Charline von Heyl, New Work (Installation View), via Art Observed

Few artists possess the sort of free-ranging, exploratory style and vocabulary that seems to mark the output of artist Charline von Heyl.  The German-born painter’s work is relentlessly committed to the canvas as a space for both formal reinvention and ongoing investigation.  Moving through a new selection of works this fall at Petzel Gallery, von Heyl returns to this mode, presenting a series of new compositions that marks her continued interest in texture and space as formative modes of the painter’s internal language.   (more…)

Marguerite Humeau, Birth Canal (Installation View), via Adelaide Pacton for Art Observed

Marking a new chapter in a body of work that has long mined the strange juxtapositions of history, culture, form and space, artist Marguerite Humeau has touched down at the New Museum this month, opening a show of works that will remain on view throughout the fall season.  The show, titled Birth Canal, presents a new body of digitally rendered sculptures realized in cast bronze and carved stone, each proposing its own unique vision of how to think through the understanding of the body and it relation to modernity.   (more…)

Harold Ancart, Untitled (2018), via David Zwirner

Over the past few years, Belgian-born, New York-based painter Harold Ancart has remained one of the more unique voices in modern painting.  The artist’s deceptively simple, ragged style of painting and his intuitive interpretations of natural phenomena and iconographies have seen his work move through a broad range of styles and iterations, including massive depictions of flames, icebergs and lush forests, always offset by a sense of spatially-sound minimalism.  Captivating in their spare, exploratory style, the artist’s works are a fascinating look at the language of modern practice, and how historical touchstones can double back on themselves to create new structures and vocabularies.  (more…)

Li Binyuan at MoMA PS1, via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Exploring shared conceptual space between two generations of Chinese performance artists, MoMA PS1’s Land: Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan is a highlight of its summer calendar.  The exhibition, which draws on each artist’s unique approach to the body, particularly bodies exposed to physical or mental extremes, as well as the forces applied to it, from urbanization to culture to the natural world, presents itself as a documentation of sorts, relying heavily on each artist’s history of performance and video.   (more…)

Senga Nengudi, RSVP Reverie D (2014), via Sprüth Magers

For over four decades, artist Senga Nengudi has been pushing at the boundaries between sculpture, photography, and performance. A member of the African American avant-garde in Los Angeles and New York during the 1970s and 1980s, Nengudi began her career with innovative sculptures and performances, staged within art spaces and beyond gallery walls, that expanded the definition of sculpture, while simultaneously drawing on performance art’s ephemeral capabilities to investigate and question.  For Nengudi, this mode worked well to examine and seek to define women’s delimited roles in contemporary culture. Marking her first solo exhibition in Germany, the artist”s current exhibition at Sprüth Magers is a concise and powerful summary of her work at a time of significant debates worldwide over power and identity. (more…)

David Wojnarowicz, Americans Can’t Deal with Death (1990), via Art Observed

Few artists have managed to fly so consistently under the microscope of the art world’s fascination with downtown New York in the way that David Wojnarowicz has for so many years. Beginning in the late 1970s, the artist created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes, yet his body of work has long been held off from the more hallmark names of the era in terms of impact and historical resonance.  This month, The Whitney seeks to remedy this situation, granting the artist his first major museum retrospective, and turning its focus on a body of work that has long shone brightly even away from the limelight. (more…)

James Turrell, Logos (97) Medium Glass Circle (2017), via Kayne Grifffin Corcoran

Kayne Griffin Corcoran Los Angeles is currently exhibiting a selection of new and historic works by James Turrell, including four unique glass works, together with his Autonomous Structures series, a as well as models and prototypes of architectural spaces made between 1989 and 1991. The works on view epitomize his ongoing conversation with light in a retrospective that looks back on the last fifty years through a focused group of pieces. Light and space become a mode of understanding space and time, echoing the circumstances of perception, and building an architecture in its own right. The viewer perceives his sites only through consciousness, with light functioning as an interior mirror reflecting the spatial and temporal depths of one’s seeing, and the presence within space. “I’ve always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream,” Turrell says. “Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people…we don’t normally see light like that. But we all know it.” Turrell does not aim at bringing the viewer to a dazed, exotic zone; he wants to recall this other dimension we know innately.  (more…)

Nicholas Hlobo, Phantsi Komngcunube (2017), via Lehmann Maupin

Artist Nicholas Hlobo’s work has long explored the potentials for using various material sources and referential systems, using a range of elements like metal piping and fabric stitching to create elegant, arcing forms and figures that operate as self-contaned metaphors of sorts.  Free-flowing and adventurous, the artist’s work allows him to work instinctively while drawing his forms directly onto canvas from his subconscious, a mode that invites both critical participation and quick impulse at the same time. His work is presented in some sense as a catharsis or exorcism, purging from himself the indoctrination of cultural dichotomies that set boundaries of either/or, where Hlobo wishes to portray the multitude. (more…)

Julia Phillips, Failure Detection (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on at MoMA PS1, New York-based artist Julia Phillips makes her solo museum debut with a show of tense, stimulating sculptures that explore both the presence and absence of the human form.  Featuring six newly commissioned major works alongside existing sculptures, Phillips’s work dives into the space around the body as reflective of the internal, and external politics shaping the world beyond its limits.

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Subodh Gupta, Adda/Rendez-vous (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view through the end of the summer at the Monnaie de Paris, Indian artist Subodh Gupta has orchestrated a series of large scale installations and sculptures spread throughout the halls of the famed Parisian institution, a body of work that runs throughout the artist’s focused and expressive sculptural practice. Selected pieces will be on display in conversation with the Monnaie’s permanent collection of metal artifacts to encourage reflection on the medium of metal both in terms of its symbolic value as well as the technical and artistic skill required to manipulate and bring meaning to it. (more…)

Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (1975), via Art Observed

Featuring one hundred artworks by Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeu de Paume anchors its summer offering with a show dedicated to the artist’s equally enigmatic and engaging practice, one that worked through principles of urban encounter, agency and abstraction with a unique sense of humor.  The show, titled Anarchitect explores the importance of Matta-Clark’s practice towards a rethinking of architecture after modernism. Embracing a diversity of media that include photography, film and printmaking, the exhibition features a number of works related to contemporary urban culture that further contextualize Gordon Matta-Clark’s compelling critique of architecture. (more…)

Peter Fischli, Cans, Bags and Boxes (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings

Currently on view at Reena Spaulings in New York, artist Peter Fischli has brought together a body of small-scale works under the title Cans, Bags and Boxes.  Marking an elaboration and subtle reinterpretation of a body of works originally shown in Los Angeles last year, the exhibition emphasizes Fischli’s razor-sharp wit and roving creative vision.   (more…)

Jack Smith, Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Artists Space in New York, artist Jack Smith’s adventurous, ground-breaking oeuvre is the subject of an ambitious, expansive two-floor exhibition exploring his work in the 1970’s and 80’s.  Smith’s work sits at the core of much of the American underground’s creative output of the last quarter of the 20th Century, uniting a group of artists invested in the eerie and weird, the surreal, and the abject as strategies to push (or even antagonize) the viewer’s understanding of their format, and the world around them. One can easily see the impact of Smith’s work in John Waters’ filmic output, or Mike Kelley’s sculptural and performative riffs, to name a few. Smith’s work was equally influential in its do-it-yourself mentality as it was for its sheer ability to create worlds and populate them with a swirling, surreal cast of characters that seemed to work both as surrealist escape and autobiographical interpretation of the world of Manhattan during the post-war years.

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Tony Oursler, TC: The Most Interesting Man Alive (Installation View), via Lisson Gallery

Tony Conrad stands among the pinnacle of modern artistic practice; a pioneering and influential experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, artist and educator whose body of work can rarely be traced within the framework of just one discipline or school of thought.  A longtime educator in conjunction with his expansive practice, Conrad’s work moves at a sprint through ideas and constructs, and has remained influential on much of the artists who worked around and with him.  One of these artists was Tony Oursler, who met Conrad in 1979 and performed in a number of Conrad’s films, ultimately forging a bond that would lead to a range of collaborations and pieces. Among these is TC: the most interesting man alive, a short biopic piece that incorporates a range of cinematic, graphic, narrative and autobiographical approaches to produce a new form of biopic about the late artist Tony Conrad. (more…)

The Mechanics of Fluids (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Currently on view at Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea exhibition space, the gallery’s entry in the annual string of summer group shows dives into the work of artist-turned-curator Melissa Gordon. Gordon, whose work explores shifting, ever-changing experiences in texture and materiality, turns her aesthetic sensibilities towards a broader selection of women artists, charting a broad trajectory of voices and strategies including work by Lynda Benglis, Helen Frankenthaler, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman and others, all set set off by an architectural intervention of Gordon’s own design. (more…)

Alex Da Corte, Slow Graffiti, 2017.©Alex Da Corte. Courtesy the artist

David Zwirner’s summer group exhibition, This Is Not a Prop brings together aesthetically slick and conceptually witty works by an intergenerational group of artists working in a variety of media. The thread weaving through the show is questioning of bodies’ relationship to objects, both in harmony and discord, as most vividly manifested in two Franz West sculptures from the ‘90s spearheading the exhibition. (more…)

Josh Kline, 10% Tip (Applebee’s Waitress’ Hand and Foot) (2018), via Metro Pictures

Currently on view at Metro Pictures, and continuing a trend this summer towards artists taking the curatorial reins for the summer group shows across the city, Josh Kline has pulled together a body of work for the Chelsea exhibition space under the title Evidence. Featuring the work of seven artists, Evidence investigates the nature of documentation and reality in post-truth America, posing the state of modern political discourse as an opportunity to reframe and rethink the act of expression. (more…)

Sedrick Chisom, Fragile Narcissus’ Expulsion and Regurgitation of White Bile Into an Echo of His Belated Self (2018), via JTT

Drawing on the writings of the late theorist Mark Fisher as a starting point for broader explorations of modern artistic practice and its possibilities in challenging the status quo of the global capitalist landscape, Dan Herschlein has dipped his toe into the world of curating, organizing an exhibition around the work David Altmejd, Adam Putnam, Elizabeth Jaeger, Gil Batle, and more at JTT.  Using varied approaches and modes of creative making, including illustration, sculpture and even graphic novels, Herschlein’s show delves into the idea of just how modern practice might be able to work around “culturally sanctioned ideals” or to explore how the human mind may be able to sustain itself beyond these ideals. (more…)

Leidy Churchman, Paradise 8 & 9 (2018), via Matthew Marks

Following past iterations in 1998 and 2008 iterations, Painting: Now and Forever, Part III occupies the gallery spaces of Matthew Marks Gallery and Greene Naftali spread across Chelsea. Spanning five spaces in total, the ambitious checklist includes an impressive roster of over forty artists. While loosely grouping the show around style and visual vocabulary in each space, the exhibition more broadly tackles the stylistic and thematic concerns contemporary painting—mostly figurative–over the past decade.

Nicole Eisenman, Luck Lines (2018), via Greene Naftali (more…)

Carol Bove, The Romance of Black Money (2018), via David Zwirner

Currently on view at David Zwirner’s 24 Grafton Street location in London, artist Carol Bove has erected a series of her recent sculptures, exploring the artist’s continued practice combining tightly orchestrated references to the canon on modern sculpture with her own enigmatic interpretations and spatial innovations.  The show, which closes at the end of the week, marks a another chapter in Bove’s impressive vision, as her brightly colored, monolithic works continue to shift and evolve in vision and scope. (more…)

Urs Fischer, One More Carrot Before I Brush My Teeth (2001), via Hauser & Wirth

In reference to the address of Cabaret Voltaire – the birthplace of Dada in Zurich, Switzerland, Hauser & Wirth’s current exhibition Spiegelgasse (Mirror Alley), takes the landmark avant-garde movement as a starting point, and dives into the history of modern and contemporary Swiss art.  Curated by Gianni Jetzer, Mirror Alley presents a range of works from the 1930s to the present day.   (more…)

Iván Argote, Deep Affection (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view now at Galerie Perrotin in Paris, artist Iván Argote has traced a striking psycho, winding together disparate locales, global actions and fragments of a broader social narrative to understand and explore the world around us. The show, which draws on the artist’s range of actions and pieces investigating political action and history, offers a range of potentials for joining together global populations, often through a combination of art and action.

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Margo Wolowiec, 10pm Saturday (view 2) (2018), all images via Marlborough Contemporary

Detroit-based multimedia artist Margo Wolowiec’s first exhibition, Still Water, Circling Palms, at Marlborough Contemporary is a full-force manifestation on the merger of craft and digital technology. Covering the gallery’s spacious ground floor, the artist’s tapestry paintings are semi-abstract representations of computer screen shots, abundantly-colored plants, densely-blue skies or wave-strewn seascapes. Made from handwoven polymers, linen, dye sublimation ink and acrylic dye, these hallucinatory works convey dream-like collages of her various source materials, inviting the viewer to closely inspect the formation of each thread within the larger frame. (more…)

Fred Wilson, Afro Kismet (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Pace Gallery’s New York location, artist Fred Wilson has mounted his powerful exhibition Afro Kismet, reprising a work from the Istanbul Biennial that sought shared cultural threads and a refreshed cultural understanding of shared relationships between Africa and the Middle East. Continuing Wilson’s nuanced dialogues with both historical and cultural framing in conjunction with a studied view of both modern and deep history, the show’s trip to New York offers a second chance for viewers to see a challenging and important piece of work by the artist. (more…)