AO Art Observed™

Marina Abramović, The Abramović Method: Chair for Man and His Spirit (2012). All photos © Marina Abramović by SIAE 2012, courtesy Marina Abramović and Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan unless otherwise noted.

Known as the “grandmother of performance art,” Serbian artist Marina Abramović has chosen Milan as the setting for the exhibition of her much anticipated new body of work, titled The Abramović Method. Presented at PAC Padiglione d’Art Contemporanea through June 10, 2012 and complemented by an exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Lia Rumma (through May 12, 2012), this is her first major performance since MoMA’s The Artist is Present in 2010, during which Abramović sat in a gallery for 700 hours, silently and motionlessly interacting with a unending parade of museumgoers exclusively through eye contact. Abramović initiated her performance art practice in the 1970s with physically and emotionally demanding trials, aiming to test the limits of her bodily and psychological endurance. More recently, Abramović’s artistic practice has become preoccupied with the concept of duration and an obligation to the public.

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Jim Shaw, The Rinse Cycle (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Ilhan Kim.

Jim Shaw’s oeuvre maximizes a medley of mediums straddling low art found in a church’s Christmas bazaar to high art befitting a gem gallery. Shaw’s latest exhibition at Metro Pictures continues his tradition of weaving together disparate motifs to create textured compositions with multiple references to American history and a wild reimagining of world religions and mythology. The installation showcases various elements of a narrative trajectory in which two petty thieves, on the run from FBI agents in pursuit, trespass into the fictional Museum of Oist History in Omaha and don wigs that cloak them invisible and deport them to the ancient birthplace of O, the founding deity of Oism.

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Artist Agathe Snow in front of Target Practice (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Maccarone Gallery presents new work by Agathe Snow in the exhibition I like it here. Don’t you? An artist whose visual vocabulary is steeped in the rhetoric of apocalypse, this collection of papier-mâché and fiberglass sculptures represents Snow’s vision of purgatory—a perpetual present constructed from the material refuse of a damned society. Ten totemic mobiles hang from ceiling to floor, each cleverly titled to simultaneously evoke their pop mundanity and allegorical weight, or perhaps, more aptly, weightlessness. This assemblage, a collage of cultural detritus both found and fabricated, hovers silently in Snow’s mythological continuum of hope and despair, conjuring associations of childhood and war, nature and culture, life and death, and everything in between.

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Ilhan Kim.

Abstract artist Dan Walsh, known for his colorful geometric paintings, is currently presenting new works at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. Walsh hails from the minimalist tradition, however, the artist now considers himself to be a “maximalist” in the sense that the simple repetition and grid-like patterns of his work embrace the qualities of minimalism yet engage the viewer in a deeper psychological sense.

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Alex Prager, 4:29pm Van Nuys (2012)

Los Angeles based artist Alex Prager is showing internationally for the second time in her rapid rise, showing Compulsion simultaneously at Yancey Richardson in New York, M+B in Los Angeles, and Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London. Paired with a short film titled La Petit Mort (French for ‘the little death’—a euphemism for sexual orgasm) the exhibition is both a substantiation and a deviation of her previous work. Featuring scenes of film noir, tense, and poised-to-erupt, the Hitchcockian damsel in distress and Prager’s unmistakable retro touch are all on view.

Alex Prager, La Petit Mort (2012), film still

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Keith Haring, Matrix (1983). All images copyright Keith Haring Foundation.

On now at The Brooklyn Museum is ‘Keith Haring: 1978-1982.’ This dynamic multi-media exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of Haring’s early work. Best known for his “Crack is Wack” landmark mural, “The Radiant Baby,” and other stylistically similar cartoons made with thick lines of black Sumi ink, Haring also produced work in other mediums such as film and print. This show is comprised of 155 works on paper, multiple videos, and more than 150 personal objects of Haring’s, including notebooks, flyers, posters, subway drawings, and photographs; all of which, put together, capture and encapsulate the excitement and energy of New York City’s club and art scenes in the 1980s. The exhibition narrates viewers through the period in Haring’s career immediately following his arrival in New York City through the establishment of his studio space and the beginning of his interest in street art.

Kenny Scarf and Peter Schuyff, Untitled (1979)

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Michael Snow, Paris de jugement Le and / or State of the Arts (2003)

Michael Snow and Rudolf Stingel are currently showing at Secession in Vienna. While they incorporate different mediums, both Snow and Stingel’s works explore the interplay between art and audience, and utilize the exhibition spaces as fluid, living installations.

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Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings, Exhibition View. Images courtesy of CAFA Museum.

British sculptor Tony Cragg presents his first museum show in China, Sculptures and Drawings, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Museum in Beijing. Cragg, whom the exhibition’s press release hails as “one of the world’s greatest living sculptors,” has compiled 127 works—50 major sculptures and a series of watercolors and drawings—for the large-scale show, focusing mainly on his creations from the last 15 years.

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Cai Guo-Qiang in front of Desire for Zero Gravity (2012) at MOCA’s Cai Gu0-Qiang: Sky Ladder. Images via MOCA unless otherwise noted.

In the first West Coast solo exhibition of world-renowned New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) presents four commissioned projects, including the most recent work in the artist’s Projects for Extraterrestrials series, which began in 1989. Trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Cai Guo-Qiang’s projects are spectacular and theatrical gestures, embodying the ethos of action painting and a long history of creation/destruction strategies in terms of today’s complex (pyro)technical mechanisms. Using gunpowder as his medium, Cai creates large-scale drawings in a matter of seconds with the dramatic transformative potentials of this volatile material.

Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Photo on site for Art Observed by Megan Hoetger.

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Doug Aitken, Song 1 (2012). All images via Hirschhorn Museum.

The work of LA based artist Doug Aitken spans across a range of media and genres, traversing formal and conceptual terrains from watercolor to Fluxus-like happenings, book publishing to operas, and photography to public art. Largely known for his video installations, his work is equally anchored in audio, shifting in recent years to engage closely with sound as an index of space and time, deeply resonant with the contemporary human experience. The collusion of visual modalities with sound experiments and musical production propels his investigation of perceptual experience in his most recent work, Song 1, now exhibited at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC, on view from dusk until midnight through May 13. This spectacular temporary exhibition epitomizes the fluid integration of music and image in a site-specific installation that literally inverts the art museum and transforms the surrounding landscape into a 360 degree cinema. Projected upon Gordon Bunshaft’s cylindrical cement fortress, Aitken has composed a 35 minute loop of video that revolves around the museum’s cylindrical facade, veiling its bulky structure in a graceful and arresting play of light. Yet it is the accompanying score that is truly at the core of this project, comprised of a succession of covers of the song “I Only Have Eyes for You,” interpreted by a diverse checklist of musicians, which feature as the organizing principle governing an entangled loop of fragmented narratives and flashing images.

Doug Aitken, Song 1 (2012)

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Nigel Cooke, Nature Loves You (2011–2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea is currently showing Nigel Cooke’s 4th solo show in the multi-room space. Cooke was on hand at the press preview to speak about the ten new paintings that marked for the artist a move into a much more dynamic and engaging direction. The press release references de Kooning‘s infamous “No Holidays” quote—that none of his work should ever have a caesura, that work should be an endlessly ongoing practice. Cooke displays reverence to that adage; every work is “three paintings in one.” Conceived by first laying a figurative layer full of characters and interaction, followed by sweeping obscurative strokes, and then capped by an attempt to rearrange order from the chaos induced—flushing out imagined smoking flower women, tree branches, and odd clown-skull masks.

Artist Nigel Cooke at the press preview

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Catherine Opie, Faifo (2008). All Photos courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Catherine Opie’s current exhibition, the photographer’s first since joining the roster at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, is on view now at the gallery’s Chelsea location in New York City. Shot from 2007-2009, High School Football, consists of large-scale portraits and landscape shots of playing fields. Through the American ritual of football, the identities of young athletes are displayed intimately, both individually and as teams.

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Sturtevant. Photo by Loren Muzzey. All images courtesy the artist and Moderna Museet unless otherwise noted.

For half a century, Sturtevant has built her practice on the citation of other artists’ works. Challenging authorship through acts of appropriation long before it was made popular by the likes of Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Sturtevant made her artistic debut in 1965, when she presented a roomful of Warhol silkscreen flowers at a gallery mere months after the originals had been created. Although largely overlooked until recent years, Sturtevant won a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Biennale. Her latest exhibition, Image over Image, opened March 17th at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Showcasing 30 works, 4 of which are the artist’s “originals,” the exhibition fosters a sort of wall label guessing-game. As visitors travel from room to room they are confronted with familiar works from modernist art history—a Jasper Johns here, a Duchamp there. Among other artists cited in this exhibition are Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres, John Waters, and Paul McCarthy.

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David Shrigley, How are you feeling (2012). Photos on site for Art Observed by Douglas Cloninger and Samuel Sveen.

Installed April 5th, 2012, the Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley‘s dry, absurdist sense of tragi-comedy is now on display as the third “Friends of the Highline” billboard. The 25 by 75 ft billboard is located at 18th Street and 10th Avenue in the Chelsea area of Manhattan and had previously featured work by Anne Collier and John Baldessari. Known for emploring a childish aesthetic and comic wit to navigate the tense world we create for ourselves, Shrigley’s new billboard poses the question, “How are you feeling?” and provides us with an uncommon but honest response. The work speaks largely to contemporary culture and the internal pressures that attempting to “keep up with the Jones” can create. The bubbles read, “HOW ARE YOU FEELING?” “I’M FEELING VERY UNSTABLE AND INSECURE. I ALSO FEEL VERY WORRIED AND ANXIOUS ABOUT EVERYTHING.” “I ALSO FEEL TRAPPED AND I FEEL THAT I AM MUCH TOO FAT AND THAT PEOPLE ARE LAUGHING AT ME. I FEEL VERY FRUSTRATED AND DEPRESSED. I FEEL THAT I AM UNABLE TO MEET THE DEMANDS THAT HAVE BEEN MADE OF ME. I AM IN A BIT OF A RUT CREATIVELY AS WELL.”

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Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (1996)

Passage Dangereux, on view now at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, is a centennial celebration of the late Louise Bourgeois, showcasing work from the last 15 years of her life. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Bourgeois’ work evades stylistic categorization, toeing the line between figuration and abstraction in a range of artistic genres, media, and modes of display. The Kunsthalle honors this unique artist on the advent of what would be her 100th birthday, in a diverse show of sculpture, installation, and print, several of which have never before been seen in Germany, to confront existential and deeply autobiographical themes.

Louise Bourgeois, Maman (1999)

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Sketch Restaurant, London. All photos on site for Art Observed by Ryann Donnelly.

In celebration of their 10th anniversary, London’s Sketch restaurant in Mayfair unveiled a new installation from Turner prize winning British multi-media artist Martin Creed on March 1st, 2012. Creed’s installation is comprised of three main components: opulent marble tiling, large-scale murals, and an assemblage of mix-matched furnishings and tableware, each piece as functional as it is aesthetically compelling and intricate.

Martin Creed, Sketch Installation View (2012)

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Cy Twombly, The Artist’s Shoes (2002)

On view at Palais des Beaux-Arts is Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-2010, featuring a series of 100 photographs selected by Twombly before his death in 2011. Known for his paintings that subtly changed the course of contemporary art, Twombly had been a productive photographer since his student days. However, it wasn’t until late in his career that photographs were exhibited to the public. Taken with an instant Polaroid camera, Twombly’s photographs are consistently out of focus, concentrating on the ethereality in mundane objects such as a pair of slippers, a lemon, a can of paintbrushes.

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Hernan Bas, A Satanist on a Tuesday (or, The Key Master) (2012)

Detroit-based artist Hernan Bas’ new show Occult Contemporary is on now at Lehmann Maupin, the exhibition consisting of Bas’ most recent body of work: a group of paintings in various sizes depicting dark, fairytale-like scenes. The name of the show is a reference to “Adult Contemporary,” a term used to describe a category of popular music. The subject of the show itself, as reflected in the title, is inspired by the appearance of the occult in all forms of popular media, including those geared towards children and young adults. Bas displays a strong fascination with the supernatural, his paintings loaded with whimsical imagery.

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Eva Hesse, No title (1960). All images © The Estate of Eva Hesse unless otherwise noted.

Eva Hesse: Spectres and Studiowork at Kukje Gallery in Seoul combines two recent critically acclaimed exhibitions exploring German-born, Yale-educated artist Eva Hesse’s early paintings and mature studio practice. Curated by Barry Rosen, Director of the Estate of Eva Hesse and Briony Fer and E. Luanne McKinnon, two acclaimed Hesse scholars, this unique pairing allows visitors an intimate view into the development of the influential artist’s career.

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Installation view of Heart to Hand. All photos on site for Art Observed by Douglas Cloninger.

Located in the former Deitch Projects building at 18 Wooster St., Swiss Institute‘s current set of exhibitions opened with a line out the door on March 7, running through April 15. Three shows are on view: Nicholas Party’s Still life, Stones and Elephants, Pati Hertling’s curatory project Heart to Hand, featuring work by Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Adam Pendleton and brothers and collaborators Oscar Tuazon and Elias Hansen, and downstairs Jimmie Durham’s Marquette for a Museum of Switzerland. Split between the several artists, the show begins with a colorful entrance, a large open main space split in two—half the floor raised, half reappropriated as sculpture—and a basement of semi-faux artifacts.

Artist Elias Hansen at the opening

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Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns (2011). Images courtesy of Haunch of Venison.

In July 2011, Katie Paterson blended science with art in the work 100 Billion Suns for the Venice Biennale—the photo documentation of which is now on view as the first exhibition in Haunch of Venison‘s new Fitzrovia gallery space in London. Paterson was the 2010–11 Artist in Residence at University College London’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, and at the Biennale, the artist placed confetti canons throughout the city and set them off at regular intervals in a gesture to reenact Gamma Ray Bursts—the brightest explosions in the universe. During the Haunch of Venison show, one confetti canon will explode at 1:00 pm each day, littering the floor with small fragments of paper color-matched to the Gamma Ray Bursts Paterson has documented. In addition to the canon and its Venetian archive, two other astronomy-related works are on view as well, The Dying Star Letters and Ancient Darkness TV.

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Thomas Ruff, 3D_ma.r.s.04 (2012). All images from ma.r.s : © 2012 Thomas Ruff/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Thomas Ruff exhibits for the first time with Gagosian Gallery presenting two exhibitions, ma.r.s. and nudes, at the gallery’s two London spaces on Britannia Street and Davies Street, respectively. Ruff’s unique style involves various photographic experiments, often working in series and using sourced imagery combined with an assortment of photographic tools and techniques: composite picture-making apparatus, star light system for night-vision, hand-tinting, stereoscopy, digital retouching, and photomontage. “The difference between my predecessors and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture. We all lost, bit by bit, the belief in this so-called objective capturing of real reality,” says Ruff in the press release.

Installation view. Photo: Mike Bruce

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All installation images via Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photos: Matteo Monti

Marcel Broodthaers. L’espace de l’écriture is the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s works to be exhibited in Italy. The Museo de Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo) has, with this exhibition, created an homage to Broodthaers highlighting the developments and achievements of his short artistic career. The works on view—all on loan from prestigious international collectors—provide an exceptional opportunity for the MAMbo to introduce a wider Italian public to nearly fifty works by the artist. The broad selection of work on display demonstrates the artist’s main themes, influenced by his years spent as a poet, such as the relationship between art and language, the status and cult of the artwork, and criticism of the museum. According to the press release, “The curatorial project of the exhibition is intended to verify how the relationship between image, object and word constitutes the central and constant theme of Marcel Broodthaers’ research and has strongly conditioned his entire creative process.”

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Urs Fischer, Problem Painting (2011). All images via Gagosian Gallery.

In his first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery Swiss-born, New York-based artist Urs Fischer presents a group of large-scale paintings and sculptures in the exhibition Beds and Problem Paintings. The installation at Gagosian is comprised of three parts: a series of paintings, a duo of fabricated beds, and a grouping of boxes reminiscent of the artist’s 2009 Service à la Française.

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