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…)

Marianne Vitale, Beam Work (2016), via Art Observed

Venus Over Los Angeles has brought artist Marianne Vitale to exhibit in the West Coast for the first time this month, offering its ample exhibition spaces east of the river to the New York artist for a pair of monumental installations that continue her intuitive blend of simple sculptural gestures and massively-scaled material to open a space for reflection on force, structure and time.

Marianne Vitale, Thought Field (detail) (2016), via Art Observed (more…)

Sarah Meyohas at 303 Gallery (Installation View)

303 Gallery is hosting a special collaboration with New York based artist Sarah Meyohas, merging the inherently performative natures of two distinct terrains of art making and stock marketing.  Stemming from Mehoyas’s dual educational background in both business and fine arts, the Yale MFA graduate traded stocks on the New York Stock Exchange during the market’s operating hours for ten business days, affecting the value of these stocks.  Transferring their behavior into stark black and white drawings, Mehoyas transfers the market’s often erratic movements into the serene white cube. (more…)

Alexander Calder, Antennae with Red and Blue Dots (1953), © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York and DACS, London

Alexander Calder’s work as the originator of the mobile, and his free-flowing, languid techniques have long established him as a distinct pioneer of mid-20th Century sculpture.  His floating, kinetic sculptures and more grounded, static works were iconic elements of the post-war movements towards the abstract and expressive in sculptural practice.  Yet presentations and explorations of Calder’s work frequently obscure his early interest in the theatrical and performative, threads which were long instrumental to the artist’s practice, and to the development of much of his later work.  It’s these same threads that receive express emphasis in the Tate Modern’s Performing Sculpture, an exhibition of work culled from the length of Calder’s career, and which places his interests in performance, movement and time back into the proper context his later sculpture is so strongly rooted in.

Alexander Calder, Vertical Foliage (1941), Calder Foundation, New York © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS, London

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Lizzi Bougatsos, The King’s Virgin (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

What does it mean to work? To what extent is play quantifiable as labor and vice versa? Such are the questions posed by Work Habits, the latest solo exhibition from artist Lizzi Bougatsos on view at James Fuentes.  Stepping into a space lit up in traffic light red on opening night, one quickly garners a Nietzschean sense of faith unfound, unraveling foundations and unsustained beliefs.  The room, minimally adorned with a dynamic installation of assemblages, depict these found and repurposed objects as inherently lazy. (more…)

Tauba Auerbach, Shadow Weave – Metamaterial/Slice Ray (2013) © Tauba Auerbach. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Photo: Steven Probert

Tauba Auerbach’s work does much with its slight physical moorings.  Utilizing sparse, repeated patterns, meticulously executed sculptural objects and a nuanced eye for her selected materials and colors, Auerbach’s work creates delicate structural harmonies and ordered, meditative pieces that create a sense of calm despite their geometrically-complex, constantly evolving surfaces.  This method is executed to great effect in the artist’s just-opened exhibition at Paula Cooper’s 21st Street location, compiling selections from several ongoing series of the artist’s work, as well as new sculptural elements, a library of texts, and several new publications from Auerbach’s Diagonal Press publishing house, included in the gallery bookstore. (more…)

Elizabeth Peyton, Sea (Kristian) (2016), via Sadie Coles

Presenting a new body of paintings, including both landscapes and portraiture from her travels and experiences, Elizabeth Peyton opens a new body of work at Sadie Coles HQ in London, filling the gallery’s Davies Street location with her uniquely delicate watercolors, pencil drawings and oil compositions.  The show is Peyton’s seventh with the gallery in nearly twenty years, and marks a continuation of her recent practice and stylistic diversity.    (more…)

Anne Collier, May/Jun 2009 (Cindy Sherman, Mark Seliger) (2009), all photos via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

The Guggenheim’s Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, curated by Jennifer Blessing, senior photography curator at the museum, delves into methods utilized by artists to diverge from traditional notions of photography as a chronicle of tangible reality.  Such capturing of verité leaves the stage for investigation of process, material, and expression in works by ten contemporary photographers, spanning three floors at the museum’s side galleries, and guiding viewers through various sections containing selections of work by a single artist, among them Sara VanDerBeek, Erin Shirreff and Kathrin Sonntag to name a few. (more…)

Mark Grotjahn, Miller (Green) (Date TBC), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Mark Grotjahn doesn’t stay in one place for too long.  Despite the honed abstraction techniques illustrated in his long-running series like Butterfly Paintings, his recast, painted cardboard box sculptures, and the swirling figuration of his Face works, Grotjahn has also spent countless hours on small-scale projects, conceptual exercises and intriguing asides.  There is, for one, his Instagram account, a free-wheeling aesthetic testing ground where the artist has obsessively posted album covers, sets of reflexive iPhone screenshots, and bizarre scenarios culled from both his own life and printed media. (more…)

Steve McQueen, Remember Me (2016), via Marian Goodman

“I want to put the public in a situation where everyone becomes acutely sensitive to themselves, to their body and respiration,” Steve McQueen writes in the press release to his new exhibition at Marian Goodman in Paris.  The opening line is an ominous one, hinting at both the perceptual and empathetic threads that his work often delves into, and is a fitting context for the exhibition on view, presenting the artist’s recently completed filmic work Ashes, as well as a funereal neon installation, Remember Me, both of which deal with the juxtaposition of life and death, light and darkness. (more…)

Dana Sherwood, Crossing the Wild Line (2016), courtesy the artist and Denny Gallery

Dana Sherwood’s conceptual focus is the Anthropocene, a contentious term which in essence describes our present and future epoch, framed by the destabilization of nature as impacted by human activity on earth. With a practice that spans drawing, video, and sculptural installations, her work intervenes to engage local wildlife and open up a realm of play between humans and animals. Just as Joseph Beuys instigated a political party for animals back in 1974, Sherwood has hosted a dinner party for animals, using her skills as a former baker to create decorative, decadent meals to entice her guests, ultimately presenting the results at Denny Gallery in New York. (more…)

Louise Bourgeois, Maman (1999), Collection The Easton Foundation, Courtesy Garage Museum Photography by Olga Alekseenko.

Organized by Haus der Kunst, Munich in collaboration with Moscow’s recently opened Garage Museum, Structures of Existence: The Cells is the largest presentation of the series Louise Bourgeois created in the last two decades of her life, shown alongside the early paintings and drawings which led to the development of her monumental pieces. (more…)

Marlon Mullens, Untitled (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

The White Columns Annual returns to the non-profit space’s West Village grounds this week, kicking the new year off with another exhibition examining the subtle threads and networks of the art world in New York and abroad through the perspective of a single voice.  Each year, the exhibition, celebrating its landmark tenth year this month, offers the position to an art world figure, whether it be a gallerist, writer, or curator, to summarize the past year in a single exhibition, often with the end result being a show that spans a diverse group of practitioners usually separated by context, art world hierarchies or other influences. (more…)

Gilbert & George
, THE BANNERS
 (Installation View), 9x9x9, White Cube Bermondsey
 © Gilbert & George. Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)

THE BANNERS is the title of Gilbert & George’s ongoing exhibition at White Cube’s Bermondsey location, following the eminent duo’s larger scale installment Scapegoating Pictures for London in 2014. Resuming their sturdily rebellious stand against anything corporate or organizational, this current exhibition, akin to their previous one, appropriates the vocal language of political outrage and public protests that have been normalized and spread widely by the media.  As its self-explanatory title dictates, the exhibition includes thirty banners bearing ten different slogans and each repeating on three different white papers. (more…)