Venus Over Manhattan, all images by Art Observed

Over the last several years, the Independent Art Fair has built a name for itself as a dynamic and focused exhibition project, culling together small selections of exhibitors that emphasize curation and focus over the sprawling aisles of mega fairs and blue-chip magnets. This year, the fair has returns its 20th Century offering for the run of The Armory Show further uptown. The show, focusing in on historically-resonant works, makes for a striking new offering during Armory Week, and a fitting continuation of the fair’s well-established focus.

Norman Zammit at Karma

(more…)

Jonathas de Andrade at Galeria Nara Roseler

Despite a heat wave that made early September feel like mid-July in New York, this week, the fall art season and the promise of cooler weather has descended on The Big Apple, and New Yorkers are flocking back from their summer travels to kick off one of the busiest art seasons of the year at the Armory Show. This year, the Javits Center is home to over 225 booths, featuring selections from gallery veterans, non-profits, museums, and emerging gallerists from over 35 countries. The fair was notably divided into several sections such as Galleries, Solo, dedicated to single artists, Not-for-Profit, Focus, a section curated by Candice Hopkins, featuring solo- and dual-artist presentations that under-represented artists who draw on cultural connections, and Presents, featuring galleries that are less than 10 years old.

Leonard Baby at Anat Ebgi

(more…)

Katherine Bernhardt at David Zwirner, all images via Minji Son for 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 reopened the newest iteration of its art fair franchise. Now in its second year, the fair, led by Frieze Seoul Director Patrick Lee, features over 120 galleries, with a strong focus on Asia alongside a range of galleries from countries around the globe, as well as its signature program of screenings, talks and other projects.

Theaster Gates at White Cube

(more…)

Malediction and Prayer (Installation View), via Modern Art

Taking its name from a Diamanda Galas record of the same name, Malediction and Prayer marks this year’s summer group show entry at London’s Modern Art. Delving into a range of richly expressive painting and sculpture throughout the show, the program takes on modes of seeing and representation that balances intimacy with intensity, dense layers with moments of triumphal revelation.  (more…)

Martin Wong, Malicious Mischief (Installation View), all images via Camden Art Center

Artist Martin Wong is widely recognised for his extraordinary depictions of social, sexual and political scenographies from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Weaving together narratives of queer existence, marginal communities, and urban gentrification, Wong stands out as an important countercultural voice at odds with the art establishment’s reactionary discourse at the time. This summer, the artist’s work is at the center of an impressive show at the Camden Art Center in London, tracing the artist’s works as an extension of his life. (more…)

Marcin Dudek, NEOPLAN (2023), via Edel Assanti

Artist Marcin Dudek’s work finds particular and complex sites for intervention in the language of the everyday, charging familiar forms and structures with a loose, vibrant energy that underscores cultural tensions, frictive languages, and modes of engagement that underline conflict and collision. This mode of practice finds particular expression in NEOPLAN, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with Edel Assanti on at the gallery’s London exhibition space. and running concurrently with his solo show at Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, and the launch of his new monograph. (more…)

Ugly Paintings (Installation View), via Nahmad Contemporary

This month, writer Dean Kissick and curator Eleanor Cayre have teamed up at Nahmad Contemporary to present a new exhibition titled Ugly Painting. Drawing on works that mine the deliberate use of grotesque, garish, or abject in brushwork, representation, composition, or coloring, the show presents a range of works that run through a range of confrontational and conceptual approaches to the human form, its representation, and its understanding.  (more…)

Christina Mackie, Token 31 (2020), via Herald Street

On this month at London’s Herald Street, artist Christina Mackie exhibits a range of ceramic works and watercolors that showcase the artist’s multidisciplinary engagement with color and material. Combining a body of ceramic sculptures called Tokens and paintings titled Seaports, the show uses pigments, earthenware, slips, glazes, and an array of fabrics, to investigates the physical and chemical properties of her mediums, and simultaneously expose their emotional subtexts.

Christina Mackie (Installation View), via Herald Street

(more…)

Susumu Kamijo, Bear Mountain (2023), via Alexander Berggruen

On this summer at Alexander Berggruen, the exhibition Levity presents a range of paintings that reflect on the comic and the absurd through a range of styles and techniques. Irony, mirth, the absurd, the evolving image of cartoon, and even darker, but amusing reads of the human condition serve as entry points into the language of the contemporary. Using humor as a mode to elicit a direct reaction from the viewer, the works on view press the viewer to move beyond their comfort zone. (more…)

Carol Bruns (Installation View), via White Columns

Brooklyn-based artist Carol Bruns marks her latest solo exhibition and first in Manhattan in over two decades with a body of recent works on view this summer at White Columns, continuing the artist’s work in a range of materials and forms that negotiate languages and ways of creating and approaching art and its production. (more…)

Sarah Cunningham, The Crystal Forest (Installation View), all images via Lisson

Lisson Gallery presents its first solo exhibition by British painter Sarah Cunningham this month, exploring psychological spaces and multifaceted landscapes that the artist composes within her layered and generative canvases. This new body of paintings – including a major triptych and large-scale works, alongside smaller panels – focusses on Cunningham’s abstract forays into kaleidoscopic environments and imagined forest clearings, which she constructs over time through layer after layer of gesture and radiating bursts of light, line and color. (more…)

Jean-Luc Moulene, TransBébu (Le Buisson, 2021) (2021), all images via Miguel Abreu

This summer at Miguel Abreu in downtown New York, the gallery’s artist roster gathers together for a group show that delves into painting, sculpture, works on paper, and other hybridized modes as am exploration of diverse themes and concepts. The cosmos, the monochrome, the representation of nature and the body, as well as the geometric impulse are imaginatively engaged in the paintings, sculptures and drawings included in this dynamic arrangement of works, unified under the title Shake the Dust.

Alex Carver, Temporary Composition (Hand Attached to Broken Leg) (2019)

(more…)

Al Hassah Issah, Piercing the Air (2022), all images via Mitchell-Innes & Nash

This month in New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash present Worldmaking, a group exhibition of ten emerging artists living and working in Ghana, with many showing their work in New York for the first time. Exploring relationships of content and politics, perception and reflection across the works on view, the show, co-curated by Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah and curator and Gallery Director Ylinka Barotto, Worldmaking frames Ghana against a backdrop of Western consumption, architectural influences that derive from years-long domination, colonial impact on ecosystems and economies, and the use of traditions as conduits to preserving the past and understanding the present. (more…)

Supawich Weesapen, The Comet, the Soul, and its Reflection (2022), via Clearing

Marking its entry in summer group show season, Clearing Gallery has opened MADE IN THE DARK, a selection of works that unifies five artists along lines of the phenomenological, spiritual and material. Drawing on otherworldly images, surreal interpolations of the human body, and figures that push the familiar into strange new territories, the show makes for a fascinating outing, exploring the thresholds of worldly and otherworldly phenomena through modes of mysticism and skepticism, on through fragmented and material negotiations.

Made in the Dark (Installation View), via Clearing

(more…)

Maureen Dougherty, BOXER (2023), via Cheim and Read

On view this summer in New York, Cheim & Read gallery invites artist Maureen Dougherty to present Borrowed Time, a selection of new works by the painter and filmmaker. Continuing the artist’s work in documentary modes that branch both creative practices, the works on view here are direct and unflinching portraiture, stark in color and form in a manner that explores the sitter’s persona in deep, rich nuances.

(more…)

Regina José Galindo, SIREN (installation view)

On Saturday, July 29, 2023, The Watermill Center hosted “the BODY: The Watermill Center Annual Summer Benefit,” celebrating creative experimentation in support of the organization’s year-round Artist Residency and Education programming. This year’s benefit centered on the body’s role in art making and featured exhibitions and performances by a dynamic roster of international artists before culminating with a showing of Artistic Director Robert Wilson’s “Ubu.” (more…)

Sanaa Gateja, Ripe (2022), via Karma

This summer in New York, Karma presents Rolled Secrets, the first New York solo show dedicated to the work of Sanaa Gateja’s following the artist’s inclusion in the 58th Carnegie International. The artist, who transforms natural materials and post-consumer paper waste into complex, mosaic-like works, here continues his practice with a range of materials that include hand-rolled paper beads, cloth, and soaked and pounded strips of bark. Motivated by an innate sensibility of form, Gateja’s often monumental works oscillate between figuration and abstraction.  (more…)

Song Dong, ROUND (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this summer at Pace Song Dong’s ROUND focuses on the artist’s practice over the past three years, placing ancient Chinese philosophy in a contemporary context and offering new understandings of ideas that figure prominently in his work. Song, who is one of the most important figures of the Conceptual art movement in China, blurs the boundaries between art and life in his interdisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and film. Here, the artist uses the circle as a mode of philosophical and graphical meditation, reflecting on culture, memory and time through a range of forms.  (more…)

Thomas Hirschhorn, Schema Art and Public Space (2016-2022), via Marlborough

This summer at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, the group show Schema: World as Diagram presents a dynamic and intricate series of investigations into lines of thought, diagrammatic modes of thinking, and the use of graphical and indexical modes of organization to present and obscure the process of thought and creation. Occupying two floors of the gallery, the exhibition brings together over 50 artists whose works engage in these themes.  (more…)

Klara Kristalova, The Cold Wind and the Warm (Installation View), via Lehmann Maupin

This summer in London, Lehmann Maupin presents The Cold Wind and the Warm, an exhibition of new work by Klara Kristalova, dwelling on the artist’s figurative ceramic sculptures that incorporate both aspects of the human body and elements of nature, and marking her first solo show in London.  (more…)

Distribuidx (Installation View), via Lisson

This summer, Lisson Gallery marks its entry into the string of group shows sprung up across the art world with a show that opens a dialogue between the work of artist Hélio Oiticica and a range of intergenerational artists with varying relationships to Latin America. The presentation is curated by César García-Alvarez, the Executive & Artistic Director of The Mistake Room in Los Angeles. (more…)

Gilbert & George, BONE TIES (2022), via Lehmann Maupin

This month at Lehmann Maupin’s New York exhibition space, artists Gilbert & George present a body of new works, unified under the title THE CORPSING PICTURES, and centering on concepts of death and humor in equal measure. The exhibition comprises a suite of richly colored pictures starring the artists themselves in various poses of alarm and resignation as bones encroach in intricate patterns over their faces and bodies. Employing their signature use of bold color and symmetrical composition, Gilbert & George confront the subject of mortality and life itself. (more…)

The Lawrence Weiner estate is now represented in Asia by Pace. “Lawrence Weiner’s work redefined how art can communicate meaning,” Pace CEO Marc Glimcher said in a statement. “Language and material come together in his practice to create an experience that is somehow at once universal and unique. A giant of Conceptualism, Weiner offers the phenomenal, the radical, and the poetic in his work, and we are honored to bring it to our audiences to engage with it themselves.” (more…)

Piet Mondrian, Evolution (1911), via Art Observed

This summer, the Tate Modern presents an exploratory show tracing convergences and divergences in the work of Piet Mondrian and Hilma af Klint. Taking the work of these two luminary twentieth century artists in concert, the show draws intriguing connections across phenomenology, experience, and abstraction, exploring how each artist used their craft to push deeper inquiries and explorations of the world they lived in.  (more…)