Yayoi Kusama, Obliteration Room (2002 – present), via Art Observed
Yayoi Kusama returns to New York City this summer at David Zwirner, bringing a new body of paintings, sculptures, and one of her popular, full-room installation pieces, all of which offers a nuanced look at the 86 year-old artist’s prolific output.
Yayoi Kusama, My Life (2014), via Art Observed
The Shortlist for the 2015 Turner Prize has been announced, featuring a diverse body of artists and practices that diverges wildly from last year’s heavily video and film-centric affair. The 2015 Prize exhibition will be staged this year at the Tramway arts venue in Glasgow. The Turner Prize, a £25,000 award, is Britain’s most prominent recognition in the arts, and this year will go to either London artist Bonnie Camplin, German-born artist Nicole Wermers, London-based arts collective Assemble (which adopted an abandoned housing estate and converted it into a new community space), or artist Janice Kerbel. Working in a wide variety of media, social practice and community milieu factor heavily into the pieces on view this year.
The Turner Prize exhibition will open this October in Glasgow. (more…)
Virginia Overton, Untitled (2015 ), all images courtesy White Cube
On view in London at White Cube in Mason’s Yard is an exhibition of new large-scale minimalist sculptures by American artist Virginia Overton. The exhibition is Overton’s first in the UK.
Subodh Gupta, This is not a fountain (2011), via Ross Maddux for Art Observed
Subodh Gupta’s most recent show at Hauser and Wirth is an exercise in the personal. Long known for works combining the intensely personal with broader social constructs and ritualistic approaches to the art object, his current exhibition places an even more central focus on the intensely personal, communal relations life in India, and his emphasis on the unifying, material structures over which daily life proceeds. (more…)
Ryan McNamara, Performance Plaque (2014)
Ryan McNamara star has rapidly been on the rise in the past years, as his infamous performance commissions, among which are his breakthrough Performa 09 piece A Fag Could Do That and his McLaren Award-winning performance MEEM, which the artist brought to Miami Beach last December. Following the immense success of his recentresidency, McNamara is making his comeback to New York at Mary Boone Gallery’s Midtown location with an exhibition that delves into the tangible aspects of performance art, the remains of a performance (body parts, clothing, and materials), which are left behind following a piece. (more…)
Mick Peter, all photos via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
The newly re-opened SculptureCenter in Long Island City has earned a reputation for forward-thinking exhibitions and thematic concerns, opening new dialogues between the constructed, three-dimensional object and its related artistic formats. It’s perhaps highly fitting then, that the exhibition space’s newest show, and its first since its impressive renovation, would focus specifically on these links of space and form. (more…)
Paul Sietsema, Red painting (detail) (2014), all images courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
On view at Matthew Marks is an exhibition of new work from LA-based artist Paul Sietsema. The exhibition includes new paintings and drawings, in addition to Sietsema’s two most recent films, all focusing on varying themes of production, consumption, proliferation of cultural objects and the systems in which these objects circulate.
The Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village, the arts studio and salon that once served as the original home of the Whitney Museum, has been named a National Treasure by the National Trust, calling it “the cradle of the modern American art movement.” (more…)
David Hockney, Woldgate Woods, November 26th (2010), via Art Observed
David Hockney returns to the Pace Gallery this month, showing a selection of new works that once again focus on the artist’s love affair with his Woldgate home, and the continued expansion of his decades of work as a painter into new media forms. Titled The Arrival of Spring, the work is another entry in the artist’s documentation and depiction of the landscapes of rural Britain. (more…)
Pawel Althamer, The Secret of the Phaistos Disc (Installation View), all images courtesy Deste Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse of Hydra
On view at the Deste Foundation’s exhibition space, the Slaughterhouse of Hydra, is an experimental blend of contemporary sculpture and performance, as designed by Polish artist Pawel Althamer. The interactive project explores the nature of family relationships, and their role in making up the broader structural arrangements and familial relations that often drive global social interactions.
Rene Ricard, The Archaic Smile (1978)
An artist embracing multiple formats, genres and techniques, Rene Ricard was born into a troubled family in Boston in 1946. Before he was eighteen years old, Ricard had already moved to New York, and immersed himself in its vibrant Downtown scene, appearing in many of Andy Warhol’s films, and becoming a regular in the artist’s “Factory.” Referred to as ‘the George Sanders of the Lower East Side, the Rex Reed of the art world’ by Warhol, Ricard emerged as a highly influential art critic in the early 80’s, playing major a role in launching the careers of artists such as Julian Schnabel, Francesco Vezzoli, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose graffiti works were compared to the wall paintings in Pompeii by Ricard in his famous Artforum essay The Radiant Child. (more…)
A new article by curator Sam Smiles in The Guardian this week studies the perceptions of late-life creativity in famous painters and artists, particularly in contrasts of value between the 19th and 20th century, and cites a number of critics who have noted most master artist’s work comes after their 50th year. The article comes with concurrent run of three exhibitions exploring late work by Matisse, Turner and Rembrandt in London. (more…)
303 Gallery has announced plans for an exhibition of the work of former Sonic Youth frontwoman and longtime fine artist Kim Gordon, running into the summer of 2015. Gordon was added to the gallery’s roster earlier this year, but installed work there in 2012 in collaboration with Karen Kilimnik. (more…)
Lucio Fontana, Scultura astratta (1934), all images courtesy Museum d’Art Moderne
On view at Museum D’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is an retrospective exhibition of Italian painter Lucio Fontana, who was known as one of the the primary founders of Spatialism, and was long known for his association with the Arte Povera movement. The exhibition will continue through August 24th. (more…)
Giulio Paolini, Autoritratto (Self-Portrait) (1968), Courtesy of Dominique Lévy Gallery and Courtesy Archivio Giulio Paolini, Turin
Hypothesis for an Exhibition, a survey show paying homage to the work of conceptual artist Giulio Paolini is open at Dominique Lévy on Madison Avenue through August 16. In addition to Paolini himself, the exhibition features the work of Richard Aldrich, Harold Ancart, Sebastian Black, Kerstin Brätsch, Guyton/Walker, KAYA, Charles Mayton, Seth Price, Josh Smith, R.H. Quaytman, Antek Walczak and Viola YeÅŸiltaç. Additionally, Studio Manuel Raeder has designed an accompanying publication, which incidentally coincides with London’s Whitechapel Gallery retrospective Giulio Paolini:To Be or Not to Be. (more…)
Sarah Ortmeyer, Sankt Petersburg Paradox (2014)
Among the decision-making factors in set expanse of time, risk plays a crucial part. Simply described as the potential of losing an owned value upon a taken action, the risk element occupies a noticeable part in economic, social and political dynamics, aside from striking as a noteworthy reality to consider for individuals in the daily routine. The St. Petersburg Paradox, a group show on view at Swiss Institute through August 17th, observes this broad topic through a determined perspective, suggesting an alternative reading based on the reflection of risk elements in artworks.
The St. Petersbug Paradox (Installation View) (more…)
The use of 3D Printing in contemporary art is growing, and this week, the International Foundation for Art Research will host a special event investigating the impact and use of the advanced technology in current studio practices. “The technology, which facilitates replication, has legal implications, such as patent and copyright infringement and, down the road, possibly also forgery and fraud”, says Ifar Executive Director Sharon Flescher. (more…)
Ed Ruscha, Periods (2013), all images courtesy Gagosian Gallery
On view at Gagosian Gallery in New York is a survey of prints and rarely seen photographs produced by Ed Ruscha from 1959 until the present. The exhibition was organized by Gagosian’s director Bob Monk, and will remain on view through July 11, 2014.
A Wall Street Journal article notes a recent study showing that art stimulates areas of the brain involved in vision, pleasure, memory, recognition and emotions, evidence of how strongly and naturally inclined the brain is towards enjoying art. (more…)
The Telegraph takes a look inside the former home of late artist Louise Bourgeois, which will be reopened as a research center and exhibition space next year, and which was the site of the artist’s legendary work ethic. “She would stay up for three days in a row, hyper,” says her former assistant Jerry Gorovoy. “We tried different sleeping pills, nothing worked. My days would start at ten, and sometimes she’d been sitting there since six waiting for me. ‘You’re late’ she’d say, in the black skirt and shirt she wore every day.” (more…)
Marina Abramovic’s new performance 512 Hours opened yesterday at the Serpentine, with the artist granted free reign to enocunter visitors in the empty gallery space and do as she wishes. “The idea is that the public are my material, and I am theirs,” she says. “I will open the gallery myself in the morning and close it at 6 p.m. with my key. I want to understand how I can be in the present moment, be with the public.” (more…)
Artist Mélanie Matranga has been awarded the first annual Frieze Artist Award, a new prize that welcomes emerging artists to create an ambitious work for the Frieze London fair. Matranga’s work will feature a set of videos “that follow a young artistic couple as they negotiate ‘freedom, success and the proper functioning of a couple.’ The episodes will be filmed during the construction of Frieze London in Regent’s Park, including a purpose-built café, which Matranga has designed for use by visitors.” (more…)
Mark Flood, Available Nasdaq Symbol (Installation View), via Art Observed
Few artists are prepared to plumb the depths and egoistic state of the art market, image culture and corporate personhood the way Mark Flood has for the past decades. Time and again, the artist’s occasionally crass, bold-faced techniques and assemblages of mass-media signifiers toys with the spectacle of consumption, mocking both advertisements and political symbolism as bound up in a state of image-consumption. It’s this dichotomy, writ large against the backdrop of the art market that defines his current show of work at Zach Feuer in New York. (more…)
The Atlantic documents a conservation approach pioneered in the 1980’s by Raymond Lafontaine, using color and lighting theory to hide fading and prevent having to tamper with the surface of the work. “In human color perception you have a light source, a surface, and a viewer, and the three interact,” says Jens Stenger, a conservation scientist who is using the technique to work on six murals by Mark Rothko at Harvard. “If you can’t change the surface, you can change the light source to change the color.” (more…)
