Michele Abeles, 10/28/19, 5:00PM (2020), via 47 Canal

Upon entering the doors of 47 Canal Gallery, one is immediately greeted by a strangely familiar, and oddly timely series of images.  Skeletal hands, ghoulish visages and ghostly figures dance across a series of photos, while other frames bear the image if close up novelty gravestones and other Halloween decorations.  One month out from Halloween, the exhibition, presented by artist Michele Abeles, turns these familiar features into a meditation on commercial iconographies, capitalism and the spiritual undertones that these systems draw on, always centering the body in these conversations on space and time, the body and mortality.   Read More »

Kelly Akashi, via Tanya Bonakdar

The fall art season is in full swing, at least in name, with galleries cautiously reopening, and a tense consideration for ways forward currently in the air, all serving as a fitting backdrop for the second iteration of Art Basel’s Online Viewing Room program.  Filling in for the cancelled Basel and Miami Beach editions of its fair program, the recently opened OVR:2020 invites a select group of artists and galleries to make up some lost ground in their seasonal calendar, and to offer works for sale, amplified by the fair’s global reach. Read More »

Carmen Herrera, Painting in Process (Installation View), via Lisson

Since her time in post-war Paris when she first developed her signature hard-edged style, painter Carmen Herrera has instilled a rigorous practice to create her distinctive body of work, culling together a range of various color structures and elusive geometric arrangements to arrive at her engaging and unique constructions.  Now, the artist is opening a show of recent works at Lisson, bearing the title Painting in Process, exploring her construction and exploration of her works before their final form.  Read More »

Renée Green, Excerpts (Installation View), via Art Observed

Entering Bortolami Gallery for its first show of the fall season, one is immediately greeted by a flurry of color.  Bright   banners hang from the ceilings, adorned with dazzling fluorescent pairings that emphasize the fragments of text that dot each piece, and which find a fitting counterpoint in a ring of framed pieces encircling the gallery walls.   The pieces are the product of artist Renée Green, whose body of new works returns to an ongoing interest in the concept of color and language, text and space, perception and understanding.   Spanning the artist’s three decades of working with color’s polyvalent effects, the works in Excerpts manifest her open-ended questioning of invented yet established taxonomies, in order to play with and to displace designations that may seem to be known. Read More »

Cosima Von Bonin, HETERO (2020), via GAGA

Returning to Los Angeles for a second show with GAGA and her first in the gallery’s LA space, artist Cosima von Bonin has installed a body of new works, merging together her signature selections of pop cultural iconographies, material inversions and surreal interpolations of the gallery space, united under the title HETERO.  Using the gallery as a framework on which to explore and elaborate her unique formal investigations, the artist explores the idea of extended, and often distended, narrative flows.   Read More »

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

Drawing on the shifting conceptions of political geography and economy, the work of Lisa Alvarado mines a certain point of friction between western art history and other modes of visual expression, using historical frameworks and objects to populate her work with subtle but enduring critiques of capitalism and colonialism.  Alvarado’s paintings operate as stage sets, artworks, and ritual objects simultaneously, often targeting a certain sense of meditative, considered reflection while looking, and using this space to incorporate new historical tropes into the work.

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

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Ricky Swallow, Rocking Chair with Rope (Meditation #1) (2020), via David Kordansky

Currently on view at David Kordansky in Los Angeles is BORROWED SCULPTURES, an exhibition of new floor- and wall-based bronze sculptures by the Australian-born artist Ricky Swallow.  Continuing the artist’s enigmatic explorations of bronze sculpture and its relationship to the materiality of the everyday, the show mounts a body of works that walk a peculiar line between manufactured sculpture and readymade. Read More »

Heather Phillipson, The End (Installation View), via City of London

A riddle topped with a cherry, Heather Phllipson’s new sculpture installation on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in London has all the makings of a work fittingly in line with the surreal progression of events that have marked 2020.  A massive dollop of whipped cream, topped off with a cherry, a large fly and whirling drone, the piece, titled The End, seems to invite questions of just what its title might imply: are we looking at the end of meaning, the end of the world, or perhaps just the end of a particularly large sundae? Read More »

Gary Simmons, Screaming into the Ether (2020), via Metro Pictures

As galleries reopen in New York and test out their new exhibition strategies, the first string of gallery highlights and highly touted shows are beginning to pop up online.  Among these is Screaming into the Ether, the newest show of paintings by artist Gary Simmons at Metro Pictures.  Mining the language of classic cartoon aesthetics and the often physically expressive poses its characters took, Simmons’s show turns moments of comical action into desperate, unnerving moments through his slurred, blurry hand.   Read More »