Ever since Alex Rotter announced in February that he was leaving Sotheby’s — one of several top specialists who departed in the wake of a buyout offer and the arrival of Amy Cappellazzo’s art advisory group — this column has been asking the former co-chairman of contemporary art worldwide if he planned to cross over to Christie’s.
This week, Mr. Rotter said the answer was yes.
“Christie’s over the last 10 years has been the Yankees,” he said. “I might as well go to the best team and make them even better, hopefully, with me coming there.”
Mr. Rotter will become chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s Americas, beginning in March 2017, after 16 years at Sotheby’s, joining a department that includes Loic Gouzer as a deputy chairman.
Brett Gorvy, Christie’s chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art, said he and Mr. Rotter have a long history of respectful rivalry. “There was always a sense that one day we would work together,” Mr. Gorvy said.
Continue reading the main storyHe also said he has been impressed over the years by the sales skills of Mr. Rotter, 42, who was born in Austria. “He went up against us in pretty tough times and came pretty close to beating us,” Mr. Gorvy said, “though he did not quite beat us.”
Mr. Rotter considered other options — like joining a gallery or going out on his own as an art adviser — but ultimately determined that he wanted to do what he had been doing. “I like the corporate environment,” Mr. Rotter said. “I like working with people.”
“They wanted me,” he added of Christie’s, “and what Christie’s stands for is what I think our business should be all about — expertise, relationships and passion.”
When Calder Met Picasso
It isn’t just prolificacy or twisted wire that Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder had in common. “Picasso was defining a void, not just a mass without solidity,” said Alexander S. C. Rower, 53, the president and founding director of the Calder Foundation. “He was creating a negative space, which was Calder’s central theme.”
That is among the revelations shared by Mr. Rower, one of Calder’s grandsons, and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 56, one of Picasso’s grandsons and a co-founder of the Museo Picasso Málaga. Together they are curating a show in October that will inaugurate the Almine Rech Gallery’s first exhibition space in the United States.
“We were both interested in exploring our grandfathers’ legacies,” Mr. Rower said. “What is the life force that can be translated into a work of art?”
Mr. Ruiz-Picasso is married to Ms. Rech, the gallery’s founder. The New York space — Ms. Rech also has locations in Paris, Brussels and London — will be led by her eldest son, Paul de Froment.
The show will feature more than 50 works from the grandsons’ collections, many of which have seldom or never been on view.
“It’s not a comprehensive exhibition of these two great artists,” Mr. Rower said. “It’s a personal reflection.”
The show represents the fruits of an exchange in which each man shared images of his grandfather’s works that in his opinion echoed the other artist’s pieces.
“It was an extensive dialogue,” said Mr. Ruiz-Picasso.
Because of the intimate nature of that process, “this show,” Mr. Rower said, “isn’t like anything else I’ve done.”
Liza Lou Makes a Move
Since 2005, the artist Liza Lou has split her time between her home in Los Angeles and South Africa, collaborating with Zulu women on intricately-beaded works that have earned her an international reputation.
More recently, she and her team have been creating monochrome woven canvases, to be featured in coming exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin, which has just become Ms. Lou’s New York gallery.
“I realized what I really needed to do was respond to the place where I was working and listen to the stories and the lives of the women that I care about,” Ms. Lou said. “When you weave, you keep the work very close to your body — it’s much more transportable.”
“If there is a taxi strike or rioting, I make work in response to that,” she added. “I don’t say, ‘We’re going to still make that sculpture.’ We’re going to make work that can be easily hidden. You can put it in your bra, you can stick it in your handbag and the work can carry on.”
Cologne, Reconstituted
Shortly after starting her Cologne gallery in 1983, Monika Sprüth published three issues of the magazine Eau de Cologne, which featured the artists Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel.
Now the Los Angeles location that Ms. Sprüth opened with Philomene Magers in February is bringing those artists back together.
Using the magazines as a point of departure, the exhibition will highlight how these five artists have helped shape the gallery’s program as a way to introduce Los Angeles audiences to the gallery. “I have a history with these artists,” Ms. Sprüth said.
The show — similar to one the gallery mounted at its Berlin location last fall — will include works from the 1970s to the present.
“We thought it would be interesting to revisit the beginnings of the gallery,” Ms. Magers said. “That’s really the base of what we’re coming from.”
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