The week in art news: Frieze Seoul opens to uncertain market, picture drama for Keir Starmer, crits from beyond the grave and more…

Two fairs open in South Korea this week: Kiaf has been going every year since 2002, while Frieze Seoul started in 2022 and is now on its third edition. Tickets are combined, allowing visitors to attend both events. Korea’s art market is currently in a “period of transition” according to The Art Newspaper. In recent years, the Korean art market was knocked back by the Covid pandemic and by political and economic turmoil; GDP grew by only 1.7% last year, and president Yoon Suk Yeol is facing allegations of corruption and protests. Art sellers are hoping that they’ll see better returns this year.

Nicoletti Gallery leaves Vyner Street for Shoreditch. The gallery, run by founder Oswaldo Nicoletti and director Camille Houzé, opened on Vyner Street in 2018. The new location at 81 Paul Street offers a larger exhibition space for the growing gallery. The interior will be designed by JAM, an architecture practice co-founded by Adam Willis and Joe Halligan of Assemble. The new gallery will open to the public on 19th September with ‘SPIT’, an exhibition by French artist Tarek Lakhrissi. With Nicoletti’s move, Vyner Street, once the centre of the YBA art world, now has no galleries.

Starm in teacup as papers slam PM over picture move: comments by prime minister Keir Starmer’s biographer hinted that the PM wanted to move an ‘unsettling’ painting of Margaret Thatcher hung in the Iron Lady’s former study at 10 Downing Street. Several newspapers jumped on the interior design issue and tried to spin it into a scandal, making out as if Starm’ had personally smashed the canvas. Tory Sir John Redwood said, “He wants to drag Britain down, he’s pessimistic, he’s saying that we’re a shower, he’s blaming the British people and saying that we are the rot and he’s got to sort out the rot.”…calm down.

Meanwhile, The Art Newspaper reports another PM’s painting won’t be moving. Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Le Rêve de L’Artiste was once owned by Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, and hung in 10 Downing Street. Now, the UK government has placed an export bar on the $8M (£6M) work to ensure it stays within the UK.

Speaking of decline and fall: the Financial Times reports that Sotheby’s saw an 88% decline in earnings and a 25% decline in auction sales in the first half of 2024. The figures were detailed in a report shared with its lenders ahead of its recent deal with Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, ADQ. Sotheby’s problems are part of a widespread decline in the art market, but were made worse by sales that fell below expectations, such as Francis Bacon’s portrait of George Dyer that sold in May for $27.7M, below its low estimate of $30M.

Is the writing on the mall for Adrian Cheng’s K11? The businessman and major art collector is facing serious financial problems because of a downturn in Hong Kong’s property market. Bloomberg reports that Cheng’s company, New World Development Co., is expected to make a loss of up to $2.6B for the financial year ending in June, its first loss in 20 years. In recent days, Cheng’s K11 Art Mall received an offer for $1.2B from China’s state-owned CR Longdation property company.

It belongs in a museum: a double portrait of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck was recovered 40 years after being stolen. The work, by 17th-century artist Erasmus Quellinus II, was stolen in 1979 while at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, while on loan from the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House. It was spotted for sale in Toulon, France in 2020, and recovered after three years of negotiation between the seller and the London-based Art Loss Register.

Hate mail: construction workers find secret message hidden in London’s National Gallery. The Art Newspaper writes that the workers were demolishing a concrete column in the Sainsbury Wing when they discovered a typed letter hidden inside the concrete. The letter was written in 1990 by John Sainsbury (Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover), one of the donors responsible for the new wing, and criticised architects Venturi and Scott Brown’s choice to include the ‘unnecessary’ columns and thanked the discoverers for demolishing them. Sainsbury died in 2022, one year after the demolition work was approved. We can only guess he died happy.

Artnet News reports that the 68-year-old New York-based Chinese artist Gao Zhen was arrested while visiting relatives in China. He was charged with creating artworks that break the 2018 Heroes and Martyrs Protection Law that protects ‘national heroes’ from slander. Zhen made the offending artworks, which criticise Mao Zedong, the former Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and founder of the People’s Republic of China, back in the 2000s. If found guilty, Zhen could face up to three years in prison.

Los Angeles museums start joint collection: Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art are building a joint collection of contemporary LA art, starting with 260 works donated by collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn. It’s the latest in a trend of museums and galleries teaming up to share art and artists. “We’re all going to share the labour of it, we’re going to share the costs of it,” Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, told the New York Times. “We think it’s going to be part of art history writ large.”

Canadian sculptor Jacqueline Winsor dies, 82. Winsor was born Vera Jacqueline Winsor on 20th October, 1941, in Newfoundland, Canada. She made her name as a post-minimalist, feminist artist in 1970s New York. In 1976, she was given a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The critic Lucy Lippard compared her choice of materials, pine, rope, brick, twine and nails, to the “bleak coast of Newfoundland.” She was known for working slowly, sometimes producing only three sculptures in a year. Windsor’s family confirmed that she died of a stroke on Tuesday 3rd September.