Wet Paint: Kenny Scharf Says a Swiss Dealer Stole His Art, Justin Bieber Parties at UTA Artist Space, & More Juicy Art-World Gossip

Every Thursday afternoon,
Artnet News brings you Wet Paint, a gossip column of original
scoops reported and written by Nate Freeman. If you have a tip,
email Nate at nfreeman@artnet.com.

SCHARF GETS SHORT SHRIFT FROM SWITZER

Another week, another artist-versus-dealer
Instagram fight. On Wednesday, the artist Kenny
Scharf took to the social media/revenge platform to air a
searing condemnation of the Gstaad gallery
Patricia Low Contemporary, accusing the Swiss
dealership of “ripping off artists” due to the fact that he “never
received these works back” after having a show at the space in
2015. “I’ve tried everything all I have left is social media
shame,” he said in a post containing images of several paintings
and sculptures. “So after five years I’m posting stolen art.”
Scharf’s crie de coeur immediately ricochetted around the
internet, prompting notes of concern from fellow artist
Maripol and Goodfellas actress
Debi Mazar. 

“Wet Paint” obtained emails that
were sent between Scharf’s studio, his Los Angeles gallery
Honor Fraser, and Low over the course of a few
months in 2016. In March 2016, the Gstaad dealer—who has run a
gallery in the chic Swiss ski town since 2005—sent said that she
could not send the works because the freight company Via Mat had
thrown away the crates she was going to use to ship them. When
Honor Fraser director Laura Watts followed up in
April, a Patricia Low Contemporary employee said that “the
transport company did a mistake with the crates and now they have
to resolve the problem.” A followup by Watts in May—saying,
reasonably, “I assume by now the crates have been constructed?”—was
met with crickets, as was an email sent in July by Scharf studio
manager Dave Morgan (“Any word on this?”). At that point, gallery
owner Honor Fraser emailed Low herself, asking for a wire transfer
to account for the painting. Low said that the “bank wont send such
an amount with just an email” and said she would get the money to
her “when I’m back from my holidays.” For point of reference, she
was talking about the summer of ’16.

After that, a source said Low
“ghosted” Scharf. In his Instagram, the artist said Low claimed she
went bankrupt and changed the gallery’s name. But he’s now hopeful
for a resolution: Word came in Wednesday night that hours after the
Instagram was posted, Low’s lawyers reached out to Scharf, ready to
talk. Low herself didn’t respond to an email requesting
comment.

BIEBER GOOFS OFF AT GALLERY

UTA Artist
Space, the Los Angeles gallery run by the United
Talent Agency, has earned a reputation as the Tinseltown
talent conglomerate’s more thoughtful side, underscoring the
company’s long dedication to contemporary art. Since July 2018,
when it moved to a new building in Beverly Hills
designed by Ai Weiwei, UTA Artist Space has hosted
exhibitions such as a Color Field show featuring Helen
Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland,
Morris Louis, and Sam
Gilliam, and it currently has a show on view organized by
hotshot Chicago dealer Mariane Ibrahim,
featuring up-and-coming African American artists. 

Sounds like some sober-minded
art cred, right? Well, on Friday all that seriousness went out he
window when the space went full-on Hollywood, becoming a venue for
Justin Bieber to celebrate the Paddle 8 auction the he and his
wife, Hailey Bieber, put together to
benefit LIFT Los
Angeles and Inner-City Arts. Soon enough Jaden Smith showed up and
started to playfully roughhouse with the Biebs, jumping on top of
him as adoring Bieliebers watched on, phones out. The highlight of
the evening, however, was when Kylie Jenner took the microphone to
sing her viral hit, “Rise and Shine,” which began its life—as most
classics do—as a nine-second clip Jenner posted to her Instagram of
her waking up her daughter, Stormi.  

HUNTING FOR HEZBOLLAH MOOLAH

Chelsea galleries had some
unexpected visitors earlier this month: officials from the
Treasury Department and the Department of
Homeland Security. Sources say the D.C. muscle was sent up
north to comb through the arts district and suss out whether anyone
was still selling work to Nazem Said Ahmad, the
Lebanon-based collector who made a fortune in the
diamond business. Keeping Ahmad as a client would be a big no-no,
as the Trump administration recently had Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin (himself the son of art
dealer Bob Mnuchin) place sanctions on the
collector, accusing him of laundering money
for Hezbollah, which the administration
considers a terrorist organization. It’s unclear whether the brass
found any shops offloading inventory to Ahmad, but word to the
wise: he is known to collect artists such as Antony Gormley,
Barbara Kruger, Gerhard Richter,
Yayoi Kusama, whose show at David
Zwirner’s Chelsea space was open through last
week. 

FULL SPACE FOR HALF
GALLERY

Bill Powers is
bringing the gallery scene back to the East
Village. Decades after the brief rise and fall of a
red-hot art circuit in the blocks between Avenue A and Avenue B—one
that nurtured the careers of Jeff Koons,
Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton,
and Richard Prince—Powers will open a new location
of Half Gallery, the space he’s run in various
locations since 2008, at 235 East Fourth Street, right on Avenue
B. That puts him just a few blocks away from fellow
Alphabet City outfit Karma, and a
hop, skip, and jump away from the Manhattan branch of the
Brant Foundation. While he was tempted to join the
current vogue and open in Tribeca after the Upper East Side
building was set to be rebuilt, he chose the East Village for its
historic role in shaping the current market. He cited as examples
Lisa Spellman’s 303 Gallery and
Colin de Land’s American Fine
Arts, which were both on East Sixth Street, and
Pat Hearn, who was on Avenue B, a block from the
new Half Gallery. The first show will be Tanya
Merrill, and it opens in February. 

TAIWAN AND DONE?

Last year, the first edition of
Taipei Dangdai was a gambit to bring an Art
Basel-style international contemporary art fair to Taiwan—and,
by most accounts, it was a
hit. Pace, Gagosian, and
White Cube all did business, Sean
Kelly opened a gallery in Taipei (his first non-New York
space) timed to the fair, and it was attended by collectors such as
Budi
Tek and Ulli Sig. But for the second
edition, Taipei Dangdai may get tripped up by an unexpected speed
bump. The fair’s VIP preview will open just days after a
contentions presidential election, and some dealers and advisors
are skipping Dangdai this year due to what could be a political
climate not too temperate for selling art. The pro-democracy
incumbent is facing a real threat from the pro-Beijing opposition,
and there are reports that China is attempting to influence the
election via Facebook. Sounds familiar!

WE HEAR…

Kenny
Schachter’s “The Hoarder” auction at
Sotheby’s turned out to be a “white glove”
sale—meaning every item found a buyer—netting the irascible Artnet News columnist
$780,000, mostly through lots that Schachter generously offered
without a reserve… that the rumor mill is once again chattering
that David Zwirner is getting ready to open a
space in Berlin, home to not just a good number of
artists but also his father, Rudolf Zwirner, who
lives on an estate in the Grunewald Forest… that
the Nasher Museum of Art, the fabulous institution
at the world-class Wet Paint alma
mater Duke University, acquired Derek
Fordjour’s Signing Day (2019) from his February
show at Night Gallery in L.A…. that photographer
and onetime Warhol Factory mainstay Stephen
Shore shot the new campaign for Rag &
Bone, starring model Paloma Elsesser… that Jeffrey
Epstein once announced his intentions to marry the
daughter of art collector Glenn Dubin, an Epstein
associate who has a gallery named for him at the Museum of
Modern Art… that after Avery
Singer‘s decampment
from Gavin Brown to join Hauser
& Wirth, word is getting around that one of Brown’s
top dealers is leaving for Hauser as well—just months after his
gallery director Thor Shannon left for David
Zwirner.

SPOTTED

Jay Z and
Kanye West thawing out their years-long feud at
Diddy’s 50th birthday party, where they embraced
in front of Kerry James Marshall’s Past
Times (1997)—which Diddy bought from Sotheby’s in
2018 for $21.1 million *** Artists Maia Ruth
Lee, Rachel Rossin, and Zak
Kitnick at Lee’s on Canal Street for the
Wide Rainbow Holiday Party, which raised funds for
the nonprofit’s mission of supporting the arts in youth programs in
New York *** A naked Rob Pruitt at his annual
holiday flea market at Karma Bookstore over the
weekend, which also featured a performance by Gerard
Malanga and Sonic Youth’s Lee
Ranaldo ***

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Kenny Scharf Says a Swiss Dealer Stole
His Art, Justin Bieber Parties at UTA Artist Space, & More Juicy
Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet News.