Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Audience (detail) (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over the full expanse of Hauser and Wirth’s 18th Street location, Rashid Johnson has brought a series of new paintings, sculpture and assemblage to New York for his first gallery show in the city in several years.  The show, which dwells on concepts of escape, anxiety and history, is a concise examination of Johnson’s practice through a range of theoretical approaches and material interests.     (more…)

James Turrell at Dorotheenstadt Chapel (Installation View), via Art Observed

The memorial chapel of the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin is temporarily home to James Turrell’s most recent light installation, a gradually shifting arrangement of colored lights that fills the space with a gentle glow.  Every Monday and Saturday through December, the chapel will fill with light in time with the setting sun and envelope attendees in the otherworldly, immersive experience, as a series of LED lights hidden in the architecture of the chapel turn on as the sun begins to set, and change over the course of the next hours to correspond to the light outside of the space. (more…)

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 10 (1910), via Fondation Beyeler

In terms of the various rejections of painterly convention that defined the early decades of the 20th Century, few schools of thought left the same lasting imprint on the act of painting as “Der Blaue Reiter” (The Blue Rider).  The internationally distributed group of artists, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc chief among them, were early entries in the varied schools of thought and practice that sought to change the aesthetic and political energies of their craft through a combination of dynamic invention in their craft, and iconoclastic, ideological fervor in their writing and organization.  Making the case for a practice divorced from rote representation, the pair of artists instead relied on color and line themselves, affording these essential elements a much broader range of expressive capacity and spiritual evocativeness that would ultimately pave the way for much of the century’s adventures into abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau—Obermarkt with Mountains (1908), via Fondation Beyeler

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Shio Kusaka’s prints at Karma, via Art Observed

For eleven years, Printed Matter’s annual Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 has ushered in the fall art season with its unique and enigmatic selection of small press publishers, gallery bookmakers, artist-run presses, and other producers of small-scale works, antiquities, multiples, and other ephemera.   Offering an intimate and often far more portable selection of works by a wide range of artists and authors, the show, which runs through Sunday, offers a broad snapshot of the further reaches of the city’s arts community, where graphic arts, design, writing and studio practice have one of their few opportunities to mingle and show work in the same context, making for a unique look at New York’s fertile and expanded creative communities.

The David Zwirner Booth, with art by Oscar Murillo and Yutaka Sone, via Art Observed

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Eddie Peake, Head (2016), via Art Observed

Jeffrey Deitch is back in New York.  Following several years of one-off projects, rumored re-openings and pop-up exhibitions, Deitch touched down at his former space at 18 Wooster for good, kicking off his renewed tenure in the building last week with a series of celebratory performances by British-born Eddie Peake.  The artist, whose neon and glitter encrusted works have long been a staple of Deitch’s exhibition program, brought a fittingly enthused atmosphere to the exhibition, as his work Head left a literal mark on the gallery itself. (more…)

Sophia Al-Maria, still from Black Friday (2016). Digital video projected vertically, color, sound; 16:36 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai.

Currently showing on the first floor of the Whitney Museum is Black Friday, the American-Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria’s solo debut in the United States.  Born in the U.S. and educated in London and Egypt, Al-Maria has been a central voice in the Gulf region’s burgeoning contemporary art scene.  At the helm of the art collective Gulf Cooperation Council as a founding member, Al-Maria’s work drives at a concept of “Gulf Futurism,” a term she coined to define the rapidly evolving economic and social landscape of the region.  As a writer, researcher and filmmaker, Al-Maria has been delivering a substantial body of work on oil-fueled wealth and its political/social consequences in the Middle East.

Sophia Al-Maria, still from The Litany (2016). Digital video projected vertically, color, sound; 16:36 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai. (more…)

Taryn Simon, An Occupation of Loss (Installation View), courtesy Park Avenue Armory Image © Naho Kubota

In the midst of the Park Avenue Armory, a series of immense silos tower up from the floor, part of artist Taryn Simon’s landmark performance An Occupation of Loss, which brings a series of funeral mourners from around the globe to the Drill Hall for an overwhelmingly powerful performance meditating on loss, political agency, and common human experience. (more…)

David Hockney, Barry Humphries, 26th, 27th, 28th March (2015), all images courtesy Royal Academy

Currently on view at London’s Royal Academy through the end of the month, artist David Hockney continues his remarkably prolific painterly output, bringing a new series of portraits created at his Los Angeles studio to the British Institution.  Exploring a wide range of sitters through the artist’s particular approach to the genre, the show is both a striking map of Hockney’s own life, and his vivid, tireless approach to his craft.

 David Hockney, Rita Pynoos, 1st, 2nd March (2014)

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Raqib Shaw, Self Portrait in the Study at Peckham (After Vincenzo Catena) Kashmir Version (2015-2016), via White Cube

Raqib Shaw’s work is flush with context, canvases as densely layered with paint as they are with intersections of religious, historical and personal signifiers, drawing on the sprawling figurative techniques of Renaissance reliefs, decorative arts, and portraiture in quick succession.  His are paintings investigating the techniques and histories of these early Western works, while drawing on his own personal experiences to drive and embellish their original iconographies.  Shaw brings a new body of these works in sculpture and painting to White Cube’s Bermondsey location this month, continuing his investigation of 15th, 16th, and 17th Century art through the lens of his own life. (more…)

Ai Weiwei, Standing Figure (2016), via Art Observed

Turning his sense for political inequality and global human rights issues towards the Mediterranean’s current refugee crisis, Ai Weiwei has brought a body of both new works and recent pieces from the past ten years to Athens’s Museum of Cycladic Art, exploring a fruitful intersection of historical and current political contexts in conversation with the artist’s own personal history.  The exhibition, which marks both Ai’s first exhibition with an archeological museum context as well as his first in the nation of Greece, is a well-selected show, which takes direct aim at the Syrian refugee crisis while addressing the history of Greece in subtly powerful ways. (more…)

Mark Grotjahn, Pink Cosco (Installation View), All artworks © Mark Grotjahn. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery. Installation photography: Mike Bruce

Continuing his inquiries into the modes of perspective, constraint and repetition at play in the modes of contemporary art practice, Los Angeles-based painter Mark Grotjahn brings a new series of works to Gagosian Gallery in London, under the title Pink Cosco.  Reprising several of his previous forms, particularly his painted “mask” sculptures, executed in bronze and covered in varied layers and styles of paint, Grotjahn again insists upon the beauty and precision to be discovered in variations on a theme. (more…)

Keith Sonnier, Ba-O- Ba VI (1970), Copyright: Haeusler Contemporary Munich/Zurich Photograph: Wolfgang Stahl

Keith Sonnier‘s work has stood as a landmark voice in the development of abstract languages and explorations in the sculptural form, suspending neon lights over and across varied materials, from strips of cloth to reflective panes of glass, each time utilizing his materials’ internal consistencies to drive at nuanced explorations of light and space.  It should be telling then, that Whitechapel Gallery’s impressive exhibition focused on the artist takes up only three years of his career, examining his creative output from 1968 to 1970 as a foundational point in both his work, and the generation of artists around him. (more…)

Ed Ruscha at Gagosian Gallery, via Art Observed

Few artists have left the sort of impact Ed Ruscha has left on the field of small-press and art book publishing over the course of their career.  Ruscha, whose almost constant output of small books of photography, prints and other printed matter, has consistently redefined both the material and conceptual practice of book manufacturing since the 1960’s.  His early pieces in this medium, executed during the 1960’s and 70’s, helped to redefine its practice, shifting the artist’s book from a limited-edition, rare item, to a mass-produced and widely distributed object that was seen as a step towards the democratization of art through its scalable production.

Ed Ruscha at Gagosian Gallery, via Art Observed

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Vito Acconci, WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976 (Installation View)

Continuing a consideration of its nearly half-century long history in New York City, MoMA PS1 is celebrating its fortieth anniversary with an exhibition dedicated to the early career of artist Vito Acconci, a pioneer of body and performance art in the United States during the 1960’s and 70’s that drove forward new concepts and perceptions of art practice while PS1 was similarly expanding the concept of the exhibition space.  WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976 focuses on Acconci’s works from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—the years that proceeded the opening of PS1 as an experimental, non-profit art center under the guidance of Alanna Heiss. (more…)

Liu Wentao, Untitled (2015), via White Cube

Taking over the full two-floor layout of White Cube’s Mason’s Yard exhibition space, the gallery’s summer exhibition the world is yours, as well as ours explores the richly diverse and energetic forms of Chinese painterly abstraction, considering its format beyond facile classifications as a corollary to Western technique.  Delving into the cultural histories and forms of Chinese painting over the past centuries, White Cube presents the abstraction of China’s current crop of artists as a deeper engagement wth a range of practices between modernism and more traditional approaches to the painterly surface.  The show places Taoist thought at its base, exploring how the appreciation of abstract form in Chinese culture more broadly has left the door open for diverse experiences and engagements with the canvas in the modern era. (more…)

A.R. Penck, Elektrischer Stuhl (1960), all photos via Osman Can Yerebakan

Climbing up the winding staircase of Michael Werner Gallery’s Upper East Side townhouse and entering the exhibition space, one is immediately faced with Elektrischer Stuhl (Electric Chair), a painting of a man being executed before a group of mourners.  The work, by Neo-Expressionist painter A.R. Penck, perhaps best embodies the artist’s combination of abrasive political gesture with his particular sense of aesthetic operation.  Early Works, on view at the gallery through September 3rd, outlines the body of Penck’s work in Dresden in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the influential artist suffered under the harsh social and political climate prevailing in East Germany.  It was during this period that the artist was the subject of an embargo by the government on his works, ultimately leading him to flee his hometown for Cologne, where he received a marked degree of critical and commercial acclaim.

A.R. Penck, Standart-Modell/CCCP-Studie (1972-73) (more…)

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 1B Bild mit rotem Kreuz (Merzpicture 1 B Picture with Red Cross) (1919), via Hauser and Wirth

Joining in the celebration of the Dada Movement’s 100th birthday this year in Zürich, Hauser and Wirth gallery has selected a premier group of works by on of the style’s prominent masters, bringing together works by Kurt Schwitters, and simultaneously placing them in conversation with pieces by Hans Arp and Joan Miró.  Examining the personal relationships and shared formal interests over the course of each artist’s work in the first half of the 20th Century, the exhibition is a fascinating blend of historical background and visual tour-de-force, bringing together a rare series of works through a less frequently explored series of connections.

Hans Arp, Geometrische Collage (Collage géometrique) (1918), via Hauser and Wirth

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Danny Lyon, Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville, 1966 (1966), via Whitney Museum of American Art

Exhibited at a critical moment of heightened tensions regarding civil liberties in America, Danny Lyon’s retrospective exhibition transforms the Whitney’s fifth floor into a space for cultural reflection.  Set against a backdrop that confronts pertinent issues regarding violence, incarceration, and inequality, Lyon’s work chronicles a complex photographic history of the racial, social, and political issues that are currently challenging the United States anew in the 21st Century.  The serious tone of his work is met with the intimacy in which he engages with his subjects, offering a sense of hope while putting a deeply human face on subjects who are marginalized and oppressed. (more…)

Jessica Diamond, No Money Down (1986/2016), via Art Observed

Taking the currently fraught political climate in the U.S. as a starting point for a deeper reflection on national and local history, James Fuentes’s summer group show offers a fitting cultural parallel in the early years of the 1980’s in New York City.  Charting the era’s conservative economic and foreign policies, the exhibition, curated by Andrew J. Greene & James Michael Shaeffer, brings together works by Nayland Blake, Jessica Diamond, Peter Halley and Robert Morris executed between 1982 and 1984.  Recording and critiquing a range of social and economic crises during the era, the show is a subtly resonant look at the deeper histories of cultural critique in the city, and the role artists have played in this process.

Peter Halley, Yellow Cell with Conduit (1982), via Art Observed

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Adam Pendleton, Untitled (code poem) (2016), via Public Art Fund

The Public Art Fund’s The Language of Things, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, takes on a challenging prompt this summer, seeking to communicate with the public through works that utilize language and linguistic themes in one of the most congested and sonically dense spaces in the city, just outside of City Hall downtown.  Benjamin’s assertion that “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake in language” further deepens this show’s proposed dialogue, looking at complexities of language as a utilitarian, communicative tool, to emphasize Benjamin’s conclusion that “it is in the nature of each one to to communicate its mental contents.” (more…)

Cao Fei, Whose Utopia (2006), courtesy MoMA PS1

Currently on view at MoMA PS1, Cao Fei presents her first ever solo museum exhibition in the United States.  The artist’s practice, while rooted in video, performance and photography, takes on a sort of ever-shifting, fluid mode of inquiry into the modes of reality and fantasy in the 21st Century, underscoring human desire’s inextricable links with its economic and material bounds.  Presented here, the show’s slowly unfolding range of interests, from bizarre diorama work to her several year engagement with Second Life, to a series of intuitive and empathetic portraits of modern subcultures, traces the Chinese artist’s ability to navigate multiple modes of understanding and existence in the face of an increasingly mechanized modernity.

Cao Fei, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007-2011), Courtesy MoMA PS1

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Quick Light (Installation View), all images courtesy Serpentine Gallery

Quick Light, an exhibition of recent paintings by American artist Alex Katz has taken over the Serpentine Galleries in London this summer, showcasing the artist’s expressive range and signature style through September 11th, 2016.  The exhibition centers in particular on Katz’s landscape paintings or “environmental landscapes,” which seek to envelope the viewer in a single encounter with the sublime.  Large-scale canvasses, often depicting human and natural forms, fill the gallery space, a particularly well-selected body of work that addresses both the artist’s long history and the unique grounds of the Serpentine itself (more…)

Keith Sonnier, Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent (1970), via Art Observed

Celebrating the forty year history of its residency at the school building in Long Island City, MoMA PS1 has launched an impressively expansive exhibition reflecting on the history and continued vitality of the alternative art spaces movement in both its impact on the history of 20th Century art, as well as its resonance in the field today.  Culling together a diversely focused but attentively arranged group of artists, FORTY presents a series of studies on the voices of the 1970’s New York art community, and its broader connections to the changing face of contemporary art during the era. (more…)

Marco Barrera, Gaze (Exchange Rate) (2016), via Art Observed

The current group show at Moran Bondaroff is a swirling, surreal exercise in sculptural gesture, compiling a trio of uniquely-motivated artists whose works play on the intersection of materials, contexts, and conceptions of the human body.  The show, which brings together new works by artists Agathe Snow and Marco Barrera in conjunction with a series of historical works by the Irvine, CA-based artist George Herms, emphasizes connections in the capability for everyday objects to escape their quotidian bounds by way of addition and juxtaposition.

Eternal at Moran Bondaroff (Installation View), via Art Observed

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