Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms (Installation View), via Fondation Cartier

The flood of recent work on view by Damien Hirst suggests an artist in the midst of a bout of inspiration, pumping out a broad range of works that underscore his roving interests and consistency in vision across paintings, sculpture and photography. Yet his most recent series, Cherry Blossoms, on view at Fondation Cartier this summer, sees something of a step into a more contemplative mode, a point of reflection around which so many frenetically-charged recent works seem to orbit.  The exhibition presents 30 paintings chosen by the artist among the 107 canvases of the series, all large-format. (more…)

Matthew Wong, Untitled (2015), via Cheim & Read

Since his sudden death in 2019, the work of painter Matthew Wong has only grown in recognition and reputation, building on an impressively diverse and evocative approach to art-making that underscores the artist’s self-taught method and brilliant eye. This self-taught exploration of the artist’s work is at the core of a new show at Cheim & Read in Chelsea, where the artist’s Ink Drawings, some of his first ventures into painting, are currently on view. Running through September 11th, the show offers a look at Wong’s early output, and the germinal state of his vision as an artist.  (more…)

Cady Noland, The Clip-On Method (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this summer in New York, artist Cady Noland has opened a show of new works at Galerie Buchholz in conjunction with a two volume publication of the artist’s work and writing, both of which are unified under the title The Clip-On Method. The show, offering a rare chance to see Noland’s work in person, continues her incisive and often confrontation exploration of violence and power in the American psyche, and its effects. (more…)

Olga Balema, Computer (2021), via Camden Art Center

On now at Camden Art Center in London, Computer marks Olga Balema’s first solo exhibition in the UK, centered around a single flat sculpture, created in her studio and the surrounding streets in New York, and consisting of a large digital print of a domestic carpet repeated in a grid-like arrangement, manipulated first through the ‘banner buzz’ digital printing interface and later with different movements and incisions. The work is minimal in the most explicit sense, a series of flat panels attempting to present space as an abstraction with the most limited means possible.  (more…)

Korakrit Arunanondchai, Workshop for Peace/Cry Pan Cry (2018), via Clearing

Marking a particularly expansive approach, Clearing Gallery has invited a massive list of artists to fill the gallery’s expansive Bushwick exhibition space. Bringing together an expansive range of the gallery’s artist in a conversation around modern practices, aesthetics and concepts. Moving across a series of sculptural and painterly iterations that create a colorful and expressive whole, the show makes for a refreshing and exploratory take on the summer group show. (more…)

The Galaxy Song (Installation View), via David Kordansky

On view this month at David Kordansky, the collaborative fashion project Online Cermaics and artist Matthew Brannon have joined together to present The Galaxy Song, a show that treats the motifs, cosmic mindfulness, and countercultural narratives associated with the Grateful Dead as springboards for open experimentation with material and concept. While the 1960s-era, psychedelic origins of the Dead—as well as the band’s propensity for inspiring its fans to reinterpret its densely interwoven iconographies—provide the show’s major conceptual through lines, the show equally explores the possibilities of screen-prints and fashion as vectors for complex aesthetic concepts.

Matthew Brannon, San Francisco Owes/Owns/Sold Me (2021), via David Kordansky

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Robert Nava (Installation View), via Art Observed

It’s been something of a blitz of work since Robert Nava joined Pace Gallery last year, with the artist now marking his second show in as many years with gallery out at its East Hampton outpost. The artist, presenting new work created this year, continues a body of work the explores his outlandish assemblages of bodies in space, creating bizarre visual mandalas designed to both immerse and confront the viewer.  (more…)

Chuck Close, Self-Portrait (No Glasses) (2016), via Art Observed

Artist Chuck Close, a pioneer of the postmodern and contemporary portraitist, has passed away at the age of 81. A defining voice in the landscape of New York’s post-war art scene, the artist leaves behind a legacy of work that mixed together an insightful use of photorealist technique and subtle commentary on its construction to create an influential body of work. (more…)

Darren Bader, Mundi 56 (2021),via Sadie Coles

This summer at Sadie Coles HQ in London, the humorous and incisive work of artist Darren Bader comes back to the UK for his fourth solo show with the gallery. Through a range of media – sculpture, Augmented Reality (AR), mural, photography and posters – the artist continues to distill and defamiliarize the concept of the ‘art object’. (more…)

Louise Bourgeois (Installation View), via Galerie Karsten Greve

Louise Bourgeois could be the artist who most drew on her personal experience and trauma to fuel her work, using her work and emotions as equal sounding boards towards each other, and creating a complex, dense body of work. Using art as a therapy product, she gave shape to her emotions and developed a corpus of themes and motifs through her sculptures, drawings, multiples and paintings. At this show of works at Galerie Karsten Greve in St. Moritz, this work gets a nuanced and attentive look.  (more…)

Eliza Douglas, Orgy of the Sick (Installation View), via Overduin

Painter Eliza Douglas has opened a show of new work in Los Angeles this month, a selection of paintings spread throughout Overduin and Co. that explore the convergences of pop graphics and commercial materiality, rendering a series of swirling, kaleidoscopic commentaries on cartoons and their subcultures.  (more…)

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…)