Wade Guyton, Untitled (2020-2021), via Matthew Marks

It’s a natural impulse to try and make sense of the past year by any possible means, and the current string of shows on view across the art world featuring reflective works, photo archives, and other modes of documentation as expression seems to speak to that phenomenon. Case in point: artist Wade Guyton’s current exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles, a selection of pieces that feature the artist’s signature approach towards the construction of the canvas, while drawing in particular on images archived over the past year of Covid-19 quarantine and recovery. (more…)

Julien Nguyen, hic manebimus optime (2021), via Matthew Marks

Currently on at Matthew Marks’ Chelsea gallery location, artist Julien Nguyen has selected a series of recent paintings to mark the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Spanning a selection of works that showcase the artist’s attentive and expressive output, the show features thirteen oil paintings made over the past three years. (more…)

Lucy Raven (Installation View), via Dia

Marking the reopening of the Dia Art Foundation’s Chelsea headquarters following an expansive renovation project, artist Lucy Raven has installed a set of new works that emphasize points of renewal, construction, and the organization’s place in the history of contemporary art through a deft and intuitive process. (more…)

Borna Sammak, Not Yet Titled (2021), via JTT

Artist Borna Sammak opens a new show at JTT this month, continuing his work drawing on symbols and signage from contemporary pop culture and the modern urban landscape to create a dizzying exploration of aesthetics and meaning in our hyperconnected textual and graphical landscape. Featuring a series of works rendered with beach towels as well as a large-scale digital video installation, the show furthers Sammak’s enigmatic investigations of meaning and expression through the materials of the modern landscape.  (more…)

Tim Gardner, Cali Poppy (2021), via 303 Gallery

Currently on view at 303 Gallery, artist Tim Gardner has brought forward an expressive body of new watercolors continuing his practice in depicting scenes that collectively form a vivid portrait of contemporary life. Drawing primarily on an extensive personal image archive, the artist’s use of photography as a point of departure elucidates the psychological realism of lived experiences. (more…)

Iván Argote, Wild Flowers: A Chest (2021), via Perrotin

For the last 15 years, Iván Argote has been investigating and creating interventions on public monuments from his home country of Colombia to his current home in France. Influenced by the 2020 global uprisings of a new generation of young social activists confronting systems of inequality, oppression, and racial hierarchy, Argote’s artistic works come through as poetic and political gestures. This body of work settles at Galerie Perrotin this month, as the artist will present six new bodies of work proposing alternatives for contested monuments within major historic cities, centering in particular on Bogota, New York and Paris.

Iván Argote, A Place for Us (Installation View), via Perrotin

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Marlene McCarty, Into the Weeds: Sex and Death (Installation View), via Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

On view through the end of the month at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., artist Marlene McCarty has orchestrated an impressive multi-disciplinary installation, Into the Weeds: Sex & Death. Delving into the titular subject through a range of materials and works, the show centers on a selection of new, large-scale drawings as well as a set of gardens and composting structures spread across the gallery, including a dumpster-based garden installed outside the gallery.

Marlene McCarty, WEED: Our Lady of the Flowers (Aconitum) (2020-21), via Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

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Tetsumi Kudo, Bonjour et Bonne Nuit (1963), via Hauser & Wirth

In a wide-ranging practice spanning four decades, postwar Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo explored the effects of mass consumerism, the rise of technology, and ecological degradation on post-war society through satirical, critical, elaborately detailed and meticulously constructed environments that continue to exert a powerful influence on artists today. This framing serves as the central conceit of Metamorphosis, the artist’s first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York. Drawing in particular on the artist’s interest in transformation as a mode of personal and collective evolution, the show frames his work as a seeking of a way beyond the traps of Western Humanism, and exploring just how one might imagine a world beyond that of the modern. (more…)

Gabriel Orozco, Installation View, via kurimanzutto

Currently on at kurimanzutto’s East Hampton exhibition space, the gallery has staged a small-scale show of works by the artist Gabriel Orozco. The artist, whose long explorations of geometric form and space in relation to both traditional art materials and reclaimed objects from the world around him, here presents a fitting summary of his recent practice in small-scale, but engaging outing. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama, I Want Your Tears to Flow with the Words I Wrote (Installation View), via Victoria Miro

Throughout her career, Yayoi Kusama has developed a unique and diverse body of highly personal work that connects themes around the natural world, human cognition, and personal mythology. Continuing to address the twin themes of cosmic infinity and personal obsession, the works in this exhibition are testament to an artist at the height of her powers. Marking her first show in several years at Victoria Miro in London, the exhibition showcases Kusama’s relentless drive to express the most abstract of personal feelings.

Yayoi Kusama, On Hearing the Sunset Afterglow’s Message of Love, My Heart Shed Tears (2021), via Victoria Miro

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Christian Boltanski, via Marian Goodman

The French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski has passed away at the age of 76, his gallery announced this week. The artist, whose work long explored the notion of absence and trauma in the face of death and violence, politics and memory, leaves behind a legacy of works that challenge the progression of history at human scale, rendering physical traces and concrete representations of lives lost, bodies now absent, and spaces haunted by past events.  (more…)

Jean Genet, Un Chant D’Amour (film still) (1950), via Metro Pictures

On now at Metro Pictures, a group show featuring the work of Reza Abdoh, Jean Genet, Nash Glynn, Torbjørn Rødland, Elliot Reed, Heji Shin, and Nora Turato, takes on an engaging notion of the dream, drawing on Freudian psychology and philosophy to explore the idea of wishes, imagined landscapes and distorted impulses as the landscape of the repressed and the taboo, a show that unfolds like a dream in its own right, and which poses its images as a set of tableaus in which the viewer is welcome to find fragments of themselves. (more…)

David Smith, Follow My Path (Installation View), via Hauser and Wirth

In a 1952 lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts, sculptor David Smith described the inspiration behind one of his recent sculptures, saying “My wish is that you travel by perception the path which I traveled in creating it. That same wish goes for the rest of my work.” Welcoming the viewer to follow that same path, Hauser & Wirth is currently presenting a body of the artist’s work at its uptown exhibition space in New York, inviting viewers to explore the artistic processes by which Smith reshaped sculpture’s form and function, embarking on new terrain in the field of abstraction. (more…)

Shirazeh Houshiary, Pneuma (Installation View), via Lisson

For the artist’s 13th exhibition with Lisson Gallery, and her first at the gallery’s Cork Street location, artist Shirazeh Houshiary is  a new body of work, the first in over a decade to exclusively focus on the artist’s paintings. Unified under the title Pneuma, the show brings together a body of works that mine both haptic and optic illusions, filling the surface of each work with a palpable energy drawn from the artist’s careful study of kinetics. (more…)

Andrew Cranston, It was your birthday (and a seagull shat on your head) (2021), via Karma

This month, Karma presents a body of recent works by the British painter Andrew Cranston, marking his first solo exhibition in New York. The artist, who creates transportive images that destabilize the viewer’s sense of time, and invite them to explore a space between nostalgia and dream, relies on dense marks of oil and subtle washes of distemper, using the material to guide the viewer through a series of relationships in space and depth. (more…)

Tom Sachs, Ritual (Installation View), via Thaddaeus Ropac

“As I create, I meditate, and the lust of acquiring a product is replaced by the love of making it.” So reads a quote by Tom Sachs as the intro to his most recent exhibition of works at Thaddaeus Ropac in London. Ritual, an exhibition of new works never previously seen in the UK, reflects this notion, bringing forth four new sculptures conceived for the exhibition in order to demonstrate the comprehensive spectrum of Sachs’ distinctive sculptural practice. Displayed on bespoke pedestals inspired by modernist shapes, each sculpture is characterized by the same bricolage aesthetic that has long defined the artist’s work, and underscores his unique sense of interrelation with the language of modern urban culture, conceptual assemblage, and the history of the avant-garde. The sculptures bear traces of their making, becoming vehicles for reflection on the creation of value and human labour. (more…)

Jonas Wood, Wimbledon with Bball Orchid (2021), via Gagosian

Just in time for Wimbledon, painter Jonas Wood has installed a selection of new works at Gagosian, paying tribute to the highest honors of the tennis circuit, the four major Grand Slam courts, and the disparate landscapes on which aspiring champions are pitted. On view through July 16th at Gagosian’s Madison Ave. exhibition space, Four Tennis Courts forms a Grand Slam of its own, in which the rigors of professional athletic competition are displaced by deft visual play. (more…)

Jon Pylypchuk, Untitled (2021), via Petzel

How does one contend with loss? When a close friend or relative passes on, the sensation of loss seems to pervade objects, moments in time, spaces, bound up in memory and personal reflection. This sense seems to flow from the recent work of Los Angeles-based artist Jon Pylypchuk, who presents What have we missed, a solo exhibition of new sculptures at Petzel Gallery’s Uptown New York space this month.  (more…)

Karyn Olivier, PARALATUVIER (EXPANSION) (2021), via Tanya Bonakdar

Currently on at Tanya Bonakdar in New York, the gallery has opened a debut solo show by artist Karyn Olivier, At the Intersection of Two Faults. Olivier’s artistic practice merges multiple histories and collective memory with present-day narratives, manipulating familiar objects and spaces, to re-contextualize the viewer’s relationship to the ordinary. The show, featuring a range of recent works, asks the viewer to reconcile memory with conventional meanings, ultimately revealing contradictions and dualities as well as new possibilities and ideas. (more…)

Kati Heck, Macht, los (2021), via Sadie Coles HQ

In her second exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ, artist Kati Heck has brought forth a new group of paintings and drawings centered around the horse, using the animal as both historical interpolation and metaphor for human psychology.  (more…)

Paul Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (2017), via Nathalie Karg

Opening a new summer group show centered around self-portraiture, Nathalie Karg’s Mirror, Mirror executes a series of explorations on perceived identity as a slippery experience, an unreliable form or concept that is constantly challenged and reified within the photographic medium. Featuring new and recent works of self-portraiture by Whitney Hubbs, Tommy Kha, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Ilona Szwarc, the show explores self-presentation as self-creation, a hallmark of the social media age.  (more…)

Alice Neel, Andy Warhol (1970), via Art Observed

Over the course of her career, one might say that Alice Neel did her best to paint everyone, embracing a wide-ranging and exploratory approach to portraiture that invited countless figures up to her home in Upper Manhattan. Capturing neighbors, friends, art world luminaries and other figures, Neel’s work brought the full spectrum of New York’s residents into a single body of work. Now at The Met, the artist’s work, and the city that birthed it, gets their due attention. (more…)

Peter Fischli, RELIEFS (Monkey 21) (2021), via Spruth Magers

In his wide-ranging oeuvre, artist Peter Fischli carefully observes and draws from the everyday world to create sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that address similar concerns to those explored as part of his collaborative practice with his late collaborator David Weiss. The artist’s work, so often centered around often overlooked, quotidian aspects of everyday life, sees him posing that same in an experimental and humorous way. For his most recent show, Fischli takes that interest towards a pair of specific models.  (more…)

Satoshi Kojima, Catch Me if You Can (2020), via Bridget Donahue

Painter Satoshi Kojima has returned to Bridget Donahue this month for another exhibition of his strange, ephemeral compositions, a series of surreal, swirling landscapes and figures suspended in a bold, cartoonish world. Welcoming strange engagements with the fabric of the everyday, the artist opens the door on a new way of experiencing reality, twisting urban landscapes and historical constructions into each unique canvases.  (more…)