Art Industry News: A Fugitive Hong Kong Billionaire Is Unmasked as the Seller of a $26 Million Hockney Painting + Other Stories

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most
consequential developments coming out of the art world and art
market. Here’s what you need to know on this Friday, January
17.

NEED-TO-READ

Taiwan Will Host Censored Aichi Triennial Show –
A museum in Taiwan will
restage the highly
publicized exhibition that was part of
the Aichi Triennial last year.
The show, which chronicles works of art that have been censored in
Japan, closed after just three days following threats of violence
over the inclusion of a sculpture by Korean artists Kim
Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung of a so-called “comfort woman.”
The director of the Taipei Museum
of Contemporary Art, Li-Chen Loh, says his version of the show will
also include works that have previously been censored in
Taiwan. (The Art
Newspaper)

Sackler Gift Stirs Controversy at Vermont Museum
– A proposed donation of
art from a foundation affiliated with the Sackler family has caused
a stir at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Brattleboro,
Vermont, a town that has suffered the highest number of opioid
overdoses in the state. After some soul-searching, the museum
decided to accept the transformative gift of 300 objects collected
by the late Arthur M. Sackler and donated by the foundation overseen
by his widow, Elizabeth Sackler. (Arthur died in 1987, before his estranged
brothers developed OxyContin.) “We have not and will not accept any gifts from
anyone who has profited from the opioid crisis,” the museum’s
director Danny Lichtenfeld said. “Many of us have had this crisis
touch our lives personally.” (VT
Digger)

Russian Collecting Couple Released From Jail –
The Russian couple who lent a Ghent
museum a trove of allegedly fake avant-garde Russian paintings has
been released by Belgian police. No charges have
been made against Igor and
Olga Toporovsky, but the
pair remain under investigation. The lawyer who filed a criminal charge against
the Toporovskys on behalf of a group of international art dealers
says that the investigation will be led by a judge who will decide
whether or not to prosecute the couple. The director of the
Museum of Fine Arts in
Ghent, Catherine de
Zegher,remains suspended
following the the controversial show, “Russian Modernism,” which
experts fear included as many as two dozen fakes.
(TAN)

Did a Dentist Try to
Pass Off Fake Picassos? – A German dentist has been
accused of trying to pass off 20 fake Picassos as the real thing.
Although he had not officially attempted to sell them before being
caught, the man is accused of the “unauthorized exploitation of
copyrighted works and the use of fake certificates.” His hearing is
in Dusseldorf on January 28. According to the prosecution, the
52-year-old met with representatives of several auction houses at a
hotel to show them the works, claiming that handwritten notes on
the back were from one of Picasso’s sons. (Monopol)

ART MARKET

Fugitive Real-Estate Mogul Is Revealed as Hockney Seller
– The fugitive Hong Kong
billionaire Joseph
Lau has been unmasked
as the anonymous seller of David Hockney’s The Splash, which could fetch between
$26.2 million and $39.3 million (£20 million to £30 million) at
Sotheby’s London on February 11. Lau was convicted of bribery
and money-laundering in Macau in 2014, but he has avoided
imprisonment by not traveling there. He is believed to have bought
the Hockney at Sotheby’s in 2006 for a comparatively modest $5.4
million—now, he stands to make a nearly 630 percent profit.
(Bloomberg)

Jill Soloway Teams Up With Judy Chicago at Felix –
The TV producer has selected works
by Judy Chicago for a special project at Felix LA, the upstart
hotel fair that runs alongside Frieze Los Angeles in February. The
feminist artist’s work will be presented by Jessica Silverman Gallery of San Francisco. For
the first time, the hotel fair will ask visitors to pay $20
admission. (Los Angeles
Times)

Royal Abdication Coin Sells for £1 Million –
A rare King Edward VIII gold
sovereign sold for a record £1 million ($1.3 million) to a private
UK buyer. The coin is one of a trial set that was never actually
released, since the king abdicated the British throne in 1936 to
marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. (Guardian)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Zoé Whitley Will Lead Chisenhale Gallery –
Whitely, the star curator who helped organize “Soul of a Nation:
Art in the Age of Black Power,” will succeed Polly Staple at the
helm of the East End London nonprofit in late March 2020. Whitely
most recently served a short stint as senior curator at Hayward
Gallery in London; she has also held top roles at Tate Britain and
Tate Modern. (Press release)

Howard University Gifted
African American Art Trove – The historically black
university in Washington, DC, has received a collection of African
American art valued at $2.5 million from Patricia Walters, the wife
of former dean of the school’s political science department, Ronald
Walters. The trove consists of 152 pieces from notable eras,
including the Harlem Renaissance. (WTOP)

Cristina Iglesias Wins
Architecture Prize – The Spanish artist has won the third
annual Royal Academy Architecture Prize for her contribution to
architecture. Iglesias is known for her public artworks that offer
a site for gathering and often use water to create a sense of
respite from the surrounding urban environment. (e-flux)

Park West Gallery
Supports Suicide Prevention – Park West Gallery, best
known for selling art by the Pop artist Peter Max on cruise ships,
has donated $250,000 to the American Foundation for Suicide
Prevention in memory of Mary May, Max’s wife, who died by suicide
last year. (Press release)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Preservationists Fight
to Save the Frick’s Music Room – While the beloved
garden at the Frick Collection was saved from
destruction in a revamped expansion plan, the museum’s historic
music room faces the same fate as part of the updated $160 million
renovation. An online petition to protect the music room in its
current state has received 6,000 signatures. (Gothamist)

Claudia Rankine Plans
New Work for the Shed – The acclaimed author, poet, and
MacArthur fellow’s new theater work Help will premiere at
the Shed in New York from March 10 through April 5. Directed by
Taibi Magar and starring Roslyn Ruff from Marriage Story,
Rankine’s piece follows a woman as she encounters white men in
airports and airplanes and asks them what they think of their
privilege. (Press
release)

Nick Cullinan Defends
Closing the National Portrait Gallery – The director of
the National Portrait Gallery has responded to criticism about the
museum’s three-year closure, pushing back against Bendor
Grosvenor’s article last year in
The Art Newspaper that criticized the “secretive”
decision to close starting in June. “The project is the most
transformative since our building opened in 1896, the first to
consider it as a whole and is much needed,” Cullinan writes in an
op-ed. “It will see us refurbish all of our galleries and rehang
and re-interpret the entire collection from top to bottom.”
(TAN)

Hong Kong Protest
Sculpture Heads to Copenhagen – A Danish sculptor has
modified his work, Pillar of Shame, to include portraits
of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters ahead of its arrival
outside Danish parliament. Jens Galschiøt’s work originally
commemorated the victims of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. It now
includes the faces of Hong Kong demonstrators wearing helmets,
goggles, and gas masks. (Hong Kong Free
Press)

The post Art Industry News: A Fugitive Hong Kong Billionaire
Is Unmasked as the Seller of a $26 Million Hockney Painting + Other
Stories appeared first on artnet News.