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…)

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1271 Scribbles 12 (2007), all photos via Quincy Childs for Art Observed

The Drawing Center in New York is currently presenting selections from the collection of Sol LeWitt, offering a glimpse into the creative inspirations of one of the Post-War era’s central figures.  Showcasing an array of memorabilia and art including Japanese woodblock prints, hand-colored tourist photographs, and letters from his contemporaries, the show traces a lifetime of intellectual exchange and exploration by the pioneer of minimalist and conceptual practice. (more…)

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 19 (1921), via Art Observed

The Guggenheim Museum has opened its doors on an expansive exhibition of work by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, exploring the Bauhaus member’s impressive contributions to the development of 20th Century Modernism. Combining his explorations in sculpture, painting, film, photography and even installation, the exhibition places the artist’s enthusiasm for technological progress into conversation with the present day. (more…)

Tracey Emin, Resting, 2015 gouache on paper 8.78 x 11.89 inches Photo © George Darrell. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2016. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.

Stone Love defines a definitive next step for Tracey Emin, the already prolific artist whose now-three-decade long career has delivered a particular example of artistic sincerity and introspection throughout a wide range of artistic forms and formats.  Constantly returning to her own ambitious urge for self-discovery and contemplation, Emin’s body of work translates pristine and emphatic human instincts through her own intuitive lens. Referring to the first sentence in David Bowie’s 1972 song Soul Love, the exhibition considers alternate possibilities for love—arguably the most complex yet by far the most undertaken subject in art and literature.

Tracey Emin, Another way to Think of You, 2015 embroidered calico 89.76 x 90.94 inches Photo © George Darrell. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2016. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.

Tracey Emin, You were here like the ground underneath my feet, 2016 acrylic on canvas 60.24 x 83.86 inches Photo © George Darrell. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2016. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.

As the news in the run-up to this exhibition often dwelled on, Emin recently married a stone near her coastal studio (a scene depicted in one of her pieces), which she sees as a permanent object that will serve as a source of eternal fortitude. “Being in love with a stone is monumental”, Emin has said, walking through the exhibition of her signature neon texts, gouache on paper drawings and bronze sculptures, as well as some embroidery.  Stone renders a land of possibilities where loving singlehandedly nourishes its subject, unrestrained by societal or physical norms for desire.  As much as humanistic and philosophical, Emin’s narrative for the exhibition conveys her personal journey and her current emotional map as an artist and human being.

Tracey Emin: Stone Love Installation view, Lehmann Maupin, Photo © George Darrell. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2016. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.

Emin, stripping the restraints and impositions of physical love between two parties, approaches the phenomenon as an endeavor and, to some degree, a duty, waiting to be fulfilled.  Loving to love, as its own virtue, celebrated by David Bowie, leads Emin’s work towards an elimination of a desired object of affection.  Yet at the same time, the stone, appears in its original definition, as well as allegorizing transcendence beyond what is tactile and mundane.

Tracey Emin: Stone Love Installation view, Lehmann Maupin Photo © George Darrell. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2016. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.

Reading Just Let Me Love You in Emin’s own handwriting, the namesake neon piece is in conversation with bronze sculpture of an abstracted female figure, with her vulva facing the artist’s declaration of unrequited love, as if building an ephemeral bound between words and images both catering to her acclimation to an inner journey rather than an externalized ideal. Channeling one of her most iconic works, Everyone I’ve Slept With (1963-95), the show also includes a series of embroidered illustrations of female forms, which Emin appliqués mostly based on photographs of her nude self in various positions.  Tying the meticulous process of knitting with equally determined efforts invested in carnal infatuation and self-awareness, these large scale calicos deepen the dialogue around the mediative and eventually fruitful state of embarking on a journey—be it embroidering or falling in love.

Tracey Emin: Stone Love is on view at Lehmann Maupin through June 18, 2016.

Tracey Emin during the walkthrough of her exhibiton Stone Love at Lehmann Maupin, Photo: Osman Can Yerebakan

— O.C. Yerebakan

Related Links:
Lehmann Maupin [Exhibition Page]
W Magazine [Tracey Emin Talks Her Past and Marrying a Stone (Literally)]

Tony Cragg, Hardliner (2013), via Thaddaeus Ropac

British sculptor Tony Cragg has brought a series of 25 new sculptural works to Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Pantin Gallery, showcasing the artist’s impressive range of skills in steel, bronze, wood, fiberglass, and even stone.  The show, which capitalizes on his major exhibition at St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, underscores Cragg’s relentless material and sculptural explorations, and offers a continuation of more recent work to counterpoint the more historical thread found in the Russian exhibition. (more…)

Gert & Uwe Tobias. Untitled (2016) via CFA Berlin

Now through June 11, CFA Berlin presents a series of new work from Gert & Uwe Tobias, drawing from a rich tapestry of visual and historical references, including Dutch florals, contemporary painting and medieval art forms, where surrealism meets prehistory. The twin brothers, born in Brasov, Romania and now working in Cologne, center their work in large part on their Romanian heritage, weaving together this legacy with graphic design, and modern abstraction.  Horror and the grotesque are frequent themes of the brothers’ work, revealing an easy linked forged between the hybrid forms found in Surrealism and those featured in myth and legend.   (more…)

Anish Kapoor, She Wolf (2016), via Art Observed

Currently at Gladstone Gallery’s Chelsea locations, artist Anish Kapoor has brought a selection of recent works for Today You Will Be in Paradise, an exhibition that showcases the artist’s particular application of sculptural language towards revealing inquiries of perception, memory, and the body itself.  Exercising his practice across a broad framework of wall-mounted and free-standing arrangements of visceral, often hyper-realistic pieces, Kapoor’s pieces turn extremely personal moments into opportunities to explore broad human themes.

Anish Kapoor, Three Internal Objects (2013-2015), via Art Observed

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Jenny Saville, Ebb and Flow (2015) © Jenny Saville. Photograph by Ashmolean Museum Photo Studio

Jenny Saville is known for her large-scale oil paintings of bodies in flux, and associated with flesh in all its forms: living, dead, young, old, human and animal. There is a fascination with the mass, weight, and transmutability of the body that runs throughout Saville’s impressive and applauded career, and now, Gagosian’s London space is presenting Erota, an exhibition of new drawings by the artist that equally represent a continuation of themes, questioning of previous work, and a departure into new territory. (more…)

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Metro Pictures, Cindy Sherman has installed a series of new photographs, portraits that mark her first new body of work in five years. The pieces, exploring more nuanced cultural frameworks at play in Hollywood image production, feel like a fitting conclusion to a long-running body of work, while expanding Sherman’s critical dialogue with the image through a studious selection of figures and contexts.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

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