Sue Williams, Chicken Leg in Yellow (2017), via 303 Gallery

Currently on view at 303 Gallery, Sue Williams has brought a new body of paintings continuing her exploration of history and memory through the abstraction of both form and the painterly canon.  The exhibition, devoted to a handful of paintings and collages that trace the artist’s precise, and often humorously incisive approach to the American past, in conjunction with an incisive look at its impact on the female body.   (more…)

Vija Celmins, Night Sky #20 (2000-2016), all photos via Matthew Marks Gallery

It’s been almost seven years since New York has seen a Vija Celmins show.  Often working in small scales, Celmins has been painting realistic impressions of nature and man-made objects since the 1960’s. Known to take years to finish a painting, Celmins’s relentless pursuit of her work sees the artist often trying to rework pieces even after they have been hung.  The New York show is worth the wait, however, with Celmins presenting a beautiful group of new paintings, drawings, objects, and prints with Matthew Marks Gallery, on view through April 22nd.

  
Vija Celmins (Installation View)

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Jack Whitten, Black Monolith X, Birth of Muhammad Ali (2016), images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Artist Jack Whitten has opened an exhibition of new work in New York this spring at Hauser & Wirth, his first show with the gallery since joining its roster last year.  Presenting pieces from the last two years of practice, Whitten’s work, on view at the gallery’s temporary 22nd Street location, continues his exploration of the canvas as a site for engagement with the material consistency and visual expressivity of paint in a manner that often eludes easy classification as abstraction or minimalist technique.

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Joe Bradley, Out Joy (2017), via Art Observed

Currently on at Gagosian Beverly Hills, artist Joe Bradley is presenting a body of new works, continuing the artist’s complex and occasionally irreverent visual language through a wide range of formats and materials.  Marking the gallery’s most recent entry in its annual Oscars Weekend exhibition series, the exhibition is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery in Los Angeles, a fitting introduction to his work that draws widely from his recent output.

Joe Bradley, Eric’s Hair (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Ryan McGinley, Dash (Manhattan Bridge) (2000), via Team Gallery

Over nearly two decades, photographer Ryan McGinley has explored the deep emotional character and vivid energy of American youth, capturing its subcultures, heroes and creative communities in moments of joy and exuberance, desire and rebellion.  This long engagement with the broad cultural underground of the United States has seen the artist build a striking and diverse oeuvre, one which receives a well-deserved reflection in the artist’s most recent show at Team Gallery, Early, a survey of the artist’s work between 1999 and 2003.

Ryan McGinley, Early (Installation View), via Team Gallery

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August Sander, Untitled (Group for Sherrie Levine Composed by Gerd Sander in 2012), all photos by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Currently occupying the top floors at Hauser & Wirth’s temporary 22nd Street space, Serialities provides the viewer with an ample range of works adopting visual repetition in photography, sculpture, and drawing as a manifestation and elaboration of their conceptual and narrative crux.  Organized with French art dealer Oliver Renaud-Clément, the exhibition finds its source of inspiration in August Sander’s decades-spanning photography project People of the 20th Century, a massive collection of 600 photographs in which Sanders chronicled German daily life through images of individuals of his home country between the 1910’s and the beginning of the 1950’s.  While Sanders sub-categorized his collection based on occupation or social class, People Who Came to My Door, one of his more personal and intimate groupings, anchor this group exhibition.  Through Sanders’s mellow, balanced approach to his subjects, he captures poses of deliberation and vulnerability, exposing their inner selves for the artist’s lens and viewer’s eyes.  His interest in depicting various social and economic groups in Germany before and after World War II delivers an inquisitive social landscape overall. (more…)

Jimmie Durham, At The Center of the World (Installation View), via Art Observed

For nearly fifty years, artist Jimmie Durham has worked at a unique junction of material and focus, exploring the modern world through his haphazard material sensibility.  Compiling works from broken planks of wood, reclaimed oil drums, signs, blown glass and other objects, the artist’s assemblages delve into the modern landscape, repositioning one’s perspective on the landscape of modernity, and the often challenging disconnects between human progress and the day to day world.  Currently presenting a survey of his work at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the artist gives the viewer a moment to catch up to the times, bringing together a range of interests in history and politics that constantly undergird his approach to his work.

Jimmie Durham, Homage to David Hammons (1997), via Art Observed

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Alice Neel, Anselmo (1962), via Art Observed

Drawing on painter Alice Neel’s longtime residence in the northern reaches of Manhattan, David Zwirner is currently presenting a body of paintings by Alice Neel, curated by author and critic Hilton Als, and exploring Neel’s longtime practice in portraiture.  Encouraging an exploration of visual art history and politics, social commentary and painterly craft, the exhibition is a striking exploration of the artist’s work in all of its nuance and power.   (more…)

Ron Nagle, Glorious Assemblage (2016), via Art Observed

Ron Nagle’s miniature sculptures function in part as narrative fragments, scenes and situations held in time and added a certain sense of life and energy by their imaginative, curving forms or remarkably evocative relations of space.  Some conjure the effect of domestic scenes, others a moment of geological rupture, while others present themselves as somewhere between the two, always emphasizing the artist’s patient craft and attention to detail that has made his connections with fellow West Coast artists like Ken Price all the more apparent.  Nagle returns to Los Angeles this spring for a show with Matthew Marks Gallery, bringing a new body of sculptures and drawings created over the course of 2016, once again illustrating these elements in play with his ever-growing body of work. (more…)

Bjarne Melgaard, The Casual Pleasure of Disappointment, 2017. Photography by Andre Herrero. Courtesy of Red Bull Arts New York.

For its inaugural exhibition as Red Bull Arts, the multi-purpose art venue in Chelsea has opened its doors for Bjarne Melgaard’s immersive reenactment of a clothing store, titled The Casual Pleasure of Disappointment, and furthering the artist’s already well-documented engagements with pop culture, fashion and personal subjectivities over the course of his body of multimedia works.  The Norwegian artist, who has enjoyed tremendous recognition in the U.S. in recent years, especially his psychedelic installation at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, has brought his own fashion line, which had its European debut at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo last November, to New York.   (more…)

Dinh Q. Le in the fair’s Encounters section courtesy 10 Chancery Lane, via Vivienne Shi for Art Observed

The Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center opened its doors this morning on the first hours of Art Basel Hong Kong, signaling the launch of Hong Kong Art Week in the city, and bringing crowds of collectors, dealers and other art world professionals to bear on the lengthy hallways and aisles of the event.  Marking a distinct focus on the Asian market, the fair boasted an impressive look at the continent’s contemporary arts circuit, with a burst of early sales that hinted at an ongoing willingness to spend at major events.  True to form, the event managed to bring out an impressive list of international VIP’s.  Hans Ulrich Obrist, Melissa Chiu, and Uli Sigg could all be seen wandering the aisles of the fair, as well as Ryan Gander, Rashid Johnson, and Christo, who was presenting a survey of his work at Galerie Gmurzynska.

Francis Picabia at Hauser & Wirth, via Vivienne Shi for Art Observed

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Ibrahim Mahama, Non-Orientable Nkansa (2017), via White Cube

Since his step onto the world stage at the 2015 Venice Biennale, artist Ibrahim Mahama has garnered impressive critical attention for his use of reclaimed jute sacks and other cast-off materials.  Drawing on the intersections of capitalist exchange, material decay, and commercial detritus, Mahama’s work uses structure and use as indicators of failed and fluctuating economic systems.  This practice takes on new elements and variations in the artist’s current exhibition at White Cube in London, his first solo exhibition in the UK, and a powerful introduction to the artist’s attentive, challenging body of work.

Ibrahim Mahama, Issaka Tob (2016), via White Cube

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Luc Tuymans, K (2017), via David Zwirner

Continuing the globe-hopping market events of March this year, collectors, galleries and artists will touch down in Hong Kong for the fifth edition of Art Basel’s fair event in the city, bringing 242 galleries from 34 countries around the globe to the annual sales event.  Marking a strong focus on Asian galleries and artists this year (at least half of the exhibiting galleries are based on the continent), the fair may trace a shift away from globalized networks and towards strengthening national and regional markets.

Vanderlei Lopes, EEDDM II, via Athena Contemporanea (more…)

Raul de Nieves, via Art Observed

It’s been a long time coming for this year’s Whitney Biennial, an exhibition that has sat on pause for several years as the institution prepared for its move downtown, and got comfortable in its new space in the Meatpacking District.  Opening its first Biennial since 2014, the stage has been set for a particularly timely moment of reflection on both America and its art communities at a time when the national identity has rarely been so fiercely contested and examined.

Ajay Kurian, Childermass (2017), via Art Observed

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Francis Picabia, The Adoration of the Calf (1941-42), via Art Observed

Taking on the endlessly inventive and ever-shifting formal abilities of artist Francis Picabia, MoMA’s current survey dedicated to the painter (and the first of its kind in the United States) has earned almost ceaseless praise, diving deep into the fluid and challenging series paintings, poems, published works, performances and films of one of French surrealisms landmark voices.  Spread across the gallery’s sixth floor exhibition space, Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction (which closes at the end of the week), serves as both a striking introduction and an impressively deep elaboration on the artist’s body of work.  (more…)

Raymond Pettibon, A Pen of All Work (Installation View), via Art Observed

Over the past 50 years, few artists have produced a body of work as expansive, multivalent, and formally diverse as Raymond Pettibon, the longtime illustrator whose early work for the Los Angeles punk band Black Flag set the stage for his later career delving into the often elusive, twisting histories of American culture.  Ranging from literary rumination on baseball, surfing and poetry through to comical interpretations of the dark history of the American counterculture, Pettibon’s endlessly evolving body of work, often executed in pen and ink, twists and turns varied histories into an endlessly flowing stream of images, one that often functions as an alternative to the prolific mass media systems of modern American culture.  This restless approach to his craft is on view this spring at the New Museum, where his first major retrospective, A Pen of All Work, has brought hundreds of the artist’s works to bear on the walls of the institution. (more…)

Pier Paolo Calzolari, Untitled (2014-2015), via Art Observed

Taking over both of Marianne Boesky’s exhibition spaces on West 24th Street in Chelsea, Italian artist Pier Paolo Calzolari is currently showing a wide range of works exploring his specific interpretation of the Arte Povera movement, and his engagement with a broad range of materials that lend each of his works a notable sense of diffusive agency, allowing his chosen materials to function as both subject and object.

Pier Paolo Calzolari, Untitled (Scarpetta) (1994), via Art Observed

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B. Wurtz, Bunch #4 (1996), via Lulu Gallery

Opening in conjunction with the broad range of events and projects around the Zona Maco art fair this past week in Mexico City, the Cuauhtemoc-based gallery Lulu has welcomed New York-based artist B. Wurtz to present a body of new works, continuing the artist’s enigmatic engagement with the materiality of the everyday.  The exhibition will remain on view through the middle of April.

B. Wurtz (Installation View), via Lulu Gallery

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Terence Koh, Sleeping in a beam of sunlight (Installation View), via Art Observed

When Terence Koh announced his sudden return from Upstate New York for a show in Manhattan last year, few could anticipate the artist’s intricate clusters of collaged material, soundscapes, and of course, his Bee Chapel, an immense hive installed inside a wax structure viewers could sit inside and listen to the insects buzzing drones.  So when the artist announced a second show in Los Angeles, and took up residency inside the rooms of Moran Bondaroff, one expected something of a second shock inside the sun-filled gallery space.

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Christopher Wool, Untitled (1989), via Phillips

Taking its turn after a consistent offering yesterday at Christie’s, Phillips held its spring 20th Century Sale at its 30 Berkeley Square this evening, a 30-lot affair that saw a less measured evening by comparison, underscoring the auction house’s continued efforts to compete alongside the auction house giants, and the challenges it still faces in competing against these marquee sales . Scaling its offering back in comparison with full 60-lot offerings at the other sales, the house managed to move its premier works, while occasional struggles in placing lots overshadowed some of its larger successes.  The sale saw 5 lots go unsold over the course of the evening, not counting two withdrawn lots, bringing a final tally of £14,660,000.   (more…)

Mark Rothko, No. 1 (1949), via Christie’s

Following a few days pause for collectors to recover from the busy rush of Armory Week in New York, Christie’s has kicked off another week of major sales in London this evening, concluding its Post-War and Contemporary Evening offering with an unexpectedly energetic outing.

Critics and insiders watching the sale had said little on the auction house’s offerings this week, other than its focus in recent sales on Asian bidders, instead focusing primarily on the high percentage of guaranteed lots in Sotheby’s competing offering tomorrow night.  Even so, Christie’s carried its own trove of guarantees, with at least 5 works promising third-party guarantees before the sale.  The strategy seemed to pay off, as the evening’s lots moved swiftly and without issue, with only 3 lots failing to find a buyer, and ultimately bringing the sale to a final tally of £96.3 million.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Beautyful Ones (2012), via Christie’s (more…)

Mark Rothko, No. 1 (1949), via Christie’s

With the proceedings of the Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale concluded this past week, attention turns to London’s Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sales, as a trio of auctions will look to test the waters in the early months of 2017.  Boasting an impressively strong focus in particular on German art, the auction houses will seek strong results in a market that has seen noticeably turbulent, unpredictable results in the past months.  Yet a recent bump in the London art market, driven by the weak pound, may see some unexpected results for the week’s offerings.  Either way, the week should see each auction house battling it out for market share through aggressive guarantees.  (more…)

NADA, via Art Observed

One could have been mistaken for assuming there wasn’t much a NADA New York fair during Armory Week could add to the already broad scope on both the city’s art scene and the international network that the week’s many fairs and openings already offered.  Yet at the same time, NADA seems to have long prided itself on its surprises, and its first edition in Tribeca (away from its usual haunt at Basketball City on the Lower East Side) made for a timely update on the fair’s already sterling reputation in the art fair circuit.

Joani Tremblay at Projet Pangee, via Art Observed

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Sascha Braunig, Hide (2015), via Art Observed

Currently on view on the ground floor of MoMA PS1, painter Sascha Braunig has compiled a body of work from the past five years of her practice, showcasing the range and depth of the artist’s investigations into the painted canvas, and her investigations into the act of portraiture.  Working through a wide range of visual materials, Brauning’s swirling, twisting confrontations with the history portraiture, and modes of understanding the human form itself, open an intriguing dialogue with the Mark Leckey exhibition just upstairs, and underscore Brauning’s imaginative practice.

Sascha Braunig, Warm Leatherette (2015), via Art Observed

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