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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Oscar Murillo, Manifestation (2018-2019), via David Zwirner

Currently on view at David Zwirner London, artist Oscar Murillo has brought forth a selection of new works exploring both his past visual language and a range of expressive new iterations of his technique, delving into the visual history of his paintings as a shared exchange with both history and modernity.  On view through the end of the month, Murillo brings out a new range of pieces and projects that underscore his continued engagement with the painted canvas. (more…)

Olga Balema, Brain Damage (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

Upon entering the gallery space at Bridget Donahue this month, one is greeted by a peculiar selection of objects.  Small-scale, think strips of elastic material are laid up against the walls of the space, or twisted out along the floor.  The pieces, with their slight impressions upon the viewer’s perception of space, seems to lend the already raw Chinatown space a look of material temporality, of objects held in momentary sway, as if left behind in between residents.  (more…)

Piero Manzoni, Achrome (1961-62), via Hauser & Wirth

In 1960, at the height of his artistic maturity and of his awareness on the gradual path and progression of his work, artist Piero Manzoni would branch out into a series of material experimentations and evolutions that would mark one of the most prolific stages in his career, and also one of the most conceptually fruitful. The artist, utilizing diverse natural and synthetic materials, such as cotton wool, canvas, polystyrene, phosphorescent paint, and even bread, stones, and straw, would ultimately create a broad range of his Achromes, arrangements of material that both draw on their compositional elements and on their sheer mass to create a new awareness of the object and the space around it, a new manner of seeing branching directly out from the piece itself. Simultaneously, the artist would explore a range of other practices and performative works, focusing in particular on the realization and execution of extensive “lines,” traced across papers, photos, and even across the gallery space. Delving into this important period in the artist’s career, Hauser & Wirth New York has brought together two concurrent exhibitions devoted to the artist’s work, unfolding over two floors and focusing on Manzoni’s most significant bodies of work.

Piero Manzoni, Linea lunga 7200 metri (1960), via Hauser & Wirth

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Roy Lichtenstein, The Conductor (1975), Final Price: £4,977,000 via Phillips

With minimal fanfare and a steady hand, Phillips Auctions rounded out a well-managed evening sale of Contemporary and 20th Century works yesterday evening, closing a 36 lot sale to a final sales total of £35.9 million  with 5 lots going unsold.  The evening marks another strong and reliable outing for the auction house, making itself felt in the blue-chip market with increasingly strong results.  (more…)

Julia Scher, Glückshaube (2006), via Ortuzar Projects

For over three decades, artist Julia Scher has explored the relationship between surveillance, authority, and exhibitionism, orchestrating complex and intimate explorations of the way human and non-human parts of the modern technological apparatus function, both in the creation of and the limitations of personal expression and individual freedom in the modern world. Delving into how technology creates new and divergent relationships to the existing structures of power, Scher investigates just how these relationships bound and inform our place in the world. (more…)

Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait (1975), Final Price: £16,542,650 via Sotheby’s

Following up on a steady, reliable auction last night at Christie’s, Sotheby’s came out swinging this evening, marking a £69,720,050 sale in London that showcased a relatively strong market and ample interest for works at the highest levels of the blue-chip market.  The evening’s sale, which saw 4 of the 43 lots on offer go unsold, marked a strong closing for the first half of the year at Sotheby’s, and brings the season one step closer to conclusion. (more…)

Joan Mitchell, La Seine (1967), via David Zwirner

Currently on view at David Zwirner’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York, the gallery is presenting  a selection of multi-paneled paintings by American master Joan Mitchell, the first exhibition to look specifically at Mitchell’s work in this format, and the possibilities for her work brought forth through the use of expansive amounts of space. (more…)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) (1984), via Christie’s

Marking the first of the week’s trio of Contemporary and Post-War Auctions in London this week, Christie’s has capped a 35-lot offering to a final of $45,346,950, a strong figure that saw only three works go unsold with ample interest from buyers to keep the evening moving quickly and relatively smoothly.  The sale marks something of a snap back into form for the auction house following a dire struggle last week during its Impressionist/Modern offering, and seemed to signal emerging blue-chip markets for several younger artists. (more…)

Adam Pendleton, Ishmael in the Garden: A Portrait of Ishmael Houston-Jones (still) (2018), via Max Hetzler

On view at Berlin’s Galerie Max Hetzler, artist Adam Pendleton is presenting a body of new works under the title Who We Are, spread between both locations in the German capital: Bleibtreustraße 45 and Goethestraße 2/3, and marking Pendleton’s first show with the gallery.  The show, drawing on a range of cultural and aesthetic touchstones, presents itself as a sort multi-layered cultural history, intersecting music and film, dance and personal narrative through a series of video and wall-mounted works. (more…)

Yuji Agematsu, zip: 10.01.03 … 10.31.03 (2003), via Miguel Abreu

Currently on view at Miguel Abreu, Japanese-born, Brooklyn-based artist Yuji Agematsu has brought forth a diverse and expressive body of works to the galleries’ 88 Eldridge space, a selection of works delving into notions of urban space and the dense material fusions that it is capable of producing. Connecting the various processes and movements of the New York City streets into a productive engine of its own, the Agematsu’s work chains together disparate spaces and perceptions of reality. (more…)

Robert Therrien (Installation View), via Art Observed

Robert Therrien, an artist whose impressively-scaled sculptures of banal objects and everyday scenes was capable of twisting a viewer’s sense of time and space, has passed away at the age of 71 .  The news was broken by Gagosian, which represents him.   (more…)