516 works when it was first staged in 1895. [ARTnews]
News
The Saatchi Gallery in London has covered up two paintings featuring nude figures and Islamic texts by the artist SKU. Muslim visitors told the gallery they found the works offensive. [The Guardian]
This month, ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, will open an exhibition and event space at the Main Museum’s former home in Downtown Los Angeles. [Los Angeles Times]
Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo received the Isamu Noguchi Award last week, and she told The Cut, “Unlike Noguchi, I don’t feel I am an artist, but I feel we share a similar spirit of always searching for something new.” [The Cut]
Market
ARTnews Top 200 Collector David Martinez will sell Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis [Ferus Type] and Frank Stella’s Point of Pines at Christie’s in New York this month. The Warhol is estimated between $50 million and $70 million, and the Stella between $25 million and $35 million. [Bloomberg]
Firsts
Works by the storied TV painter Bob Ross have made their institutional debut at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, where they figure in the show “New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival.” The museum’s director and curator urges, “Put aside your prejudices of Bob Ross and think of him as a true artist.” [The Art Newspaper]
Sculptor Antony Gormley has been commissioned to create 29 iron “bodyforms” for the Greek island of Delos, home to ancient ruins dating to the 9th-century BCE. [The Guardian]
Lives
An obituary for Ben Heller, a collector and dealer of abstract art who died late last month at age 93. One of his most notable accomplishments was selling Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952) to the National Gallery of Australia. [The New York Times]
Then & Now
The Atlantic asks, “What Happens to Abandoned Malls?” In response, one reader shared photos of a former mall in Bangkok that was later used to raise koi. [The Atlantic]
Take a look at these archival and contemporary images of the city of Pripyat, which was devastated by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 1986. “Now, in the 33 years since the last human resident left, nature has reclaimed it,” Darmon Richter writes. [Atlas Obscura]