Dan Graham, Stage Set for Music no. 2 for Glenn (2018), via Lisson

Artist, writer and curator Dan Graham, a vital force and vision in the development of conceptual art who used the language and grammar of architecture as a way to explore culture, space and perception, has passed away at the age of 79. The artist, whose body of work consistently defied easy classifications, often used architectural pavilions, glass and mirrors to shape and define the experience of space, allowing viewers to move through and into his pieces to experience peculiar constructions and arrangements of spatial relations.  (more…)

Tony Matelli at The Ranch, all images by Art Observed

As Frieze opens up shop for the week on the West Coast, the bevy of satellite fairs and event openings are underway across the city, including the always hotly anticipated Felix LA Art Fair, the brainchild of collector Dean Valentine that spreads works across the halls and rooms of the iconic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. The show allows a unique mixture of intimate exhibitions and adventurous concepts that felt well-suited to the well-heeled patrons of the contemporary art market, both looking for a good piece of work and a unique experience while buying it.

Cynthia Talmadge at 56 Henry

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Chris Burden at Gagosian, all images via Art Observed

With the sun setting over the sprawling expanse of the Californian metropolis, the early hours of the third Frieze Los Angeles Art Fair are in the books, marking a much anticipated return after several years marked by logistical issues and the challenges of the pandemic. Opening this year at a new location on Wilshire Boulevard, the fair has doubled down on its vital engagement with the city, and with its thriving art scene, launching another strong event.   With strong sales reported and an energetic atmosphere across the fair, it would seem that the small-scale and focused approach of the fair had once again seen the fair brand making its case as an arbiter of thoughtful, curated approaches towards the market and its participants. (more…)

Pedro Coronal, Galeria de Arte Mexicano, all images by Anfisa Vrubel for Art Observed

The post-pandemic edition of ZonaMACO, the largest art fair in Latin America, came back this year with a revitalized and vibrant energy. Its location, Mexico City, has become a focal point in the art world and a haven for artists looking for creative possibilities. The Art Week brought together a dynamic assortment of art world insiders—emerging galleries and established cultural institutions, young artists and designers, and the usual cool kids on the scene. Surrounding the fair, the satellite events were bursting with activity, from gallery and museum openings to performances and parties, and the classic lunches at Contramar. (more…)

Carmen Herrera, Untitled (Orange and Black) (1956), final price $1,179,000, via Phillips

Carmen Herrera, the Cuban-born painter who found success late in her career, has passed away at the age of 106. A pioneer and longtime explorer of hard-edged graphical abstraction and minimalist compositions, Herrera was a quiet but consistent voice in the development of 20th Century art, and a formative voice in the language of the postwar avant-garde.  (more…)

Alvaro Barrington, Win or lose/choose (2021), via Blum & Poe

Following several years of uncertainty raised by the Covid-19 Pandemic, the Frieze Art Fair returns to the sprawl of Los Angeles for a third year under the sunny skies of the Golden State. Having capped a pair of sold out editions before the pandemic began, this year’s edition takes up a new location and renewed vigor, emphasizing its role as a major part of the early weeks of the annual fair calendar. (more…)

Caroline Larsen at The Hole NYC, all images by Anfisa Vrubel for Art Observed

Taking over the Centro Citibanamex for another year of exhibitions, the Zona Maco art fair opened this week to packed crowds and enthusiastic response. The fair, which marks its 18th year this year, has continued to grow and evolve since its early years, and this year’s edition was no different, with a strong list of exhibitors that made the excitement of a full edition after several years of challenges posed by Covid-19 all the more palpable. Aisles were packed for much of the early hours of the fair, with gallerists and museum directors, collectors and advisors weaving through each booth.  (more…)

Zhivago Duncan, Shield of Thought (2019 – 2020), via Zhivago Duncan

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (November) (2020), via Gagosian

As winter coasts into the early weeks of February, the art world returns once more to the sprawling Mexico City metropolis for another year of art week, centered around the proceedings at Zona Maco Art Fair, and the surrounding areas. With Mexico City’s stature growing each year as a central hub of the global arts community, the week once again promises a range of impressive shows and openings alongside the thriving sales events at the main fair. (more…)

Pavilions (Installation View), via Lisson

Marking a particularly unique investigation of modern sculptural and installation practice, Lisson Gallery is currently hosting Pavilions at its New York space, presenting a group of artists who engage with various forms and concepts surrounding the use of pavilions, ranging from physically-realized structures to designs conceived as ideas or sketches. Though the works in the exhibition vary in medium and scale, all are centered around the interaction with the viewer, together creating an environment that explores individual memory, identity and experience. (more…)

Bill Lynch, No Title [Bird on Branch and Three Plates] (n.d.), via The Approach

On view now at The Approach in London, the gallery has assembled an exhibition of paintings and drawings, never shown until now, by the late American artist Bill Lynch (1960-2013) united under the title I am a Bird from Heaven’s Garden. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Lynch immersed himself in making drawings and paintings for over three decades, creating lyrical, expressive gestures on salvaged plywood that would mix abstraction and concrete iconographies in striking ways.

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Mary Obering, Works from 1972 – 2003 (Installation View), via Bortolami

This month at Bortolami Gallery, the work of artist Mary Obering takes center stage. Surveying Obering’s prolific output from 1972 to 2003, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s singular approach to Minimalism and geometric abstraction, spanning both floors of the gallery, with the Upstairs dedicated to artworks from the 1970s, a nod to the artist’s SoHo studio in which she took residency in 1971. (more…)

Petra Cortright, YAMAHA CDRW-4260T_vampire erotica archives TYPOGRAPHY MICROSOFT (2021), via Foxy Production

On view this month at Foxy Production, the gallery has assembled a show of new works by the artist Petra Cortright, marking her third solo exhibition with the gallery. Presenting images framed as “distillations” of the imagery that dominates our every day, this  new series of digital paintings uses Angel Wing Clematis, a white narrow-petalled climbing-vine flower—thought to symbolize knowledge and aspiration—as its central motif. (more…)

Rose Wylie, Battle in Heaven (Film Notes) (2008), via Zabludowicz Collection

Currently on view this month at the Zabludowicz Collection, a selection of the institution’s holdings are presented as a look at the progression and evolution of figuration in modern practice. The Stand-Ins brings together 19 artists who deploy autobiographical elements and a cast of imagined characters in the construction of their paintings and narratives, and maps lines of influence across generations, featuring seminal figures alongside important new voices. (more…)

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…)

Matias Faldbakken, Beaten Ink, Upset Brick, Downcast Charcoal (Installation View), via Chantal Crousel

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…)

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.

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.

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.

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.

The show closes February 26th.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
Chris Martin at Anton Kern [Exhibition Site]

Georgia Gardner Gray, Gustav (Tired) (2021), via Sadie Coles

On view this month at Sadie Coles’ Kingly Street location, the gallery has compiled a range of works in both two and three dimensions that deal with the body and space, politics and class, race and identity, all through a range of approaches and executions. Drawing together work by Natalie Ball, Kevin Beasley, Georgia Gardner Gray, Tau Lewis, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Simphiwe Ndzube, Agata SÅ‚owak and Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, the show brings together a range of perspectives that make for an engaging, enervating project.

Yves Laloy, Untitled (1956), via Perrotin

On view this month at two of Galerie Perrotin’s Paris exhibition spaces, artist Yves Laloy’s work gets an expansive and exploratory review, marking the first major exhibition since a 2004 retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. Unifying a series of private loans for the show, the exhibition marks an unprecendented look at the architect-turned-painter and his kinetic, colorful painterly constructions. (more…)

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…)

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.

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.

On view at GRIMM this month in New York, artist Arturo Kameya presents a body of works unified under the title En esa pulga se mezcla nuestra sangre / In that flea, our blood mixes. Featuring a range of new works that expand beyond the narratives explored in the artist’s multimedia presentation currently on view in Soft Water Hard Stone, the New Museum Triennial, the show continues Kameya’s investigation of the plasticity of history and time, revisiting events and narratives through perspectives that are at times contradictory, and through the lens of the personal memories of his upbringing in Lima, Peru.

In 1976, the artist Lutz Bacher was approached to be interviewed for a volume of artist interviews, a young artist who had adopted a masculine, German-sounding pseudonym that covered her work in an air of conceptual mystique. Accordingly, the interview proved to be something of a challenge, breaking apart the artist’s concepts and motives in a manner that would ultimately force some of her underlying concepts into the light of critical appraisal. This awareness led Bacher to try something different, interviewing herself around one of her long-running fascinations, the assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald. Delving into the conspiracies around Oswald and his convenient murder, the interview was then printed over with a series of photostatic prints.

This work, which would ultimately be called The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview, delves into the collective memory of this formative national trauma, and whose story continues to vex skeptics of the official narrative to this day. In the following decades, Bacher would reiterate The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview in different formats, including not only the photostats, but also as live multimedia performances in the ‘80s. The work is presented this month at Galerie Buchholz in New York this month, gathering all versions of the Interview together for the first time, including the positive and negative photostats, the performance and video versions, materials from the 1984 performance, its appearances in her publications, and a series of pasteups.

Each iteration was considering a new, unique version of the work, with the artist introducing various threads and variations on the understanding of the interview and her interests in both Oswald and the obfuscation of her own identity in turn. In Oswald, Lutz would find something like a cypher for her own conspicuously displaced subjecthood, and an example of how unknowability can provoke desire, intrigue, and speculation. In the Interview, she focuses on theories of Oswald having body doubles, and much in the same way, her work ultimately takes on a series of those same body doubles, mirror images of the work that seem to function in unspecified variations.

Taking the artist’s work as a jumping off point to explore her formative ventures into identities and bodies, generative projects and the hazy, nuanced understanding of the artist as operator and creator, the show is a fascinating look into Bacher’s work. This is perhaps best seen in The Betty Center, the preserved collection of her writings, sketches, and collected materials, assembled in a series of binders the artist has designated a work in its own right. Musing on the full scope of her work, the show seems to look at Bacher from both her early works, and her final pieces.

The show closes February 5th.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz [Exhibition Site]