Sculpture in art news this week: Koons set to take it to the moon, Weiwei gets visceral

A SUMMARY OF THE MOST EXCITING ART NEWS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE

While we focus on Indian art, we can’t obviously function in a vacuum. It’s a small world and everything is connected, especially on the web. So, let’s train our spotlight across the world map to see what’s going on — from art trends to socio-political issues to everything that affects the great aesthetic global consciousness. Or, let’s just travel the world and have some fun!

Artist Jeff Koons to send sculptures to the moon 

US artist Jeff Koons has announced that he will send some of his own sculptures to the moon later this year, which will then be sold on earth in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the digital assets that are shaking the contemporary art market. \”I am very excited to announce my first-ever NFT project, \’Moon Phases,\’ rooted in humanistic and philosophical thought,\” the artist wrote in a Twitter post. Pace Gallery in New York City, which represents Koons, has not yet announced the number or size of the moon-bound sculptures, but it has said the works will be left permanently on the lunar surface in a transparent, thermally coated miniature satellite. Launching the spacecraft is private US company Intuitive Machines. One NFT of each sculpture on the moon will be offered via Pace Gallery\’s NFT platform Pace Verso. Hindustan Times tells you more. 

 

Ai Weiwei exhibits colossal glass sculpture of bones, viscera  

Roman National Museum and Berengo Stuido have announced the debut of ‘La Commedia Umana’ by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. One of the largest Murano glassworks ever constructed, the huge chandelier consists of over two thousand pieces of hand-blown glass cast by master glassmakers of Berengo Stuido. Taking shape as a cascade of bones, skulls, and black glass organs, the installation is now on display at the Baths of Diocletian, the historical core of the Roman National Museum since its establishment in 1889. With its colossal dimensions, spanning over six meters in width, about nine in height, and weighing around four tons, the monumental sculpture will leave viewers in awe and admiration. Design Boom has all the details. 

  

Is America ready for Alberto Giacometti’s art? 

Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti lived through two world wars and became an emblem of postwar existentialism. Many young artists and writers revered him and came to Paris hoping to spot him. Friends with Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was photographed by an impressive array of the 20th century’s finest photographers — some of these portraits appear in a major Giacometti exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art (through June 12). The show, drawn from the Foundation Giacometti in Paris, will travel to the Seattle Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. American audiences have not had quite the same relationship with Giacometti as audiences in Europe. While major painters in Europe and the United Kingdom took him as an authentic master and a model to emulate, Americans have treated him more as a curiosity. The Washington Post analyses the timing.