Jim Shaw, The Potato Family (2018), via Metro Pictures

Currently on view at Metro Pictures, artist Jim Shaw returns to New York with a series of five new paintings, united under the name The Family Romance.  Continuing the artist’s penchant for blending personal, political, and surreal narratives, the show traces Shaw’s interests in behavioral psychology and themes surrounding the family unit. (more…)

B. Wurtz, Octave (2018), via Metro Pictures

Over the past few decades, B. Wurtz’s work has mined a striking juxtaposition of materials and symbols, mixing together domestic objects, quotidian references and various spatial interruptions designed to work at the fabric of the object itself.  This month, the artist has returned to Metro Pictures for a show of new works, continuing this mode of practice on an engaging scale. (more…)

Josh Kline, 10% Tip (Applebee’s Waitress’ Hand and Foot) (2018), via Metro Pictures

Currently on view at Metro Pictures, and continuing a trend this summer towards artists taking the curatorial reins for the summer group shows across the city, Josh Kline has pulled together a body of work for the Chelsea exhibition space under the title Evidence. Featuring the work of seven artists, Evidence investigates the nature of documentation and reality in post-truth America, posing the state of modern political discourse as an opportunity to reframe and rethink the act of expression. (more…)

Andreas Slominski (Installation view), all images via Metro Pictures, New York.  Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.  Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

Known for his intriguing humor and sleek aesthetic, German artist Andreas Slominski presents artifacts of consumerist desire in their most pristine forms, well before their wearing out over time through consumer use. His most recent exhibition at Metro Picture presents a group of fresh-from-the-factory portable plastic toilets, complete with stainless surfaces and bright colors. Instead of the foreseeable contrast they would orchestrate with a hygienic white cube space, these non-used bathrooms comply with the all-white atmosphere thanks to their immaculate exteriors and unusual display concepts. (more…)

David Maljkovic, Alterity Line (2002-2017), via Metro Pictures

Continuing his interest in reconfigured and re-appropriated sculpture and painting that runs throughout the length of his career, Croatian-born artist David Maljkovic has returned to his New York exhibition space, Metro Pictures, for a show of new works.  The exhibition, titled Alterity Line, is a fitting summary of much of his earlier work, transforming pieces  from various stages of his practice into new ones to obfuscate hierarchies between media and artworks, and considering the relationship between art’s autonomy and its formal developments. (more…)

Jim Shaw (Installation View), all images via Metro Pictures

In his current show at Metro Pictures, artist Jim Shaw presents a group of new paintings, sculptures, and drawings—all from 2017. The show is the first in the city since his survey The End is Here was presented at the New Museum in 2015. Shaw’s work often mixes American cultural references with comic books, art history, religion, Greek mythology and his own subconscious. Suffice it to say that in the time that has passed since his New Museum. exhibition the political and social climate in America has undergone an upheaval. For this new show Shaw combines his usual brand of dark humor with themes of materialism, war and corruption in works that speak to the current state of affairs in America, post-presidential election.
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Trevor Paglen, A Study of Invisible Images (Installation View), via Art Observed

Drawing on the increasingly complex relationship between human relations, technological ascendency and the exercise of power that ultimately serves as a negotiating space between these two forces, Trevor Paglen’s work has repeatedly explored how the modern computer processor is ever more embroiled in the fabric of human decision-making and world-building. Having traveled the globe, and even fired a satellite into space to look down on it from outside its atmospheric confines, Paglen’s work delves into the physical architectures, and often otherworldly effects that the modern state of surveillance and speed renders on human understandings of time, space, and even our own perceptions of identity or self.

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Robert Longo, Untitled (Bodyhammer: 9mm) (2008), via Art Observed

Few writers have walked such a fine line between coy observations of modernity and the possible dystopian future that lay just under the surface of daily life in the way that writer J.G. Ballard had over the course of his more than fifty years of writing.  Mixing a playful sense of imagination with dark and disturbing meditations on the state of the world, the writer’s work continues to serve as a major inspiration for artists and philosophers in the 21st century, just as some of the futuristic conditions he so often described have begun to manifest themselves in the real world. (more…)

Robert Longo, Untitled (Raft at Sea) (2016-17), via Art Observed

Several years ago, a lone Robert Longo piece left quite an impression at Art Basel Miami Beach.  The subdued charcoal composition depicting several players from the St. Louis Rams posing in the iconic “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose that followed in the wake of the death of young Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in nearby Ferguson, Missouri was stark and imposing, a powerful reminder of the specter of police violence preying on black citizens in the United States.  It made for a sudden rupture in the often buoyant atmosphere of the fair, and one that welcomed the turbulence of the outside world in. (more…)

Sara VanDerBeek, Labryinth (2016), via Art Observed

Sara VanDerBeek’s work has long operated at the intersections of process and practice, history and modernity, as the artist allows her investigation of chosen images and art forms to bleed into the image itself.  This mode of practice, pulling diverse material interests into a linear mode of production,  welcomes a nuanced and often multifaceted approach to the cultural and historical contexts of her subject matter, a focus that sits at the center of the artist’s current solo show at Metro Pictures.

Sara VanDerBeek, Pieced Quilts, Wrapped Forms (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Metro Pictures has announced that it is now representing Oliver Laric.  Laric has shown widely on the international circuit, and was included in last year’s New Museum Triennial, but has yet to have a solo exhibition in New York.  The news comes just days after Laric’s British gallery, Seventeen, announced plans to expand to New York City.   (more…)

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Metro Pictures, Cindy Sherman has installed a series of new photographs, portraits that mark her first new body of work in five years. The pieces, exploring more nuanced cultural frameworks at play in Hollywood image production, feel like a fitting conclusion to a long-running body of work, while expanding Sherman’s critical dialogue with the image through a studious selection of figures and contexts.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

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Camille Henrot (Installation Pictures), via Art Observed

Camille Henrot’s first solo show with Metro Pictures is something of a story in three parts, bringing the artist’s loosely flowing, cartoonish drawings to bear against her interests in environmental installation, digital artifacts and an interest in the modes and experiences of banality to bear across a broad selection of pieces. The artist’s work, presented here, offers a considered, meandering pathway through the iconography and subtle psychologies of modern life. (more…)

Trevor Paglen, NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, New York City, New York, United States (2015), via Art Observed

Continuing his investigation of covert military and intelligence operations, Trevor Paglen returns to Metro Pictures for his second exhibition with the gallery, charging his work with the intricacies of research and formal explorations of color and abstraction, while focusing particularly on the geography and aesthetics of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance programs.

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Sterling Ruby will now be represented by Hauser & Wirth in New York. He was previously represented by Pace Gallery, but parted ways with the gallery earlier this year. Prior to that Ruby was with Foxy Production and Metro Pictures. He is currently represented by Sprüth Magers and Xavier Hufkens in Europe.
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Jim Shaw, The Rinse Cycle (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Ilhan Kim.

Jim Shaw’s oeuvre maximizes a medley of mediums straddling low art found in a church’s Christmas bazaar to high art befitting a gem gallery. Shaw’s latest exhibition at Metro Pictures continues his tradition of weaving together disparate motifs to create textured compositions with multiple references to American history and a wild reimagining of world religions and mythology. The installation showcases various elements of a narrative trajectory in which two petty thieves, on the run from FBI agents in pursuit, trespass into the fictional Museum of Oist History in Omaha and don wigs that cloak them invisible and deport them to the ancient birthplace of O, the founding deity of Oism.

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Installation view. All images via Metro Pictures Gallery.

John Miller’s exhibition Suburban Past Time at Metro Pictures Gallery combines several mediums in “a continuation of the artist’s ongoing sociological investigation into so-called middlebrow culture, which focus on artifice in Western consumer societies,” according to the press release. Art Observed was fortunate enough to visit with Miller in the following interview.

Art Observed: After looking over the photos of the work and seeing it in person, there’s this sense of the everyday that comes out but there is also this pervasive strangeness that you seem to capture. It’s akin to the experience one has in a public space, when you walk through and notice a glimmer of strangeness that you see or feel for just a second—the absurdity of the everyday. Are you concerned with capturing that strangeness?

John Miller: A little bit, yes. A couple things on that note: One inspiration or source for the show was a show by Michelangelo Pistoletto at Luhring Augustine 2 or 3 years ago. Like many of his works he created silkscreens on mirrors, but I had never seen him do anything like this where he had a bunch of images and things that connoted public space like traffic cones and construction webbing, all coupled with images of ordinary looking women, but then they were made slightly uncomfortable because they were with traffic cones in public spaces—and you had to ask, was this an ordinary woman or a street walker? I got into this idea of public space, when a woman waited too long she looked suspect, and it showed a kind of genderedness of space. When a man stands on a corner you think he’s just waiting around, he’s less suspicious. I also liked the idea of overlaying two spaces—the gallery space, which is commercial space, like a store, and this staging of public space.

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Mike Kelley, via Interview

Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley (born Detroit 1954) passed away from apparent suicide in a state of depression, according to Helene Winer of Metro Pictures Gallery in New York. Kelley was represented by Metro Pictures for twenty years before showing with Gagosian since the early 2000s. His work often dealt with found objects and abjection, from sculptures and collages to performance and video, coined “clusterfuck aesthetics” by Jerry Saltz after his 2005 show, Day is Done. Kelley was also a proponent of punk, having been in bands throughout college, ‘Destroy All Monsters’ at the University of Michigan, and ‘Poetics’ at the California Institute of the Arts. Having held major solo exhibitions at the Whitney, LACMA, Tate, and Louvre, Kelley’s work is slated to be shown at the Whitney Biennial for the eighth time this year.

Mike Kelley, Arena #7 (Bears). Via the Skarstedt Gallery.

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Half Gallery, opening reception. Image by ArtObserved.

AO was on site June 8th for the opening of “A Ways A Way,” the new exhibition at Half Gallery.  Curated by Meredith Darrow and Devendra Banhart, A Ways A Way offers synoptic views of work by artists Scott Campbell, William Eadon, Kevin Long, Megan Marrin, Keegan McHargue, Fabrizio Moretti, Angeline Rivas, Adam Tullie, and Banhart himself.  Coming from various corners of the artistic field, these men and women form a motley roster of familiar names: in addition to be being creators of fine art, Campbell is a renowned tattoo artist, Eadon is a deisgner, Long skateboards and plays guitar, Moretti is the drummer for The Strokes and Little Joy, Rivas and Tullie co-own Cavern Collection, Banhart is a singer-songwriter, Marrin works in mixed-media, and McHargue choreographs.  In attendance last night were Cynthia Rowley, Kathy Grayson, and a repletion of artists, gallerists, friends, and passerby.  Viewers spilled jocundly onto the surrounding sidewalk, chatting and enjoying a lovely night outside of the diminutive, buzzing gallery.

Anonymous Portrait, Fabrizio Moretti, 2010. Image by Oskar Proctor for ArtObserved.

Text, images, words form the artists, and an interview after the jump…
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The First Annual Art Awards via Guggenheim.org

Last night, October 29, marked the inauguration of a new annual art event: Rob Pruitt presented The First Annual Art Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Yorkin association with the city’s oldest alternative art space, White Columns.

The awards were conceived by artist, Rob Pruitt, as a performance-based artwork; for the occasion he recruited the characters of Index Magazine’s wry satirical web series, Delusional Downtown Divas. The New York Times have reported that “…the Divas schemed to infiltrate the art establishment by any means possible. In one segment they pitched a tent in the Guggenheim, doing their laundry in the lobby fountain.”

Jeffrey Deitch and Kembra Pfahler at The First Annual Art Awards at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum via style.com

More images, text and related links after the jump….

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Untitled (City of Glass) (2009) by Robert Longo, via Metro Pictures

Currently on view at Metro Pictures in New York is Robert Longo’s “Surrendering the Absolutes.’  The exhibit features a group of Longo’s signature large-scale charcoal drawings where subjects are linked by atmospheric sensations of light and abstract forms. In these works Longo focuses on the shifts of perception that an image evokes.

Press Release [Metro Pictures]
Robert Longo: Surrendering the Absolutes [New York Art Beat]
Robert Longo [DailyServing]            

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Cindy Sherman Untitled 2008 photograph via Metro Pictures.

Currently on display at Metro Pictures is Cindy Sherman’s first exhibition since 2004.  Like practically all of Sherman’s work, the photos have the artist acting as her own model.  The pieces are not traditional self-portraits however, as Sherman dons makeup, hairstyles, and wardrobe all conceived and executed by the artist herself.  The exhibition which, is untitled, has Sherman dressing as affluent women in elaborate gowns and jewelry, set against backgrounds of lavish homes and gardens.  To create the work the artist first photographed herself against a green screen and then then digitally merges the image with background photos shot separately.

Photographer Cindy Sherman Sports Latest Disguise [NY Magazine]
Cindy Sherman: Transformer, playing dress-up is actually a profession [Village Voice]
Cindy Sherman Channels the End of an Era [The Huffington Post]
Cindy Sherman: Press Release [Metro Pictures]
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Jonathan Monk at Casey Kaplan – March 30 to May 5, 2007

“…Jonathan Monk, will present a new body of work that takes shape from key principles of Conceptual art — the favoring of ideas over object-making, serialism, the dematerialization of the art object — interpreting them with a playful sensibility and through a variety of media: 16 mm film, painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and a laser light installation.”

– Casey Kaplan Gallery

To read the entire press release click here.

Andreas Hofer at Metro Pictures – March 23 to April 21, 2007

“For his New York debut, Andreas Hofer presents “Only Gods Could Survive,” a haunting and hallucinogenic installation of sculpture, painting, drawing and collage…Using subject matter that includes comic book heroes, science fiction, bygone Hollywood and symbols of the Third Reich, Hofer extracts these signs from a forbidden world, producing artworks that traverse time to become an ominous and fanciful meditation on history and popular culture.”

– Metro Pictures Gallery

Photo courtesy of of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery

To read the entire press release click here.

Karel Funk at 303 Gallery – March 10 to April 7, 2007

“Karel Funk’s paintings are made with layers of thin paint that reflect light, influenced by Dutch and Flemish painters of the 17th century and Renaissance portraiture, as well as by American figurative painters from the past 20 years and their relationship to photography based work. In the end, the tenderness of each painstaking detail that goes into Funk’s handling brings the viewer closer to the subjects, even as they turn further away from us.”

– 303 Gallery

To read the entire press release click here.