Iran do Espírito Santo, Untitled (Folded Mirror 13) (2011). All photos on site for Art Observed by Perrin Lathrop.

Three new bodies of work comprising Brazilian artist Iran do Espírito Santo’s Switch on view now at Sean Kelly Gallery continue the artist’s investigation into connections between light, form, and space. Espírito Santo has expressed his interest in exploring “the duality we live in; between the concrete world and that of ideas. It’s an existential human condition; the artworks are a way of negotiating this, a need to deal with immateriality.” Gallery goers may witness three very different series, each exploring light’s interaction with the perception of space.

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‪‬Jeffrey Deitch discusses art in his home, famous friends, and how an artist’s work is not a ‘practice’

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‪‬Elisabeth Murdoch reportedly donates “seven-figure sum” toward educational facilities in planned £215 million wing of Tate Modern

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‬Metropolitan Museum of Art security guard shoots himself in the leg while cleaning gun in basement locker room, the 63-year-old man is in stable condition, and “the public and the staff were never in danger”

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Dan Graham, Two 2-Way Mirror Ellipses, One Open, One Closed (2011-2012). All images via Lisson Gallery.

Equal parts graceful and subversive, the pavilion structures of Dan Graham consistently toy with the manufacture and perception of space. Using a combination of mirrors and glass to blur the ideas of internal and external space, Graham invites viewers to participate fully in the physical framework of his pieces while still remaining partially anchored as spectators to their relations with its space. This dichotomy is readily seen in a series of new pavilion structures currently on view at the Lisson Gallery in London.

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‪‬ ‘The Clock’ a real time 24-hour video collage by Christian Marclay (recently a Time Magazine top 100 most influential person) returns to New York this summer at the Lincoln Center Festival, July 5 through August 5

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‪‬Agata Olek crochets two excavators in her hometown of Katowice, Poland, for the Katowice Street Art Festival opening today through April 29

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‪‬Frieze New York announces artists to be included in sculpture park overlooking East River on Randall’s Island, including Louise Bourgeois, Ernesto Neto, Subodh Gupta, Jeppe Hein, and Jaume Plensa, curated by Tom Eccles

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Janaina Tschäpe’s table installation, a giant squid with condom roe. All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

The Brooklyn Artists Ball took place last night, the annual fundraising gala hosted by the Brooklyn Museum. A number of artists and celebrities were in attendance, including Judy Chicago, Aurel Schmidt and Dustin Yellin, as well as those honored with the Asher B. Durand Award: Martha Rosler, Amy Sillman, Mickalene Thomas. Between a lively cocktail hour and an after party sponsored by W Magazine sat an elegant dinner with one-night-only 40-foot-long “table environments,” created by 16 Brooklyn Women artists. The event was the fifth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, with Ms. Elizabeth A. Sackler present to receive the Augustus Graham Medal for strong commitment to the arts and the Brooklyn Museum.

Guests posing for the interactive video installation by Nicole Cohen

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‪‬A 474-year-old painting by Italian artist Girolamo de’Romani has been returned to its Jewish heirs since being plundered by Nazis in WWII, the family now deciding to sell the work at Christie’s in New York on June 6, the work insured for $2.5 million

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All installation images courtesy Gladstone Gallery by David Regen, copyright the artists.

The Spirit Level is a large multimedia group show currently on display at both of the Gladstone Gallery locations in Chelsea. New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone curated the show with the intention of tapping into various levels of consciousness with both sexual and surreal imagery. With a rather dark and visceral edge, the work spans a variety of mediums: painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and installation. Between the two galleries, a total of 19 artists are represented including Martin Boyce, Ann Craven, and Sam Gilliam.

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‪‬MAXXI, Italy’s national contemporary art museum in Rome, to have board of directors replaced by government-appointed administration following an unresolved 2012 budget

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‪‬Artist Christian Marclay, creator of The Clock, and collector Alice Walton of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art among Top 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine

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‪‬Takashi Murakami speaks on several personal and Japanese cultural issues in an edited interview with the Wall Street Journal

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Marina Abramović, The Abramović Method: Chair for Man and His Spirit (2012). All photos © Marina Abramović by SIAE 2012, courtesy Marina Abramović and Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan unless otherwise noted.

Known as the “grandmother of performance art,” Serbian artist Marina Abramović has chosen Milan as the setting for the exhibition of her much anticipated new body of work, titled The Abramović Method. Presented at PAC Padiglione d’Art Contemporanea through June 10, 2012 and complemented by an exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Lia Rumma (through May 12, 2012), this is her first major performance since MoMA’s The Artist is Present in 2010, during which Abramović sat in a gallery for 700 hours, silently and motionlessly interacting with a unending parade of museumgoers exclusively through eye contact. Abramović initiated her performance art practice in the 1970s with physically and emotionally demanding trials, aiming to test the limits of her bodily and psychological endurance. More recently, Abramović’s artistic practice has become preoccupied with the concept of duration and an obligation to the public.

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Jim Shaw, The Rinse Cycle (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Ilhan Kim.

Jim Shaw’s oeuvre maximizes a medley of mediums straddling low art found in a church’s Christmas bazaar to high art befitting a gem gallery. Shaw’s latest exhibition at Metro Pictures continues his tradition of weaving together disparate motifs to create textured compositions with multiple references to American history and a wild reimagining of world religions and mythology. The installation showcases various elements of a narrative trajectory in which two petty thieves, on the run from FBI agents in pursuit, trespass into the fictional Museum of Oist History in Omaha and don wigs that cloak them invisible and deport them to the ancient birthplace of O, the founding deity of Oism.

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‪‪‬Model May Andersen becomes assistant director at The Hole gallery following spring internship and is also separately in the press today regarding her dating Julian Schnabel

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‪‬Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas P. Campbell earned $1.04 million in pay and benefits in 2010, a number comparable among other museum heads as the Met expanded loan and exhibition programs and attendance reached a forty-year peak [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Six works by Gerhard Richter from 1968–93 to be auctioned at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Sale on May 8 in New York, “With an aggregate low estimate of almost $40 million, the six works are primed to be a landmark event in the Richter market.”

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Artist Agathe Snow in front of Target Practice (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Maccarone Gallery presents new work by Agathe Snow in the exhibition I like it here. Don’t you? An artist whose visual vocabulary is steeped in the rhetoric of apocalypse, this collection of papier-mâché and fiberglass sculptures represents Snow’s vision of purgatory—a perpetual present constructed from the material refuse of a damned society. Ten totemic mobiles hang from ceiling to floor, each cleverly titled to simultaneously evoke their pop mundanity and allegorical weight, or perhaps, more aptly, weightlessness. This assemblage, a collage of cultural detritus both found and fabricated, hovers silently in Snow’s mythological continuum of hope and despair, conjuring associations of childhood and war, nature and culture, life and death, and everything in between.

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Ilhan Kim.

Abstract artist Dan Walsh, known for his colorful geometric paintings, is currently presenting new works at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. Walsh hails from the minimalist tradition, however, the artist now considers himself to be a “maximalist” in the sense that the simple repetition and grid-like patterns of his work embrace the qualities of minimalism yet engage the viewer in a deeper psychological sense.

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‪‬Ai Weiwei pens an essay in the Guardian on Chinese censorship, “The internet is uncontrollable. And if the internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It’s as simple as that.”

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‪‬Ai Weiwei sues Chinese government over tax issues claiming violations in handling witnesses, evidence, and company accounts

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‪‬Eleven Rivington expands to second space at 195 Chrystie street, opening April 29; Maccarone Gallery also opens an additional space around the corner from current West Village locale, set to open in June

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