Summer Group Show (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

The group exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery revives an excitement for the accomplishments of formal, conceptual and technical art practices during the mid to late 20th century, presenting a lively exhibition that groups together an overlapping group of six prolific artists: Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Fred Sandback, Anne Truitt, John McCracken and Lawrence Weiner, one is privy to the continuing reverberations of works that defined both minimalist and conceptual techniques in contemporary art practice, often passing from one school to the other while redefining notions of structure, method, dimensionality, and form.  Stoic in its midtown location, the exhibition presents an impressive collection of conceptual and minimalist classics, offering continuing pivots and critically advanced methodological expectations of non-referential visual forms.

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The Museum of Modern Art and Basel’s Schaulager Collection are partnering to present a major retrospective focused on the work of Bruce Nauman, set to open in Switzerland in March of 2018.  The show will then cross the Atlantic to MoMA for a September opening. (more…)

The Met is currently working on plans for a 2017 exhibition focused on the work of Lucio Fontana, and initial reporting by the Art Newspaper indicates that the exhibition could be held at the Breuer building, formerly the home of the Whitney Museum.  “An exhibition at the Met will necessarily be all-encompassing,” an anonymous source close to the museum says. (more…)

Karen Kilimnik, The Cold Winter Lane, The Polish Countryside, A Delft Landscape (2013) via Sprüth Magers

Artist Karen Kilimnik returns to Sprüth Magers this month, showcasing her small-scale, painted appropriations, mixed with the influence of traditional Delftware.  Kilimnik’s work focuses on expressing her own views of openness and precision, elegance and humor through a variety of mediums, often creating site-specific projects that mimic 19th Century interiors and often incorporating the design and fashion of the era.  Her small paintings overlay found imagery with new landscapes and imagined scenarios, reinforcing the atmospheric effects of the painterly surface while maintaining the scale and shape of the landscape and her palette. (more…)

Daniel Buren, Au fur et à mesure, travaux in situ et situés (Bit by Bit: In Situ and Situated Works) (Installation View) (2015), all exhibition images via Kamel Mennour

Daniel Buren presents a new, in situ exhibition at Kamel Mennour this month, a show that demonstrates the form a gallery space lends to the art shown within it. Transforming the space itself into a part of his artwork, Buren instills in his work the tendency to guide the viewer’s perception and sense of location. (more…)

On Kawara, July 16th, 1969 (1969), via Art Observed

Taking On Kawara’s work at face value, one could imagine that the artist had been preparing for years for a career retrospective.  His near-endless stream of date paintings, accounting records for every book he read or person he met, and his series of postcards and maps are a record of the artist’s daily experience as he lived it, leaving behind a steady stream of locations, times and movements from each day of his life. (more…)

The 2015 edition of the Kurt Schwitters Award, which comes with a $28,000 prize an an exhibition in the Sprengel Museum Hannover, has been awarded to Pierre Huyghe.   (more…)

Pierre Huyghe, Zoodram 5 (2011)

Following a year of strong solo exhibitions and special projects in the United States and abroad, Pierre Huyghe has opened a the first major retrospective devoted to his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, pulling together a combination of his most ambitious videos, sculptures and installation environments, allowing a broad few of the artist’s continued interests in fluctuations of time, space and matter as expressed within the gallery environment.  Huyghe’s retrospective, which first opened in Paris, early last year, finally makes it to U.S. soil, bringing with it a group of 50 projects culled from the artist’s 20 year career. (more…)

French filmmaker Pierre Bismuth is going in search of a long-forgotten sculpture by Ed Ruscha, a fake rock that was created and then abandoned in the Mojave desert.  The work, titled Rocky II, does not have a confirmed location, but Bismuth is determined to locate it, and has launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund the completion of the film.  “We will answer the questions ‘Where is this rock?’ ‘Why is it hidden?’ and ‘What is there to hide?'” says Bismuth. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal profiles collectors Aaron and Barbara Levine, whose focus on collecting conceptual art has led to an impressive collections of 20th century art focused around works by On Kawara and Marcel Duchamp, among many others.  “The first time I saw the early 20th-century abstractions of Kazimir Malevich, I was in tears,” Ms. Levine says.  (more…)

The New York Times profiles the work and life of Ray Johnson, an artist who left a subtle but lasting impact on the discourses of pop, conceptual and abstract art over the course of the last half century, before taking his own life in 1995.  “He was a guerrilla fighter against materialism and fame, and in a sense he’s still fighting today,” said Frances F. L. Beatty, president of Richard L. Feigen & Co., which represents Mr. Johnson’s estate. (more…)

Marcel Duchamp, 3-Mending Standard (1913-1914 / 1964), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Few artists have left such a mark on the history and direction of 2oth and 21st Century art in the same manner as Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who was at the forefront of revolutions both on and off the canvas in the first half of the century.  Taking this impact as a starting point, the Centre Pompidou is currently presenting Marcel Duchamp: La Peinture, Même, an exhibition exploring the artist’s early roots in painting and drawing, and how these stylistic leanings contributed to his later work in the development of the readymade, installation based work, and other conceptual pursuits. (more…)

Dash Snow, Untitled (2008), all images courtesy Blain|Southern Berlin

On view at Blain|Southern Berlin is a group exhibition examining the use of text and poetics in art objects from the 1960s to the present day. Entitled Sed Tantum Dic Verbo (Just Say The Word), the exhibition was curated by American writer and editor Glenn O’Brien and will remain on view through December 20th.

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Hermann Nitsch,Kreuzwegstation (Station of the Cross) (1961) at Hauser and Wirth, via Art Observed

The Viennese Actionist movement was one of the more visceral post-war collectives that sprung up from the war-torn landscape of mid-20th Century Europe.  The group of Austrian artists (while claiming they were never affiliated officially), among them Otto Mühl, Günter Brus, and Rudolph Schwarzkogler, combined disturbing and often surreal imagery with a ritualistic approach to art making, creating elaborate pieces that often involved flayed animal carcasses, body parts, and bucket upon bucket of blood.

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Anne Collier, Developing Tray #2 (2009)

In the winter of 2012, a gigantic human eye was gazed out intently on Chelsea and the Hudson River from the High Line billboard on 18th street. The billboard installation, Developing Tray #2, belonged to Anne Collier, an artist known for her appropriation based photographs culling a wide range of printed media from popular culture, suggesting a reinterpretation of otherwise neglected statements. Utilizing minimalistic techniques and a neutral white surface as a background, Collier photographs album covers, commercials, magazine pages or calendars, revealing the subtle ideological undertones related to feminism, consumerism and gender politics. (more…)

Aram Saroyan, Lighght (1989), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

Aphasia, a brain dysfunction resulting in the failure of comprehension of language, is the starting point of Lisa Cooley’s summer group show Itself Not So.  Curated by staff member Rachel Valinsky, and titled after a poem by Susan Howe, the selection grabs this condition as a metaphor for the disconnect between mind and speech, examining the possible fractures causing intellectual and emotional failures regarding the self. The exhibition argues that, with the corruption of the harmony among sound, thoughts and speech, a possible chaos and detachment brings an individual’s functionality to a standstill. Both intellectual and emotional, social and biological, this turmoil challenges the autonomy of those inflicted. (more…)

Giulio Paolini, Autoritratto (Self-Portrait) (1968), Courtesy of Dominique Lévy Gallery and Courtesy Archivio Giulio Paolini, Turin

Hypothesis for an Exhibition, a survey show paying homage to the work of conceptual artist Giulio Paolini is open at Dominique Lévy on Madison Avenue through August 16. In addition to Paolini himself, the exhibition features the work of Richard Aldrich, Harold Ancart, Sebastian Black, Kerstin Brätsch, Guyton/Walker, KAYA, Charles Mayton, Seth Price, Josh Smith, R.H. Quaytman, Antek Walczak and Viola YeÅŸiltaç. Additionally, Studio Manuel Raeder has designed an accompanying publication, which incidentally coincides with London’s Whitechapel Gallery retrospective Giulio Paolini:To Be or Not to Be. (more…)

Stephen Prina, Detail of Monochrome Painting: A Posterior Prototype: Average Size (1994), all images courtesy Patrick Painter

Patrick Painter Gallery in Los Angeles is currently hosting an impressively selected group show, culling artists from the past 30 years of practice entitled Titans of the Stratosphere, and featuring six artists: Rodney Graham, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Stephen Prina, Christopher Wool, and Andrea Zittel.

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On Kawara, 5 Feb. 2006

Artist On Kawara, whose ongoing artistic project involved the painting of each day of his life, has passed away at the age of 81.

Born in 1933 in Japan, Kawara worked in Tokyo until 1965, when he moved to New York City.  Shortly after arriving, Kawara began his famous “date paintings” series, painting the calendar date for each day of his life, meticulously recording the passage of his life on canvas through a simple, tracing of dates and time.  His absurdist, heavily conceptual bent opened a new engagement with the processes of time and context in art, making him an unlikely air to the work of early Dadaists like Duchamp and Magritte. (more…)

Jayson Musson, Sculptural Allegory for a Specific Cultural Sphere (2014), via Osman Yerebakan

Jayson Musson first came into prominence with his online personality Hennessy Youngman, a character commenting on different topics related to art from a wry perspective, while satirizing the clichés of the art world and the hip-hop culture at the same time.  Played by Musson himself for his Youtube series Art Thoughtz, Hennessy Youngman can be seen comparing the dance style of Yvon Rainer to the moves in A-Ha’s Take On Me video or flirting with Carolee Schneemann. Similar to Musson’s articles for his short-lived column Black Like Me on Philadelphia Weekly, his online persona/alter ego Hennessy Youngman is an outpost of the artist’s investigation of racial stereotypes and the making of sub-cultures in today’s society. (more…)

Lothar Baumgarten, Los Aristòcrates de la Selva y la Reina de Castilla (2011-2012), Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman

Currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery is Los Aristòcrates de la Selva y la Reina de Castilla, a large scale exhibition by the renowned German conceptual artist Lothar Baumgarten. Known for his slide projections, site-specific installations and sound recordings in which he a range of different issues from international politics to institutionalization of the arts, Baumgarten is once again presenting a complex body of work at Marian Goodman Gallery. Carrying the idea of civilization into the core of his argument, the artist touches upon different representations of cultural identity and evolution of the mankind.

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Pierre Soulages is profiled in The New York Times this week, exploring the artist’s 60+ year career, and his position as one of the most successful artists in France, and his continuous output, even as he approaches his 95th birthday.  “I’ve decided to lose count of his age,” says dealer Dominique Lévy said. “I always feel he’s challenging me and pushing me and such a force of nature.” (more…)

Korakrit Arunanondchai, 2555-2012 (2012), via Art Observed

At just 28 years old, Korakrit Arunanondchai (“Krit” for short) has already compiled an impressive aesthetic vocabulary for himself.  Mixing his own blend of aesthetic signifiers (denim, flowers, musical tropes, performative hip-hop) with a variety of media including painting, video, sculpture and performance, to create a fluid, intertextual universe.  It’s just this universe that dominates the artist’s first exhibition at MoMA PS1 this spring, a single room affair that culls from the artist’s already dense body of work to extract a series of focused themes and subjects in the artist’s young career.

Korakrit Arunanondchai, Untitled (Muen Kuey No. 17) (2013), via Art Observed (more…)

The Museum of Modern Art has announced that it will host the first-ever U.S. museum retrospective of works by Robert Gober.  Titled The Heart Is Not a Metaphor, Mr. Gober’s work will be on view beginning in October.  “Robert is totally involved and approaching himself as if he were one of his subjects,” says Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture. (more…)