Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (7-10) (1992), via Art Observed

“I like paintings that balance contradictions. I like paintings that look clear and simple at first glance and then sort of crumble under your gaze,” says painter, Thomas Nozkowski, the American painter whose work over the past several decades has spanned a range of styles and techniques, approaches and modes of seeing throughout his career. “And it’s even better if further looking enables you to put it together again, understand it in a new way.”  Such modes of seeing and making pictures is presented this month at Pace Gallery in New York, running throughout the artist’s 50+ year career as a striking, and refreshing survey of his practice. (more…)

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Andrea Holding her daughter Nephratitioustide the Social Network Banquet Hall (2016 / 2017), all images via Gavin Brown’s

In her self-titled solo debut at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, artist LaToya Ruby Frazier illustrates an American landscape where dualities intertwine, marring the boundaries separating joy from despair or abundance from nothingness. Her depictions of secluded interiors, occupied by domestic clutters and family histories translate into stories of struggle, while barren deserts under the California sun encapsulate human ardor. Spanning her two decade photographic practice, Frazier’s three-floor presentation at the gallery’s spacious Harlem location introduces one series on each floor. Complimented by the accents of the building’s previous life as a brewery, the photographer’s black and white gelatin silver prints explore dichotomies of public and private, meditating on the role of the camera lens as a witness of our profound and collective moments, be those experienced firsthand or communally mediated. (more…)

Louise Nevelson, Dawn’s Presence – Three (1975), via Art Observed

Spread across the rooms of Pace Gallery’s West 24th Street location, Louise Nevelson’s iconic wood sculptures draw the viewer through various geometric planes, familiar cultural forms and intriguing variations on a theme.  The artist’s work has hung in the walls of Pace over 20 times in the past 50 years, and returns here with a particular focus on her pieces from the late 1950’s onwards, a point where her particular artistic voice was beginning to fully develop.   (more…)

Zach Bruder, Edening On (2017), courtesy Magenta Plains.

There is little doubt that Zach Bruder is seriously invested in space; both the tangible area delimited by the stretcher and the real and imagined places rendered on the canvas are of utmost importance to the Cleveland-born painter. The eight works included in Edening On, Bruder’s first solo exhibition at Magenta Plains in New York, flaunt the artist’s ability to render different spatial dimensions, finding a humorous irony and cohesive unity in their discordance. (more…)

Rita Ackermann, Hip Shot (2016-2017), via Marlborough Contemporary

Body Matters, currently on view at Marlborough Contemporary is a two piece art exhibition featuring the work of Rita Ackermann and Carol Rama. The juxtaposition of each artist’s works, which mine brusque gestures and varied approaches to the construction of the art object, creates a dialogue between the two artists, and an almost maniac motion of ideas and eras. The composition of each work inhabits a space amid the figurative and the abstract, where human form disappears and reappears with flashes of color and movement. The concordance of imagery of psychosexual fantasies, dark distortions and transgressive glitches initiates a conversation that honors and liberates the beauty of the female form. (more…)

Thrush Holmes at Beers London, via Art Observed

For early entries in the art world’s annual calendar of art fairs, exhibitions and selling events, few can compare with the proceedings of Zona Maco during Mexico City’s annual art week.  Now in its 15th year, the landmark fair for much of Latin American has grown even larger, expanding to host 170 galleries from around the globe within the confines of the Centro Banamex in the city, offering a program of conferences with international guests, a section with specialized publications and editorials, and the widest program of parallel activities with exhibitions at the most outstanding galleries and museums in the country.

Marco Maggi at Pierro Achtugarry, via Art Observed

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Heimo Zobernig, Untitled (2017). All images courtesy Petzel Gallery.

Now through February 17, Petzel Gallery is currently hosting a pair of shows by Heimo Zobernig. Chess painting, on view at the gallery’s Chelsea location, recasts and re-creates the artist’s previous show at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA. Through an emphasis on the gallery’s architecture and spatial arrangements in each show, Zobernig facilitates a confrontation with the constructed, theatrical experience of visiting an art exhibition.

Heimo Zobernig, nework (Installation View)

Heimo Zobernig, Untitled (2017)

In chess painting, a show on view at the gallery’s 18th Street location, the artist makes use of discreet installations to draw visitor’s attention to the act of viewing. His large-scale, primed monochrome canvasses hang atop rolls of black photography paper. This black-and-white palette remains consistent throughout the exhibition, with repurposed mobile podiums adorned with cozy, black-and-white checkered faux-fur blankets. These platforms resemble daybeds, inviting visitors to relax and remain in the space of the gallery, furnishing the exhibition space with the promise of comfort and leisure.

Heimo Zobernig, Chess Painting (Installation View)

Concurrently, more work by Zobernig will be exhibited at the gallery’s Upper East Side location through February 24. In nework, the artist exhibits nine new text paintings. Since 1986, Zobernig has used the sans serif typeface in his catalog and poster designs. In 1993, for a group exhibition, Zobernig subdivided the letters of the show’s title (REAL) into four fields using orange, brown, gray, black, and white in reference to Robert Indiana’s LOVE paintings. One year later, the REAL pictures were produced in the same colors. Eventually, Zobernig extended the color scale of the REAL images and began to incorporate the German word EGAL (“whatever”) into this work with lettering. In these, new works, the words EGAL and REAL overlap to fill the canvas and essentially interrupt and cancel each other out. The words are written into and on top of one another, thus their meaning disappears.

Heimo Zobernig, Untitled (2017)

Zobernig’s work is situated within the impact of Modernism and emphasizes a questioning of the institutional mechanisms that contribute to the exhibition of artwork. Through an emphasis on the structure of the exhibition space, including the light, architecture, and structure of the gallery, Zobernig presents a holistic but subtly challenging experience of encountering the art work in the structure of the museum.

Zobernig was born in Austria in 1958. He has exhibited widely and in various international institutions, including solo shows in Cologne, Sweden, at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Kunsthaus Graz, and two solo exhibitions at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon. His work was presented in the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Vienna.

— A. Corrigan

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Petzel Gallery]

Women’s History Museum, OTMA’s Body (Installation View), All images courtesy of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.

Now through February 25, the Women’s History Museum presents OTMA’s Body, their first solo show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Women’s History Museum, established in 2014, is the moniker of Amanda McGowen and Mattie Rivka Barringer, who often work in close collaboration with friends and other artists. The group typically combines performance, image making, and clothing design in their work, and recently began to incorporate sculpture, music, and video as well. This exhibition, on view through the end of the month, features clothing, jewelry, prints, and sculptural pieces. (more…)

David Maljkovic, Alterity Line (2002-2017), via Metro Pictures

Continuing his interest in reconfigured and re-appropriated sculpture and painting that runs throughout the length of his career, Croatian-born artist David Maljkovic has returned to his New York exhibition space, Metro Pictures, for a show of new works.  The exhibition, titled Alterity Line, is a fitting summary of much of his earlier work, transforming pieces  from various stages of his practice into new ones to obfuscate hierarchies between media and artworks, and considering the relationship between art’s autonomy and its formal developments. (more…)

Robin Rhode, Black Friday – 1 Billion (2016)  all images Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Utilizing socially-engaged practice and urbanism to reflect on prevalent socio-political climates, artist Robin Rhode is known for his work in photography and film, chronicling everyday life through cityscapes and urban architecture. His current exhibition at Lehmann Maupin aligns with his work about the post-apartheid South Africa.  In this show, however, the territory he looks to for inspiration is the Middle East. After spending time in the region on the occasion of his exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Rhode witnessed the dynamics between Israelis and Palestinians in terms of power, opportunity, and freedom, and sought to represent these situations here. (more…)

Terry Adkins, Akhenaten (2013) all images courtes of the Estate of Terry Adkins, New York. © The Estate of Terry Adkins

Soon after Lévy Gorvy announced representation of Terry Adkins’ estate, the gallery has opened its first solo exhibition, The Smooth, The Cut, and The Assembled, dedicated to the late artist’s multimedia work spanning various decades. With his unexpected passing in early 2014, Adkins left behind an expansive body of work, focused primarily around sculpture, while meditating on the medium’s relation to ephemerality and sound. Known for his interest in musical scores and physicality, the artist captured immateriality on three dimensional levels, with mundane objects placed in often unfamiliar forms. This focused selection of works, organized by Adkins’ long-term collaborator Charles Gaines, assembles works from different eras to demonstrate the artist’s commitment to narratives that ran throughout his practice, including socio-political topics in addition to artistic methods. Doing justice to its title, the exhibition manifests tactility, rupture and composure, encapsulating both Adkins’ interest in manual production and utilization of surfaces for poetic language. (more…)

Margaret Lee, Waiting is for lovers (detail) (2017), all images via Marlborough Contemporary

In the landscape of New York’s current contemporary arts scene, few figures have left such a subtle, yet enduring impact in the way that artist Margaret Lee has, both for her own work, and for her advocacy for the downtown arts community through her work with 47 Canal Gallery. Lee’s work is a perfect representation of the sort of all-in cosmopolitanism that defines her varied practices as both artist and gallerist, blending historical forms and an attentive use of formal minimalism to arrive and enigmatic, impressive installations and works.  This framework is particularly well-illustrated in …banana in your tailpipe, an exhibition currently on view at Marlborough Contemporary’s London exhibition space. (more…)

Jamian Juliano-Villani, October, 2018 (2018), via Art Observed

Over the last several years, few young painters have continued to present work as consistently engaging, imaginative and original as Jamian Juliano-Villlani.  Twisting a range of iconographies and approaches to modern painting through an endlessly shifting hall of mirrors, the artist’s works are exuberant outings and explorations of just where surrealism can take us in the 21st Century.  Moving from ventures through the styles of 20th Century studio cartoons and graphic arts on to early computer graphics, bloated hyperrealism and back, the artist’s work always leaves space for a nuanced interest in how reality shapes itself from its contingent parts, and how one can explore the landscape of the world around us through its varied images and iconographies.   (more…)

Genieve Figgis, Happy Accidents of the Swing (2018), via Almine Rech

Part of the challenge of the current exhibition of work on view by painter Genieve Figgis on view at Almine Rech’s Paris location lies in the deciphering of her press release.  With only a single paragraph on the genesis and economic boon caused by the “Monster Jesus” phenomenon (in which a woman’s disastrous restoration of a fresco depicting the Christ in the North of Spain became the city’ main tourist draw), the show makes Figgis’s paintings a bit more confounding.  For an artist whose body of work consists of deconstructed, loosely rendered interpretations of Rococo and Classical masterpieces, the comparison is a strange one.  Are we being led to understand Figgis’s work as a degradation of these works?  Is she presenting them as an economically-motivated path away from such classic images?

Genieve Figgis, Wish You Were Here (Installation View), via Almine Rech

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Mark Verabioff, Concerned Women For America Rim Glue Pour Cultural Confinement Rundowns Pool Side (2017) (detail), all images by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Entering Mark Verabioff’s first exhibition with Team Gallery, the audience encounters expansive, full-wall images of entertainment industry figures symbolizing generations of American pop culture, such as the controversial photos of child actress and model Brooke Shields, iconic fashion editor Diana Vreeland (photographed by Francesco Scavullo), and teen heartthrob Nick Jonas. Known for his image and text based practice in which he cross-references words and pictures in relation to their abundant presence and status in visual culture, Verabioff mines the archives of art history, feminism, gender politics, and pop. The L.A.-based artist’s riff on language and pictures stems from his exhibition title, TEARS, brewing two distinct meanings and pronunciations of the word “tear” in contextual and performative levels. Other words with versatile meanings and utterances, such as “rim” and “pour” extend his play on language.

Mark Verabioff, TEARS at Team Gallery (Installation View)

The act of ripping off a page, and the drops shed by the eye encapsulate two avenues Verabioff takes with the word “tear” throughout the exhibition. Conveyed through tear drops adorning various eyes are notions of guilt, shame, and redemption; they appear around the eyes of many celebrity photos amassed by the artist, both in wall-spanning vinyl decals and small prints off of magazine pages. The vast collection of photographs shows woman celebrities at the prime of their careers include Grace Jones, Cher, Madonna, Candy Darling, and Diane Ross, with the word “ANTIFA” reading on the top left corner of each image.

Mark Verabioff, TEARS at Team Gallery (Installation View)

Although “antifa” calls to mind political activism and vocal opposition, the artist’s appropriation of the word in the company of glamorous celebrity photography furthers his approach to language as a social phenomenon and political tool. Either posing for Scavullo’s lens or featured in an anonymous magazine, these women, among which are also unknown models, overall constitute a transcendental aura within the gallery as they stare into our eyes with glamour and confidence. Yet they challenge the limitations and expectations imposed by the society and media due to age, sexuality, and their career.

Mark Verabioff, Concerned Women Rundowns Poolside (2017)

The artist utilizes a torn piece of tape to create the typical paisley pattern or a rectangular shape at the edges of these famous eyes. Strength and vulnerability, two opposites embedded in the act of crying, complicate these figures’ recognition in society as icons and victims, recalling Warhol’s use of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor photographs. The performative gesture of ripping “things,” pages or tapes in this case, imbue an archivist but also anarchist nature to Varabioff’s process, which expands to his mixed-media acrylic paintings blending various pictorial and textual traits onto canvas.

Mark Verabioff: TEARS is on view at Team Gallery through March 3, 2018.

Mark Verabioff, TEARS at Team Gallery (Installation View)

—O.C. Yerebakan

Related Link:
Team Gallery [Exhibition Page]

Stephen Shore, New York, New York, May 20, 2017 (2017), via Art Observed

Few photographers have left such an enduring impact on the practice of contemporary photography, and arguably on the state of contemporary art making as Stephen Shore.  Exploring a mix of taut, close cropped examinations of modern civilization alongside the varied textures and scenes that marks its intermingling with natural environments and varied foreign agents, Shore’s interest in the present condition is frequently bound up in a series of variations and interpretations along shared themes.  Working in series with varied materials and cameras, his work is ever-shifting and precise in its statements, making him an endlessly compelling artist to view. (more…)

Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #59 (1972), via Art Observed

Dwelling on a unique body of work in artist Tom Wesselmann’s expansive oeuvre, Gagosian Gallery in New York is currently presenting a series of the artist’s monumentally-scaled “Standing Still-Lifes,” a series of works that saw the artist explore past practices and themes in his work, while embracing a scattered, varied approach towards his own imagery.  On view through the end of February, Wesselmann’s work in series presents a unique opportunity to dive deeper into the artist’s relentlessly innovative vision and interests in the language of American consumerism.   (more…)

Petrit Halilaj, Abetare (Fluturat) (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour

Currently on view at Kamel Mennour in Paris, artist Petrit Halilaj has brought a nuanced body of works that explore the constitution of both history and society through its youngest members.  Exploring the phenomena of early childhood, the various cultural touchstones and worlds created from young minds, and their analogs in the world around them, Halilaj’s work is a striking and empathetic exploration of both violence and youth, memory and time. (more…)

Ida Ekblad, Proper Stuff (Installation View), via Herald St

It would be understandable to overlook the works currently on view at Herald St. in London as paintings by Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad.  The young painter and sculptor, whose work so often mines the scrawling hands of graffiti writing or mixes in cast-off detritus from her daily daily wanderings, here has taken a decidedly more contemplative route.  Over a small series of paintings, she embraces a distinct sense of foreground and backdrop, mining new ground to create a particularly compelling body of works. (more…)

Eddie Martinez, Love Letter #15 (2017), via Art Observed

Artist Eddie Martinez has returned to Mitchell-Innes & Nash this month, bringing two different bodies of work to the gallery’s two exhibition spaces in Chelsea and Uptown.  These two shows mark the first time Martinez’s work has been exhibited in New York since major solo exhibitions at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College and at The Drawing Center, New York, and signal a continuation of themes explored in those shows. Martinez’s work, which draws on languages of modernist painting while abstracting its language through varied techniques and imaginative approaches to the canvas.

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Serge Alain Nitegeka, Colour & Form XL (2017), via Marianne Boesky

Since joining Marianne Boesky several years ago, the Johannesburg-based painter Serge Alain Nitegeka has explored a series of ever-changing, constantly evolving approaches to a familiar construct. Blocks of color and stark, geometric forms dominate his pieces, always interested and invested in the way their application is capable not only of dividing up the space of his panels, but equally in how the viewer’s comprehension of space is shifted in turn. For his most recent exhibition at the New York Gallery, Nitegeka brings a selection of striking new paintings that continue this array of interests, applied towards increasingly impressive ends.

Serge Alain Nitegeka, Colour & Form XLVIII (2017), via Marianne Boesky

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Katherine Bernhardt, Siesta (2017), via Canada Gallery

Katherine Bernhardt’s work is nothing if not repetitive, producing colorful, swirling landscapes of repeated graphic motifs, often using variations on a theme to produce a sort of constellation of the everyday.  For her most recent show at Canada Gallery, she returns to this mode of practice. Cigarettes and Nike logos are a frequent occurrence, as are pizza, tropical fruits and even the occasional insect.  The show, which draws its name and inspiration in part from the classic Charlton Heston futuristic nightmare film Soylent Green, is equally invested in a sense of societal decline, pushing the artist’s own approach to figuration to stranger heights, twisting bodies ever further and images into an even more bizarre state of juxtaposition.  The same ideas are present to be sure, but the artist’s use of this same repetitive motif, one she has used over the past several years since debuting the approach at Canada three years ago, has been pushed to intense new vistas. (more…)

David Lamelas, The Other Side (Installation View), via Maccarone

The current exhibition at Maccarone Gallery in Los Angeles is something of a subdued affair, a pair of works by David Lamelas erected on either side of the gallery’s main, bisecting wall. The show, Lamelas’s third with the New York/Los Angeles gallery, is executed in conjunction with the current iteration of Pacific Standard Time, which included a body of the artist’s works. (more…)

Elizabeth Murray, Painting in the 80s, via Art Observed

Walking into Pace Gallery’s expansive exhibition hall on 25th Street in Chelsea, one is greeted by heaving masses of material, great swollen lumps of paint and canvas, bent and twisted into explosively animated forms.  These are the works of painter Elizabeth Murray, a pioneering abstractionist whose intuitive work with cut and shaped canvases has underscored her place among the lead voices of post-war painting in the US.  At Pace this winter, the gallery has turned its attention to a small body of paintings from the artist’s work during the 1980’s as a continuation of her last show, the fittingly titled Painting in the ‘70s.

Elizabeth Murray, Painting in the 80s, via Art Observed (more…)