Zoe Barcza, Fidelio (2016), via Art Observed

Team Gallery has opened 2017 with a commanding group exhibition, The Love Object, a show curated by Tom Brewer that draws on the writings of Roland Barthes to frame a body of works exploring love and the act of love through a more objective lens, delving into relations of bodies, texts and language as a mode of investigating not only the state of emotional attraction, but equally the frameworks we use to understand these forms. (more…)

Christian Jankowski, Retrospektive (Installation View), all photos courtesy CFA Berlin

The work of Christian Jankowski involves various social and artistic practices, a comingling of actions in which the visual product is often only a single aspect of the larger work.  Randomly encountered bystanders become co-conspirators in his spectacle, often interrogating modes of modern communication and interaction.   Timed to coincide with the Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale 2016, the first-time collaboration between the gallery and Berlin-based Jankowski, the exhibition is presented as a retrospective and features predominantly cinematic work produced by the artist. (more…)

Image: Christian Jankowski, Monument to the Bourgeois Working Class, 2012

All images courtesy Klosterfelde Gallery

Now on view at Berlin’s Klosterfelde Gallery is German contemporary multimedia artist Christian Jankowski‘s  Monument to the Bourgeois Working Class: a video projection, photo series, and large-scale sculpture, which explore tensions between social classes and the use of mass media as a political instrument. Though, while political on the surface, the works are also said to represent the struggles of the individual artist.

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Toby Ziegler‘s The Cripples, image via Art Observed

Back in 2003 in Frieze’s first year, no major international art fair had ever been hosted in London before. Frieze Art Fair, organized by Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, has helped take London from being a city without a focused art scene to its current state at the center of the European art market. Now in its tenth year, Frieze Art Fair in London’s Regent’s Park has seen around 60,000 visitors, with 264 dealers from 35 countries hoping to sell work (valuing an estimated  £230m) created by more than 2,400 artists within 175 of the world’s leading galleries.

An Aaron Young motorcycle burn out work at Massimo de Carlo in Milan, photo via Art Observed

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Doug Aitken, Now (2011) at 303 Gallery NY. All photos for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

AO is on site in London for this week’s Frieze Art Fair. With 173 galleries selling an estimated $350 million worth of art, a level of anxiety pervades as the week’s results will be indicative of the overall international contemporary art market. Works like Christian Jankowski’s droll The Finest Art on Water and Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine directly comment on the world economic state, while the overall demeanor remains upbeat, with art world moguls and A-list celebrities enjoying the festivities.

Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine (2011), Thomas Dane Gallery

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Move over vaporetti — there’s a new barge in town. Slated to gracing the banks of the Grand Canal in Venice over the past five days was a project by The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, entitled “Commercial Break.” The exhibition is organized by Neville Wakefield, a contemporary art writer prolific curator globally. Powered by POST Magazine, “Commercial Break” considers itself to be a provocative architectural intervention in a city where no advertising is traditionally displayed. Unfortunately, as Artinfo reported, the city pulled permits a few days before and the videos were instead screened at the project’s Bauer Hotel party. The woman behind the “GCCC” is Dasha Zukhova, girlfriend of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich; it is the institution’s second project in Venice.  All videos are now viewable on the exhibition’s website.

Among videos featured is one by  Richard Phillips, starring Lindsey Lohan.

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