Flash News: Tino Sehgal – Palais de Tokyo – Wifredo Lam – Tate Modern – Christian Boltanski [

[25.08.2016]

Every fortnight, Artprice provides a short round up of art market news: Tino Sehgal – Palais de Tokyo – Wifredo Lam – Tate Modern – Christian Boltanski

Tino Sehgal at the Palais de Tokyo

British-German artist Tino SEHGAL (1976) began his career as a dancer working with experimental choreographers Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy. 20 years after his stage debut, the principle of living art hasn’t deserted him. In fact it has become his signature, his way of resisting the production of plastic objects. The exhibition he is putting together in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris – covering no less than 13,000 square metres – promises to be particularly exciting. It looks to be an experience in itself, especially as Tino Sehgal integrates the audience into his work. This was particularly true in his 2010 This Progress exhibition at the Guggenheim museum in New York. Visitors to the museum (emptied of all works for the occasion) were met by a child at the bottom of the spiral ramp, asking a small group of individuals about their perception of progress. As they went up, the group were asked other more complex questions by a schoolchild and then by a young adult, and finally by a mature individual at the highest point of the museum. This performance was the first “living work” acquired by the Guggenheim Museum. Three years later, the artist was awarded the Lion d’Or for best artist for his international Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopaedical Palace) exhibition at the Venice Biennial. This boundary-breaking artist, who has exhibited all over the world (the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2015, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2005, 2006 and 2007, the Serralves Foundation in Porto in 2005, etc.), is so against the production of physical works that his auction market is nonexistent. This fact in itself is rare enough to deserve to be highlighted. As you can’t buy it, you must visit it, from 12 October to 18 December 2016 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Wifredo Lam at the Tate Modern

There is an exhibition of major Cuban artist Wifredo LAM at the Tate Modern from 14 September 2016 to 8 January 2017 after his notable exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The exhibition features nearly 300 works and a hundred documents (paintings, ceramics, art books, archival documents, photographs) that showcase the highlights of the artist’s works and career. The exhibition includes his iconic work, La Jungle, the canvas that caused a scandal at his 1944 New York exhibition, which was then bought by the MoMA the following year. Supported by New York art dealer Pierre Matisse, Lam was known and recognized in his lifetime, including by the biggest cultural icons of his time, artists and intellectuals like Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Aimé Césaire, Lucio Fontana and Asger Jorn. Today, the peripatetic exhibition confirms the major role Lam plays in modern art, while his auction market is becoming more dynamic, with two new millionaire auctions in the first half of 2016, bringing the number of paintings sold for over a million dollars to 13.

Christian Boltanski’s heartbeats

Christian BOLTANSKI has been recording heartbeats all over the world since 2008. The French artist has already captured the sound rhythms of several thousand hearts, and stores the recordings on “Art island” at Teshima in Japan. This time his Heart Archive has been installed near Edinburgh, to capture new vital signs (exhibition until 25 September 2016 at Jupiter Artland). At the heart of this growing sound library, Boltanski continues to explore the themes of death, memory and remembrance, which have been woven through his work since the 1980s. Although his individual exhibitions are rare (the last was held in 2015 for the twentieth anniversary of the Marian Goodman gallery), Christian Boltanksi is one of the most well-known French artists internationally, one of the few to do well in the US market, which represents a third of his auction earnings. The price of his works is by no means astronomical: his record sale 10 years ago was for $157,000, for the Le reliquaire installation, a 1988 work combining metal cans, photographs and light bulbs. The artist hasn’t reached similar prices since. The momentum has even slowed, to the point that a major installation of the same period, entitled Réserve (La fête du Pourim) and made up of 123 metal cans, five photographs and five light bulbs, went for just $56,000 in June 2016 at Christie’s in Paris.