John Baldessari, Movie Scripts/Art: With a Fly Crawling on It (2014), via Art Observed

One of the most prominent names that defines the past 40 years of West Coast conceptualism, John Baldessari is currently presenting a new body of work at Marian Goodman Gallery. Titled Movie Scripts / Art 2014, the series resumes the pioneer’s investigation on the visual language of artworks and the possibility of a dialogue between images, words and cultural formats like film and literature. Baldessari, who has always been curious about the range text can explore in artistic expression, has not been hesitant about placing images next to sentences and written situations, often directly posing questions to the work or offering sarcastic alternatives to its surface level relationships. (more…)

E.V. Day, CatFight (2011-2014) via E.V. Day Studio

On view now at Mary Boone’s uptown gallery is the haunting sculpture series Semi-Feral by artist E.V. Day. The show centers around a large, site-specific sculptural piece comprised of multiple casts of saber-tooth tiger skeletons floating above the floor of the gallery space.  Day’s work, often concerning sexuality and femininity, takes its point of departure here from the slang term “cat fight.”  A phrase that typically robs a fight from any viciousness, Day returns the notion to its original, ferociously natural element.

(more…)

NPR speaks with Robert Indiana, discussing the artist’s legacy as the creator of the iconic LOVE logo and sculpture, and his perceived neglect in the contemporary arts discourse.  While LOVE remains immediately recognizable, Indiana’s broad body of work is often overlooked.  The artist goes on to talk about his personal ties to his work, and his take on contemporary America.  “The American Dream, that’s our folly,” he says. “That’s our folly. Look where we’re ending up.” (more…)

Louise Lawler, Detail, Chicago (placed and pulled) (2011-2013), via Casey Kaplan

The arrangement of works for Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler’s current show at Casey Kaplan in New York is an interesting one: long strings of Gillick’s text hang from the ceilings of the space, while long, blurred images from Lawler’s archival image collection are stretched across the walls.  It seems an almost deliberate attempt to escape the stationary logic of the art object, constantly forcing the viewer to move between rooms and works, always reappraising position and meaning as they go.

Louise Lawler and Liam Gillick (Installation View), via Casey Kaplan (more…)

Robert Indiana, The American Gas Works (1962), Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art

Robert Indiana‘s lasting fame in the canon of American post-war modernism will forever belong to his iconic LOVE sculpture—that immediately recognizable logo of stacked letters animated by it’s slanting O, which graces merchandise as ubiquitous as the US postage stamp. This beautifully simple graphic, originally conceived as a design for a Christmas Card for MoMA, has in fact so eclipsed Indiana’s expansive career that his name has become synonymous with its text. And yet this fall’s large retrospective at the Whitney, Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE, plumbs the depths of his oeuvre to present an artist far more complex than those four well-worn letters. Curated by Barbara Haskell, the exhibit presents paintings and sculptures by the pop artist that highlight Indiana’s sociopolitical conscience as boldly as their hard-edged execution, and traces his developing formal vocabulary of language and abstraction, from biting political commentary, to personal biography, to literary allusion, Indian’s broad selection of works on view dispel any notion of the artist as one-hit-wonder.  This exhibit demonstrates the thematic expanse Indiana pursues “beyond Love”, including American identity, the American Dream, and the politics of race and sexuality. Rife with literary references to American authors and indebted to artistic predecessors such as Charles Demuth, the textual program is often as radical as his post-painterly abstraction.

Robert Indiana, LOVE (1961), Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art (more…)

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #138 (1984), via Skarstedt Gallery

Skarstedt Gallery is currently presenting the retrospective 1980’s Revisited, revisiting the works, theories and artists that helped to define the dynamic decade in contemporary art.  Fetauring works by Carroll Dunham, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, David Salle and Cindy Sherman, the show highlights the varied and often conflicting artistic styles of the time, particularly in the newly developing approaches of Appropriation, Neo-Expressionism, and Graffiti.  The 1980’s were a controversial decade for the art world, a period of active boundary breaking by artists looking to challenge contemporary society.

Jeff Koons, One Ball Total Equilibrium (1985), via Skarstedt Gallery

(more…)

Air de Pied-à-terre (Installation View), via Lisa Cooley

Walking into  Air de Pied-à-terre, the newest show on display at artist Lisa Cooley’s gallery, one is reminded of an otherworldly hotel lobby. With the help of fellow artist and curator Alan Reid, Cooley has created an “Air de-Pied-à-Terre” (an alternative living space, located away from one’s home). The gallery has numerous articles that evoke a nostalgic atmosphere within the show – mobiles that dance around the room, paintings that mimic children’s creations, and homely looking text juxtaposed against more classical looking portraiture. The entirety of the show is punctuated by stereotypically domestic constituents such as chairs and potted plants that engulf the viewer and invite them to make themselves at home. (more…)