Gustav Klimt’s previously unknown “Seeufer mit Birken” (lakeside with birch trees), discovered in private home in Netherlands [AO Newslink]

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Anish Kapoor to design a mobile, 700 person capacity, inflatable “pneumatic structure” concert hall for Northern Japan to bring music and performing arts to the areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami [AO Newslink]

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Detail of Dog head from Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2011) All photos by Megan Hoetger for Art Observed.

The installation of the first major public sculpture work by well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on August 20th, its West Coast stop on a global tour. Encircling the elevator up from the parking structure in the North Piazza of LACMA’s sprawling campus, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads functions as a marker of a heavily trafficked threshold. Its position outside the parking is particularly suited to the car-dominated geography of Los Angeles, but it also allows multiple points of approach for those visitors ambling between the Ahmanson and Broad buildings, or just arriving through the Chris Burden street lamps.

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Neo Rauch, Unter Feuer, 2010. Via Museum Frieder Burda

The Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany is hosting a large-scale retrospective of Leipzig-based artist Neo Rauch (born 1960). Showing about forty paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, the exhibition covers the past twenty years of Rauch’s career. Currently an honorary professor at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Rauch is the representative of the New Leipzig School of painting distinguished by the figurative visual language, narrative content, and technical perfection.

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Wealthy private families reportedly realizing current gains in their gold holdings and moving the proceeds into Art as an alternative asset class [AO Newslink]

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René Magritte, La Carte d’après Nature, numèro spècial (January 1954). All images via Matthew Marks

Matthew Marks is currently exhibiting “La Carte D’Aprés Nature” curated by gallery-represented artist Thomas Demand. It features three rarely-seen paintings by René Magritte supplemented by sculptures, photographs, and films by established and emerging artists that explore themes similar to the late Surrealist’s. Demand has pulled pieces from all over the world, from varying disciplines and times, that speak of Magritte’s “carte d’aprés nature,” or “map of nature.” Demand tells the Observer, “I wanted there to be the feeling of something strange.”

René Magritte, Le grand style (The Great Style) (1951)

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Installation view, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape (2011). All images via Tate Modern.

On view until September 11 at the Tate Modern in London, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape brings together work spanning six decades of the internationally renowned artist’s career. Organized with the help of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, this major retrospective is a rare opportunity to see over 150 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper culled from collections around the world, as well as five of his large triptychs in their first ever coincident display. In addition to an exceptional viewing experience, the Tate has set out to provide a political context for Miró’s work and thereby shed light on the esteemed Surrealist’s oft-overlooked engagement with and dedication to the world around him.

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Joan Miró, Painting (1927).

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MoMA PS1 Curator Peter Eleey on the upcoming ‘September 11’ exhibition at PS1: “Probably the biggest difficulty that 9/11 poses to art, at least to visual art, is contained in the ‘spectacularity’ of the attacks themselves.” [AO Newslink]

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Is this £1,500, internet purchased drawing a lost portrait of Vincent Van Gogh? [AO Newslink]

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Sol Lewitt Installation at City Hall Park, all images courtesy of Gautier Pellegrin for Art Observed.

27 career spanning works from the late conceptual artist Sol LeWitt are now on view at City Hall Park through December 2nd. Curated from museums and private collections around the the world, the landmark exhibition Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006 is the first outdoor career survey of the groundbreaking artist’s conceptual work.

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Dirk Skreber, Untitled (Crash 1) (2009)

The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture at Saatchi Gallery features 20 sculptors throughout the space, marking the first ever exclusive sculptural exhibition at the Chelsea, London showroom. The international range of artists, some well-known and some up-and-coming, produced mixed media compositions of all sizes. An overarching theme of experimentation pervaded, both with human form and bright-colored whimsy. Geometric and architectural forays are present in the work of Sterling Ruby, Roger Hiorns, and Peter Buggenhout, with more figurative developments by Thomas Houseago and David Thorpe.

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Ai WeiWei pens an editorial on Beijing that is, considering his recent incarceration, strikingly direct, yet also somehow resigned: “you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything” [AO Newslink]

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Blood Orange during a set, all photos for Art Observed by Gautier Pellegrin

As New York City and the rest of the the Eastern Seaboard hunker down for a storm here is a photoset of last week’s balmy “warm up” at MoMA’s PS1 in Long Island City, New York which featured The Juan Maclean, DFA, Blood Orange, Solange, Pictureplane and others.

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Jeanette Ingberman, a founder of 3-decade strong Exit Art in New York, died at age 59 on Wednesday in Manhattan [AO Newslink]

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The story of the global powerhouse Pace gallery and the family behind it [AO Newslink]

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East Coast Collectors scramble to fortify artwork from expected impact of Hurricane Irene [AO Newslink]

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View of the Vardø, Norway memorial “Steilneset”, 2010. All images via Wallpaper*

Architect Peter Zumthor and artist Louise Bourgeois have collaborated to design a memorial to the victims of the Finmark witchhhunts of the early 17th century.  The Steilneset stands on the edge of the small town of Vardø in Norway, where 91 women were burned at the stake or tortured to death.

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The Wall Street Journal interviews Mark di Suvero, “America’s greatest living Constructivist sculptor”
at his studio in Long Island City, New York [AO Newslink]

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Dasha Zhukova launches Garage magazine with fashion/art collaborations from Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, John Baldessari, Raymond Pettibon, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy and Richard Prince [AO Newslink]

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Yayoi Kusama at Museo Reina Sofía, installation view, via Museo Reina Sofia

A major retrospective of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) is on view at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid until September 12th, 2011. The exhibition assembles Kusama’s multimedia projects and includes drawings, paintings, collages, installation, performance, literary, and design pieces. Organized by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Tate Modern, the exhibition explores the relationship between art and the socio-cultural reality in the past 50 years as reflected through Kusama’s work. Since the late 1950’s, Kusama has been associated with pop, first generation feminist art, minimalism, happenings, conceptual and installation art. Her work addresses and reveals the mental health issues the artist has experienced since the late 1970’s, visible through her “use of repetition, monochrome, and grids.”  However, as the curator Frances Morris reminds, “we need to balance the obvious framework of her mental health with the framework of art history and cultural milieu in which she operated over time.” Already shown in the Pompidou Centre, Paris at the beginning of 2011, this one-artist retrospective will travel to the Tate Modern, London in February 2012 and the Whitney Museum, New York in June 2012.  The exhibition traces Kusama’s artistic development through a number of periods.

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Announcement for Warhol’s Original Soup Cans Show at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles in 1962, via MOCA

On view now at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art is Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans from 1962. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans are arguably both his most recognizable work, and that of American Pop Art as a whole. The installation opened on the 49^th anniversary of both the first exhibition of the paintings at Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery, and Warhol’s first solo show.

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), via the Museum of Modern Art

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Jeff Wall, Boy Falling from Tree (2010) via BOZAR

On view at the Center for Fine Arts (BOZAR), Brussels and curated by Joël Benzakin, the Crooked Path exhibition examines the artistic roots of Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, while pointing out the status of photography in relation to other artistic disciplines such as painting and cinema.  The exhibition features twenty-five photographs by Wall displayed with over one hundred multimedia artifacts by key figures of Western mainstream art since the late nineteenth century onwards, including Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Frank Stella, and Carl Andre  – artists designated as those who made the strongest impact on Wall’s career. By showing these works, ‘The Crooked Path’ shows the influence of  Minimalism, post-Minimalism, Cinematography, Conceptual and post-Conceptual photography, nineteenth century and contemporary photography on Wall’s work.

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Ryan McGinley, Tom (Golden Tunnel) (2010), via OHWOW Gallery

On view now through August 27^th is “Post 9-11” at Los Angeles’s OHWOW Gallery. The group show features works by  New York-based artists who have in common both their rise to fame in the years since 9/11, and outspoken work that addresses sex, drugs, and the general decadence of the New York art scene at the time. Dan Colen, Terence Koh, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Ryan McGinley, Agathe Snow, Dash Snow, and Aaron Young  all have work represented in this show that aims to chronicle their relationships, collaborations, and responses to external circumstances of the past decade.

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