Ragnar Kjartansson, Me and My Mother (2010), via Art Observed

When The New Museum opened its doors for its spring season last month, curator Massimo Gioni noted subtle threads of comparison in the pieces on view.  Meant to be a concise yet meticulous look into a series of individual works or focuses from a disparate group of artists, the series of exhibitions currently on view play on a series of common threads, incorporating mixes of sound and music, documentary, performance and history from artists Camille Henrot, Hannah Sawtell, David Horvitz, Jeanine Oleson and Roberto Cuoghi, arranged in a way that perhaps makes best sense to address as a singular experience the artists’ works, shared themes, and interests.

Hannah Sawtell, ACCUMULATOR (2014), via Art Observed (more…)

Sterling Ruby, ACTS/SOME RISE SOME REST (2014), via Hauser and Wirth

Hauser and Wirth’s current show of works by Sterling Ruby is something of a grab-bag, incorporating a wide swath of the artist’s current practice in sculpture, assemblage and collage spread across the gallery’s vast 18th Street exhibition space.  The large-scale and commanding physicality of the works is offered ample room for viewers to circle and consider, but Ruby doesn’t’ waste the space on a small set of works either.  Sculptures and hanging works take up almost every square inch of the gallery, arranged in close proximity.  It’s easy to miss one work or another, caught up in the commanding presence of a third nearby.

Sterling Ruby, SUNRISE SUNSET (Installation View), via Hauser and Wirth (more…)

Sophie Calle, Rachel, Monique (2014), all photos by Emily Heinz for Art Observed

Since May 9th until June 25th this year, the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, in conjunction with Paula Cooper Gallery, has been transformed into a gateway that marries the universality of sacred space and the experience of life and death through the singular exploration of a specific life.  Artist Sophie Calle is known for her deeply emotional work and propensity for crossing the boundaries of personal and social space in a way that is successful in its dramatic and often controversial appeal to the human condition. “Rachel, Monique” may be one of her strongest works in this vein to date.

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Claude Monet, Nymphéas (1906) via Sotheby’s

Following hot on the heels of the events of Art Basel just last week, the London outposts for Christie’s and Sotheby’s will open their doors for a pair of highly touted Impressionst and Modern Art Evening sales, beginning two final weeks of major art auctions before the art world moves into the summer lull.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Grey (1927) via Sotheby’s

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Zhang Wan, Artificial Rock at Art Unlimited photo by Art Observed

As Sunday winds down, the 2014 edition of Art Basel in Switzerland is drawing to a close, concluding another week that saw the small Swiss city at the center of the art world for one dizzying week of sales, projects and installations.  The wealth of collectors, dealers and curators saw dealers bringing big-ticket works to the table across the board, and the steady stream of sales for blue-chip works and high priced works continued well beyond the VIP days early last week.

Andra Ursuta, Orthodoctrinator at Art Unlimited (more…)

Tim Barber, Relations (Installation View), via Art Observed

In his most recent body of work, Tim Barber captures everyday moments and splits them open to reveal the complex interactions within. On display at Capricious 88, Relations invites the viewer to relate to the universality of the seemingly unrelated, yet similarly impactful, images.

Tim Barber, Relations courtesy Capricious (more…)

Thomas Hirschhorn, Flamme Èternelle (Installation View), via Flamme Eternelle Website

“I am interested in the ‘too much’, doing too much, giving too much, putting too much of an effort into something. Wastefulness as a tool or a weapon’ says Thomas Hirschhorn about his practice. The Swiss-born artist’s new exhibition, Flame Èternelle in Palais de Tokyo in Paris is the indisputable proof of this effort of presenting the ‘too much’.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Flamme Èternelle (Installation View), via Palais de Tokyo (more…)

Recently appointed Stedelijk Museum director Beatrix Ruf is interviewed in The Art Newspaper this week, discussing her vision for the museum, her previous work at Kunsthalle Zurich, and what she thinks arts institutions should be focusing on in the 21st Century.  “The big general question for us all is how museums should be made to function,” she says. “We are all looking into the meanings of heritage and the interplay between the caretaking of heritage and how to develop collecting further.” (more…)

Heman Chong, Mrs. Dalloway (2014), via Art Observed

On view at P! in New York is two-person exhibition featuring works by Elaine Lustig Cohen and Heman Chong, in which the artists curate and commission works from each other.  The exhibition emphasizes the concept of holding multiple roles within creative work.  Both Lustig Cohen (b. 1927) and Chong (b. 1977) have worked in a variety of different positions and roles in the art world, including artist, designer, curator, dealer, and writer, and hold a mutual respect for each other’s work. For the exhibition, this respect played out in the gallery as Chong selected works from Lustig Cohen’s body of paintings, while Cohen commissioned Chong to create nine new pieces within his ongoing series of imagined designs for book jackets.

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Jake and Dinos Chapman are looking to their hometown of Hastings for their next show, seeking crowd-funding that would reward donors with artist designed tattoos.   “We will be seeking out the dark underbelly of Hastings, to find its seething evil,” says Jake Chapman, “And then we’re going to tickle it.” He adds it’s “the only way we’re going to get down to Hastings to see our mum and dad”. (more…)

Pu Zhiqiang, the lawyer representing Ai Weiwei in his case to reclaim his visa from the Chinese has been arrested and detained by the government, after attending a meeting commemorating the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.  “The current suppression of rights lawyers is worse than in the 2011 ‘Jasmine’ period” says friend and colleague Teng Biao. (more…)

The city of Paris has named a public square in its 13th Arrondissement after Jean-Michel Basquiat, a fitting choice given the area’s popularity with street artists and street art tourists.  “Basquiat is one of the biggest contemporary artists,” 13th Arrondissemnet mayor Jérôme Coumet says. “He defended the cause of African-Americans in the US, and was also a lover of France. He was the artist who blazed the trail for street art, and art in public space.” (more…)

Andreas Gursky, Alba (1989), C-Print, Diasec, 87 x 108 7/8 x 2 3/8 inches (framed), Copyright: Andreas Gursky / DACS, 2014, Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London

On view at Sprüth Magers London is an exhibition of important early landscapes from German photographer Andreas Gursky, created between the late 1980s and early 1990s. The photos were taken before Gursky began exploring the use of digital photography, and are simple in form and content, often titled after the location where they were taken. The exhibition will continue through June 21st.

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Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, L’Ètrange Cité (Strange City), via Art Observed

In 2010, Christian Boltanski spread piles of clothes reaching to fifty tons around the interior of Grand Palais. Three years before Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer brought in cement and metal along with dust and debris into this patriarchal symbol of French industrial awakening. Richard Serra, Daniel Buren and Anish Kapoor are among the other superstar artists who have marked their signatures in this historical building in response to France Ministry of Culture’s annual Monumenta project, which invites an artist to create a new body of work to be exhibited inside the impressive architecture of Grand Palais. On view through June 22nd is this year’s commission L’Ètrange Cité (Strange City) by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, arguably Russia’s most celebrated names in contemporary art.

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, L’Ètrange Cité (Strange City), via Art Observed (more…)

Lee Bul, Via Negativa II (2012), via Art Observed

On view at Lehmann Maupin in New York is an exhibition of works by South Korean artist Lee Bul, exploring “the intrinsic tension within utopian idealism,” and composed of sculptural works and large-scale installations.  Addressing humanity’s vision of an ideal future, the works focus on formal, architectural, and theoretical concepts, moving away from her former focus on the human form and into a consideration of the larger human environment.

Lee Bul, Untitled sculpture (M5) (2014), via Art Observed

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The Miami Beach Convention Center will undergo a renovation project that will include more than $5 million saved up for art commissions that are to be integrated throughout the site. It is uncertain how the rebuilding will affect Miami Art Basel, as well as other art fairs such as Design Miami. The physically expansive exhibition of Design Miami’s current show “Design At Large” presents more instances of big spaces. “Having a big, dramatic space was a real impetus, because it enables us to show something unexpected,” Design Miami’s executive director Rodman Primack said.

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Many of Vincent van Gogh‘s works have been in Arles, France for around a decade since the artist worked there, but due to absence of exhibition space, no one was able to see them. After a three-year remodeling project, the antiquated Hôtel Léautaud de Donines has been officially transformed into a modernized gallery that will contain and display van Gogh’s treasured works to the public. “There was no space like this in Arles before,” said Maja Hoffmann from the Fondation van Gogh. “We can host van Gogh at anytime now. This is what we really call the permanent home for van Gogh.”

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Ai Weiwei is set to launch a new project in Poland next month, consisting of three pits filled with broken crockery and covered over.  Installed in Brodno Sculpture Park, the hidden crockery are replicas of vases from a previous project made in 2005.  “In reaching out to the history of this precious object, Ai was interested in the fetishisation of certain artefacts and their complex history encapsulated in the colonial logistics of robbery and appropriation,” says park curator Sebastian Cichocki. (more…)

A Wall Street Journal article notes a recent study showing that art stimulates areas of the brain involved in vision, pleasure, memory, recognition and emotions, evidence of how strongly and naturally inclined the brain is towards enjoying art.   (more…)

A Long Island art seller is being sued by a pair of galleries after allegedly losing a $3 million Degas sculpture.  Rose Ramsey Long accompanied a set of works earlier this year to San Francisco, where real estate mogul Luke Brugnara was supposed to purchase them.  However, Long left the works in an empty house as Brugnara directed, and when Brugnara was arrested for fraud in the sale, the Degas sculpture had disappeared.   (more…)

MoMA has announced an upcoming career retrospective for Björk, spanning the artist’s work across a broad expanse of fields including sound, film, visuals, instruments, objects, costumes, and performance.  The show will also feature a brand new music and film experience  made in collaboration with director Andrew Huang and 3-D design leader Autodesk. (more…)

Walton Ford, Windsor, May 1829 (2014), via Art Observed

On view at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York is a series of watercolors by Walton Ford, exploring the iconography of traditional natural history painting, while focusing on encounters between human culture and the natural world, and featuring for the first time words written in the margins from Ford’s imagined perspective of the animal subjects.

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Lisson Gallery announced this morning that it will be building a new, 8,500 square-foot gallery space underneath the Highline on 24th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, bringing the London-based gallery to Manhattan for the first time.  The space will be led by Alex Logsdail. (more…)

Jerry Saltz is in New York Magazine this week analyzing the state of abstract painting in the current market, and the increased popularity of what he deems “diluted” abstract works.  The piece is accompanied by a slideshow of several works, tracing markedly similar trends in the current market.  “The artists themselves are only part of the problem here,” Saltz writes. “Many of them are acting in good faith, making what they want to make and then selling it. But at least some of them are complicit, catering to a new breed of hungry, high-yield risk-averse buyers, eager to be part of a rapidly widening niche industry.” (more…)