Alex Israel, Sunset Coast Drive (2022), via Greene Naftali

On view this month at Greene Naftali, the gallery plays host to Sunset Coast Drive, its second solo show presenting the works of Alex Israel. An outing that looks to deepen the artist’s ongoing ongoing engagement with the culture and aesthetics of his native Los Angeles, it mines the sparkling optimism exported by its entertainment industry, while presenting imagery subject to close scrutiny.  (more…)

Veit Laurent Kurz at Weiss Falk, all images via Art Observed

Returning to its recently transplanted site in another hall of the Messe Basel, the Liste Art Fair makes its voice felt on the landscape and layout of Basel Art Week this season with another edition of its event showcasing works by a range of galleries presenting the latest and newest voices in contemporary art. Running in conjunction with the Art Basel fair just a few minutes away in another hall of the expansive exhibition center, Liste welcomes 82 galleries, each centering on younger artists, new concepts and exploratory work. For gallerists, participating at LISTE, the fair is an opportunity to network globally and present their program to professionals and art lovers that gather in Basel during this important week on the international art calendar.

Tomas Diaz Cedeño at Peana

(more…)

Folkert de Jong at Sofie van de Velde

Marking it’s return to its usual spot in early summer, the 2022 edition of Art Basel has opened its doors for its early hours, preparing for a public opening this weekend with an expansive offering of works from European galleries and those further afield. Open once again at the Messe Basel, 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. Emphasizing it’s place as a central force in the run of events and fairs worldwide, Basel’s return to form is a tentpole in a run of reopenings in the wake of the Covid-19 shutdowns.

David Hammons at Xavier Hufkens

(more…)

Anna-Sophie Berger, Lady Wealth (2022), via JTT

On view this month at New York’s JTT Gallery, artist Anna-Sophie Berger presents a selection of new works that draw on bodies, space and perception to create striking visual and psychological effects. Using a fusion of everyday materials posed in unique new permutations, her body of work is a striking and potent investigation of how these items construct a shared reality, or perhaps just the sense of one.  (more…)

Anna Imhof, Avatar (Installation View), all images by Aleph Molinari for Art Observed.

Continuing her experimentation with spatial arrangement and irreverent institutional takeovers, Anne Imhof has transformed the uptown gallery space of Galerie Buchholz for her new exhibition, Avatar. A simulacra of an institution of learning, the exhibition plunges the viewer into an alternate universe that embodies the industrialized cut-and-paste production of knowledge and identity. It is both an avatar for these spaces of socialization, as well as the avatars people adopt while navigating  them. Presenting physical signifiers in opposition to surreal juxtapositions of other works, the show explores the role of space in the production of power, sites of cultural socialization, and its interrelations to social constructs.  (more…)

Marlene Dumas, The Martyr (2002-04). All images via Art Observed.

The Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi presents Open-End this summer, a major monographic exhibition of work by Marlene Dumas, the Cape Town-born artist renowned for her portraiture exploring the depth, breadth and intensity of human emotion. Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, the solo-exhibition features over 100 works from 1984 to 2021, including previously unseen paintings such as Persona (2020). Curated by Caroline Bourgeois and the artist herself, open-end spans 33 rooms across two floors of the 18th-century Pinault Collection space alongside the Grand Canal in Venice. (more…)

Francis Bacon, Seated Woman (1961), via Skarstedt

On view this summer, Skarstedt has assembled a striking selection of work by painter Francis Bacon, titled Faces and Figures. The exhibition unifies a group of masterworks spanning the 1950s to the 1970s. Featuring depictions of some of his most beloved friends, lovers, and muses—Peter Lacy, George Dyer, Muriel Belcher, and Henrietta Moraes—along with an intimate self-portrait and a portrait of Pope Pius XII, the exhibition traces poignant moments of loss and companionship that underscores the artist’s masterful blending of art and life.  (more…)

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Errata (Installation View), via Mor Charpentier

Marking his second solo show at mor charpentier, British-Lebanese artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan continues a body of research on sound as legal evidence, focusing on the unbreakable relationship between testimony and the technology used to record it. Interested in the blind spots of global justice systems, the artist examines sound as a means to reveal historic acts of erasure and rupture. Here, that concept centers around the Nuremberg Trials, and the structures of justice and witnessing this process created and perpetuated.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Errata (Installation View), via Mor Charpentier

(more…)

Lynda Benglis, Yellow Tail (2020), via Blum & Poe

On view this month Blum & Poe, the gallery presents Excavation, marking the second solo exhibition of works by Lynda Benglis, continuing the artist’s work in soaring, swooping strokes of bronze. Alluding to themes of referencing the artist’s past in relation to her current work, and referring to the interchanges of positive and negative space as if one was digging or displacing earth, similar to the cast-making process.  (more…)

Kevin Beasley, Wood shed (on improvisation) (2022), via Art Observed

This month at Regen Projects, artist Kevin Beasley brings forward a selection of dynamic new works that marks his first solo gallery show in LA. With a multidisciplinary practice that incorporates sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, music, and performance, Beasley probes the material and cultural conditions that shape our perception of history. His ability to alchemize ordinary material—specifically personal artifacts and articles of clothing—into sculptures that are simultaneously transcendent and familiar has placed him at the vanguard of artistic and cultural thought. That practice continues here. (more…)

Celeste Rapone, Muscle for Hire (2022), via Marianne Boesky

On view at Marianne Boesky this month in New York, artist Celeste Rapone brings to bear a number of unique new canvases that underscore her investigation of painted space, and its ability to place itself directly between the imagined and the real. Marking Rapone’s first solo show with the gallery the artist continues to examine the potential of painting through the human form. Drawing inspiration from her native New Jersey, Rapone seeks to communicate both personal and collective feelings of anxiety, longing, and nostalgia experienced in contemporary life.

Celeste Rapone, Nightshade (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Rapone’s works focus on the figure, often centering on women protagonists whose bodies impossibly contort and twist up to the confines that Rapone creates within the painting, or at other times capturing a tender exchange between a pair of figures. Rapone produces her works without preliminary drawings, gradually building the compositions of her paintings through a dynamic interplay between scale, color, pattern, and the shapes of the human form. In the settings of her paintings, the artist populates the space with an array of allusions, pulling from art history, pop culture, autobiographical sources, and drawing influence from the stylized figuration introduced by the Chicago Imagists.

Celeste Rapone, Nightshade (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Celeste Rapone, Living Room (2022), via Marianne Boesky

Ranging in scale, each work within the show is unique and multifaceted in its development. At times, Rapone has a narrative in mind from which a thematic environment evolves for her characters to navigate. In others, the onset of a work is driven by formalist concerns, in which the artist begins with a unique color configuration or an abstract composition of shapes that then influence the formation of a painting’s scene. The resulting forms of her figures, whose bodies defy the rules of proportions and scale, are both undeniably present and vulnerable within the canvases. These forms and figures swirl throughout the space, turning into a careful balance of constructed image and observations of life. Delving into a space that exists between the artist’s eye and constructed world, here she turns the body into a site for the negotiation of memory, site, longing and history.

The show closes June 11th.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
Celeste Rapone: Nightshade [Exhibition Site]

Veronica Ryan, Along A Spectrum (Installation View) via Paula Cooper

On view this month, and corresponding with her work on view at the Whitney Biennial this summer, artist Veronica Ryan brings a body of new compositions to Paula Cooper this month, underscoring a unique and open-ended series of material dialogues that showcase the artist’s investigation and interpretation of the language of the modern day. Capping off a whirlwind two years including an impressive series of shows and her recent recognition with an OBE, the show at Paula Cooper offers a rare but concise look at the concerns and questions her work poses.  (more…)

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (Early Egyptian) (1973), via Gladstone

Marking an expansive exploration of Robert Rauschenberg’s sculptural output at the peak of his ability, Gladstone Gallery and the Robert Rauschenberg have collaborated on a series of shows exploring his Venetian and Early Egyptians series. Spread across Gladstone’s Chelsea galleries, this show reveals Rauschenberg’s significant place in helping to define the history of post-Minimalist sculpture, seeing beyond what others decided should be the limits of art. Rauschenberg’s career was defined by the longing for work that existed beyond simple distinctions of medium, form and genre, often using found objects and collages of material to create hybridized material sites. The Venetian and Early Egyptian series blur the line between sculpture and painting, between waste and conservation, and between everyday objects and artworks. (more…)

Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa (2005). Photography by Aleph Molinari for Art Observed.

Driving down the interminable Highway 90, one eventually hits upon Marfa, the remote West Texas town that materializes out of the vast expanse of desert landscape: a ragged lowland that stretches out to the horizon, flanked by distant red earth mountains and mesas on either side. The only harbinger of the town’s existence is the iconic—and no longer sarcastic—Prada Marfa store, an installation built by Elmgreen & Dragset some forty minutes outside of town. (more…)

Richard Prince, Hoods (Installation View), all images via Art Observed

On view this month at Gagosian in Chelsea, artist Richard Prince has collected a body of work spanning over 30 years of practice, focusing in particular around his explorations of the iconography and imagery of American car culture. Titled Hoods, the show features a range of works that see Prince working with modified and customized car hoods, using their sculptural design as a point of entry for broader investigations of Americana, identity and time. Hoods will feature more than thirty works made over the span of twenty-five years, from 1988 through 2013, all personally selected by the artist for this exhibition, and which showcases loans from major institutions and private collections, including the Brant Foundation, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut; the Broad, Los Angeles; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Pinault Collection, Paris; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; as well as from the collection of the artist.

Richard Prince, What’s What (1989)

(more…)

Nicole Eisenman, Maker’s Muck (2022)

Over the course of their career, the painter Nicole Eisenman has proved a master at the construction of new worlds, mixing together figurative rigor with an animated and expressive counter-world, arriving on a body of work that alternatives between lush, cartoonish bodies and meticulous depictions of close friends and sitters. For their first show at Hauser & Wirth in New York, the artist takes this mode to new heights, culling together an expansive range of sculpture, painting and drawing that underscores Eisenman’s ability to both reflect and refract reality in alternate measure. (more…)

Lauren Halsey, My Hope (2022)

Presenting a range of sculptural inventions, clusters of material, and incisive observations of the cultural landscape of the African-American experience, artist Lauren Halsey uses her work to imagine new possibilities for art, architecture, and community engagement. Combining found, fabricated, and handmade objects, her work maintains a sense of civic urgency and free flowing imagination, addressing crucial issues confronting Black people, queer populations, and the working class. This mode of work finds expressive footing in her new show at David Kordansky’s recently opened New York exhibition space, bringing together a range of work to create a shifting and colorful view of South Central LA.

Lauren Halsey, My Hope (detail) (2022)

(more…)

Ernesto Neto, Between Earth and Sky (Installation View), all images via Art Observed

Since the 1990s, Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto has created a distinct body of work that marks both an ongoing formal inquiry into space, volume, balance, and a deep engagement with sensuality, energy, and spirituality., all while elaborating on the neo-concrete and the history of Brazilian modernism. Incorporating organic shapes and materials that engage all five senses, his work draws on the history of Brazilian art and a close interaction with natural forms to create otherworldly and communally-experienced objects and spaces. (more…)

A recently unearthed Michelangelo sketch, considered to be the artist’s first nude, has sold  at Christie’s Paris for a record 23 million euros ($24 million). “Michelangelo has decided to make the figure into something that corresponded more to his aesthetic by making him much more robust and monumental, while at the same time keeping the fragility of the figure, who is exposed and shivering” as he awaits baptism,” says Christie’s Old Masters expert Stijn Alsteens. (more…)

The Jean-Michel Basquiat work from the collection of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had a strong return to auction last night at Phillips, where it achieved $85 Million, part of a total sale of  $224.9 million, the highest in the company’s history.  (more…)

Olafur Eliasson at Tanya Bonakdar, all images via Art Observed

Returning this year to The Shed in New York City’s recently redeveloped Hudson Yards, the 2022 edition of Frieze New York is now open, with a range of shows and projects spread throughout the exhibition space that include ambitious solo projects, surveys of gallery rosters, and focused, historical presentations that underscore the fair’s place as both a site for discovery, and one of the premier selling events of the yearly art world calendar. With over 65 dealers on hand from New York and around the globe, the fair signals something of a scale-back from the sizable expanses of the versions held at Randalls Island, yet nevertheless presents a dynamic and immersive program.

Rob Pruitt at Massimo De Carlo

(more…)

Roe Etheridge via Andrew Kreps

With the increasingly lively schedule of a spring art season in New York that feels like it’s finally finding its pacing again, attention and anticipation once again turns to the opening of this year’s edition of Frieze New York, set to open its doors in just a few days at its new home at The Shed. With the fair now nearing 10 years of operation in the city, this year’s edition should once again prove to be a strong note in the spring fair season.  (more…)

The Independent Art Fair will launch a new fair in September this year that will focus on 20th Century Works. “Over the years, there has been a shift, with next-generation dealers showing a more diverse group of artists and territories, geographically, socially, politically,” says Independent director Elizabeth Dee. “They are looking forward and looking back, saying, ‘We need to have a canon that looks like our program.’” (more…)

The second leg of Sotheby’s sale of works from the collection of real estate magnate Harry Macklowe and his ex-wife Linda Macklowe has netted $246.1 million, bringing the total sale price for the collection to a record $922 million, with fees. “Either art is one of the few assets that seem to have a good immunological protection against recession, or inflation is much stronger than we think,” says specialist Loic Gouzer. “The art market feels very close to the spare parts market — good works are hard to find and very expensive.” (more…)