Richard Serra, NJ-2 (2016), via Art Observed

Richard Serra’s works are nothing if not an experience; curving, twisting forms that wind the viewer through space, while taking an active hand on shaping the space itself.   Throughout the artist’s career, he has continued to create works that challenge conventional understanding of form, and re-conceptualize notions of gravity in play with his objects.  Working within this familiar domain, Serra is currently presenting three unique, large-scale steel sculptures at Gagosian Britannia Street, London. On view through March 10th, 2017 his new works highlight his mastery of material, and his unique ability to continually pursue a sense of creative vitality.  In some sense, his works here: NJ-2 (previously on view in New York), Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, and Rotate, exist as portals of some sort, gateways into a repositioned experience of space, and the act of viewing work within a given series of physical constraints. (more…)

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa (1964-1965), via Cardi Gallery

The return of Mexico City’s increasingly vital art week this February signals the first wave of 2017’s major fair events, as much of the world’s contemporary art world converges on the sprawling Mexican capital.  Centered around the large-scale Zona Maco fair and its smaller, younger sister fair Material at the Expo Reforma, the week offers a wide range of events and openings accompanying the market-focused proceedings. (more…)

Mark Leckey, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things (2013), via Art Observed

British artist Mark Leckey has brought a dense, timely exhibition to bear on the second and third floors of MoMA PS1 this month, as the artist’s first comprehensive U.S. survey brings a range of perspectives on the pace and content of a digitized life.  Questioning and playfully subverting the varied symbolic systems and technological structures that facilitate the landscape of modern life, Leckey’s exhibition is a fitting opening note of 2017, challenging hierarchies of power and image-making in a time when the consistency and reliability of information has become an increasingly troubled subject.

Mark Leckey, GreenScreenRefrigerator (2008-2016), via Art Observed

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Henry Moore, Warrior with Shield (1953—1954), all images courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Taking a historically nuanced approach towards the vastly influential career of British sculptor Henry Moore, Hauser & Wirth is currently presenting an exhibition of early works on paper by the artist.  Exploring the artist’s graphic practice in the years directly following the end of WWII, the exhibition traces Moore’s ongoing engagement with the world of literature, and his engagement with the broader artistic spheres as he continued to hone and develop his practice.  Organized by the Henry Moore Foundation and curated by the artist’s daughter, Mary, the exhibition traces Moore’s impressive creative spirit, and the ever-shifting craft of an artist continuing to work through wartime. (more…)

Miguel Ángel Cárdenas, Green Couple (1966), via Kelly Lee for Art Observed

Spanning a wide range of pieces, including paintings, video, drawing and assemblages by the Colombian-Dutch artist Miguel Ángel Cárdenas, Andrea Rosen’s current exhibition offers a concise examination of the artist’s formal evolution and shifting compositional interests.  Born and raised in Colombia, the artist moved to Amsterdam during the early 1960’s, offering his own interpretation of the threads of pop and conceptual practice dominating the conversations of European practice during the era.   (more…)

Miles Coolidge, Coal Seam, Bergwerk Prosper-Haniel #3 (2013), via Peter Blum

A pairing of large photo works of coal mine walls with smaller photochemical pieces, Peter Blum’s exhibition of works by Miles Coolidge reinvigorates a dialogue around 20th century inquiries into chemistry, art production, and process imagery, presenting shared sensations of something physically visceral, all realized via inkjet pigment or liquid chemicals, realized in a manner evoking the sublime. (more…)

Jane Freilicher, Window (2011), via Art Observed

The city of New York has always served as a grand subject for artists, its towering skyline spreading its shadow over the Hudson and the minds of its resident artists.  At Derek Eller Gallery this month, three of these artists are the subject of an exhibition examining this same impact on their respective practices, framed in particular by the meditative oil paintings of Jane Freilicher.  The artist is joined by Daniel Heidkamp and Mira Dancy, both of whom offer their own interpretations of modern life, both in the city, and beyond.   (more…)

Hannah van Bart, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

Hannah van Bart’s works serve as particularly intricate visual experiences, often twisting interior and exterior architectural forms around the human body (frequently female), presenting the human figure in a manner that subverts the canvas’s illusions of depth, and the human brain’s understanding of flat surfaces.  Her paintings, presented at Marianne Boesky this month, present themselves as something of a variation on theme as a result, allowing the viewer to trace the artist’s varied explorations of her subjects, and their varied relationships to the world around them.

Hannah van Bart, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

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Matt Johnson, Drywall #2 (Grape Hyacinth M560-3) (2016), via 303 Gallery

Spread out across the floor of 303‘s exhibition on West 21st Street, a wide, often enigmatic series of seemingly cast-off objects sit atop small plinths.  Ranging from crumbled pizza and avocado boxes to stacked bags of concrete to immense towers of interlocking slabs, the sculptures are part of a new series by Los Angeles-based artist Matt Johnson, using the flexible and expressive capacities of wood to create works that vary in their notes of the hyperreal, pathetic and ephemeral in relation to the world around them.  Taking this intersection of historical and cultural reference points as a rich space for operation, the artist’s work conjures a wide range of interpretations and readings through minimal effort.

Matt Johnson, Untitled (4 Stacked Tape Rolls) (2016), via 303 Gallery (more…)

Jean-Luc Moulène, Ce fut une belle journée (Installation View), all images via Chantal Crousel

New work by Jean-Luc Moulène is on view at Galerie Chantal Crousel this month, as the French artist explores a unique body of new works created between 2012 and 2016, the last time the artist exhibited his work publicly.    His fifth exhibition with the gallery, Moulène’s work sees the artist continuing his studied approach to the sculptural form, and history of the field in conjunction with various objects and contexts.

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Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina, Asymmetrical Response (Installation View), via Art Observed

Since 2003, artists Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina have held an ongoing dialogue on contemporary practice, politics and the web, exploring their shared experiences in the early years of broadly accessible internet culture, and the often obscured histories that the era’s technologies and sites (GeoCities, early Javascript, etc.) held.  Working together for the first time, the artist’s have embarked on Asymmetrical Response, an exhibition at The Kitchen that feels like equally like historical research and contemporary study, engaging with a distinct era of internet culture while serving as an elaboration and examination on the conditions that have ultimately played out on the stage of American politics this year. (more…)

Dan Walsh, Fin (2016), via Art Observed

Artist Dan Walsh’s work draws on process as a mode of transcendence, working through canvases through a series of evolving forms and rule-based approaches to the canvas space.  The artist, currently presenting a body of new works at Paula Cooper’s upstairs exhibition space on 21st Street, draws on repetitive, undulating bars of color and expanding forms to create shifting perceptions of space within the closed bounds of the work, or applies similar rules to the deconstruction of the image into a series of lines and dots. (more…)

Kaspar Müller, JMSERADZFGHDSJKFHBYCMXCFNBKLADSHJ (Installation View), all images via Société

Artist Kaspar Müller’s JMSERADZFGHDSJKFHBYCMXCFNBKLADSHJ is now on view at Société through January 31st, 2017, marking the artist’s third solo show at the gallery with a series of multimedia works exploring varied approaches to painting, printmaking and assemblage, all in an aim to represent a full year of the artist’s life.  Gathering together the impressions and experiences of the turbulent months of 2016, the show emphasizes reflection on the incompleteness or incoherence that immediate historical reckonings and complex geo-political situations often imply, particularly when considered from the vantage point of a lone Swiss artists.   (more…)

Mike Kelley, Kandors (Installation View), via Venus Over Manhattan

Venus Over Manhattan is currently presenting a curated review of Mike Kelley’s work in the Kandor series this month, exploring the artist’s work and research into the comic book mythology of Superman, the implications of his origin story, and the broader cultural and psychological frameworks that this story works within and through.  Selecting four of the artist’s works in the series, the show takes a meditative, focused perspective on Kelley’s expansive body of work. (more…)

Liz Glynn, Untitled (after Balzac, with Burgher) (2014), via Art Observed

Spread across two rooms at Paula Cooper’s 21st Street exhibition space, artist Liz Glynn has installed an enigmatic series of sculptures, ranging in form and scale while playing on distinct threads of classical art history, and on the mechanical processes underlying these works.  Continuing a thread of the artist’s practice drawing on critical examinations of the art object, its historical contexts, and the aura conferred on it as a result, the exhibition is a striking, and occasionally comical, examination of function and form in both modern and historical practice. (more…)

Zoe Barcza, Fidelio (2016), via Art Observed

Team Gallery has opened 2017 with a commanding group exhibition, The Love Object, a show curated by Tom Brewer that draws on the writings of Roland Barthes to frame a body of works exploring love and the act of love through a more objective lens, delving into relations of bodies, texts and language as a mode of investigating not only the state of emotional attraction, but equally the frameworks we use to understand these forms. (more…)

Omer Fast, Still from August (2016), All images via Martin-Gropius-Bau.

Now through March 12th, the Martin-Gropius Bau presents the first large solo exhibition of the work of Omer Fast, compiling seven of the artist’s projects from the course of his career, including CNN Concatenated (2000), Looking Pretty for God (after G.W.) (2008), 5000 Feet is the Best (2011), Continuity (2012), Everything that Rises Must Converge (2013), Spring (2016), and a new piece entitled August (2016).  Fast’s art straddles the border between fiction and fact, probing the concept of reality created by one’s own personal narratives versus that created by media or collective narratives, often allowing the two poles to co-mingle and blur together. (more…)

Anthony Caro, Terminus (2013), via Art Observed

In the early years of his career, Anthony Caro worked on a series of twisting, enigmatic depictions of human and animal figures, works that owed much to the spatial interrogations of Picasso and the broader canon of 20th Century European abstraction.  The works are impressive in their understanding of the gestural and conceptual operations of the era’s avant-garde, but for Caro’s career, served in part as a starting point for his own engagement with space, not only on paper or canvas, but in three dimensions.  This engagement with the dual acts of perception and depiction, sight and operation, takes center stage at Mitchell-Innes & Nash this month, as the late artist’s final sculptures are shown alongside some of his first drawings and paintings, a rare opportunity to appreciate the range of evolution the artist reached during the course of his prolific career.

Anthony Caro, First Drawings Last Sculptures (Installation View), via Art Observed  (more…)

Keith Sonnier, Chila (2016), via Art Observed

Continuing his work with Pace Gallery, Keith Sonnier has brought a series of both new and historical works to the gallery’s uptown exhibition space.  His fourth solo show with Pace, Ebo River and Early Works features a range of works pieces by the artist, tracing his continued use of light as a central medium. Sonnier, who works in Bridgehampton, has worked with neon and industrial materials for more than forty-five years, and brings a selection of his works sharing themes of movement and space to the gallery walls.

Keith Sonnier, Lit Circle Red with Etched Glass (1968), via Art Observed

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Stan VanDerBeek, Movie Mural (1968), via Art Observed

If there’s one distinct argument coming out of the Whitney’s expansive exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, it’s a reinforcement of the expression “the story’s in the telling.”  Drawing on a wide range of artists and collectives practicing in the late 20th Century and early 21st, the exhibition takes a decidedly narrative bent on increasingly pervasive communication technologies, and the cultural effects that these forms have left both on human interaction at large, and the art world itself.

Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun (2015), via Art Observed

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Ken Price, McLean (2004), all photos via Hauser & Wirth

Spanning the range of Ken Price’s career and formal interests in equal measure, Hauser & Wirth London is currently dedicating an expansive show to the American artist, from his early work in California on through a series of cups, vases and abstracted forms that underscore his relentless formal invention.  Shown in conjunction with the artist’s famously comical, graphic watercolor works, the show is an impressively deep survey of Price’s work and process.

Ken Price, Untitled (1986)

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Philip Guston, Alone (1971), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

On view at Hauser & Wirth’s temporary 22nd street location, Laughter in the Dark compiles one hundred and eighty pieces created by artist Philip Guston between 1971 and 1975.  Working feverishly at his Woodstock studio in response to the highly contentious, corruption-filled presidency of Richard Nixon, the artist’s work carries exceeding resonance in the post-election landscape of American politics.  Opening just days before Donald Trump took the presidency, the show traces several connections and common threads between Guston’s era and our own, and offers a glimpse at how art and humor may sustain a nation struggling once again with its sense of identity. (more…)

Charles Long, SendingLadyMotherFrame1 (2016), courtesy the Artist and Tanya Bonakdar

Filling the ground floor exhibition space at Tanya Bonakdar with a series of six small-scale sculptures, artist Charles Long returns to the Chelsea gallery for their eleventh exhibition together.  Drawing delicate exchanges of space and form through Long’s careful selection of elements, the show offers a playful, intuitive exploration of sculptural technique, and the conventions that place these objects on view to the public. (more…)

Jean Tinguely, Ballet des pauvres (1961), all photos via Besiana Vathi for Art Observed

One of the pioneering artists in the concept of kinetics and movement in their works, Jean Tinguely is the subject of an expansive retrospective, Machine Spectacle, currently on view at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, charting the artist’s creative trajectory and body of work, and highlighting his fascination with movement and formal progression as the focus, rather than the means of his practice.  Using movement and change as modes of critical inquiry, the works on view underscore Tinguely’s understanding of the modern condition, examining capitalist spectacle and modern culture in conjunction with his work’s internal series of aesthetic decisions.

Jean Tinguely, Le Cyclop РLa T̻te, collaboration with Niki de Saint Phalle (1986)

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