Oslo to launch new art biennial in 2019

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Oslo’s first art biennial to launch in May 2019 | Oslo’s Agency for Cultural Affairs yesterday announced the launch of the city’s first public art biennial, with the inaugural edition set to take place in May 2019. The event, which will explore the theme of art in the public realm, will be curated by Eva González-Sancho, a former director and curator at FRAC Bourgogne, and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, founder and former director of Kunsthall Oslo. Both curators began working with the city of Oslo in 2014, researching models for the planned biennial as part of the preparatory project Oslo Pilot.

Queens Museum director Laura Raicovich resigns | Laura Raicovich, president and executive director of the Queens Museum in New York, on Friday announced that she is resigning from her position, citing differences between her own political vision for the museum and that of its board members. Before joining the Queens Museum as director in 2015, Raicovich served as director of global initiatives at New York-based non-profit Creative Time. Speaking to the New York Times last week, Raicovich ascribed her motivation for stepping down not to one specific event but to multiple clashes with the board over political strategy, such as her recent decision to close the museum on 20 January as part of an art strike on the anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Ghent museum closes Russian art exhibition |The Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent (Museum voor Schone Kunsten) yesterday confirmed that it had removed all 24 artworks that were on display as part of its disputed exhibition ‘Russian Modernism 1910–30’, the Art Newspaper reports. The authenticity of the works, lent by the Brussels-based Dieleghem Foundation and attributed to artists including Kandinsky, Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Rodchenko, was first called into question in an open letter signed by a group of scholars and art dealers on 15 January, after which the museum removed half-a-dozen works for assessment while the rest of the objects were to remain on public display until the exhibition’s planned closing date at the end of February.

UK government places export bar on Turner painting | UK arts minister Michael Ellis has placed a temporary export bar on a painting by J.M.W Turner, sold to an overseas buyer at auction last July for nearly £19m. Ehrenbreitstein (1835), thought to be one of only six major Turner paintings still in private hands, depicts the landscape of the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein near Koblenz in Germany, visited by Turner in 1833. UK buyers have until 28 May to express a serious intention to meet the painting’s £18,533,750 (plus £306,750 in VAT) asking price, after which the export bar may be extended for a further seven months.