Renee Cox, Springs WinterWonderland (2021), Image courtesy of Superposition Gallery

On view at Eastville Museum (Eastville Community Historical Society) is a group exhibition titled “Resilience,” honoring the Eastville Museum in Sag Harbor—an institution founded in the 1980s to preserve the history of Black and Indigenous people in the community. Curated by Storm Ascher, the exhibit brings together 21 contemporary artists who have been called to respond visually to the curatorial theme of resilience. The Eastville Museum is situated within the Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Nineveh Subdivisions, (a.k.a SANS) region of Sag Harbor, one of the oldest Black communities of the Hamptons, established in the 1940s. The tight-knit coastline community of SANS, written about at length in Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead’s autobiographical novel, Sag Harbor, was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.
(more…)

(Portrait of the artist by Aleph Molinari for Art Observed)

Painter, sculptor, and multi-disciplinary artist Zhivago Duncan reinterprets the myths and archetypes of antiquity to construct an overarching story of the development of human consciousness. Blending mythology and elements of science fiction, he creates elaborate allegorical paintings, kinetic machines, and large-scale raku sculptures that together form his own cosmogony. Zhivago’s multi-ethnic background could be a clue to his desire to hybridize elements of different cultures: his mother escaped Syria to settle in the United States, and his father is of Danish descent. Zhivago’s upbringing was nomadic, taking him from Terre Haute, Indiana to Malta, Saudi Arabia, Berlin, and finally Mexico City, where he currently works and resides. Art Observed met Zhivago at his studio, where he walked us through the inner workings of his mythical worlds and landscapes. (more…)

Macon Reed, via Art Observed

The first chills of September are in the air in New York, temperatures are cooling again, and, like clockwork, another art season is now underway, kicked off once again by the opening of the Armory Show and its satellite fairs in New York City. That means that, once again, the night before the fair is the domain of Spring/Break Art Show, the curator-first, project oriented fair that brings together a range of expressive and imaginative works under a broad curatorial banner. Leaving ample space for exploration and investigation, the fair is a perennial highlight, and, now in its 10th year, seems to have hit its stride.

Noah Kloster, via Art Observed

(more…)

Hans Josephsohn at Max Hetzler, all photos by Art Observed

With the first notes of fall drifting into the air, and August fading into September, attention turns this week to the South Korean capital of Seoul, where Frieze has opened the latest expansion of its burgeoning art fair franchise, running this weekend. The new fair, led by Frieze Seoul Director Patrick Lee, features over 110 galleries, with a strong focus on Asia alongside a range of galleries from 20 countries. The fair marks the continuation of several years of growth for Frieze, which has added expansions in LA, New York and now Seoul in several years of quick development.

Park Seo-Bo at White Cube

(more…)

Leslie Hewitt, Riffs on Real Time with Ground (Deep Reflection) (2021), via Anton Kern

On view this summer at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Photographic Pictures arranges a body of work drawing on photography and the possibility for expanded senses of perception and representation through the medium. Curated by artist Anne Collier, the show culls together a range of works including pieces by the artist, Luigi Ghirri, Jack Pierson, and Jiro Takamatsu, whose 1972-73 series provides the central inspiration for the show. (more…)

Sabine Moritz, Lair I (2022), via Marian Goodman

On view this summer at Marian Goodman, a solo exhibition by Sabine Moritz brings forth a suite of new large-scale paintings and works on paper. The exhibition, the artist’s first presentation in the New York gallery, follows three previous exhibitions held at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris. The presentation will be comprised of a new series of abstract paintings and new intimately scaled workson paper, all from 2021-2022. This vibrant, abstract terrain is presented in conjunction with four select representational works. This new body of work can be seen as the next chapter in Moritz’s phenomenological practice –– acts of deep looking that seek to understand the world.

(more…)

Samantha Vernon, Vacant Lots (2015-2022), via Canada

This month at Canada, the gallery presents a group show titled SUMMER Nights, featuring work by Addoley Dzegede, Julia Haft-Candell, Gi (Ginny) Huo, Abigail Lucien, Carly Mandel, Mary Manning, Lee Relvas, Beverly Semmes, Fin Simonetti, Hanae Utamura, Sam Vernon, Rachel Eulena Williams, and Kristine Woods. Exploring a range of works that oscillate between various fragments of architecture, the show draws on artists using memory and experience to create works meditating on world building, family, and the abstractions of daily life. (more…)

Francheska Alcantara, Tiger Jaw IV (2022), via Lehmann Maupin

On view this month at Lehmann Maupin in New York, the gallery welcomes New York City-based artist Teresita Fernández to curate a group show for the summer season, bringing together works by Francheska Alcántara, Carolina Caycedo, Adriana Corral, David Antonio Cruz, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Leslie Martinez, Glendalys Medina, Jeffrey Meris, and Esteban Ramón Pérez. Engaging various degrees of abstraction, the works in the show are united by each artist’s focus on materiality, process, and tactility.  (more…)

On the Nature of Things (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps

On view this month at Andrew Kreps Gallery, the gallery presents a meditation and exploration of the history of Assemblage, culling together a range of works that span over eighty years and drawing from the work of more than forty artists who explored and shaped that mode of practice.  (more…)

Kathleen Ryan, Bad Peach (Bite) (2022), via Josh Lilley

On view this month at Josh Lilley’s London exhibition space, artist Kathleen Ryan presents a new body of works, presenting a series of intriguing topographies and structures that mix together engaging mechanical and organic symbolisms to create peculiar, surreal objects. Walking a line between cityscapes, cells and circuit boards, Ryan’s work mines an engaging and resonant set of commentaries on modern life, suspending her images and objects in a space between technology and bodies.

Kathleen Ryan, Bad Melon (Double Rainbow) (2022), via Josh Lilley

(more…)

The Patriot (Installation View), via O’Flaherty’s

O’Flaherty’s, the gallery project of painter Jamian Juliano-Villani, has, in its short time, has built a reputation for challenging and engaging shows, operating a program that has made the small gallery a central voice in the representation of young artists and historically resonant projects overlooked by larger galleries. It should be no surprise then, that the pioneering space would take an equally iconoclastic and engaged approach to the summer groups show, lampooning the format with The Patriot, an open call exhibition that has packed the gallery to the gills with art for the past month.

The Patriot (Installation View), via O’Flaherty’s

(more…)

Raoul de Keyser, Come on, play it again nr. 2 (2001), via David Zwirner

On view through the end of this week at David Zwirner’s Hong Kong location, artist Raoul de Keyser presents a selection of works the continues and elaborates on a previous show at the gallery in 2021. Among the notable works that will be on view are representative paintings from the Belgian artist’s seminal Come on, play it again; Hal, and Hayward series, made during the height of his career, from the middle of the 1980s to the 2000s. (more…)

Cayetano Ferrer, Surrogate Pylon Display Unit (replica) (2015-22), via Petzel

Marking its entry in a summer of group shows, Petzel Gallery’s uptown space hosts Commonwealth and Council, a show dedicated to the Los Angeles gallery of the same name, celebrating over ten years of work supporting young artists and the growth the gallery has seen in recent years. Founded in 2010, Commonwealth and Council has committed itself to a dynamic program building counter-narratives that reflect individual and collective realities. On view here, artists Cayetano Ferrer, Gala Porras-Kim, Nikita Gale, rafa esparza, and Suki Seokyeong Kang, showcase interests and focuses on the underrepresented, acknowledging that meaning occurs at a host of myriad idiosyncratic registers—and propose alternative modalities of knowledge, speech, and value systems. (more…)

Hugh Hayden, all images via Art Observed

Lisson Gallery wades into summer group show month with The odds are good, the goods are odd this year, a group exhibition that highlights a new generation of New York-based sculptors. Bringing together artworks across a range of mediums, the presentation showcases the divergent ethoses behind sculpture-making today. The featured artists favor the handmade, creating a spectrum of artworks that range from the polished and conceptual, to the raw and visceral. (more…)

The British Museum is testing the waters on a “Parthenon partnership” that could send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece, Bloomberg reports. “What we are calling for is an active ‘Parthenon partnership’ with our friends and colleagues in Greece,” says deputy director Jonathan Williams, noting that the move seeks to “change the temperature of the debate” around the disputed works. (more…)

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your body is a battlefield) (1989/2020), via David Zwirner

Barbara Kruger makes her first outing with David Zwirner Gallery this summer, marking her inaugural show with the exhibitor three years after announcing she was joining the mega-gallery. Spanning the gallery’s three locations on West 19th Street in New York, the show is a monumental review of her work, and quite a timely one. Kruger powerfully and directly engages with viewers through a distinctive visual language, utilizing images, text, and technology as tools of communication to reveal and question established power structures and social constructs, challenging power structures through their direct address. (more…)

Andreas Gurksy, Bauhaus (2020), via Art Observed

On view this summer at Gagosian New York, photographer Andreas Gursky compiles a selection of both new and recent images, continuing his documentation and exploration of the landscape of modernity. Gursky’s large-scale photographs evoke the global flow of information, the chaos of contemporary life competing with the classical desire for order. He portrays the visual extremes of the present moment with an objective eye, capturing built and natural environments on a grand scale in richly detailed images of autobahns and cruise ships, mountains and waterfalls. While comparable in their scope to early nineteenth-century landscape paintings, Gursky’s works retain the precision of photography. Many have been digitally manipulated, and often reveal a sensitivity to the damaging effects of human systems on the natural world. (more…)

Catechism (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

Throughout the layout of the current group exhibition at Bridget Donahue, one can’t help but trace the works as a series of pointing arrows. Bright colors and strange, lumpen arrangements seem to trade barbs with each other, while other works create a series of conversations on typography and text, design and craft. In each case, the show seems to tug at a series of half-ideas, as if allowing the show to breathe anew in each moment of encounter.

Evelyn Reyes, Four Carrots, Pink (2004-2009), via Bridget Donahue

(more…)

Robb Pruitt, Avery (2022), via 303 Gallery

On view this month at 303 Gallery, a body of new work by Rob Pruitt marks a continuation of the artist’s mining of the tension between comic renditions, heightened emotional states, and deep, rich engagements with the history of pop art, all centered around his latest series of Face paintings. (more…)

Sarah Ortmeyer, DAVID (2022), via Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Combining together a series of works and a range of different approaches and series from her practice, artist Sarah Ortmeyer presents a selection of pieces at Galerie Eva Presenhuber this month, united under the title SPORTS CLUB NEW YORK. 

(more…)

Oli Epp, Surrogate (2022), via Perrotin

On view this month at Galerie Perrotin, artist Oli Epp collects a range of works that mine a strange and otherworldly relationship with the language of painterly figuration and abstraction. Presenting a series of tightly constructed images that twist and warp bodies into playful new iterations, his works on view moving from human figures to animals to objects, always returning to the same deconstructive approach.

Oli Epp, Dead Center (2022), via Perrotin

(more…)

B. Wurtz, Untitled (2017), via Garth Greenan

On this month at Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, artist B. Wurtz presents Monuments, featuring a number of the artist’s playful sculptures and mixed media works deconstructing elements of scale and monumentality and marking the artist’s first show at the gallery. Known for his repurposing of everyday flotsam into joyous, humorous, and beautiful sculptural objects. The works in the presentation, spanning the past four decades of Wurtz’s career, take the language of the everyday, and transpose it, creating strange tensions and relationships between materials. (more…)

Claes Oldenburg

Artist Claes Oldenburg, a foundational voice in the development of American contemporary and pop art, has passed away at the age of 93. Known for his monumental constructions that turned every day objects into large-scale sculptures and installations, the artist’s work re-created a range of iconic American images. “My intention is to make an everyday object that eludes definition,” he said. “I’ve expressed myself consistently in objects with reference to human beings rather than through human beings.”  (more…)

Jeppe Hein, Changing Spaces (Installation View), via Art Observed

This summer, artist Jeppe Hein has installed Changing Spaces, an interactive public art installation on Rockefeller Center’s Center Plaza, a swirling torrent of “liquid architecture” that continues the artist’s use of space and phenomenon to encourage visitors and passerby to stop and interact with the work. (more…)