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Good Morning!
- Julio Le Parc, a pioneer of Kinetic Art and winner of the Venice Biennale Grand Prize, has died at 97 in Paris.
- Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, i.e. the duct-taped banana, was stolen from the Centre-Pompidou Metz.
- The British Museum says its decision to postpone a lecture titled “The Ancient History of Israel and Judah” was “not censorship.”
The Headlines
IN MEMORIAM. Julio Le Parc, the Argentine-born pioneer of kinetic art, died on May 30 in Paris, at 97, reports ARTnews. The artist’s health had declined in recent days, but he remained deeply engaged with his work until the end, while eagerly awaiting a major retrospective opening June 11 at London’s Tate Modern, his son Yamil Le Parc told the Argentine newspaper La Nación. Le Parc’s vibrating light installations and shimmering mobiles invited viewers to actively participate with the works, making him one of the leading figures in kinetic art, long before immersive art experiences took social media by storm. A founding member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) in Paris, he believed in collaborative artistic experimentation and rejected the notion of a solitary artistic master. But Le Parc was singled out in 1966, when he won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, despite many of the works he presented relying on reflected light, optical instability, and movement. The Tate retrospective will open without him, but for an artist who insisted viewers become actively engaged with his creations, writes ARTnews‘s Daniel Cassady, “the exhibition arrives not simply as a memorial, but as a reminder of how much Le Parc influenced contemporary art.”