Jeff Koons (Installation View), via Art Observed

Opening its new exhibition space in London during Frieze Week, Almine Rech has tapped Jeff Koons for a series of new pieces to christen the space.  The show, which draws heavily on Koons’s recent work in his Gazing Ball series, shown alongside a small selection of polished steel Ballerina sculptures, marks an interesting continuation of the series. (more…)

Mayor Gallery in London has filed a lawsuit against the publishers of the Agnes Martin catalogue raisonné, and the committee responsible for authenticating her works, claiming that 13 works left out of the book, and held by its clients, have been rendered worthless.  “When I read the complaint, I failed to see a legal claim. I’d never seen a legal complaint without a claim, until now. I compare it to an opera without music,” says Aaron Richard Golub, the lawyer representing the authentication committee.   (more…)

Galerie Perrotin will open a new space in Tokyo in the Spring of 2017, the gallery announced this week.  The space will be located in the Roppongi neighborhood, on the ground floor of the Piramide Building, and is currently covered by wallpaper designed by French artist Pierre Le-Tan, reimagining works by the gallery’s artists. (more…)

The New York Times has a piece this week on the pervasive presence and threat of dust towards the works in the MoMA galleries, the focus of a new new audio guide work by artist Nina Katchadourian.  “I like coming at the big things by what‘s immediate and observable to me,” the artist says. (more…)

Art Basel has announced the exhibitor list for the 2017 edition of its Hong Kong art fair, bringing a group of 187 galleries to the Hong Kong Convention Center.   (more…)

Paula Cooper is featured in the New York Times this week, as the paper spotlights her impact on the New York art world, and her pioneering approach to running a gallery, including her opening of the first gallery south of Houston during the 1970’s.  “I went because that’s where the artists were,” she says. (more…)

William Eggleston is profiled in the New York Times this month, as the artist reflects back on his work and his studious sense of the photographic image.  “I know they’re there, the angles and compositions,” Eggleston says. “Every little minute thing works with every other one there. All of these images are composed. They’re little paintings to me.” (more…)

Steve Cohen’s art collecting gets a spotlight in Fortune this week, as the Hedge Fund Manager shares his vision and strategies on acquiring works.  “I am purely from the gut,” he says. “And I know right away. If it stays in my brain—let’s say I go see a picture, if I keep thinking about it, I know it’s something I like. If I forget about it, then I know, couldn’t care less.” (more…)

The New York Times has a profile on Mark Leckey this week, as the artist opens his exhibition at MoMA PS1, and considers his place in the modern art world.  “Art is changing — I don’t know if what I’m doing feels like it belongs to an older era, one older white man having a show,” he says. “The idea of celebrated artists is being rightly questioned. So to do a show like this, though it comes with all this excitement and energy, at the same time, it might already be — not archaic — but belong to the past.” (more…)

The Wall Street Journal spotlights the collaboration between architect Joe Weishaar and sculptor Sabin Howard to create a WWI Memorial in Washington, D.C., an effort that will create one of the largest bronze sculptures in the world.  “When I got to his website, I just knew he was the one I wanted to work with,” Mr. Weishaar says of Howard’s work. “There’s a level of craft there that has completely disappeared from American sculpture and drawing schools.” (more…)

Ai Weiwei returns to New York this fall in a big way, opening a pair of exhibitions at Mary Boone, as well as a show at Deitch Projects, and another at Lisson Gallery, returning to the city he lived in for much of the 1980’s.  “I wish I had known him in New York in the 1980s when he was here for a whole decade, and it turns out that many of my friends knew him,” Jeffrey Deitch says. (more…)

Dana Schutz, Red (2016), All images via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed

Now through the 29^th of October, the CFA in Berlin hosts an exhibition of new work by Dana Schutz, Waiting for the Barbarians, retaining the artist’s prior interest and investment in absurdist and dark humor and pushing it onto new ground.  Where earlier work depicted often surreal or unlikely scenarios, Schutz’s new series is far more concerned with depicting the absurdity of current political and social realities. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the CFA. (more…)

Julie Mehretu, Conjured Parts (head), Aleppo (2016), via Melis Sonmezler for Art Observed

Pushing her particular brand of gestural and highly-nuanced awareness of the picture plane, artist Julie Mehretu’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman in New York is a powerful entry in the artist’s ongoing exploration of abstraction.  Realizing intricate networks of marks, twisting and turning around each other to create swarms and clusters of sinewy, undulating forms, Mehretu’s practice is an ever-evolving study of process in its own right.  Yet her new pieces, showing through the end of the month, present a new sense of both technical urgency and depth of the visual field, combining to create a series of striking new works. (more…)

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Simon Denny, Blockchain Future States (Installation  View), all images via Petzel Gallery

Simon Denny’s latest exhibition at Petzel Gallery is an ambitious investigation into the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology, delving into the utopian ideals and potential opportunities that blockchain poses, taking on this treatment through an examination of three forerunners of the technology and their visions for the future.

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Matthew Barney, Case BOLUS -A value (sweetloaf)/ O value (sweetloaf), – JIM BLIND (andro.) -rec. majora -rec. minora (1989-91), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

Reflecting back on his relentlessly shape-shifting, enigmatic career and ever-evolving material practice, Gladstone Gallery has re-staged Matthew Barney’s Facility of DECLNE, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, shown for the first time in 1991.  While the iconic Cremaster Cycle stands as Barney’s emblematic body of works, the show offers an intuitive reflection on the artist’s initial works, presenting the New York art world a with rare opportunity to trace his initial works leading up to the monumental series, and to explore the threads that would later weave and wind their way through the complex and multi-faceted narrative of the film series, particularly his interest in systems of visual, subliminal and rhetorical structure and their orchestration both as performative operations and constructed series of images. (more…)

Carroll Dunham, Pink Mound with Eruption (5/18/93, 5/19/93) (1993), via Art Observed

On view throughout Gladstone Gallery’s 64th Street exhibition space, Carroll Dunham’s Drawings track the early stages of the artist’s evolution and interests, introducing concepts that would continue to inform and reshape his practice over the coming years.  Displaying a body of works from 1982 to 1996, the works on view employ a variety of materials, including wood, papyrus, wax crayon and charcoal.  Though lesser known, Dunham’s early drawings speak to his originality and desire to explore a single medium to its full potential. (more…)

Guy Wildenstein’s fate has been left to a tribunal following arguments in his tax evasion case, the NYT reports.  The judges will spend up to three months considering the case before reaching their decision, which could include jail time and a 250 million euro fine for alleged deceptions in how the works were held.  “The bank knows only what the family told them,” says Alexandre Bronstein, a laywer pushing a criminal case over several of the works seized from the Wildenstein collection.   (more…)

Phillips’s Robert Manley announced the auction house’s star lot for its upcoming November Contemporary Evening Sale in New York, a colorful Clyfford Still priced between $12 million and $18 million.  “Formerly in the collection of the artist’s friend and student, the painter Edward Dugmore, the painting has been off the market for decades and has never been to auction,” Manley notes of the work. (more…)

The Frick Collection has announced that Selldorf Architects will helm the museum’s upcoming renovation, returning to plans that had been put on hold after protest over the original expansion blueprints.  “It’s about enhancing the visitor’s experience and making it utterly seamless, so that it doesn’t harm any of the existing experience that people cherish, myself included,” Annabelle Selldorf said. “We’ll do our darndest.” (more…)

Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art is spending $500,000 to restore Wolf Vostell’s concrete encrusted Cadillac sculpture, a piece which has long sat in a yard lot until the museum decided to rehabilitate its blocky frame.   “Restoration and conservation is what we do, but I’d never done a project like this,”says Stephen Murphy, the general manager of Chicago Vintage Motor Carriage, where the car was restored. (more…)

Ai Weiwei is interviewed in the New York Times this week, as the artist prepares to open an exhibition at Deitch Projects, displaying the cast-off garments and shoes of migrant travelers.  “The migrants are there but they’re not there. These clothes are existing, something you can touch,” he says.  “I grew up in a similar condition. I would wear a shoe worn by my brother. It was often too big, but I would wear it. It’s better than no shoes. My father used his ties as a belt because he didn’t have a belt. When he was doing hard labor in the winter, he would open up the tie to wrap on his feet because he had no socks and they were so cold.” (more…)

Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim, via Art Observed

The Guggenheim celebrated the 20th Anniversary of the Hugo Boss Prize this evening, hosting the bi-annual arts award gala last night in its iconic atrium space, and reflecting back on the string of nominees and winners over the past two decades, among them Matthew Barney, Paul Chan, and Lorna Simpson.  This year, Anicka Yi became the latest artist to receive the prestigious honor, receiving the $100,000 prize and an exhibition at the museum this coming spring.  Yi was nominated alongside Tania Bruguera, Mark Leckey, Ralph Lemon, Laura Owens, and Wael Shawky.

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Yoko Ono has opened her first large-scale public installation in the US this week, Skylanding, in Chicago’s Jackson Park.  “Skylanding is a place where the sky and earth meet and create a seed to learn about the past and come together to create a future of peace and harmony, with nature and each other,” Ono says. “Peace among all people and nations begins with peace in our hearts, streets and parks.” (more…)