Nicholas Hlobo, Phantsi Komngcunube (2017), via Lehmann Maupin

Artist Nicholas Hlobo’s work has long explored the potentials for using various material sources and referential systems, using a range of elements like metal piping and fabric stitching to create elegant, arcing forms and figures that operate as self-contaned metaphors of sorts.  Free-flowing and adventurous, the artist’s work allows him to work instinctively while drawing his forms directly onto canvas from his subconscious, a mode that invites both critical participation and quick impulse at the same time. His work is presented in some sense as a catharsis or exorcism, purging from himself the indoctrination of cultural dichotomies that set boundaries of either/or, where Hlobo wishes to portray the multitude. Read More »

Julia Phillips, Failure Detection (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on at MoMA PS1, New York-based artist Julia Phillips makes her solo museum debut with a show of tense, stimulating sculptures that explore both the presence and absence of the human form.  Featuring six newly commissioned major works alongside existing sculptures, Phillips’s work dives into the space around the body as reflective of the internal, and external politics shaping the world beyond its limits.

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Subodh Gupta, Adda/Rendez-vous (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view through the end of the summer at the Monnaie de Paris, Indian artist Subodh Gupta has orchestrated a series of large scale installations and sculptures spread throughout the halls of the famed Parisian institution, a body of work that runs throughout the artist’s focused and expressive sculptural practice. Selected pieces will be on display in conversation with the Monnaie’s permanent collection of metal artifacts to encourage reflection on the medium of metal both in terms of its symbolic value as well as the technical and artistic skill required to manipulate and bring meaning to it. Read More »

Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (1975), via Art Observed

Featuring one hundred artworks by Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeu de Paume anchors its summer offering with a show dedicated to the artist’s equally enigmatic and engaging practice, one that worked through principles of urban encounter, agency and abstraction with a unique sense of humor.  The show, titled Anarchitect explores the importance of Matta-Clark’s practice towards a rethinking of architecture after modernism. Embracing a diversity of media that include photography, film and printmaking, the exhibition features a number of works related to contemporary urban culture that further contextualize Gordon Matta-Clark’s compelling critique of architecture. Read More »

Peter Fischli, Cans, Bags and Boxes (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings

Currently on view at Reena Spaulings in New York, artist Peter Fischli has brought together a body of small-scale works under the title Cans, Bags and Boxes.  Marking an elaboration and subtle reinterpretation of a body of works originally shown in Los Angeles last year, the exhibition emphasizes Fischli’s razor-sharp wit and roving creative vision.   Read More »

Jack Smith, Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Artists Space in New York, artist Jack Smith’s adventurous, ground-breaking oeuvre is the subject of an ambitious, expansive two-floor exhibition exploring his work in the 1970’s and 80’s.  Smith’s work sits at the core of much of the American underground’s creative output of the last quarter of the 20th Century, uniting a group of artists invested in the eerie and weird, the surreal, and the abject as strategies to push (or even antagonize) the viewer’s understanding of their format, and the world around them. One can easily see the impact of Smith’s work in John Waters’ filmic output, or Mike Kelley’s sculptural and performative riffs, to name a few. Smith’s work was equally influential in its do-it-yourself mentality as it was for its sheer ability to create worlds and populate them with a swirling, surreal cast of characters that seemed to work both as surrealist escape and autobiographical interpretation of the world of Manhattan during the post-war years.

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Tony Oursler, TC: The Most Interesting Man Alive (Installation View), via Lisson Gallery

Tony Conrad stands among the pinnacle of modern artistic practice; a pioneering and influential experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, artist and educator whose body of work can rarely be traced within the framework of just one discipline or school of thought.  A longtime educator in conjunction with his expansive practice, Conrad’s work moves at a sprint through ideas and constructs, and has remained influential on much of the artists who worked around and with him.  One of these artists was Tony Oursler, who met Conrad in 1979 and performed in a number of Conrad’s films, ultimately forging a bond that would lead to a range of collaborations and pieces. Among these is TC: the most interesting man alive, a short biopic piece that incorporates a range of cinematic, graphic, narrative and autobiographical approaches to produce a new form of biopic about the late artist Tony Conrad. Read More »

The Mechanics of Fluids (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Currently on view at Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea exhibition space, the gallery’s entry in the annual string of summer group shows dives into the work of artist-turned-curator Melissa Gordon. Gordon, whose work explores shifting, ever-changing experiences in texture and materiality, turns her aesthetic sensibilities towards a broader selection of women artists, charting a broad trajectory of voices and strategies including work by Lynda Benglis, Helen Frankenthaler, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman and others, all set set off by an architectural intervention of Gordon’s own design. Read More »

Alex Da Corte, Slow Graffiti, 2017.©Alex Da Corte. Courtesy the artist

David Zwirner’s summer group exhibition, This Is Not a Prop brings together aesthetically slick and conceptually witty works by an intergenerational group of artists working in a variety of media. The thread weaving through the show is questioning of bodies’ relationship to objects, both in harmony and discord, as most vividly manifested in two Franz West sculptures from the ‘90s spearheading the exhibition. Read 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. Read More »