Erwin Wurm, Urinal (2011/2019), via Lehmann Maupin

Currently on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York, artist Erwin Wurm brings forward a new body of work that marks an expansion and elaboration on his already precise and peculiar style of sculpture. Titled Yes Biological, the show utilized biological effects and elements to create a new series that pushes the boundaries of sculpture ever further. (more…)

Jamal Penjweny,  Saddam is Here (2010), via MoMA

Military engagement in Iraq over the last 30 years has had a unprecedented impact on contemporary culture and society, with American intervention  in the Gulf and Iraq Wars opening a debate on American values and beliefs, in turn influencing the work of artists around the world. Exploring this concept MoMA PS1 presents Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011, a large-scale group exhibition analyzing the legacy of the U.S. military presence in the region. The exhibition spans four floors, including more than 250 works featuring over 80 artists and collectives, including thirty-six Iraqis and Kuwaitis.

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Noah Davis, Man with Alien and Shotgun (2008), all images via Art Observed

In the all-too-short run of his life as both an artist and organizer, Noah Davis was a larger than life energy.  He was a tireless advocate for black arts in Los Angeles, and a relentless energetic painter whose lush figurative style tied together signifiers and concepts from across the expanse of modern painting.  As curator and organizer at the Underground Museum, a black-owned-and-operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood, he was a central figure in advocating and advancing the work of his peers and predecessors, creating historical dialogues on the back of his own vision.   This energy serves as the underlying power of his current exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, where the late artist’s work is succinctly summarized and celebrated.

Noah Davis, 1975 (8) (2013)

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Hanne Darboven, Erdkunde I, II, III (1986), via Sprüth Magers

Currently on view at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, the gallery presents a selection of works by Hanne Darboven, the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Berlin gallery.  Compiling her works Erdkunde I, II, III (Geography I, II, III) (1986) and (Süd-) Koreanischer Kalender / (South) Korean Calendar (1991), the exhibition marks the beginning of the gallery’s worldwide representation of the Darboven Estate.  (more…)

Jon Pylypchuk, Cast your empire on a kingdom of doubts (2019), via Petzel

On view in its Chelsea exhibition space, Petzel Gallery presents Waiting for the Next Nirvana, an exhibition of new paintings by Canada-born, Los Angeles-based artist Jon Pylypchuk. On view through the end of February, the show draws on his work as a musician, and as an artist, exploring concepts of nostalgia, anticipation, energy, confidence, and, foremost, seductive and rebellious emotion. (more…)

Fischli/Weiss, The Raft (1982/83), via Sprüth Magers

Currently on view at Sprüth Magers’s London exhibition space,  Should I paint a pirate ship on my car with an armed figure on it holding a decapitated head by the hair? marks the fifth exhibition by the pair of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss at their London gallery. The exhibition presents a concise overview of the artists’ transformations of the commonplace in the form of three seminal works from throughout their collaborative career, a subtle investigation of their core themes in a minimal selection of pieces. (more…)

Hans Haacke, All Connected (Installation View), via New Museum

Artist Hans Haacke’s works, ranging from kinetic art to environmental art, conceptual art and institutional critique, culminates in his critiques of social and political systems, orchestrated in masterful form this winter at the New Museum.  The retrospective marks the first major American museum exhibition of Haacke’s career, focusing on the influence of the corporate world on contemporary art. (more…)

Kim Gordon, The Bonfire 2 (2019), via 303

Taking over the exhibition spaces at 303 Gallery’s Chelsea space this winter, Kim Gordon presents a body of new works that mix together a range of cultural vantage points and disparate iconographies through multi-media works, photographs and painted canvases.  Her second solo exhibition with the gallery, the show is a striking look at the artist’s nuanced and expansive oeuvre, one which has earned her increasing recognition in recent years.

Kim Gordon, Los Angeles June 6, 2019 (2019), via 303

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Mark Dion, Bureau of Censorship (1996/2019), via Art Observed

The year 2020 is being heralded as a crucial moment for society, a moment to respond to massive political upheaval and environmental crises. With immigration on the rise around the globe, and social tensions inflamed over crises of leadership at the heads of global superpowers, the world is at a crossroads. This concept sits at the core of Songs in the Dark, a group show currently on at Tanya Bonakdar that illustrates how artists deal with the world at its tipping point; how artists find beauty in the darkness of their own times, how they straddle the personal and political in their work, and how they make art as activism. (more…)

Issy Wood, Slouching towards the maxillofacial unit (2018), via JTT

Issy Wood’s paintings and sculptures carry a peculiar cultural charge, moments of collision and fusion that mark her objects with both the signifiers of the art historical and with the banal moments of daily life. For her current show, daughterproof at JTT in New York, the artist continues this process, putting forward a selection of works that seem to mark the passage of culture and time against the body itself.   (more…)

Ugo Rondinone, thanx 4 nothing (A Tribute to John Giorno) (Installation View), via Gladstone

When the poet John Giorno passed away late last year, he left behind a lifetime of artistic adventurism and exploration, a reputation for his tireless support of the arts and his energetic commitment to collaboration, connection and creativity.  It makes sense then, that one of the first shows to celebrate the artist since his passing would be a collaboration with his husband, artist Ugo Rondinone, at Gladstone Gallery.  Open now, the show features the artist’s captivating 2015 video piece thanx 4 nothing, (more…)

Ragen Moss, Senior Borrower (with Mezzanine Borrower) (2019), via Bridget Donahue

Currently on view at Bridget Donahue, artist Ragen Moss has hung an octet of peculiar hanging sculptures.  Referred to at points as “couples” and as “animals,” the show seems to take on the atmosphere of animals moving about an enclosure, watched closely by the viewer to glimpse moments of personality and persona. The works, on view through the end of the month, offer a particularly impressive chance to observe and explore the nature of viewing, and the concept of nature itself.    (more…)

Lothar Baumgarten, Tropenhäuser (Guayana), Conservatorie (Guayana) (1969-1972:2012), via Marian Goodman

Currently on view at Marian Goodman in New York, artist Lothar Baumgarten is the subject of a posthumous show focusing on a body of work he helped compile before his passing.  “The Early Years” focuses on the formative works that shaped his oeuvre, and functions as an homage to one of the most important German artists who influenced a subsequent generation, not to mention an artist who has worked with the gallery since the 1980’s.

Lothar Baumgarten, Kosmos (1968), via Marian Goodman

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Lee Bul, Perdu XX (2019), via Lehmann Maupin

On view through January 18th in New York, the South Korean artist Lee Bul presents a selection of new works unified under the title Interlude: Perdu at Lehmann Maupin, a solo presentation that  features recent mixed media paintings from the artist’s Perdu series that blend biomorphic and cybertronic forms, vividly yet delicately rendered in acrylic paint and mother of pearl.  The artist’s work, which incorporates these divergent forms into a new formal language, makes for an expressive wrinkle in her broader body of work. (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.”  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…)

Rachel Harrison, Hoarders (2012), via Whitney

Combining sculpture, readymades, drawing and a playful conceptual bent, artist Rachel Harrison’s work over the past 30 years has challenged easy readings of consumption, commercialism and modernity, imbuing her lumpy, peculiar objects with a sense of wry humor and situational irony.  Opening a major retrospective at The Whitney this winter, the artist’s work gets ample room to breathe, to striking result.    (more…)

Rashid Johnson, The Hikers (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this fall in New York, Hauser & Wirth presents The Hikers, an exhibition of recent works by Rashid Johnson that unites ceramic tile mosaics, collaged paintings, and a large-scale sculpture that work together to address Johnson’s recurring interest in currents of anxiety and escapism created by the political and social turmoil felt across the United States and around the globe. (more…)

Jessi Reaves, Going Out in Style (Installation View), via Herald St

Currently on view at Herald St Gallery in London, the New York-based artist Jessi Reaves has opened a new show of work, ‘Going out in style,’ which marks a continued evolution in her practice and her second exhibition with the London space. Presenting works that are contradictory in their forms and perceived functions, often oscillating between sculpture and furniture while never quite fitting squarely into either category, the artist’s work underscores a particularly resonant series of concepts and conundrums in the landscape of the present. (more…)

Merlin Carpenter, Untitled (2019), via Simon Lee

Artist Merlin Carpenter is a relentless shapeshifter, continuing a critique of modern art through a boundless series of projects and practices that often delve into ruptures and problems with the language of modern art. Exploring problems not of understanding, but of functionality in terms of art’s presentation and use, the artist explores just how aesthetics and value systems can be extended over the canvas. Emphasizing new levels and layers of observation intended to focus not only within the world of art-viewing, but in the world more broadly, the artist’s work makes a striking visual impact. (more…)

John Baldessari

Artist John Baldessari, who pioneered a uniquely humorous and challenging approach to painting and conceptual art making over the past half century, has passed away at the age of 88.  A leading voice in the development of conceptualism, his interest in ideas and their functioning over the image itself would make him an influential and dynamic voice for post-war art. (more…)

Calvin Marcus, City Pig/Wild Boar (2019), via David Kordansky

Opening his second exhibition at David Kordansky in Los Angeles this winter, painter Calvin Marcus returns to his enigmatic, always challenging body of work, turning his approach towards painterly composition towards increasingly complex, and increasingly nuanced compositions. Titled GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG, the show features four bodies of work—including paintings, sculpture, and photography across its three exhibition spaces. (more…)

Roger Brown, Runaway (1968), via Venus Over Manhattan

Counted among the ranks of the Chicago Imagists, Roger Brown possessed a unique sense of figuration and composition. Celebrated for their use of imagery, figuration, narrative, and patterning, this group of artists pulled from idiosyncratic sources to produce deeply personal and visually diverse work, shirking the cool, stylistic orthodoxies that dominated on the coasts in favor of a fluid, colorful style that mixed together disparate styles and techniques. (more…)

Francesco Clemente, India I (2019), via Vito Schnabel Projects

Artist Francesco Clemente opens a show of work at Vito Schnabel’s New York exhibition space, highlighting the artist’s famed nomadism and his embrace of varied geographies spread over the full expanse of the globe. Moving between Italy, the United States, India and elsewhere, Clemente has long embraced the practice of moving across sites, and allowing his aesthetic interests it follows. Clemente’s work traverses time and recorded history to probe the mysteries, ecstasies, incongruities, and, ultimately, the gravitas of the human condition, working through the metaphysics of spirituality, mysticism, identity, and the self, too render a body of work in a variety of mediums that is often charged with eroticism and intimacy, rich in references, and expansive in its openness to interpretation. (more…)

Matthew Wong, Starry Night (2019), via Karma

Passing away at the untimely age of 35, artist Matthew Wong left behind an impressive body of painted canvases, pieces that moved through a dynamic and compelling emotional range exploring light and shadow, space and bodies as shifting value systems rarely lingering in easy relief for any prolonged period. Opening just a few weeks after the artist’s passing, his current exhibition at Karma, Blue, continues this practice.

Matthew Wong, Blue (Installation View), via Karma

Wong casts the landscapes and interiors of his exhibition under the glowing spaces between light and shadow, the transitional states where light passes to dark, and day might fade slowly into the early hours of night. The works here, dusky and nocturnal, were intended as the coda, or sundown, to a previous series of day-lit oil and gouache paintings, exploring a watery, fluid treatment of both space and the light that bounds it. Delving in particular into the color blue, Wong was primarily fascinated with the idea of the color as a fluid ground upon which light and space could play out.

Matthew Wong, Solitude (2018), via Karma

Matthew Wong, Blue (Installation View), via Karma

Wong concerned himself with the “blueness of blue”: its fluidity, its affect, and its uncanny ability to “activate nostalgia, both personal and collective,” according to the show’s press release, and his interest in subject matter that drifts into the personal sphere is underscored by the scenes themselves. Meditative and bucolic, they move between improvisation and memory, taking on characteristics where space and time are just as hazy as the light that floats into the picture plane. The images here were witnessed in Sicily, often on walks while traveling with his mother, the result being a time frame in which the artist both looks back on his past, and seems to delve into it more deeply to seek out elements and ideas either initially hidden, or emergent with the inclusion of new sensations. Wong’s rendering of light is dappled, corpuscular: a contrast to the smooth gradations of his interiors, and occasionally feature spotlights, cascading from a door or window left ajar. These moments and symbols, often implying a space just out of site, contributes to the allure and mystery of these works, and the sense of sadness that seeps forth when considering a talent gone too early.

The show closes January 5th.

Matthew Wong, Autumn Nocturne (2018), via Karma

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Matthew Wong: “Blue” at Karma [Exhibition Site]