The Calder Prize 2005-2015 (Installation View)

The Calder Prize 2005-2015, now on view at Pace Gallery in London, explores the influence of artist Alexander Calder in relation to the work of six contemporary artists, each of whom were awarded a prize in the former’s name.  Now through March 5, the five winners of the Calder Prize to date are featured in conversation with Calder’s own work.  The artists awarded the Calder Prize are seen to be continuing Calder’s legacy by imagining new and innovative directions for sculpture, among them Tara Donovan (2005), Žilvinas Kempinas (2007), Tomás Saraceno (2009), Rachel Harrison (2011), Daren Bader (2013), and Haroon Mirza (2015). Working in impressively divergent media, the artists are united by their common vision to push the limits of material through variations on space and time in their work, a point that unifies them with Calder’s vision.   (more…)

Richard Aldrich, Untitled (2014-2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Richard Aldrich‘s wide-ranging stylistic and conceptual practice over the past twenty-plus years has spanned any number of formats, from sparse abstraction to minimalist exercises in process painting, often subverting these established schools through momentary inflections of wit and comic interpretation.  Yet at the core of Aldrich’s practice is an effort to push beyond mere stylistic variation and a good sense humor, often using his practice and its shifting material grounds to explore a wide range of both techniques in image-making, as well as processes in each work’s construction on an intuitive level.

Richard Aldrich, Time Stopped, Time Started (Installation View), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

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The Art Market Monitor reports on Sotheby’s 2015 earnings report today, noting relatively flat gains countered by strong increases in the company’s internal finances.  Marion Maneker also notes that the company’s stock price continues to benefit from the ongoing buyback program. (more…)

Maya Widmaier-Picasso has been ordered to pay legal fees of 25,000 euros, about $28,000, in her case with representatives of the Qatari royal family.  The court also rejected a plea to void a seizure order for the bust at the center of the ongoing cases over her father’s sculpture. (more…)

Doug Wheeler, Untitled (1969/2014), via David Zwirner © 2016 Doug Wheeler

The work of Doug Wheeler is an exercise in embodiment and space, perhaps more so than many of his Light and Space compatriots.  Rather than merely exploring the sensations of seeing and perceiving space, Wheeler pushes beyond this sense of expanded optics and its cognitive effects, often exploring how this sense of space is reflected onto broader sensations of the body.  Encasements, the third solo exhibition by Wheeler in collaboration with David Zwirner, continues this work, showing a body of smaller-scale works that work in a strikingly harmonious series of interactions throughout the gallery. (more…)

Lee Ufan, From Line No. 800117 (1980), all photos via Art Observed

Blum & Poe’s close ties to the history and proliferation of Asian art in the United States cannot be ignored, having advocated for and built a market around Japanese and Korean artists like Takashi Murakami and Lee Ufan during the 1990’s.  Since then, the gallery has become an inextricable link between the continents, a point explored in the gallery’s most recent exhibition, Dansaekhwa and Minimalism, currently on view at the gallery’s Culver City location.

Kwon Young-woo, Untitled (1982), via Art Observed (more…)

Performa has announced a new Board of Directors, including artists Rashid Johnson as Vice Chair and Shirin Neshat as a newly appointed Director.  “My first experience with Performa was during the Performa 13 Biennial, when I worked with Performa to restage LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman in the 10th Street Russian-Turkish Bath House. I was impressed by Performa’s artist-first approach and their hands on involvement in helping realize my vision,” Johnson said.  “I look forward to helping continue the great legacy Performa has earned and helping it to grow as a resource for artists and a vehicle for producing and showcasing innovative performance-based works.”  (more…)

The 9th Berlin Biennale has announced its locations for this summer, including the Akademie der Künste, the European School of Management and Technology, the Feuerle Collection, the Blue-Star sightseeing boat by Reederei Riedel, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art.  The Biennale will be curated by DIS, and focuses on “the virtual as the real, nations as brands, people as data, culture as capital, wellness as politics, and happiness as GDP.” (more…)

Paris’s FIAC satellite Officielle has been placed on hold by organizers Reed Exhibitions, following complaints over low sales figures and a difficult location at last year’s event.  “We were not unhappy with our sales at the 2015 edition, we sold rather well and cleared a small profit. But it’s true that we did not feel like we were [in the majority],” says Gallerist Bernard Ceysson.   (more…)

Continuing its efforts in Silicon Valley, Pace Gallery has left its temporary space in favor of a more permanent outpost in downtown Palo Alto.  “It was time to fish or cut bait,” says President Marc Glimcher. “You can’t do a pop-up forever.”  (more…)

The Public Catalogue Foundation has been renamed Art UK, and is launching an initiative to digitize the full collection of works in the British public collections.  The project continues the organization’s already completed efforts at digitizing the nation’s oil paintings, a 10 year, £6 million venture. (more…)

The University of Oklahoma has agreed to return a Pissarro painting, La Bergère, that was looted by Nazis from collector Raoul Meyer.  The work will go to Meyer’s daughter Léone, who has agreed to show the painting on a rotating basis in Oklahoma and France.  “Léone Meyer has agreed that, rather than getting the painting back for her own living room, to continue the public display of the painting for the public,” her lawyer said.

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Eddie Martinez, Restartation (2015), via Art Observed

Brooklyn-based painter Eddie Martinez had charted a particularly unique course for himself in recent years, exploring both expressly abstracted compositions and their relationships to more rigid, serial processes in both painting and sculpture.  Trained as both a draftsman and painter, the artist’s dual experience in both meticulously planned composition and free-roving expressionism floats to the surface in his first exhibition with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, on view now at the gallery’s Chelsea location. (more…)

Harmony Korine is interviewed in The Guardian this week, discussing his early career, his new work as a painter, and his reputation as a cultural antagonist.  “I’m fine with it,” he says. “I want to do extreme damage. I want to be disruptive, I don’t care about the flow and I don’t want to go with it.” (more…)

Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens (Installation view), via Sprüth Magers

For the most recent new exhibition in Berlin, Sprüth Magers has brought together work from thirteen artists under the title Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens.  Curated by Goodroom and Johannes Fricke Waldthausen, the exhibition features works by Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Andy Hope 1930, Oliver Laric, Jon Rafman, and Andro Wekua, among others.  Intended to navigate visitors through the intersecting narratives within the realm of surrealist animation, abstraction and the ideas of “New Materialism” as expressed through the greater logistics of the world wide web, the exhibition references the notion of the screen as a critical tool of the conscious and unconscious, as well as a surface for projections of communication and technological abstraction.   (more…)

Dia’s Jessica Morgan is profiled in Vogue this week, underscoring her unique perspectives and highly praised vision as a curator.  “She really goes deep, deep, deep,” says Urs Fischer. “She digs herself in.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper profiles the curatorial focus at The Met’s new Breuer building, and its willingness to push deeper into the perspectives and dialogues of contemporary art.  “Whether we like it or not, professional artists are heirs to, and inextricably tied to, traditions,” says painter Kerry James Marshall, who will select a body of works from the museum collection to show alongside his own retrospective.  As he notes, the space allows the Met to “highlight the intellectual links between historical forms and modes of production.” (more…)

Hong Kong’s M+ Museum is opening an expansive exhibition of works currently, including several politcally charged pieces from the Uli Sigg Collection, testing what seems to be a frigid political climate in mainland China. “It is up to Hong Kong to choose how free it wants to be,” says Lars Nittve, a former M+ curator.  “If there is a message to this exhibition, this has to be it.” (more…)

The Tate Modern is planning a landmark retrospective for David Hockney in 2017, one of the largest exhibitions the museum has ever opened.  “We’ve shaped the show and made a selection and then he’s made suggestions and we’ve shifted the emphasis a bit and there are some works he’s asked us to think about,” says co-curator Chris Stephens. (more…)

W Magazine Profiles Xin Li, the Deputy Chair of Christie’s Asia, and her unique career path as both a basketball player and model.  “I’ve always played better during the real game than in practice,” Li says of her focus in the auction room. “It’s something I learned from being an athlete and model. I feel the lights and the camera, and I know how to stay focused. But when you are working as a model, it’s all about you. Working in an auction house, nothing is about you. I learned how to switch off my past and become a different person.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper has interviewed a group of artists, T.J. Wilcox and Deborah Kass among them, to offer their perspectives and suggestions for the opening of the Met’s Breuer Building for exhibitions.  “There is some of that overdue revisionism going on and I will be thrilled to see Kerry James Marshall’s retrospective [at the Met Breuer this autumn], one of the most important painters of my generation,” Kass writes.  “But until this re-evaluation includes women, incredibly important pieces of art history continue to be willfully, almost petulantly omitted.” (more…)

Robert Ryman, Untitled (1960), via Art Observed

Walking through the doors of Dia: Chelsea, one is immediately struck by a lack of lighting, with the halls and open floor plans of the building lit only by dull sunbeams streaming down from the open skylight and onto the works of painter and conceptualist Robert Ryman.  The show is a notable fusion of history in both the immediate and the general for the artist, a point that makes considerable sense giving his subject matter, presented here in a span of works focusing primarily on his career in the 1960’s through the 1980’s. (more…)

Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled (2016), image courtesy of Tatiana Trouvé and König Galerie

“Time is the theme underlying all my work,” states Italian-born, Paris-based artist Tatiana Trouvé.  Frequently reflecting ideas of time and intervention through her prolific body of drawings, sculptures and installations, the artist is presenting a new exhibition at Berlin’s König Galerie, where she has enacted a space illustrating the origins and systems dictating the flow and movement of the universe.  Consisting of furniture covered with bronze blankets, on whose backs reveals drawings and text, traced and written,her objects combine multiple realities incorporating dreamlike states and alchemical properties, always based on nuanced, multifaceted layers of space and time.  Each installation reveals a fragmented culture, and a system pushed into instability through her varying representational techniques.   (more…)

MoMA has announced plans for the U.S.’s first major retrospective on the work of Francis Picabia, set to open in November of this year.  The show is presented in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich, which will show the exhibition this summer before it travels across the Atlantic. (more…)