Anish Kapoor, the India-born contemporary sculptor, will get a stand-alone exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in late 2009, RA Secretary and Chief Executive Charles Saumarez Smith said.
The show of Kapoor’s work, filling all of the main-floor galleries, will look back at the evolution of the Turner Prize- winner’s career, Saumarez Smith, who left the National Gallery’s directorship for the RA last year, said in an interview.
He also outlined architect David Chipperfield’s plans to renovate, by 2012, the academy’s Burlington Gardens annex: build a lecture theater, refurbish the upstairs gallery spaces, and open a ground-floor restaurant.
Saumarez Smith, 54, is steering an institution that for three decades was dominated by former Exhibitions Secretary Norman Rosenthal, mastermind of such blockbusters as this year’s “From Russia”, “Aztecs” (2002-3) and “Sensation” (1997). Rosenthal left in January to become a freelance curator; the RA exhibitions program for the next four years is mostly his doing. In the spring of 2009, the RA will show the work of the 19th- century Japanese printmaker Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
The new boss’s aim is to showcase the 240-year-old RA’s other constituents: the 80 artists, or academicians, who govern it, collectively displaying their work at the annual Summer Exhibition; and the art school, Britain’s oldest, where William Blake and J.M.W. Turner studied. He is glad that Kapoor and Chipperfield, both academicians, are in the RA spotlight. (Bloomberg)

LONDON - The July 2008 Evening Sale of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s London achieved the phenomenal sum of £94,701,550 ($188,853,831) against a pre-sale estimate of £67.4 – 96.6 million, making it the most successful Summer sale of Contemporary Art in Europe. The sale had numerous high points throughout the evening, with records achieved for 11 different artists.

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is about to display to the world one of the most important public art projects that the city of New York has ever hosted. It is “The New York City Waterfalls”, the extraordinary series of four waterfalls that will rise about 36 metres above the water of the Big Apple’s bay: realized in full respect of the environment and dislocated in four points facing the East River, in Lower Manhattan, under the Brooklyn bridge anchorage and on the northern coast of the Governor’s Island. An extremely impressive work by the European artist, who received the entire budget of 15 million dollars by the Public Art Fund, a private non-profit foundation, which in past years sponsored also “Sky Mirror” by Anish Kapoor and “Puppy” by Jeff Koons, both installed at the Rockefeller Centre.

On 15th May, the auction house Phillips de Pury & Co. in New York will begin two sessions dedicated to Contemporary Art, which will conclude on 16th May with the latest returns. We will be helping to showcase the two sales which amount to about 370 lots, among which are some of the most famous stars of the contemporary art world.

Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

It was not long ago that the German industrialist, Reinhold Wurth, discovered his great passion. It was the start of the seventies and a promising young man was approaching the world of art, showing interest in the german painter Emil Nolde, in German expressionism, to then push himself towards contemporary art, but also turning his eye to German Renaissance art.