Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) (2016), via LACMA

What makes an artwork truly original? What does intellectual property ownership look like? For over four decades, celebrated American multimedia artist Richard Prince has been investigating these questions through his unflinching conceptual works, most notably through collections of photography highlighting the myth of the cowboy and the American West through repurposed, rephotographed, and cropped Marlboro ads from the 1980’s and 1990’s. Currently, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is exhibiting Richard Prince: Untitled (Cowboy) featuring not one, but two previously unseen photography projects of this nature from the 2010s. (more…)

Gina Malek, Truth in Timbre (2017), via E. Tay Gallery

Painter Gina Malek brings a body of new paintings to E. Tay Gallery this month, assembling a series of the artist’s intuitive interactions with the canvas through a range of different scenes and situations. Teasing out various modes of linguistic understanding and interpretation through her loosely rendered canvases, Malek’s work in the show plays with the act of speech, and the vagaries of expression that so often spring from the inexact moments of vocalization.  (more…)

Isa Genzken, Untitled (2017), via Art Observed

For sheer conceptual punch and visual intensity, few works from the career of Isa Genzken carry in the way that her Schauspieler pieces manage.  Arrangements of various mannequins, from young children to adult bodies are arranged in the artist’s works from this series, each dressed in various fineries and strange arrays of various clothing. Work tools, ponchos, colorful fabrics and sunglasses adorn her figures, creating various scenes and scenarios that always keep the body and its relationship to the world around it in full view.  For her most recent show in Berlin, on view at König Galerie through the end of the weekend, Genzken has presented a selection of works from this series, continuing her razor-sharp investigation of the phenomena of modern reality. (more…)

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Two Times NR 34 (2016), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Launched in conjunction with the artist’s current exhibition at the Tate Modern, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is currently presenting a range of recent works by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, exploring the artist couple’s continued exploration and investigation of the threads of memory, narration and understanding through myriad approaches to art making. The exhibition presents a collection of three separate series of recent works, each reflecting the artist’s complex relationship with the past, and the notions of personal and collective memory.  (more…)

General Idea, 1968 General Idea Shaped Ziggurat Painting #1 (1986), via Mitchell-Innes and Nash

Formed in Toronto in 1969 by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, the artist collective General Idea built its body of work on a strikingly diverse array of themes, constantly revisiting both the field of contemporary art production and the identity politics of the era that ultimately underscores so much of the artist’s act of world-making, critique and expression.  No subject was safe from their intuitive and enigmatic lens, from the myth of the artist, the role of mass media, and the relationship between the body and identity, to questions of gender and sexual representation, and perhaps most famously, the HIV/AIDS activism of the 1980’s, a mode of critique that the group were pioneers of during an era of intense repression and governmental silence.  Working in a broad range of practices, from paintings to performances, published editions to video, sculpture to installation, the group was almost constantly in a state of reinvention, speaking to the diversity and power of their collective vision.  (more…)

Françoise Grossen (Installation View), via Blum & Poe

Delving deep into the early practice and sculptural explorations of artist François Grossen, the New York outpost of Blum & Poe is currently presenting a series of works by the Swiss artist. Including both early sculptural builds and maquettes that trace her evolving interests in the potential for fiber and fabric not only as sculptural material, but equally as carriers of various symbolic and spatial interventions. The, show, on view through January 6th, serves as an expansive introduction to the artist’s work, working through both her hanging pieces and arrangements of rope and fabric on a flat plane. (more…)

Raymond Hains, Sociale Populaire Nationale (1973), via Max Hetzler

Among the flood of works on view this summer at the main pavilions of the Venice Biennale, few artists’ work managed to do as much with as little as the late French artist Raymond Hains.  Spread across a single room of the Giardini’s main structure, Hains’s mix of bastardized street posters, peculiar, sculptural arrangements of detritus and cast-off artifacts, and even the occasional poster of his own design, the artists range and insight into the various constructions of identity and cultural iconography in a world of near-constant data overload felt particularly timely.

Raymond Hains, You know nothing Raymond (Installation View), via Max Hetzler

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Mike Kelley, Kandors 1999-2011 (Installation View), via Art Observed

Considering artist Mike Kelley’s enduring relationship and engagement wiht the landscape of Los Angeles, the return of the artist’s famed Kandors series to Hauser & Wirth in the city’s Arts District feels like something of a victory lap for the artist’s works.  The Kandors, which have made their rounds over the past several years, showing in New York, Europe, and elsewhere, represent one of Kelley’s final bodies of work before his untimely passing, and perhaps his most elaborate engagement with the language of pop culture, and the varied convergences of mythology and psychology that so often make up the language of the best American cultural iconographies.

Mike Kelley, Kandors 1999-2011 (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Katharina Fritsch, Skull (2017), via Art Observed

Compiling a range of new works from the artist’s enigmatic sculptural practice, Matthew Marks Gallery has brought a show by Katharina Fritsch to Chelsea, the artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York since 2008. The show, which continues the German artist’s practice in a ground-level engagement with both the forms and images of our everyday lives, as well as the mythologies that animate our daily relationships and cognitive practices, consists of a small series of new sculptures, spread throughout the gallery’s three rooms.  (more…)

Arshile Gorky, Painting (1947-1948), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

Hauser & Wirth’s first exhibition for Arshile Gorky, the seminal Armenian-American painter of Abstract Expressionism, focuses on a four-year period in his life, beginning with his stay at Crooked Run Farm in Virginia, and concluding around the time of a series of unfortunate events in 1947, a year prior to his passing. Already an established artist as a key figure in non-figurative painting during the mid 1940’s, Gorky retreated to his wife’s parents’ farm in search of creative stimuli that would augment his interest in fluid nonlinear forms and subliminal themes. His isolation from the New York art scene—a network the artist always chose to remain distant from while his peers Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning dominated the social circle—ultimately manifested itself in contemplative and personal narratives and natural colors. (more…)

Richard Prince, Untitled (#109) (2016-2017) all images Copyright Richard Prince Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Richard Prince returns to Gladstone Gallery after a prolonged absence with his new body of work, Ripple Paintings, a series of large scale inkjet prints that riffs on the painted medium with both its title and process. An avid collector of vintage Playboy imagery, Prince uses Whitney Darrow Jr. watercolor drawings published by the magazine between 1967 and 1970 to create his swirling collages. Pages from different issues he acquired on eBay provides Prince new surfaces to paint onto, while the caricatures’ sexist and vulgar language gets blanketed by watercolor paint in bright hues and fluid forms. Placing pages he torn out of various issues flat onto floor, Prince loosely pours watercolor paint and lets the liquid meander on each page. After an overnight drying process, each work gives a unique and uninterrupted silhouette of paint with traces of the cartoon behind. (more…)

Ellen Gallagher, Whale Falls (2017) © Ellen Gallagher, Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth

Accidental Records, now showing at Hauser & Wirth LA, is Ellen Gallagher’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The collection of paintings, drawings and collage on view includes both new and recent works, which tread familiar conceptual territory while expanding upon themes from her rich and evolving oeuvre. The show’s title reflects the breadth of referential material that substantiates Gallagher’s work—from the literary to the musical, the psycho-theoretical to the culinary. In this erudite exploration of the Middle Passage—the deadly intercontinental journeys of slave ships—Gallagher excavates the depths of black history as well as the oceanic context in which so many slaves died. Known for her minimalist, pop-inflected collages that meditate on the African American body in history and culture, Gallagher focuses her lens upon the Black Atlantic.

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Dean Levin, Arches (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Returning to Marianne Boesky for his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Dean Levin has brought together a more ambitious and, paradoxically, more understated body of work than in his prior Boesky show, A Long, Narrow Mark. Through the series of sculptural installations and series of paintings assembled here, Arches takes Levin’s architectural interests and focuses them on the curved construct of an arch. (more…)

Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go (Installation View)

Almine Rech Gallery, one of Paris’s foremost galleries, opened its first New York location more than a year ago on the Upper East Side, bringing with it a unique program that mixes a strong artist roster with a consistently adventurous curatorial project.  For its most recent venture, the gallery has brought together key figures from the canon of 20th century Western art for Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go. Adapting its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the exhibition investigates ways artists use text as an allegorical element. Serving as a chronological and thematic starting point to the exhibition is Être ou ne pas être, Picasso’s 1912 painting considered as one of the foremost examples of appropriation of text in modern painting. Declaring “to be or not be” in French with gouache on paper, Picasso not only pays homage to one of the most emblematic texts ever written, but he also questions the mimetic essence of a painting. Can a painting of words serve to depict an image? (more…)

Haim Steinbach, Untitled (fins, dolphin, seahorse) (2017). All images via White Cube Gallery.

Now through January 20th, 2018, White Cube is presenting jaws, a series of new works by Haim Steinbach at Mason’s Yard, featuring a new series of shelf works and the major installation Design #15–Design for a Yogurt Bar, first conceived in 1981 and reconfigured for the gallery space. Centered around ideas of leisure and health, Steinbach’s works in the show draw on cultural models from the 1970s and 1980s to reveal novel and unexpected meanings through juxtaposition.

Haim Steinbach, starbucksroast (2017)

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Jim Shaw (Installation View), all images via Metro Pictures

In his current show at Metro Pictures, artist Jim Shaw presents a group of new paintings, sculptures, and drawings—all from 2017. The show is the first in the city since his survey The End is Here was presented at the New Museum in 2015. Shaw’s work often mixes American cultural references with comic books, art history, religion, Greek mythology and his own subconscious. Suffice it to say that in the time that has passed since his New Museum. exhibition the political and social climate in America has undergone an upheaval. For this new show Shaw combines his usual brand of dark humor with themes of materialism, war and corruption in works that speak to the current state of affairs in America, post-presidential election.
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Enrico Castellani, via Art Observed

Enrico Castellani, one of Europe’s pioneering avant-garde artists in the year’s following WWII, has passed away at the age of 87 in his home of Celleno, Italy, near Rome.  Castellani was a relentlessly inventive and creative painter, having worked closely with a number of groups and collectives including Cobra group, Group Zero, and the Neo-Concrete artists in Brazil.   (more…)

Ashley Bickerton, Catalog Terra Firma Nineteen Hundred Eight Nine #2 (1989), Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton’s first U.S. survey dedicated to his multimedia work serves as a compact retrospective of his four-decade long career, shaped by various geographical and ideological milestones that show a continued response to the artist’s ongoing quest for meaning and space for contemplation in modern age. The exhibition, on view now at The FLAG Art Foundation proceeds a larger survey, Ornamental Hysteria, which opened in the spring of 2017 at the Damien Hirst-owned Newport Street Gallery in South London, including a total of 51 familiar and new works by the artist. The artist offers a range of work from both his current time in Bali and his long residency in New York, where Bickerton emerged in the 1980’s alongside Jeff Koons and Peter Halley. The show offers selections from various periods of his career, mostly including sculpture and painting, two mediums that have always remained intertwined since his early days. (more…)

Jannis Kounellis at Luxembourg and Dayan, via Art Observed

A contingency is a future event or circumstance that is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty, one that may rely on distinct conditions or concessions made in the present. This conditional framework serves as the namesake of the most recent exhibition of work on view at Luxembourg and Dayan this month, one that poses its exploration of the Italian post-war as contingent on a viewer’s willingness to freely-associate between various modes of practice in contemporary art. (more…)

Lucy and Jorge Orta at Jane Lombard, via Art Observed

Turning the corner onto the iconic drag of Ocean Drive, one’s attention is immediately drawn to the slender white tent laid out along the ocean skyline, a gleaming structure that houses the Untitled Art Fair underneath its minimalist structure.  Its annual home, placed squarely in the midst of boozey beachgoers, restaurant soundsystems, and the annual flood of Art Basel Miami Beach visitors, the fair has one of the more unique positions in a week full of unique offerings, one that balances some of the most familiar sights of the city with the impressive work on view inside.  Compounded by the floor to ceiling windows in the fair tent, the fair is an annual must-attend for those looking to get their dose of dynamic contemporary art and Florida sun in one go. (more…)

Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz, via Art Observed

As far as fairs go each year in Miami, few can compare with the unique flair and spirit of the New Art Dealers Association’s annual production in Miami, taking over hotel lobbies and ballrooms with a collection of works from young artists, smaller galleries and inventive projects that always make for an engaging, freewheeling time matched only by the fair’s impressive eye for vintage Miami charm.  So when the brutal storms that ravaged the southern tip of Florida this year made for some complications in planning at the fair’s annual haunt up-beach at The Deauville, it seemed as if some of the wind had been kept from its sails. Taking over Ice Palace Studios in an area close to downtown Miami, NADA’s most recent iteration manages to make the best of an unfortunate situation, adding the familiar atmosphere and communal spirit of the fair to an intriguing new locale on the other side of Biscayne Bay.

Molly Zuckerman Hartung at Rachel Uffner, via Art Observed

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Allan McCollum at Thomas Schulte, via Art Observed

The doors have opened on the latest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, bringing a stream of collectors and dealers into the Miami Beach Convention Center for another year of the fair’s high-profile sales, and an annual look back at the year for the art world.  Commanding a roster of over 200 galleries from around the world, the marquee event of the fall market season in the U.S., and one of the biggest social events of the art world calendar has gotten underway, with thousands flocking to the sun and sand of the Florida metropolis.

Kevin Beasley at Casey Kaplan, via Art Observed

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Nate Lowman, Maria (2017), via Maccarone

As another year in the art world draws to a close, global attention turns to the southern tip of the U.S. for another year of Art Week Miami, the sprawling multi-fair spectacle that each year flood both Miami Beach and Miami proper with waves of art lovers, artists, collectors and revelers for a range of installations and exhibitions, not to mention the infamous schedule of parties and events surrounding the week. (more…)

Geta Bratescu, The Leaps of Aesop (Installation View), via Art Observed.

This spring, the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale opened its exhibition for this year’s iteration of the institution’s ongoing exhibition. The show, a string of drawings and paintings creeping up the walls of the gallery, and running across each of the rooms formed dense networks of gestures and panels that made each of their respective movements and concepts all the more powerful.  The show was a review of the career of Geta Bratescu, the 91-year old artist whose career has investigated the range of 20th Century practice as her own relationship to it grew and evolved over the course of her life. In the months running up to the opening of the exhibition, Bratescu joined on with Hauser & Wirth, and now brings a range of her works to bear on the gallery’s Chelsea exhibition space.   (more…)