Tom Burr (Installation View), all images via Bortolami

On this month at Bortolami Gallery in New York, Tom Burr reprises his dual role as artist and exhibition maker, relocating the act of making from the traditional studio space into the gallery. With a range of works that mix sculpture, 2-dimensional work and installation, the show is a striking and nuanced investigation of space as a material in art, and art’s ability to generate spaces in turn.  (more…)

Gerhard Richter, 3 Scheiben (3 Panes of Glass) (2023), all images via David Zwirner

This month in New York, David Zwirner presents a body of new works by the German master Gerhard Richter, comprising a range of practices, techniques and materials that underscore the artist’s breadth and depth. On view from March 16–April 29, 2023, at 537 West 20th Street in New York,the exhibition presents a group of Richter’s last paintings, made in 2016–2017; a number of these abstract oil paintings will be shown here for the first time. Though Richter completed his last paintings in 2017, his dynamic practice continues his artistic inquiries into the possibilities of abstraction and perception through his ongoing experimentation with drawing, printing and sculpture.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) (2016)

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Cassi Namoda, “Dog meat, cat meat, God-knows-what-meat” (2020), via exhibition curators

Sotheby’s Institute of Art presents “The Dreamers”, a student curated collection of artworks that explores the elusive characteristics of dream states and the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy. In collaboration with the class “Curating Contemporary Art”, the Institute provided students with the opportunity to propose, organize, and curate their own projects surrounding themes that they felt were most relevant and pressing to the contemporary moment. “The Dreamers”, the first show of the series, presents works from a range of exclusively female-identifying and queer artists including Maess Anand, Felipe Baeza, Shuyi Cao, Jessica Diamond, Cassi Namoda, Jess Xiaoyi Han, Angela Heisch, Arina Izmestieva, Heather Jones, Janet Jones, Ann McCoy, Joiri Minaya, Kiki Smith, Devin Osorio, Ana Maria Velasco, and Yin Zhang. (more…)

Sherrie Levine, Repetition and Difference (2022), via David Zwirner

This month in Paris, David Zwirner invites artist Sherrie Levine to present a body of new works in the city, marking her first show in the French capital in over 30 years. Featuring major new suites of paintings and photographs, as well as a selection of sculptures, this exhibition showcases several bodies of work that are central to Levine’s practice, and that distinctly engage her ongoing inquiry into notions of authorship, originality, and authenticity.

Sherrie Levine (Installation View), via David Zwirner

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Katherine Bradford, Trapeze Artists (2023), via Campoli Presti

On this month at Campoli Presti’s Paris exhibition space, artist Katherine Bradford marks her fourth show with the gallery. Exploring the world of  acrobats, their colorful costumes and masks as a study of form and color, the artist uses this framework as a way to explore societies and mico-cultures through whichartists and spectators are projected. (more…)

Clare Rojas, Go Placidly (Exhibition View), via Andrew Kreps

In her work, artist Clare Rojas employs a deeply personal visual language as she moves freely between dense figurative scenes, and minimal, abstract compositions. Rojas approaches both with a consistent, lyrical sensitivity as she interjects totemic references to her own life, and the Northern Californian landscape that surrounds her studio, seeking to distill fleeting memories and experiences into concrete shapes. For her first exhibition with Andrew Kreps, Rojas continues these modes of practice. (more…)

Gina Pane, Préliminaire (Installation View), via kamel mennour

Returning to the work of Gina Pane for its fifth gallery show dedicated to the renowned artist, kamel mennour has turned attention to the artist’s time at the Beaux-Arts de Paris during the 1960’s, examining how the artist’s experience in Paris during that time shaped (and re-shaped) the course of her career.  (more…)

Paul Mogensen, no title (2022), via Karma

On this month at Karma New York is Paintings: 1965-2022, a survey exhibition of work by painter Paul Mogensen. Known for his mathematical, progressional works that defy categorization and treat the canvas as a site for both deconstruction and restructuring of painting as a format, the artist’s work here illustrates a career of innovation and exploration.  (more…)

Portrait of the artist in his studio in Metepec, Mexico via Hilario Galguera Gallery

Opening on April 20 at Hilario Galguera Gallery is Mexican artist Gabriel O’Shea’s solo exhibition Preludio. Through his experiments with classical and contemporary mediums, from monochromatic paintings and wax sculptures to AI software, O’Shea explores the complex, and often surreal, relationship between technology and religion in a postmodern digital age.

Art Observed sat down with O’Shea over Zoom to talk about his artistic background, his creative processes, and the major themes surrounding the exhibition. (more…)

Andreas Schulze, Untitled (Chelsea Flowers) (2023), via Sprüth Magers

Artist Andreas Schulze returns to Sprüth Magers this month for his fourth solo exhibition at the London Gallery. Bringing with him a body of works that present confusing, unexpected forms as a mode of examining visual configuration and possibility, the artist once again returns to explorations of context and form as a site for the negotiation of both sensation and nonsense. (more…)

Marguerite Humeau, meys (Installation View), via White Cube

Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey is structured as a journey, incorporating sound, moving image and sculpture and enlisting the collaboration of artificial intelligence as well as hives of skilled craftspeople in order to explore ideas of interdependence and collective intelligence. Leading the viewer from the present and local to a distant, speculative future, Humeau entwines plural narratives around these themes – from a human society in collapse, to a simulation of the secret life inside an insect community, and a projected future gathering of a newly-formed collective in the process of synchronising. (more…)

Lee Scratch Perry, Bird War (2019), via Cabinet

Over the course of his life, musician Lee “Scratch” Perry was a seminal and exploratory producer, a seminal voice in the development and export of Jamaican dub reggae to the UK, US and beyond. Forging an experimental and esoteric arc in his work that mined pop culture, surrealism, and spiritual tenets of rastafarianism, Perry was also an avid painter and fine artist, creating dense, swirling series of allusions on paper, canvas, and other repurposed materials. Throughout, the artist’s work mirrored the playful and cartoonish nature of the characters and worlds he built on record. The artist’s work is the subject of a show at Cabinet in London this month, celebrating the late artist with a sprawling selection of works.

Lee Scratch Perry, Ark Work (Installation View), via Cabinet

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Hannah Levy, Untitled (2023), via Casey Kaplan

On view this month at Casey Kaplan’s Manhattan exhibition space presents a body of new wall and freestanding works by artist Hannah Levy, continuing the artist’s challenging and exploratory work in concepts around the human form, and concepts of its transcendence. Here, incorporating glass into the artist’s practice, Levy takes on new material processes through both traditional and experimental methods to arrive at new interpolations of her already tightly-honed practice. (more…)

Richard Prince, Untitled (2019-2020), via Sadie Coles HQ

On this month in London, artist Richard Prince marks his seventh solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, bringing forth a new iteration and expansion of his iconic Joke Paintings. The artist, who has long mined the linguistic flows, political temperatures and structural modes of American pop culture, here finds new ground to explore in these modes for the show, titled Everyday.
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Robert Bechtle, 60 T-Bird (1964), via Gladstone

This month, Gladstone presents the first posthumous exhibition of works by Robert Bechtle, spanning nearly six decades of his practice. Highlighting important subjects he returned to throughout his lifetime, this expansive selection of paintings, watercolors, and drawings demonstrates the technical and conceptual ingenuity of his process that evolved over time and transformed approaches to realistic figurative painting in the United States. On the occasion of this exhibition. The show also marks the gallery’s first in the representation of the artist’s estate.  (more…)

Urs Fischer, Schmalifornia (2022), via Gagosian

This month at its Beverly Hills location, Gagosian presents Ice Cream Truck Democracy, an exhibition of paintings by Urs Fischer. In this new series of works, which occupies a range of sizes and formats, Fischer combines silkscreened, hand-painted, and hand-stenciled imagery, applying a collage-like aesthetic to his personal observations of Los Angeles.

Urs Fischer, Citizen’s Arrest. (2023), via Gagosian

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Zeng Fanzhi, Untitled (2022), via Hauser & Wirth

This month in Los Angeles, Hauser and Wirth makes history with the first solo exhibition in the city for Zeng Fanzhi, the renowned Chinese painter whose expansive and intricate body of work has made him a singular both in both his home country and internationally.   A pioneer of contemporary Chinese art, Zeng is celebrated globally for his constantly evolving style and subject matter, and the works on view herald his latest artistic breakthroughs that contemplate the intersection of Western art and style with traditional Chinese subject matter and philosophy.

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Franz West, Echolalia (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this month at David Zwirner’s 533 West 19th Street space in New York, the gallery presents a commanding installation by artist Franz West. Created only a few years before the artist’s death, Echolalia consists of seven colorful, larger-than-life sculptures that seem to stand slightly off-balance, interspersed with three cushioned divans. Not exhibited publicly in more than ten years, the work represents the apotheosis of West’s commitment to sculpture as social space, integrating the viewer within an immersive, total environment. Conceptually, the installation manifests the intersection of many of West’s ongoing interests—most notably, the playfulness of sculpture, the participation of the viewer, and the importance of language.

Franz West, Echolalia (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Martin Puryear, Looking Askance (2023), via Matthew Marks

Marking the latest exhibition at both Los Angeles exhibition spaces, Matthew Marks has launched an expansive of works by Martin Puryear that also makes for the artist’s first solo show in the city in over 30 years. Compiling a range of works that revisit Puryear’s material adventurousness and tight examination of structural and historical progressions, including seven sculptures made over the past five years in a variety of media including wood, bronze, and stone.

Martin Puryear, Happy Jack (2020), via Matthew Marks

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Hermann Nitsch, Selected Paintings, Actions, Relics, and Musical Scores, 1962–2020 (Installation View), via Art Observed

Marking a major exploration and presentation of the artist’s work, Pace Gallery is currently showcasing a selection of paintings, scores and relics from artist Hermann Nitsch, an impressive collaboration with the artist’s Foundation that also celebrates the first English translation of his autobiography.  (more…)

Minerva Cuevas, In Gods We Trust (Installation View), via kurimanzutto

For more than three decades, artist Minerva Cuevas’s practice has been rooted in research-based projects concerned with economic and environmental issues and their socio-political impact. Focused often around Mexico and its particular political, social and cultural frameworks, the artist mines history and images to create new awarenesses and notions of contemporary life. On this month at kurimanzutto in New York, Cuevas continues that practice.  (more…)

Trevor Shimizu, Tulips (2023), via 47 Canal

Cycles, on view this month at 47 Canal, marks artist Trevor Shimizu’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, and a continuation of his enigmatic and studied engagement with disparate painterly languages. Presenting nine new paintings, varying in scale and unrelenting in spirit, the artist continues to push further through the genre model of landscape painting, and past his painterly personas. (more…)

All Photography by Aleph Molinari for Art Observed

Through her multi-media sculptures and large-scale installations, Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade explores natural and social systems and the underlying structures of reality. Her precise and technically complex works are physical representations of order, scale, and systems that extend from the subatomic to the celestial. Integrating physics and mathematics into her formal language, Kwade creates ethereal – and almost improbable – spatial compositions.

Art Observed sat down with Kwade to talk about her formative experience growing up in Germany at the cusp of political upheaval, the philosophical approach to her work, and her latest exhibition Silent Matter at OMR in Mexico City. In the minimal, brutalist space of the gallery, Kwade created a delicate universe entirely of her own. (more…)

Cy Gavin, Untitled (Grass Growing on a weir) (2022), via Gagosian

Gagosian presents an exhibition of new paintings by Cy Gavin this month in New York, marking the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Gavin’s landscape paintings transmute subjective responses to specific places into expansive works with striking palettes and fluid, gestural brushwork. Composed in dimensions that are in keeping with the scale of experience, these paintings interpret the sites and processes of the natural world. In this body of work, Gavin concentrates on subjects he finds in the vicinity of his studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. He proposes a conception of landscape in relation to his status as a citizen and steward of the land, developing ways to explore themes of growth, renewal, and belonging. (more…)