Alex Prager, 4:29pm Van Nuys (2012)

Los Angeles based artist Alex Prager is showing internationally for the second time in her rapid rise, showing Compulsion simultaneously at Yancey Richardson in New York, M+B in Los Angeles, and Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London. Paired with a short film titled La Petit Mort (French for ‘the little death’—a euphemism for sexual orgasm) the exhibition is both a substantiation and a deviation of her previous work. Featuring scenes of film noir, tense, and poised-to-erupt, the Hitchcockian damsel in distress and Prager’s unmistakable retro touch are all on view.

Alex Prager, La Petit Mort (2012), film still

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Keith Haring, Matrix (1983). All images copyright Keith Haring Foundation.

On now at The Brooklyn Museum is ‘Keith Haring: 1978-1982.’ This dynamic multi-media exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of Haring’s early work. Best known for his “Crack is Wack” landmark mural, “The Radiant Baby,” and other stylistically similar cartoons made with thick lines of black Sumi ink, Haring also produced work in other mediums such as film and print. This show is comprised of 155 works on paper, multiple videos, and more than 150 personal objects of Haring’s, including notebooks, flyers, posters, subway drawings, and photographs; all of which, put together, capture and encapsulate the excitement and energy of New York City’s club and art scenes in the 1980s. The exhibition narrates viewers through the period in Haring’s career immediately following his arrival in New York City through the establishment of his studio space and the beginning of his interest in street art.

Kenny Scarf and Peter Schuyff, Untitled (1979)

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All images courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, Paris

Following a year in the public eye for Jaume Plensa, the artist’s current show at Galerie Lelong in Paris is comprised of steel and rock creations as well as accompanying drawings. These “modern hermits” follow in the wake attention Plensa garnered last year via large scale sculptural installations in Madison Square Park, M.I.T. and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The mid-sized works and drawings are approachable, “silent observers of the hustle and bustle,” according to the press release.

Jaume Plensa, The Hermit VI (2012)

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‪‬Jenny Holzer discusses her use of language and new paintings with Kiki Smith in Interview, “Until recently, I felt I had to sneak color, but now I just paint it.”

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‪‬Rob Pruitt to collaborate with Jimmy Choo on 2013 Cruise collection of shoes, handbags, and leather goods slated for a November release. “We sensed that Rob’s twist on Jimmy Choo glamour would yield something very collectible and uniquely beautiful,” said the brand’s creative directors

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Curator Chris Stephens. All photos on site for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

Currently on view at Tate Britain through July fifteenth, Picasso & Modern British Art sets up a large-scale juxtaposition between Pablo Picasso’s legendary oeuvre and its influence and impact on British art of the twentieth century. The exhibition positions over 60 Picassos in dialogue with nearly 100 works by such  luminaries as Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney—in the Tate’s words “seven of Picasso’s most brilliant British admirers.”

Pablo Picasso, The Source (1921), left; Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1936), right

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Michael Snow, Paris de jugement Le and / or State of the Arts (2003)

Michael Snow and Rudolf Stingel are currently showing at Secession in Vienna. While they incorporate different mediums, both Snow and Stingel’s works explore the interplay between art and audience, and utilize the exhibition spaces as fluid, living installations.

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‪‬Art historian recognizes possible El Greco work in private collection of Camilla Blaffer: a canvas bought at a Paris auction 20 years ago depicts St. Francis, a common subject of the artist, and was signed with the artist’s proper name (though the signature was lost in the restoration)

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‪‬Palais de Tokyo opened its doors on Thursday after a €20m, 10-month renovation, offering an intentionally dusty 237,000 sq feet spread over four floors, the center’s president de Loisy saying, “Nothing is perfectly clean, nothing is perfectly painted on purpose. It is so important in art not to control everything. It’s all in favor of creativity.”

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‪‬The Metropolitan Museum of Art publishes guidebook of nearly two million works on 449 pages with 600 color illustrations, distributed by Yale University Press

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Walter De Maria, 5-7-9 Series, installation view. All images courtesy of Gagosian Gallery Rome.

Influential American sculptor Walter De Maria is currently exhibiting part of his 5-7-9 Series at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome. De Maria has been involved with numerous historical art movements, including Minimalism, Land Art, and Conceptual Art, and the present exhibition represents a chance to view De Maria’s contribution to some of these. The 5-7-9 Series is one of three large-scale, multi-part installation sculptures. The current Rome exhibition is edition 2 of 2; the first being on permanent view at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. This series is preceded by The 4-6-8 Series (1966) and followed by Time/Timeless/No Time (2004).
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Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings, Exhibition View. Images courtesy of CAFA Museum.

British sculptor Tony Cragg presents his first museum show in China, Sculptures and Drawings, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Museum in Beijing. Cragg, whom the exhibition’s press release hails as “one of the world’s greatest living sculptors,” has compiled 127 works—50 major sculptures and a series of watercolors and drawings—for the large-scale show, focusing mainly on his creations from the last 15 years.

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‪‬Stolen Paul Cézanne painting recovered by Serbian police from a Swiss gallery heist four years ago when three suspects stole four paintings at gunpoint. If authenticated, the Cézanne will be the third painting recovered and could be worth $108m [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’—one of four versions—is on view now in London at Sotheby’s today for one week before heading to New York for May 2 auction, expected to fetch $80m

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‪‬Thomas Kellein steps down from director position with Chinati Foundation, agreeing to stay on as consultant for next 6 month period, “I am gratefully wishing my colleagues and my board of directors the very best in the future.”

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Cai Guo-Qiang in front of Desire for Zero Gravity (2012) at MOCA’s Cai Gu0-Qiang: Sky Ladder. Images via MOCA unless otherwise noted.

In the first West Coast solo exhibition of world-renowned New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) presents four commissioned projects, including the most recent work in the artist’s Projects for Extraterrestrials series, which began in 1989. Trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Cai Guo-Qiang’s projects are spectacular and theatrical gestures, embodying the ethos of action painting and a long history of creation/destruction strategies in terms of today’s complex (pyro)technical mechanisms. Using gunpowder as his medium, Cai creates large-scale drawings in a matter of seconds with the dramatic transformative potentials of this volatile material.

Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Photo on site for Art Observed by Megan Hoetger.

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‪‬Ed Ruscha models Band of Outsiders spring line

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‪‬Damien Hirst’s ‘Hymn’ sculpture graffitied with simple ‘occupy’ word in blue spray paint outside the Tate Modern in London, The Occupied Times calling Hirst, “the man who has defined the capitalist approach to art more than any other”.

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‪‬James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem speaks with David Byrne and John Schaefer at a Gregory Crewdson organized symposium at the Yale University School of Art, proposing musicalized turnstiles at New York City subway entrances

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Doug Aitken, Song 1 (2012). All images via Hirschhorn Museum.

The work of LA based artist Doug Aitken spans across a range of media and genres, traversing formal and conceptual terrains from watercolor to Fluxus-like happenings, book publishing to operas, and photography to public art. Largely known for his video installations, his work is equally anchored in audio, shifting in recent years to engage closely with sound as an index of space and time, deeply resonant with the contemporary human experience. The collusion of visual modalities with sound experiments and musical production propels his investigation of perceptual experience in his most recent work, Song 1, now exhibited at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC, on view from dusk until midnight through May 13. This spectacular temporary exhibition epitomizes the fluid integration of music and image in a site-specific installation that literally inverts the art museum and transforms the surrounding landscape into a 360 degree cinema. Projected upon Gordon Bunshaft’s cylindrical cement fortress, Aitken has composed a 35 minute loop of video that revolves around the museum’s cylindrical facade, veiling its bulky structure in a graceful and arresting play of light. Yet it is the accompanying score that is truly at the core of this project, comprised of a succession of covers of the song “I Only Have Eyes for You,” interpreted by a diverse checklist of musicians, which feature as the organizing principle governing an entangled loop of fragmented narratives and flashing images.

Doug Aitken, Song 1 (2012)

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation held an Easter celebration at MoMA PS1 this past Sunday in typical DIY Bruce fashion. From 3–6 PM, a gamut of bands played in the Performance Dome while a lamb roasted outside, and an Easter egg hunt included cigarettes. While the group’s Brucennial 2012 exhibition continues through April 20, the one-day event in the courtyard of PS1 was titled Bruceforma 2012: The Resurrection.

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Nigel Cooke, Nature Loves You (2011–2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea is currently showing Nigel Cooke’s 4th solo show in the multi-room space. Cooke was on hand at the press preview to speak about the ten new paintings that marked for the artist a move into a much more dynamic and engaging direction. The press release references de Kooning‘s infamous “No Holidays” quote—that none of his work should ever have a caesura, that work should be an endlessly ongoing practice. Cooke displays reverence to that adage; every work is “three paintings in one.” Conceived by first laying a figurative layer full of characters and interaction, followed by sweeping obscurative strokes, and then capped by an attempt to rearrange order from the chaos induced—flushing out imagined smoking flower women, tree branches, and odd clown-skull masks.

Artist Nigel Cooke at the press preview

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‪‬Magma Group protests Damien Hirst exhibition outside Tate Modern in London wearing clown costumes and holding signs, “Artists against flagrant self-promotion” [AO Newslink]

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Catherine Opie, Faifo (2008). All Photos courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Catherine Opie’s current exhibition, the photographer’s first since joining the roster at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, is on view now at the gallery’s Chelsea location in New York City. Shot from 2007-2009, High School Football, consists of large-scale portraits and landscape shots of playing fields. Through the American ritual of football, the identities of young athletes are displayed intimately, both individually and as teams.

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