Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin

With the weather turning increasingly chilly, and the fall months coming on in full stride, the art world would normally turn its attention this week to London, where the tents would be up and the halls would be ready for another edition of Frieze Art Fair in the British Capital.  Yet the fair’s annual run is just one more event moved online this fall, as Europe and the United States continue to contend with the heightened stress and security concerns of the COVID-19 pandemic.  This week, the British staple of the annual art calendar has popped up online, open for the next week with a broad set of works on view, and a range of galleries logging in from around the globe.

Gretchen Bender at Metro Pictures

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Pieter Schoolworth, Shifted Sims #9 (Eco Lifestyle) (2020), via Petzel

Currently on at Petzel in New York City, painter Pieter Schoolwerth brings a collection of new canvases to bear, exploring a series of psychoactive tableaus and surreal depictions of humanity, a body of work that feels particularly apt in the strange landscape of a post-lockdown COVID-19 world.  Drawing on a range of signifiers and image sets for his works, the artist swirls his illusory, dream-like landscapes through the halls of the gallery. (more…)

Bruce Nauman, Two Leaping Foxes (2019), via Sperone Westwater

Welcoming Bruce Nauman back to New York City as the artist prepares to open his retrospective survey a the Tate Modern this month, Sperone Westwater’s SoHo Gallery plays home to a series of imaginative, surreal sculptures.  Marking his thirteenth solo at the gallery, his first 45 years ago in 1976, the show presents a set of new sculptures, underscoring the artist’s continued practice across a wide range of diverse mediums, including his own body, language, sound, film, video, neon, holograms and 3D technology. Once again reflecting on the perceptions, preconceptions and contradictions which characterize our existence in the world, the series of works on view underscores Nauman’s capacity to expand and elaborate on the capacities of art in the 21st Century.

Bruce Nauman, Walking a Line (2019), via Sperone Westwater

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Lucia Nogueira, Mischief (1995), via Art Observed

Touching down in Tribeca this fall for the first show in its newly opened space, New York’s Luhring Augustine opens its new doors with an illuminating show of works by the late Lucia Nogueira, a London-based, Brazilian-born artist whose brief but remarkable career saw her explore a range of captivating formal iterations and exploratory projects.  Marking her first solo exhibition in the United States, the artist’s work is quite at home in the classic New York architecture of the new space, and invites an intriguing first entry both for her work in the US, and for the gallery’s new home.   (more…)

Pat Steir, Untitled (2008), via Levy Gorvy

Taking over Lévy Gorvy’s New York exhibition space this fall, artist Pat Steir has compiled a selection of works from her ongoing series of Waterfall Paintings, this time focusing in particular on her pieces executed on paper.  Walking a fine line between the grand scale and gesture of her paintings on canvas as well as the more intimate sizes of the works here, the show traces a unique aspect of Steir’s engagement with the form.   Working on paper has been a quintessential aspect of Steir’s practice since the 1970s, producing a body of work that often saw prints and drawings coming out of the same conceptual exercises as her large-scale canvases.  As the show press release notes, these pieces have rarely been seen outside of museum collections, with Steir’s own personal holdings unseen for many years.  For this show, the artist pulls back the veil to explore the ways in which her practice is informed by these pieces on paper.  (more…)

Isa Genzken, Paris New York (Installation View), via David Zwirner

Taking over David Zwirner’s gallery space in Paris, German artist Isa Genzken returns with a new body of work that seems to both celebrate and destroy the assembled codes of historical knowledge in architecture and art, building a renewed awareness of space and time in the gallery spaces. This will be the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with David Zwirner and her first solo show in Paris since 2010, coinciding with a major presentation of Genzken’s early work at the Kunstmuseum Basel. (more…)

Michele Abeles, 10/28/19, 5:00PM (2020), via 47 Canal

Upon entering the doors of 47 Canal Gallery, one is immediately greeted by a strangely familiar, and oddly timely series of images.  Skeletal hands, ghoulish visages and ghostly figures dance across a series of photos, while other frames bear the image if close up novelty gravestones and other Halloween decorations.  One month out from Halloween, the exhibition, presented by artist Michele Abeles, turns these familiar features into a meditation on commercial iconographies, capitalism and the spiritual undertones that these systems draw on, always centering the body in these conversations on space and time, the body and mortality.   (more…)

Kelly Akashi, via Tanya Bonakdar

The fall art season is in full swing, at least in name, with galleries cautiously reopening, and a tense consideration for ways forward currently in the air, all serving as a fitting backdrop for the second iteration of Art Basel’s Online Viewing Room program.  Filling in for the cancelled Basel and Miami Beach editions of its fair program, the recently opened OVR:2020 invites a select group of artists and galleries to make up some lost ground in their seasonal calendar, and to offer works for sale, amplified by the fair’s global reach. (more…)

Carmen Herrera, Painting in Process (Installation View), via Lisson

Since her time in post-war Paris when she first developed her signature hard-edged style, painter Carmen Herrera has instilled a rigorous practice to create her distinctive body of work, culling together a range of various color structures and elusive geometric arrangements to arrive at her engaging and unique constructions.  Now, the artist is opening a show of recent works at Lisson, bearing the title Painting in Process, exploring her construction and exploration of her works before their final form.  (more…)

Renée Green, Excerpts (Installation View), via Art Observed

Entering Bortolami Gallery for its first show of the fall season, one is immediately greeted by a flurry of color.  Bright   banners hang from the ceilings, adorned with dazzling fluorescent pairings that emphasize the fragments of text that dot each piece, and which find a fitting counterpoint in a ring of framed pieces encircling the gallery walls.   The pieces are the product of artist Renée Green, whose body of new works returns to an ongoing interest in the concept of color and language, text and space, perception and understanding.   Spanning the artist’s three decades of working with color’s polyvalent effects, the works in Excerpts manifest her open-ended questioning of invented yet established taxonomies, in order to play with and to displace designations that may seem to be known. (more…)

Cosima Von Bonin, HETERO (2020), via GAGA

Returning to Los Angeles for a second show with GAGA and her first in the gallery’s LA space, artist Cosima von Bonin has installed a body of new works, merging together her signature selections of pop cultural iconographies, material inversions and surreal interpolations of the gallery space, united under the title HETERO.  Using the gallery as a framework on which to explore and elaborate her unique formal investigations, the artist explores the idea of extended, and often distended, narrative flows.   (more…)

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

Drawing on the shifting conceptions of political geography and economy, the work of Lisa Alvarado mines a certain point of friction between western art history and other modes of visual expression, using historical frameworks and objects to populate her work with subtle but enduring critiques of capitalism and colonialism.  Alvarado’s paintings operate as stage sets, artworks, and ritual objects simultaneously, often targeting a certain sense of meditative, considered reflection while looking, and using this space to incorporate new historical tropes into the work.

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

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Ricky Swallow, Rocking Chair with Rope (Meditation #1) (2020), via David Kordansky

Currently on view at David Kordansky in Los Angeles is BORROWED SCULPTURES, an exhibition of new floor- and wall-based bronze sculptures by the Australian-born artist Ricky Swallow.  Continuing the artist’s enigmatic explorations of bronze sculpture and its relationship to the materiality of the everyday, the show mounts a body of works that walk a peculiar line between manufactured sculpture and readymade. (more…)

Heather Phillipson, The End (Installation View), via City of London

A riddle topped with a cherry, Heather Phllipson’s new sculpture installation on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in London has all the makings of a work fittingly in line with the surreal progression of events that have marked 2020.  A massive dollop of whipped cream, topped off with a cherry, a large fly and whirling drone, the piece, titled The End, seems to invite questions of just what its title might imply: are we looking at the end of meaning, the end of the world, or perhaps just the end of a particularly large sundae? (more…)

Gary Simmons, Screaming into the Ether (2020), via Metro Pictures

As galleries reopen in New York and test out their new exhibition strategies, the first string of gallery highlights and highly touted shows are beginning to pop up online.  Among these is Screaming into the Ether, the newest show of paintings by artist Gary Simmons at Metro Pictures.  Mining the language of classic cartoon aesthetics and the often physically expressive poses its characters took, Simmons’s show turns moments of comical action into desperate, unnerving moments through his slurred, blurry hand.   (more…)

Sculptures by Anton Bakker at Walker Fine Art, via Hamptons Fine Art

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With the summer months in full swing and the challenges of a post-COVID art world continuing to pose new issues for the market, an increasing number of fairs and exhibitions are moving towards online sales and shows.  Hamptons Virtual Art Fair, currently open online, marks a new entry in the string of fairs and online exhibitions that have run this summer, an intriguing addition that references the art world’s annual pilgrimage to the Eastern end of Long Island without the sun and sand.  It’s an interesting addition to an art calendar long defined by timing and travel for the collector class, a wink towards where, in late summer, its buyers may well be logging in from.

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Keith Sonnier, Dala (2016), via Art Observed

Artist Keith Sonnier, a pioneering voice in the development of light art and an ardent user of neon in complex, multi-layered sculptural arrangements, has died at the age of 78.  His studio confirmed the news the week. (more…)

Christo at The Floating Piers, June 2016, Photo: Wolfgang Volz

Christo, the Bulgarian artist known for massively scaled environmental works that spread miles of fabric and other materials across natural landmarks and buildings at sites around the globe, has passed away at the age of 84.  Working for much of his life alongside his late wife, Jeanne-Claude, who passed away in 2009, the artist’s iconic pieces, like 2005’s The Gates in New York’s Central Park, or his wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin, turned modern locales into subtle, surreal echoes of themselves.   (more…)

Edward Kay, via Rob Tufnell

Making its own entry in the string of fairs and digital viewing sites embaraced by the art world to mitigate some of the damage caused by COVID-19, the New Art Dealers Alliance has launched a new project, the aptly titled FAIR.  Spanning several weeks of curated exhibitions from member galleries in New York and further afield, NADA’s new project will look to keep attention and focus on smaller galleries and artists amidst a time where many are suffering from the drop in physical contact and face to face encounters that make up so much of the art world’s business model.   Taking place May 20–June 21, 2020, FAIR will directly support 119 NADA Gallery Members and 81 other galleries that have been financially impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, totaling nearly 200 galleries around the world.   (more…)

Bosco Sodi, A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains (Installation View), via Art Observed

As the city of Hong Kong gradually reopens, galleries are slowly returning to business as usual, with shows returning to their exhibition schedules, albeit slowly and gradually.  Among these shows is a quite striking exhibition of new pieces by Mexican artist Bosco Sodi at Axel Vervoodt, incorporating a range of material investigations and variations on his already enigmatic and exploratory processes. Titled  A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, the exhibition takes the artist’s own hand and his engagement with traditional Chinese art techniques in equal stride. (more…)

Mark Manders, via Tanya Bonakdar

Taking the challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic head-on, the Frieze Art Fair has opened its Online Viewing Room program, bringing a selection of works by its exhibitors to view on its website.  Opened as a stand-in for the cancelled New York edition of its international fair program, the online show has created an expansive online show, welcoming those left working from home or sheltering in place to take a leisurely browse through the show. (more…)

Dike Blair, Untitled (2020), via Karma.  The gallery is hosting a show of the artist’s work in its Online Viewing Rooms

As the weeks progress and institutions remain shuttered over COVID-19 concerns, many arts organizations are responding with online virtual education programming related to the arts, often accessible globally at no cost. Art Observed has compiled a selection of these resources, from online classes and exhibitions to panel discussions and online interviews. There has perhaps been no better time to develop and hone one’s skills, as regards both creating and appreciating art, and through these links, Art Observed hopes to enable its readers to branch out, exploring new concepts and skills from the safety of their homes, while helping to relieve some of the pressures and tedium of social distancing.
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Dustin Yellin and Vik Muniz Converse on Instagram Live, via Art Observed

This week, artists Dustin Yellin and Vik Muniz sat down this week on Art Observed’s Instagram Live channel to discuss art, the current state of the world, and share insights into their practice.  The full interview is now up on our Instagram channel. (more…)

Richard Prince: Cowboy is now available HERE

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