Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens (Installation view), via Sprüth Magers

For the most recent new exhibition in Berlin, Sprüth Magers has brought together work from thirteen artists under the title Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens.  Curated by Goodroom and Johannes Fricke Waldthausen, the exhibition features works by Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Andy Hope 1930, Oliver Laric, Jon Rafman, and Andro Wekua, among others.  Intended to navigate visitors through the intersecting narratives within the realm of surrealist animation, abstraction and the ideas of “New Materialism” as expressed through the greater logistics of the world wide web, the exhibition references the notion of the screen as a critical tool of the conscious and unconscious, as well as a surface for projections of communication and technological abstraction.   (more…)

Franz West, Lamp (2003), all photos by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Marlborough Broome Street, the downtown, contemporary-focused outpost of Chelsea’s Marlborough Gallery, opened its doors for a summer group show titled Marlborough Lights this month. Curated by Leo Fitzpatrick, a newly appointed director at the gallery, the exhibition traces a loose interpretation of the lightbulb as a source of energy and an allegory for critical thinking, while exploring the potentialities for the lamp as a creative container for motives beyond mere furniture or utilitarian lighting.

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Lynda Benglis, Bounty, Amber Waves, and Fruited Plane (2014) via Storm King Art Center

As summer reaches its zenith in New York, countless outdoor exhibitions and special public projects have sprung up across the city and region, encouraging visitors to take a more intrepid stance towards the art world.  Continuing its annual series of special exhibitions, the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, NY has invited New York artist Lynda Benglis to take full advantage of its sprawling Catskills property, bringing a number of her organically-inspired cast sculptures to investigate the picturesque environs upstate.  With 12 outdoor sculptures and an additional 15 on view inside the museum galleries, Benglis’s exhibition is a striking look at the artist’s aesthetic interests over the past 15 years, as she increasingly incorporated notions of public, urban space and natural phenomena into her dizzyingly complex sculptural assemblages. (more…)

Karl Holmqvist, Bebe Coca wall drawing (2015)

The influx of summer group shows have already begun in New York this year, as galleries presenting diverting and compelling themes take the slow summer months to explore connecting themes among their roster of artists and the broader art world.  Gladstone Gallery’s Hello Walls is one of the most intriguing of these early group exhibitions, placing an emphasis on the wall as a means for contextual experiment and repositioned working structures. (more…)

Olafur Eliasson is interviewed in Fast Company this week, discussing his design projects and views on urban infrastructure, including the capacities for city planning and art to change how people interact and use limited urban space.  “Reflexivity is about connectivity, and connectivity is sometimes more about looking into yourself than looking at the ‘other.’ It can be hard work, and it can be uncomfortable, but sometimes public space has to make that demand of you,” he says.  “And sometimes art—and good art always—makes that demand of you. It makes you work. It makes you give. It makes you into a producer of space, of situations, of life, instead of being a consumer.” (more…)

Rachel Harrison, Magnum (2015), via Regen Projects

New York-based artist Rachel Harrison is presenting a multifaceted exhibition at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects this month, exploring notions of representation, perspective and time as they function in both the context of the gallery and in the artist’s own work.  Titled Three Young Framers, the exhibition’s tacit reference to the photography of August Sander points to this notion of the subject as a participant in the act of photography, echoed today in an era of widely proliferating photographic technology. (more…)

Andra Ursuta, Scarecrow (2015), all photos via Connie Huang via Art Observed

Andra Ursuta has never shied away from a challenging, multifaceted study of global culture, executing monumentally-scaled works that are often just as imposing in their materiality and contextual weight as they are in size alone.  For the artist’s most recent exhibition at Ramiken Crucible, she turns her attention once again to these juxtapositions of commercial and cultural might through the imposing forms of industrial, cultural, athletic and financial prowess. (more…)

Ida Applebroog, The Ethics of Desire (Installation View)

The Ethics of Desire is the title of the currently running Ida Applebroog exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. In her decades long career, the New York native has frequently used her work to dismantle and reform sexual politics and its echoes in society (i.e. the women’s liberation movement, body politics and gender classification, to name a few).  Her turbulent biography, from a childhood in a Jewish Orthodox family in the Bronx to her time in Chicago and California, gained further momentum when she relocated in New York in the mid 1970’s. (more…)

Mona Hatoum is profiled in The New York Times this week, as the artist prepares for her solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou this month, and reviews the multi-faceted international upbringing that informs much of her work.  “The basis of it is a feeling of wanting to be free of all those restrictions, whether it’s social or political, that are always put on people,” she says, “so I can be whatever I want to be.” (more…)

The Park Avenue Armory has received a gift of $65 million from the The Thompson Family Foundation, bringing the total amount of money given by the foundation to the institution to a total of $129 million over the past years.  The Foundation, set up to honor the memory of businessman Wade Thompson, has long been a staunch supporter of the Armory.  “He passionately believed that the Armory should be rescued as one of the country’s most important landmarks,” says his widow, Angela Thompson. (more…)

The Snarkitecture Studio has unveiled a massive ball pit installed inside of Washington D.C.’s National Building Museum, part of a 10,000 square foot work titled The Beach.  The work will remain open to the public through September 7th. (more…)

London’s Whitechapel Gallery has announced plans for an ambitious exhibition of Arab art, pulling more than 100 works from the Barjeel Art Foundation, and noted as “the broadest single overview of Arab art to be shown in the UK to date,” the Art Newspaper reports.  “The Barjeel foundation’s guiding principle is to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent, publicly accessible art collection in the UAE,” the foundation said in a statement. (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…)

The LA Times looks at the immense efforts taken at the Broad Museum to ready the exhibition space, including the negotiations in installing and managing immense artworks like a recently purchased Takashi Murakami piece.  “Contemporary art is so varied in form, material and scale that you often need to devise new approaches for moving and installing certain pieces,” says the Broad’s director of collections management, Vicki Gambill.  “That’s what makes the work infinitely interesting and complex. Preparators love solving problems.” (more…)

Roni Horn, Hack Wit – chasing blue out (2014), via Hauser and Wirth

Hauser and Wirth is currently devoting both its Saville Row Galleries to a collection of several recent series by Roni Horn, documenting the American artist’s ongoing investigations of language, repetition and meaning that stem from both the viewer and artist’s encounter with the work. (more…)

Ai Weiwei has opened a series of new exhibitions in Beijing, signaling a relaxation of the capital’s ban on the showing the artist, while foreign travel is still off limits.  “The decision-making process is opaque. I can only speculate that the authorities realize that they have created a situation that, sooner or later, has to be resolved,” says John Tancock, a longtime collaborator of Ai’s and an adviser to Chambers Fine Art. (more…)

Harlem’s Studio Museum has announced plans for a new, $122 million building, designed by David Adjaye, on West 125th Street.  “We have outgrown the space,” says Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden. “Our program and our audience require us to answer those demands.” (more…)

Damien Hirst has installed his large-scale work, Charity, outside of the Gherkin tower in London this week, a nearly 25-foot high statue of a young girl in a leg brace, holding a vandalized collection tin.  “Charity is an iconic piece of art. It is also a symbol of changing attitudes to disability over the past 50 years, since collection boxes like the one depicted in this sculpture were seen on high streets across the country,” says Alan Gosschalk, fundraising director at Scope, the British disability charity that once used the collection tins depicted in Hirst’s work. (more…)

Manchester’s Whitworth Museum has been awarded the UK’s annual “Museum of the Year” award, recognizing the institution’s impressive new expansion project, unveiled this past February. (more…)

Olaf Breuning, Brancusi (2015)

Olaf Breuning, the Swiss-born, New York-based artist who has received wide acclaim for his playful appropriations of the iconography of popular culture, has returned to Metro Pictures for a highly anticipated solo exhibition, titled The Life. Consisting of 25 MDF panels each reaching to 9 feet high, the artist’s lofty, circular panels and free-standing steel sculptures incorporate Breuning’s mix of the humorous, quotidian and idiosyncratic imagery of the contemporary social landscape: emojis, bean bags, beer bottles, human figures and other objects, omitting any hierarchal separation so that each element blends into a somewhat objective examination of reality. (more…)

The Tom Bradley terminal at LAX has launched a series of new arts commissions this week, including works by Mark Bradford, Pae White and Ball-Nogues Studio.  “We imagined this space as a kind of reprieve or garden where people could rest their minds as they moved through the building,” says Benjamin Ball of Ball-Nogues. “The project is meant to be seen from a variety of angles.” (more…)

The London Underground has announced a year-long series of artist commissions in the newest iteration of its ongoing arts patronage, including video work from Liam Gillick, and new design commissions from Giles Round and Design Work.  “Gillick has taken his camera, picking out features of the Victoria Line in an unfolding narrative,” says Eleanor Pinfield, the head of Art on the Underground. (more…)

A series of six new public commissions spearheaded by Norman Rosenthal, former head of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, have been announced for Embassy Gardens, the site of the new U.S. Embassy in London.  “Each show is a germ of an idea that could become a museum exhibition,” Rosenthal says. “They are all shows I have dreamt of doing.” (more…)

Theaster Gates, White Sky, overcast (2014), All Images Courtesy White Cube Gallery

Now through July 5, the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey presents an exhibition of new work by Theaster Gates, the installation artist and professor of visual art at the University of Chicago who draws from themes of individual and collective history, place and self, and empowerment in his work.  Freedom of Assembly continues and expands upon the artist’s approach to art as a vehicle for social-justice, communication, and critique.

Theaster Gates, Freedom of Assembly (Installation View)

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