Yoko Ono, THE RIVERBED (Installation View), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Spread across two gallery spaces, Yoko Ono’s THE RIVERBED demonstrates the possibility and presence of basic human connection through the manipulation of various materials.  Together, the assemblages of stone, string, and ceramic create a process of healing through, as the artist says,”love, and creativity.”  This concept of mending is both internal and external, as string criss-crosses the space of each gallery, continued through pencil and paper on the sketchbooks provided.

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Tetsumi Kudo, Untitled (1971), via Hauser and Wirth

A key figure in the development of Tokyo’s Post-War, “Anti-Art” Movement, the work of Tetsumi Kudo explodes with a distinct sense of withered vibrancy: human body parts, plants and hulking, distending forms contend for space on what appear to be plots of earth, colored in sickening tones and rarely, if ever, clustering together beyond a few lilting stems.  The artist’s work, the subject of an exhibition at Hauser and Wirth Zurich (in collaboration with Andrea Rosen, which represents his estate), is a darkly realized challenge to the aftermath of nuclear war in Japan, and the artist’s disillusionment with the modernist notions of progress and “blind humanism.” (more…)

Anish Kapoor, Internal Object in Three Parts (detail) (2013-2015) © Anish Kapoor; Courtesy the artist & Lisson Gallery

Anish Kapoor & 17th century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn are placed into a neighborly conversation at the Rijksmuseum this month, as dualisms of flesh and meat, figuration and abstraction underscore the more nuanced connections between the pair, and illustrate the ever-changing focal points, yet unified interests in the shapes and forms of the human body and its depiction. (more…)

Urs Fischer, Bruno and Yoyo (2015), via Vito Schnabel Gallery

Vito Schnabel has taken over the lease at the former St. Moritz home of Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, marking the curator’s first permanent gallery space with an exhibition of new work by Urs Fischer, as well as a public installation at the nearby Kulm Hotel by Sterling Ruby.  The pair of exhibitions are a strong next step for the curator, paying homage to the history of Bischofberger’s space while emphasizing Schnabel’s vision for a gallery engaged with the broader landscape of his new home. (more…)

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Two Times #3 (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Delving into fragmented, often confounding representations of history and identity, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have brought a new body of works to Pace Gallery in New York City, continuing the couple’s unique vision in representing and reinterpreting their past in Russia and their challenging figurative work which ties into dualities and pluralized senses of time and space. (more…)

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic (1970), via Art Observed

Few series of work are as immediately recognizable as Robert Motherwell’s Elegies, his bold collection of compositions, inflected with broad strokes of black meant as a public lament to the bitter civil war that upended the Spanish Republic in the years leading up to World War II, and which saw the installation of fascist leader Francisco Franco.  The works, which Motherwell would continue until his death in 1991, are a striking visual critique, great swaths of black obliterating his spare compositions in white, blue and other subdued grounds, as if the war itself has overshadowed the artist’s own painterly hand blotting out his compositions with the tense, recurring figures of bars and blots of paint. (more…)

Robert Smithson, The Machine Taking a Wife (1964), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Before he began his pioneering work in land art and environmental sculpture in the late 1960’s, and shortly before his untimely death in 1973, Robert Smithson was exploring the quirkier, more colorful ends of the pop art spectrum, pulling from a broad range of figurative and cultural images.  Pornography, textured plastic, machinery and photographs collided in the Pop works, drawing from the often lascivious but always captivating landscape of Times Square, with its sci-fi movie houses, porn shops and street walkers combining to create a fitting commentary on the excess of American consumer culture.

Robert Smithson, Untitled [Zig zag star center, motorcyclist with wings, and microscope with wings] (1964), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

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Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Officers) (1982), via Petzel Gallery

Taking over the uptown, 67th Street location of Petzel Gallery, Troy Brauntuch is presenting a selection of early compositions, created between 1976 and 1983, illustrating some of the artist’s early interests in techniques of photographic reproduction and representation, executed in a variety of materials and styles that hint at the artist’s later work.

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Head) (1978), via Petzel Gallery

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Bradley Kronz, Untitled (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Tucked away on the fourth floor of 134 Bowery, an understated yet impressive Federal-style building, LOMEX opened its doors late last month with minimal fanfare.  The space, operated by curator, writer and artist Alexander Shulan, takes its name from one of Robert Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway plans, a strictly utilitarian concept which would have razed much of the area around the gallery’s home, and once served as the studio of Eva Hesse. (more…)

Agathe Snow at The Journal, via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Agathe Snow’s current exhibition at The Journal in Williamsburg is a flurry of touchstones, compiling fragments of art history, domestic objects, knitted material, paint, and any number of accompanying materials to explore what the artist deems the full-length of human existence, an attempt at a totemic retelling of man’s relationship to the world around him.  Objects cluster and clump together, or are cast into heaps and piles spread across the spacious confines of the gallery.  The show, which continues the artist’s enigmatic approach towards sculpture, identity and its related historical contexts, is at times comic, and at others sobering, interrelating the artist’s personal life, themes of death and rebirth, and the always present backdrop of human culture.

Agathe Snow at The Journal, via Rae Wang for Art Observed (more…)

Alberto Burri, Grande sacco (Large Sack) (1952). Photo: Antonio Idini, Soprintendenza alla Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, courtesy Ministero dei Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo

The chasm between experience and representation seeps through the full expanse of The Trauma of Painting, a major Alberto Burri retrospective at the Guggenheim, an ambitious exhibition that’s as much an exploration in process as it is an embodiment of wartime and its brutal demands on humanity. Born in 1915 in the Italian town of Città di Castello, Umbria, a region steeped in the grandeur of Renaissance art, Burri’s early years were overshadowed by both World Wars.  While beginning his career as a doctor, his capture by the British and his internment in Texas during WWII propelled him into painting.  Without a formal artistic education, Burri developed a practice stemming from his training as a physician, evoking elements of abjection and corporeal tactility. (more…)

The New York Times reviews the new, $160 million expansion and renovation of the Milwaukee Museum of Art, which adds new exhibition space as well as repairs and fixes to the institution’s older wings.  “People shouldn’t come to a museum just for the architecture, and this brings back the balance to the art,” says Director Dan Keegan.   (more…)

Peter Doig, Horse and Rider (2014)

Following his solo exhibition at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa that coincided with the 56th Venice Biennale, Peter Doig is the subject of an exhibition at Michael Werner‘s Upper East Side townhouse with his new body of work.  Featuring works from the artist’s Italian debut, the selection of pieces at the gallery includes works Doig created in 2015, reflecting the Trinidad-based artist’s most recent artistic endeavors, and an expansion of his increasingly fluid and expressive hand. (more…)

Ellsworth Kelly, Curves on White (Four Panels) (2012), via Art Observed

Ellsworth Kelly, a pioneer of 20th Century abstraction and an early voice in the development of color field painting and cut-canvas work, has passed away at the age of 92.

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Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Exotourisme (néon) (2002-2013), all photos via Daphné Mookherjee for Art Observed

The work of Dominique Gonzales-Foerster often combines media, spatial arrangements and video within the prism of time to explore links and lines of intersection between literature, film, architecture and music.  For her retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, she takes over the Galerie Sud as a spatial timeline, superimposing temporal strata to create an installation that serves as both a retrospective and forward-looking journey into the body of her work, questioning the viewer on fragmented identities and fictions, notions of inside and outside or absence and presence, and even the idea of time travel. (more…)

Fabio Mauri, Oscuramento (Darkening) (1975), all photos via Art Observed

Fabio Mauri’s work is defined by trauma.  The Italian artist spent his early years growing up alongside the rise of the Italian Fascist Party.  His childhood was defined by the images of war and violence, not merely through the scope of WWII, but in the violent political structures of the era that sent his family and countrymen to war.  In his maturity, the late artist frequently returned to the sites and encounters with the images and iconography of that era in the Italian Nation, staging sculptural environments that placed domestic signifiers and human actors into contact with the objects of war: uniforms, helmets, weapons and scenes of twisted metal or military planning.

Fabio Mauri, Picnic o Il buon soldato (Picnic or The Good Soldier) (Installation View) (1998)

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Asad Raza with work by Jordan Wolfson, Jessica Dickinson and bedsheets from his childhood selected by Rachel Rose, via Art Observed

“Hey, I’m Asad,”  Asad Raza greets the viewer at the ground floor of his apartment building on Spring Street, before leading them up the stairs to his modest one-bedroom.  Over the past month, Raza has brought a number of visitors through the space for Home Show, a group exhibition of site-specific and performative works that he compiled from a close group of friends, including Tino Seghal, Camille Henrot, Rachel Rose and many more, guiding them through the show with an enthusiastic flair that intertwines his own personal history and life with the work of his friends and collaborators.

A heart pump loaned to the artist from his father, via Art Observed

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Tom Sachs, Crawler (2003), all photos via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

The group exhibition Space Age, which closed yesterday at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris-Pantin, took up all four of the gallery’s spacious halls to examine historical and commissioned works by twenty contemporary artists, drawing on the astrological, the exploratory, and the untapped potential of outer space.  The artworks on view explored one of humanity’s most archaic collective dreams: the conquest of the skies and the immersion in the cosmos.

James Rosenquist, An Intrinsic Existence (2015), via Art Observed (more…)

A CNN article looks at the factors causing astronomical jumps in price in the art market recently, and the extended efforts of the auction houses to entice buyers.  “You bring as many people as you can into the headquarters through dinners and cocktail parties, and your global specialists center there and try to sell the work,” says Lisa Dennison, Chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America. (more…)

Brice Marden, Eastern Moss (2012-2015)

Brice Marden is the subject of a solo exhibition that spans three all three 22nd street locations for Matthew Marks Gallery, unveiling a new body of paintings and drawings that continue a number of the artist’s ongoing interests with the narrative potential for color.  The works on view here possess a demure yet captivating appeal, underlining the New York-based artist’s continued interest in the intersections of 20th Century abstraction, broader art histories, and the use of color-field composition in varying applications. (more…)

Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Fragonard Young Girl Playing with her Dog) (2014-2015)

Challenging the established notion of history as linear entity, art history often manifests itself as an intergenerational pattern, embedding variant heterogenous theories, movements and phenomena onto compound structures, while just as often disregarding its most sound chronological hierarchies. Jeff Koons, whose current exhibition at Gagosian Gallery continues his entries in his series of Gazing Ball works, takes this opportunity to scrutinize the constellation of art history, drawing his own threads and theories through a diverse and complexly interrelated series of works. (more…)

Mark Bradford, Deimos (2015)

Over the past several years, Mark Bradford has had something of a meteoric rise in the art world, garnering impressive recognition, critically and commercially for his exhilarating painterly style and vivid shifts in form and technique . Committed to creating uncompromisingly grandiose and ambitious works of art, Bradford has been the subject of rightfully increasing acclaim, most recently proven by his solo exhibition Scorched Earth at the Hammer Museum in his hometown Los Angeles, and his recent commission for a massive installation to accompany his upcoming retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. (more…)

George Baselitz, Untitled (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Intertwining his own personal artistic process with distinct threads of historical reference, wry humor and disparate aesthetic threads, Georg Baselitz is currently on view at Gagosian Gallery’s 980 Madison space for a small exhibition of new works, positioning the artist’s drawings and watercolors as a “visitation,” as the artist terms it, by Japanese ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai.

Georg Baselitz, Visit from Hokuskai (Installation View)

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Willem de Kooning, Clamdigger (1972), via Art Observed

It’s an interesting trajectory to follow when an artist, late in their career, strikes out into new media, carrying over a fully articulated, steady aesthetic sensibility that has been honed over decades of work.  The results are often dynamically contrasted against the artist’s broader body of work, and often evinces a renewed creative energy and a fresh vigor for formal investigation or subversion.

Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman on a Bench (1972), via Art Observed (more…)