All posts tagged: Agnes

Agnes Gund’s Rothko Painting Sells for M., Setting New Record

Agnes Gund’s Rothko Painting Sells for $98 M., Setting New Record

Published by José Betancourt

A Mark Rothko painting formerly owned by art patron and longtime Museum of Modern Art president emerita Agnes Gund sold at Christie’s on Monday night for a hammer price of $85 million. With fees, the total came to $98.4 million, handily breaking the Abstract Expressionist’s auction record. The work started with a $60 million bid and received about a dozen bids from buyers represented by several Christie’s specialists, before hammering to strong round of applause to a buyer represented by Rachael White Young, a senior specialist in postwar and contemporary art. Related Articles No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), a seven-foot-tall abstraction dating to 1964, carried a $80 million estimate going into the sale, placing it right in the range of the artist’s previous record, set in 2012. The sale of Orange, Red, Yellow (1961), also at Christie’s New York, totaled $86.9 million, just under double its high estimate. Gund’s Rothko measured 93 by 69 inches, roughly similar to the Orange, Red, Yellow, which measured 93 x 81.3 inches. But whereas the latter work was …

Agnes Gryczkowska Discusses Curating Marina Abramović’s Berlin Mega Show

Agnes Gryczkowska Discusses Curating Marina Abramović’s Berlin Mega Show

Published by Jenni Sidey

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world. Last week, Marina Abramović opened her first solo presentation in Berlin since the 1990s, the bombastically named, “Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition” at Gropius Bau. Set to run through August 23, the show brings together historical and recent works, tracing her long-standing engagement with ritual, eroticism, death, and the body as a site of political and spiritual intensity. Drawing on Balkan folklore, alongside Abramović’s performance history, the exhibition moves between film, installation, sculpture, and live action to create an environment where the boundaries between individual and collective experience are continually tested. At its core, the show frames the erotic as a driving force, linking fertility, mortality, and transformation. Moments of humor sit alongside lamentation and ritual intensity, underscoring the exhibition’s refusal of a single, fixed reading. Related Articles At the packed opening, a huge screen showed Abramović’s video work, Tito’s Funeral (2025), broadcasting women beating their chests in a near trance-like state, …

Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett

Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett

Published by Jenni Sidey

In an era where cozy fantasy continues to enchant readers worldwide, Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett arrives as a perfectly brewed concoction of whimsy, warmth, and wonder. Set against the frost-kissed backdrop of 1920s Montreal, this standalone novel weaves together the practical concerns of cat rescue with the otherworldly perils of dark magic, creating a narrative that purrs with charm while occasionally showing its claws. A Shelter for Lost Souls (Feline and Otherwise) Agnes Aubert is a woman who thrives on order. As the meticulously organized director of a cat rescue charity, she approaches life with checklists, protocols, and an unwavering commitment to finding homes for Montreal’s forgotten felines. When circumstances force her to relocate the shelter to a mysteriously affordable space on Rue des Hirondelles, Agnes believes she’s secured a practical solution to her housing crisis. What she discovers instead is that her new landlord isn’t merely eccentric—he’s Havelock Renard, the infamous magician who once attempted to end the world. Fawcett, known for her bestselling Emily Wilde series, demonstrates remarkable range …

Agnes Gund Collection Heads to Christie’s With M Rothko

Agnes Gund Collection Heads to Christie’s With $80M Rothko

Published by Jenni Sidey

When Agnes Gund bought Mark Rothko’s 1964 abstraction No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) in 1967, she purchased it directly from the artist in his studio. The painting would go on to hang in her living room for decades. This May, it will be offered on the secondary market for the first time, leading a focused group of works from her collection at Christie’s. The auction house announced today that it will offer three pieces from the personal holdings of Gund, who died last September, during its marquee May sales in New York: the Rothko, estimated in the region of $80 million; Cy Twombly’s 1961 Untitled, estimated at $40 million to $60 million; and Joseph Cornell’s 1948 Untitled (Medici Princess), estimated at $3 million to $5 million. Related Articles The grouping is small but serious. Rothko, Twombly, and Cornell all artists who reshaped postwar art in distinct ways, and these works are ones Gund, a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and its president from 1991 to 2002, lived with, not just collected. That provenance will almost …