Raymond Pettibon, Frenchette (Installation View), via David Zwirner

With the days of FIAC now fading into the distance, the art world has settled down a bit in Paris, but some of the fresh energy and excitement of the week remains, particularly in the Marais, where David Zwirner’s brand new exhibition space at 108, rue Vieille du Temple has now opened permanently. The well-appointed space is christened by American artist Raymond Pettibon, who marks his first solo show in the city since 1995. Read More »

Jim Shaw, Strange Beautiful (2019), via Praz-Delavallade

It’s hard to avoid the bizarre poignancy of Jim Shaw’s work in the modern era. The artist’s incisive and often hysterical engagements with the language of modern U.S. politics, moments of historical violence, pop culture and even commodity capitalism (usually all at once), makes him one of our era’s most erudite cultural critics, even if he may, simultaneously, be one of our most ribald. His work, on view now at Praz-Delavallade in Paris, makes the most of our current historical moment, putting the full weight of the current era into a new series of works. Read More »

Jeppe Hein, Moon Mirror (2019), via 303

Artist Jeppe Hein rounds out a new show of works at 303 Gallery this month, a selection of works that continue a frank, emotive sensibility and a meditative approach towards perception and understanding in his work.  The show, including neon works, LED-lit sculptures and painted canvases, seems to reflect and rework a range of expressive tendencies from the contemporary canon through a colorful, subdued lens. Read More »

Jonathan Lyndon Chase, watch shopping (2019), via Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Currently on view at its Chelsea exhibition space, Mitchell-Innes & Nash is currently presenting Embodiment, a group exhibition of works by Pope.L, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Cheyenne Julien and Tschabalala Self that explores the different ways in which corporeality is envisioned and depicted within the spatial confines of the two-dimensional picture plane. Focusing on a selection of works that tease and turn the human form through a variety of perspectives and varied iterations, the show is a fascinating investigation of how the human form exists in contemporary art, and how it might be incorporated in the future. Read More »

Yayoi Kusama at Victoria Miro, via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

Spread out along the spacious aisles and picturesque dome of the Grand Palais in Paris, the Foire internationale d’art contemporain, also known as FIAC, has returned once again for another year of sales and exhibitions in the French capital. With Wednesday evening slowly dragging into the late hours, the fair’s VIP opening is now concluded, once again garnering strong praise and enthusiastic response from its attendees. This year, the list of galleries brings together exhibitors from 25 countries, marking its 46th edition with a fitting reflection of its storied history, one echoed by the prestigious locale of the Grand Palais. With an exacting selection of modern art, contemporary art, and design galleries, among the most emblematic of the international scene, the fair’s opening hours once again underscored its vitality in the modern fair circuit. Read More »

Paul Chan, Khara En Tria (Joyer in 3) (2019), via Greene Naftali

On view this month at Greene Naftali in Chelsea, artist Paul Chan makes his fourth solo entry in the gallery program, featuring a new series of works Chan calls “Bathers.” Marking new iterations and elaborations on his prior work, the show explores space and movement through simple materials. Read More »

Janiva Ellis, Wokey Doke (2019), via 47 Canal

There’s a remarkable concept of balance and duality in the work of Janiva Ellis, moments of sublime beauty and fragile, held states that seem to make the moments of bizarre surrealism and sinister iconographies all the more unnerving.  For her most recent show, ‘Tip Drill,’ on view at New York’s 47 Canal Gallery through October 20th, the artist continues her practice of elaborate systems of tension and release. Read More »

Dan Graham, via Art Observed

After a whirlwind few hours in London, the Frieze Art Fair is underway, and the doors are open for the public. Opening its doors this week for its 17th edition in Regent’s Park, Frieze London has once again turned the art world’s collective eye towards the British capital for the next week, as sales and installations across its spacious halls make for a fitting center to one of the city’s busiest art events. Read More »

Amy Sherald, Sometimes the King is a Woman (2019), via Hauser & Wirth

This fall in New York, artist Amy Sherald, the artist tapped for First Lady Michelle Obama’s commanding, cool portrait for the National Archives, opens a show of new works at Hauser & Wirth, her first with the gallery. Titled ‘the heart of the matter…,’ the show debuts two paintings that reach a new, monumental scale for the artist, with monochromatic backgrounds that evolve into fully realized scenes referencing quintessential Americana, as well as a series of portraits that continue her iconic exploration of the contemporary black experience.   Read More »

Dis, January 9, 2008 (2019), via Project Native Informant

The New York collective Dis has long reveled in a mixture of the politically-incisive and the socially-mischievous, putting further a body of work that dwells on revolution and change, modes of sociality in the digital age, and the mass-media phenomena that populate the world around us. After a year in which the group moved back into online publishing, embracing a “pivot to video,” trumpeted by social media giant Facebook (which, ironically, was later revealed to be based on a false premise), the collective has opened a show in London at Project Native Informant, compiling a range of recent works that explore the idea of the 2008 economic crisis as a missed opportunity for economic revolution. Read More »

Berta Fischer (Installation View), via James Fuentes

Marking his second exhibition with the Berlin-based painter, James Fuentes’s current exhibition of works by Berta Fischer brings a summery energy to downtown, a selection of brightly-colored, technically impressive arrangements that underscore the artist’s abilities in the sculptural medium. Read More »

Elizabeth Murray, DuckWabbit (1992), via Pace Gallery

The work of American painter Elizabeth Murray gets its first UK exhibition this summer in London, with Camden Arts Centre showcasing an impressive selection of the artist’s work from across her multifaceted career. Documenting Murray’s continued engagement with the languages of abstraction and conceptualism, the artist’s work delves into various iterations of painterly expression, from studies in violent action to nuanced investigations of the canvas as a form and medium in and of itself. Read More »

Peter Saville, Blue Monday (1983), via Sprueth Magers

Culling together a selection of works that chart the landscape of British art as it moved through the landscape of industrial collapse through the neoliberal ascendancy of the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, Sprüth Magers is currently presenting New Order: Art, Product, Image 1976 – 1995 at its London exhibition space. The exhibition originates from a discussion about the cultural status and art historical positioning of one of Peter Saville’s best-known works for Factory Records made in the early 1980s, an object that helped in blurring the boundaries between art, design, pop and product. Read More »

Simone Fattal, Works and Days (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view through the end of August, MoMA PS1 is presenting the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Simone Fattal. The Lebanese-American artist whose commanding body of work weaves together disparate elements and sources to create new stories and concepts. The show brings together over 200 works created over the last 50 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and collages that draw from a range of sources including war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, mythology, and Sufi poetry to explore the impact of displacement as well as the politics of archeology and excavation.

Simone Fattal, Works and Days (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Tarkulnga (1988) Ronnie Tjampitjinpa , © Copyright Agency. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2019 Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian

Following up on the much-praised New York exhibition documenting the leading painters from the Central and Western Desert regions of Australia, Gagosian’s Los Angeles exhibition space has pulled together a second iteration of Desert Painters of Australia, a strikingly powerful show documenting the indigenous art traditions of the country.
In the late 1960s, the Australian government moved several communities from the Western Desert region—primarily Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Arrernte peoples—to the Papunya settlement, about 150 miles south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, a forced displacement that simultaneously centered the Indigenous Australian art community around a centralized hub where artists would gather to create murals works on canvas, and other forms drawing on ceremonial decorations and sand art. The result was a transposition of historically-resonant modes to the physical media of contemporary art and which has since presented a new outlet and opportunity for Papunya Tula artists to reexamine the imagery and present their culture to outsiders through transcendental visual codes. Read More »

Ed Moses and Qin Feng via Blain|Southern

Currently on view at Blain|Southern’s London exhibition space, the work of Ed Moses and Qin Feng are placed into a fluid, flowing conversation across cultures, conducted in a shared artistic language. Relying on the two artists’s various interests in composition as a combination of varied gestural actions and interventions in the space of the canvas, the show is a striking look at the styles and ideas between two divergent perspectives in contemporary art in both the U.S. and China. Read More »

Economies (Installation View), via LTD

Currently on view at LTD Los Angeles, the gallery’s summer exhibition, Economies, explores the notion of observation and exchange, suspending the images and objects of the world of art as transactional properties, bound up in a flow between the work’s circulation and its effects.  The show, delving into the possibilities of simple materials suspended in flow, or twisted up into strange assemblages.  Read More »

Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat (Installation View), via Art Observed

Over the course of her career, Simone Leigh has continuously and insistently centered the black female experience, creating a range of works that pose the body in arrangements twisting architectural elements, sound, and other items into shared space. For her show with Guggenheim for her 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, the artist explores fusions of sound, text and sculpture to create broader narratives of resilience and relation.  Read More »

My Head Is a Haunted House (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ

Currently on view at Sadie Coles HQ in London, My Head is a Haunted House explores the weird and eerie from a range of perspectives, mixing together works from a broad group of artists.  The show, curated by writer Charlie Fox, is an intriguing investigation of materiality and motive, swapping pathos for a suspended sense of presence, and a concrete subject for a creeping sense of a body, either present or withdrawn. Read More »

Donald Moffett, Lot 090307 (O) (2007), via Lehmann Maupin

On view for the summer months at Lehmann Maupin, a group show compiling the work of Angel Otero, Donald Moffett, Carrie Moyer and many more. The exhibition, co-organized by Curator Michael Goodson and Lehmann Maupin Curatorial Director Anna Stothart and spanning both of its Chelsea locations, combines a group of artists centered around more traditional formal, material, and spatial concerns, while also explicitly engaging with social, political, and psychological areas of influence to expand the established narrative traditionally used to answer the question, “Where does abstraction come from?” Read More »

Betty Woodman, Venus #7: Homey (2014), via David Kordansky

Currently on at David Kordansky’s Los Angeles exhibition space, Shadows and Silhouettes brings together a selection of sculptures and paintings by Betty Woodman, the artist’s first solo show in a gallery since her death. Meandering through the last years of the artist’s live, the show takes particular interest in the technical issues of constructing the work, and how these moments and movements in space can work in conjunction with the artist’s hand to complete the object. Read More »

Allan Sekula, Man sleeping under a eucalyptus tree, Embarcadero park, (SD) from Fish Story (1989-1995), via Marian Goodman

Having first shown the late Allan Sekula’s nuanced and incisive photographic and conceptual work at its London Gallery this spring, Marian Goodman has once again tapped the artist’s archive for a wide-ranging exhibition of his works at its New York space this summer, compiling works from a range of different projects the artist has embraced over the years, and moving between film, performance and photography. Read More »