Eungie Joo takes on Sharjah Biennial, while Sheikha Al-Mayassa may have taken the Bacon

Christopher Wool, Apocalypse Now, 1988

We have to confess, we’re still recovering from last week’s auctions sales, which busted through records left and right (including $26.5 million for one of Christopher Wool’s stencil paintings, pictured to the right. We’ll let that sink in.) The real star of the evening, however, was Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucien Freud, 1969, which stirred up some lively bidding, until Acquavella Galleries bid a staggering $142.4 million, on behalf of an undisclosed client. Last night, rumors started flying that the bidder was none other than Sheikha Al-Mayassa, oh she of the QMA and Art Review Power lists. Today Acquavella tepidly tried to refute this, according to Artinfo.

Eungie Joo attends the 2012 Gwangju Biennale

But thankfully this is not the only reason the Gulf is in the news. This week the Sharjah Art Foundation announced that Eungie Joo will be the curator of the 12th Sharjah Biennial, slated for March 2015. Formally curator of Education and Public Programs at the New Museum (where in 2012 she was responsible for the insitution’s sophomore triennial “The Ungovernables“,) Joo is now Director of Art and Cultural Programs at Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brasil. Given her extensive travel, and the international connections so casually flaunted in “The Ungovernables,” we have no doubt that Joo will deliver. All the same, those interested in joining the conversation can attend the upcoming March Meeting, set for March 13-16, 2014. Not-so-imaginatively-themed “Come Together,” the event brings in artists, curators, institutional practioners, and otherwise, from all over the world, for a series of discussions that keep the Foundation active during the biennial’s “off” years. [You can check our post about the previous meeting here.]

And, since there’s always a Russian connection, we should also note that on November 23, the Sharjah Art Foundation will open “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: A Collective Memory.” Find out more about this exhibition (which will run through February 23, 2014) here.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, They Are Free – Four Paintings about Freedom, 2012