Opening its doors for its press and VIP preview today, the 22nd annual Armory Show is officially underway, bringing the art world’s top galleries and exhibitors to Piers 92 and 94 for another year of sales and showings. (more…)
Monika Grzymala, Raumzeichnung (outside/inside) (2016), via Lisson Gallery
Working in close collaboration with The Drawing Room, Lisson Gallery’s has brought together a selection of pieces that explore the more conceptual reaches of the drawing process, not only exploring drawing as a condition of ideation or practice for smaller works, but as a method of experiencing, and segmenting, space itself. Titled Line, the show is a strong investigation of space and memory, time and flow, extended “off the page,” as the press release reads. (more…)
Morten Skrøder Lund, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed
LTD Gallery is presenting the first U.S. Exhibition of painter Morten Skrøder Lund’s paintings on Polyethylene Vinyl Acetate (PEVA), dwelling on notions of time, composition and the interaction of paint and ground. (more…)
Michael Riedel, Untitled (Description Field “Art Material”; rer), (2015), via David Zwirner
Set to open this week, the Armory Show is returning to New York City for its 22nd year, setting off the dense selection of exhibitions, fairs, parties and programs of Armory Week 2016. With a number of shifts in location and scheduling for this year’s selection of events, the week should see a new face on familiar proceedings. (more…)
The Calder Prize 2005-2015 (Installation View)
The Calder Prize 2005-2015, now on view at Pace Gallery in London, explores the influence of artist Alexander Calder in relation to the work of six contemporary artists, each of whom were awarded a prize in the former’s name. Now through March 5, the five winners of the Calder Prize to date are featured in conversation with Calder’s own work. The artists awarded the Calder Prize are seen to be continuing Calder’s legacy by imagining new and innovative directions for sculpture, among them Tara Donovan (2005), Žilvinas Kempinas (2007), Tomás Saraceno (2009), Rachel Harrison (2011), Daren Bader (2013), and Haroon Mirza (2015). Working in impressively divergent media, the artists are united by their common vision to push the limits of material through variations on space and time in their work, a point that unifies them with Calder’s vision. (more…)
Richard Aldrich, Untitled (2014-2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed
Richard Aldrich‘s wide-ranging stylistic and conceptual practice over the past twenty-plus years has spanned any number of formats, from sparse abstraction to minimalist exercises in process painting, often subverting these established schools through momentary inflections of wit and comic interpretation. Yet at the core of Aldrich’s practice is an effort to push beyond mere stylistic variation and a good sense humor, often using his practice and its shifting material grounds to explore a wide range of both techniques in image-making, as well as processes in each work’s construction on an intuitive level.
Richard Aldrich, Time Stopped, Time Started (Installation View), via Rae Wang for Art Observed
Doug Wheeler, Untitled (1969/2014), via David Zwirner © 2016 Doug Wheeler
The work of Doug Wheeler is an exercise in embodiment and space, perhaps more so than many of his Light and Space compatriots. Rather than merely exploring the sensations of seeing and perceiving space, Wheeler pushes beyond this sense of expanded optics and its cognitive effects, often exploring how this sense of space is reflected onto broader sensations of the body. Encasements, the third solo exhibition by Wheeler in collaboration with David Zwirner, continues this work, showing a body of smaller-scale works that work in a strikingly harmonious series of interactions throughout the gallery. (more…)
Lee Ufan, From Line No. 800117 (1980), all photos via Art Observed
Blum & Poe’s close ties to the history and proliferation of Asian art in the United States cannot be ignored, having advocated for and built a market around Japanese and Korean artists like Takashi Murakami and Lee Ufan during the 1990’s. Since then, the gallery has become an inextricable link between the continents, a point explored in the gallery’s most recent exhibition, Dansaekhwa and Minimalism, currently on view at the gallery’s Culver City location.
Kwon Young-woo, Untitled (1982), via Art Observed (more…)
Eddie Martinez, Restartation (2015), via Art Observed
Brooklyn-based painter Eddie Martinez had charted a particularly unique course for himself in recent years, exploring both expressly abstracted compositions and their relationships to more rigid, serial processes in both painting and sculpture. Trained as both a draftsman and painter, the artist’s dual experience in both meticulously planned composition and free-roving expressionism floats to the surface in his first exhibition with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, on view now at the gallery’s Chelsea location. (more…)
Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens (Installation view), via Sprüth Magers
For the most recent new exhibition in Berlin, Sprüth Magers has brought together work from thirteen artists under the title Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens. Curated by Goodroom and Johannes Fricke Waldthausen, the exhibition features works by Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Andy Hope 1930, Oliver Laric, Jon Rafman, and Andro Wekua, among others. Intended to navigate visitors through the intersecting narratives within the realm of surrealist animation, abstraction and the ideas of “New Materialism” as expressed through the greater logistics of the world wide web, the exhibition references the notion of the screen as a critical tool of the conscious and unconscious, as well as a surface for projections of communication and technological abstraction. (more…)
Aleksandra Domanovic, Turbo Sculpture, (2010-13), all photos courtesy The Mistake Room
The Mistake Room Los Angeles presents Histories of a Vanishing Present: A Prologue, the second chapter in a series of four exhibitions, featured as part of a long-term research initiative launched by the space. This multiyear project spotlights the experience of millennial generation artists from the Global South who, through a lens of postmemory, explore the media through which the past is transmitted across time and space. The exhibition investigates how traumatic histories play out in the practices of contemporary artists, often whose experience of these histories is indirect—inherited through the images, narratives and objects of preceding generations. Curated by Cesar Garcia and Kris Kuramitsu, A Prologue features video pieces from four artists situated in non-western cultures, chronicling both events, relations and practices not typically included in the art historical canon. In animating the enduring consequences of colonization, nationalism, ethnic wars, globalization and the legacy of racism, these artists engage in a complex meditation on their cultural heritage and identity politics, and embrace history as a site of reflection and reinvention.
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 (æ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.
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.
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…)
