Art News Galore

The 2012 Artists Rooms tour

Filed under: Art events — Alan @ 5:13 am

The 2012 Artists Rooms tour will be hosted by the Scottish towns of Dunoon, Banff and Linlithgow. The tour involves modern and contemporary art and was announced this week. Robert Mapplethorpe, the American photographer will have his work shown at several Scottish locations. August Sander, a German photographer will have works displayed in Banff as well as Leicester.

The MAC is a new contemporary art venue in Belfast and is a highlight of the 2012 tour. There will be art featured here by Robert Therrien. Also recently opened is the Hepworth Wakefield which will be displaying sculptures by Richard Long. The Ferens Gallery in Hull will host works by Andy Warhol.

The Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland are the joint owners of the tour and responsible for its organisation. There are over 700 pieces of art involved in the tour, all of which were sold to the tour in 2008 by Anthony d’Offay. He sold them for over £26m despite the entire collection being worth over £125m. This tour will be the fourth of its kind and will show the art at 44 galleries and museums across the nation. The tour is supported with a generous grant from the Art Fund.

Gallery’s record on art damage is poor

Filed under: Art News — Alan @ 8:49 am

A new set of documents shockingly proved that hundreds of sculptures, paintings, and other pieces of artwork have been damaged while under the supervision of the leading galleries and museums in the UK.

Among the works damaged are pieces by Tracey Emin and Andy Warhol and include dinosaur bones and a doll house.  In one specific case a complete steam engine was destroyed by accident.  A few items were damaged to the point where they had to be scrapped, while others required thousands of pounds worth of renovations.

The National Galleries of Scotland were responsible for eight damaged pieces of art, including the Andy Warhol painting Mark of the Beast and the Tracey Emin piece My Uncle Colin. The Tate Modern damaged Ishi’s Light, 2003 by Anish Kapoor when a film cameraman hit it.

Paintings were also damaged by poor supervision at the Tate, which saw damage twice in one year to Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon: once when a child left fingerprints on it and another incident in which it was dented by a child.

For the most part, the documents found that incidents were most likely to occur while a painting or work was being taken down or installed by staff.  For instance, at the London National Gallery Domenico Beccafumi’s painting Marcia was broken in two when being removed from the wall.  An adhesive failure was blamed for the incident which led to repair costs.

The Victoria and Albert Museum also damaged a 15^th century Christ figure while removing it at the cost of £1,600 in repairs.