Marguerite Humeau, Riddles (Installation view), via Art Observed

French artist Marguerite Humeau is showing new works at Clearing Gallery this summer, marking a continued engagement with processes of deep historical research and engagement with varied mythological traditions in her work, the new exhibition draws particular interest from the myth of the Sphinx, investigating the creature as a fitting metaphorical subject and thematic for the landscape of modernity.  Here, Humeau takes on the state of modern surveillance, translating the Sphinx into a fitting metaphor for the modern technological landscape, and a convenient point of connection between the massive communicative power of modern tech and the mythic power of Greek civilization. (more…)

Anselm Kiefer, The Painter’s Studio (2016), via Art Observed

Artist Anselm Kiefer returns to New York this month, bringing with him a dense and wide-ranging body of oil paintings, books, watercolors and assemblages to the expansive halls of Gagosian’s Chelsea exhibition space.  Marking a continued engagement with the process and materiality of painting, rather than a direct engagement with a selected end subject or image, the artist’s works here reflect his continued interest in the alchemical potentials for painting, and the broad vocabulary he has developed over the course of his career. (more…)

Serpentine Pavilion, via Iwan Baan for Serpentine Galleries

The move into summer months in the city of London brings with it the opening of a new Serpentine Pavilion commission, the ongoing architectural program in Hyde Park which sees architects from around the globe submitting groundbreaking and adventurous designs for the museum’s temporary outdoor structure.  Used as an open-air locale for talks, screenings, performances and other parts of the Serpentine’s summer programming, the pavilion is one of the enduring projects of the institution. (more…)

Alexander Calder, Portrait for Joan Miró. Private Collection; 2017 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Successió Miró, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris 2017.

Calder/Miró: Constellations, on view through June 30, 2017, presents the work of Alexander Calder and Joan Miró at Pace Gallery and Acquavella Galleries, respectively, a two-venue exhibition aiming to present the distinct bodies of work and complementary concepts shared between the two artists while they were separated on either side of the Atlantic during World War II.  Presenting approximately 60 sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, the show presents a dialogue highlighting formal, social and political concerns informing the processes of both artists at a distinct conceptual and aesthetic high point for both their careers. (more…)

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (682-4) (1988) Final Price: £2,389,000, via Phillips

Marking the final night of auctions before the market’s slow summer months, Phillips Auctions in London capped a buoyant sale that served as an emphatic close to two weeks of sales in the British capital.  Moving gradually through a 31-lot sale with slow, steady bidding, many works hung on the auction block for some time, coaxed up to estimate or beyond, with only 3 works going unsold, ultimately bringing the evening to a close on a figure of £24,373,000. (more…)

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait (1963-64), final price: £6,008,750, via Sotheby’s

Marking its entry in London’s final week of major evening auctions for the first half of 2017, Sotheby’s closed a small, 41-lot proceeding this evening in its Contemporary department, running through its offered works with impressive results and  steady bidding  that ultimately brought home a final total sales figure of £62,325,750 for the sale.  Bounding through its lots, leaving only works unsold, the sale offered a high note for the contemporary market’s continued strength.    (more…)

Max Beckmann, Hölle der Vögel (1937-38), final price: £36,005,000, via Christies

Continuing a series of auctions this month in London, Christie’s capped its Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale tonight at its King Street location in the British capital on a relative high note.  The decidedly subdued, yet well-appointed auction closed on a final tally of £149,500,000 for its 33 lot offering, with only a small fraction of works going unsold (94 per cent sold by lot) over the course of the proceedings. (more…)

Anne Imhof, Faust (2017), via Art Observed

Images capture. They calcify. Within space and time, images appear to sustain a frozen existence with a kind of false grace that suppresses the perpetual change and motion that could be posed as all that which, for lack of a more concise term, is not the image itself.  The dialectic between motion and image, fluidity and representation, is the central conflict of Faust, Anne Imhof’s Golden Lion-winning performance for the German Pavillion at the 57th Venice Biennale. (more…)

Daniel Buren, To Align: works in situ 2017 (Installation View), via Bortolami Gallery

On view through the end of the week, Bortolami Gallery is currently presenting its fourth exhibition of work by Daniel Buren, taking place in the gallery’s new Tribeca location.  Buren’s rich and varied career has been the subject of major museum exhibitions worldwide, and here, in the gallery’s spacious location at 39 Walker Street, turns towards the architectural character of the newly inaugurated space.  His works here draw on space, position and perspective to transform the space with his bright colors and filtered light. (more…)

Wassily Kandinsky, Bild mit weissen Linien (1913), via Sotheby’s

Holding court with a short but well-appointed pair of sales in London, Sotheby’s kicked off a week of auctions in the British capital, closing its Impressionist and Modern Evening sale with a string of impressive figures and a new auction record for Wassily Kandinsky at £33 million, ultimately bringing a final sales figure of £127,945,750.  The night also saw a short curated sale, “Actual Size” precede the evening’s main event, which saw mixed results and a £20,931,250 final tally for its offering.

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Ellsworth Kelly, Diptych: Green Blue (2015), via Art Observed

Since the passing of Ellsworth Kelly in December of 2015, the exhibition of the artists’s final works has made for a sort of bittersweet anticipation. The show could be seen as a grand farewell to an artist who changed the landscape of American painting several times over during the course of his career, each time delving deeper into his clean, almost rhythmic approach to the shaped canvas that filled its confines with rich bounties of color.  Presented this month at Matthew Marks, the artist’s last body of work does not disappoint, and the series of pieces, culled from past sketches and concepts or completely new ideas, feels like a fitting look at the furthest points of the artist’s exploration before he laid down his brush for the last time.  (more…)

Georg Baselitz, Descente (Exhibition view). All images courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddeus Ropac

On now through the first of July, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is presenting a body of new works by German artist Georg Baselitz in its spacious Paris Pantin exhibition galleries.  The show, titled Descente, brings together a set of new paintings and works on paper that concern the concept of aging and that of the “late work” in the career and life of an artist. (more…)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Installation View), via Art Observed

Reflecting on the landmark career and tragically short life of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Zwirner has opened its first exhibition dedicated to his work.  Zwirner has partnered with Andrea Rosen to jointly represent the artist’s estate worldwide, a move that promises increasingly broad exposure and support for his vision and canon. (more…)

Subodh Gupta, Cooking the World (2017), via Art Observed

As Sunday drew to a close in Basel, the flagship Art Basel fair brought its program to its finale at the Messe Basel, capping an unexpectedly vigorous few days of sales and other programs that once again underscored the fair’s exceptional attraction for collectors across Europe, North America, and the rest of the globe.  Capping its five day run on Sunday evening, the week concluded on a high note, with ample sales that focused primarily around the blue-chip highlights of the fair’s lower floor, while sending a strong message on the market’s health more broadly.

Albert Oehlen, Geigenbau (2003), via Art Observed

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Jordan Wolfson, (Installation View), all images courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ

On view through June 17th, Jordan Wolfson’s first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ spans both of the dealer’s London gallery spaces, with his new video work Riverboat song featured at the Kingly Street space, and a group of new sculptural and virtual reality works presented at the nearby Davies Street gallery.  Creating nightmarish scenes which often contain symbols that suggest a perversion or deconstruction of the American Dream, the artist’s work blends fantasy and reality into a chilling combination.

Jordan Wolfson, Still from Riverboat Song (2017)

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Frank Stella, Alu Tuss Star (2016), via Art Observed

Marianne Boesky Gallery is currently exhibiting new work by artist Frank Stella, debuting seven large-scale sculptures created this year and underscoring the artist’s ongoing engagement with color, shape, and composition. Taking the shape of stars, ribbons, and bowties, these colorful sculptures activate and engage the surrounding space, and draw on an expanded history of Stella’s own formal language to give the works a sense of both vivid engagement with the sculptural language, and with his own creative evolution.

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Rodrigo Hernandez at Galeria Madragoa, via Art Observed

Returning to its home at Warteck, a former schoolhouse on the banks of the Rhine, the Liste Art Fair continues to build on its position as one of the central hubs for the week of Art Basel.  The fair, which prides itself on a careful curation of young galleries, dynamic, forward-thinking works, and a roster of performances that remains one of the week’s main draws, Liste’s program marks it as one of the essential stops for both collectors and art lovers during a bustling week in the Swiss city. (more…)

Art Basel, via Art Observed

The 48th edition of Art Basel opened its doors today for the first official day of its week-long run in the Swiss city, and capped its VIP preview with an impressive array of sales that underscored the fair’s lynchpin position in the summer market calendar.  Attendees poured into the halls of Messe Basel early this morning, jockeying for position and a first crack at the exhibition’s premier works, and bringing down a rain of early sales that indicated a return to form for a Western market that had struggled in the past year.  The hallways were packed for the opening day, with collectors Peter Brant, Don and Mera Rubell, and Uli Sigg rubbing elbows with Beatrix Ruff, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Phyllida Barlow and Wolfgang Tillmans. (more…)

Michaël Borremans, Black Mould/The Badgers Song II (2015), via David Zwirner

As June rolls on, the art world returns to the Swiss city of Basel for the annual flagship art fair of the Art Basel fair franchise, taking over the Messe Basel for four days of high-profile sales, special projects and artist talks that sit at the center of a week of exhibitions, shows and satellite fairs.  Art Basel marks the latest entry in a bustling calendar of European art events that included the opening of both the Venice Biennale and the latest edition of Documenta in both Athens and Kassel in the past weeks, and should offer one of the last indicators of the European market’s strength before autumn.

Ashley Bickteron, Small Yellow Catalog: Cigarettes, Purple Pigment, Cheese Doodles, Broken Glass (1991), via Lehmann Maupin

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Marta Minujin, The Parthenon of Books, via Art Observed

With the early days of summer behind us, curator Adam Szymczyk’s bold and expansive Documenta 14 has opened in both Kassel and Athens, marking the high point of the summer’s crowded European exhibition schedule.  Continuing the event’s long-running tradition as a two-site exhibition project, this year’s show is one of Documenta’s most fully-realized in this framework, with massive exhibition plans and equally lofty concepts split between each location.

Miriam Cahn, via Art Observed

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Walead Beshty, Office Work (Canon imageCLASS D1350 Monochrome Laser All-in-One Printer, Copier, Scanner, Fax F161402) (2017), all photos via Sarah Cohen for Art Observed

Artist Walead Beshty’s work has frequently mined the language and situations of modern labor as productive systems for rendering his works in the gallery space.  There are his postal works, for instance, which use the often rough delivery methods of varied delivery companies to create shattered, misshapen sculptures produced through the route’s inherent inefficiencies; or his works from the last show at Petzel Gallery in New York, which used the movements of gallery employees on a copper table top to create swirling patterns emphasizing the movements and gestures of modern office work.  For the artist’s most recent exhibition at Petzel, this interest in production and systems returns, running through a broad body of works that underscores his intuitive use of simple gestures and deft manipulations to create his pieces.

Walead Beshty, Open Source (Installation View)

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Joan Jonas, What is Found in the Windowless House is True (Installation View), via Art Observed

Taking over almost the full expanse of Gavin Brown’s impressive Harlem exhibition space, artist Joan Jonas returns to New York with a body of work in tow that mingles previous explorations and new meditations on man’s relationship with the natural world.  Pulling the viewer along a meandering pathway up through the gallery’s multi-floor exhibition space, Jonas’s work greets the viewer with visual twists and turns of their own, each time dwelling on the act of perception and understanding, natural phenomena and man’s modern contexts.

Joan Jonas, What is Found in the Windowless House is True (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Installation View), via Art Observed

After much anticipation, the crowds of the Venice Biennale have finally packed through the doors of the Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana to take their turn at the visual tour de force of Damien Hirst’s Treasures of the Wreck of the Unbelievable.  The show, which opened last month at François Pinault’s pair of exhibition spaces in the city, has garnered considerable discussion over the past several months since its announcement, and with good reason.  Hirst’s exhibition is a challenging, and often confounding experience, taking on the museum as a form, and pushing it to its symbolic limits.

Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Robert Longo, Untitled (Raft at Sea) (2016-17), via Art Observed

Several years ago, a lone Robert Longo piece left quite an impression at Art Basel Miami Beach.  The subdued charcoal composition depicting several players from the St. Louis Rams posing in the iconic “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose that followed in the wake of the death of young Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in nearby Ferguson, Missouri was stark and imposing, a powerful reminder of the specter of police violence preying on black citizens in the United States.  It made for a sudden rupture in the often buoyant atmosphere of the fair, and one that welcomed the turbulence of the outside world in. (more…)