January 2 | The Fine Art Group to target $1 billion lending in Asia

Article
The year opens with Europe increasingly looking to the Asian market, polemics in Paris and a restructured Lahore Biennale.

The Fine Art Group targets $1 billion lending in Asia

The London-based investment fund The Fine Art Group has announced that it plans to deploy at least $1 billion over the next decade in lending to Asian collectors.

The group will open its first Asian offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong early this year. The move follows a streak of high-profile acquisitions by Asian collectors in the last few years, including record-breaking sales of works by Amedeo Modigliani, Vincent Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. According to The Fine Art Group CEO Philip Hoffman, existing investment funds specializing in art are virtually unknown in the region. Read more via The Financial Times.

 

The art collector Liu Yiqian — © Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

 

 

The city of Paris spent €86 million on Pinault’s future museum

The city of Paris and the satirical weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné are in disagreement about whether the €86 million paid by the former to buy the historic headquarters of the city’s Bourse — which will host the collection of billionaire art collector François Pinault — was a necessary expense. The newspaper contends that the city of Paris could have acquired the building for the symbolic sum of 15 cents, as stipulated in the 1949 lease whereby the city “sold” the Bourse to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI). Although the lease prevented the CCI to sell the building to a third party, it also stipulates that, should the Bourse be resold to the city of Paris, the CCI could do so for the property’s actual market value.

In addition, the city of Paris claimed to have given €23 million to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry as compensation for its investment in the building; according to Le Canard Enchaîné, however, this sum should have been €4.3 million — the value established in an audit by the prefecture of Ile de France. More (in French) via Le Figaro.

 

© Artefactory Lab ; Tadao Ando Architect & Associates ; NeM / Niney & Marca Architectes ; Agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier.

 

 

Lahore Biennale to launch in March 2018 with new artistic director

Following the resignation of artistic director Rashid Rana in August 2017, the inaugural edition of the Lahore Biennale is back on track. The event, Pakistan’s first major contemporary art exhibition, will open on March 18 and run through March 31, under the artistic direction of artist Iftikhar Dadi, who will work alongside an advisory committee consisting of Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid and architect Raza Ali Dada. The list of participating artists and venues is yet to be announced. Read more on The Art Newspaper.

 

© Lahore Biennale