James Welling, Chemical (2018), via David Zwirner

Over the course of the last decade, photographer James Welling has branched out into a series of more experimental modes of image production, often welcoming degrees of abstraction and indeterminacy into the creation of his photographic images.  Using unorthodox photographic procedures in conjunction with varied processes that see his works moving between abstraction and representation, his recent series of work are emblematic of the breadth of his ongoing experimentation with the conventions and materials of photography. (more…)

Richard Deacon, House & Garden (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

Drawing together a body of new photographs, ceramics and sculpture from the past year of artist Richard Deacon’s ever-evolving studio practice, the current solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery, House & Garden, explores relationships between materials and processes, representing innovations in Deacon’s thinking about sculpture, and the relationships of image to surface, object making to the pictorial, and sculpture to the plinth, all notions that have been present in his work and are at the nexus of his steadfast interest in a multiplicity of modes of production. (more…)

Hilma af Klint, Paintings for the Future (Installation View), via Art Observed

It’s been a long time coming for the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint.  Born in 1862 in Stockholm, her works during the years leading up to and after the turn of the 20th Century marked an increasingly surreal departure from the studied realism of her peers, and into a state of abstraction the made her a leading voice in the development of the language and practice of modernism. Yet af Klint’s work is also frequently held aside from her peers of the era, that is, until now, with an ambitious and thrilling Guggenheim exhibition aiming to put her work back into its proper historical and aesthetic context. (more…)

Michael Heizer (Installation View), via Gagosian

Spanning the breadth and depth of the artist’s work in both sculpture and land art, Gagosian’s Paris in Le Bourget is currently presenting a body of work by Michael Heizer that moves from 1968 to the present.  Over fifty years, Heizer has redefined the very idea of sculpture in his explorations of size, mass, and process. His earth-moving constructions, paintings, and drawings explore the dynamics of positive and negative space.  With this show, the magnitude and nuance of his work is allowed to breathe at scale, presenting a body of works that underscore his evolution and incorporation of increasingly complex methodologies into his practice. (more…)

Robert Rauschenberg, Palladian Xmas (Spread) (1980), via Ropac

Over the course of his career, Robert Rauschenberg occupied an almost innumerable series of critical and theoretical positions in the practice and production of art objects, often bounding from material to material and technique to technique in bounds that often moved beyond the scope of any single artists entire oeuvre.  His relentless interest in particular with the picture plane itself, and its capacity for interruption or disruption through the inclusion of ready-made objects, collaged pieces and even the scraps of other paintings, Rauschenberg produced what could best be considered as a career in a constant state of flux caused by its own movements.
Robert Rauschenberg, Rodeo Palace (Spread) (1976), via Rauschenberg Foundation

This winter, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London is presenting the artist’s iconic Spreads series, reflecting on the artist’s work pioneering new ways of painterly construction while remaining focused on his own painterly language.  The large-scale Spreads encapsulate many of Robert Rauschenberg’s best-known motifs and materials, and the twelve works from the series―the largest of which stretches to over six metres wide are presented alongside a series of paper collages from the same era.  In the Spreads the artist’s familiar motifs from his object-laden Combines is reprised, incorporating car tires, doors, bedding and other materials in conjunction with fabric materials and canvas, all conspiring to create a dense, multilayered series of materials that challenges and reframes the canvas as a collecting pool for both materials and ideas, reference systems and the objects that contain them, all negotiating within the canvas as one potential conclusion of the project of the 20th Century avant-garde.
Robert Rauschenberg, Rumor (Spread) (1980), via Ropac

Rauschenberg himself was well aware of these conversations of object and image, referring to the “Spreads” as both a negotiation of history and “something you put on toast.”  The language of his materials laid across the canvas negotiate with their mode of presentation, ultimately creating even more dense linguistic networks alongside the concepts explored within the works themselves.  Rather than a purely retrospective exercise, the development of his Spreads is also suggestive of a more complex relationship between past and present, integrating not only elements from his earlier work but also reflecting changes in his life, his practice and in contemporary art at the time. Rauschenberg’s use of fabric color blocks in his Spreads not only represented a shift in his color palette from the urban experience of New York to the bright oranges, pinks and yellows of life in Florida, but also engaged with recent artistic developments such as Color Field painting and Minimalism, incorporating references to a new generation of artists.

Robert Rauschenberg, Spreads 1975-1983 (Installation View), via Ropac

This series of works, a vast trove of historical touchstones and concepts united by Rauschenberg’s hand, makes for a striking investigation of the artists’s work, and his vantage point from the vanguard of 20th Century art.

The show closes Janaury 26th.

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Thaddaeus Ropac [Exhibition Site]

Bridget Riley, Quiver 3 (2014), via Spruth Magers

Comprising work made between 1960 and the present, Bridget Riley: Painting Now at Sprüth Magers LA surveys the development of the British artist’s career-long exploration of looking and seeing in relation to the capacities of painting and picture making. Her work, consisting of tightly-interlocked bands of color and explorations of the potential for relief and tension in the presentation of visual stimuli, is presented here in its development of optically-elusive, challenging pieces, ones that make the viewer acutely aware of the act of looking. (more…)

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

In 1998, artist Julia Scher installed her work Wonderland in New York. Immersing the galley in a theatrical pink and purple light, Scher’s Wonderland is a multimedia environment where visitors are welcomed by the sound of the artist’s authoritative yet soothing voice: ‘Attention. There are live cameras here in Wonderland, recording you… Warning. Your size may change, here in Wonderland. Thank you for coming!’ This hint at the concepts of surveillance, of the reproduction of reality, and of the deconstruction of space and time feel particularly resonant in a new century, and underscore the cutting-edge nature of Scher’s work.

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

Scher’s work comes on the heels of a recent revival in interest around her work, and a performance of one of her ongoing works, ‘Security by Julia’ at Frieze this year. The Security By Julia series, which began in 1988, uses public space to question the invasion of personal freedom within the public realm, using the tools of the electronic age to critically engage it, specifically a recurring use of security cameras. Here, her reprised work follows a similar logic, provoking questions on the state, its presence in everyday life, and ways of living beside, or outside of it.

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

At the center of the space are two semi-circular child-sized desks arrayed with complex technical equipment and cabling, vintage computer monitors with live surveillance footage, various ephemera—such as bags of White Rabbit Creamy Candy—and Scher’s signature pink guard caps. Alluding to prior works and dense multi-media narratives, the artist’s selections of objects form a central nervous system of sorts, a series of narrative elements conspiring in their reproduction and reframing of the reality of the gallery space. Referencing both psychedelics and classic literature, as well as her own work, Scher’s pieces here invite a meditation on youth and media. On the walls, complementing the central assemblage of technological apparatuses, large-scale prints depict children, among them American actress and director Lena Dunham aged 10, dressed in the same pink uniforms and caps that are neatly folded on the desks.

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

Posed here, the artist’s work mirrors the subversions of role-play and power, yet the inclusion of these same images are notable in turn for their place in the gallery today. It’s worth considering that the millennial models used for this piece have now grown into a place of power in the world. Dunham in particular is now a vastly successful writer and filmmaker in her own right. Scher’s work, presented in its new state, is perhaps an even more potent reflection at this point, not only suggesting the distended sense of reality caused by the exercise of state power, but perhaps more notably, the surreal nature of a new generation taking up these weapons, and eventually growing into their own place of power in the world.

The show closes February 9th.

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Julia Scher: Wonderland [Exhibition Site]

David Ostrowski, The Thin Red Line (Installation view), courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photography: Voytek Ketz, London & postproduction by Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin

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Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

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Seth Price, Hell Has Everything (2018), via Petzel

In the past several months, artist Seth Price has taken to making and posting mixtapes on his personal SoundCloud page. Described in a recent Art News post as “soundtracks for painters,” his mixes (and the article itself), underscore Price as an inveterate consumer of media and information, embracing a constant stream of data that he often delves into or twists up into the language and production of his works.  This compilation of information sits at the core of Hell Has Everything, the artist’s first show of work at Petzel Gallery in New York in six years.
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Chiharu Shiota, Me Somewhere Else (2018), via Blain Southern

Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota brings her signature techniques in environmental installation to bear at Blain|Southern this fall for her first exhibition at the gallery’s London space. Compiling a selection of new works that include a new site-specific installation, along with sculpture and works on canvas, the artist’s show, Me Somewhere Else, underscores her practice in attempting to connect and reframe the operations of her own memory in exchange with the world around her. (more…)

Ellsworth Kelly, Color Panels for a Large Wall II (1978), via Matthew Marks

In 1978, Ellsworth Kelly was commissioned to create a painting for the lobby of a new building in Cincinnati. His piece, Color Panels for a Large Wall, was the resulting work, a 30-by-125-foot painting that clocked in as his largest ever made. Yet the artist’s work in this vein would live well beyond this specific installation, reprised in several iterations of shows and installs in Amsterdam, New York, and Munich. In 2003, Kelly reconfigured the painting’s eighteen panels — from two rows of nine to three rows of six — when it was installed in its permanent home at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. (more…)

Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed

The long-awaited career retrospective of artist Bruce Nauman is now open in New York City, filling both MoMA PS1 and the sixth floor of MoMA’s main exhibition building in Midtown with the artist’s challenging, often outrageous body of work in sculpture, video, light works, and other formats.  The show, which is on view through February, is an intriguing and in-depth look at the work an artist always looking to push the boundaries of his craft, and often the viewer’s comfort level. (more…)

Hannah Wilke, Untitled (1974-77), via Alison Jacques

Bringing together works from the early 1960s through to 1987, Alison Jacques Gallery in London is currently presenting an exhibition spanning three decades of the American painter, sculptor, photographer, video and performance artist Hannah Wilke’s work, in partnership with The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles. This is the first time since Wilke’s death in 1993 that her paintings on canvas from the 60s have been exhibited. 
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Stanley Whitney, In the Color (2018), via Lisson Gallery

Color inspires and informs the work of Stanley Whitney, whose paintings explore the many possibilities for juxtaposition and movement across the canvas, each drawing on irregular rectangles in varying shades of strength and subtlety. His work creates fluctuating series of intensities and reliefs, draw on the composition of adjacent nodes, a structure that seems to welcome exchanges between freedom and constraint, open space and riding control, all bound together by the evolving exchanges in color.   He returns to New York this fall for his fourth exhibition with Lisson Gallery, marking the first solo show of the artist to occupy both of New York gallery spaces. Investigating his profound and nuanced relationship to color and its spatial effects throughout his career, the show includes paintings and drawings dating back to the 1990s in one gallery, and a suite of brand new works in the other.  (more…)

Blinky Palermo, To the People of New York City (1976), via Art Observed

One of his most iconic bodies of work, German artist Blinky Palermo’s To the People of New York City comes home this fall, placed on view at Dia: Chelsea.  Part of Palermo’s Metal Pictures series (or Metallbilder), the pieces reflect the artist at the peak of his abilities, and underscore his enduring contributions to the the landscape of the 20th Century avant-garde. (more…)

Agnes Martin, Affection (2001), From The Collection Of Laura Arrillaga-andreessen, © 2018 Estate Of Agnes Martin:artists Rights Society (Ars), New York

Having traveled from coast to coast for exhibition in New York City, Pace Gallery’s current show examined the shared aesthetic space of painter Agnes Martin and the meticulously crafted blankets of the Navajo (Diné) people of the American Southwest touches down for a striking last show of 2018.  The exhibition, which explores the shared use of parallel lines and tight grid-work in both the painter’s canvas and the blanket-maker’s loom, makes for a fascinating investigation of two aesthetically distinct visions that found their most compelling articulation amongst the landscape of the American desert. (more…)

Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel (Installation View), via Art Observed

One of the most eagerly-anticipated shows of 2018, artist Sarah Lucas has touched down at the New Museum, bringing with her an expansive body of works that runs the full expanse of her craft.  Curated by the New Museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni associate, Margot Norton, the show, Lucas’s first in an American institution, spans three floors and any number of aesthetic modes, moving from sculpture to photography, wallpaper to video in ways that both explore each object and twist the original historical contexts of their works (gallery shows, museums and her renowned Venice Biennale show from 2015 all get their due here) into new configurations. (more…)

Works by Adam Pendleton, via Eva Presenhuber

Exploring two distinct voices in the evolution of art practice over the past 20 years, Eva Presenhuber has brought a strikingly confrontational, challenging exhibition to New York City, showing a body of works by Adam Pendleton and Liam Gillick that works between each artist’s strengths, and mines an ever-shifting understanding of the world around them to motivate and elaborate their respective iconographies.  
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Dan Colen, The Trap (2016-2018), via Gagosian

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery’s Beverly Hills location in Southern California. Dan Colen has pulled together a body of paintings that feel decidedly at home in a location so close to Hollywood.  His show of new works, High Noon, is a striking interrogation of corporate image production, shared memories, and the cognitive effects of modern commercial communication, all pulled together by their use of a distinct style of background painting utilized heavily in the classic Wile E. Coyote cartoons of the Warner Brothers’ cartoon universe.   (more…)

Ken Price, NeGrum (1994), via Matthew Marks

Currently on at Matthew Marks Gallery’s New York exhibition space, a body of small-scale works by American sculptor Ken Price dot the room, each drawing the visitor’s eye with a meticulously arranged series of loping curves, compellingly evocative forms and lumpy, surrealist modes of expression.  This range of pieces, underscoring Price’s intuitive knowledge of bronze and its potential sculptural capacities, makes for a colorful, striking break from the chilling cold and overcast days of December in the city.  (more…)

Ugo Rondinone at Eva Presenhuber, via Art Observed

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Myrlande Constant, via Art Observed

With the proceedings of Art Week Miami winding on, the halls at the Miami Beach Convention Center continue to draw massive crowds of both buyers and visitors, its luxe appointments and impressive stock of established blue chip works commanding big headlines and even bigger price tags. But across Biscayne Bay, the New Art Dealers Alliance had kicked off its annual take on the Miami Fair Week. NADA Miami, set up inside the Ice Palace Film Studios, puts itself forward as showcasing new art and to celebrating the rising talents from around the globe, exploring new or underexposed art that is not typical of the “art establishment,” by their words. NADA Miami is also the one of the only major American art fairs to be produced by a non-profit organization, and is recognized as a much needed alternative assembly of the world’s youngest and strongest art galleries dealing with emerging contemporary art.

Nathan Hylden, via Art Observed

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Daniel Buren at Bortolami, via Art Observed

The doors have opened at the Miami Beach Convention Center yet again for another December sales event at Art Basel Miami Beach, as collectors, dealers and artists flock to its cavernous halls and pack its renovated structure for several days of sales and showings.  The fair’s place as the final major sales event of the year always seems to bring a last flutter of enthusiasm before the last weeks of December give dealers a chance to catch their breath, and this year was no exception, with collectors packing into the queue early in the morning for a first crack at the event’s VIP opening.   (more…)