Anselm Kiefer, Für Velimir Khlebnikov: Die Lehre vom Krieg: Seeschlachten (2004-2010), via Phillips

The first of June’s Contemporary Art sales in London has wrapped up in London this evening, as Phillips concluded its 20th Century and Contemporary sale to mixed results and a final sales total of £11,873,000, within the evening’s sales estimate.  The 31-lot sale saw 10 of its works go unsold, while a handful of other pieces brought impressively strong prices, ultimately casting ominous, albeit foggy indications of the European market in the wake of the Brexit vote.

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Nicole Eisenman, Under The Table 2 (2014), via Art Observed

On view through this past weekend at the New Museum, painter Nicole Eisenman was showing a striking exhibition of pieces on the third floor, spanning the artist’s output over the past several decades, and underscoring her impressive creative investigations into the modes of sculpture and painting.

Nicole Eisenman, Hanging Man (2016),via Art Observed

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Yayoi Kusama, Chandelier of Grief (2016). All images via Victoria Miro.

Now through July 30th, Victoria Miro in London is presenting new works by Yayoi Kusama, spanning the gallery’s three locations and waterside garden across the British capital.  The work featured here was created exclusively for this show, including the artist’s iconic pumpkin sculptures, immersive mirror rooms, and her ongoing My Eternal Soul series. Across the work exhibited, the artist’s ongoing investment in themes of the infinite and the sublime is explicit. (more…)

Imi Knoebel, Bild 16.02.2016 (2016), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Comprised of 22 new artworks, Imi Knoebel’s current exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Marais exhibition space offers a new direction for the German painter, whose decades of practice in the intersection of color field painting, shaped canvases and minimalist serialism offer a new point of departure for a series of loosely rendered, yet exceptionally vital new works, pushing his honed stylistic practice towards new experiments within the art historical lexicon. (more…)

Jean Dubuffet, Late Paintings (Installation View), all images via Timothy Taylor

Now through July 2, London’s Timothy Taylor Gallery presents an exhibition of Jean Dubuffet’s late works, featuring paintings, sculpture, and works on paper completed from the late 1960’s through to the 1980′.  Works from his L’Hourloupe cycle, pieces from the Théâtres de mémoire, as well as a selection from the Psycho-sites, Mires, and Non-Lieux series join together in the gallery space, marking the artist’s transition from traditional painter to sculptuor and conceptual architect in the late years of his prolific career. (more…)

Walter de Maria, Truth/Beauty series (detail) (1993 – 2016), © The Estate of Walter De Maria, Photo Joseph Asghar. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Comprising two separate series created by the artist during the course of his career, Gagosian Gallery on London’s Britannia Street has opened an exhibition of work by renowned minimalist Walter de Maria, opening a dialogue within the artist’s own body of work across decades of practice, and through a range of materials that underscore the artist’s particular approach to questions of space, subjectivity and time. (more…)

Amedeo Modigliani, Madame Hanka Zborowska (1917), via Christie’s

Early warnings about this week’s sales in London seem to have some weight to them following the sales outcome at Christie’s this evening.  The auction house’s summer Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale wrapped in London tonight with a dreary outing, closing the 36-lot auction to the paltry tune of £25,612,500, with almost one third of the works offered failing to find a buyer.

Claude Monet,  L’Ancienne rue de la Chaussée, Argenteuil (1872), via Christie’s

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Amedeo Modigliani, Jeanne Hébuterne (Au Foulard) (1919), via Sotheby’s

Sotheby’s logged its entry in the Impressionist and Modern Evening sales last evening, with a healthy, brisk sale that reached a final tally of £103,280,000, beating initial estimates with only three works unsold.  Despite a small selection of lots, the evening’s offerings saw healthy competition, and several top lots that commanded hefty final prices, even if prices tapered off quickly after several marquee works.

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Sigmar Polke, Rotter Fisch (Red Fish) (1992), via Sotheby’s

As the sales and events surrounding Art Basel begin to wind down this weekend, many collectors will turn their attention to London, where two weeks of auctions will mark the final major sale of the first half of 2016.  Spread across five auctions, the sales seem notably subdued in comparison with last month’s attempts to shoot the moon in New York, perhaps in part due to concerns about Britain leaving the EU blunting collectors’ willingness to invest in the pound, yet strong works and seemingly hearty interest may manage to keep the them interesting. (more…)

Nicole Eisenman, Weeks on the Train (2015), via Art Observed

Blurring together vastly divergent styles, historical epochs and scenes, painter Nicole Eisenman’s work has defined itself as some of the era’s most stylistically inventive, moving from hyper-stylized abstraction and almost absurdist arrangements through to impeccably rendered portraiture and often lyrical arrangements of figures in space.  Offering a counterpoint to the artist’s current exhibition at the New Museum, Anton Kern is currently playing home to a series of new works by the artist, underscoring the artist’s ever-changing stylistic approaches, and aesthetic interpretation of image-making in the 21st Century.

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Haegue Yang, Sol LeWitt Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times, Split in Three (2015), all photos via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

With the early hours of Sunday morning comes the last sales of Art Basel’s flagship fair in Switzerland, as dealers begin to close up shop and begin their treks home from the Messe Basel, beginning the more relaxed summer months.  This recess begins on something of a high note, as the contemporary market pushed onwards in the face of foreboding predictions for a weak buying market.  Sales remained consistently strong across the course of the event, with a number of major sales occurring both in the early hours of the VIP Previews (which saw an impressive line of collectors outside the exhibition, patiently standing through the rainy weather), onwards throughout the rest of the week.

Yoshitomo Nara, MIA (2016)

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Martin Creed, Work No. 2721: Shutters Opening and Closing (2016), via Art Observed

The long-awaited Martin Creed retrospective at the Park Avenue Armory has opened its doors, bringing an almost exhaustive survey of the artist’s work to New York for one of the summer’s more peculiar, and ultimately, more striking exhibitions.  Pulling from the artist’s 20+ year career, the exhibition offers a fascinating and adventurous exhibition, that asks as much from the viewer as it presents, allowing free-roaming exploration and rewarding it with a range of shocks and surprises.

Martin Creed, Work No. 548 (2006), via Art Observed

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Meg Webster, Solar Grow Room (2016), via Paula Cooper Gallery

Currently on view at Paula Cooper’s West 21st Street space, Meg Webster is currently presenting a selection of new works, continuing her focus on sculptural works that encourage viewer participation while engaging subtly with the space around it.  In Chelsea, Webster has injected the pristine gallery with natural elements, fostering a deeper sensory examination of the spatial and relational interactions among viewers and the space they pass through, in turn revealing the always-existing power and beauty of nature through the individual’s relationship with it, and within it. (more…)

Bernard Frize, Navia (2016), all photos via Art Observed

The work of Bernard Frize is something of a painterly exercise in contradictions, playing with sensations of an endless void against dualities of hindrance and motion, creating complex dialogues over the surface of the canvas.  Lustrous veils of color plunge to the edge of the frame, highlighting its periphery in a vibrant glow. Voluminous swirls and blends of color challenge the often opaque surfaces with deeper dimensions, hints of infinite planes of white or black beneath its surface, that offer his pieces a sense of weight and depth far beyond their material capacities. (more…)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Michael Jenkins) (1991) Paint on wall Dimensions vary with installation

All photos courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation Photo: Pierre Le Hors

At Andrea Rosen Gallery, the first leg of a three-part exhibition commemorating the legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres concentrates on a single thread of the late artist’s expansive oeuvre.  Each one of his portraits—often times installed at their subjects’ residences—depicts a selected subject through a selection of important or trivial happenings loosely attached to the subject’s biography.  Placed on high ends of the gallery walls, right before ceilings begin, the portraits complicate hierarchies between climaxes and details in one’s lifespan, while challenging the methods of displaying art.  Curated by Julie Ault and Roni Horn, this current installment is set to continue with exhibitions at Massimo De Carlo in Milan and Hauser & Wirth in London this month, weaving an intercontinental dialogue through other prominent threads in the Cuban-born artist’s body of work. (more…)

Sam Pulitzer, Untitled (2012), via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

Offering a more focused counterpoint to the impressive sprawl of the Art Basel fair nearby, the LISTE Art Fair has also opened its doors for its 20th anniversary edition, bringing trademark selection of smaller galleries, curatorial projects, and a more relaxed, familiar atmosphere to the bustle of Fair Week in Basel, Switzerland.  Having opened its doors to VIPs this Monday, LISTE has already drawn impressive praise and attention for its offering this year. (more…)

Art Basel, via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

The doors have opened on the 46th edition of the annual Art Basel fair in Switzerland, marking another flagship entry in the ever-growing fair’s yearly calendar of events.  Capping its first round of early previews today, the fair, which opens to the public on June 16th, has put forward a well-balanced event this year, mixing historical perspective with a series of eye-popping installs and strong selections.

Ai Weiwei, White House (2015), via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

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Kevin Beasley, Untitled (Shrink) (2016), via Casey Kaplan

As summer gets into full swing, the art world once again flocks to the Swiss city of Basel for the flagship entry of the Art Basel fair, which once again sets up shop at the expansive Messe Basel, near the banks of the Rhine.  This year’s edition continues the event’s reputation for capitalizing on the space and scale afforded it in the Messe’s impressive exhibition halls, bringing 280 galleries from around the globe, and showing over 4,000 artists inside its spacious confines. (more…)

Jasper Johns, Untitled (2014), via Art Observed

Spanning the last thirty years of his career, Jasper Johns’s monotypes make up a fascinatingly diverse, unique body of works, one that forms something of a microcosm for the rest of the artist’s body of work.  Themes appearing throughout Johns’s career; jagged minimalism, number systems, and the incorporation of the art historical into various structures of subversion or reinterpretation, are presented again through a selection of etched prints across a wide variety of hues, subjects and approaches.  This body of work is the subject of the artist’s current exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, following his continued exploration of the monotype as an expressive and diversely capable medium from 1983 to the present day.

Jasper Johns, Untitled (2015), via Art Observed

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Bjarke Ingels Group Serpentine Pavilion, via Serpentine Galleries

The annual Serpentine Galleries pavilion commission is a rare architectural project predicated on immediate and widespread public use while also encouraging formal inventiveness to the furthest possible degree.  Each year’s works, laid out on the grounds of Kensington Gardens, function as a site for talks, performances and other events, while also as a showcase for some of the brightest talents in contemporary architecture. (more…)

Stephen Prina, Carl Sandbug, Born: January 6, 1878, Galesburg, Illinois, Died: July 22, 1967, Flat Rock, North Carolina (2015), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Stephen Prina’s eighth solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery pulls its audience into an ephemeral territory, where the fluidity of one’s memories engages with the tactile presence of objects.  Through a highly introspective narrative, the exhibition pays homage to Prina’s hometown of Galesburg, a small city in Illinois where the artist grew up.  Currently based in Los Angeles and Cambridge, Prina elaborates on the act of remembering his home, while seeking creative stimuli in the mundane details of the day to day, to reach broader conclusions on the human condition and artistic endeavor.  The works on view are singular, autonomous artifacts, eventually converging in focus through Prina’s grand orchestration of converging narratives that twist the past through a contemporary lens.   (more…)

Jordan Wolfson, Colored sculpture (2016) All images are Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London and David Zwirner, New York.

On view at David Zwirner’s 525 West 19th street location is Jordan Wolfson’s most recent investigation of the sculptural genre in the age of new technology.  Following 2014’s exceptionally received and widely seen (Female Figure), the voluptuous and arresting female animatronic that Wolfson created at a professional Hollywood film studio, his current exhibition introduces Colored sculpture: a larger-than-life, red-haired teenage boy suspended from a mechanic structure that controls his movements and often violently degrades his body.

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Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Marionette Maker (2014), all photos via Luhring Augustine Gallery

The Canadian artist duo of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, known for their immersive installations mixing deeply sculpted sonic environments with an often theatrical narrative, are currently presenting their fourth solo exhibition with Luhring Augustine this month with two recent works: The Marionette Maker (2014) and Experiment in F# Minor (2013).  (more…)

Gert and Uwe Tobias, Untitled (GUT / 2489), via Art Observed

Artists Gert and Uwe Tobias return to Team Gallery in New York for a show of new drawings and sculpture this month, bringing with them a new variant on their already prolific output of work negotiating the spheres between the folklore of their native Romania, and the context of Western art production that their own work is situated within.   (more…)