Maureen Dougherty, BOXER (2023), via Cheim and Read

On view this summer in New York, Cheim & Read gallery invites artist Maureen Dougherty to present Borrowed Time, a selection of new works by the painter and filmmaker. Continuing the artist’s work in documentary modes that branch both creative practices, the works on view here are direct and unflinching portraiture, stark in color and form in a manner that explores the sitter’s persona in deep, rich nuances.

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Regina José Galindo, SIREN (installation view)

On Saturday, July 29, 2023, The Watermill Center hosted “the BODY: The Watermill Center Annual Summer Benefit,” celebrating creative experimentation in support of the organization’s year-round Artist Residency and Education programming. This year’s benefit centered on the body’s role in art making and featured exhibitions and performances by a dynamic roster of international artists before culminating with a showing of Artistic Director Robert Wilson’s “Ubu.” (more…)

Sanaa Gateja, Ripe (2022), via Karma

This summer in New York, Karma presents Rolled Secrets, the first New York solo show dedicated to the work of Sanaa Gateja’s following the artist’s inclusion in the 58th Carnegie International. The artist, who transforms natural materials and post-consumer paper waste into complex, mosaic-like works, here continues his practice with a range of materials that include hand-rolled paper beads, cloth, and soaked and pounded strips of bark. Motivated by an innate sensibility of form, Gateja’s often monumental works oscillate between figuration and abstraction.  (more…)

Song Dong, ROUND (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this summer at Pace Song Dong’s ROUND focuses on the artist’s practice over the past three years, placing ancient Chinese philosophy in a contemporary context and offering new understandings of ideas that figure prominently in his work. Song, who is one of the most important figures of the Conceptual art movement in China, blurs the boundaries between art and life in his interdisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and film. Here, the artist uses the circle as a mode of philosophical and graphical meditation, reflecting on culture, memory and time through a range of forms.  (more…)

Thomas Hirschhorn, Schema Art and Public Space (2016-2022), via Marlborough

This summer at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, the group show Schema: World as Diagram presents a dynamic and intricate series of investigations into lines of thought, diagrammatic modes of thinking, and the use of graphical and indexical modes of organization to present and obscure the process of thought and creation. Occupying two floors of the gallery, the exhibition brings together over 50 artists whose works engage in these themes.  (more…)

Klara Kristalova, The Cold Wind and the Warm (Installation View), via Lehmann Maupin

This summer in London, Lehmann Maupin presents The Cold Wind and the Warm, an exhibition of new work by Klara Kristalova, dwelling on the artist’s figurative ceramic sculptures that incorporate both aspects of the human body and elements of nature, and marking her first solo show in London.  (more…)

Distribuidx (Installation View), via Lisson

This summer, Lisson Gallery marks its entry into the string of group shows sprung up across the art world with a show that opens a dialogue between the work of artist Hélio Oiticica and a range of intergenerational artists with varying relationships to Latin America. The presentation is curated by César García-Alvarez, the Executive & Artistic Director of The Mistake Room in Los Angeles. (more…)

Gilbert & George, BONE TIES (2022), via Lehmann Maupin

This month at Lehmann Maupin’s New York exhibition space, artists Gilbert & George present a body of new works, unified under the title THE CORPSING PICTURES, and centering on concepts of death and humor in equal measure. The exhibition comprises a suite of richly colored pictures starring the artists themselves in various poses of alarm and resignation as bones encroach in intricate patterns over their faces and bodies. Employing their signature use of bold color and symmetrical composition, Gilbert & George confront the subject of mortality and life itself. (more…)

The Lawrence Weiner estate is now represented in Asia by Pace. “Lawrence Weiner’s work redefined how art can communicate meaning,” Pace CEO Marc Glimcher said in a statement. “Language and material come together in his practice to create an experience that is somehow at once universal and unique. A giant of Conceptualism, Weiner offers the phenomenal, the radical, and the poetic in his work, and we are honored to bring it to our audiences to engage with it themselves.” (more…)

Piet Mondrian, Evolution (1911), via Art Observed

This summer, the Tate Modern presents an exploratory show tracing convergences and divergences in the work of Piet Mondrian and Hilma af Klint. Taking the work of these two luminary twentieth century artists in concert, the show draws intriguing connections across phenomenology, experience, and abstraction, exploring how each artist used their craft to push deeper inquiries and explorations of the world they lived in.  (more…)

Oscar Murillo, manifestation (2020-2022), via Gagosian

This summer at its Grosvenor Hill, London location, Gagosian presents To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting, an exhibition of new and recent works by more than forty artists from the Americas, United Kingdom, and Germany. The exhibition has been organized by guest curator Gary Garrels, who, in collaboration with the artists, has selected a single painting by each, with most works presented here for the first time. This is Gagosian’s first exhibition to be sited across its two galleries in Mayfair, at Grosvenor Hill and Davies Street. (more…)

Bob Thompson, An Allegory (1964), via 52 Walker

Marking its seventh exhibition downtown, 52 Walker has opened So let us all be citizens, an exhibition devoted to the short but fruitful career of Bob Thompson. Spotlighting the artist’s jazz-influenced style and consideration for color, line, and figuration—developed during a period when abstraction was the dominant trend in American art—this intimate exhibition pays homage to the friction Thompson generated between his proximity to and deviation from cited and canonical sources.

Bob Thompson, So let us all be citizens (Installation View), via 52 Walker

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Jordan Wolfson, Untitled (2020), via Gagosian

Opening in conjunction with the hustle and bustle of fair week in Basel, artist Jordan Wolfson presents a selection of works at Gagosian that continue his incisive and often wry investigations of violence, pop culture, and constructions of identity. Pairing painted-over photographs of the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. with decals bearing the graphic image of a red rose and the forbidding slogan “Describing how a dog was slaughtered,” Wolfson juxtaposes and mischievously negates potent signifiers of optimism, infallibility, and love.

Jordan Wolfson, Untitled (2020), via Gagosian

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Uri Aran, I’m a Restaurant (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps

On view this month at Andrew Kreps in New York, artist Uri Aran opens a presentation of new works united under the enigmatic title I’m a Restaurant. Exploring pluralities of voice, modalities of form, and a perspective on narrative and the artist that invites vagaries and unclear frameworks.Aran leaves exposed the threads of the mysterious, unstable process by which parts turn to wholes, drawing on traditions of assemblage, ready-made, and process art to create works that are ambiguous and ever-shifting, changing with each viewer, with each viewing. (more…)

The Met is training a group of military officers to work at saving historical artifacts and artworks in Ukraine. “The weaponization of art history,” says Alison Hokanson, associate curator of European paintings, “is the weaponization of objects but also the weaponization of the stories that are told through these objects.” (more…)

Alice Neel at Victoria Miro, all images via Art Observed

Once again opening in the early weeks of summer in the Swiss city of Basel, the Art Basel art fair kicked off its opening previews early this week, with crowds flocking to the Messe Basel for another week of works on view, films, talks, and other projects. Preparing for its public opening with an expansive offering of works from European galleries and those further afield, the fair continues its reputation as a flagship for the international fair brand, with over 200 leading galleries and more than 4,000 artists from five continents.

Danielle Orchard at Perrotin

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Yayoi Kusama, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers (2023), via David Zwirner

On this month, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers,  brings together a body of new of works by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama at David Zwirner featuring new paintings and sculptures elaborating on her signature motifs of pumpkins and flowers, and a new Infinity Mirror Room. Presented across the gallery’s 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street locations in New York, this will mark ten years since Kusama’s first solo show with David Zwirner in 2013 and will be one of her largest gallery exhibitions to date. (more…)

Hernan Bas, Conceptual artist #23 (Popsicle stick sculptor; a purist, he consumes his materials in devotion to his craft, leading to his inevitable last work) (2023), via Lehmann Maupin

Lehmann Maupin presents the latest works by Hernan Bas this summer; The Conceptualists: Vol. II, an exhibition of new work that continues a project begun in 2021. Bas is best known for his narratively rich scenes that feature a wide-range of references spanning art and literature, popular culture, kitsch, the occult, religion, and mythology. Across his works, Bas seeks to defamiliarize everyday experience through humor, revealing the surreal and absurd lurking beneath the mundane. In the Conceptualists series, Bas marries his personal appreciation of conceptual artists with his ongoing exploration of eccentricity.  (more…)

Luc Tuymans, Smiley (2022), via David Zwirner

Open this month at David Zwirner Gallery’s  537 West 20th Street location in New York, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans presents a selection of new works that marks his seventeenth show with the gallery. Mining a hazy, liminal technique that results in works that defy easy categorization, Tuymans continues the exploration of the act of seeing, and reflecting that image in his work.  (more…)

Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Daniel Paiol López (2023), via Sean Kelly

Sean Kelly in New York presents a body of new works by painter Kehinde Wiley this month, inviting the artist to showcase a series of paintings that continue his interpretation of the western canon and its politics of representation and perspective. Informed by Wiley’s focus on the evolution of Black culture globally, the show draws on the artist’s recent visits to Cuba, and explores the phenomenon of the carnivalesque in Western culture. Referencing a diverse range of artists, the circus, and the power of street performance and dance, the HAVANA paintings focus on the circus as a site of disruption for the rational mind and circus performers who embrace a dynamic and vibrant way of living and being in the world.

Kehinde Wiley, Misahel Hernández Study (2023), via Sean Kelly

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Emily Ludwig Shaffer, Mary (2023), via Galerie Pact

This month in Paris, artist Emily Ludwig Shaffer presents a body of new works at Galerie Pact that continue an expressive and iterative approach to the language and canon of art history, interpreting and recontextualizing classical signifiers as a colorful and densely layered series of canvases. Using the work as a space to reclaim the woman’s body from the male gaze, her pieces draw on human form and its relation to history to create new modes and representations.  (more…)

Austin Lee, Good Weather (2023), via Pace Prints

This month in New York, artist Austin Lee presents a selection of prints in collaboration with the Pace Prints studio. Titled “Good Impressions,” the show marks a continuation of Lee’s expressive and multi-faceted modes of image generation.  (more…)

Lena Henke, Memory of young sculpture VIII (2023), all images via The Ranch

This summer at The Ranch in Montauk, artist Lena Henke has installed a body of works that respond to the site’s equestrian and architectural histories. Titled Nature Wills It, the exhibition brings together a range of works that combine human and animal signifiers to create a range of formally and conceptually-challenging works in the gallery space. Rather than put forward a coherent and unified body, Henke’s work proposes alternate ways of figuring the horse. These sculptures evince an agonistic making: grappling for different means of picturing the animal’s visual features. Endeavoring toward the haptic and latent, the horse is segmented into components (head, body, hoof), each given its own handling and media. (more…)

Abraham Cruzvillegas, Little Song (Installation View), via Kurimanzutto

On view at Kurimanzutto’s New York exhibition space this month, artist Abraham Cruzvillegas brings forth his second solo project in the city with a new body of sculptural pieces created in his studio in Mexico City in the last year. The show, which takes over the gallery’s larger exhibition space in the city, integrations the artist’s signature approach and trademark color motifs, paying tribute to the work of Brazilian post-war art while engaging with the aritst’s own iterative exploration of historical and material interests. (more…)