For the first time, as part of an initiative to quell the impact of nation-wide gallery closures, David Zwirner has partnered with a host of smaller Lower east side galleries to bring virtual sales to its new online exhibition venue. The effort is titled Platform: New York.

Hosting a selection of twelve galleries featuring works by emerging artists ripe among the New York art scene, Zwirner’s online viewing rooms went live to the public on Friday and will run through until May 1st. With this digital option replacing live exhibitions, the online sales have shifted from being a disappointing remedy to the coronavirus disruptions on the global art industry to becoming a source of unprecedented collaboration within the industry. Initial interest around the program’s novelty has driven high engagement for these virtual spaces. A Zwirner representative confirmed several sales made on the exhibition’s opening day, with a total of 8,000 visitors to the website.

The offerings are among the highly conceptual segment of the emerging artist’s sector. Platform: New York comprises works almost entirely readymade. The show presents a refreshing variation from the paintings favored by the market seen through global art fairs and public auctions. The digital “rooms” feel like bespoke editorial spreads made for a highly discerning online audience that expects beautiful media. The detailed imagery manages to let the hyperreality of the works come across without feeling like a simulation.

47 Canal’s show features installations by New York-based artist Josh Kline, who is slated to be the subject of an upcoming solo survey at Oslo’s renowned Astrup Fearnley Museum. Kline’s Submersion from 2019 is an orange painted lab hood, underneath which houses solvent submerged petri-dishes holding doll-house interiors back-lit by a flame-colored fluorescence. One close-up shot stands out – showing a hyper-miniscule living room that bends perception. Carrying a price of $85,000, the museum-quality work is among the most expensive of the works in Platform. Another work, his 2016 Desperation Distillation featuring a shopping cart filled with cast bottle sculptures and lit from beneath carries a price tag of $75,000.

At JJT, new works by Elaine Cameron-Weir, a Canadian artist known for her industrial-influenced practice debuted. Her stainless steel sculpture, Snake 11 from 2020 is priced at $50,00 and a second work, a triptych made of metal and rawhide comprising chandelier parts is priced at $35,000.

At James Fuentes two Keegan Monaghan oil paintings from 2019 carried prices between $30,000 and $40,000. In Bridget Donahue’s digital corner, multi-media artist Lisa Alvarado’s two acutely painted canvases texturized to appear like quilt fabric are price at $14,000 each. For the artist “the works are repositories of memory, vibrational reminders of invisible states.”

At Queer Thoughts, one of the few set of paintings in the exhibition is Megan Marrin’s The Rest Cure and Regimen from 2020 each stark and surreal-esque depictions of antique scaffolded brass showers with an anatomical undercurrent. Both paintings carry a price of $22,000.

At Company gallery, Troy Michie’s cut paper, photo and print assemblages are host to socio-political scheme and ruminations on identity with Divid Terriority and Los Atravesados/ The Skin Of The Earth Is Seamless both made in 2019 are each priced at $16,500.

At Brooklyn’s Elijah Wheat Gallery, sculptor Zsofia Keresztes’s installation Glossy Inviolability features a massive glass mosaic piece, that starkly resembles an outsider art monument, is priced at $15,000. At 94 Allen Street’s Magenta Plains, painter Nathanial Robinson’s blurry landscapes nod to a temporal blip between passing scenery. Presenting works made between 2019 and 2020, the large-scale paintings are priced between $14,000 and $20,000.

At Bureau, on the lower east side between Stanton and Houston street, Brandon Ndife’s 2020 sculptural work, Breeding Ground made in 2020, a sculptural floor-based work features a repurposed wood shelving unit hosting earthen decay. The item is just one among his broader installation My Zone which now sits in the closed gallery, realizing the work’s “post-disaster” imperative. Two of his available works are priced between $3,500 and $6,500.

Today, Sotheby’s announced that Margherita Maccapani Missoni, heir to her family’s eponymous Italian fashion house will partner as a guest curator for the auction house’s eighth edition of its Contemporary Curated sale in London, which will open bidding from April 14-21^st.

The sales will feature pieces by both lesser-known and blue-chip contemporary artists such as Eddie Martinez, Damien Hirst, Yayoi Kusama, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Alighiero Boetti, Yoshitomo Nara and George Condo, among others. Carrying more affordable price points, the ‘Contemporary Curated’ series remains an opportunity for collectors to explore new and established artist’s markets. Guest curation by luxury tastemakers has become a staple across Sotheby’s contemporary segment —hosting Dior Homme director Kim Jones in the March New York series, as well as Roksanda Ilincic, Jill Stuart and Victoria Beckham lending an eye in past seasons.

Describing her artistic inclinations as “irresistibly drawn and simultaneously repulsed by grotesque aesthetics” Missoni’s selection of highlights from the sale find intrigue in the radically unpalatable that threads throughout emerging contemporary art. Among the highlights on offer in the sale include Yayoi Kusama’s 1993 Star, featuring the artist’s signature obsessive repeated patterning estimated at £150,000–200,000, as well as Monir Farmanfarmaian’s steel-and-painted-mirrored-glass piece Geometry of Hope from 1975 slated with an estimate of £300,000–400,000. Another work, Pfeifenköpfe (Box #2), by artist Albert Oehlen, known for merging the crude and the neutral, features a pink-hued print adorned with three pipes which is priced an estimate of £20,000-30,000.

A collector in her own right, Missoni recalls of the conceptual artist William Anastasi, whose work is included in the auction, “I once read ‘if Duchamp’s aim was to kill art, Anastasi displays the corpse, in various stages of decay.’ I still can’t find better words to describe his ingenius artistic journey.”

Missoni is the granddaughter of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni, founders of the fashion label established in 1953. Recently-appointed as the creative director to the brand’s millennial sub-label, the heiress carries the aesthetic legacy signature to the globally renowned knitwear company that gained notoriety in the 1970s for its bold maximalism. Following their inaugural runway show in 1967 in Florence, the house attracted international interest among fashion industry leaders, and under the direction of two generation of Missoni women, the label became internationally recognized for its signature bold print and pattern motif referential to the seminal eras of Italian fashion.

The Italian house is a pioneer among its contemporary brands, which boasts 65 years in business with art direction run solely by Missoni descendants — the business model is a rarity in the luxury industry. Coinciding with the younger Missoni’s assignment to the brand’s offshoot label, in 2018, Missoni sold a minority of its stake to an Italian state-backed private equity fund with plans of expansion.

Levy Gorvy announced today a new exhibition of works by renowned French abstract expressionist painter, Pierre Soulages, available to the public via their inaugural online viewing room that will run until April 17^th.

Currently the subject of a major solo retrospective at Paris’s Musée du Louvre, the museum is honoring the decades-long career of the seminal painter, who to-date is only the third living artist in the museum’s history, next to Picasso and Chagall to be featured in a solo exhibition. Despite the career bookending milestone, the centenarian artist continues to produce work.

Following his military service in the 1940s, Soulages returned to Paris where he began seriously painting, and became established among the Jeune École de Paris (Young School of Paris) of abstract expressionists. Although he has been compared to Ab-Ex contemporaries such as Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, with whom he shared an existential sensibility, his approach was radical in its rejection of traditional uses of color. Famed for his signature deep black palette set against a neutral ground, Soulages’s practice garnered the label outrenoir, meaning “beyond black.” Soulages achieved his quintessential aesthetic by using a palette knife to apply the thick black paint – treating it as a building material, rather than a pigment. “Like this” — the painter narrates in a film that coincides Levy Gorvy’s viewing room — “it produces striations, with varying depth, which make the light vibrate.” For Soulages, the deep black was a source of gravity, from which he could build depth.

Light Out of Darkness features three 2019 works from his ongoing Outrenoir series, initiated in the 1980s. Each of the paintings carries a thick black impasto covering the entire canvas, as light refracts on the paint’s gloss making the works appear sculptural. Even at his age, the works indicate Soulages range in continuing to adapt his painterly legacy.

With the coronavirus pandemic having forced closure of most major auction houses worldwide, Sotheby’s has announced staff furloughs, pay cuts, and layoffs across its global offices. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sotheby’s, which employs around 1,700 people across all of its locations, will furlough 12 percent of its staff members, or around 200 employees. (Sotheby’s representatives have yet to confirm an exact number.) On Wednesday, Sotheby’s CEO Charles F. Stewart revealed the company’s furlough and pay cut plans in a remote town hall meeting.

After the article was published, Christie’s also announced it would start furloughing staff based in Europe. As part of the plan, the house will lay off some temporary outside contractors and enact a voluntary salary sacrifice for a segment of the company’s highest-earning employees.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Sotheby’s will be carrying out a 20 percent pay cut for its remaining employees in the U.S. and the U.K. whose jobs will be retained, as well as an additional 10 percent pay cut for executives, according to a staff-wide internal message. The report also said that overtime pay and performance-based incentive compensation will be temporarily suspended.

In the past several weeks, the house has majorly restructured its sales schedule. With the majority of its live auctions canceled, the house has shifted to private sales and has been rapidly expanding its online offerings in various fine art and luxury categories. Yesterday, Sotheby’s announced a set of new online 20th century day sales that will replace its live auctions, underlining the house’s commitment to going digital during the pandemic. So far, the house has been forced to close 10 of its salesrooms and around 80 of its global offices following the CDC’s policy guidelines issued in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a statement provided by a Sotheby’s representative, the house said its leadership remains focused on its client engagement and in maintaining the company’s various services during this period. A representative from Christie’s headquarters in the U.K. echoed the same priority oriented towards the company’s auxiliary platforms, noting “our core teams remain in place to support our clients through Private sales, Online sales and to collate sales to be ready to service when live auctions recommence.”

With the gallery sector’s spaces closed for the remainder of Spring, many dealers have taken to expanding online platforms to make their previously scheduled exhibitions accessible to the public. On Thursday, Di Donna Galleries announced it will launch its first online viewing space, featuring a solo exhibition of works by key modernist painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. The virtual exhibition is just one segment of a traveling series held in collaboration with modern and contemporary dealers, Paris-based Jeanne Bucher, and Waddington Custot of London.

A key postwar artist, Vieira da Silva’s early career in Paris among the avant-garde of postwar abstractionist lead to a storied contribution to modern painting. In the late 1920s, Lisbon-born Vieira da Silva came to the city to pursue formal arts training where she became established within the European abstract expressionist movement, Art Informel – a period which rejected American Ab-Ex exceptionalism and took to Eastern philosophy to reconsider standards of perception in modern painting. In Paris, she worked and lived among Cubist painters such as Joaquín Torres-García and Italian Futurists, whose styles became influential to her later signature style of maze-like tiling and depth-field play. During the 1940s following the start of the war, the artist moved from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, until 1947 before her eventual return to Paris.

Also influenced by contemporaries such as Fernand Leger, with whom she studied in her adolescence, Vieira da Silva cultivated a unique style of abstraction that broke rules of formalist tradition. Her representations responded to the impact of WWII atrocity on surrounding locales. Surveying street views and urban labyrinth – her paintings envisioned disorientation in the metropolitan modern perspective – they came to display a more globally-oriented and fragmented vision— reacting to the war’s onset of transnational displacement.

Among the highlights of the exhibition, Les Joueurs de cartes dated 1947-48 and Figure de ballet from the same year encapsulate the artist’s skill in reimagining structural planes to depict figurative illusions. Inspired by card games and the ballet, the works nod to a deceptive spatial recession for which she gained notoriety. Her 1955 Sans Titre, painted during a seminal moment in the artist’s career upon her return to Paris from exile — the work features a signature grid central to the overall cast of the painting’s surface, from which she built out an abstraction of gestural elements that invoke the cityscape.

By the early 1940s, the artist was already established as one of the defining cultural figures of the 20th century— selected to show in Peggy Guggenheim’s Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century in New York. In 1961, she won the Grand Prize for Fine Arts at the Biennale in Sao Paulo and in 1966, was the first woman awarded the French Grand Prix Nationale des Arts. With works in the permanent collections of several major institutions such as MoMA, the Tate, and Centre Pompidou, etc., her place as a postwar staple has stood the test of time and outlasted an art market canon that has omitted works by important female modernists.

In the offering at Di Donna’s online space, the works available carry prices ranging from $70,000 to $2 million. Within the last decade, the artist’s market has risen significantly, exceeding the seven-figure mark in 2010. Her 1944 seminal painting L’Incendie I (The Fire I) set the current auction record of $2.8 million in Christie’s London contemporary evening sale in 2018. Nonetheless, her market has been historically undervalued relative to her contemporaries such as Jean Dubuffet, Nicolas de Stael, and Jean Fautrier. The gallery’s director, Emmanuel Di Donna confirmed Vieira da Silva’s international market potential having “consistently reached a strong audience in Europe in the last 30 years.”

Di Donna, who noted that Vieira da Silva’s works is now growing in prominence within the global market, said “the recent rise in attention to her work is in large part due to an increasing appreciation for post-war European art, where the market has been historically focused on American post-war such as the Abstract Expressionists.” Di Donna further emphasized this crucial moment in the market’s attention citing “an increased focus on the women artists who have been up-to-recently overshadowed by their male peers.”