Hannah Levy, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

Currently on view at MoMA PS1 for the museum’s spring and summer season, Past Skin draws on a nuanced understanding of modern man, dwelling on both changing conceptions of the body and body politics in conjunction with the modes of information dissemination, networked culture and physical architecture that have created a more nuanced assemblage of forms and functions in modernity.  Drawing heavily on the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the show, organized by Jocelyn Miller, pulls the human form into the swarms of data modern life is embedded within, and explores how this position has subtly changed the human relationship to the world around us. (more…)

DIVINE DIALOGUES: Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity, exhibition view. All images courtesy of the Museum of Cycladic Art.

On the occasion of Documenta 14 in Athens, the Museum of Cycladic Art presents “Divine Dialogues: Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity,” an exhibition that juxtaposes twenty-seven works by the American artist Cy Twombly with twelve ancient Greek artworks and objects from the Archaic and Classical periods. As the press release concedes, the impact of Greece’s geography and mythos on Twombly’s artistic production is widely known; “Divine Dialogues” seeks not just to reaffirm the scope and depth of this influence, but to make a firm case for Greek antiquity’s continuing relevance to modern and contemporary art at large. (more…)

Carlos Motta, Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2015) (detail) Courtesy of the artist

Praz-Delavallade, a main figure in the Paris gallery scene since the ‘90s, opened its first space in the United States in Los Angeles this past January. This summer, the gallery continues its program on the west coast with Over the Rainbow, a group exhibition dedicated socio-political trajectory of the LGTQ movement in the United States, and its ebbs and flows through painting, photography, sculpture, and video. As a French import on the city’s gallery-dense Wilshire Boulevard, the gallery brings together an intergenerational group of artists drawn from a global spectrum of interests and backgrounds, each looking at seminal moments in the gay liberation movement, such as the Stonewall upheaval, the outbreak and aftermath of HIV/AIDS epidemic, and marriage equality granted to same-sex couples through allusive or direct approaches that grasp at a timeless, global sensitivity. (more…)

Alexander Calder, Red Lily Pads (1956), via Art Observed

An embarrassment of riches is spread along the winding pathway of the Guggenheim Museum this spring, tracing the long and storied history of the New York institution through its interconnected relationships with the collectors and avant-garde pioneers that helped to grow the institution into the powerhouse that it has since become.  Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim offers visitors a firsthand look at the inception of one of the city’s enduring guardians of modern and contemporary art, all through the eyes and hands of the various parties involved in its early years. (more…)

Carsten Höller, Double Mushroom Vitrine (Threefold), 2015. All images via Gagosian Gallery.

On view through September 1^st, the Gagosian Gallery in New York presents REASON, an exhibition of recent work by Carsten Höller.  In this show, the artist’s first in New York since 2011, Höller unites scientific exactitude, play, and art through work that transforms the gallery into a laboratory for exploring and disproving the conceptual act and understanding of reason. Revolving doors, rotating mirrors, giant mushrooms, and huge dice create a world of discovery and whimsy, in which viewers are invited to explore the fascinating and beautiful logic behind the natural world.

Divisions Square (Senegal-yellow Surface), 2017

Trained in the natural sciences, Höller’s work has revolved around interrogating the methods through which humans seek to understand the world. Towards this end, he imposes standardized systems of logic on the behaviors and appearances of humans, fungi, insects, and animals, then lets go and observes what happens. As the artist states, “I start with a formula to get a process going, then the formula takes over and continues into infinity on its own. It is not about creative decisions anymore; there is no choice, only reason.” The effect of this process is the sense that Höller’s work seeks to invite viewers into the satisfying and inspiring process of discovery and experimentation. By eliminating subjectivity, the subjects are treated as independent, organic material acting and reacting independently. This places both the viewer and the artist in the position of an objective observer, passively admiring the results of some predetermined formula.  Both formally and conceptually captivating, Höller’s topics work to involve the viewer and inspire reflection and wonder. In this exhibition, the overall scheme for the two galleries is that of binary, diametric opposition and division. Following a pattern of diminishing halves, this takes place through color gradations, light intensity, and the positioning of the work itself.

Installation View.

In Revolving Doors, constructed according to the concept of triadic division, the viewer is engulfed in a sea of changing, shifting, turning reflections. The Divisions series of paintings, as well as two murals that cover the gallery walls, instead follow a binary logic. A biological equivalent to this geometric pattern is explored in Divisions (Rose-grain Aphid and Surface), which shows the parthenogenesis of a female rose aphid against a red background. The Giant Triple Mushroom sculptures are composed of enlarged cross-sections of three different fungal species, while Muscimol 3. Versuch, sees the artist exploring the hallucinogenic effects produced by the fly agaric mushroom when ingested. Another mushroom work, Flying Mushrooms is a giant stabile with moving parts, involving the rotation of seven fly agaric mushroom replicas slowly through the air like a propeller.

Installation View.

As in his other investigations, Höller seeks to eliminate subjectivity in order to apply and allow divisional formulae to determine the composition of each work. Setting objects free in a loose network of objects and interpretations, his pieces push the viewer into an extended space of indeterminacy and playful construction of meaning. The standardized systems of logic applied here produce a captivating and hyperreal resulting piece. The artist’s fascination with the formulaic rationality that rules the natural world comes through in REASON, and invites the viewer into an experience of wonder and play, predicated on the foundation of objective precision. In turn, the exhibition takes on the role of homage to the exquisite symmetry of the natural world.

Revolving Doors, 2014/16

— A. Corrigan

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Gagosian Gallery]

Thomas Ruff, PRESS++32.54 (2016), via Art Observed

Process is product for Thomas Ruff.  The German photographer has explored a wide ranging body of work over the course of his thirty-plus years of his practice, frequently using the act of creating a photographic image as the generative locus for his work. Embarking on a new body of work in past years, the artist’s press++ series makes its debut this month at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, a fascinating investigation of the act of image production and consumption. (more…)

Julien Ceccaldi, Pompeii Bathhouse (2017), via Art Observed

Lomex Gallery, housed in Eva Hesse’s former studio, continues a hot streak of quality programming with their current exhibition of new works by artist Julien Ceccaldi. The show, bluntly titled Gay, is a gathering of Ceccaldi’s paintings on various materials, combining a range of unique, well-orchestrated surfaces. (more…)

Installation View. All images via Pace Gallery.

Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery present Border Cantos, a collaborative multimedia exhibition by artists Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo. Misrach, an American photographer, and Galindo, a Mexican-American experimental composer, have been working together since 2011, blending musical scores and photography, instrumentation and sculpture, to discuss and represent the increasingly militarized 1,969-mile border wall between the United States and Mexico. The work in Border Cantos spans photography, sculpture, and sound, integrated seamlessly to create an impression of the presence of tragedy and tenuousness. (more…)

Robert Grosvenor, Untitled (2014-2017), via Art Observed

Three cars parked side by side make up Robert Grosvenor’s Untitled (2014-17), a single work presented as the artist’s second solo exhibition at Karma’s downtown exhibition space. We can’t be certain that the term “parked” accurately describes these objects, however, as it implies movement that was halted, and a close assessment of the vehicles does not yield a consensus on their past or present mobility. Our fascination with Grosvenor’s sculptures runs parallel to our suspension in this perpetual state of uncertainty, in which the work of art becomes the site of an investigation into the identity of an object.

Robert Grosvenor, Untitled (detail) (2014-2017), via Art Observed

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Jenny Sabin, Lumen, via Art Observed

Marking its embrace of the hot summer months in New York, MoMA PS1‘s popular Warm-Up summer concert series has returned to New York City, bringing with it the annual Young Architects Program design for an outdoor canopy structure to shade and entertain visitors and concert-goers in the museum’s open courtyard.  This year, the museum has tapped Jenny Sabin Studio, a Cornell-based design group known for its tech-first design concepts and use of woven, photo-reactive materials, spreading a photo-luminescent tent structure, and robotically-woven chairs across the space.  (more…)

Andrea Zittel and Tom Burr, Concrete Realities (Installation View), via Art Observed

Over the course of their respective careers, Andrea Zittel and Tom Burr have both negotiated an enigmatic and thorough interest in the built environment, addressing questions of site-specificity, subjectivity, and the body through spaces and environments that pull lived space and imagined realities into a shared domain.  This month at Bortolami, the pair’s respective visions will also share a common site, grappling with similar visual languages and interests in text, assemblage and architecture to challenge readings of space, and the strategies we employ to exist within our given environments.  (more…)

Ai Weiwei, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Hansel and Gretel (Installation View) at Park Avenue Armory. Photo by James Ewing

Exploration of surveillance and its corresponding limits has long remained a prominent thread in Ai Weiwei’s aggressively political multimedia practice, particularly following his detainment and imprisonment by Chinese authorities in 2011 due to his vocal dissent of the country’s governmental policies on human rights. Hansel & Gretel, Weiwei’s Park Armory tour-de-force in collaboration with architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, furthers his past surveillance-themed projects such as 2012’s WeiweiCam, for which the artist had installed fifteen cameras around his Beijing residence to stream a 24-hour live footage of his home. Coinciding with the one year anniversary of his detention by the Chinese government, the comparison the artist built between actual imprisonment and systematic violation of privacy echoes with his current occupation of Park Armory’s Guild Hall, transforming the column-free exhibition space into a pitch black zone of uncertainty and peril. (more…)

Robert Longo, Untitled (Bodyhammer: 9mm) (2008), via Art Observed

Few writers have walked such a fine line between coy observations of modernity and the possible dystopian future that lay just under the surface of daily life in the way that writer J.G. Ballard had over the course of his more than fifty years of writing.  Mixing a playful sense of imagination with dark and disturbing meditations on the state of the world, the writer’s work continues to serve as a major inspiration for artists and philosophers in the 21st century, just as some of the futuristic conditions he so often described have begun to manifest themselves in the real world. (more…)

Satoshi Kojima, Last Dance (2016), via Art Observed

Now through August 4, Bridget Donahue in New York presents an exhibition by painter Satoshi Kojima, his first ever North American show. The artist’s pastel-hued paintings offer a view into alternative histories, realities, and even other planets, executed with an updated Surrealist sensibility.  Kojima’s paintings invite the viewer into multiple different worlds of unfolding weirdness and intrigue, all through the softness of his color palette, in conjunction with the bizarre worlds he envisions. (more…)

Leo Villareal, Ellipse (2017), via Art Observed

Marking his first exhibition with Pace since joining the gallery this past year, artist Leo Villareal has opened a show of new works at the gallery’s 24th Street exhibition space. Villareal, whose twinkling, shifting LED light installations are iconic parts of the urban landscape from New York to San Francisco and around the globe, has built a reputation for his nuanced understanding of public space, and the capacity for simple light arrays to transform its environment, and brings a series of new installations, light panels and video to the gallery. (more…)

Painting the wall at Watermill Center, via Art Observed

The 24th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit & Auction took place this past Saturday evening, returning to Robert Wilson’s expansive performing and interdisciplinary arts campus with a new selection of performances and installations laid out across the grounds. Honoring performer Laurie Anderson and actress Isabelle Huppert this year, the event also served as a tribute to the late artist and musician Lou Reed, while also serving to benefit the Watermill Center’s continued residency and research projects. Anderson and Reed previously performed a work together, The Wildebeests, at the event in 1997, reprised this year as a culmination of the evening’s proceedings.

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John Graham, Mascara (1950), via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Divided into two opposite galleries inside the Parrish Art Museum’s sleek architecture, John Graham: Maverick Modernist, a comprehensive survey of the 20th century Ukrainian-American painter, offers a breakdown of the artist’s ever-evolving four-decade long career from 1920s and onward.  Curated by Alicia G. Longwell, the show recaps Graham’s defiant approach to Modernism, considering his sharp divergence from his dedication to modern art for the sake of figurative portraiture of female sitters in the 1940’s. Even then, at the height of his career, referring to Graham as a maverick would not be misguided: his models’ cross-eyed expressions, excessive make-ups, and mathematical details on their faces clash with easy readings as representational, and offer an intriguing historical context for much later practice in contemporary painting. (more…)

Taryn Simon, Charles Irvin Fain, Scene of the crime, the Snake River, Melba, Idaho, Served 18 years of a Death sentence for Murder, Rape and Kidnapping; The Innocents (2002), courtesy Taryn Simon Studio and Guild Hall

Since Taryn Simon first delivered her seminal The Innocents series in 2002, the New York-based artist’s work has continued to revisit and re-examine the concepts of power, identity and their interrelated social effects, examining how varied political conditions render real human effects on the body, and on space.  This summer, East Hampton’s historic art and culture center, The Guild Hall re-contextualizes Simon’s compelling photography series about misconceptions of guilt and impossibility of rewinding time on its 15th anniversary, serving as a backdrop for ongoing discussions around prejudice, injustice, and empathy. Organized by Guild Hall Chief Curator Christina Mossaides Strassfield, the exhibition reiterates a selection of photographs and video from the overall series that had its debut at MoMA PS1 in 2003. (more…)

Philippe Vandenberg, No Title (ca. 2007), via Art Observed

When the Belgian artist Philippe Vandenberg committed suicide at his Ghent home in 2009, he left behind an expansive body of work, including a drawing book that brims with semi-abstract watercolor sketches detailing the artist’s inner conflicts. Dedicated to the work Vandenberg created between 2006 and his death, Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition at its uptown space in New York aims to bring the legacy of the pioneer painter back to the New York art world’s attention. While Vandenberg left a significant footprint in his hometown during the European Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980’s, he maintained a relatively low profile in the United States, with only a handful of solo exhibitions in the last three decades. This show, organized by Anthony Huberman, the director of San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, expands throughout the gallery, bringing together a group of milestones from his last years that underscores his unique vision. (more…)

Meschac Gaba, Reflection Room Tent (2017), via Tanya Bonakdar

Working between Benin and the Netherlands during the course of the past 20 years, artist Meschac Gaba has forged a unique language for addressing and visualizing the varied effects and themes both driving and stemming from the rapid pace of globalization.  Utilizing a playful approach to environmental installation and sculpture, Gaba’s work frequently presents spaces and scenes drawing from the marketplace and the museum, the refugee camp or the modern office.  For his current solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, Gaba has installed his Reflection Room Tent piece, opening a space for dialogue and engagement between visitors inside the gallery space.

Meschac Gaba, Memoriale aux Refugies Noyees (Memorial for Drowned Refugees) (2016), via Tanya Bonakdar (more…)

Shannon Ebner, Will And Be Going To (2017), via Art Observed

Los Angeles-based artist Shannon Ebner has marked her first solo exhibition with Eva Presenhuber this month, taking over the gallery’s exhibition space at 39 Great Jones in New York with a series of photographs on aluminum that mark the artist’s continued engagement with temporality and space.  Spread across the gallery’s two floor layout, Ebner’s photographs confront the viewer with a series of reinterpreted engagements with the act of photographic production, pushing for meditations into the creative act and exhibition of her images.

Shannon Ebner, Signal Escapes (2017), via Art Observed

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Cerith Wyn Evans, S=U=T=R=A2 (2017), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Mixing together sonic and visual systems of perception, artist Cerith Wyn Evans has opened an exhibition of new works at Marian Goodman’s Paris exhibition space, marking an expansion of the artist’s long-running interest in the gray area between speech and written text, sound and image.  Spread out across multiple floors in the gallery, the artist’s pieces delve into the functions behind cognition and spatial awareness, using familiar imagery and the written word to shape and disrupt the acts of reading, seeing and hearing.  (more…)

Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

“No one writes lyric on a battlefield. On a map stuck with arrows,” begins Quarto, a 2009 poem by the feminist author and essayist Adrienne Rich. Adopting its name from the metaphorical expression Rich uses in her poem’s first line, Gladstone Gallery’s summer group exhibition, Lyric on a Battlefield, seeks impressions of beauty inherent in the struggles and joys of everyday experience through the poetic and personal narrative of life. Organized by Miciah Hussey, the exhibition pairs established names such as Suzanne McClelland, Anne Collier, and Ellen Berkenblit with a younger generation of artists like Monique Mouton and Louisa Clement.

Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

The introspective and meditative nature of the lyric, in terms of offering a highly subjective interpretation of time and space, infuses each juxtaposition of collective human experiences, like loss, intimacy, and memory, with a sense of vivid and often urgent vitality.  Presented here, the show’s works turn this sense of humanity into a powerful rumination on modern society, and the varied experiences that undergird our negotiation with everyday existence.

The biggest discovery of the exhibition is f.marquespenteado, the gender-nonconforming pseudonym of the Brazilian artist Fernando Marques Penteado, who combines traditional embroidery methods with found objects and text to orchestrate installations brimming with complex narratives. Although the artist is an established name in his native country and in Europe, his presence in New York has remained somewhat limited, with the exception of his inclusion in the Jewish Museum’s 2015 group exhibition Orthodox, which had aptly focused on artists outside mainstream dynamics of the art world.

The artist’s ability to infuse emotion, sensuality and soul to everyday objects allows him to marry domesticity with sexuality, while his texts add a sense of vivacity and character to his often mundane materials. The embroidery he accentuates and defamiliarizes his arbitrary objects which stems from a dedication to a practice that has been traditionally associated with feminine labor. In one of the installations, two pairs of clogs are placed in front of a wooden rake and dried flowers, standing in for a pair of absent bodies of two male lovers whose relationship is recounted through an imaginary interview conducted with one of them.

Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

By contrast, Suzanne McClelland’s large scale double-sided painting Reg Park and the Hard Gainers exemplifies the Brooklyn-based painter’s decades-long investigation of text, data, and image culture through the lens of American ideals such as success, fame, and class. What appear on the surface as tempestuous and fervent abstract paintings, emanating from loose hand gestures, encapsulate her research and analysis-heavy process regarding facts prevalent in our society, such as male privilege and unjust distribution of opportunity. Adorned with slightly abstracted letters and names, McClelland’s abstract paintings further the artist’s interpretation of information as a fluctuating entity through their double-sided natures that offer alternative paths to same ends.

This sense of text and movement, experience and action, running throughout the show makes for an intriguing engagement with intersections of text and the life it describes. Lyric on a Battlefield is on view at Gladstone Gallery through July 28, 2017.

— O.C. Yerebakan

Read more:
Gladstone Gallery [Exhibition Page]

Harumi Yamaguchi, Fight Mode (1976) via Art Observed

Tucked in the back room of Bridget Donahue‘s Bowery exhibition space lies Project Native Informant’s contribution to the itinerant exhibition project CONDO: Harumi Yamaguchi’s first US solo exhibition. Yamaguchi, a commercial artist active from the 1970’s onwards, is an expert air-brusher. Not unlike fellow artist and commercial illustrator Hajime Sorayama, her illustrations portray human figures in an idealized setting: perfect lighting, unblemished skin, and gleaming white teeth, a sense of almost unnerving beauty amplified by their provocative poses and minimalist backdrops.

Harumi Yamaguchi at Project Native Informant Hosted by Bridget Donahue, via Bridget Donahue

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