October 4 | Artist Leo Villareal now represented by PACE gallery

Born in Albuquerque in 1967, Villareal is known for his installations with neon, strobe, and LED lights; his “sequences” intertwine electronic software and hardware, creating an intense dialogue with public spaces and natural settings. Villareal will also lead the team of FUTURE\PACE, a cultural partnership between Futurecity and PACE that reexamines the role of public art, architecture and urban planning. Villanova’s work will be on display at PACE’s booth at Frieze, London, later this week. Artnews has more.

Sotheby’s Hong Kong Autumn Sales series continues with enormous success, with a total $65 million realized on October 3d  — nearly 20% higher than the low pre-sale estimate. Works by artists such as Zao Wou-Ki, Sanyu and Yoshitomo Nara led the sale, the success of which was partly made possible by #TTTOP, the sale of contemporary art curated by Asian pop star T.O.P, designed to attract new buyers — which fetched $17.4million. The sale was led by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Infantry, which brought in $6 million on an estimate of between $3.87 million and $5.16 million. Read more on Art Market Monitor.

The collection of The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art — one of the leading contemporary art institutions outside Europe and the U.S., will leave Iran for the first time in forty years for the touring exhibition “The Unveiled Collection: The Masterpieces from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art,” organized by Giovanna Melandri, president of the Fondazione MAXXI in Rome. The exhibition, which will include masterpieces by Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Francis Bacon, will travel to Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and then to MAXXI in 2017. More information via Art Forum.

Next year, London’s Barbican Centre will host the first major exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work in the UK in over twenty years. Titled “Boom for Real”, the retrospective will feature more than 100 works, including paintings but also works in collage, Xerox, performance, graffiti, and music. As part of the exhibition, the 1981 group show at MoMA PS1 — Basquiat’s first ever commercial show — will be reconstructed. Artlyst has more information.

Laurel Zuckerman, the great-grandniece of German-Jewish businessman Paul Leffmann — who fled Germany under duress in 1935 and was forced to sell Pablo Picasso’s The Actor, now worth an estimated $100 million, to finance his escape — is suing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the painting, after having demanded its return since 2010. The painting changed hands multiple times before being donated to the Met in 1952. In spite of Zuckerman’s claims, the museum asserted its “indisputable title” to the painting in a press release. More on artnet News.