FRIEZE ART FAIR

The ninth edition of the leading international contemporary art fair takes place in London's Regent's Park from 13–16 October 2011. 173 of the world's leading galleries representing 33 countries will present new work by over 1,000 of the world's most innovative artists.

LUCIAN FREUD BLOCKBUSTER OPENS EARLY 2012

Photograph: David Dawson/Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery on Tuesday revealed details of what will be a blockbuster, with more than 100 works filling most of the ground floor gallery space. The exhibition, the first major show to focus on Freud's portrait work, had been planned in close partnership with the artist, who died aged 88 in July. Lucian Freud's final work will be shown in a National Portrait Gallery exhibition opening February 9, 2011. The painting is an enormous and unfinished nude portrait of his assistant and close friend, David Dawson, with Dawson's whippet, Eli. The work will be shown for the first time and will feature prominently in the major 2012 exhibition covering seven decades of the artist's probing, distinctive portraiture. His final work was, said curator Sarah Howgate, "a commanding and affectionate" portrait of a man who had been the artist's assistant for 20 years.

AI WEIWEI AT KUNSTHAUS GRAZ

AI WEIWEI
INTERLACING
September 17, 2011–January 15, 2012

INTERLACING is the first large-scale exhibition of Ai Weiwei's photographic and video works. In his New York period (1983–1993), Ai Weiwei took photographs, but especially since his return to Beijing, he has tirelessly documented everyday realities of the urban environment and society in China, and discussed them in blogs and twitters. The photographs of the radical changes to the urban built fabric, the search for earthquake victims, and the destruction of his Shanghai studio are presented along with art-photographic projects, the documenta Fairytale project, the countless blog and mobile-phone photographs. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive book of material and archives published by Steidl and from Feb. 21 to April 29, 2102, it will show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.