Briefing

Victoria Miro will open a new gallery in Venice this May with an exhibition by Chris Ofili. The gallery's fourth space, it will be housed in the former Galleria il Capricorno in the San Marco district. Opened in 1971 by gallerist Bruna Aickelin, Galleria il Capricorno is known for showing key 20th century artists such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Victoria Miro has a long friendship with Aickelin and, since the late 1990s, il Capricorno has staged solo exhibitions by Victoria Miro gallery artists including Hernan Bas, Verne Dawson, NS Harsha, Chantal Joffe, Wangechi Mutu and Grayson Perry.

Glasgow International has announced Richard Parry as its new Director. Parry will organize the 2018 festival after serving as Director of the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool since 2013, prior to which he was assistant curator at Hayward Gallery in London. As Director of the Grundy Parry curated and organized more than 25 exhibitions. At the Hayward Gallery he curated shows such as Psycho Buildings (2008), The New Décor (2010), and Wide Open School (2012), as well as a Tracey Emin solo in 2011. Parry will take up his new post in May 2017, and succeeds Sarah McCrory, who was recently appointed as the Director of the new gallery at Goldsmiths in London.

The Biennale of Sydney’s artistic director Mami Kataoka has named 21 artists selected for the 21st edition held next year. With around 70 artists expected to be included, this selection by the Tokyo-based Chief Curator of the Mori Art Museum includes Ai Weiwei, Laurent Grasso, N.S. Harsha, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Ciara Phillips, Koji Ryui Haegue Yang and Eija-Liisa Ahtila. The biennial wil run over 12 weeks from 16 March until 11 June 2018 at multiple locations throughout Sydney.

The Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art has been created with its first edition launching in June 2018. Organized by the non-profit Riga Biennial Foundation the biennial will include a ‘significant proportion’ of works by artists born or based in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Greek-born curator Katerina Gregos, who organized the Belgian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale and was artistic director of Art Brussels from 2012-16, has been named chief curator. The curatorial concept will be announced later this year.

Wang Bing has been announced as the winner of the 2017 EYE Art & Film Prize at a ceremony in Amsterdam’s EYE Filmmuseum yesterday. Bing receives GBP£25,000 which will go towards funding the creation of new work. In spring 2018, EYE will present an exhibition by Bing and the two previous winners of the prize, Hito Steyerl (in 2015) and Ben Rivers (2016). The EYE Prize was created in 2015 with the aim of supporting and promoting an artist or filmmaker whose work unites art and film; it is intended to fund the making of new work.

Leeds Art Gallery will reopen its galleries to the public on 13 October 2017 after a period of closure for repairs. Reopening programme highlights will include a Joseph Beuys exhibition, and new acquisitions by US artist Martine Syms and British sculptor Alison Wilding. The gallery in the north of England will reopen with a re-presentation of the collection across the gallery that looks back over 130 years of its collection. The collection houses work of early 20th century UK artists such as Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer and key works by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Jacob Epstein and Francis Bacon.