Howard Hodgkin’s art collection will be auctioned

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Sotheby’s to auction Howard Hodgkin’s personal art collection | Sotheby’s has announced the upcoming sale of around 400 objects from the collection of Howard Hodgkin, who died in March this year. The auction of works, which until recently had been on display in Hodgkin’s Bloomsbury home, is intended to raise funds for projects that the artist had hoped to implement or support. Although Hodgkin’s celebrated collection of Mughal-period Indian paintings and drawings has not been included in the sale, a number of Ottoman, Indian and Islamic tiles, textiles and rugs will be auctioned, alongside an eclectic range of objects spanning Italian pietra dura marbles and contemporary artworks by Patrick Caulfield, Bhupen Khakhar, and Peter Blake.

Gwangju Biennale announces theme and curatorial structure for 2018 edition | The Gwangju Biennale of contemporary art in South Korea has announced the theme for its 2018 edition, as well as a marked change to its curatorial structure, Art Review reports. This twelfth edition, to be titled ‘Imagined Borders’, will explore ‘the national and geopolitical reconstruction that has taken place on a global level’. While in recent years the biennale has mostly been led by a single artistic director (Maria Lind in 2016; Jessica Morgan in 2014), this year it has announced the intention to switch to a ‘multiple curator system’.

Carnegie Museum of Art director Lynn Zelevansky to step down | Lynn Zelevansky, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, is to resign from her role, it was announced on Friday. Zelevansky, who has run the Pittsburgh institution for eight years, is a contemporary art specialist who previously head of the contemporary department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exact date of Zelevansky’s departure has not yet been announced.

Historic England would not have listed destroyed Jacobean ceiling | A Jacobean-era ceiling, torn down last week in a Bristol building undergoing redevelopment just one day before Historic England was due to assess the building’s historic significance, would not have been listed as protected heritage had it survived, the Architects’ Journal reports. The building that housed the frescoed plaster ceiling, which dated to the early 17th century, did ‘not meet the criteria for listing’ due to heavy alterations which have taken place over the years. Nonetheless, the incident has drawn attention to the lack of interim protection for buildings in England awaiting assessment, leading to renewed calls for the government to introduce automatic protective measures.

Recommended reading | Writing for the Guardian, Olivia Laing explores themes of language, race and power in the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, ahead of an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Barbican Art Gallery. Meanwhile, the New York Times has a fascinating piece on the case of the Willem de Kooning painting stolen from the walls of the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985, which investigates the possibility that the ‘the heist was engineered by a retired New York City schoolteacher […] simply so he could enjoy’ the painting in his own home. And in the LA Review of Books, Andy Fitch talks to Etel Adnan ‘about her first 91 years of innovative interdisciplinary production’.