The Vitruvian Man (c. 1487) is a study of the proportions of the human body inscribed within the absolute forms of a circle and a square, using metalpoint, pen and ink, with touches of watercolour on paper. One of Leonardo Da Vinci’s best-known works, the drawing is stored in the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia in Italy, and only rarely exhibited due to its fragility as a work on paper.
Influenced by the theories of Roman architect Vitruvius in his treaty “De Architectura†(1st century BC), Da Vinci drew a male figure with his hands and feet touching the perimeter of a circle, his navel at its precise center. Another position is superimposed with his feet standing on the base of a square while his arms extend outwards, the area directly below the navel as the center of the square, per Da Vinci’s own findings.
From 1st March to 25th May 2024, Skarstedt’s London Gallery presents a solo exhibition featuring the work of American artist Jeff Koons. The show includes five mural-sized paintings crafted between 2001 and 2013 drawn from Koons’ series: Easyfun-Ethereal, Antiquity, and Popeye. (more…)
At Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles, “Live(s) on Air” is on from February 24 to May 4, 2024, featuring new works by Tomás Saraceno. This exhibit explores the theme of eco-social interdependence with a collection that includes sculpture, works on paper, and film. It aims to engage viewers in thinking about the impact of humans on the environment and paths toward coexistence on Earth.(more…)
AO was on the ground at the fifth edition of Frieze Los Angeles, held from February 29th to March 3rd, 2024, at Santa Monica Airport, which brought together over 95 galleries exhibiting contemporary art from various regions, showcasing the city’s role in the global art landscape. (more…)
AO is on-site at Perrotin, which inaugurated its new Los Angeles gallery with an exhibition featuring Japanese artist Izumi Kato, running from February 28 to March 23, 2024. Kato’s work, known for incorporating elements of both ancient traditions and modern themes, aligns with Los Angeles’s landscape, which includes both natural and urban environments. The artist’s figures, created in his Tokyo studio, are displayed in a setting that reflects the coexistence of contrasting elements, a theme prevalent in Kato’s art.
Sophie Kitching, Nocturne, 3A Gallery, all photos by Migle Staniskyte
For her latest exhibition on view at 3A Gallery, Sophie Kitching presents new paintings from her Nocturne series, a shadowy and dreamy companion to her Invisible Green series, started in 2019. Both the Nocturnes and the Invisible Green paintings incorporate images of bright flowers and leaves as their main subject matter, but the former is painted onto a background made of black ink mixed with Payne’s gray whereas the latter is on a white canvas. The contrast of both and indeed the title itself—Nocturne—alludes to the opposites representing night and day versions of one another, but moreover they tell a subtle tale of light versus shadow and express entirely different temperaments and moods.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa (2005). Photography by Aleph Molinari for Art Observed.
Driving down the interminable Highway 90, one eventually hits upon Marfa, a remote West Texas town that materializes out of the vast expanse of desert landscape, flanked by distant red earth mountains and mesas on either side. The only harbinger of the town’s existence is the iconic—and no longer sarcastic—Prada Marfa store, an installation built by Elmgreen & Dragset some forty minutes outside of town. (more…)
Third floor of the Gallery Building, 57th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenue, in a sinuous corridor, a discreet sign on one of the doors: SPACETIME. The faint lighting inside sets the tone.
An array of artworks is on view: floating sculptures, abstract paintings, a black suitcase facing a plasticine ball, a tree adorned with paper disks, large prints, small models including detergent caps and yogurt lids, a shoebox on a shelf, flying boomerangs, and a Japanese scroll greet the viewer in the first two rooms. The gallery is intimate, and the experience is total. Gabriel Orozco’s ongoing project is a secret which spreads from word of mouth to fortunate visitors and passersby. The show encapsulates 30 years of work masterfully staged in these tight quarters.
Giorgio Griffa, Dittico lieve odulaato (1996), via Casey Kaplan
On view at Casey Kaplan this month in New York, the gallery has unified a series of works created by the Italian artist Giorgio Griffa, creating a near-past retrospective that explores the artist’s work over the last 20 years throguh a selection of seven paintings. This exhibition marks the fifth iteration in a series of exhibitions focusing on the artist’s practice by decade, continuing a conceptual exercise that has offered concise but attentive looks at his work over the course of his career. (more…)
Marking his first solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, artist Matias Faldbakken brings together a series of installations that unify drawings from 2017 to 2021 alongside a series of various groups of lacquered bricks, some locally sourced, others originating from Norway. The artist, who has often explored notions of antagonism and conflict, charging his works with a sort of disruptive, confrontational energy, here turns that notion towards the act of drawing itself. (more…)
Chris Martin, Gold Teeth for Lance De Los Reyes (2021), via Anton Kern
On view this month at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, artist Chris Martin presents a body of new works that continue the artist’s luminous, colorful approach towards the painted canvas, and the continued relationships of scale that flow through so many of the artist’s works. On view on the first floor of the gallery space, a series of large-scale canvases and a smaller painting made in tribute to the late Lance De Los Reyes, present night skies, washes of color and surreal moments of explosive energy in a set of explorations of energy and space.
Chris Martin, Seven Pointed Star (2018-2020), via Anton Kern
Images and depictions of the cosmos are a uniting thread among all of the paintings: inky night skies, planets, constellations, stars, and moons, continung a relationship between deep space and the landscapes in the near field. The artist, who has long drawn inspiration from time spent in the Catskills, where he would follow patterns and movements in the land and its wildlife, here takes those same iconographies and applies them towards unique expressions of space.
Chris Martin, Untitled (2019-2021), via Anton Kern
The influence is clear in all of these new works, a number of which were painted in his Catskills studio. The five paintings in the gallery’s back atrium are all atmospheric skyscapes—some seeming to directly depict the constellations and night sky of the open woods and fields. It is not only nature found in these works, but the influence of Brooklyn, music, and pop culture are also evident—in Telescope Sphinx in Outer Space, for example, Martin’s painted galaxy is populated by collaged images of Greta Garbo as the Sphinx, sailors, mushrooms, frogs, birds, musicians, and pot leaves—among others—creating humor and play in the cosmic heavens.
Chris Martin, Telescope Sphinx in Outer Space (2019-2021), via Anton Kern
Martin’s work has long negotiated this peculiar space between the spiritual, the natural, and the pop cultural ether that seems to hold and envelope so much of his approach towards the image. Rather than place these notions in opposition, his pieces here present a fusion of all inputs, a harmony of inspiration that seems to place the distant vistas of outer space, the internal reveries of solitude, and everything between, on equal footing.
Robert Gober, Waterfall (2105-2016), via Matthew Marks
This month in New York, Robert Gober makes his return to Matthew Marks Gallery, bringing forth new drawings and sculptures made from a wide variety of materials including wood, resin, acrylic paint, cotton fabric and running water, all the works in the exhibition were made in Gober’s New York studio over the past five years. A continuation of Gober’s expressive and illusory body of work exploring politics of the body, memory and time, his most recent show presents a series of new constructions running along similar conceptual avenues.
Robert Gober, Waterfall (detail) (2105-2016), via Matthew Marks (more…)
Chris Daze Ellis, Is This Seat Taken? (2020), via PPOW
On view this month in New York, P·P·O·W has compiled a body of new works by Christopher “Daze†Ellis, the longtime graffiti writer and painter who came up among a new generation of taggers who began their work during the late 1970’s, and who would be among those who earned early recognition by the New York gallery scene during the 1980’s. Combining a selection of significant works from the 1980s and early 1990s with a series of new paintings and sculptures, Give It All You Got chronicles a lifelong dedication to portraying the lifeforce of New York City and commemorating those who were a part of what it once was. (more…)
Yves Scherer, Le Cerisier (2021), via Eva Presenhuber
On view this month at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s New York outpost artists Yves Scherer and Louisa Gagliardi present separate bodies of work unified by the gallery space, creating a subtle and enigmatic discourse on reality, perception and culture. Across a set of sculptures and paintings, the show is a striking meditation on the two artist’s work, and the unexpected but compelling linkages between them.
Paul Chan, A drawing as a recording of an insurrection (Installation View)
In 2021, a mob of protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol, creating a wealth of now enduring images of a country in the midst of political and cultural strife. The images, something of a modern media collage, were at times surreal and unsettling, at others comical and bizarre, underscoring the United States’s modern crossroads of political and social identification. These images became the inspiration for artist Paul Chan, whose work A drawing as a recording of an insurrection, a massive double-sided illustration interpreting the day’s events, is on view now at Greene Naftali.
Michael A. Robinson, all images by Elisa Etrari for Art Observed
As The Armory Show returns to the Piers on the West Side of Manhattan, so too comes the annual opening of the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, the adventurous, curator-driven program that takes up space at a pop-up location for a week of compelling and unique exhibitions and projects. (more…)
Bianca Beck at Rachel Uffner, all images via Art Observed
Kicking off the 11th year of operation, Independent NY has once again touched down at Spring Studios in Tribeca, once again opening the doors on its take on the presentation of an art fair. Smaller in scale and more focused in terms of its gallery selections, the fair’s presentation feels more like a presentation of a series of small gallery shows run side-by-side, with ample space and a mellow browsing experience that draws strength from the fair’s invite-only exhibitor structure and immense glass windows, underscoring its reputation as a boutique event with impressive draw.
Austin Lee at Jeffrey Deitch, all images via Art Observed
Considered among New York’s premier art fairs, and a leading cultural destination for discovering and collecting the world’s most important 20th- and 21st-century art, The Armory Show has long figured at the forefront of the city’s annual spring offerings for art exhibitions and shows.  With its first day of sales in the bag, the fair is once again showing why its impact and stature cannot be ignored. (more…)
Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain (Count Down – 22) (2000), via Paula Cooper
Exploring divergent concepts and bodies of work in exchange over the course of a show currently on view at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, photographers Sophie Calle, Bruce Conner and Paul Pfeiffer have gathered together under the title “Documents & Recitations.â€Â The show, which features a range of different images and works from each artist’s oeuvre, explores the format of the series to construct new narratives, and engage notions of individual memory and collective perception as translated through the medium of photography. (more…)
With the Venice Biennale recently closing, only a few exhibitions remain on view in the city. Fortunately, for those who choose to visit this month, there is an exhibition at ALMA ZEVI featuring works by Heidi Bucher. Entitled Sublime Geometry, the show offers moments for discovery just as Venice harbors a wintry magic: in the quiet, crepuscular afternoon hours you arrive to this tucked away gallery space to find walls glowing with mother of pearl pigment.
Born in the Swiss town of Winterthur, Bucher studied textile design under Max Bill at the School of Applied Art in Zurich where she made silk collages that are enchanting for their varying degrees of precision and inexactitude. One work hangs in a corner of the gallery and invites closer inspection; illuminated from certain angles, it gives off a subtle luster redolent of a Vija CelminsNight Sky.
Closing its doors this evening, the week of sales at Art Basel Miami Beach has kicked off, capping off a strong week for galleries in South Florida, and a strong opportunity to close out the year with a flourish. Commanding a roster of over 200 galleries from around the world, the marquee event of the fall market season in the U.S., and one of the biggest social events of the art world calendar has gotten underway, with thousands flocking to the sun and sand of the Florida metropolis. (more…)
Gabriel Orozco at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2024
Izumi Kato at Perrotin
