Art Photos mixed

Leavy or coniferous ?
Photo by Patrice Thomas

Sala de billar - Museo del Romanticismo by Yaroslav Romanenko

A blockbuster exhibition dedicated to Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti is due to open in Qatar early next year. Picasso-Giacometti (22 February-21 May), which will launch at the Fire Station Artist in Residence centre in Doha, opened earlier this year in Paris at the Musée National Picasso (until 5 February).The exhibition includes more than 80 works drawn from the collections of the Musée National Picasso and the Fondation Giacometti in Paris. These include The She Goat by Picasso (1950) and Giacometti’s Tall Woman (1960).

The curators, including Catherine Grenier, the director of the Fondation Giacometti, highlight the “correspondences between their works, the influence of the surrealist movement, and the return to realism during the post-war period”, says a press statement.

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Lady in red by Daniel Kordan

Foggy weather by Andre Villeneuve

As the role of Russian hackers in the US presidential election comes under scrutiny, a bill protecting works of art on loan to the US from foreign institutions from seizure was passed by the Senate on Saturday, 10 December and is now waiting to be signed into law by President Obama. The legislation could end a years-long cultural cold war with Russia, which has refused to loan works since 2010 due to lawsuits filed in the US over objects seized during the Bolshevik Revolution.The bill was firmly backed by the US Association of Art Museum Directors, whose director Christine Anagnos said: “The exchange of works of art between countries supports cultural understanding and enables Americans to experience works that they otherwise might never have a chance to see in person.” Following a visit by Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, to the US in October, the museum posted on its website that the bill’s passage “will make it possible to restore museum exchanges between the countries”.

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The organisers of Sculpture Projects Münster have revealed further details about the artist projects lined up for next year’s public art show in Germany (10 June-1 October). More than 30 works, encompassing*sculptures and performance pieces, will be included in*the fifth edition of the influential exhibition that takes place every 10 years.The veteran, Chicago-born artist Michael Smith will set up a fully operational tattoo studio that, he says, will “target a particular demographic: the 65-plus crowd”. Senior citizens can choose from a selection of tattoos designed by current and past Sculpture Projects artists. Smith and invited artist friends will also submit designs. The tattoo parlour, called Not Quite_Underground, will be*run by professional tattoo artists based in Münster.



A 3D model of Peles Empire's project for Sculpture Projects Münster

Meanwhile, the Berlin-based art collective Peles Empire will build a sculpture based on buildings destroyed in Münster in the 1950s, combining drawings made of the original facades and sketches of the present-day building exteriors. The artists tell The Art Newspaper: “The outline of the front of the sculpture is based on drawings of either destroyed buildings [in Münster], proposed sketches and also of how the building looks now—kind of a mix of the past and the present.”Other artists due to take part include the Hungarian dancer Alexandra Pirici who will present a performance piece in Münster town hall based on the 1648 treaty known as the Peace of Westphalia, which brought the Thirty Years War to an end. The organisers add that the Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen plans to connect the two shores of the Münster harbour basin with a “virtually invisible footbridge” made of grids used for landing stages.

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British artists and brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, part of the YBA generation that rose to fame in the 1990s, are to have their first major solo show in Turkey next year. In the Realm of the Senseless opens at Arter, a private museum in Istanbul run by the Turkish billionaire and collector and Omer Koç, on 10 February (until 7 May).Organised by Nick Hackworth, the director of the London-based private collection Modern Forms, the exhibition will unite more Hell sculptures than ever before. They include Sum of All Evil (2012-13), which features toy soldiers, centaurs and fornicating plastic dinosaurs, and Unhappy Feet (2010), depicting penguins pecking polar bears to death on bloodied glaciers. Another four vitrines will be installed on the ground floor of the three-storey gallery.

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Alighiero Boetti (1940-94), the post-war Italian conceptual artist whose star has been in the ascendancy in recent years, will be the subject of major exhibitions in Venice and Paris.

Coinciding with the opening week of the Venice Biennale (8-13 May), an ambitious survey of Boetti’s work will bring together his largest and smallest pieces from 11 of his most important cycles of work, including his well-known airplane series, maps and embroideries. The Cini Foundation, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, is hosting the show, entitled Minimum/Maximum.

With major loans coming from both sides of the Atlantic, and significant input from the artist’s family and the Alighiero Boetti Archive, the curator and director of the Cini Foundation’s Institute of Art History, Luca Massimo Barbero, plans a linear approach to the show.



Alighiero Boetti, Mettere al mondo il mondo (To bring the world into the world) (1975)

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Donald Trump has received negative reviews not only from around the world, but also from beyond the grave. A recently discovered unpublished note by the late Donald Judd, written in 1989, reveals that the US artist did not think much of the property tycoon, now US president-elect. Judd recounts reading an interview with Trump in Life magazine while he was sitting in the dentist’s office. “He says in Life that he only buys ‘Old Masters and that contemporary art is a con’,” Judd wrote. “And of course ‘real-estate development’ is a good honest business.” The note, part of the Judd Foundation’s archive, was uncovered by the artist’s son Flavin Judd, who is the co-president of the foundation. Last month, the foundation published Donald Judd: Writings, a new collection of the artist’s essays and notes. The bit about Trump did not make it into the book because his father’s handwriting could not be deciphered in time, Flavin revealed during a talk in New York last month.

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