Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 41 2025

At first glance, there seems to be no end in sight to the demise of galleries. Almine Rech is closing its London gallery and liquidating its UK business, reports Melanie Gerlis in The Art Newspaper (paywall may apply): "The international gallery Almine Rech has closed its space in London's Mayfair and put its UK business into voluntary liquidation. Filings to Companies House confirm that the London branch, recently re-registered as LG Realizations 2025, went into liquidation in August, a decision that a gallery statement says “was a technical step to restructure a lease that no longer aligned with our plans”." At the same time, Pace is closing its gallery in Hong Kong, reports Kabir Jhala, also in The Art Newspaper: "Pace will cease to operate its Hong Kong gallery space as of later this month. [...] ‘Our gallery space at H Queen's is no longer serving us and since our lease is expiring, like many other galleries, we are taking the opportunity to exit,’ the spokesperson adds. [...] Hong Kong's viability as the premier Asia outpost for international galleries has been imperilled following a sharp decline in spending by Mainland Chinese collectors, political pressure from Beijing and a downturn in the global market. Last year, the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery closed its Hong Kong space and has not reopened in the city. However, this news is no cause for lamenting the crisis in the art market. The major galleries operate like chain stores in other industries. Their business model is scalable and is adapted to the turnover at the respective locations. When things aren't going so well, one or two showrooms are closed. When the economy picks up again, they expand.

There is certainly something happening in the gallery scene, as Annie Armstrong reports at Artnet (possibly paywall): "Dispatch from Los Angeles: The vacancy left this summer by the closure of Blum may be getting filled by... drumroll, please... another Blum! On 1 July, two days before dealer Tim Blum announced that he would be closing his powerhouse gallery, his eldest son, August Blum, opened a sculpture show by artist Bennet Koziak in a storage unit in Echo Park—a space he calls the Village. [...] The Village is off the beaten path of the city's mainstay galleries, but it's near other if-you-know-you-know spaces."

Colnaghi is also opening a new branch in Saudi Arabia. Melissa Gronlund reports in the Art Newspaper: "Colnaghi, one of the world's oldest surviving art dealerships, will open a space in Riyadh, following a deal struck with the Saudi private equity firm Sarat Investment Holding, worth 10 million Saudi riyals (around £2 million). [...] However, Islamic art and artefacts are a major area of interest for the region's collectors, and Colnaghi is expected to begin selling in that field, according to a local source."

This reinforces the trend of following the lure of money to the Gulf, which Glen Lowry, outgoing director of MoMA, has also succumbed to as future advisor to the Islamic Arts Biennale, as Valentina di Liscia critically notes at Hyperallergic: "But perhaps it is not so different from models of patronage in the US, or at least not for Lowry, who is accustomed to accepting money from unsavoury characters. MoMA’s board, after all, has its own questionable human rights footprint. [...] In any case, Lowry had already made his views on the art world’s ethical conflicts crystal clear in 2023 — ironically, also on the Art World: What If…?! podcast, when he declared in its second-ever episode that questioning museum trustees over their political affiliations or financial entanglements amounts to “fascism.”

Speaking of which: The International Council of Museums (ICOM) is holding its 27th annual conference in Dubai in mid-November, marking the first time it has been held in an Arab country. The Museum Fair will take place at the same time.

Meanwhile, the auctions in Hong Kong are sending positive signals, reports Elisa Carollo in the Observer: "Led by the highly anticipated Picasso painting Buste de femme (1944), Christie's 20th/21st Century Evening Sale on Friday, 26 September, in Hong Kong closed just shy of a white-glove result with a total of HK$565,649,000 ($73,038,183), giving a strong start to the season for the fall marquee evening sales, now beginning in Asia before moving to London and New York."

A strong regional marketplace could develop in Atlanta, believes Daniel Cassady of Artnews: "Last week, during the second edition of the Atlanta Art Fair, one question filtered through the humid Southern air: What would it take for Atlanta to become a national arts hub, something like Dallas, with its billionaires and spacious museums, or Chicago, with its scrappy artist-run spaces and university backbone? The money is already there: sports fortunes, the film industry's tax-break boom, a burgeoning tech industry, and a scattering of wealthy Southern families. What's missing is harder to pin down. [...] The opening day was buzzing, but not with your typical art fair clientele. There were as many high school and college students there as people in Gucci loafers. Falcons jerseys and T-shirts outnumbered blazers three to one. Both attendees and staffers alike were in good spirits. “Hey y’all, welcome, enjoy!” the person who scanned my ticket said as I walked into the fair. Would that ever be said at Frieze or Art Basel?

There is a somewhat belated but illuminating report on Contemporary Istanbul by Werner Bloch for the Tagesspiegel (paywall), which places the event in the context of the country's social situation: "But of all things, an art fair, Contemporary Istanbul (CI), is something of a bastion against the growing dictatorship. Here, a spirit of freedom and openness prevails. CI was in part a fair for the courageous, even if the messages are often hidden and sometimes need to be deciphered. “There are problems with democracy and human rights in many places,” says fair founder Ali Güreli after the artists and gallery owners have left. “We all, and especially the artists, must remain calm, intelligent – and radical.” What a statement. Güreli invented CI and realised it despite all the hurdles. He is a visionary of a kind rarely found."

Also somewhat delayed is my report on the Fine Art Biennale Paris, the successor to the Biennale des Antiquaires and Fine Arts Paris, in the Handelsblatt online.

In Vienna, a fair that hardly anyone outside the city is aware of is holding on with astonishing tenacity. Werrner Remm shares an interesting observation in Artmagazine: "Fair For Art Vienna, the fourth of Vienna's autumn fairs, started last Friday. The art fair in the Aula der Wissenschaften in Vienna's first district has attracted the highest number of participants to date, with 45 galleries, art dealers and a special exhibition. Almost all of the additional exhibitors are from the field of contemporary art, while the art and antiques trade continues to decline, combining classical art with contemporary works."

Nina Siegal has compiled a guide to buying antiques for the New York Times in the run-up to Frieze Masters.

Artnet's last annual general meeting before its privatisation received surprisingly little coverage in the relevant international media. Only Daniel Cassady refers to my report for the Handelsblatt in Artnews: "Andrew E. Wolff—who holds about 98.93 per cent of Artnet shares, according to boerse.de, and also owns rival platform Artsy—will serve as interim chief executive. Earlier this year, Wolff's Beowolff Capital offered a voluntary public takeover of the company. Jan Petzel, managing director of Wolff's Leonardo Art Holdings, said he was surprised by Pabst's resignation but pleased that the annual meeting went ahead." The media landscape of the art world, the online market and, above all, the commodification of art are likely to change dramatically if the owner of Artnet and Artsy exploits the potential of the interaction between the two companies.

I describe private deals and private auctions as instruments not unlike shadow banks in their lack of transparency for Monopol (paywall).

Annika von Taube comments on Ryder Ripps' acquittal for his copies of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs at Monopol (paywall): "The most interesting thing about this case (which, incidentally, has been referred back to the district court, where it may be reopened if the people at Yuga Labs are as stupid as their monkey pictures) is that it involves appropriation art in digital form. While Sherrie Levine still had to laboriously photograph her copies from catalogues, in the digital world, appropriation is as simple as right-clicking. Potentially, an infinite number of identical motifs could be generated as unique NFTs, each with its own smart contract. The value would then no longer be determined by the motif itself, but [by] its blockchain address(es)."

Art Basel has recruited Carly Murphy, a senior employee at Christie's, according to a press release. Daniel Cassady puts the appointment into context for Artnews: "The hire comes amid broader shifts between auction houses, galleries, and fairs. Christie's former chief executive Guillaume Cerutti stepped down in January to join the Pinault family, while Sotheby's Brooke Lampley moved to Gagosian and Christie's Jussi Pylkkänen left to advise privately. Horowitz himself briefly decamped to Sotheby's before returning to Art Basel as CEO in 2022."

According to a report by the English-language television station NHK World Japan, a Beltracchi forgery has turned up in Japan. Julia Encke summarises for the FAZ: "NHK showed Beltracchi together with a company representative in an online interview. There he admitted: 'I painted it around 1990. I studied Kisling intensively and painted his pictures, so it was and remains a work by Kisling. I worked quite hard myself to create an exceptionally good work, so I don't think people are disappointed.'"

Alex Greenberger mourns the death of former Artnews owner Milton Esterow at the age of 97 there: "Esterow purchased ARTnews in 1972 from Newsweek, which at the time was a division of the Washington Post Company, and owned it until 2014, when ARTnews was sold in 2014 to Sergey Skaterschikov. (The publication was then acquired two years later by Peter Brant, who also owned Art in America; both publications have been owned by Penske Media Corporation since 2018.) During the time he owned ARTnews, Esterow transformed the magazine into a news-focused entity, infusing the publication with an energy it had lost in the years after its critics had helped define movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop during the postwar era."