Wallace Collection Spotlights Flora Yukhnovich, Eyes On Marcel Duchamp Prize Nominees, and More: Morning Links for January 11, 2024

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The Headlines

ARTISTS RULE! For Artlist, art critic Tabish Khan investigated British artists who run private museums with their own works, from Damien Hirst to Gilbert & George, and Glenn Brown. The phenomenon is, he noted, more recent that the concept of collectors finding or creating a space to steward their treasures. It seems to have all started in 2015 with Damien Hirst opening Newport Street Gallery in a rather neglected corner of Vauxhall in South London. Galleries are supportive of the idea. White Cube is happy to be showing Gilbert & George’s new creations, while The Centre allows them to exhibit and reposition previous bodies of work. Gagosian refers to The Brown Collection as “an absolute gift to the city” of London. This model begs the question of what happens to the museums in the long-term future. Will they persist once their owners are gone?

WALLACE & YUKHNOVICH.Flora Yukhnovich will be the star of the Wallace Collection in London this summer, The Art Newspaper reports. The British artist is mostly known for reinterpreting 18th-century classics. Her paintings, inspired by Rococo masters, will temporarily replace two works by French painting François Boucher – “Pastoral with a Bagpipe Player” (1749) and “Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain” (1749) – at the top of the grand staircase on the landing of Hertford House, from June to October. Both will be moved to a display space on the ground floor. “I have been visiting [the Wallace Collection] since I was a student to immerse myself in the 18th century and to study the Boucher paintings,” she said.

The Digest

Have you heard of Artists Who Code? “It is a volunteer collective of like-minded enthusiasts for art and technology,” explained Scott McCreary, now a senior software engineer at Vannevar Labs. “We started it at the beginning of Covid because we saw our friends in the arts losing their jobs, and we wanted to provide a community for them to make the same journey from the arts to tech that we had taken.” Did not you know? Artists have many of the professional qualities that companies desire. [Forbes]

The Marcel Duchamp Prize, an annual award promoted by the Association pour la Diffusion Internationale de l’Art Français (ADIAF), has announced the four finalists of its 24th edition. The nominees are Abdelkader Benchamma, whose practice is based on drawing, sculptress Gaëlle Choisne, photographer Noémie Goudal, and duo Detanico & Lain. The winner will receive €35,000 personally and up to €30,000 to produce an exhibition of their work at the Centre Pompidou. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

CULTURED offered a rundown of the best art the Big Apple has to offer in the month of January. Spoiler alert: following “the glut of painting on view in New York recently, there will be plenty of sculpture, installation, and screen-based work to shake things up. [CULTURED]

Florian Daguet-Bresson got the profile treatment from Le Figaro. L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a French village largely dominated by antique dealers, is where he grew up and discovered his art. “I was fascinated by colors and materials. I have sharpened my eye by looking at birds and their feathers. Which led me to ceramics, an art right in the middle of a revolution.” [Le Figaro]

Christian Dior has announced that their Pre-Fall 2024 collection will be unveiled at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City on 15 April. Behind this high-expected fashion show hides the designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, who has drawn inspiration from Marlene Dietrich’s iconic style to create structured blazers with large pants and pencil skirts. This collection is “not just about threads and cuts; it’s [also] a heartfelt tribute to the enduring connection between Dior and the United States.” [Grazia]

The Kicker

FUN, GAMES & ART. “What happened to fun?”, The New York Times asks. “Shouldn’t it also, sometimes, be joyous?” In traditional white cubes, art can look elitist or academic. Enters Luna Luna, the amusement park staged in Hamburg, Germany, in 1987, where nearly 30 professional artists including Basquiat, Hockney and Dalí designed the rides. About 250,000 people attended that summer — families, children, students, hipsters seeking reprieve. But shoestring funding and a thwarted tour let the production sit, disassembled and forgotten in storage, for 35 years. Now about half the attractions have been restored, beautifully, and arranged for the public in a new show in Los Angeles titled “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.” [The New York Times]