Isa Genzken, Mach Dich hübsch! (Installation View), via Art Observed

Isa Genzken is one of Germany’s most notable contemporary artists. Born in 1948, her work spans sculpture, installation, film, photography, collage, and painting, and she has continued to drive the German arts community forward with an inventive approach to digital media and created computer-designed sculptures that dates to the 1970’s.  Drawing on influences of American minimalism and conceptual art, alongside pop art, Genzken’s ready-mades and mannequin-based works also enter into conversation with Dadaist and Surrealist influences. (more…)

Piet Mondrian, Ovale Komposition mit Farbflächen (1914), photo courtesy Martin Gropius Bau © Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Nie-derlande

With his famous works focusing on geometric lines and primary colors, Piet Mondrian’s history as an artist is often obscured by his iconic later output.  Yet, the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin is exhibiting work by Piet Mondrian in an exhibition entitled The Line, taking the artist’s creative evolution and exposition as its starting point.  Initially starting his career painting in the Impressionist style, this exhibition of Mondrian’s work dedicates itself to showcasing the artist’s career and subsequent development of his unique stylistic innovations.  With over 50 drawings and paintings, the journey through Mondrian’s career is exposed through his many lenses and creative phases, and is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in Berlin since the opening of the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1968.

Piet Mondrian, Komposition mit rot, schwarz, gelb, blau und grau (1921), photo courtesy Martin Gropius Bau © Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Nie-derlande

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Diane Arbus – A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. (1966), Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum

In partnership with Jeu de Paume, Paris, The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, The Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum is hosting a major retrospective of the work of American Photographer Diane Arbus, including a number of previously unseen pieces.

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Eberhard Schrammen, “Maskottchen (Mascot)” (c. 1924), in “Bauhaus 1919-1933” at MoMA. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Photo: Gunter Lepkowski © Estate Eberhard Schrammen

Complementing the Maholy-Nagy exhibition in Frankfurt showing at Shirn Kunsthalle through February 7, 2010, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is celebrating the early-20th century Bauhaus collective in a show which runs in the Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery through January 25, 2010. This presentation of the highly influential German school comprises 400 works, many of which have never before been exhibited publicly in the United States. Drawn from both private and public collections, including 80 works from MoMA’s holdings, the show also features 150 pieces from the three German Bauhaus collections, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassik Stiftung Weimar. The exhibition comes to MoMA after an earlier version at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius Bau, which showed from July 22 to October 4, 2009.

Vasily Kandinsky, “Schwarze Form (Black form)” (1923), via MoMA. Private collection. Courtesy Neue Galerie New York. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

more images and story after the jump…
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