Sturtevant. Photo by Loren Muzzey. All images courtesy the artist and Moderna Museet unless otherwise noted.

For half a century, Sturtevant has built her practice on the citation of other artists’ works. Challenging authorship through acts of appropriation long before it was made popular by the likes of Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Sturtevant made her artistic debut in 1965, when she presented a roomful of Warhol silkscreen flowers at a gallery mere months after the originals had been created. Although largely overlooked until recent years, Sturtevant won a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Biennale. Her latest exhibition, Image over Image, opened March 17th at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Showcasing 30 works, 4 of which are the artist’s “originals,” the exhibition fosters a sort of wall label guessing-game. As visitors travel from room to room they are confronted with familiar works from modernist art history—a Jasper Johns here, a Duchamp there. Among other artists cited in this exhibition are Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres, John Waters, and Paul McCarthy.

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David Shrigley, How are you feeling (2012). Photos on site for Art Observed by Douglas Cloninger and Samuel Sveen.

Installed April 5th, 2012, the Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley‘s dry, absurdist sense of tragi-comedy is now on display as the third “Friends of the Highline” billboard. The 25 by 75 ft billboard is located at 18th Street and 10th Avenue in the Chelsea area of Manhattan and had previously featured work by Anne Collier and John Baldessari. Known for emploring a childish aesthetic and comic wit to navigate the tense world we create for ourselves, Shrigley’s new billboard poses the question, “How are you feeling?” and provides us with an uncommon but honest response. The work speaks largely to contemporary culture and the internal pressures that attempting to “keep up with the Jones” can create. The bubbles read, “HOW ARE YOU FEELING?” “I’M FEELING VERY UNSTABLE AND INSECURE. I ALSO FEEL VERY WORRIED AND ANXIOUS ABOUT EVERYTHING.” “I ALSO FEEL TRAPPED AND I FEEL THAT I AM MUCH TOO FAT AND THAT PEOPLE ARE LAUGHING AT ME. I FEEL VERY FRUSTRATED AND DEPRESSED. I FEEL THAT I AM UNABLE TO MEET THE DEMANDS THAT HAVE BEEN MADE OF ME. I AM IN A BIT OF A RUT CREATIVELY AS WELL.”

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

Damien Hirst‘s first official retrospective is on now at the Tate Modern in London. The retrospective spans two decades of the artist’s notoriously grand-scale artwork, featuring some 70 pieces. Often dealing with themes of life and death, Hirst’s works are known for their high prices and marketability. The show includes his spot paintings, pharmaceutical cabinets and vitrines, a diamond covered skull, as well as several large preserved animals and a room full of live butterflies.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)

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Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (1996)

Passage Dangereux, on view now at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, is a centennial celebration of the late Louise Bourgeois, showcasing work from the last 15 years of her life. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Bourgeois’ work evades stylistic categorization, toeing the line between figuration and abstraction in a range of artistic genres, media, and modes of display. The Kunsthalle honors this unique artist on the advent of what would be her 100th birthday, in a diverse show of sculpture, installation, and print, several of which have never before been seen in Germany, to confront existential and deeply autobiographical themes.

Louise Bourgeois, Maman (1999)

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‪‬George Condo confirmed as artist of Kanye West’s new single ‘Theraflu,’ the image tweeted Wednesday night; it is Condo’s second work for West [AO Newslink]

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Sketch Restaurant, London. All photos on site for Art Observed by Ryann Donnelly.

In celebration of their 10th anniversary, London’s Sketch restaurant in Mayfair unveiled a new installation from Turner prize winning British multi-media artist Martin Creed on March 1st, 2012. Creed’s installation is comprised of three main components: opulent marble tiling, large-scale murals, and an assemblage of mix-matched furnishings and tableware, each piece as functional as it is aesthetically compelling and intricate.

Martin Creed, Sketch Installation View (2012)

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Cy Twombly, The Artist’s Shoes (2002)

On view at Palais des Beaux-Arts is Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-2010, featuring a series of 100 photographs selected by Twombly before his death in 2011. Known for his paintings that subtly changed the course of contemporary art, Twombly had been a productive photographer since his student days. However, it wasn’t until late in his career that photographs were exhibited to the public. Taken with an instant Polaroid camera, Twombly’s photographs are consistently out of focus, concentrating on the ethereality in mundane objects such as a pair of slippers, a lemon, a can of paintbrushes.

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‪‬Bravo releases trailer for ‘Gallery Girls’ and other upcoming shows, following “seven young women who dream of living a chic and fashionable existence in New York City… all share a passion for art, but are divided amongst their Manhattan and Brooklyn lifestyles with vastly different attitudes and tastes towards fashion, art and men.” [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Rirkrit Tiravanija to host 12 hour soup banquet, ‘Soup/No Soup’ within Grand Palais in Paris as prelude to La Triennale 2012, noon to midnight tomorrow, April 7 [AO Newslink]

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Hennessy Youngman and Maurizio Cattelan on participating artist’s pop-up red carpet. All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer and Douglas Cloninger.

YouTube art-theory phenom Jayson Musson A.K.A. Hennessy Youngman‘s show Itsa Small Small World opened Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at the new Chelsea gallery of Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni, Family Business. Originally approached to offer a lecture (Youngman has been touring the country following his sudden rise to fame due to 2011’s “Art Thoughtz” web series), the fitted hat and medallion-wearing, gun-toting Penn MFA graduate instead decided to offer the space to his affectionately addressed “Internet” following. In an intensely saturated salon style hanging—with works crammed atop more works—over 300 artists submitted to the 150 sq ft window-front space, as well as various performances outside.

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‪‬Christie’s to auction Jeff Koons’ ‘Baroque Egg with Bow (Blue/Turqoise)’ at Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction in London on June 27, the 2-meter tall sculpture, one of five in multi-colored ‘Celebration’ series, expected to go for £2.5–3.5 million [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sotheby’s to auction ‘Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror’ by Francis Bacon, estimated at possible $40 million at the contemporary-art evening sale in New York on May 9 [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Ai Weiwei ordered to shut down 24-hour live stream of his Beijing studio, though he told Radio 4’s World at One that he “won’t be shut down” [AO Newslink]

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Hernan Bas, A Satanist on a Tuesday (or, The Key Master) (2012)

Detroit-based artist Hernan Bas’ new show Occult Contemporary is on now at Lehmann Maupin, the exhibition consisting of Bas’ most recent body of work: a group of paintings in various sizes depicting dark, fairytale-like scenes. The name of the show is a reference to “Adult Contemporary,” a term used to describe a category of popular music. The subject of the show itself, as reflected in the title, is inspired by the appearance of the occult in all forms of popular media, including those geared towards children and young adults. Bas displays a strong fascination with the supernatural, his paintings loaded with whimsical imagery.

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Eva Hesse, No title (1960). All images © The Estate of Eva Hesse unless otherwise noted.

Eva Hesse: Spectres and Studiowork at Kukje Gallery in Seoul combines two recent critically acclaimed exhibitions exploring German-born, Yale-educated artist Eva Hesse’s early paintings and mature studio practice. Curated by Barry Rosen, Director of the Estate of Eva Hesse and Briony Fer and E. Luanne McKinnon, two acclaimed Hesse scholars, this unique pairing allows visitors an intimate view into the development of the influential artist’s career.

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‪‬Google Art Project launches site expansion, now including 151 institutions from 40 countries, with over 32,000 works digitally archived online for global virtual viewing [AO Newslink]

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‪‬New Museum-based Rhizome to hold third “Seven on Seven” conference, pairing artists with “technologists” in one-day one-on-one brainstorming sessions, the results of which to be unveiled at Saturday, April 14, at the New Museum [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sotheby’s auctions record-breaking $26.7 million 900-year-old calligraphy brush ceramic washing bowl, the high estimate more than doubled by eight bidders [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Tracey Emin unveils British Airways A319 Air Bus Olympic-inspired ‘Dove’ plane artwork by Emin’s mentoree Pascal Anson [AO Newslink]

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Installation view of Heart to Hand. All photos on site for Art Observed by Douglas Cloninger.

Located in the former Deitch Projects building at 18 Wooster St., Swiss Institute‘s current set of exhibitions opened with a line out the door on March 7, running through April 15. Three shows are on view: Nicholas Party’s Still life, Stones and Elephants, Pati Hertling’s curatory project Heart to Hand, featuring work by Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Adam Pendleton and brothers and collaborators Oscar Tuazon and Elias Hansen, and downstairs Jimmie Durham’s Marquette for a Museum of Switzerland. Split between the several artists, the show begins with a colorful entrance, a large open main space split in two—half the floor raised, half reappropriated as sculpture—and a basement of semi-faux artifacts.

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Artist Elias Hansen at the opening

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‪‬Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani, head of Qatar Museum Authority, profiled in the Economist, works to better Doha, Qatar, with Museum of Islamic Art and record-price acquisitions “Art—even controversial art—can unlock communication between diverse nations, peoples and histories.” [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sotheby’s contemporary Chinese art auction sold several works above estimated prices in Hong Kong on Monday, top sale was Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘Bloodline: Big Family No. 2’ for US$6.7 million, other sales including works by Liu Wei, Wang Guangyi, Jia Aili [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Long Island dealer Glafira Rosales and companion Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz involved in FBI investigations regarding authenticity of several paintings by artists including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Jean-Michel Basquiat [AO Newslink]

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‪‬British tourist Andy Fields may have bought a 1930s signed sketch of American actor Rudy Vallee by a juvenile bed-ridden Andy Warhol for $5 from an unidentified man in Las Vegas who claimed his aunt once babysat the artist, value estimated at £1.3 million if authenticated [AO Newslink]

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