Diane Arbus, Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. (1962), via Art Observed

In 1956, Diane Arbus struck off on a path that would redefine the practice of photography in the 20th Century, adopting a wide-ranging yet equally nuanced eye for subjects and situations in the teeming metropolis of post-War New York City and beyond.  Culling together a selection of these works, including a wide grouping of previously unseen shots from the artist’s personal archives, the Met Breuer has opened a landmark exhibition documenting the artist’s formative years, titled In The Beginning, and spanning the first seven years of her practice as an artist (1956 to 1962). (more…)

Mika Rottenberg, Bowls Balls Souls Holes (Bingo) (2014), via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

Currently on view at Palais de Tokyo for its annual summer exhibition, Argentinian-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg presents a broad selection of works, bringing a series of her expansive installation and video works, alongside new commissions, to the Paris institution’s grounds.  Centered around the artist’s recent Venice Biennale commission, NoNoseKnows, the show runs across a broad variety of the artist’s work over the last decade, exploring themes of production, economy, and the body through her own uniquely madcap lens. (more…)

Wangechi Mutu, Throw (2016), via Art Observed

Blackness in Abstraction is Pace Gallery’s museum level survey of a candid, simple concept—the use of the color black in art since the 1940’s—stemming from the visual impact of its subject color and spreading toward its various pertinent connotations.  Curated by Adrienne Edwards, the selection, featuring twenty-nine intergenerational artists, puts a particular emphasis on monochromes, yet a broad array of media, including video, sculpture and photography, is available in an exhibition that joins in on the highly populated list of conceptually potent summer group shows.   (more…)

Rachel Whiteread, Yellow Edge (2007-2008), via Art Observed

Continuing its slow but steady expansion around the globe, Gagosian Gallery has inaugurated a new exhibition space in downtown San Francisco, opening a spacious and beautifully lit gallery on Howard Street, just across from the recently re-opened SFMoMA.  Taking the opportunity to flex its roster in its new home, the gallery has curated a strong exhibition, Plane.Site, taking intersections of form, practice and material across a variety of artists from the gallery’s expansive representation. (more…)

Kenneth Noland, Adjoin (1980), via Art Observed © Estate of Kenneth Noland/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY www.vagarights.com

Like many of the forms of 20th Century abstraction, the shaped canvas invites both dedication and constant reinvention, a technical fold in the painterly language that allows an artist to work between the picture plane/mark-making relationship of traditional practice, and the more sculptural elements of the art form that have developed alongside critical reappraisals of the medium since the historical avant-garde.  Twisting the canvas and the artist’s gestural vocabulary around edges and into curious re-examinations of space, it has remained a core element of the craft ever since the advent of minimalism pushed a new language of space both within the canvas, and around it.   (more…)

Fine Young Cannibals (Installation View), via Petzel Gallery

Fine Young Cannibals, a summer group show currently up at Petzel Gallery’s 18th street location, is currently undertaking the perpetually ambitious task of examining the current state of painting.  Bringing together work from sixteen different artists, the show poses the question of whether the type of contemporary work sometimes categorized as “Zombie formalism,” borrowing a term first coined by critic Walter Robinson, is purely market driven, or whether the work should be given more consideration.  The pieces on view, which range from challenging formal workouts to coy, momentary operations on canvas, offer an intriguing look at current threads in the painterly discourse, adopting a fairly even-handed approach to the artists on view, and their respective interests.

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Paul Lee, Lung (2016), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Maccarone Gallery in LA, New York-based Paul Lee has brought a series of his enigmatic assemblages to bear on the gallery walls.  The artist, who previously worked between film and photography, has branched out over the course of his career into a wide variety of techniques, formal elements and material engagements, turning his attention here to a minimal selection of objects that allow him to explore a series of visual correlations and systems within Maccarone’s spacious rooms.

Paul Lee, Either Side of the Night (2016), via Art Observed

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Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream Ciudad Juárez, México (2013), via David Zwirner

This month, Francis Alÿs returns to London for his first exhibition in the city in over 15 years, opening his third exhibition of work with David Zwirner Gallery.  Focusing on the intense political history and narco-violence that has plagued the North Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez for over a decade, the artist’s particular investigative style leaves the experience of this corruption and murder-torn border town distinctly inconclusive, a point that only contributes to the already tragic nature of its story.

Francis Alÿs, Untitled (2013), via David Zwirner

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Christopher Knowles, House (2016), via Art Observed

A staple of the summer arts calendar, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center hosted its annual benefit and auction this past weekend, bringing a score of artists, benefactors and revelers to the center’s scenic Long Island property.  Launching the event in collaboration with the Bruce High-Quality Foundation, which seems to be slowly but surely returning to a more concrete, object-oriented practice after several years almost exclusively focused around the BHQFU, the event featured As We Lay Dying, a new selection of works and performances spread out across the Watermill grounds, executed in conjunction with a series of sound installations by composer and artist Anohni. (more…)

Richard Serra, NJ-1 (2016), via Art Observed

Spread across both of Gagosian’s Chelsea exhibition spaces, Richard Serra’s immense spatial investigations have returned to New York City, marking a continuation and expansion of the artist’s already tightly honed sculptural language.  Consisting of a total of only four works, the gallery is showing Serra’s immense rolled steel work NJ-1 in its 21st Street space, while giving over its 24th Street gallery to a trio of Serra’s pressed steel installations, a pairing that sees him returning to his precise visual vocabulary while pushing its expressive limits.

Richard Serra, Every Which Way (2015), via Art Observed (more…)

Alex Katz, Fall (2015), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Continuing his recent surge of output, Alex Katz has brought a new series of landscapes to Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Marais exhibition space.  Bringing his attention yet again to the landscapes of Maine, the artist’s work here presents his calm, subdued style in a fitting conversation with the untouched curves and lines of Northern New England.

Alex Katz, New Landsacpes (Installation View), via Thaddaeus Ropac

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Brian Belott, Untitled (After Guston) (1995), via Art Observed

Gavin Brown’s 291 Grand Street location is playing home to the gallery’s summer exhibition this month, a cunning and often comical play on art history curated by painter Brian Belott.  Inviting a group of artists to take their own improvisational runs on various artists from the last 100 years of painting and sculpture, the show plays on the memory of Glenn Gould, whose own takes on popular figures and music themes equally expressed his own artistic brilliance.

Bobo, The Legendary Impetus Behind Wegmans (2016), via Art Observed

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Roxy Paine, Meeting (2016), via Art Observed

The concept of “the narrative” is one that feels increasingly relevant in a contemporary art context defined in part by gestures and approaches that owe much to the last 60 years of creative practice.  Considering the work in relation to an isolated other, a sort of phantom context that either motivates, grounds or produces the work in question ultimately seems to be one such strategy for re-invigoration of the techniques used in creating the object itself.  This is the strategy through which the current group exhibition at Pierogi’s LES Gallery space, False Narratives, presents its artists, compiling work that not only explores the construction of ulterior situations and modes for the work itself, but equally questions these narratives as unreliable.

Brian Conley, Decipherment of Linear X (2004), via Art Observed

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Sadie Benning, The Crucifixion (2015), via Art Observed

Artist Sadie Benning has returned to New York for a strong summer exhibition this month, filling Mary Boone’s Fifth Avenue location and Callicoon Fine Arts’s downtown space with a series of mixed media pieces that continue a taste for colorful abstraction, formal evasiveness, and cartoonish figures, applied here towards the perception of and reflection on the presence of higher powers.  Viewing the catastrophes and power struggles of modern society through the lens of the divine, Benning has realized a series of images depicting various gods and value systems in her signature blocks of color, lending a loose style to already weighty subject matter.

Sadie Benning, Nature (2015), via Art Observed

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Robert Irwin, Dawn to Dusk (2016), via Art Observed

For the past two decades, Robert Irwin’s installation in the Texas town of Marfa has been something of a distant possibility, a long-rumored project commissioned by the Chinati Foundation, and focused around the dilapidated grounds of the former Fort D.A. Russell hospital where the organization makes its home.  Now complete, the massive installation work, Irwin’s only permanent, free-standing composition, has transformed the space into a placid marker of time, a place where meticulous architectural geometries make masterful use of the West Texas sun and landscape in a prime example of Irwin’s unique sculptural vocabulary.

Robert Irwin, Dawn to Dusk (2016), via Art Observed

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Nairy Baghramian, Scruff of the Neck (LR 30/31/32), All images via Marian Goodman Gallery

Now on view, Marian Goodman Gallery in London is presenting Scruff of the Neck, a series of site-responsive sculptures by artist Nairy Baghramian.   This is Baghramian’s first major solo show in London since The Walker’s Day Off at the Serpentine Gallery in 2010, and continues the Berlin-based Iranian artist’s practice in creating formally inventive sculptures that operate in both physiological and mechanical dimensions, articulating and reflecting the artist’s interest in exploring the space of the body in a non-habitual way. (more…)

Jason Moran, STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 (2015), via Art Observed

In STAGED, on view at Luhring Augustine, artist and musician Jason Moran explores the history of jazz in America, in connection with explorations of the relationship between music, language and communication.    The show, on view at the gallery’s Bushwick location through the end of next week, marks his first solo exhibition, where his work as a musician is complimented by artworks and installations that reflect and expand upon his profound knowledge of jazz and jazz history.

Jason Moran, Run 4 (2016), via Art Observed

Moran is best known as the MacArthur-winning jazz pianist and artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center.  In recent years, however, he has worked with visual artists like Theaster Gates, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Stan Douglas and Adam Pendleton to expand his repertoire beyond the concert hall.  In 2015, Moran debuted sculptures and a series of works on paper at the Venice Biennale, works that now constitute part of STAGED, an ongoing project.

Jason Moran, Run 4, Right Hand (2016), via Luhring Augustine

Negotiating the limits of historical and artistic investigation, the show examines the forces of performance and process that drive at the cultural and social history of jazz, the mingling of physical locations and the immense talents that graced their stages, in conversation across decades. Moran has created two installations based on historic New York City jazz venues that are no longer in existence: the Savoy Ballroom (opened in Harlem in 1926, now known as an emblem of the swing era), and the Three Deuces (a comparatively modest venue located in midtown prominent from the 1930s-1950s). These installations present a mix of both mythical imagining and historically accurate representation of these spaces, in which so much of jazz history took place. Moran’s installations recreate the stages of these institutions sourced from photographs taken at the height of their popularity.  Over the course of the viewer’s time in the show, the piano will strike up into song, or voices will echo out from the Savoy’s ceiling, entering into a ghostly dialogue that transcends easy readings of time and space.

Jason Moran, The Temple (For Terry Adkins) (2016), via Art Observed

Jason Moran, Basin Street Runs 1 and 2 (2016), via Art Observed

Memory and material residue feature prominently in this exhibition. Works are created by making runs on the piano with charcoal-covered fingers, or smearing the hands across piano rolls, as if the practice of musicianship was slurred across easy boundaries or notation, much in the way that Jazz so often upended the logical structure of early 20th Century music.  The smudges and flourishes of these works seem distinctly musical, as if the performative energy of the piece had been captured, a record of musical engagement that is charged with its musicality despite its purely material dimensions.

Jason Moran, STAGED: Three Deuces (2015), via Art Observed

In STAGED, Moran resurrects the material of musical history and negotiates the traces it leaves behind. This exhibition represents a stunning example of the productive and fascinating ways in which history, memory, art and research can intersect.  Though it resists classification under the heading of contemporary art, the sculptural and visual dimension of Moran’s STAGED are striking examples of how the immateriality of music and history can be captured on paper and in space.

— A. Corrigan

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Luhring Augustine]

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, Untitled (2015) © the Artist Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

A Modest Proposal, Hauser & Wirth’s summer exhibition curated by staff members Madeline Warren and Yuta Nakajima, adopts its eloquent title from Jonathan Swift’s namesake essay from 1729.  Recognized for being one of the foremost satirists in English language, Swift vigorously mocked Ireland’s political climate at the time through his sharp wit in various forms of writing—perhaps most famously in the show’s namesake essay, where the writer suggests the poor profit off of their children by selling them as food to the wealthy. (more…)

Colin O’Con, Magma Arch (2015), via Art Observed

In 2012, David Zwirner Gallery launched a novel concept for the summer group show.  Called People Who Work Here, the gallery opened its floors to its own employees, launching an exhibition of works that underscored the depth of talent of those working for the international mega-gallery.  Four years later, the gallery has picked up where the last exhibition left off, opening a new iteration of the show that welcomes over 35 artists to show their work at the gallery’s 19th Street location, just steps away from a massive new Jeff Koons sculpture in the gallery’s open garage exhibition space.  Curated by Marina Gluckman and Jaime Schwartz in gallery’s Research and Exhibitions department, the show takes a playful look at the gallery’s skilled employee based, and offers subtle historical parallels with its own selection of artists.

Joel Fennell, Still-life (after McCobb) (2016), via Art Observed

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Empirical Intuitive Absorption (Installation View), via Art Observed

On paper, the list of artists for Andrea Rosen’s summer exhibition, Empirical Intuitive Absorption, may raise an eyebrow or two: Fernand Léger showing alongside Graham Marks, Matthew Ronay contrasted with Serge Charchoune, all underscored by Terry Riley’s swirling compositions.  Organized by Ronay, whose recent lecture at the Perez Museum in Miami inspired the exhibition, the show takes concepts of intuition and execution as two sides of the same coin, of the replication and creation of natural models through blind aesthetic representation. (more…)

Sam Lewitt, Less Light Warm Words (Installation View), via Art Observed

The news that Swiss Institute would leave its location at 18 Wooster this summer joined a slow but steady list of high-profile departures from SoHo that included Artist’s Space and other longtime residents of the neighborhood.  With this movement from its home soon to be underway, Swiss Institute has turned its attention to a pair of exhibitions dealing with concepts of the institution, infrastructure, and urban locales as it takes its final bow in the space.  Giving the space upstairs over to artist Sam Lewitt’s installation Less Light Warm Words, while German artist Mathis Altmann takes over the gallery’s basement exhibition space, filling it with a bizarre series of pieces that mix the abject with the structural.

Mathis Altmann, Untitled (2016)

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Asger Jorn, Portrait of Odilon Redon (1958), via Art Observed

Despite a remarkably expressive hand and a pioneering range of styles, Asger Jorn’s work has long been somewhat under-appreciated in the United States. The Danish artist and COBRA co-founder’s work ranges across a broad series of compositional techniques and practices that defined him as a founding voice of post-war abstraction, yet his reputation seems almost underemphasized by comparison to his stature in Europe.  It’s this contrast that makes his show currently on view at Petzel Gallery feel like such a well-kept secret, a balanced, well-organized exhibition that spans a wide range of the artist’s practice.  (more…)

Liz Larner, xv (caesura) (2016), via Max Hetzler

Exploring recent trends in the use of ceramics and pottery in contemporary art practice, Galerie Max Hetzler has launched a group exhibition exploring not only current approaches and interests in the ancient art of ceramics, but equally placing it in the context of 20th and 21st Century practice.  Delving into the historical undertones and evolutions of the ceramic craft in the hands of those not originally trained in the medium, the show moves from the early explorations of Lucio Fontana, through to a range of works made in the past five years.

La Mia Ceramica (Installation View), via Max Hetzler

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Wolfgang Tillmans, The State We’re In, A (2015), via Art Observed

Few artists have served as such fervent and enigmatic documentarians of the modern landscape as Wolfgang Tillmans, the German-born, London-based photographer who mixes astute and often empathetic images of nightlife and youth culture alongside his more exploratory projects, mixing natural photos, landscapes, and even surreal images of technological innovations, massive building projects, or the iconography of international commerce.  For his current exhibition at Maureen Paley in London, Tillmans has allowed each of these elements to take their moment in the spotlight, creating an expansive catalog of works that feels remarkably perceptive in the context of current events.

Wolfgang Tillmans, I refuse to be your enemy, 2 (2016), via Maureen Paley

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