Gina Beavers, Cake (2015), via MoMA PS1

In her visceral, vexing, often grotesque paintings, New York–based artist Gina Beavers welcomes an experience of pop culture, and of the history of its depiction in modern art, as a swirling vortex of techniques and transformations. Using sourced digital images appropriated from social media and the Internet, Beavers’s work sees her repurposing the digital graphics into thickly layered compositions that border on sculpture. Hot dogs and hamburgers, human lips and sporting implements all burst forth from the surface of the canvas, a sort of exercise in both dimensionality and texture that underscore their strange abstraction, both from the original scene captured, and from the image’s prior home online.  For her exhibition at MoMA PS1 this summer, the artist continues her explorations of these cultural formats. (more…)

Jeff Koons, Rabbit (1992), final price:$91,075,000, via Christie’s

Following the early days of the marathon week of auctions in New York, it wasn’t hard to anticipate a strong outing for the Contemporary Auctions soon to take place, yet the impressive sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips this week outpaced expectations, charting a path of major auction records and bested tallies that marked a strong outlook for the secondary market. Of particular note was the setting of a new auction record for a living artist with Jeff Koons’s Rabbit selling for a new record price of $91,075,000. (more…)

Arthur Jafa at the Venice Biennale, via Art Observed

The awards for the 58th Venice Biennale have been announced, with the Lithuanian Pavilion’s operatic beach installation taking home the Golden Lion for best exhibition, Arthur Jafa winning the Golden Lion for best artist in the main exhibition, and Jimmie Durham winning the Lifetime Achievement award.  A full list of awards is included below: (more…)

David B. Smith, via Art Observed

With the annual return of The Armory Show to the Piers on the West Side of Manhattan, so too comes the annual opening of the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, the adventurous, curator-driven program that takes up space at a pop-up location for a week of compelling and unique exhibitions and projects.  The fair’s playful reputation and emphasis on young artists and curators welcomed a striking intersection of styles and practices, yet one that seemed to frequently play on witty inversion or twists on the banal.  Given the size and scale of the proceedings around it, SPRING/BREAK has edged out an impressive niche for itself among the bustle of Armory Week, a space where exploration and adventurousness seem to win out over the sales-focused proceedings of its bigger sister fairs around New York. One can only hope that this sense of the unexpected continues to sit at the core of its mission, offering a refreshing respite from the all too familiar fair fatigue of the week. (more…)

Calvin Marcus, Blue Devil (2018) at David Kordansky, all images by Diletta Fenicia and Quincy Childs for Art Observed

Opening its doors this week for its 16th edition, Frieze London 2018 has once again turned the art world’s collective eye towards the British capital for the next week, as sales and installations across its spacious halls make for a fitting center to one of the city’s busiest art events. With 160 galleries from around the globe showing at the Regent’s Park exhibition space, the rest of the world seems to have come along for the ride.

Daniel Arsham, Patch 5 (2018) at Perrotin

Antony Gormley, FRONT (2016) and Alvaro Barrington, A Straight Face (2018) at Thaddaeus Ropac

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Megan Marrin at David Lewis, via Art Observed

Offering a fitting counterpoint to the expanses of the Messe Basel, Liste Art Fair has returned to Warteck, a former schoolhouse on the banks of the Rhine now serving as an exhibition and performance space, for another year of exhibitions showcasing adventurous and exploratory proects from a range of galleries around the globe.  Liste continues to build on its position as one of the central hubs for the week of Art Basel, priding itself on a careful curation of young galleries, dynamic, forward-thinking works, and a roster of performances that remains one of the week’s main draws.

Edouard Montassut, via Edouard Montassut

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Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché (1917), Price Realized: $157,159,000, via Sotheby’s

A marathon week of auctions in New York is now underway, but not quite off to a roaring start, as Sotheby’s capped an unsteady and often struggling auction this evening at its uptown location.  Led by a strong performance by an Amedeo Modigliani masterpiece, the sale failed to achieve much beyond its marquee lots, ultimately capping the sale with 13 unsold works that brought the sale to a final tally of $318,313,600.

Pablo Picasso, Le Repos (1932), Price Realized: $36,920,500, via Sotheby’s

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TEFAF NY, via Art Observed

Taking over the cavernous halls of the Park Avenue Armory, The European Fine Art Fair, better known as TEFAF, has returned to the Big Apple for another year, bringing a sense of balance and focus to the broad selection of fairs spread across the city.  The fair, which is now in its second year in the city of New York, has become one of the more noteworthy additions to an already crowded week of sales and fairs, with its focus towards high-end blue chip artworks in conjunction with classic design, artifacts and other fields, a focus that makes it both a concentration of the focus of many fair proceedings around town, and an elaboration, seeking buyers new to the field of collecting fine art, furniture, or otherwise, through a more organic mode. (more…)

Frieze, via Art Observed

As the sun beat down on the ferries making their way up the East River this morning, Frieze New York opened its doors on the early hours of its first preview day, offering an opportunity for collectors and dealers to take a first stroll through the fair without the bustling crowds of the later fair days.  Celebrating its seventh year on Randall’s Island, the fair’s early previews saw a first look at a fair that has come into its own as an anchor of New York’s already packed art scene, and which has become a much-anticipated first hint of the summer months in the city, a first opportunity to get outside and into the greenery of the slender island just north of Manhattan. (more…)

Artist Taryn Simon will reprise her powerful work An Occupation of Loss at a secret location in London, a piece in which she brings together a group of professional mourners from around the globe to perform their craft.  “Their performance activates tears in the mourners – and sometimes in those who enter the heightened atmosphere of the towers,” she says. (more…)

Goldsmiths College in South London will open a new art gallery in a converted swimming baths near the school.  The building will be designed by Turner Prize-winning collective Assemble. “Of course this is a building with a roof and walls and lighting, something I’ve wanted to do for a while; at the same time there is still an element of working with artists to make the building make sense, to use the idiosyncrasies of the building,” says director Sarah McCrory. (more…)

Laura Owens and Wendy Yao’s 356 Mission Gallery and Ooga Booga Bookstore project is shutting its doors in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights. “It was a labor of love, with finite resources, and never intended to last forever,” collaborator Whitney Yao said in a statement. “We still believe that art spaces are vital to the cultural empowerment of all people, and that artists can be allies of vulnerable communities.” (more…)

Bugada & Cargnel gallery in Paris has “ceased its activities,” Art News reports, closing up shop at its Belleville space. “We wish to thank all those, artists, gallery staff, collectors, curators, art critics, art lovers, who accompanied us, supported us, trusted us, or simply appreciated the exhibitions we organized and our work during all these years,” the gallery wrote, adding that there were plans for future projects. (more…)

Willem de Kooning at Lévy Gorvy, via Art Basel

Marking the second major international art fair of this month, the global arts community has headed east, touching down in the towering metropolis of Hong Kong for the sixth edition of the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair.  Marking the continued shift of focus on the highest end of the global market towards China and its neighbors, the fair has slowly but surely developed into an economic powerhouse for the market, and one where some of the largest deals seem to happen in an open selling environment.  As blue-chip dealers and gallerists increasingly focus on the city and surrounding regions for well-heeled buyers, the fair has taken up a place as a major meeting place for the international art cognoscenti and a group of collectors with an increasingly honed taste for Western art.

Anicka Yi at 47 Canal, via Art Basel

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Yinka Shonibare, Wind Sculpture (2018), via Art Observed

With the weather turning slowly towards the gentle breezes and sunshine of spring in New York, a new sculpture by Yinka Shonibare has sprung up on the corner of 5th Ave and 57th, the southeastern corner of Central Park and long-running home to the Public Art Fund’s ongoing commission project.  The piece is a particularly resonant one for the current juncture, mixing bright colors and a fluid, windswept form that carries deeper political subtexts and histories of capitalist exploitation of the African continent.  (more…)

Terence Koh at Andrew Edlin, via Art Observed

Situated in a beautiful lofted space in the heart of TriBeCa, Independent NY is easily one of the most picturesque of the fairs returning to Armory Week this year.  Looking out at the towering skyline of downtown Manhattan, the viewer’s gaze alternates between works hung close to the floor to ceiling glass paneling and on the erected walls nearby.  The open plan and imaginative projects chosen only adds to the atmosphere, making Independent simultaneously a relaxed, mellow browsing experience and a deep dive into impeccably selected works. (more…)

Yinka Shonibare at James Cohan, via Art Observed

As Wednesday winds down, this year’s edition of the annual Armory Show has gotten underway, with the doors of Piers 92 and 94 opening on to an expansive array of booths and art objects.  Marking its most recent iteration since first opening in 1994, this year’s edition of the Armory Show also marked its first for new director Nicole Berry, who took over following Benjamin Genocchio’s ouster over reports of sexual harassment.  Berry brings years of experience with EXPO Chicago, and it shows, with a relaxed pacing and well-curated body of main booths and special exhibitions keeping the fair at the top of its game. (more…)

Brooke Nicholas, via Art Observed

As the Armory Week begins to heat up, and turns towards the centerpiece of the week’s proceedings at Piers 92 and 94 tomorrow, the first night of SPRING/BREAK was underway at 4 Times Square.  Holding its seventh edition this year, the fair has grown into one of the more enigmatic and exciting events of the week, with this year being no exception.   (more…)

Tomas Saraceno at Tanya Bonakdar, via Art Observed

The early weeks of March in New York are notoriously packed with art.  There’s the usual string of exhibitions and openings, coupled with the ever-growing number of art fairs taking up space across the city during Armory Art Week.  With that in mind, it’s no wonder that the ADAA might look outside this marathon week in hopes of reaching a broader fair-going public. That gambit seems to have paid off this year, as the ADAA Art Show opened its doors at the end of February, setting itself apart from the mass of exhibitors opening their doors in the coming days.   (more…)

Sophie Kitching, Ausblick (2018), Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen, LL 31012018 (2018), installation view -46,08°, fffriedrich, photo by Robert Schittko

The night sky, with the reflecting light of the full moon or the gloom of the new moon, offers a polarity of attraction and rejection that not only affects natural phenomena like high and low tide but also works as a mirror for the contemplation of basic human dispositions. Gazing into the stars, the astronomical objects or their formal representation, comes from the curiosity to see what lies beneath the surface of things. This ability to go beyond the boundaries of time, space and fiction, and the fascination for the infinity of the outer space has been a constant source of inspiration for artists.

-46,08°, fffriedrich, installation view

Frankfurt-based project space fffriedrich presents such parallel visual worlds in the exhibition ‘-46,08°’ featuring works by Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen, Sophie Kitching and Anselm Schenkluhn. For all three artists, the moon and the stars function as symbols, become subjects of iconographical experiments or are actively implicated in their creative process. The works on view move between personally and scientifically oriented approaches and explore various craft techniques in their artistic development. Presence and absence, shadow, illusion and dissolution are recurring concepts in their work.

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Allan McCollum at Thomas Schulte, via Art Observed

The doors have opened on the latest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, bringing a stream of collectors and dealers into the Miami Beach Convention Center for another year of the fair’s high-profile sales, and an annual look back at the year for the art world.  Commanding a roster of over 200 galleries from around the world, the marquee event of the fall market season in the U.S., and one of the biggest social events of the art world calendar has gotten underway, with thousands flocking to the sun and sand of the Florida metropolis.

Kevin Beasley at Casey Kaplan, via Art Observed

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Claude Monet, Les Glaçons, Bennecourt (1893), via Sotheby’s

Following a landmark sale last evening at Christie’s, Sotheby’s took its turn this past evening in the Impressionist and Modern category, pursuing the exceptional results its rival notched over the course of the evening.  Tonight was no different, as the auction house led a wild sprint through its 67-lot sale to reach a final tally of $269,718,600. (more…)

The Bass in Miami Beach. Photo by Robin Hill : Courtesy of The Bass.

Located in the center of Miami Beach’s rapidly expanding art and architectural hub, The Bass Museum has finally reopened after an ambitious renovation spearheaded by principal architect David Gauld. The $12 million renovation and expansion, which adds 4,100 square feet to the existing 8,700 square feet exhibition space, as well as a brand new 5,200 square feet wing for educational programming, is the second major renovation the museum has undertaken since opening in 1964. The Bass (which was originally named the Bass Museum of Art) went through an expansion of 16,000 square feet in 2001 under the creative consultancy of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, whose team then had included Gauld. In the new space, the New York-based architect’s vision suggests commitment to authenticity, while expanding towards new horizons in the museum-going experience. The additions of new programmable space merges with the building’s monumental integrity and refined Art-Deco façade, allowing a sophisticated vision of a global contemporary art museum under the welcoming dome of a landmark institution that has catered to local residents in Miami Beach for decades.

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Sanford Biggers presented by monique meloche, via Art Observed

Situated just beyond the tourist traps of Navy Pier, the EXPO Chicago art fair attracted visitors out over the lapis waters of Lake Michigan for the sixth iteration offering another year of global arts attention on the Windy City. British artist Roger Hiorn‘s deliciously fun, foam spawning A retrospective view of the pathway is prominently placed in the front yard of the space, serving as a prominent lure for the show, and indicative of this same international flavor. As well as partnering with the Palais de Tokyo and Institut Francais for an exhibition of emerging French and Chicago artists at the DuSable Museum of African American History, the press release heralded this year as the “most global edition to date.”

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