Lifestyle

Ed Ruscha's Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, the last privately owned large-scale painting he created in the 1960s, will be hitting Christie's auction with a pre-estimated cost of $50m USD. The 1964 artwork recently appeared in the touring retrospective, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, which went on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art afterwards. It's being brought to auction by owner Sid R. Bass, a Texas oil heir who first acquired the work in 1976 through a trade for another Ruscha painting.Widely considered as the father of LA contemporary art, Ruscha first moved to the City of Angels from Oklahoma in 1956 to attend Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), using banal freeways, low slung buildings a...

The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA) has acquired a new building for $25 million, effectively doubling its space. The building, previously home to the de la Cruz Collection, adds 30,000 square feet to the museum, allowing for expanded exhibitions and programming. ICA's artistic director, Alex Gartenfeld, credited donations from individuals like real estate mogul Craig Robins for making the purchase possible as per a report by Artnews.Before opening to the public, the building will undergo renovations. The de la Cruz Collection, founded in 2009 by Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, was a prominent Miami art space until it closed earlier this year following Rosa’s passing. Carlos later auctioned off several works, including pieces by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Ana Mendieta, sparking controv...

Francis Bacon’s work doesn’t pull punches. His portraits—distorted, raw and brutally emotional -- are on full display at the National Portrait Gallery’s Francis Bacon: Human Presence. The exhibition spans Bacon’s career, from his early 1940s portraits to his self-portraits and deeply personal works in the 1960s. It’s a study of how Bacon tore apart traditional portraiture, using his personal anguish as fuel. The influence of his relationships is glaring -- most notably, his long-term partner Peter Lacy, whose vulnerability is captured amidst chaos. Bacon’s use of the triptych format reveals the collapse of their relationship, faces twisting into something monstrous. And when his lover George Dyer died by suicide just before a major show, Bacon’s grief turned inward. A 1973 self-portrait sh...

Everyday is an adventure in Jonas Wood's vibrant paintings. The American artist is globally recognized for flattening the banality of daily life into wondrous compositions that incorporate his passions across sports, plants and virtually any subject that piques his interest. On view at Gagosian London is a new solo exhibition of paintings that explore how Wood conflates often competing elements. Housed at the gallery's Grosvenor Hill location, the eponymously titled show presents some of Wood's most chaotically patterned works to date. Wood likes to play with perspective, shifting the flattened plane of the canvas through repeating patterns, like the texture of a wall or couch, with competing colors, shapes and decorative elements, such as a distant skyline in Robot and Bear (2024) or a di...