The week in art news: Picassos in museum toilets are fake, Frieze owner calls on Biden to quit, ICA accused of targeting activists and more…

Toilet Picassos are fake: the continuing controversy over a women-only exhibition at the Australian Museum of OId and New Art has taken a new turn, as the “Picassos” moved to the women’s toilets are revealed to be fakes. The works were made by Kirsha Kaechele, artist, curator, and wife of MONA’s millionaire owner David Walsh. It was claimed they were originals, inherited from Kaechele’s great-grandmother. Kaechele is now claiming that the entire thing was a “conceptual artwork” about gender imbalance. We’re asking, has the museum flushed its reputation?

Ari Emanuel, art collector, CEO of Frieze’s parent company, Endeavour, and Democratic Party donor, calls on Joe Biden to pull out of the US presidential race. The Art Newspaper reports that Emanuel made the comments at the Aspen Ideas Festival on 27th June, the day after the first TV debate between President Biden and Donald Trump. Biden’s poor performance led to questions over his health and to numerous calls for him to step aside. So far, Biden has rejected those calls, claiming he is the only candidate who can beat Trump.

Billionaire art collector Jorge Pérez slams Ron DeSantis for cutting Florida’s state arts budget. Property developer Perez has a keen interest in making Miami attractive to outsiders and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting the arts across the city. “This is just a horrible message to send,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. “We want to be a serious city, and serious means that we have great education and we have great exposure to culture.”

Actor Jim Carrey is putting his collection up for sale at Bonhams Los Angeles. The collection, including paintings, design, furniture and photography, will be sold in 35 lots as part of the auction house’s Modern Design & Art sale on the 25th July. Notable lots include: Joris Laarman’s Cumulus Table, a David Hockney swimming pool on paper, furniture by Philippe Hiquily and Kenny Scharf’s painting Ice Mont Ster (2014).

The curatorial trend for picking two names out of a hat continues, as the Royal Academy gets ready to stage a dual exhibition of Anselm Kiefer and Vincent van Gogh. The exhibition, the first to pair the two artists, has been developed between Kiefer’s studio and the Van Gogh Museum. Even so, does mashing them together do anything for either artist? It’ll open in Amsterdam, before moving to the Royal Academy on the 28th June 2025.

Bonhams called out for charging fees in charity auctions. An article in The Guardian reports that while the Bonhams catalogues claimed “all proceeds” would go to charities, the auction house was actually keeping the ‘buyer’s premium’ for itself. This fee, charged on top of the final ‘hammer price’, ranges from 28% to 14.5%. In response to the backlash, Bonhams said it has now “waived all sellers’ and buyers’ fees” for charity auctions held earlier this year and for the next few months.

ICA layoffs targeted Palestine activists, former workers claim. 14 workers were reportedly laid off from London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in March this year. Protest group Cultural Workers Against Genocide notes that all 14 received informal warnings over a letter posted on the ICA website in October 2023 calling for the gallery to sign up to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. The ICA maintains that the layoffs were due to budget cuts.

Charges dropped for 80 protestors arrested at Art Institute of Chicago. In May, a group of pro-Palestine activists set up camp in the museum’s North Garden and were arrested for trespassing. The anti-war protest was one of a wave that swept US university campuses.

The show must go on? A new finding committee for Documenta 16, the German quinquennial (that’s every five years) contemporary art exhibition, has been appointed, over six months after the previous committee resigned. Yilmaz Dziewior, Sergio Edelsztein, N‘Goné Fall, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Mami Kataoka, and Yasmil Raymond will be responsible for naming the director of Documenta 16, due to open in Kassel, Germany, in 2027.

Nolder Artist Residency under fire for non-payment of artists, Artnet News reports. Ghanaian painter Foster Sakyiamah is suing NAR founder Joseph Awuah-Darko for $266,527.99, the amount deducted from his residency payment for “costs and expenses.” The residency programme has come under criticism from a number of Ghanaian artists since 2021 due to the contract terms. In some cases, artists are asked to contribute a minimum of 21 artworks.

Joseph Awuah-Darko recently made headlines in May earlier this year, with claims posted to Instagram that he was sexually assaulted by American artist Kehinde Wiley in June 2021 at the Noldor Artist Residency. Wiley denies the allegations.

LACMA accused of showing fake paintings, Artnet News reports. Suspicions were first raised in February by South Korean national daily newspaper JoongAng, when the exhibition of Chester and Cameron Chang’s Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened. Last week, a panel of experts in Korean art determined that four of the works by Korean painters Lee Jung-seob and Park Soo-keun are fakes.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan will close its Hong Kong gallery, the Financial Times reports. The gallery opened in 2020 and was headed by Rebecca Wei, who was previously at Christie’s. Wei put the decision down to “client behaviour changing,” saying that following the Covid pandemic, more clients were viewing and buying remotely.

London-based artist and filmmaker Lawrence Lek has been announced as the winner of Frieze London’s 2024 Artist Award. The award – in partnership with Forma – gives early to mid-career artists the opportunity to create a new commission at Frieze London. Lek’s winning entry, a sculptural video installation, tells the story of a cyborg therapist created to save other AI from the brink of self-destruction

The past two weeks saw the loss of three major female figures on the New York art scene: Dorothy Lichtenstein, wife of Roy Lichtenstein and founder and president of the artist’s foundation, 84; June Leaf, abstract painter, sculptor, and wife of photographer Robert Frank, 94; and Audrey Flack, feminist, photorealist painter and bronze sculptor, 93.