A.R. Penck, Elektrischer Stuhl (1960), all photos via Osman Can Yerebakan

Climbing up the winding staircase of Michael Werner Gallery’s Upper East Side townhouse and entering the exhibition space, one is immediately faced with Elektrischer Stuhl (Electric Chair), a painting of a man being executed before a group of mourners.  The work, by Neo-Expressionist painter A.R. Penck, perhaps best embodies the artist’s combination of abrasive political gesture with his particular sense of aesthetic operation.  Early Works, on view at the gallery through September 3rd, outlines the body of Penck’s work in Dresden in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the influential artist suffered under the harsh social and political climate prevailing in East Germany.  It was during this period that the artist was the subject of an embargo by the government on his works, ultimately leading him to flee his hometown for Cologne, where he received a marked degree of critical and commercial acclaim.

A.R. Penck, Standart-Modell/CCCP-Studie (1972-73) (more…)

Researchers in Antwerp have identified a strange white marking on the surface of Edvard Munch’s The Scream as candle wax, disproving previous reports that the mark was a bird dropping resulting from the artist’s frequent practice of painting outside.  “Munch employed a cardboard substrate to paint the Scream, a material that is particularly fragile and hygroscopic and would have suffered severe damage when left outdoors,” a spokesperson said. (more…)

A coalition of Israeli artists, museum directors and art educators have filed suit against the Israeli government, the Art Newspaper reports, accusing the state of intimidating institutions and instituting policies the lawsuit calls a “death blow to culture institutions that rely heavily on public funding.” (more…)

The Guardian has a peculiar story on Facebook’s censorship of a drawing by Hans Holbein this week.  The work, a study of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s right hand, was pulled from the site after claims that it violated the site’s community standards, leading to renewed criticisms of the site’s stance toward great works of art. (more…)

The Art Newspaper reports on a major theft from the studio of Anselm Kiefer, a thieves broke through wire cages and stole a ten-ton lead sculpture valued at €1.3 million, as well as several tons of marble.  Two women were apprehended after the theft, but released on a lack of evidence in their connection to the burglary.   (more…)

The Bass Museum in Miami Beach has postponed its reopening until next year, following a series of delays in construction.  “Our primary concern is ensuring that we conduct a careful and courteous renovation to preserve this iconic piece of Miami Beach history,” says executive director and chief curator Silvia Karman Cubiñá. “The process of renovating historic landmarks differs greatly from that of modern structures, and we have needed to extend our construction deadline to accommodate these intricacies.” (more…)

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 1B Bild mit rotem Kreuz (Merzpicture 1 B Picture with Red Cross) (1919), via Hauser and Wirth

Joining in the celebration of the Dada Movement’s 100th birthday this year in Zürich, Hauser and Wirth gallery has selected a premier group of works by on of the style’s prominent masters, bringing together works by Kurt Schwitters, and simultaneously placing them in conversation with pieces by Hans Arp and Joan Miró.  Examining the personal relationships and shared formal interests over the course of each artist’s work in the first half of the 20th Century, the exhibition is a fascinating blend of historical background and visual tour-de-force, bringing together a rare series of works through a less frequently explored series of connections.

Hans Arp, Geometrische Collage (Collage géometrique) (1918), via Hauser and Wirth

(more…)

Nancy Spector, the Brooklyn Museum’s Chief Curator, is profiled in New York Magazine this week, as she outlines her weekly routine, her attempts to gallery-hop each week, and the challenges of non-profit work.  “There’s all the essential work that we do to create our central product, and there’s all of the scholarship and thinking and educational components that are really critical to what we do, and then there’s the fact that you have to raise money for everything — absolutely everything. So that is just a parallel track that’s always there.” (more…)

The Tate was reportedly paid only of £350,000 a year for its partnership with British Petroleum, early figures released by the museum show.  “The company tried to buy public support by quadrupling the amount of money they gave the Tate,” says Emma Hughes of activist group Platform.  “As BP fought over compensation for Gulf of Mexico communities in the US courts they were throwing money at the Tate in an attempt to de-toxify their brand.” (more…)

NADA Miami Beach will return to the Deauville this December, after one year at the Fontainebleau further south on Collins Ave.  The move puts considerable distance between the main Art Basel event and NADA’s event.  The organization did not comment on the move. (more…)

Larry Gagosian is hosting a fundraising event for Hilary Clinton, the first time that the dealer has actively been involved in political campaigning, Art News reports.  Artists including Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, and Barbara Kruger have donated works for auction to benefit Clinton’s campaign. (more…)

Danny Lyon, Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville, 1966 (1966), via Whitney Museum of American Art

Exhibited at a critical moment of heightened tensions regarding civil liberties in America, Danny Lyon’s retrospective exhibition transforms the Whitney’s fifth floor into a space for cultural reflection.  Set against a backdrop that confronts pertinent issues regarding violence, incarceration, and inequality, Lyon’s work chronicles a complex photographic history of the racial, social, and political issues that are currently challenging the United States anew in the 21st Century.  The serious tone of his work is met with the intimacy in which he engages with his subjects, offering a sense of hope while putting a deeply human face on subjects who are marginalized and oppressed. (more…)

An article in the New York Times this week questions the continued struggles of the Old Masters market, and the collector tastes that have led to a decline in buyer interest.  “We have no intention of selling old masters pictures or 18th-, 19th-century pictures, because these markets are now so small and dwindling,” says Phillips head Edward Dolman. “The new client base at the auction houses — and the collecting tastes of those clients — have moved away from this veneration of the past.” (more…)

Abraham Entertaining the Angels, a rarely exhibited work by Rembrandt, is set to go on view at The Frick in May of 2017.  “The show explores how, as an artist, you represent a confrontation between the earthly and the divine, the immaterial and material,” says Frick curatorial fellow Joanna Sheers Seidenstein. (more…)

The renowned art collection of Russian industrialist Sergei Shchukin is set to leave the State Hermitage for the first time in a century, showing at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.  The selection of 130 pieces traveling to Paris is considered one of the finest single collections in the world.   (more…)

Jessica Diamond, No Money Down (1986/2016), via Art Observed

Taking the currently fraught political climate in the U.S. as a starting point for a deeper reflection on national and local history, James Fuentes’s summer group show offers a fitting cultural parallel in the early years of the 1980’s in New York City.  Charting the era’s conservative economic and foreign policies, the exhibition, curated by Andrew J. Greene & James Michael Shaeffer, brings together works by Nayland Blake, Jessica Diamond, Peter Halley and Robert Morris executed between 1982 and 1984.  Recording and critiquing a range of social and economic crises during the era, the show is a subtly resonant look at the deeper histories of cultural critique in the city, and the role artists have played in this process.

Peter Halley, Yellow Cell with Conduit (1982), via Art Observed

(more…)

The 2020 edition of Manifesta will be held in Marseille, the organization announced this week.  “Manifesta is researching how cities are coping with these encounters that influence our daily lives, and the way we live now and in the near future,” says Hedwig Fijen, director of Manifesta.  “The contradictions in the urban context of Marseille, its history, its position in the southern periphery of Europe, and its close connection in thematic perspective with Manifesta 12 in the City of Palermo, makes it an excellent choice for a Manifesta edition in 2020.” (more…)

The New Museum has announced the first major museum exhibition of the work of Raymond Pettibon, taking up three floors at the museum and spanning his full career.  The show opens on February 8th, 2017, and will run into the spring. (more…)

The Tate Britain is currently showing an exhibition of paintings and photography, paired together using an Artificial Intelligence program that evaluates works based on algorithmic patterns and logic systems, and assembles galleries based on that information.  “The team have created and trained a ‘brain’ to a point where it is simulating certain human attributes and unleashed it online – and it is creating a gallery,” says Tony Guillan, the producer of the IK prize.  “Without knowing it, it has created subjective meaning. By asking the question ‘how do computers work and think?’ you ask the exact same question of humans.” (more…)

Lisa Cooley is closing her Lower East Side gallery after eight years.  “Although this chapter is ending, another one is right around the corner—more sustainable, more rewarding, and more interesting. In my mind, this change will continue and extend the direction of the recent gallery program,” Cooley said in a statement.  “Stay tuned. I hope to show that growth can be about ideas, not just about scale, and I look forward to seeing everyone in person soon.” (more…)

Ed Ruscha is the subject of a short documentary created by MoCA TV and narrated by Owen Wilson, exploring the artist’s body of work and ongoing engagement with Los Angeles, in conversation with commentary from a group of the artist’s contemporaries.  “He looks out directly, without any beauty or mystery, although the paintings are great to look at,” artist Ed Moses says. (more…)

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (code poem) (2016), via Public Art Fund

The Public Art Fund’s The Language of Things, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, takes on a challenging prompt this summer, seeking to communicate with the public through works that utilize language and linguistic themes in one of the most congested and sonically dense spaces in the city, just outside of City Hall downtown.  Benjamin’s assertion that “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake in language” further deepens this show’s proposed dialogue, looking at complexities of language as a utilitarian, communicative tool, to emphasize Benjamin’s conclusion that “it is in the nature of each one to to communicate its mental contents.” (more…)

Cao Fei, Whose Utopia (2006), courtesy MoMA PS1

Currently on view at MoMA PS1, Cao Fei presents her first ever solo museum exhibition in the United States.  The artist’s practice, while rooted in video, performance and photography, takes on a sort of ever-shifting, fluid mode of inquiry into the modes of reality and fantasy in the 21st Century, underscoring human desire’s inextricable links with its economic and material bounds.  Presented here, the show’s slowly unfolding range of interests, from bizarre diorama work to her several year engagement with Second Life, to a series of intuitive and empathetic portraits of modern subcultures, traces the Chinese artist’s ability to navigate multiple modes of understanding and existence in the face of an increasingly mechanized modernity.

Cao Fei, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007-2011), Courtesy MoMA PS1

(more…)

Quick Light (Installation View), all images courtesy Serpentine Gallery

Quick Light, an exhibition of recent paintings by American artist Alex Katz has taken over the Serpentine Galleries in London this summer, showcasing the artist’s expressive range and signature style through September 11th, 2016.  The exhibition centers in particular on Katz’s landscape paintings or “environmental landscapes,” which seek to envelope the viewer in a single encounter with the sublime.  Large-scale canvasses, often depicting human and natural forms, fill the gallery space, a particularly well-selected body of work that addresses both the artist’s long history and the unique grounds of the Serpentine itself (more…)