The Harrisons, On Making Earth (1970-ongoing), via Various Small Fires

Currently on view in Los Angeles, gallery Various Small Fires has compiled a selection of works from the careers of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, affectionately referred to as “The Harrisons.”  A visionary pair who embraced early warning signs of a global ecological catastrophe, The Harrisons have used their lives and careers as a spring board for investigations and experimentations in just how artists mights provide alternatives and opportunities for global preservation in the face of global climate change and political indifference.  (more…)

Donald Moffett, Lot 090307 (O) (2007), via Lehmann Maupin

On view for the summer months at Lehmann Maupin, a group show compiling the work of Angel Otero, Donald Moffett, Carrie Moyer and many more. The exhibition, co-organized by Curator Michael Goodson and Lehmann Maupin Curatorial Director Anna Stothart and spanning both of its Chelsea locations, combines a group of artists centered around more traditional formal, material, and spatial concerns, while also explicitly engaging with social, political, and psychological areas of influence to expand the established narrative traditionally used to answer the question, “Where does abstraction come from?” (more…)

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Untitled (2011), via 303 Gallery

35 years ago, gallerist Lisa Spellman opened 303 Gallery, a space that would stand as a cornerstone of the New York art world over the coming decades, and which still stands as an icon of distinctive artistic practices, conceptual rigor, and a little bit of New York style. Now, with the gallery celebrating its three and a half-decade milestone, it has launched a publication and exhibition culling together works and perspectives from the length of its run as a gallery.

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Betty Woodman, Venus #7: Homey (2014), via David Kordansky

Currently on at David Kordansky’s Los Angeles exhibition space, Shadows and Silhouettes brings together a selection of sculptures and paintings by Betty Woodman, the artist’s first solo show in a gallery since her death. Meandering through the last years of the artist’s live, the show takes particular interest in the technical issues of constructing the work, and how these moments and movements in space can work in conjunction with the artist’s hand to complete the object. (more…)

Allan Sekula, Man sleeping under a eucalyptus tree, Embarcadero park, (SD) from Fish Story (1989-1995), via Marian Goodman

Having first shown the late Allan Sekula’s nuanced and incisive photographic and conceptual work at its London Gallery this spring, Marian Goodman has once again tapped the artist’s archive for a wide-ranging exhibition of his works at its New York space this summer, compiling works from a range of different projects the artist has embraced over the years, and moving between film, performance and photography. (more…)

Andrew Sim, A pink Christmas tree (2019), via Karma

“What is the weird?” queries Karma in the exhibition text for its summer group show, which brings together the work of Henni Alftan, Matt Hilvers, Ruth Ige and Andrew Sim. Quoting from Mark Fisher, the show’s press release seems to trace a subtle line around the show as a whole: “When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here.” (more…)

Harland Miller, Me (2019), via White Cube

Mining a unique fusion between graphic design, painting and other tenuously associated aesthetic fields, artist Harland Miller’s work, on view this summer at White Cube’s Hong Kong location, lends itself to a striking and detailed interrogation of the language of design, and the design of language. Miller draws on a wide range of cultural references, including ’60s and ’70s graphic design and the bold, upbeat covers of post-war psychology books, yet set these graphical icons in conversation with the language of American painting, explicitly drawing links between the energetic abstraction of the era and the graphic design that seemed to bubble up alongside it.

Harland Miller, Boss (2019), via White Cube (more…)

Kelley Walker, Untitled (2006), via Paula Cooper

Exploring the convergence of varied aesthetic concepts and interesting overlaps between their artists respective practices, Paula Cooper Gallery’s summer show has opened, presenting a selection of sculptures and installations by Sam Durant, Liz Glynn, Walid Raad, Kelley Walker, and Meg Webster. Titled Non-Vicious Circle, the show draws its title and conceit from the 2014 mobile by Sam Durant on view. (more…)

Painters Reply: Experimental Painting in the 1970s and now (Installation View), via Lisson

In September of 1975, Artforum published a special issue on painting. In addition to articles such as “Painting and the Struggle for the Whole Self” and “Painting and Anti-Painting: A Family Quarrel”—in which Max Kozloff said “brush wielders were afflicted by a creative halitosis”—were the responses to a questionnaire polling 21 painters on the state and prospects of the medium. Decried for a distinctly fatalist bias towards the medium, the issue seemed to present the painted canvas as an object moving towards artifact, an icon of the post-war era that was swiftly losing its potency. (more…)

Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (Installation View), via Gavin Brown

Artist Alex Katz is still painting daily at the age of 92, working at an impressively quick pace that sees the artist continuing to produce his elegant, smooth style of portraiture and landscape across a wide array of subjects and scenes. Acclaimed for his iconic portraits and impressionistic landscape depictions, the artist has inspired generations of painters. For his most recent exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, the Brooklyn-born artist has compiled an impressive number of pieces, exploring the expanding reaches of his world and his painterly abilities. (more…)

Cindy Sherman at National Portrait Gallery (Installation View)

What more can be said of the work of Cindy Sherman? An artist who has consistently produced works that interrogate and rework the notions of image construction and understanding through the use of her own image, Sherman’s photographic output has moved through an exceedingly broad selection of focal points and interests. There’s her selection of film still works, placing her image onto prints in a manner that seems to reference some disembodied section of an unseen classic, while elsewhere, her collection of hyper-specific portraits mines the notions of identity construction and affiliation in the modern cultural landscape. (more…)

Nelly Zagury, The Giant Stalker & The Cannibal Flower (2019), via Art Observed

Taking over the impressively appointed former William Ulmer Brewery at 81 Beaver Street in Bushwick, local gallery The Chimney has initiated an impressive installation, taking over six large rooms in the building to present a series of large-scale installations and selections of works by nine American and international artists. (more…)

Yang Fudong, Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project, Day 30 (2018), via Marian Goodman

Considered one of China’s most important contemporary artists, the Shanghai-based Yang Fudong’s work has evolved through a diverse series of focal points and interests over the course of his career, moving through painting, video and other bodies of work that underscore his place as a central contributor to the landscape of Chinese contemporary art and a prominent voice in the national discourse. This month in London, the artist presents an exhibition of new work at Marian Goodman, the first with the gallery in London, and the international premiere of his epic project Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project. (more…)

Eric Fischl, The Exchange (2018), via Sprüth Magers

For over four decades, Eric Fischl has produced uncompromising images of American society, presenting a challenging and often surreal perspective on the forms and functions of middle and upper class malaise as reflected in the body itself. Figures routinely share space on his canvases, yet their gazes rarely meet, lounging or posed in a manner that reflects a certain deconstruction of the body as persona. Even when they do, through composition, pose and gesture, they are trapped in the midst of strained exchanges, moments of exchange and interaction that seems to place the viewer in the midst of a meditation on the body and on the societies it constructs.  Marking his first solo exhibition in LA in 25 years, the artist’s current exhibition, Complications From an Already Unfulfilled Life, marks both a continuation of this thread and a new path forward, marking his first show in the Californian metropolis with Sprüth Magers. (more…)

Daniel Richter, Plications of Come (2019), via Regen Projects

Currently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, painter Daniel Richter has brought forth a selection of new works, continuing recent explorations in methodology the artist first began experimenting with in 2015.  One of the most influential painters of his generation, Richter’s work continues the lineage of post-war German painting that includes artists such as Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen.  Mixing together disparate threads of figurative painting and abstraction, his pieces twist pop culture, media images and other bits of communicative detritus through a shared space, resulting in swirling compositions that implies an ever-open eye on the world around him. (more…)

Marisa Merz, via Gladstone

Marisa Merz, the Italian sculptor whose enigmatic and intricate sculptural arrangements was a foundational part of the impact of the Arte Povera movement in the country and around the globe, has passed away at the age of 93.  Merz, the only woman associated with the vanguard movement, blazed her own path through the landscape of post-war Italy, and founded a sculptural language that is enduringly important today.

The wife of Mario Merz, Marisa was born in Turin, Italy, in 1926, but little information on her early years persists.  Yet her time at home during the 1960’s marked her first experiments with simple materials, working with sheets of metal and thread to create nuanced clusters of material and subtle engagements with her family life.  Merz’s work maintained a sense of intimacy and love, tenderness and the human body, that marked her work as distinct from her contemporaries, and which has made her work enduringly resonant.

Marisa Merz, via Gladstone

She is survived by her daughter Beatrice, who heads the Fondazione Merz, and who told the NYT Style section in 2017: “I recently asked her how some of her works came about, what was the thought, inspiration, or approach behind them. She answered that she always and only did what she liked, and that every work originated from the pleasure of making it, from a spontaneous gesture or finding of a particular object or material.”

Read more:
Marisa Merz, Key Arte Povera Figure and Relentlessly Inventive Sculptor, Is Dead at 93 [Art News]
MARISA MERZ (1926–2019) [Artforum]

Jamian Juliano-Villani, Let’s Kill Nicole (Installation View), via Massimo de Carlo

Currently on view at Massimo de Carlo in London, Jamian Juliano-Villani’s new exhibition, Let’s Kill Nicole, seems to emphasize the same sort of alternating morbidity and innocence of an adolescent suggestion of violence. In the same way that a child might suggest death as a way of solving a minor dispute, Juliano-Villani’s works seem to balance a timeless, vivid energy with simplistic, even banal scenes and subject matter. (more…)

Wolfgang Tillmans, Greifbar 77 (2018), via Maureen Paley

Culling together a selection of new works and recent projects by Wolfgang Tillmans, Maureen Paley in London has opened an expansive and exploratory show that documents the artist’s multifaceted approach to image-making, featuring new and previously unseen works from the mid 1980s to the present day. (more…)

Gina Beavers, Cake (2015), via MoMA PS1

In her visceral, vexing, often grotesque paintings, New York–based artist Gina Beavers welcomes an experience of pop culture, and of the history of its depiction in modern art, as a swirling vortex of techniques and transformations. Using sourced digital images appropriated from social media and the Internet, Beavers’s work sees her repurposing the digital graphics into thickly layered compositions that border on sculpture. Hot dogs and hamburgers, human lips and sporting implements all burst forth from the surface of the canvas, a sort of exercise in both dimensionality and texture that underscore their strange abstraction, both from the original scene captured, and from the image’s prior home online.  For her exhibition at MoMA PS1 this summer, the artist continues her explorations of these cultural formats. (more…)

Chris Ofili, Dangerous Liasions (Installation View), via David Zwirner

Currently on at David Zwirner’s 34 East 69th Street townhouse in uptown New York City, artist Chris Ofili is presenting a series of new works unified under the title Dangerous Liaisons. Referencing René Magritte’s eponymous painting of 1935, which Ofili explores in drawings that employ the compositional organization of the Surrealist’s work as a structure for his own rich and layered exploration of color and line, the exhibition underscores Ofili’s abilities as an expressive and emotive painter whose craft with the brush is complemented by his rich conceptual practice. (more…)

David Hammons, Untitled (2017), via Hauser & Wirth

Marking his first major exhibition on the West Coast in decades, artist David Hammons has touched down at Hauser & Wirth for a major summer blockbuster, an exhibition that underscores the artists’s expansive and challenging practice, and its ongoing discourse with the languages of race, wealth, politics and modern art that have been his hallmark over the course of his life. Remaining razor sharp in its ability to comment on and critique the various socio-cultural spheres his work moves through, Hammons’s show is a masterclass in subtle condemnation. (more…)

Jonas Wood, Still Life with Red Panels (2018), via Gagosian

Jonas Wood’s rapid rise in the past few years to representation at Gagosian seemed to happen almost overnight. But for followers of the Los Angeles-based painter, his ascension comes as no surprise. Wood’s impressive approach both painting and drawing showcases a masterful sense of patterns, perspectives and color, using figurative vantage points to arrive at beguiling images and innovative constructions of the picture plane. On view this month at Gagosian, a range of works from the artist underscores this ability, and delves ever deeper into his creative practice. (more…)

Alissa McKendrick, Untitled (2018), via Team

Painter Alissa McKendrick is presenting a solo exhibition at Team Gallery this month, bringing a selection of paintings to bear on the gallery’s project room series “Gallery B.” The artist, whose works mine a particular language between the surreal, figurative and narrative, makes for a refreshing summer entry in the gallery’s programming. (more…)

Annette Messager, Sleeping Pacific (2017), via Marian Goodman

Artist Annette Messager has brought a series of new works to Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris this month, orchestrating a series of drawings and wall mounted works as well as her first video install, Lost in Limbos (2019).  The show, continuing Messager’s incisive material inventions and impressive orchestration of varied states and conceptual operations, is on view through July 19th.

Annette Messager at Marian Goodman (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

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