Maureen Gallace, Clear Day (Installation View), via Art Observed

Painter Maureen Gallace has brought an expansive look at her painterly practice to MoMA PS1 this summer, opening an exhibition cataloguing the artist’s long-running engagement with the rural American landscape, and the pastoral language that underwrites it as a source for constant reinvention.  Pulling together a dizzying selection of the artist’s work, the exhibition offers an opportunity to trace these recurrent ideas and concepts through a wide swath of the artist’s work, bringing the viewer into an extended engagement with both her formal language, and the subject itself. (more…)

Charles Ledray, Bone Rocker (1995), with Robert Gober, Untitled (1984-88) (left) and Luc Tuymans, Plates (2011), right. All images Nicolas Linnert for Art Observed.

David Zwirner‘s summer exhibition, The House Without the Door, makes a curatorial departure from Emily Dickinson’s poem of a similar name. The works center around themes of interiority and domesticity, alluding to both the poet’s reclusive personality and her writing’s exploration of issues stemming from such a lifestyle, which moved past memories and objects towards intense introspection and deep-seated feelings of anxiety and trauma.

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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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Strange Attractors, Aki Sasmoto – all photographs by Oskar Proctor for Art Observed.

This week the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York opened its doors for the 75th edition if its defining exhibition: The Biennial. Simply titled, 2010, the show rejects an organizational theme and instead uses time as its marker in a matter-of-fact cross-section of American art today. The show is one of the smallest in the Biennial’s history – works by only 55 artists and collaborative teams are displayed on four floors of the museum’s ‘Breur Building’ in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This year the entire third floor of the building has been taken dedicated video installation – first exhibited at the Biennial in 1975 – a sure sign that video work has now reached maturity, worthy of recognition as an independent art form. In addition, the museum’s fifth floor is devoted to artists in the Whitney’s permanent collection who have shown in past Biennials.

Francesco Bonami, Curator of Whitney Biennial 2010

Whitney Biennial 2010 – Interview with curator Francesco Bonami via VernissageTV

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