Chris Burden, Buddha’s Fingers (2014-15), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Spanning two uptown locations of Gagosian Gallery is a series of recent works by the late artist Chris Burden, who passed away last year at age of sixty-nine soon after his large scale New Museum retrospective. Burden, who started his career with avant-garde performances that played a significant role in furthering body art on a global scale, alongside his other American peers Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, then shifted towards idea-based practice later in his career.  Challenging in terms of execution rather than physical fortitude, these projects Burden undertook emphasized a concretized, material practice. (more…)

Diana Thater, Knots and Surfaces (2001), via Art Observed

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has invited Diana Thater to open her first U.S. retrospective, currently on view in the museum campus’s Art of the Americas building, and pulling a focused, yet nuanced exploration of much of Thater’s early work, tracing the intersections of her various aesthetic and conceptual interests as they converge in her environmental installations here. (more…)

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Captain America Drawing in Ten Parts 41.17) (2008–09) (part three), Photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio © Mark Grotjahn

After exhibiting this body of work at Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo in 2010, Gagosian Gallery is presenting Mark Grotjahn’s ten part surrealist drawing exercise Untitled (Captain America).  The title of this show is a play on the original comic book series, where Captain America was intended to fight against the Axis Powers during World War II.  Seventy years later, the motif of Captain America is still significant and commonly used as a symbol of fighting for the American Dream.  (more…)

LAABF, via Thisbe Gensler for Art Observed

This weekend, MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary space in Little Tokyo opened its doors again for the West Coast edition of the rabidly popular Printed Matter Art Book Fair.  The fourth iteration of the fair in the sunny metropolis, this year’s event saw strong attendance, and benefitted from a staggered scheduling that avoided the bustle of Los Angeles Art Week this past month.   (more…)

Zhu Jinshi, Ten Object 2 (1990), all photos via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Culling together a body of work spread over the past 25 years of the artist’s practice, Blum & Poe’s 66th Street New York location is currently presenting a show by Zhu Jinshi, offering an intriguing and wide-ranging perspective on the artist’s historical development. (more…)

Brian Belott, Baarpyp (2015), via Art Observed

Walking into the doors of Moran Bondaroff in LA, the viewer is immediately greeted with a swarm of colors, massive chunks of colorful canvas often swelling into distended forms that only hint at their original, rectangular shape.  These pieces, the work of Brooklyn-based painter Brian Belott, make up his first exhibition in Los Angeles, as well as his first with the gallery.   (more…)

Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture (描法) No. 15-76 (1976) photo courtesy White Cube (George Darrell)

Considered one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, White Cube’s Mason’s Yard is currently presenting the work of Park Seo-Bo in his first solo show in the UK.  Best known for his Ecriture series of paintings, which he began in the late 1960s, the artist’s work in the series has allowed for his body, mind and creative process to merge together to form works that fully breathe out into space and time.  This exhibition traces the origins of these works, featuring 16 paintings made between 1967–81. (more…)

Peter Doig, The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991), via Christie’s

The first week of 2016’s Contemporary Art auctions concluded this evening, as Christie’s capped a solid sale of works that further disrupted any easy conclusions on a widely rumored market adjustment.  All in all, the sale saw a strong sell-through rate, as only 7 of the sale’s 61 lots did not find a buyer, bringing in a final tally of £58,099,000.  Buyers seemed particularly eager over the course of the night, clamoring for a sizable portion of the work on competitive bids and rapid back and forth between buyers and Jussi Pylkkanen (cheerfully referred to as “good-old-days” bidding by WSJ’s Kelly Crow), pushing the sale quickly through its procession of works. (more…)

Lucian Freud, Pregnant Girl (1960-61), via Sotheby’s

The London Contemporary Auctions continued its mixed run this week, as Sotheby’s concludes this evening’s entry to mixed results.  The 59-lot sale saw 11 works go unsold,not to mention a number of high-profile withdrawn lots, bringing a final tally of £69,461,000, a figure that sat squarely within the auction house’s presale estimates.  Of particular note in the early moments of the sale was the withdrawal of the evening’s star Gerhard Richter lot, a move that left the auction house with a considerable gap in its initial estimates.  Even so, the auction room was practically buzzing as the sale got underway.

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Piero Manzoni, Achrome (1958), via Phillips

The week of Contemporary Sales is now underway in London, after Phillips concluded its first major auction of 2016, its “20th Century and Contemporary Art,” to uneven results this past evening, seeing 9 of 43 lots going unsold, and a final total of £24,590,500.  Sales were decidedly reluctant this evening, despite the sale’s strong sell through this evening.  Many works lingered at low estimate, or only achieved the low with the added premium and fees, a note that underscores realistic estimates set by Phillips, but perhaps a far less rabid buying market.

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Catherine Opie, Cecilia, 2013 © Catherine Opie. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Two discernible genres in photography, portrait and documentation determine Catherine Opie’s current dual-gallery exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in New York.  In her inaugural exhibition at the gallery, Opie comes in full throttle, presenting her well-regarded photo-portraits alongside a group of abstracted landscapes in Chelsea, as well as her documentation of the late Elizabeth Taylor’s L.A. mansion in the gallery’s Lower East Side location. (more…)

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (1990), via Sotheby’s

Taking up the second week of London’s early-year, marquee auctions, the Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sales are set to get underway this week with a trio of offerings that will again test the health and enthusiasm of the market in the face of what many have called a “cooling off.” (more…)

Jan Peter Hammer at Labor Gallery, all photos via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

As Sunday drew to a close, another week of fairs, openings and events concluded in Mexico City, centered around the Zona Maco and Material Art Fairs in the sprawling metropolis. (more…)

Borden Capalino, Say Mr. Sandman (2016)

Greeting the visitors at the entrance to Lisa Cooley during Active Ingredient, a group exhibition curated by the gallery’s long time collaborator Alex Fleming, is Colette Lumiere’s Sleeping in a Glass Cabinet. Portraying the renowned artist, known for such sleeping performances from inside a glass vitrine during the 1970’s, this 1991 print vividly summarizes the content of the exhibition, delving into a material reinvigoration and transformation of works and their compositional elements through exposure to time and space. (more…)

Jonathan Borofsky, Acrylic on Unprimed Canvas with Bubble Wrap and Duct Tape at 2,680,377 (1978-80), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

A large scale exhibition of historic work by artist Jonathan Borofsky is currently on view at Paula Cooper Gallery.  Globally recognized for his large-scale, representational and industrious sculptures exploring and elaborating on the human condition in performative gestures, Borofsky’s work here exposes his cognition and subjective outlets.  Compiled of modest scale sculpture, painting and print, the selection promises a studious route to the more remote corners of the artist’s practice. (more…)

Pablo Picasso, TeÌ‚te de Femme (1935), via Sotheby’s

The first week of February’s auctions concluded last evening, following a difficult set of sales at Sotheby’s that saw tepid, occasionally concerning results, with 13 of the 37 Impressionist and Modern works going unsold, bringing a total of £78,308,000, while the auction house’s small but impressive selection of 16 Surrealist pieces saw 2 go unsold, bringing the modest sale a tally of £14,860,500. (more…)

Max Ernst, The Stolen Mirror (1941), via Christie’s

A marathon night has concluded at Christie’s this evening, following the auction house’s back to back sales of premier works. The sale provided an solid start to 2016’s winter and spring seasons of sales, and sends an indication of the market’s stability moving forward, even if the astronomical prices of the recent past were notably absent.  All told, the Impressionist and Modern Sale saw a respectable outing, with 12 of the 50 lots on sale going unsold, and reaching a total of £66,430,000, while the Surrealist auction immediately after achieved £29,487,100, with 10 unsold lots.

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Paul Cézanne, Ferme en Normandie, été (Hattenville) (1882), via Christie’s

With the opening weeks of 2016 drawing to a close, the London auction houses are preparing for the first entries in the year’s sales calendar, presenting two weeks of offerings that will serve as a bellwether for the year. Considering recent concerns (and numerous articles) over the cooling of the market in the early months of this year, the market should offer an initial indication of just how buyers and sellers may respond, and whether recent notes on an increased reliance on Asian customers will be proven accurate. (more…)

William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), via Art Observed

Artist William Kentridge is currently presenting a pair of multi-media film installations at Marian Goodman’s uptown New York location, drawing on parallels of death and life, utopia and decay, atrophy and entropy.

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Paramount Ranch, all photos via Art Observed

Nestled away in the Thousand Oaks town of Agoura Hils, the Paramount Ranch served as a film location for much of Hollywood’s elite, seeing Bob Hope, Cecil B. DeMille and Gary Cooper step on camera for iconic Westerns. Now, almost 90 years later, the Ranch (currently part of the National Parks system), the ranch has become the annual retreat from LA Art Week for the titular Paramount Ranch fair.

Janis Varelas at The Breeder (more…)

Thomas Eggerer, Waterworld (2015)

Tucked inside a single room at Petzel Gallery is Waterworld, a humbly scaled exhibition, yet impressively scaled work by New York-based, German artist Thomas Eggerer.  The artist’s work has long been shown in this context, showing only a few works at a time in their enthrallingly large-scale dimensions that further the artist’s ongoing aesthetic tendencies and focus on each meditative, impressively detailed scenario.

Thomas Eggerer, Waterworld (detail) (2015) (more…)

Erwin Wurm, Butter (Fridge) (2015), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Erwin Wurm returns to Thaddaeus Ropac’s Paris Marais location this month for an exhibition of new works, continuing his bizarre and occasionally disturbing interpretations of the materials of everyday life, broken down and perverted by momentary inversions and surreal inflections of force.  The show, titled Lost, enters further into the vocabulary of objects the Austrian artist has developed over the course of the past 20 years, narrowing his focus to the objects and landscapes of the domestic interior.   (more…)

Outside of Art Los Angeles Contemporary at Barker Hangar, via Art Observed

Art Los Angeles Contemporary opened its doors this past evening at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, bringing the city’s art scene, as well as many from New York, London and further afield to the sunny haze of the California metropolis.  The fair, which has seen increasingly high praise over the past years, saw strong attendance and packed aisles in the early hours as visitors occasionally paused to look towards the sound of planes taking off just overhead.

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Marcel Dzama & Raymond Pettibon, Beware Diamond Dog (2016)

Forgetting the Hand, a novel collaboration between Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon, is currently on view at David Zwirner Gallery.  The show pulls together two artists, who, though emerging from vastly different generations and backgrounds, share noted parallels in the conveyance of the ridicule of contemporary culture.  Even the exhibition title emphasizes the interconnectedness between the two artists’ practices, where distinction of authorship between the two evaporates. Both represented by David Zwirner since the 90’s, Pettibon and Dzama embarked on this collaboration in the summer of 2015 on the occasion of New York Art Book Fair, where David Zwirner Books presented a zine printed with many of these pieces. (more…)