Our daily round-up of news from the art world
MCH Group is launching a new fair in Singapore | MCH Group, which owns the Art Basel franchise and recently acquired a majority stake in Masterpiece London, will be launching a contemporary art fair in Singapore in November 2019, reports The Art Newspaper. The company will partner with Sandy Angus of Angus Montgomery Arts and Tim Etchells for the new fair, to be called ART SG. Applications for the fair will open later this year, with some 80 galleries expected to participate.
FBI recovers Robert Motherwell painting stolen 40 years ago | US attorney Geoffrey Berman announced yesterday that the FBI’s art crime team had recovered Untitled (1967), a Robert Motherwell painting stolen 40 years ago. The theft occurred when Motherwell hired a moving company in 1978 to transport paintings to a new storage space. He later noticed that dozens of the works were missing. The painting from 1967, recovered after the son of a deceased employee at the moving company brought it to the Dedalus Foundation to have it authenticated, has now been returned to the foundation. The search for the other missing paintings continues.
Michael Gitlitz appointed executive director of Katonah Museum of Art | Michael Gitlitz has been announced as the new executive director of Katonah Museum of Art in New York’s Westchester County. Gitlitz previously worked as a senior specialist in modern and contemporary art at Paddle8 auction house. He was a director at Marlborough Gallery in New York between 2001 and 2015.
Recommended reading | In the New York Times, Thomas Chatterton Williams speaks to Adrian Piper about her retrospective at the MoMA and self-imposed exile from the US. In The Guardian, Jake Nevins discusses how certain designations such as ‘political art’ or ‘AIDS art’ can flatten meaning in his review of the Whitney’s retrospective of the work of David Wojnarowicz and in Vulture, Carl Swanson speaks to Jenny Saville about how her new paintings address motherhood and the #MeToo movement.