Lorna Simpson, Five Properties (2018), via Hauser & Wirth

Marking her first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth London with a body of new works, artist Lorna Simpson’s Unanswerable features new and recent paintings, photographic collages and sculpture.  Continuing the artist’s pioneering approach to conceptual photography, which features powerful juxtapositions of text and staged images, often bringing into question the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history, the show is a fitting reintroduction to Simpson’s work for a broader audience, and one that marks the continued impact and importance of her practice today.  (more…)

Doug Aitken, New Era (Installation View), via Art Observed

Walking into the shadowy depths of 303 Gallery this month, viewers are confronted with an almost completely destabilizing series of visuals.  Huge explosions of color and line expand out from the center of television screens placed in the pitch-black space, swirling movements and patterns created by arrangements of various technologic peripherals and paraphernalia.  Accentuated by the hall of mirrors the artist has constructed inside the gallery space, the video creates a alienating effect, the feeling of being awash in technologic constructs we are inventing faster than we can fully comprehend their effects on communication, knowledge or expression. (more…)

Mark (Installation View), via Team Gallery

The word “mark” takes the center stage in Team Gallery’s ongoing group exhibition, featuring works by Erica Baum, Louise Fishman, Suzanne McClelland, Shannon Ebner, and Al Loving. Aptly and simply titled mark, the exhibition gathers a group of two dimensional works in print and painting that loosely investigate the impact of visual culture on personal and collective memory. Initiated through varied linguistic and social traits of the word finding to its current use and connotations in modern English, the various approaches here explore differing meanings of the “mark,” each of which serve as tactics to examine societal codings of information, ethics, and culture. (more…)

Sean Raspet, Receptor-Binding Variations (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

Taking over the large main room of Bridget Donahue this month, artist Sean Raspet has assembled a strangely minimalist arrangement of objects along the walls of the space.  Small white machines jut out into space, each humming quietly and dispensing a subtle scent.  These timed micro-diffusers are each emitting a scent designed by the artist, an experiment in scent reception that plays on his interests in synthetic compounds and their phenomenological capabilities. (more…)

Jeff Koons and Gagosian Gallery are facing a lawsuit over three allegedly undelivered sculptures by the artist, filed by collector and MoMA trustee Steven Tananbaum. “Behind the ostensible façade of Jeff Koons’ art world triumphs and record-breaking auction prices,” a filing by litigator Aaron Richard Golub charges, “lurks a well-oiled machine, more specifically an established, archaic System as old as the hills applied to the art world to exploit art collectors’ desire to own Jeff Koons sculptures.”  (more…)

Sarah Crowner, Folded Greens (2018), via Casey Kaplan

Notching her second exhibition with Casey Kaplan Gallery, artist Sarah Crowner has returned to the dealer’s Flower District space for a show of new paintings and a site-specific installation that underscores her continued interest in the language and lineage of the natural world in modern painting. Drawing on any number of figurative and abstract histories of painting the world around us, Crowner’s work is a refreshingly nuanced interpretation, one that draws similar graceful curvatures and natural forms from cut and sewn canvases.  (more…)

Richard Aldrich, Wizard (2017), via Bortolami

Diving into the language and history of painting, artist Richard Aldrich’s new exhibition at Bortolami Gallery comes up to the surface with a diverse series of finds, spanning a range of practice that underscores his unique and energetic practice.  The show, which combines both sculptural interventions and a range of canvases mixing text, drawing and oil painting, offers an impressive look at the artist’s recent work, and leaves the viewer grasping for steady ground.  Yet, as the case with many great artists, Aldrich seems to fundamentally understand the joy in a little hard work, and the conceptual twists his pieces carry make their often confounding arrangements particularly rewarding for intrepid viewers ready to crack open a puzzle.

Richard Aldrich, Enter the Mirror (Installation View), via Bortolami

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Cosima von Bonin, WHAT IF IT BARKS 1 (WHITE BASS GUITAR VERSION) (2018), via Petzel

Expanding a body of work already recognized for its exceptionally whimsical, imaginative fusions of form, color and context, artist Cosima von Bonin is currently showing a series of new works on view this month at Petzel in New York.  The artist’s eighth show with the gallery, What if It Barks is also perhaps her most ambitious for the space, continuing her unique formal interventions on a grand scale with AUTHORITY PURÉE, her first full scale installation at Petzel’s 18th Street location.  (more…)

Tedd Stamm (Installation View), via Lisson Gallery

Walking from Ted Stamm’s current exhibition at Lisson Gallery to Dan Flavin: in daylight or cool white at David Zwirner, the sharp angles of the two artists’ works seem to echo each other, representing two bodies of minimalist experimentation with a similar interest in form, and riffing on the shape of their canvas, whether that canvas be paper, neon, or stretcher. Stamm’s show is perhaps the more grounded in the traditional language of art-making, yet equally pushes his works to the semantic breaking points of the art object. (more…)

Anri Sala, The Last Resort (2017), all images via Marian Goodman Gallery

For his first show in New York since his solo exhibition at the New Museum in 2016, Anri Sala presents two new major installations at Marian Goodman Gallery that continue his interest in utilizing sound and music to question experience.

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Kim Tschang-Yeul, Waterdrops (1980)

In a decade-spanning exhibition at Upper East Side’s Almine Rech Gallery, Kim Tschang-Yeul exhibits a body of water drop paintings that have become something of a calling card for the Korean artist. Pursuing the singular idea of depicting water drops in ever-shifting narratives, the artist has built an elaborate series of works in this form over the past few decades, exhibiting his meticulously-illustrated oil on canvas compositions to a broad audience in Europe, Asia, and America. The exhibition emphasizes the artist’s unending quest to expand this signature style to implement political, personal or artistic narratives into simple, yet poetic presence of oozing water. Using the drop’s magnifying ability and translucent ethereality in diverse formats, Kim merges techniques of hyperrealist painting with cues from abstraction, particularly with his direct reference to monochromatic painting. (more…)

Artie Vierkant, Image Object Thursday 5 October 2017 2:17PM (2018), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Galerie Perrotin’s spacious Lower East Side headquarters is a body of new works by digital artist Artie Vierkant.  The show continues Vierkant’s interest in the shifting modes of perception and criticality as the art object moves from a concrete object in the gallery space to an image of documentation online.  Filling the gallery with a series of his Image Object works, Vierkant’s pieces open an extended engagement between the object and its digital referents, ultimately seeking to break down connections between the two. (more…)

Robert Irwin at Sprüth Magers (Installation View), via Art Observed

Few artists have left such a remarkable imprint on the art and art history of Southern California in the way that Robert Irwin has done over the past 50-plus years. Pioneering a mode of practice that slowly but deliberately broke ranks with the painterly abstraction and object-based practice of the era to develop a mode of art-making that embraced light, form and space as free-floating, conceptual tools.  As a native Californian, Irwin’s work drew heavily from his experience of its delicate nuances in light and tone, the massive expanses of the California desert, evolving into complex geometric arrangements of space using scrim and paint to create shiting densities of light. (more…)

Liu Shiyuan, Isolated Above, Connected Down (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar

The 33 year old Chinese-born artist Liu Shiyuan’s solo exhibition Isolated Above, Connected Down at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery introduces not only six mashups of curated photography compositions in the second floor main gallery, each called Almost Like Rebar, but also two large-scale creations: a substantial cinematic work shown in a sprawling but comfortable first floor “rec room,” more playpen for grown ups than video installation, and upstairs, another literally “soft” environment: a felt-carpeted room installed in the project space supplemented with found furniture and coffee smells. (more…)

Stan Douglas, Loot (2017), via Art Observed

Continuing his practice of blending the hyperreal and the inherent materialities of photographic production, artist Stan Douglas has returned to David Zwirner this month for a show of new works from two divergent modes of practice.  The show, titled DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout, mixes together Douglas’s ongoing practice of detailed, involved portraiture, staged scenes that incorporate both specific time frames/locations into a freewheeling riff on the construction of reality, and a body of work that uses computer algorithms to deconstruct the image.  Throughout, Douglas’s interest in the construction of the image, and the narratives (or lack thereof) that emerge from the surface is at center stage.

Stan Douglas, Stranded (2017), via Art Observed

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Suki Seokyeong Kang, Jeong 井 (Installation View)

For her first exhibition with Tina Kim Gallery, Seoul-based artist Suki Seokyeong Kang has orchestrated a three-stage installation of sculpture, film and painting, offering a glimpse of her complex artistic practice prior to her US museum debut at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in late April. Here, she utilizes the gallery’s spacious sequential architecture to engage with the audience in a succinct narrative on cultural identity, memory, and art-making. The exhibition title Jeong 井 refers to a Korean musical notation system, Jeongganobo, that differs from the Western system of coding music in structure and form. Comprised of squares situated in a grid-like format, this musical system values time and suggests the next note through a lettering system in vertical sequence. Similar to notes that inform the musician through a score, Kang’s installation guides its audience through a set of visually subtle, yet conceptually robust steel and wood sculptures. (more…)

Dan Flavin, Untitled (To Helen Winkler) (1972), via Art Observed

During the early years of Dan Flavin’s career, the artist was known to experiment in particular with fluorescent lights as much for aesthetic potential as for the economics of their procurement.  Easy to access in any hardware store (and often just as easy to return after a show), Flavin embraced the cheap materials of home improvement projects and industrial construction as an essential part of his practice.  Yet what Flavin achieved with his pieces is equally significant, creating stately, somber interrogations of space and perception with these simple materials, often using simple patterns and accumulations of material that tied him to other masters of the burgeoning school of minimalist practice developing around him in New York. (more…)

Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at The Guggenheim, artist Danh Vo’s major retrospective invites a swirling, multi-faceted experience of the world and its political/social hierarchies over the past 40 years. Investigating moments and memories from the artist’s own life in Europe after his family fled Vietnam in the wake of the war during the mid-1970’s, his pieces move between assembled objects (documents, photos and journals) from participants in various parts of the war era, other iterations and moments of conflict and co-existence between Asia and the West, and his own memories and experiences. Presented here, the exhibition offers a striking opportunity for the viewer to explore a wide body of the artist’s output, which only amplifies his creative and political vision.

Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

Ryan Gander (Installation View), via Lisson Gallery

The passage of time is at the center of artist Ryan Gander’s current solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery’s 67 Lisson location in London.  Marking the artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery, Gander’s show has pulled a particularly simple, yet tellingly even-handed quote from his father as the inspiration for the show: “let the world take a turn.”  Taking his father’s words to heart, Gander encourages spectatorship, welcoming the viewer to allow time to take its course within the gallery, and to allow it to work its healing, transformational capabilities to work throughout the show.

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Isa Genzken, Untitled (2018), via Art Observed

With a career spanning over four decades, German artist Isa Genzken has constantly worked along the shifting fault-lines of art and design, architecture and media, technology and the individual.  With a body of work that constantly seems to absorb and incorporate the physical materials in her close proximity, assembling them through a range of techniques and practices that flirt with any medium that may cross her mind, from sculpture, painting and collage, to drawing, film, and photography.  Deeply attuned to both the legacies of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the materials and forms of twenty-first-century global society, Genzken’s work interrogates the impact of our increasingly commodified and interconnected culture on our everyday lives.

Isa Genzken, Sky Energy (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

Robert Gober, Untitled (2000-2001), via Matthew Marks

Recalling the title of Robert Gober’s 2014 MoMA show, The Heart is Not a Metaphor, the artist’s current show at Matthew Marks presents an embedded perspective, a uniquely engaged perspective, into Gober’s own internal world. His father built his childhood family house, and, in a similar sense, Gober was also a house-builder, starting his life of art making creating miniature dollhouses.   (more…)

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2018), via The Guardian

With spring now in our midsts, the string of public art projects targeted towards tourist-heavy summer seasons are opening across the world’s major urban metropolises, each seeking to turn heads while also offering a unique comment on public space and perhaps public discourse.  This year, the biennial sculpture project has opened its newest iteration, Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s striking re-creation of a lamassu, the winged creature of ancient Assyrian myth that guarded the gates of Nineveh.

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Willem de Kooning at Lévy Gorvy, via Art Basel

Marking the second major international art fair of this month, the global arts community has headed east, touching down in the towering metropolis of Hong Kong for the sixth edition of the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair.  Marking the continued shift of focus on the highest end of the global market towards China and its neighbors, the fair has slowly but surely developed into an economic powerhouse for the market, and one where some of the largest deals seem to happen in an open selling environment.  As blue-chip dealers and gallerists increasingly focus on the city and surrounding regions for well-heeled buyers, the fair has taken up a place as a major meeting place for the international art cognoscenti and a group of collectors with an increasingly honed taste for Western art.

Anicka Yi at 47 Canal, via Art Basel

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Zach Blas, Contra-Internet (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Art in General, artist Zach Blas has installed a striking interrogation and deconstruction of the internet itself, framing his show Contra-Internet through a language that fuses both classic frameworks of punk antagonism with a new generation of digital counter-cultures.  Centered around a contemporary remake of director Derek Jarman’s masterpiece of radical queer cinema, Jubilee, Blas presents his own version of cultural collapse and reconstruction, framed through a group of artists and intellectuals seeking to rebuild from the ashes of Silicon Valley.  (more…)