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…)

Chris Martin, Golden Age #2 (2018), via Anton Kern

Drawing inspiration from the impressive two-floor layout at Anton Kern’s uptown locale, painter Chris Martin has dug into his voluminous output for a show of paintings in New York City.  Cultivating the artist’s love for the painted canvas, and for the boundless enthusiasm that surges forth from each of his compositions, the show offers a fittingly colorful, joyous survey of the artist’s work, both in recent months and more broadly over the course of his career. (more…)

Art News has a piece surveying the fallout over the firing of Helen Molesworth at MOCA, including a series of interviews with artists and collectors over the move.  In one interview, a donor recounts a time that Molesworth failed to show up for a tour of their collection. “I don’t show my collection to many people—it’s in my home. But Helen begged me twice to see the collection and then when I set it up, she no-showed me—and then never contacted me again,” an unnamed donor says. “Are you just supposed to put up with this sort of thing over and over again?”  (more…)

Marina Pinsky, Trigger Trace 1 (2018), via 303

The Russian-born artist Marina Pinsky’s work is political in the most expansive sense of the word. Delving into intersections of spatial, material and ideological models of the world and its inhabitants, her pieces examine personal relationships, contractual agreements and concrete localities as part of an ongoing continuum, working at specific narratives and sites in a mode of process that seems as inspired by social research strategies as they are by the writings of Foucault. Delving into both sculptural and photographic practices, her works seem to both model and reconstruct environments and situations while also actively documenting them in real-time. In her most recent show at 303 in New York, the city’s origins become her focus. (more…)

Barnaby Furnas, The Wrangler (2018), via Art Observed

Barnaby Furnas returns to Marianne Boesky Gallery this month, opening his seventh exhibition with the gallery with an act of both reflective meditation and an unflinching eye on the present.  Bearing the title Frontier Ballads, Furnas’s work is a sort of inverted nostalgia, recalling the golden age of the American West, and the political analogs of this era that seem to echo forth in the current wave of populist politics in the United States.     (more…)

Yinka Shonibare, Wind Sculpture (2018), via Art Observed

With the weather turning slowly towards the gentle breezes and sunshine of spring in New York, a new sculpture by Yinka Shonibare has sprung up on the corner of 5th Ave and 57th, the southeastern corner of Central Park and long-running home to the Public Art Fund’s ongoing commission project.  The piece is a particularly resonant one for the current juncture, mixing bright colors and a fluid, windswept form that carries deeper political subtexts and histories of capitalist exploitation of the African continent.  (more…)

Sue Williams, Black and White and Red All Over (1998), via Skarstedt Gallery

For artist Sue Williams, the body always takes primacy. The painter, who began her career during the 1990’s, has long tweaked and twisted the female form, pushing it and painting it into any number of surreal arrangements. Multiplying that practice over any number of permutations, her canvases eventually arrive at a breathless final product containing massive flurries of activities and bodies, simultaneously personal and sexual, and often underscoring distinct facets of the hyper-mediated experience of modern life. Taking a retrospective angle on Williams’s work this month, Skarstedt Gallery in New York is currently presenting a body of paintings from 1997 and 1998, formative years in Williams’s body of work, and striking introductions to a practice that has only continued to evolve and develop over the following 20 years. (more…)

Hannah Levy, Untitled (2018), via Art Observed

Hannah Levy has exhibited broadly since receiving her Bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 2013, showing at such distinguished venues as MoMA PS1, the Palais de Tokyo, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, James Fuentes, and Marlborough Contemporary. She also appeared on Cultured Mag’s 2018 list of Young Artists. Her work typically contrasts metal, modernist, work-a-day design with fleshy silicone forms, departing most prominently from late Surrealism’s similar juxtaposition of materialities.  For the artist’s most recent show, one view now at C-L-E-A-R-I-N-G in Brooklyn, her practice gets a concise review.   (more…)

Kelly Akashi at Sculpture Center, via Art Observed

For those looking for new insights and fresh perspectives on contemporary art practice, its hard to ignore the call of the NADA New York art fair during Armory Week.  Set up in the sprawling Skylight Clarkson Square complex on downtown Manhattan’s western edge, the show is a dense pathway through the landscape of new art, mixing playful performance pieces, studied painting and anything in between, making the fair one of the more expansive and freewheeling events of the week. (more…)

Terence Koh at Andrew Edlin, via Art Observed

Situated in a beautiful lofted space in the heart of TriBeCa, Independent NY is easily one of the most picturesque of the fairs returning to Armory Week this year.  Looking out at the towering skyline of downtown Manhattan, the viewer’s gaze alternates between works hung close to the floor to ceiling glass paneling and on the erected walls nearby.  The open plan and imaginative projects chosen only adds to the atmosphere, making Independent simultaneously a relaxed, mellow browsing experience and a deep dive into impeccably selected works. (more…)

Pablo Picasso, La Dormeuse (1932), via Phillips

With Thursday drawing to a close in London, the final night of Contemporary auctions was in the bag, as Philips capped an impressive outing, bringing a final tally of £97 million that made it the most successful and high-grossing sale in auction house history.  The sale saw some particularly strong results over the course of 50 lots, ultimately hitting several impressive auction tallies on the way to the week’s conclusion.  Marking another major statement for an auction that has increasingly staked out a space for itself in the higher ends of the secondary market, Phillips planted a flag this evening, selling several works at prices that could compete with either Sotheby’s or Christie’s premier pieces.

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Yinka Shonibare at James Cohan, via Art Observed

As Wednesday winds down, this year’s edition of the annual Armory Show has gotten underway, with the doors of Piers 92 and 94 opening on to an expansive array of booths and art objects.  Marking its most recent iteration since first opening in 1994, this year’s edition of the Armory Show also marked its first for new director Nicole Berry, who took over following Benjamin Genocchio’s ouster over reports of sexual harassment.  Berry brings years of experience with EXPO Chicago, and it shows, with a relaxed pacing and well-curated body of main booths and special exhibitions keeping the fair at the top of its game. (more…)

Gerhard Richter, Gelbgrün (1982), via Sotheby’s

The second night of London’s Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sales has wrapped, as Sotheby’s capped a 61-lot auction outing that reached a final tally of £109,292,700.  Achieving a solid price for the sale despite some underperforming lots and a handful of unsold works.  The sale seemed to underscore a market whose highest selling works are still stuck in a state of relative uncertainty, with certain bets and guaranteed prices far less reliable than in recent years.

Peter Doig, The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991), via Sotheby’s

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Brooke Nicholas, via Art Observed

As the Armory Week begins to heat up, and turns towards the centerpiece of the week’s proceedings at Piers 92 and 94 tomorrow, the first night of SPRING/BREAK was underway at 4 Times Square.  Holding its seventh edition this year, the fair has grown into one of the more enigmatic and exciting events of the week, with this year being no exception.   (more…)