National Galleries Scotland will no longer host BP Portrait Award

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National Galleries of Scotland will no longer host BP Portrait Award | The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) have announced that this year will be be the final time the BP Portrait Award is hosted at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. The exhibition, which is organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London and sponsored by the oil and gas company BP, has toured to the gallery in Edinburgh for the past ten years. In a statement, the NGS referred to its ‘responsibility […] to address the climate emergency’.

National Gallery in London launches fundraising appeal to buy Orazio Gentileschi painting | The National Gallery in London launched a public appeal today asking for help to raise the final £2m (of a £19.5m total) required to buy The Finding of Moses (early 1630s) by Orazio Gentileschi. The painting, which has been displayed at the National Gallery for nearly 20 years thanks to a long-term loan from a private collection, was commissioned to commemorate the birth of the future Charles II while Gentileschi was living in London as a court painter to Charles I. If the gallery acquires the work, it will be the second painting by the artist to enter a public collection in the UK.

Arts Council England criticised for leaving Paolozzi sculpture at building site | Toby Treves, a curator and trustee of the Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation, has publicly criticised Arts Council England for failing to remove a public sculpture by Paolozzi from the site of a major redevelopment near Euston station. The work has been boarded up, but Treves claims that the organisation had agreed to relocate it by the end of 2018. He added that the foundation would be willing to contribute to the cost of the transfer but that, as the Arts Council owns the work, ‘they do have a duty to look after it’. The Arts Council says that ‘talks are in an advanced stage regarding the sculpture and a new site has been identified’.

Sotheby’s Prize goes to two Brazilian exhibitions of Indigenous art | The third annual Sotheby’s Prize of $250,000 is being split between two exhibitions being organised in São Paulo, Brazil. These are Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s ‘Indigenous Histories’, which is scheduled to open in October 2021, and ‘OPY’, a project focused on contemporary Indigenous art co-organised by the art centre Casa do Povo, the prayer house Kalipety, and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; this is set to open in July 2020. The Sotheby’s Prize awards grants to curatorial projects that focus on ‘overlooked or under-represented areas of art history’.