Sterling Ruby, ACTS/SOME RISE SOME REST (2014), via Hauser and Wirth

Hauser and Wirth’s current show of works by Sterling Ruby is something of a grab-bag, incorporating a wide swath of the artist’s current practice in sculpture, assemblage and collage spread across the gallery’s vast 18th Street exhibition space.  The large-scale and commanding physicality of the works is offered ample room for viewers to circle and consider, but Ruby doesn’t’ waste the space on a small set of works either.  Sculptures and hanging works take up almost every square inch of the gallery, arranged in close proximity.  It’s easy to miss one work or another, caught up in the commanding presence of a third nearby.

Sterling Ruby, SUNRISE SUNSET (Installation View), via Hauser and Wirth (more…)

Filmmaker Matt Black explores the creative philosophy of Jeff Koons during a studio visit for a new video profile on Nowness, delving into the artist’s work and inspiration.  “Much of his work focuses around the idea of sensuality and being alive,” Black says. “It’s not a cold world he creates.” (more…)

The Telegraph takes a look inside the former home of late artist Louise Bourgeois, which will be reopened as a research center and exhibition space next year, and which was the site of the artist’s legendary work ethic.  “She would stay up for three days in a row, hyper,” says her former assistant Jerry Gorovoy. “We tried different sleeping pills, nothing worked. My days would start at ten, and sometimes she’d been sitting there since six waiting for me. ‘You’re late’ she’d say, in the black skirt and shirt she wore every day.” (more…)

Artist Shirin Neshat has ventured into the field of choreography, planning an an interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest alongside Polish choreographer Krzysztof Pastor for the Dutch National Ballet.  The dance will feature Pastor’s choreography alongside video footage captured by Neshat.  “We shot most of the film in Holland and now we’re watching the rehearsals and carefully going back between the dancers and the editing room,” she says. (more…)

Richard Prince has published a reflection on the state of the art auction market his website this month, noting the dissonance between his work and the astronomical sums paid on the secondary market for them, as well as his own feeling of disconnection from the works as they sell.  “The auctions might think they have something to do with what I make, but they don’t,” he says. “What they have is what they’ve always had… themselves.” (more…)

Peter Coffin, Untitled (Unfinished Hand Holding a Bell Bubble) (2013), via Art Observed

Currently on view at CANADA Gallery in New York is a selection of works from Agathe Snow, Peter Coffin and Willy Le Maitre, and featuring a bizarre series of assemblage, sculpture and photography appropriately titled The Weird Show.  Spread out along the gallery’s long, narrow rooms, the group of works on view offer a look at the work of the trio through a similar framework of pastiched cultural formats. (more…)

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue seeks an experience akin to the slow trawls of internet message boards, Wikipedia pages, and Google searches that mark the contemporary search for information, a compartmentalized seeking after discrete bits of data.  Running from image to image, many culled from the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Henrot’s project offers a condensed experience of information overload, cramming the story of the earth’s creation into 13 minutes.

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed (more…)

The Morgan Library has announced an ambitious plan to digitize its full collection of drawings and make them available online.  The project is expected to reach completion by October of next year, and will yield over 10,000 individual images by the likes of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Dürer, for free access on the Morgan’s site.  The digitization “is critical to our institutional goal of promoting drawings scholarship and reaching out to an ever larger audience,”said William M. Griswold, the museum’s director. (more…)

The Vatican City will be sponsoring pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, and has just announced its list of exhibited artists, featuring photographer Josef Koudelka, multimedia group Studio Azzurro and the artist Lawrence Carroll.  The pavilion, organized by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, will explore themes of “Creation, De-Creation and Re-Creation.”  “We want to create an atmosphere of dialogue between art and faith,” Cardinal Ravasi said. (more…)