Armory Show, via Art Observed

The doors are open and the 23rd edition of The Armory Show is underway in New York, kicking off the annual hustle and bustle of the March art calendar and its increasingly loaded week of fair sales, openings and events.  Spread out across the lengthy convention center spaces on Piers 92 and 94 on Manhattan’s West Side, the fair, Benjamin Genocchio’s first as director, seems to have taken advantage of the fresh start afforded by its new leader.

Yayoi Kusama’s Platform Installation, via Art Observed

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Gustav Klimt, Bauerngarten (Blumengarten) (1907), via Sotheby’s

Following a strong outing by Christie’s this week in London, Sotheby’s has taken its turn at the Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist markets, capping a tightly-run sale this evening that continued a week of unexpectedly strong outings for both auction houses, ultimately tallying a final of £177,022,250 for the auction house’s Impressionist and Modern sale (with 4 lots going unsold over the course of the evening), and £17,671,250 for its Surrealist sale shortly after (which saw only 2 lots go unsold).   (more…)

Paul Gauguin, Te Fare (La maison) (1892), via Christie’s

As New York City gears up for the rush and bustle of Armory Week, London has its own series of sales in swing, opening two weeks of major evening sales this evening with an impressively steady outing at Christie’s that offered some reassurance for towards alarmists and critics of the market’s current strength and consistency.  The pair of sales, kicked off by Impressionist and Modern works, and capped with a brisk sale of Surrealist pieces shortly after. (more…)

Armory Show, via Armory Show

Returning once again to the spacious halls of Piers 92 and 94 on Manhattan’s West Side, the Armory Show will open its doors this week in New York City, bringing the landmark art fair back for its 23rd year.  Marking its first year with former artnet head Benjamin Genocchio at the helm, the fair will continue its tradition of sales, talks, and projects spread across the piers, joined by an increasingly expansive series of events around the city at large.

Alex Katz, Vivien (2016), via Peter Blum

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Kader Attia, Reason’s Oxymorons (2015), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side exhibition space, a series of small cubicles stretch across the room, pulling the viewer through a banally labyrinthine series of pathways.  The piece, by the Algerian-French artist Kader Attia, is accompanied by a series of televisions, each playing a video of a doctor or other professional in psychological treatment, medical history or ethnography, and each discussing the range of medical and cultural frameworks currently in play in both Europe and Africa.   (more…)

LAABF, via Art Observed

Returning to its annual haunt at the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, the LA Art Book Fair’s fifth edition finds an event in full bloom, spreading across the building’s spacious confines with a broad look at the contemporary world of art books, editions, printmaking, zines, drawing, and even a smattering of DIY clothing design.  Featuring over 300 artists and exhibitors, the show has become a major event for the city’s thriving young arts scene, bringing thousands of visitors to the city each year.

Michael Williams at Karma, via Art Observed

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Ren Hang, via Art Info

Chinese photographer Ren Hang, known for his bold style and provocative nude images, has passed away at the age of 29 of an apparent suicide.  Hang was a self-taught photographer who drew frequent controversy in his home country for his unapologetic depictions of both male and female models, and had previously been arrested a number of times over his work.

Work by Ren Hang, via CNN

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Embarking on a range of highbrow pastiches drawing from 1950’s Americana, flashy cars and bright colors, painter David Salle continues to reinvent his unique sense of the postmodern, and the craft of painting in the contemporary era, taking over Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Marais exhibition space.  Working through a series of paintings on canvas and paper, the show welcomes a renewed perspective on Salle’s combinations of culture, color and gesture. (more…)

Sigmar Polke, Untitled (1985), via Michael Werner

Marking a timely overlap with the artist’s February 13th birthday, Michael Werner Gallery is currently showing a series of paintings from Sigmar Polke’s Pour series, delving into the artist’s relentlessly inventive and exploratory approach to the canvas.  Primarily focused around works from the later years of the artist’s career, particularly the late 1990’s, the gallery exhibition also welcomes a deeper engagement with time, offering several early works drawing on techniques that Polke would later expand on, underlining his expansive and often self-reflective inclinations towards his own body of work.

Sigmar Polke, Pour Paintings on Paper (Installation View), via Michael Werner

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Gustav Klimt,  Bauerngarten (Blumengarten) (1907), via Sotheby’s

Moving away out of the depths of winter and towards the spring market rush, Sotheby’s and Christie’s will kick off their respective sales of Surrealist, Impressionist and Modern works this coming week, marking the first major auctions of 2017, and signaling the first real test of a market dealt the lion’s share of uncertainty in the past six months.  Taking place in London, the week’s sales will offer a first look at how recent shakeups at both auction houses, and attempts to broaden their respective scopes, will fare with works on the block.

Paul Gauguin, Te Fare (La maison) (1892), via Christie’s

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John Armleder, Jasmine West (2017). All images courtesy David Kodansky Gallery.

Now through February 25, the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles hosts new work by Swiss artist John Armleder. This is the artist’s first show in the city in over 15 years and presents an array of wall paintings, several types of painting on canvas, and “installation-based gestures made in response to the overall effect produced by the other objects”, according to the press release. The show coincides with another exhibition of Armleder’s work in New York City at the Almine Rech Gallery. (more…)

Francis Kéré’s design for the Serpentine, via The Guardian

The Serpentine Galleries will host architect Diébédo Francis Kéré (founder and head of Kéré Architecture) as this year’s Serpentine Pavilion designer, making the architect the first African designer invited to work with the British Institution’s annual project.  Kéré, who splits his time between Berlin and his home city of Gando in Burkino Faso, has created a massive elevated canopy, much like the stretching branches of a tree, under which the Serpentine will host its annual series of talks, performances and other events.   (more…)

A rendering of Lumen by Jenny Sabin, via Archinect

The Ithaca-based Jenny Sabin Studio has won this year’s edition of the MoMA Young Architect’s Program with her design Lumen, a robotically-knitted canopy made from photoluminescent textiles that both absorb and diffuse light.  The work, which is made from recycled materials and also features a misting system, will hang over the courtyard of MoMA PS1 this summer, as the museum embarks on its annual Warm Up concert series.   (more…)

Jean-Luc Moulène (Installation View), via Art Observed

To walk through Jean-Luc Moulène’s retrospective at The Centre Pompidou is to traverse through a wasteland of fossils and discarded matter, a history of repurposed and spliced objects placed into an ever-evolving series of dialogues and interactions.  Giving off subtle senses of a dystopian, simulated future, the artist’s sculptures play on a suspended sense of reality, often challenging its role as constructed object or sourced material that plays on a rupture between past, present and future, disrupting easy legibility while staging a site where these divergent sensations are allowed to co-exist. (more…)

Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb, Drawn Together (Installation View)

Drawn Together, a decade-spanning look at the collaborative work of the cartoonist husband and wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb, offers a well-timed opportunity for lovers of the graphic arts at David Zwirner, coinciding with the opening of the New Museum’s Raymond Petitibon retrospective A Pen of All Work.  Although they were individually prominent artists in the graphic arts scene during the course of their careers, Aline and Robert delivered a unique visual and intellectual body of work that both drew on their marriage in the early ‘70s. Later gathered in a series titled Aline and Bob’s Dirty Laundry Comics, which debuted in 1974, the couple’s ongoing collaboration is a statement on marriage, partnership, and dependency, as well as on sexuality and gender roles of the society they lived and worked within. (more…)

Jannis Kounellis, via Art Newspaper

Greek-Italian Arte Povera pioneer Jannis Kounellis has passed away in Rome at the age of 80, according to the Italian Minister of Culture.  “It is a sad day, Kounellis has left us. A master, Italian by adoption, who left a mark on contemporary art,” Minister Dario Franceschini tweeted today. (more…)

Adrian Ghenie, Rest During the Flight into Egypt (2016), via Art Observed

Drawing on a wide range of works from the artist’s recent practice, Pace Gallery is presenting a series of new paintings by Adrian Ghenie, drawing on the artist’s unique approach to both the construction of his canvases, and the position his work takes in its relation to broader timeline of European painting and political history.

Adrian Ghenie, Degenerate Art (2016), via Art Observed

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Louise Bourgeois UNTITLED (detail) (1998-2014), Suite of 8 Holograms © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY.

Throughout the course of her fifty-year career, artist Louise Bourgeois has experimented with a broad span of media, while remaining primarily focused around her foundational sculptural works and works on paper.  That broad range of work is offered a new wrinkle in Holograms, a recently concluded exhibition at Cheim & Read that brings together a body of work never been shown in its entirety in the Chelsea exhibition space’s intimate rear gallery.  Offering a profound elaboration on the artist’s less-known approaches to her work, the show documents Bourgeois’s dialogue with the New York-based fine arts holographic studio C-Projects, resulting in eight holographic photographs blanketed with an alluring red tone, which granted the artist the potential to orchestrate her contemplative, often surreal techniques in this unexpected, yet fertile, medium.

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Boris Lurie, Adieu Amerique (1959-1960), part of the show’s “Inventing Downtown,” section all images via Shannon Viola for Art Observed

Nestled within the heart of Greenwich Village, New York University’s Grey Gallery is showcasing works from a selection of artist-run galleries in the surrounding neighborhoods over the early post-war years of 1952 to 1965.  The exhibition, which encompasses two floors of gallery space, illuminates the period in the New York art scene in which Pop Art and Minimalism were gradually overtaking the influence and impact of Abstract Expressionism. Pieces from eclipsed artists, such as women and artists of color, come to the forefront in particular here, exploring both the experimental approaches and the outcomes of a cooperatively-run sphere of downtown art, and the often overshadowed artists that were a cornerstone of New York’s cultural ascendancy during the era. (more…)

Koak at AlterSpace, via Art Observed

Taking over the spacious halls of the Expo Reforma once again (the first time in the same location as a previous edition), the Material Art Fair opened its doors this Thursday to strong attendance and interest from collectors and attendees.  Embracing an expanded floor plan for the fair without increasing its gallery count, this year’s edition of Material was distinctly walkable, as larger booths meant more space for ambitious pieces and multi-artist selections, a choice that only strengthened the show’s appeal.

Sangree at Yautepec, via Art Observed

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Willem de Kooning, Door to the River (1960), via Art Observed

Embarking on their first exhibition under their shared gallery name, Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy’s new Gorvy Lévy Gallery has opened 2017 with a bang, bringing together a landmark body of paintings by two masters of the medium, Zao Wou-Ki and Willem de Kooning.  Drawing from each artist’s unique gestural abilities and continually inventive bodies of work over the course of their evolution, the show is a major achievement for the gallery, including several major museum loans that underscores Gorvy’s impact on the gallery’s already strong programming.

Zao Wou-Ki, Untitled (1949), via Art Observed

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Wolfgang Tillmans, Eleanor / Lutz, portrait, (2016), Regen Projects. All photos via Art Observed.

As the doors of the Centro Citibanamex opened today in Mexico City, Zona Maco rolled into its 14th edition, bringing a surge in exhibitions, films, and programs to the proceedings of the yearly art fair event in the Mexican capital.  Welcoming galleries from around the globe, the fair’s early-year scheduling offered something of a kick-off to the year’s market events, while offering an indication of current market strength, as well as a spotlight on the Latin American art circuit.

Pedro Reyes at Lisson, via Art Observed

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Katharina Grosse, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

Opening her first exhibition with Gagosian since announcing her representation by the gallery last year, Katharina Grosse has brought a swirling, nuanced body of new works to the gallery’s 24th Street location in Chelsea this month, documenting her enigmatic approach to the painted canvas through a variety of approaches and forms.  Allowing varied layers and lines to intersect, overlap and combine, the artist’s gestural techniques, in conversation with her use of various technologies in the rendering of the canvas, create densely packed spaces of visual information.

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Anselm Kiefer, Walhalla (1992 – 2016), via White Cube

Walhalla, Anselm Kiefer’s latest exhibition at White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey, is a dark, thrilling, and sinister rendering of war and destruction. The show’s title, drawn from Norse mythology, and referring to the final resting place of slain heroes as they were received by King Odin, is scribbled in charcoal above the entrance. “Walhalla” or “final place of rest” is also the title of a neoclassical hall commissioned by Bavaria’s King Ludwig I in 1842, built to honor men of great repute.  Kiefer, for his part, honors not just historical figures, but found objects in tandem, marrying unreality with the show’s surreal juxtapositions: a bed sinks under the weight of a winged boulder; a lightening bolt strikes a bullet-hold wheelchair; a spiral staircase, adorned with rusted dresses, leads to an ambiguous destination.  Notions of mythology and reality are interwoven to provide an intriguing, albeit challenging, spectacle to behold. (more…)