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The Headlines
GALERIE THOMAS UNDER INVESTIGATION. The Munich public prosecutor’s office is investigating suspicions of delaying insolvency proceedings, fraud, and breach of trust by the local blue-chip Galerie Thomas, which filed for bankruptcy in July last year, reports Handelsblatt. In addition, consignors have reportedly been requesting artworks be returned as well as the proceeds from multiple sold pieces. Owner and director of the 1964-founded gallery, Raimund Thomas and his daughter and co-director Silke Thomas, were not available for comment to German reporters. What’s more, Raimund’s whereabouts are apparently unknown. The historic gallery specializing in German expressionism, the Bauhaus, European modernism, and contemporary art regularly presented in prestigious fairs like TEFAF and Art Basel.
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DARWIN ‘TURNING IN HIS (VANDALIZED) GRAVE.’ Just Stop Oil climate activists have struck again. This time, their target was Charles Darwin’s grave in Westminster Abbey, London, reports The Straits Times. This morning, activists Alyson Lee, 66, and Di Bligh, 77, sprayed the naturalist’s tomb with orange chalk and the slogan, “1.5 Is Dead,” referring to the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit set by 2015 Paris Agreement. “Millions are being displaced, California is on fire and we have lost three quarters of all wildlife since the 1970s,” one of the activists said in a video posted to the group’s Instagram account. Darwin “would be turning in his grave if he knew that we were in the midst of the sixth great extinction,” they said.
The Digest
Insurers have begun assessing the damage from the Los Angeles wildfires, calling it “possibly one of the most impactful art losses ever in America.” [ARTnews]
Radical feminist artist Florentina Holzinger will represent Austria at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Her opera remake, “Sancta,” was so shocking to some viewers that several audience members sought medical assistance as a result. [Artnet News]
The four final nominees of the Prix Marcel Duchamp have been named for next year’s top French prize, and the winner will be announced in October. They are Bianco Bondi, Eva Nielsen, Lionel Sabatté, and Xie Lei. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]
The UK Labour government’s new reduction of inheritance tax relief could force many artist estates into “fire sales” of their collections to pay new inheritance taxes. The new budget also increases taxes on UK residents who permanently reside outside the UK. As a result, wealthy collectors are increasingly moving to Italy and the UAE, where fiscal regimes are more lenient. [The Art Newspaper]
The New Taipei City Art Museum (NTCAM) is set to open in April and is the city’s first public contemporary art museum. Its innovative, blurry-edged design wrapped in aluminum tubes is by Taiwanese architect Krist Yao. [Art Dependence Magazine and The Business Times]
The Kicker
TURRELL’S CELESTIAL ART. At 81, James Turrell’s monumental Roden Crater Project has been seen by few, and still needs hundreds of millions of dollars in funding before its completed, but writer Jonathan Griffin was given a sneak peak at the land art masterpiece-in-the-making, and takes readers on a rare visit to one of the crater’s tunnels for The Financial Times. There, light from the setting sun shoots into the nearly 900ft-long tunnel every winter solstice, and projects an image of the sun on to an 8-foot-wide, white marble disc. Turrell’s project is about building what he dubs “a naked eye observatory.” To that end, “I want to award light thing-ness, so we feel its substance,” he says. Turrell is working on building a total of 27 “sensing spaces,” or stone and concrete chambers in the crater, which admit light through precise apertures. In the meantime, the public can also see his work at Gagosian Le Bourget, Paris, and later this year at Aarhus, Denmark and the DIB Bangkok Museum of Contemporary Art, Thailand. His work, Turrell says, is about “realizing our celestial selves,” and he adds: “We don’t have to go to the moon — a lesser satellite of the Earth— to declare ourselves in space.”
