Pierre Huyghe, UUmwelt (Installation View), Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (3 October 2018 – 10 February 2019). Copyright Ola Rindal. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries

Artist Pierre Huyghe is known for his complex immersive ecosystems, creating impressive arrangements of space and material that incorporate living organisms, active agents and forces that gradually transform or reactivate the gallery in which its placed.  For his new exhibition at The Serpentine Gallery in the UK, which opened during Frieze London this past month, the artist has turned the museum into a porous and contingent environment, housing different forms of cognition, emerging intelligence, biological reproduction and instinctual behaviors. (more…)

Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance (2017), via Art Observed

Spread across the rooftop garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Adrián Villar Rojas has brought a body of new sculptures to kick off this season’s Rooftop Commission project, part of an ongoing series inviting contemporary artists to create large-scale sculptural works on the concrete patio above the institution’s storied halls.  Drawing from the formal language of with the Met’s own holdings, Villar Rojas’s work joins previous installations by Cornelia Parker, Pierre Huyghe and Dan Graham, among others, exploring the museum’s site and history against the New York skyline. (more…)

LACMA has a post on its Unframed blog this week, following the life Human the dog from Pierre Huyghe’s work recently installed in the museum, and her owner, artist Marlon Middeke, as he opens a show in Kassel.  “Marlon takes back mastery of himself after years of being, quite literally, just a piece of Huyghe’s art,” writes author Brian Sonia-Wallace. (more…)

Doug Aitken, Now (2011) at 303 Gallery NY. All photos for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

AO is on site in London for this week’s Frieze Art Fair. With 173 galleries selling an estimated $350 million worth of art, a level of anxiety pervades as the week’s results will be indicative of the overall international contemporary art market. Works like Christian Jankowski’s droll The Finest Art on Water and Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine directly comment on the world economic state, while the overall demeanor remains upbeat, with art world moguls and A-list celebrities enjoying the festivities.

Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine (2011), Thomas Dane Gallery

More text and images after the jump…
(more…)