Betti-Sue Hertz to Lead Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery, Bernard Piffaretti Joins Lisson Gallery, and More

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University announced today that Betti-Sue Hertz will become its new director and chief curator. Hertz comes to Columbia from San Francisco, where she has served as a faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute, director of visual arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and contemporary art curator at the San Diego Museum of Art. She succeeds Deborah Cullen-Morales, who stepped down in August 2018 to join the Bronx Museum of the Arts as executive director, and will take up the post on September 1.

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert now represents the estate of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005). The London gallery will mount “Eduardo Paolozzi: Hollow Gods,” an exhibition focusing on the sculptures, collages, and drawings that Paolozzi made in the first fifteen years of his career, in October. Organized in collaboration with the Paolozzi Foundation, the show is being curated by Judith Collins, a former senior curator at Tate who authored the most recent monograph on the artist and a forthcoming catalogue raisonné of his sculptures.

A founder of the British Pop movement, Paolozzi rose to prominence in the 1950s when he was creating bronze Art Brut sculptures and collages featuring cutouts from magazines. He lived in Paris in the late 1940s, where he associated with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Constantin Brancusi, and Fernand Léger, before returning to London. In the December 1962/January 1963 issue of Artforum, John Coplans, a founder and former editor in chief of the magazine, called Paolozzi one of the “most vital and important younger sculptors working in England.”

Pace Gallery is launching a new platform, PaceX, which will focus on commissioning art-and-tech projects worldwide. The initiative will be led by Christy Mac Lear, the former vice chairman of the advisory arm of Sotheby’s, who also served as CEO of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for six years. Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, a former president of Pace London, was named chief creative officer of PaceX, and Kathleen Forde has been tapped as its inaugural curator of experiential art.

Commenting on the initiative, Marc Glimcher, the president and CEO of Pace and the chairman of PaceX, told Artnews that “artists reflect the time we’re in” and that the gallery is looking to support artists on the forefront of “creating experiences, not objects.” Glimcher admitted that Pace has not established a business model for the program but will focus on building one that can benefit artists working on the digital frontier.

The French abstract painter Bernard Piffaretti is now represented by Lisson Gallery. The Paris-based artist’s first exhibition at the gallery’s Tenth Avenue location in New York will open on September 13, alongside a show by Wael Shawky. Among the works on display will be new and recent paintings that the artist created using his signature duplication method. For the past four decades, he has been producing works that typically feature an abstract composition on one side of the canvas and a mirror image of that composition on the other.

“Piffaretti sometimes begins an image on the right side, at other times on the left; the viewer is left unsure which half is the original and which is the copy,” Jens Asthoff wrote in a review of the artist’s recent exhibition at Berlin’s Klemm’s gallery. “Such strategic play results in self-plagiarism, as interesting synoptic juxtapositions and distinct dynamics and rhythms exceeding the original motif unfold.”

The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University has hired Kate Kraczon as its new curator. Kraczon, who assumed her new post on August 1, most recently held the position of associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she organized over thirty exhibitions, including solo shows by Karla Black, Suki Seokyeong Kang, and Becky Suss. At Bell Gallery, she will be responsible for its exhibition program and educational initiatives as well as for managing the care and growth of Brown’s permanent collection.

André Hemer has joined Hollis Taggart as part of its recently formed contemporary division—Hollis Taggart Contemporary—which is led by director Paul Efstathiou. Born in 1981, the New Zealand–born Vienna-based artist will present works in the gallery’s booth at the upcoming Untitled Art Fair in Miami in December and will have a solo show at the New York gallery in 2020. Hemer is also represented by LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES, Los Angeles; Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London and Berlin; Yavuz Gallery, Singapore and Sydney; and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland.

“I’ve been following André’s career for a number of years and have always been impressed and inspired by the multi-dimensional nature of his work,” Hollis Taggart said in a statement. “His process is incredibly compelling, both for the visual effects it produces and for its relevance to broader discussions on the impacts of our image-laden lives. We are delighted to bring André’s into our program and to expand the audience for and visibility of his practice, which we know is so deserving of growing attention.”

Van Doren Waxter has announced its exclusive representation of the estate of Tom Fairs (1925–2007). Born in London, Fairs attended the Hornsey School of Art from and the Royal College of Art, where he studied stained-glass design and subsequently received glass commissions for the next twenty years. He taught fine art and stage design at the Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martin’s) and sketched daily.

“The first thing that strikes one about his drawings is the enormous variety and vivacity of the pencil marks, an enormously and counterintuitively wide-ranging shorthand,” Barry Schwabsky remarked in a review that was published in the February 2013 issue of Artforum. “From these myriad jots and scribbles, Fairs would, with enormous resolve and concentration, build up a landscape that, despite the small space he allowed himself (roughly four by five-and-a-half inches), can seemingly be as deep and vast, as unkempt and unpredictable, as the reality that inspired it.”

The gallery will stage an exhibition of Fairs’s rarely seen oils and paintings on paper—he only took up painting after his retirement in 1987—at its 23 East Seventy-Third Street location from September 10 to November 2.

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