Julie Mehretu, SEXTANT (Installation View), via White Cube

Moving through a range of historical and aesthetic modes of exploration for her most recent exhibition at White Cube in London, artist Julie Mehretu has offered a new fold in an already complex and multilayered body of work.  Her new exhibition, which opened just this past month, brings together a diverse and challenging arrangement of pieces that sees the artist mining contemporary image archives and newspaper headlines for her grounding material, a mode that moves beyond her prior practice and into new ground.  (more…)

Julie Mehretu, A Love Supreme (2018), via Art Observed

Long time friends Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu have teamed up for a unique exhibition concept at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris month, a show that winds through a broad range of varied techniques in abstraction. Dean and Mehretu are presenting two new works emblematic of their respective practices: Suite of Nine, a series of chalk drawings on slate depicting a solar eclipse and A Love Supreme, a large painting in ink and acrylic on canvas. On the occasion of the exhibition, the two artists decided to create in parallel 45 monotypes each. Composed of 90 works covering the walls of the gallery’s lower level, the installation Monotype Melody (ninety works for Marian Goodman) reflects a unique bond shared by the artists.

Julie Mehretu and Tacita Dean (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, The Newcomers, via Performa

Returning for another year of dynamic events, expansive projects, installations and performances spread throughout New York City this month, the wildly popular Performa Performance Art Biennial is set to touch down once again this year.  Curated once again by founder RoseLee Goldberg, Performa spans the next three weeks, bringing with it a sudden charge of energy and life to a city preparing for the subdued energy of the winter months. (more…)

Julie Mehretu, Conjured Parts (head), Aleppo (2016), via Melis Sonmezler for Art Observed

Pushing her particular brand of gestural and highly-nuanced awareness of the picture plane, artist Julie Mehretu’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman in New York is a powerful entry in the artist’s ongoing exploration of abstraction.  Realizing intricate networks of marks, twisting and turning around each other to create swarms and clusters of sinewy, undulating forms, Mehretu’s practice is an ever-evolving study of process in its own right.  Yet her new pieces, showing through the end of the month, present a new sense of both technical urgency and depth of the visual field, combining to create a series of striking new works. (more…)

Julie Mehretu, Mind Breath and Beat Drawings (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris is currently exhibiting a new series of works by painter and illustrator Julie Mehretu. in a show which Mehretu described as a ‘self-ethnographic project,’ involving a dissection of her identity as an artist through a free abstraction of her personal creative practice. The show is Mehretu’s first solo exhibition in France.

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Franz Ackermann, Walking South (2012), courtesy Faena Arts Center

Before installing the site-specific Walking South at Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, Franz Ackermann walked, trained, biked and bussed across the city for two months. Once, he took the train to the outskirts of the city and walked the same distance back, all part of his psychogeographical plan to map the city.

The result is a 260-square-meter (equal to ten highway billboards) multi-layered, 25-panel installation bursting with Ackermann’s emotional response to the landscape, dirt, people and air of Buenos Aires. Black and white photographs of buildings, cars, and street corners are a somber base for bright, unexpected shapes that extend from a busy center node, which is a tangle of red, blue, and grey tentacles growing from jellyfish-like bodies. These irregular bodies float among and encircle photos of reality, both connecting and confusing the viewer.

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All photos taken on site by Aniko Berman

On Monday, September 24, Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, the New York gallery for the famed Los Angeles print workshop, hosted its Artists for Obama event celebrating the Artists for Obama 2012 limited edition portfolio created and sold to support Obama’s reelection efforts. For the campaign, 19 artists have come together to create a portfolio of limited edition prints, with all proceeds going to the Obama Victory Fund. Of the 150 examples, 60 have already sold at $28,000 each; at the end of the project, Gemini G.E.L. hopes to raise 4.2 million dollars for the campaign. An additional sweepstakes offers supporters a chance to win the full portfolio for a $250 contribution to the fund.

Image: Artist James Rosenquist

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Fridericianum in Kassel via dOCUMENTA

Every five years, the city of Kassel in Germany plays host to dOCUMENTA, a colossal, 100-day long exhibition of contemporary art from all over the world.  Participating artists are provided at least two years to complete their work and the results are thus consistently thorough and complex.  This year is dOCUMENTA’s thirteenth edition and is expected to attract more than 750,000 visitors, nearly twice that of last year’s Venice Biennale.

Yan Lei‘s  “Limited Art Project”, a room of works completed daily over the past year.  The room and the art hung on its walls will be sprayed over with car paint, retransforming every piece into a blank canvas.  This image is featured on BBC News’ Big Picture series.

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All photos by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed.

“In Praise of Doubt” is the second half of two exhibitions currently staged by the Francois Pinault Foundation. It housed in the Punta della Dogana just a stone’s throw from Palazzo Grassi, where part one, “The World Belongs to You” can be found. The two exhibitions share a curator, Caroline Bourgeois, and both run in parallel with the Venice Biennale 2011.

The exhibition presents both historical pieces and new works, several of which are site-specific projects. The theme, as hinted by its title, is uncertainty, the questioning of identity, and revisiting intimate space in relation to the space of the artwork. The artists included are art world regulars Adel Abdesemed, Marcel Broodthaers, Maurizio Cattelan, Subodh Gupta, David Hammons, Roni Horn, Thomas Houseago, Donald Judd, Edward Keinholz, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Julie Mehretu, Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Thomas Schutte, Sturtevant, Tatiana Trouve, and Chen Zhen. Out of these twenty, a surprising half have never been exhibited before in an exhibition by the Francois Pinault Foundation.

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Anselm Kiefer, Winter Ade Scheiden Tut Weh Aberdein Scheiden Macht, Dass Mein Herz Lacht (Goodbye, Winter, Parting Hurts But Your Departure Makes My Heart Cheer), 2010
Listed at $100,000

Last night at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery on Chrystie street in the Lower East Side of New York, West-Village-based Foundation for Contemporary Arts held a benefit auction selling nearly 200 paintings and sculptures.  All proceeds went to programs of the FCA, “hoping to assist and encourage innovation, experimentation and potential in the arts,” this year providing 14 grants to artists, of $25k each.

A view from the balcony

The benefit was extremely well attended, with some of the artists joining as well. The large number of works represented a variety of globally well-known artists, including Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Brice Marden, Francesco Clemente, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Julie Mehretu, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, David Salle, Frank Stella, Elizabeth Neel, Julian Opie, Cecily Brown, Vija Celmins, Robert Gober, Nate Lowman, Dan Colen, Dana Schutz, Kara Walker, and T.J. Wilcox, to name a few.

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Untitled 1, Julie Mehretu. Estimated: $600,000—800,000. Price Realized: 1,022,500.

118 artworks that once hung in the corporate offices of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sold to bidders at Sotheby’s auction house in New York today for $12.3 million, exceeding the high-end estimate of $12 million. The sale comes almost exactly two years after the investment bank filed the largest bankruptcy in the history of the United States and its proceeds will be used to pay off the $613 billion owed to creditors. Today, Kimberly Macleod, spokesperson for Lehman Brothers commented: “We are delighted that Sotheby’s delivered the value we sought on behalf of the creditors and that the result was at the top of the pre-sale estimate.”

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Julie Mehretu, Untitled 1, 2001 (est. $600-800,000), via Sothebys.com

Almost two years to the day after Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the bank will auction off hundreds of artworks worth some $16 million in hopes of raising funds for its creditors. There will be an auction at Sotheby’s New York on September 25 followed by an auction at Christie’s London on September 29. The smallest of the three auctions will be held at Freeman’s in Philadelphia on November 7 and will focus on the Lehman’s Contemporary Art holdings.

Damien Hirst, We’ve Got Style (The Vessel Collection Blue/Green), 1993 (est. $800,000-1,200,000) via Sothebys.com

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Honoree Gabriel Orozco (with Matthew Barney behind) at BOMB magazine’s 29th Anniversary Gala & Silent Auction at the National Arts Club, New York   All photos by Oskar Proctor for ArtObserved

Last night, BOMB magazine kicked-off their 29th Anniversary Gala at the National Arts Club in New York with a Silent Auction. Since the magazines’ founding in 1981, its pages have featured over 900 interviews comprised of 1,800 artists’ voices. Many of the featured artists contributed works to last night’s auction which featured both renowned and emerging names such as Alex Hubbard, Joan Jonas, Nan Goldin, Alex Katz, Julie Mehretu, Roxy Paine, Guy Maddin, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Carrie Mae Weems, most of whom were in attendance. At 7.30pm, attendees were called to honor 4 individuals whose work and vision speak directly to BOMB’s mission of creative excellence. Rob Pruitt raised slices of toast to Honorees Cecily Brown and her husband, the New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff.  Brice Marden introduced the next Honoree artist Gabriel Orozco while Matthew Barney toasted honoree Nancy Spector, curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim.  Along with Rob Pruitt’s generous offerings of slices of golden toast, the honorees were presented with “Pink Bomb” awards created by sculptor Tom Otterness.

Brice Marden introducing Honoree Gabriel Orozco

More photos and related links after the jump…..
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