Katharina Fritsch, Skull (2017), via Art Observed

Compiling a range of new works from the artist’s enigmatic sculptural practice, Matthew Marks Gallery has brought a show by Katharina Fritsch to Chelsea, the artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York since 2008. The show, which continues the German artist’s practice in a ground-level engagement with both the forms and images of our everyday lives, as well as the mythologies that animate our daily relationships and cognitive practices, consists of a small series of new sculptures, spread throughout the gallery’s three rooms.  (more…)

Frieze London, via Art Observed

The doors are open and the 2016 edition of Frieze London is now underway, bringing a wide range of works and artists to bear on the fairgrounds at Regent’s Park in the northern part of the city.  With its VIP Preview concluding today, the fair made its first big push of sales alongside the kick-off for a number of its projects and performance works, which conclude this Sunday.

Samara Golden at Canada Gallery, via Art Observed

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Ken Price, The Beautiful West (2005), via Art Observed

It’s not difficult to recognize a piece by Ken Price.  The artist’s fluid, winding sculptures and objects signal a high point of West Coast sculpture during the post-war era, an incorporation and reworking of Bay Area Funk priorities with the artist’s own sensibilities.  These influences and ideas are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery this month, as the artist exhibits a series of drawings from the early 1990’s. (more…)

Ellsworth Kelly, Barn, Long Island (1968), via Matthew Marks Gallery

The late Ellsworth Kelly’s photographic works are the subject of the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in New York this month, offering a unique and alternative perspective on an artist already seen as one of the most influential and prominent abstractionists of the 20th Century.  The show, on view at Matthew Marks in Chelsea, showcases over thirty gelatin silver prints, originally taken between 1950 and 1982, the first ever devoted to Kelly’s photographic endeavors.  Kelly finished preparing these prints and planning the exhibition shortly before his death on December 27th, at the age of ninety-two.  Here, these photographs offer a fitting perspective of the artist’s own aesthetic inclinations, and his unique perspective for the world around him. (more…)

Ron Nagle, Skin Grift (2013), via Art Observed

The walls of Matthew Marks Gallery are dotted with miniature vitrines for the gallery’s most recent show, a combination of new and historical work by Californian artist Ron Nagle that embraces the material and structural execution of sculpture at its most scaled-down.

Following up on its impressive summer exhibition, What Nerve!, the gallery pushes deeper into the roots of one of the show’s subjects, the San Francisco bay’s iconic “Funk” movement, and the sculptural lineage that artist and California College of the Arts professor Peter Voulkos left in his wake.  Having taught both Nagle and Ken Price (both represented by the gallery), the artist’s impact was instrumental in helping to shape some of the tenants that would define Californian sculpture over the next decades.  Yet where Voulkos’s work often used size in conjunction with his vivid shapes and colors, Nagle’s work turns towards carefully shaped interactions in micro.

Ron Nagle, Untitled (2015), via Art Observed

The artist’s miniature sculptures are evocative in their minimal elements and carefully considered choices, teetering between pure abstraction and impressively subtle tableau that carry a wealth of narrative potential.  In some works, the forms call to mind beds, trees or busts, always twisted towards the surreal by the artist’s careful tweaks to the lines and curves of his pieces. Yet as much as the artist’s figurative experiments carry the works, they equally stand on their own for their masterful use of color, particularly in his most recent works; vividly colored and masterfully shaped pieces that make the most out of their material grounding.  In Handsome Drifter, for instance, Nagle’s resin-soaked glaze smolders with a gentle variation in reds and yellows, offset by the single dollop of twisted black ceramic that sits atop it.  A masterful study in balance and counterpoint, the viewer may find themselves floating in and out of a perception of the concrete in these pieces.

Ron Nagle, The Temperamentalist (2015), via Art Observed

The exhibition also includes a series of Nagle’s bronze works from the early 1990’s, exercises in the interplay of material and utility that define the cup as a tool of modern life.  Pushing his works towards jagged, almost fragmented surfaces, Nagle places his pieces in this series as a continuum of early tool construction, while emphasizing the surface of each piece, not least due to its preservation under a glass vitrine.  Joining these are some of the artist’s recent drawings, playing on the materiality of lined paper or surface texture to explore the act of drawing at a nearly atomic level.

Ron Nagle, Mutha Fakir (2015), via Art Observed

Nagle’s work seems obsessed with this brief moments of encounter between his work and the materials he executes them in, and the pared-down scale of the pieces seems to focus these moments at single points.  Always focusing themselves around balance and restraint, the artist underscores his aesthetic interests in conjunction with his own economies of form.

Offering a studious counterpoint to the Funk works explored in the gallery’s previous exhibition, Nagle’s exhibition is a striking look at the possibilities for ceramics on a micro-scale, one where strength of message is rarely sacrificed for delicacy of execution.

Ron Nagle, Lotta Wattage (2015), via Art Observed

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Ron Nagle: “Five O’Clock Shadow” [Matthew Marks]

Michael Majerus, your bad taste (2002), via Matthew Marks

Spread over Matthew Marks Gallery’s spaces on 502, 522 and West 22nd Street is an exhibition of works by late Berlin-based artist Michael Majerus.  Presenting over twenty-five paintings and multimedia installations, the show is the most comprehensive of Majerus’s work in the United States as well as the first staged in the country since his life was cut short at the age of 35 by a plane crash in 2002.

Michael Majerus, pornography needs you (2001), via Matthew Marks

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Katharina Fritsch, St. Michael (2008), via Matthew Marks

Simple yet explanatory, Sculpture is Matthew Marks Gallery’s current exhibition, bringing together the most recent three dimensional works by artists Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Jasper Johns, Charles Ray, Ellsworth Kelly and Martin Puryear. Adopting the newest in the medium as its main concept, this group exhibition presents an opportunity for gallery goers to view and compare current modalities in the art of sculpture. (more…)

Toby Ziegler‘s The Cripples, image via Art Observed

Back in 2003 in Frieze’s first year, no major international art fair had ever been hosted in London before. Frieze Art Fair, organized by Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, has helped take London from being a city without a focused art scene to its current state at the center of the European art market. Now in its tenth year, Frieze Art Fair in London’s Regent’s Park has seen around 60,000 visitors, with 264 dealers from 35 countries hoping to sell work (valuing an estimated  £230m) created by more than 2,400 artists within 175 of the world’s leading galleries.

An Aaron Young motorcycle burn out work at Massimo de Carlo in Milan, photo via Art Observed

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Ellsworth Kelly, Orange Relief with Blue (2011). All Images via Matthew Marks.

American abstract painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly has unveiled a so-called ‘shop sign’ for the inaugural exhibition of the latest Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood, California, while the gallery continues to maintain four spaces in New York City. The sign is a wide strip of painted black aluminum set across the top of the white stucco building (a converted garage, now 3,500 square feet). This is Kelly’s first major exhibition in Los Angeles after over a decade, and the showcase of Kelly’s paintings inside the gallery runs concurrently to his print retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which opened Sunday.

An outside view of the ‘shop sign’ (more…)

Anne Truitt, Pith 1969. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

Currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery are sixteen sculptures by Anne Truitt (1921-2004), marking the first time her works have been shown in New York in twenty years.  At first glance, the sculptures appear to align with the Minimalist ethos of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Mel Bochner, and indeed, Truitt was championed by Clement Greenberg in the sixties.  However, unlike the industrial methods of the Minimalists, her sculptures are hand-made investigations of color as a sensation, and how color relates to the sculptural presence.  Truitt explained that her “idea was not to get rid of life but to keep it and to see what it is.”

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