Artist Bill Viola is set to unveil a new large-scale video installation at St Paul’s Cathedral, depicting Mary holding the body of Jesus after his crucifixion.  The piece is considered a companion to his Martyrs series.  “One is concerned with birth and the other death; one with comfort and creation, the other with suffering and sacrifice,” Viola says.  “If I am successful, the final pieces will function both as aesthetic objects of contemporary art and as practical objects of traditional contemplation and devotion.” (more…)

15th Century Flemish Master Dieric Bouts’s St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child will stay in the United Kingdom, following funding help from the UK Lottery to prevent the export of the work outside of the country.  “It’s fantastic news that this stunning painting will remain in the UK for the public to see. I’m delighted that the export deferral has allowed this outstanding work of art to find a new home at the Bowes Museum,” says new Culture Minister Matt Hancock.  (more…)

The Art Newspaper reports on the opening of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yongwoo Lee’s Shanghai Project, multi-disciplinary biennial that has struggled with planning issues, scheduling, and problems with securing funding.  “Shanghai Project has restructured its priority from exhibitions to public programs and prioritised the difference of its context,” says Lee. (more…)

James Turrell installed one of his signature lighting systems in Berlin’s Dorotheenstadt Cemetery chapel this summer, playing a series of changing light arrangements against the fading light at dusk each night.   (more…)

Bortolami Gallery is launching a series of “mini-Marfas,” exhibition spaces in unexpected locales and structures across the United States, where their artists will have free reign to show their work.  Early entries in the series include a show of works by Eric Wesley in a former Cahokia, Illinois Taco Bell, and a Daniel Buren show in Miami.  “It’s a way for us to expand our reach without opening full-scale operations in another city or in New York,” says associate director Emma Fernberger, “and just getting to see more of the country.”  (more…)

Robert Irwin, Dawn to Dusk (2016), via Art Observed

For the past two decades, Robert Irwin’s installation in the Texas town of Marfa has been something of a distant possibility, a long-rumored project commissioned by the Chinati Foundation, and focused around the dilapidated grounds of the former Fort D.A. Russell hospital where the organization makes its home.  Now complete, the massive installation work, Irwin’s only permanent, free-standing composition, has transformed the space into a placid marker of time, a place where meticulous architectural geometries make masterful use of the West Texas sun and landscape in a prime example of Irwin’s unique sculptural vocabulary.

Robert Irwin, Dawn to Dusk (2016), via Art Observed

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Nairy Baghramian, Scruff of the Neck (LR 30/31/32), All images via Marian Goodman Gallery

Now on view, Marian Goodman Gallery in London is presenting Scruff of the Neck, a series of site-responsive sculptures by artist Nairy Baghramian.   This is Baghramian’s first major solo show in London since The Walker’s Day Off at the Serpentine Gallery in 2010, and continues the Berlin-based Iranian artist’s practice in creating formally inventive sculptures that operate in both physiological and mechanical dimensions, articulating and reflecting the artist’s interest in exploring the space of the body in a non-habitual way. (more…)

Jason Moran, STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 (2015), via Art Observed

In STAGED, on view at Luhring Augustine, artist and musician Jason Moran explores the history of jazz in America, in connection with explorations of the relationship between music, language and communication.    The show, on view at the gallery’s Bushwick location through the end of next week, marks his first solo exhibition, where his work as a musician is complimented by artworks and installations that reflect and expand upon his profound knowledge of jazz and jazz history.

Jason Moran, Run 4 (2016), via Art Observed

Moran is best known as the MacArthur-winning jazz pianist and artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center.  In recent years, however, he has worked with visual artists like Theaster Gates, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Stan Douglas and Adam Pendleton to expand his repertoire beyond the concert hall.  In 2015, Moran debuted sculptures and a series of works on paper at the Venice Biennale, works that now constitute part of STAGED, an ongoing project.

Jason Moran, Run 4, Right Hand (2016), via Luhring Augustine

Negotiating the limits of historical and artistic investigation, the show examines the forces of performance and process that drive at the cultural and social history of jazz, the mingling of physical locations and the immense talents that graced their stages, in conversation across decades. Moran has created two installations based on historic New York City jazz venues that are no longer in existence: the Savoy Ballroom (opened in Harlem in 1926, now known as an emblem of the swing era), and the Three Deuces (a comparatively modest venue located in midtown prominent from the 1930s-1950s). These installations present a mix of both mythical imagining and historically accurate representation of these spaces, in which so much of jazz history took place. Moran’s installations recreate the stages of these institutions sourced from photographs taken at the height of their popularity.  Over the course of the viewer’s time in the show, the piano will strike up into song, or voices will echo out from the Savoy’s ceiling, entering into a ghostly dialogue that transcends easy readings of time and space.

Jason Moran, The Temple (For Terry Adkins) (2016), via Art Observed

Jason Moran, Basin Street Runs 1 and 2 (2016), via Art Observed

Memory and material residue feature prominently in this exhibition. Works are created by making runs on the piano with charcoal-covered fingers, or smearing the hands across piano rolls, as if the practice of musicianship was slurred across easy boundaries or notation, much in the way that Jazz so often upended the logical structure of early 20th Century music.  The smudges and flourishes of these works seem distinctly musical, as if the performative energy of the piece had been captured, a record of musical engagement that is charged with its musicality despite its purely material dimensions.

Jason Moran, STAGED: Three Deuces (2015), via Art Observed

In STAGED, Moran resurrects the material of musical history and negotiates the traces it leaves behind. This exhibition represents a stunning example of the productive and fascinating ways in which history, memory, art and research can intersect.  Though it resists classification under the heading of contemporary art, the sculptural and visual dimension of Moran’s STAGED are striking examples of how the immateriality of music and history can be captured on paper and in space.

— A. Corrigan

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Luhring Augustine]

Gladstone Gallery will reprise the sculpture and video of Matthew Barney’s 1991 performance Blind Perineum this fall, a piece in which the artist scaled across the ceiling of the space using ice picks.  “There are vast numbers of artists and other interested people who have heard about it but have never seen it,” Barbara Gladstone. “People think the performance was in front of an audience, but it never was.” (more…)

Artist Rashid Johnson has joined the board of the Guggenheim Museum, making him the first artist appointed to the position since the museum’s founding.  “The collective wisdom of the museum’s board will be considerably widened and deepened with Rashid Johnson’s joining,” says director Richard Armstrong.

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Kanye West will give a guest performance at next week’s Watermill Center Benefit, an event to help fund the institution’s continued expansion and library construction.  “If we lose our history, we lose our memory,” artistic director Robert Wilson says. “So we try to have here some awareness of what happened in the past.” (more…)

Robert Irwin is featured in W Magazine this week, as the artist prepares to open his new permanent installation in Marfa, subtly altering the frame of the Fort D.A. Russell hospital so that its walls and windows play on intersections of structural line and light.  “That’s the main event, all the windows. People think they’re looking for artwork but what they’re actually seeing is beautiful nature,” he says. “I liked the architecture of the fort. All I did was take that form and elaborate it—make the walls thicker, so you get a more substantial physicality to look out of. A real sense of frame.” (more…)

The U.S. government has filed lawsuits seeking to seize $1 billion in assets that it claims were diverted from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund by Malaysian government officials.  Among those named in the lawsuits are financier Jho Low, who recently made major purchases for works by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet, seized by Swiss officials on suspicion that they were purchased with the appropriated funds. (more…)

London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, has announced plans to democratize the arts in the British capital, proposing a plan for a “Love London” card that will offer discounts and access to cultural events around the city.  “I don’t want Zone 1 to hog the best arts and culture in our city. There are 33 boroughs, I want to democratize the arts so that every Londoner can benefit from the world’s best art. Love London will give you a discount to enjoy that,” he says. (more…)

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, Untitled (2015) © the Artist Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

A Modest Proposal, Hauser & Wirth’s summer exhibition curated by staff members Madeline Warren and Yuta Nakajima, adopts its eloquent title from Jonathan Swift’s namesake essay from 1729.  Recognized for being one of the foremost satirists in English language, Swift vigorously mocked Ireland’s political climate at the time through his sharp wit in various forms of writing—perhaps most famously in the show’s namesake essay, where the writer suggests the poor profit off of their children by selling them as food to the wealthy. (more…)

Colin O’Con, Magma Arch (2015), via Art Observed

In 2012, David Zwirner Gallery launched a novel concept for the summer group show.  Called People Who Work Here, the gallery opened its floors to its own employees, launching an exhibition of works that underscored the depth of talent of those working for the international mega-gallery.  Four years later, the gallery has picked up where the last exhibition left off, opening a new iteration of the show that welcomes over 35 artists to show their work at the gallery’s 19th Street location, just steps away from a massive new Jeff Koons sculpture in the gallery’s open garage exhibition space.  Curated by Marina Gluckman and Jaime Schwartz in gallery’s Research and Exhibitions department, the show takes a playful look at the gallery’s skilled employee based, and offers subtle historical parallels with its own selection of artists.

Joel Fennell, Still-life (after McCobb) (2016), via Art Observed

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The Detroit Institute of Arts as launched a multi-year commitment to deepen its holdings of African-American art, launching a new series of acquisitions, exhibitions, artist commissions, community partnerships, staff development and internships.  “We want to be the best,” says director Salvador Salort-Pons. (more…)

Art News takes an intriguing look at 57th Street, the original gallery district in New York, and its continued place in the New York art world.  “We have a lot of European artists we represent and I don’t think they were in love with Chelsea,” says Marian Goodman. “You see so many galleries in a row that you have to question the interest level [of visitors] after a while when they go to Chelsea. Very often they start to forget what gallery they’re in and what art they show.” (more…)

Empirical Intuitive Absorption (Installation View), via Art Observed

On paper, the list of artists for Andrea Rosen’s summer exhibition, Empirical Intuitive Absorption, may raise an eyebrow or two: Fernand Léger showing alongside Graham Marks, Matthew Ronay contrasted with Serge Charchoune, all underscored by Terry Riley’s swirling compositions.  Organized by Ronay, whose recent lecture at the Perez Museum in Miami inspired the exhibition, the show takes concepts of intuition and execution as two sides of the same coin, of the replication and creation of natural models through blind aesthetic representation. (more…)

Gagosian Gallery has agreed to pay over $4 million in back taxes owed to New York State this week, the New York Times reports.  “Although we cannot comment on these findings, we accept and will fully comply with the terms of the settlement to bring closure to this matter,” the gallery said in a statement.   (more…)

The name of the woman who received Van Gogh’s ear in the mail has been revealed for the first time, the Art Newspaper reports.  Gabrielle Berlatier was the daughter of a farmer, and was working in a brothel when she encountered Van Gogh, who would later send her his ear when he cut it off.   (more…)

Christie’s sales figures for the first half of 2016 dropped to £2.1 billion ($3 billion), down 29 percent from last year’s landmark year.  “I think there are no surprises,” says president Jussi Pylkkanen. “Volumes are down, year on year, and obviously it’s a very significant reduction in just the amount of artworks that were being traded.” (more…)

Camille Henrot is profiled in New York Times this week, as she opens a new show of work at Fondazione Memmo in Rome.  “Taking on fairly ambitious projects and producing a lot is a pace that suits me,” Henrot says. “When I was young, I was a little tortured by the fact that I couldn’t make all of the works that I had in my head. Today, I feel truly happy to have that freedom.” (more…)

Seventeen buildings by Le Corbusier have been named UNESCO World Heritage Sites this week, with the organization calling his work a “testimonial to the invention of a new architectural language that made a break with the past.”  The Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh in India; the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, Japan; and the House of Dr Curutchet in La Plata, Argentina are all included on the list. (more…)