Alex Da Corte outside Frieze, via Art Observed
Frieze New York opened its doors to a misty Wednesday morning on Randall’s Island yesterday, yet the damp weather did little to dull the early rush of VIP’s attendees to the annual art fair, as strong attendance was evident throughout the lanes. (more…)
Lisa Yuskavage, Stoned (2016), via David Zwirner
Celebrating its 5th Anniversary in New York City, Frieze New York will touch down once again on Randall’s Island this week, bringing a strong selection of 202 galleries to the event, alongside a full calendar of events, performances, and talks that has turned early May into a another centerpiece of New York’s already bustling calendar, joined by both satellite art fairs and a series of high-profile gallery openings. (more…)
VigeÌe Le Brun, Baron de Thellusson (1814), via Art Observed
There are few prominent female artists that are as highly revered as Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was in 18th Century France. Falling in love with painting through her father, Louis Vigée, Le Brun went on to work for the aristocracy in Paris during the French Revolution. After painting more than thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette and her family, Le Brun was forced to flee the country over her association with the queen, ultimately working in Italy, Austria, and Russia. Once she settled in Italy, she was elected into the artist group Accademia di San Luca, and moved on to painting portraits of Catherine the Great’s family as well as Stanislaw August Poniatowski, Poland’s last king. (more…)
Patrick Meagher, Natural Artificial Neural Networks (Bethany Hamilton) (2016), Photo by Kayode Ojo
Suggested For You, Patrick Meagher’s solo exhibition at Equity Gallery, takes its name from the “suggestion engines” of social media and e-commerce sites, utilizing personal activity as a generator for financial value. With a wildly colorful CMYK palette, Meagher presents a jumble of inkjet prints and sculpture that address the ways in which the internet mediates our perception of consciousness, and simultaneously reshapes them. (more…)
Alighiero Boetti, Oggi Ventiduesimo giorno dell’ottavo mese dell’anno millenovecentootantotto (1988), via Art Observed
There’s a tangible spirit of enthusiasm in the opening exhibition for Totah Gallery in the Lower East Side, a dual exhibition exploring the work of Alighiero Boetti and Mel Bochner in concert. The pairing, at face value, seems obvious; a pair of artist’s whose roughshod textual inversions made established their roles in the language and semiotic turns in art during the 1970’s. Yet proprietor and principle curator David Totah’s investment in the broader material aspects of both artist’s careers unfolds here into a nuanced exhibition that rewards deeper readings and lingering views on each composition. It’s a point of focus that he will continue at the space, driving research-heavy installs that blend history with personal encounter, always emphasizing exchanges between the artists and his own relationships with them.
Mel Bocher and Alighiero Boetti, Verba Volant Scripta Manent (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)
Mark Wallinger, Ego (2016), via Art Observed
Taking over Hauser and Wirth London for his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Mark Wallinger has brought a nuanced collection of both new and recent works, showcasing the artist’s unique interests in the associative and perceptual variations of one’s encounter with the surrounding world, mixing together explicit psychoanalytic technique with less concrete forms that trace the body’s relation to the urban environment, or the preservation of time through similar modes of engagement. (more…)
Alexis Rockman, Cervid Cervacles (Jacob Riis Beach, Queens) (2015), via Salon 94
Alexis Rockman’s work is expressly involved in the correlations between image and ground, material and subject, often pulling from the biological intersections of human and animal, flora and fauna, or land and water, that define the landscapes of modernity. Shifting this focus to a more microcosmic level, the artist has opened a show of drawings of New York City wildlife, a project that heightens his sense of delicate relations between nature and its inhabitants, on view at Salon 94. (more…)
Tacita Dean, A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds (2015-2016), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
The Marian Goodman Gallery, New York presents ‘…my English breath in foreign clouds’, a comprehensive survey of Tacita Dean’s recent works: a collection of clouds observed from Los Angeles, three 16mm films including the striking ‘Event for a stage’ (2015) and ‘Portraits’ (2016), an intimate one on one with David Hockney smoking in his studio, as well as a photographic series newly printed on Cibachrome paper, ‘Gaeta 2015 – Fifty photographs, plus one’ (2015) which subtly links Cy Twombly’s house and studio in Italy with the poetics of his thinking process.
Ellsworth Kelly, Barn, Long Island (1968), via Matthew Marks Gallery
The late Ellsworth Kelly’s photographic works are the subject of the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in New York this month, offering a unique and alternative perspective on an artist already seen as one of the most influential and prominent abstractionists of the 20th Century. The show, on view at Matthew Marks in Chelsea, showcases over thirty gelatin silver prints, originally taken between 1950 and 1982, the first ever devoted to Kelly’s photographic endeavors. Kelly finished preparing these prints and planning the exhibition shortly before his death on December 27th, at the age of ninety-two. Here, these photographs offer a fitting perspective of the artist’s own aesthetic inclinations, and his unique perspective for the world around him. (more…)
Alex Israel & Brett Easton Ellis, Born and Not Made (2016), all images © Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis; courtesy iStock and Gagosian Gallery Photography: Jeff McLane
Marking one of the art world’s more unique collaborations in recent years, Alex Israel has partnered with writer Brett Easton Ellis to create a series of large-scale acrylic and ink canvases, reveling in the unique iconography and landscapes of Los Angeles. The show, which opened earlier this Winter at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills location, combines Ellis’s distinctively modern texts with Israel’s particular blend of pop-influenced wit, here manifested in sprawling scenes from the varying spheres and vistas of Los Angeles’s shifting landscape.
Alex Israel & Brett Easton Ellis (Installation View)
T. J. Wilcox, Word on a Wing (The Girl) (2016), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
“Staring at the starry field, I ardently hoped…” intones T. J. Wilcox in Word on a Wing (Altar Boy), one of four poems the artist penned for Equivalents, his first exhibition at Gladstone Gallery. On view through April 23rd, the exhibition urges its audience to stare upwards, much in the same way as protagonist of Wilcox’s poems, to break with the conventional exhibition viewing experience. Dispersed throughout the high ceilings of the otherwise empty gallery interior are hybrids of steel, Plexiglass and projected video, glaring in the dimly-lit space. (more…)
Fischli/Weiss, Rat and Bear (Sleeping) (2008), via Art Observed
The Guggenheim has opened its doors to Swiss collaborative Fischli/Weiss for the retrospective show How to Work Better, exploring the pair’s lighthearted, often satirical manipulations of reality and art history through their unique modes of creation. (more…)
Qiu Xiaofei, Vortex (2015), all photos via Rui Tang for Art Observed
Double Pendulum, the first solo exhibition of Qiu Xiaofei in North America, is currently on view at Pace Gallery on 510 West 25th Street. Showcasing a group of new paintings, the exhibition presents the artist’s transition towards an abstract expression through a range of colors that complicate the relationships between foreground and background. (more…)
Hernan Bas, Champagne Corks Bobbed in the Pool That Morning, 2016
Bright Young Things is Lehmann Maupin’s ongoing exhibition for a new body of work by Detroit and Miami-based painter Hernan Bas. Amongst the most particular and earnest contemporary figurative painters, Bas has established himself over the past years as a craftsman of distinctive visual narratives, in which the lavish and relentlessly indulgent daily life of western aristocracy meets the styles of mannerist painting, employing passionate color spectrums and surreal architectural forms. (more…)
Glenn Ligon, What We Said The Last Time (Installation View), all images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.
Artist Glenn Ligon has embarked on an ambitious exhibition schedule this spring, showing at both New York locations for Luhring Augustine this month. The show, which closes next week, runs through a range of Ligon’s body of work. What We Said The Last Time is the Chelsea leg of a two part exhibition, and sees the influential multimedia artist commemorating the literary work of James Baldwin, whose writings had tremendous impact on many other authors and artists. (more…)
Philippe Parreno, Li Yan, (2016). all images Courtesy Gladstone Gallery
IF THIS THEN ELSE marks French artist Philippe Parreno’s first exhibition with Gladstone Gallery, on view at two of the gallery’s New York spaces (21st and 64th street). The shows are separate in theme and bodies of work, yet intricately connected, as Parreno continues his exploration of the exhibition as a temporal experience involving architecture, art and the public. (more…)
A set of Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can prints have been stolen from the Springfield Art Museum in Missouri. “There hasn’t been an incident in any recent history,” says spokesperson Cora Scott. “We are constantly working on improving security measures and find it a challenging balance with keeping art accessible to the community. We appreciate the outpouring of support we are already receiving from our art patrons.” (more…)
Oscar Tuazon, Shelters (Installation View), All Photo credits: © Florian Kleinefenn
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Wordplay is the primary focus in Oscar Tuazon’s current exhibition at Chantal Crousel Gallery in Paris this month, pursuing a constantly folding, nebulous interpretation of concepts around reading, space, text and composition. The show, Shelters, takes its title from the angular structures erected throughout the gallery, accompanied by wall-hangings and utilitarian sculptural works that offer multiple points of engagement and interaction with the viewer. (more…)
Joan Jonas, They Came to Us Without a Word II (2015), via Art Observed
This week, Joan Jonas returned to The Kitchen to present They Came to Us Without a Word,” a reprisal and reimagining of her work from the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year. Working closely with a group of schoolchildren, and featuring a live score by her longtime collaborator Jason Moran, the show takes her initial project, and moves it closer towards a standalone stage production, dwelling on her interests in fragmented media, interrelated histories and meanings, and human understandings of the world. (more…)
Anri Sala, Moth in B Flat (2015), via Art Observed
Spread across three floors at the New Museum, Anri Sala’s current career retrospective is an impressively deep, immersive offering; a lyrical, twisting series of pieces that investigate the phenomena of sound in its relations to cultural, institutional and technological containers.
Urs Fischer, officeguy (2016), via Art Observed
Entering Gagosian’s fifth floor exhibition space on the Upper East Side, one is greeted with something of an exercise in phenomenological affect. Smelling faintly of bacon (the artist stipulated that several slices must be cooked in the gallery space each morning), the space is adorned with sweeping brushstrokes on each of the walls, and topped with a series of aluminum panels, bearing cartoon icons twisted into abstract geometric arrangements. The result is a twisting, surreal environment that feels as surreal as it looks. (more…)
Robert Rauschenberg, Tablet Series (1974)
Currently on view at Luxembourg and Dayan, the group exhibition In The Making seeks to shed light on the often overlooked, yet crucial creative dialogue between the artist and their assistant or assistants in the studio. Organized by Tamar Margalit, the exhibition, which runs through April 16th, unfolds in a manner similar to a family tree, connecting infamous or remote dots in New York art scene after the 1950’s through shared studio spaces, practices, and the informal education process that often occurs in the relationship between artist and their hired team. (more…)
Adam McEwen, Harvest (Installation View), via Art Observed
Embarking on winding pathways through the landscape of modernity, Adam McEwen’s work frequently dwells on the structures and representations of cognition, discovery and intellectual unraveling, mixing consumer objects, banal materials and re-inscriptions of symbolic systems to create interconnected bodies of work that are as mysteriously compelling as they are varied. (more…)
Renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid has passed away at the age of 65. Hadid has been a foundational voice of contemporary architecture over the course of the early 21st Century, including London’s Olympic Aquatic Centre, the Guangzhou Opera House, and the MAXXI in Rome. (more…)
