Sean Scully, 'Wall of Light Haze,' 2012. (Courtesy the artist and Cheim & Read.)

Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea now represents Irish-born painter and printmaker Sean Scully, according to Adam Sheffer, a partner at the gallery. Mr. Scully, who is best known for his large abstract canvases filled with brushy recentangles, approached Cheim & Read last year to propose showing there. He was previously represented by Galerie Lelong, which last presented a solo show of his work in 2009.

“He just felt it was time to make a move,” said Mr. Sheffer of the artist's motivations for switching galleries. He added that he thinks Mr. Scully is an "extraordinary addition" to Cheim & Read's roster of artists, which includes high-profile painters like Pat Steir, Louise Fishman and the estate of Joan Mitchell. “The gallery has such an eclectic group of artists, but in some ways people consider us a mecca for painting, and Sean is one of the greatest living painters," said Mr. Sheffer. "There is a strength and a vitality about his work that I think is consistent with a number of the artists with whom we work.”

Cheim & Read will mark Mr. Scully’s arrival with a solo exhibition in October. The intervening months will be busy ones for the artist, who has shows lined up at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in March, the Hugh Lane, Dublin's municipal gallery, in April and at the newly renovated Drawing Center in New York in September.

Lévy. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

Dominique Lévy and Robert Mnuchin, partners since 2005 in L&M Arts, are parting ways. Carol Vogel has the scoop in her New York Times Inside Art column today. Ms. Lévy plans to open up shop elsewhere on the Upper East Side. The Dominique Lévy Gallery will open in the spring. Mr. Mnuchin will continue to helm the gallery that the two ran on East 78th Street as the Mnuchin Gallery.

The pair will continue to be partners in the Los Angeles gallery they started two years ago, which is overseen by Sarah Watson.

Some details about the forthcoming Dominique Lévy Gallery, from its release:

Dominique Lévy Gallery will specialize in masterworks of post-war art and important contemporary art, in both the primary and secondary markets. The gallery will present a program of curated exhibitions that range from thematic historical surveys to showcases of exceptional new work by living artists. It also will focus upon private sales in the secondary market; produce key publications; provide advisory and collections management services; and participate in art fairs internationally.

Before partnering with Mr. Mnuchin seven years ago, Ms. Lévy was the international head of private sales at Christie’s.

As Ms. Vogel notes, things are really topsy turvy at the upper echelon of the art market. Just last week, three top level dealmakers joined forces to create Connery, Pissarro, Seydoux.

55-59 Chrystie Street. (Courtesy Google Maps)

Horton Gallery, which runs a space in Chelsea, has just announced that it will be expanding to a 2100 square foot space in the L.E.S. The building, located at 55-59 Chrystie Street (between Hester and Canal), has something of a distinguished past. Originally the home of a brewery in the 19th century, in its more recent past, it served as an early recording studio for the Beastie Boys. It has also been the home to CANADA gallery for the past ten years.

Sean Horton, the gallery's owner and director, is not a newbie to the Lower East Side. In 2006, he opened Sunday L.E.S. on Eldridge Street, which became part of the burgeoning squadron of L.E.S. galleries. In 2009, as the gallery opened a second location in Chelsea on the parlor floor of a federal-style house, where it currently resides, Sunday had its last show and remained a kind of project space for friends and colleagues during 2010. During this time of expansion, the gallery also opened a third space, a project space in the Kreuzberg neighborhood in Berlin, Germany, which it has been running for the past two years.

Update, Thursday, August 16 9:45 a.m.: “I plan to bring on additional staff and six to eight new artists, several with which I have already began a dialogue,” Sean Horton told Gallerist over email. Mr. Horton already has eight artists on his roster—mostly emerging and mid-career artists including Aaron Spangler, Peter Gallo, Keltie Ferris and Lauren Luloff. “The larger space will also provide the ability to present more rigorous group exhibitions, work with guest curators, and will provide gallery basics that I've never had like a back room and storage.”

Though Mr. Horton doesn’t work with partners, several of the gallery's collectors have offered encouragement and support.

Come September, the gallery will kick off activities in the new space with an inaugural exhibition.

Congratulations to Horton Gallery.

Installation view of Richard Artschwager at National Exemplar. (Courtesy National Exemplar Gallery)

The National Exemplar Gallery opened a year ago, and quickly earned a reputation for showing a mix of work by established talent and up-and-coming artists. But there was something unusual about it: its location, on East 54th Street. Aside from the strip of blue-chip dealers along 57th street—Pace, Marian Goodman—and, of course, MoMA, the area is something of an artistic no-man’s-land. And so it is perhaps not unexpected that Eneas Capalbo, the National Exemplar’s founder, is moving his gallery downtown.

The space is set to open in the fall on the second floor of 381 Broadway with a show featuring a complete set of upstart Sebastian Black’s “period pieces” series. Such a thing is possible in the new space, which is a little larger. “We have very long walls,” said Mr. Capalbo.

Mr. Capalbo is looking forward to his move—“I just found this place that is better, so I thought, why not?” he told Gallerist—but will have fond memories of Midtown, where he’s enjoyed the unexpected setting for the likes of Dan Colen and Nate Lowman, who had a joint book party there last fall. But his new location will serve a similar function, giving a different context to the artists you might expect to find in his old neighborhood, like his recent presentation of Richard Artschwager—an artist in his late 80s whose paintings would actually feel right at home alongside Sebastian Black, and who has a major retrospective coming up at the Whitney Museum in October.

“To show someone very old and established down there, it will make a difference.” Mr. Capalbo said. “Showing art downtown, we’ll have much more fun.”

(Courtesy Flickr)

Clifford Owens, who is fresh off a solo show at MoMA PS1, has parted with his long-time gallery On Stellar Rays. His name had been removed from the gallery's web site and Candice Madey, the owner of On Stellar Rays, confirmed the news with us today, saying that he left around April.

"It was a decision we made together," Ms. Madey said.

Mr. Owens has been with the Lower East Side gallery since it opened in 2008. The gallery's second show was a solo exhibition of work by Mr. Owens. An e-mail sent to Mr. Owens Friday afternoon has not been returned as of this writing.

Mr. Owens's exhibition at PS1, in which the artist interpreted performance scores given to him by other artists, was the source of some controversy, which we reported back in March, that resulted in Kara Walker withdrawing her participation. Her score was:

“French kiss an audience member. Force them against a wall and demand Sex. The audience/viewer should be an adult. If they are willing to participate in the forced sex act abruptly turn the tables and you assume the role of victim. Accuse your attacker. Seek help from others, describe your ordeal. Repeat.”

At that time, Ms. Walker claimed she intended the score as "hypothetical." She later backtracked and joined Mr. Owens for his final live performance at PS1. A book about the exhibition, featuring essays by Huey Copeland, John Bowles and PS1 assistant curator Christopher Y. Lew, will be released September 30.

Schimmel. (Courtesy PMC)

Update 2:20 p.m.
We've just received a statement from MOCA Board Co-Chair David G. Johnson on the matter of the departure of longtime chief curator Paul Schimmel.

The statement reads in full:

"Paul Schimmel is stepping down as MOCA's chief curator. It is amicable and there will be a press release tomorrow."

Update 12:40 p.m. 

The LA Times now reports that Mr. Schimmel has been "fired."

Mat Gleason says he obtained the story from "several high-placed sources at the museum," who described Mr. Schimmel's reported downsizing as part of a "bloodbath" that included the firing of at least three other people in various departments of the museum. In his understanding, the firings came in the wake of an end-of-fiscal-year budget meeting on Tuesday.

Original post

Paul Schimmel, the long-serving chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, appears to be parting ways with the museum. The news was first reported late last night by Los Angeles-based art writer Mat Gleason on his Coagula blog. Mr. Schimmel and the museum were not immediately available for comment, but an informed source has confirmed the move.

One of the nation's most respected curators of contemporary art, Mr. Schimmel was famed for his gigantic, exhaustive group surveys on extremely recent contemporary art, like the 1992 show "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s."

The reasons for Mr. Schimmel's departure remain unclear. Mr. Gleason's blog post would seem to indicate that he was let go. MOCA has struggled with financial issues in recent years as it fights to regrow its endowment, which shrank as it ran deficits and its investments were battered because of economic turmoil. Director Jeffrey Deitch and Mr. Schimmel have also been said to have had an acrimonious relationship.

We'll have updates as the story develops.

Paddy Johnson, 2012. (Courtesy PatrickMcMullan.com)

Arts blogger Paddy Johnson, who edits Art Fag City, has announced that she is the new art editor of The L Magazine. "Expect us to break a lot of it over here," she wrote in a post today for The L Magazine. "We'll also let you know what art events are worth your time, who's doing stupid shit you can skip, and give you the earliest links to art memes you NEED TO KNOW. Awesome." We got in touch with the blogger, curious as to just what would change with regard to her current duties at Art Fag City and The L Magazine.

"At its heart, this is a media partnership, wrapped in an editorial title," Ms. Johnson told Gallerist over e-mail. "Technically speaking my role at The L Magazine won't be too much different than what I've been doing for them already."

Ms. Johnson is currently in charge of art direction for The L Magazine.  "So I'll be assigning stories and overseeing the tone of the coverage—but the actual amount I'll be writing won't change." And the amount of editing she'll be doing won't be that different either, since The L Magazine has its own editors ("though of course I'll approve whatever goes out to them," she noted).

Corinna Kirsch and Whitney Kimball, both AFC contributors, will now also write for The L Magazine while Will Brand, AFC's editor-in-chief, will contribute to the Art Fag City column. As to our question with regard to how this will affect Art Fag City, Ms. Johnson said we'd be seeing more AFC, not less. "The blog effectively doubled its size today," she said. "Since none of [our writers] were full time here to begin with (save for Will Brand), this just means we have more work we can give our contributors. I think that's a great opportunity both for the blog and our writers."

Princeton University. (Courtesy William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)

"Pictures Generation" artists Sarah Charlesworth and James Welling have been named photography professors in the Visual Arts Program of Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts, according to a note sent out by the e-flux e-mail service. Ms. Charlesworth, who will continue to teach at the School of Visual Arts, will be a lecturer; Mr. Welling, who chairs UCLA's photography department, will be a visiting professor for the fall.

Interestingly, the release emphasizes that neither "Charlesworth nor Welling was trained as a photographer, each having discovered the medium in graduate school after studying art history at Barnard College and painting at the California Institute for the Arts, respectively."

Artist and writer Joe Scanlan, who serves as the director of the school's Visual Arts Program, offered this in his statement:

I'm very happy with the arrangement we were able to work out with Sarah and Jim to help us move the study of photography forward at Princeton: "I'm very happy with the arrangement we were able to work out with Sarah and Jim to help us move the study of photography forward at Princeton. Sarah's critical media thinking and Jim's technical curiosity are welcome additions to the visual arts on campus."

Congratulations, Ms. Charlesworth and Mr. Welling.

This is the latest in a series of developments after the resignation of Artnet's longtime CEO Hans Neuendorf, Mr. Pabst's father. Artnet magazine was an influential source of art journalism for 16 years and had offices in New York, Berlin and Paris.

Mr. Neuendorf. (Courtesy Anna Jockisch/Artnet via Bloomberg)

Hans Neuendorf, who has served as CEO of Artnet AG since 1995, resigned his position today. He will be replaced by his son Jacob Pabst.

Mr. Pabst, who takes his mother's name, has served as president of the company for the past year and was confirmed as Mr. Neuendorf's successor by the company's supervisory board today. Artnet is a German-based tech company best known for its auction price database, which is widely used by dealers to establish a "Blue Book" value for a piece of art by determining what others have paid for work by artists in the past. In recent years the company has expanded into the areas of auction analysis and low-end online auctions.

"Nobody wants to let go of something that he's doing, so it took a little bit of effort on my part to come to terms with it," said the 74-year-old Mr. Neuendorf on a phone call today with The Observer. "It took some time to actually decide to do it."

"It's a good thing, though!" He added. "The new generation is taking over. Jacob has his own team and everything is working perfectly. I'm very happy because I have a son to take over. Not everyone is that lucky."

Mr. Neuendorf was recently the subject of a lengthy profile in Der Spiegel.