Briefing
The Rijksmuseum announces its new director while Clifton Benevento closes its doors
The Rijksmuseum announces its new director while Clifton Benevento closes its doors
- New York’s Clifton Benevento Gallery will close its doors today after six years in business. In an email, co-owners Michael Benevento and Michael Clifton wrote: ‘We are indebted to the inspiring community of curators, writers, collectors and colleagues whose generosity, dedication and viewership have supported the gallery.’
- Spanish police have arrested seven men in connection with the theft of five Francis Bacon paintings valued at GBP£19 million from a private residence in Milan last year. The works, which comprise original landscape and portrait works, belonged to a close friend of Bacon himself, who made regular visits to Milan throughout his lifetime.
- The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has announced that Taco Dibbits, the current director of collections, will replace Wim Pijbes as general director on 15 July. Pijbes, who announced his resignation in March, is set to become the director of the Museum Voorlinden, a private museum and sculpture garden that is scheduled to open in September near The Hague.
- Russian artist and activist Pyotr Pavlensky will donate the USD$42,000 he is set to receive from his Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent to the rebel group Primorye Guerrillas. Several members of the Guerrillas are currently serving lengthy sentences for a series of attacks against Russian police in 2010 which left two officers dead.
- Tacita Dean is the latest artist to speak out against the U.K. leaving the European Union. Dean, who joins a long list of notable signatories including Anish Kapoor, Cornelia Parker, Elizabeth Price, Wolfgang Tillmans and Richard Wentworth, has said the idea of Brexit fills her ‘with cold dread’.
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