Camillle Henrot, Days Are Dogs (Installation View), via Art Observed

Camille Henrot works better on a grand scale.  The Golden Lion-winning French artist, whose enigmatic and playful sculptures, paintings and installations dwell on the phenomenology of life, and an often overwhelming range of lived experience, seems to draw additional strength from working with as much space as possible, perhaps best seen in her last show at Metro Pictures in New York, where a range of concepts and ideas allowed the viewer to move effortlessly through experiences of neurosis, guilt, pain and anger through to more primal emotions, and on through to a coy fusion of the two in the language of modernity.   (more…)

Robert Longo, Untitled (Bodyhammer: 9mm) (2008), via Art Observed

Few writers have walked such a fine line between coy observations of modernity and the possible dystopian future that lay just under the surface of daily life in the way that writer J.G. Ballard had over the course of his more than fifty years of writing.  Mixing a playful sense of imagination with dark and disturbing meditations on the state of the world, the writer’s work continues to serve as a major inspiration for artists and philosophers in the 21st century, just as some of the futuristic conditions he so often described have begun to manifest themselves in the real world. (more…)

Asad Raza with work by Jordan Wolfson, Jessica Dickinson and bedsheets from his childhood selected by Rachel Rose, via Art Observed

“Hey, I’m Asad,”  Asad Raza greets the viewer at the ground floor of his apartment building on Spring Street, before leading them up the stairs to his modest one-bedroom.  Over the past month, Raza has brought a number of visitors through the space for Home Show, a group exhibition of site-specific and performative works that he compiled from a close group of friends, including Tino Seghal, Camille Henrot, Rachel Rose and many more, guiding them through the show with an enthusiastic flair that intertwines his own personal history and life with the work of his friends and collaborators.

A heart pump loaned to the artist from his father, via Art Observed

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The reinstated Edvard Munch Award was given to Camille Henrot this week during a presentation event in Miami Beach, giving the artist a prize of nearly $59,000 and a solo exhibition at the Munch museum.  “There is always some dimension of challenge in the work that I do, which sometimes I regret because it is really difficult,” she says. “But, I’m more interested in the experience of making work than the final object, and I would like to continue experimenting and challenging myself.” (more…)

Camille Henrot (Installation Pictures), via Art Observed

Camille Henrot’s first solo show with Metro Pictures is something of a story in three parts, bringing the artist’s loosely flowing, cartoonish drawings to bear against her interests in environmental installation, digital artifacts and an interest in the modes and experiences of banality to bear across a broad selection of pieces. The artist’s work, presented here, offers a considered, meandering pathway through the iconography and subtle psychologies of modern life. (more…)

Haegue Yang, Sellim (2009), via Art Observed

Currently on view at MoMA through April of next year, Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection offers a carefully balanced rumination on the processes and practices that have defined the past three decades of contemporary art. Looking back at a diverse series of explorations into the political, visual and spatial interests of artists and their recent practices, the show is a remarkably broad rumination on contemporary art today, one that feels particularly strong during the summer gallery lull in New York. (more…)

Camille Henrot has unveiled a series of drawings inspired by Nicki Minaj, taking scenes and ideas from the artist’s “Anaconda” video and interpreting them into her signature style.  “Nicki Minaj is a feminist icon,” she says.   (more…)

The Wall Street Journal profiled Camille Henrot this past week, in the lead-up to the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition at the New Museum, opening this upcoming Wednesday.  The show includes her work Grosse Fatigue, which earned her the Silver Lion at Venice last year for most promising young artist, and which features the image of the turtle heavily.  “She’s slow because she is carrying this massive round thing–it’s like a figure of Atlas,” Henrot says. (more…)