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…)

Trevor Paglen, Because Physical Wounds Heal… (2022), via all images Pace

On view from May 12 to July 22 in New York, artist Trevor Paglen opens his first solo presentation with Pace in New York with a selection of new photography, sculpture, video, and other work, in a thematic presentation that examines the enduring effects of military and CIA influence operations on American culture. The show serves as the conceptual nucleus of a multifaceted project by the artist that also includes a Web3 project, set to be released by Art Blocks x Pace Verso on April 5, and related “speculative reality work” launching this spring. (more…)

Chris Burden, Cross Communication (Installation View), all images via Gagosian

Exploring artist Chris Burden’s early work as a pioneer of both multi-media engagements with technology, and their interlocking investigations of performance and the presence of the body within the media network, Gagosian is currently presenting Cross Communication, an exhibition of relics, films, and video works by the artist, plus other materials that document his early performances. (more…)

Dustin Yellin, Beneath the Wheel (2023), via Venus Over Manhattan

On this month in New York, artist Dustin Yellin presents a solo exhibition of new work at Venus Over Manhattan, exploring the imagery and structures of the natural world in relation to interconnected narratives around technological landscapes, human perception, and systemic modes of meaning-making and understanding. Comprising a series of new paintings, Cave Painting represents an important shift to painting for the artist whose practice in recent years has focused most notably on sculpture. (more…)

Guan Xiao, FEET, V7V bow (2023), all images via David Kordansky

This month in Los Angeles, artist Guan Xiao presents a body of works at the David Kordansky space that trace the lineages and connections between disparate imagery and iconography sourced from the digital realm. Emphasizing hybrid narratives, expressive approaches and an expanded sense of possibility for art-making in the contemporary era, the show is a striking look at the possibilities for making as we move deeper into the 21st Century. (more…)

Kambel Smith at Shrine, all images via Art Observed

This weekend marks a return of the New Art Dealers Alliance art fair to New York City, a longtime staple of the New York art fair calendar, and an event known for its range of exploratory and expressive new work from emerging artists, smaller galleries and new projects. For those looking for new insights and fresh perspectives on contemporary art practice, its hard to ignore the call of the fair, which reprises its role as a central tentpole of a weekend of fairs, even as the city’s string of fairs has split up between several weeks this May. (more…)

Damien Hirst at White Cube, all images via Art Observed

Returning this year to The Shed in New York City’s recently redeveloped Hudson Yards, the 2023 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 a range 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.

Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner

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Diego Vega Solorza, Dorje (2019), via Pablo Astorga

On April 18 in Mexico City, TONO, a new festival dedicated to time-based work, held its inaugural two-week program. Partnering with museums and galleries around the city, TONO presented a range of experimental performance art, video installations, and dance performances by local, regional, and international artists. With each performance filled completely at capacity with a diverse audience including collectors from Mexico City and New York, other curators and artists, and students, the festival laid its foundations as an invaluable space for stimulating dialogues surrounding the relationship between various time-based mediums in the contexts of one another. (more…)

Alina Perez at Deli, all images via Art Observed

Art-lovers descended upon Spring Studios in TriBeca this week for the much anticipated opening of Independent Art Fair, which opened its latest edition in New York the week before Frieze New York’s annual run. The fair has garnered a reputation as a reliable source of fresh talent, and its continued residence at Spring Studios emphasized its staying power and impact amongst a crowded few weeks of events.

Willie Stewart at Nicelle Beauchene

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Eva Rothschild, Sweet Spot (2023), via 303 Gallery

This month in New York, 303 Gallery presents Arms Folded and Unfolded, its fourth exhibition of new work by artist Eva Rothschild. Continuing and expanding her engagement with three-dimensional forms, spatial investigations and the subtle lines between aesthetic and utilitarian values, the artist’s work here is a striking extension of an already expansive body of work.

Eva Rothschild, Soft Rain (2023), via 303 Gallery

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Harold Ancart, Paintings (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this month at Gagosian, artist Harold Ancart marks his debut with the gallery with a body of new works that continue his atmospheric and expressive exploration of the canvas, walking a delicate line between abstraction and figuration. Continuing his studied approach towards specific visual motifs that run through a series of iterations and expressive tendencies.  (more…)

Erin Jane Nelson, Chronomicrobiome (2023), via Chapter NY

This month, Chapter NY presents Sublunary, the second show at the gallery dedicated to the work of artist Erin Jane Nelson second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new body of work centered around the Okefenokee swamp, including quilted silks, ceramic wall works, and ceramic sculpture. The artist, whose work delves into a range of conceptual frameworks from barrier islands to spirituality to science fiction, here initiates a new project around the border of Georgia and Florida, and the Okefenokee swamp that defines that geographic line. (more…)

Mark Bradford, Manifest Destiny (2023), via Hauser & Wirth

On this month in New York, Hauser & Wirth presents the expansive new show from artist Mark Bradford. You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice, a major exhibition that fills the entirety of the gallery’s 22nd Street building, marks the artist’s first show in New York since 2015, and sees him embarking upon a deeply personal exploration of the multifaceted nature of displacement and the predatory forces that feed on populations driven into motion by crisis.

Mark Bradford, Death Drop (2023), via Hauser & Wirth

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Seth Price, Ardomancer (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this month at Petzel Gallery’s 25th Street exhibition space, artist Seth Price brings forth a body of new works that merge together conceptual practices, AI-generated imagery, three-dimensional graphics and traditional painterly techniques to arrive at a range of works that subvert and confound easy readings. The show is only the second time in nearly a decade that Price has presented an exhibition of new work in New York, and offers a rare look at work by an artist who has long subverted and disrupted the reading of art as object and/or information.  (more…)

Tom Burr (Installation View), all images via Bortolami

On this month at Bortolami Gallery in New York, Tom Burr reprises his dual role as artist and exhibition maker, relocating the act of making from the traditional studio space into the gallery. With a range of works that mix sculpture, 2-dimensional work and installation, the show is a striking and nuanced investigation of space as a material in art, and art’s ability to generate spaces in turn.  (more…)

Gerhard Richter, 3 Scheiben (3 Panes of Glass) (2023), all images via David Zwirner

This month in New York, David Zwirner presents a body of new works by the German master Gerhard Richter, comprising a range of practices, techniques and materials that underscore the artist’s breadth and depth. On view from March 16–April 29, 2023, at 537 West 20th Street in New York,the exhibition presents a group of Richter’s last paintings, made in 2016–2017; a number of these abstract oil paintings will be shown here for the first time. Though Richter completed his last paintings in 2017, his dynamic practice continues his artistic inquiries into the possibilities of abstraction and perception through his ongoing experimentation with drawing, printing and sculpture.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) (2016)

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Cassi Namoda, “Dog meat, cat meat, God-knows-what-meat” (2020), via exhibition curators

Sotheby’s Institute of Art presents “The Dreamers”, a student curated collection of artworks that explores the elusive characteristics of dream states and the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy. In collaboration with the class “Curating Contemporary Art”, the Institute provided students with the opportunity to propose, organize, and curate their own projects surrounding themes that they felt were most relevant and pressing to the contemporary moment. “The Dreamers”, the first show of the series, presents works from a range of exclusively female-identifying and queer artists including Maess Anand, Felipe Baeza, Shuyi Cao, Jessica Diamond, Cassi Namoda, Jess Xiaoyi Han, Angela Heisch, Arina Izmestieva, Heather Jones, Janet Jones, Ann McCoy, Joiri Minaya, Kiki Smith, Devin Osorio, Ana Maria Velasco, and Yin Zhang. (more…)

Sherrie Levine, Repetition and Difference (2022), via David Zwirner

This month in Paris, David Zwirner invites artist Sherrie Levine to present a body of new works in the city, marking her first show in the French capital in over 30 years. Featuring major new suites of paintings and photographs, as well as a selection of sculptures, this exhibition showcases several bodies of work that are central to Levine’s practice, and that distinctly engage her ongoing inquiry into notions of authorship, originality, and authenticity.

Sherrie Levine (Installation View), via David Zwirner

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Katherine Bradford, Trapeze Artists (2023), via Campoli Presti

On this month at Campoli Presti’s Paris exhibition space, artist Katherine Bradford marks her fourth show with the gallery. Exploring the world of  acrobats, their colorful costumes and masks as a study of form and color, the artist uses this framework as a way to explore societies and mico-cultures through whichartists and spectators are projected. (more…)

Clare Rojas, Go Placidly (Exhibition View), via Andrew Kreps

In her work, artist Clare Rojas employs a deeply personal visual language as she moves freely between dense figurative scenes, and minimal, abstract compositions. Rojas approaches both with a consistent, lyrical sensitivity as she interjects totemic references to her own life, and the Northern Californian landscape that surrounds her studio, seeking to distill fleeting memories and experiences into concrete shapes. For her first exhibition with Andrew Kreps, Rojas continues these modes of practice. (more…)

Gina Pane, Préliminaire (Installation View), via kamel mennour

Returning to the work of Gina Pane for its fifth gallery show dedicated to the renowned artist, kamel mennour has turned attention to the artist’s time at the Beaux-Arts de Paris during the 1960’s, examining how the artist’s experience in Paris during that time shaped (and re-shaped) the course of her career.  (more…)

Paul Mogensen, no title (2022), via Karma

On this month at Karma New York is Paintings: 1965-2022, a survey exhibition of work by painter Paul Mogensen. Known for his mathematical, progressional works that defy categorization and treat the canvas as a site for both deconstruction and restructuring of painting as a format, the artist’s work here illustrates a career of innovation and exploration.  (more…)

Portrait of the artist in his studio in Metepec, Mexico via Hilario Galguera Gallery

Opening on April 20 at Hilario Galguera Gallery is Mexican artist Gabriel O’Shea’s solo exhibition Preludio. Through his experiments with classical and contemporary mediums, from monochromatic paintings and wax sculptures to AI software, O’Shea explores the complex, and often surreal, relationship between technology and religion in a postmodern digital age.

Art Observed sat down with O’Shea over Zoom to talk about his artistic background, his creative processes, and the major themes surrounding the exhibition. (more…)