Christian Marclay, Green Plop on Yellow (2014), via Art Observed

Christian Marclay returns to Paula Cooper this fall with an exhibition of new video work and paintings, continuing the artist’s interests in the intertwining of action and image in pop culture formats.  Here, turning his attention to comic books and graphic novels, the artist’s collagist practices are given a light-hearted twist.

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Antony Gormley, EXPANDED FAMILY X2: CHOOSE (2014)

On view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s Salzburg location through October 31st is Space Out, artist Antony Gormley’s ongoing investigation of physical space and its encapsulation through sculptural intervention.  One of the most recognized and influential sculptors working today, Gormley has always been interested in space and its correspondence to physicality, yet with his recent series, Expansion Field, the artist accentuates his often noticeable tendency towards stripping human figures down to geometrical forms. Divorced from human attributions such as curves or postures, these robust creations bear various references to the history of art including Minimalism and Russian Constructivism. (more…)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (The Black Athlete) (1982), via Sotheby’s

Another evening of auctions sales has come and gone as Sotheby’s concluded its Contemporary Evening Sale in London tonight, a fast-paced event that saw brisk sales and strong interest until the late lots, with 15 works of the 53 lot sale going unsold, and bringing in a total of £36,351,250. (more…)

Cy Twombly, Untitled (2006), via Phillips

The sales have concluded tonight at Phillips London, as the auction house capped a procedural yet impressively consistent outing, seeing a white glove sale where all 36 lots sucessfully found a buyer, bringing a final total tally of nearly £32 million for the night. (more…)

Mark Leckey, Inflatable Felix (2014) at Galerie Bucholz

The doors have opened on Frieze 2015 in London, bringing the art world en masse to Regent’s Park for the 13th edition of one of the fall’s biggest selling events.  The exhibition, which capped its “VIP” day last evening, saw viewers flocking to its long, loping hallways to browse the works on view. (more…)

Hilla Becher, via Artforum

Hilla Becher, the influential German photographer who, alongside her husband Bernd, worked as a pioneer in the field of contemporary art photography, has passed away at the age of 81.   (more…)

Agnes Martin, Untitled (1999-2000), via Sotheby’s

With the opening days of the Frieze art fair in London also come the annual fall auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, launching another season of marquee sales at the auction houses.  Starting on October 14th, one day after the fair opens its doors for the VIP viewing, the sales will offer a second opportunity for collectors to vie for top works. (more…)

Richard Long, Untitled (2006), via Lisson Gallery

This week, the global art world touches down in Regent’s Park for the 13th edition of the Frieze art fair, marking one of the first major staples of the fall festival circuit in London.  Featuring over 160 galleries from both the UK and around the globe, the event promises another year of in-depth exhibitions, special projects and installations across the British capital. (more…)

Sol LeWitt, Drawing Series I,II,III,IIII (Drawings for Xerox Book) 24 Drawings (1968), via Art Observed

In 1968, a group of artists interested in the material limits of art practice, and the interrelations between text, language and action launched The Xerox Book, a published art book culling contributions from Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Lawrence Weiner to be printed and copied as an easily distributed art work.  Presented at Paula Cooper’s 21st Street Location in New York, The Xerox Book is a return to this landmark publication, incorporating a series of works and objects drawn from or inspired by each artist’s contributions.

The Xerox Book (Installation View) © Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Photo: Steven Probert

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Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Orange over Mountain Walk, Italian Mask M30.g) (2014), via Anton Kern

Twisting the formal language of both his chosen objects and the painterly signifiers he has built up over the course of his career, Mark Grotjahn returns to Anton Kern Gallery for his fourth solo exhibition with the New York Gallery.  Building on the sculptural objects presented last year at the artist’s exhibition at the Nasher in Dallas, the works on view take Grotjahn’s interest in cast-off materials and repurposed objects, the show turns the artist’s frequently reoccurring subject, the cardboard box, into a container for his own aesthetic interests. (more…)

Dana Schutz, Fight in an Elevator (2015), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Petzel Gallery is a series of new works by artist Dana Schutz, the New York-based painter whose fluid hand, surreal scenarios and meticulous commitment to polymorphous narratives have made her a leading voice among U.S. painters. (more…)

Wolfgang Tillmans, Iquitos Dos (2013), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

David Zwirner is currently presenting artist Wolfgang Tillmans’ PCR, his first exhibition with the gallery following his departure from longtime representatives Andrea Rosen Gallery. Doing the justice to the exhibition’s inaugural nature, the gallery has reserved its two locations on 19th street for the massive show of photographs, sculpture and video, which takes its name from an abbreviation of the scientific term “polymerase chain reaction.”  A technique applied in molecular biology to reach a deeper and more particular genetic identity for a person’s DNA, PCR serves as a metaphor for the works on view, which near a hundred in total.  Each piece here underscores the breadth and depth of the artist’s expansive oeuvre, and every piece, similar to a molecule, contributes to build a larger pattern, holding traces of the German-born artist’s decades long career. (more…)

David Douard, bat-breath battery (Installation View), all photos by Daphné Mookherjee for Art Observed

David Douard’s bat-breath battery, presented at the Gallery Chantal Crousel, is a hybridization of formal territories, exploring correlations between poetry and vernacular, human and machine – recurring interests for the artist.  Often delving into the mechanisms of transformation and development, Douard’s work centers on  infectious relations between different worlds and objects, explained through media terminologies that draw from tech, biology, history, and visual culture at large.

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Sarah Sze, Hammock (2015)

Following her acclaimed 55th Venice Biennale presentation for the U.S. Pavillon in 2013 and her current participation in this year’s Okwui Enwezor-curated 56th installment, Sarah Sze is the subject of a solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery for her new body of work, returning to common themes that have informed her particularly interdisciplinary practice over two floors of the gallery space.  As is frequently the case with Sze’s work, architecture is often used as a meditative force on the space surrounding her pieces, rather than a utilitarian system of constructing materials.  Here, these explorations fall into conversation with Sze’s use of visually calm and fluid materials, as she strips the physicality of such objects from their primary definitions and purposes. (more…)

Barnaby Furnas, The First Morning (Scarlet) (2015), via Art Observed

Presenting a new body of work that combines his prior interests in masses of color and space with geometric inversions and breaks with the autonomy of the canvas, Barnaby Furnas returns to Marianne Boesky this fall, his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery since 2002.  Continuing his ongoing interest in the formal potentials for landscape painting in the Twenty-First century, Furnas’s new work negotiates a line between modern practice and the historical innovations of his forbears over the past several centuries. (more…)

Adrián Vilar Rojas, Two Suns (2015), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

The work of Adrián Vilar Rojas often occupies itself with remainders, leftovers, and detritus from the visual and aesthetic languages of human culture.  Suspending forms and materials in a timeless ruins that translates human-kind’s greatest accomplishments into a faded wreckage, the artist still manages to incorporate a certain degree of grace and elegance to his work, allowing the natural elements and human impulses that underscore his project to gradually take the foreground. (more…)

Frank Stella, La Scienza della Fiacca, 3.5X (1984), © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Precluding Frank Stella’s career retrospective at The Whitney Museum, which opens at the end of October, Paul Kasmin Gallery has opened a similarly focused exhibition of the New York artist’s particular brand of formal innovation, moving from his early minimal and shaped canvas works during the 1960’s on through to his vividly constructed and layered assemblages of the 1980’s on through to the current day.  Pulling one major work from each of the artist’s most prominent series, the nine works trace the artist’s continued evolution and investigation of shape, space and color as his material interests have gradually changed. (more…)

Trevor Paglen, NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, New York City, New York, United States (2015), via Art Observed

Continuing his investigation of covert military and intelligence operations, Trevor Paglen returns to Metro Pictures for his second exhibition with the gallery, charging his work with the intricacies of research and formal explorations of color and abstraction, while focusing particularly on the geography and aesthetics of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance programs.

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Song Dong, Waste Not (2005), photo courtesy Groninger Museum

The Groninger Museum in the Netherlands has gained an enormous installation, filling up much of their open space with the household items and various collectibles of Waste Not, the collaborative installation created between Chinese contemporary artist Song Dong and his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan.  The work is centered around the artist’s mother, who dealt with numerous hardships during her upbringing in China, and how she began to cherish and hoard all of the objects, detritus and material she acquired during the course of her lifetime. (more…)

Anthony Caro, Sunshine (1964), via Sotheby’s

Curated by Royal Academy Artistic Director Tim Marlow, Sotheby’s  tenth edition of its outdoor sculpture exhibition at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, titled Beyond Limits, swings for the fences with its studious and somewhat understated take on the impact and influence of Britain’s sculptural greats over the past 65 years.  Tracing lines of exchange and dialogue from the formal innovations of the 1950’s and 60’s through the irreverent inversions of the YBA’s during the 1990’s and on to the present, the exhibition is an intriguing examination on Britain’s own sense of the art historical as much as it is a review of its products. (more…)

Ron Nagle, Skin Grift (2013), via Art Observed

The walls of Matthew Marks Gallery are dotted with miniature vitrines for the gallery’s most recent show, a combination of new and historical work by Californian artist Ron Nagle that embraces the material and structural execution of sculpture at its most scaled-down.

Following up on its impressive summer exhibition, What Nerve!, the gallery pushes deeper into the roots of one of the show’s subjects, the San Francisco bay’s iconic “Funk” movement, and the sculptural lineage that artist and California College of the Arts professor Peter Voulkos left in his wake.  Having taught both Nagle and Ken Price (both represented by the gallery), the artist’s impact was instrumental in helping to shape some of the tenants that would define Californian sculpture over the next decades.  Yet where Voulkos’s work often used size in conjunction with his vivid shapes and colors, Nagle’s work turns towards carefully shaped interactions in micro.

Ron Nagle, Untitled (2015), via Art Observed

The artist’s miniature sculptures are evocative in their minimal elements and carefully considered choices, teetering between pure abstraction and impressively subtle tableau that carry a wealth of narrative potential.  In some works, the forms call to mind beds, trees or busts, always twisted towards the surreal by the artist’s careful tweaks to the lines and curves of his pieces. Yet as much as the artist’s figurative experiments carry the works, they equally stand on their own for their masterful use of color, particularly in his most recent works; vividly colored and masterfully shaped pieces that make the most out of their material grounding.  In Handsome Drifter, for instance, Nagle’s resin-soaked glaze smolders with a gentle variation in reds and yellows, offset by the single dollop of twisted black ceramic that sits atop it.  A masterful study in balance and counterpoint, the viewer may find themselves floating in and out of a perception of the concrete in these pieces.

Ron Nagle, The Temperamentalist (2015), via Art Observed

The exhibition also includes a series of Nagle’s bronze works from the early 1990’s, exercises in the interplay of material and utility that define the cup as a tool of modern life.  Pushing his works towards jagged, almost fragmented surfaces, Nagle places his pieces in this series as a continuum of early tool construction, while emphasizing the surface of each piece, not least due to its preservation under a glass vitrine.  Joining these are some of the artist’s recent drawings, playing on the materiality of lined paper or surface texture to explore the act of drawing at a nearly atomic level.

Ron Nagle, Mutha Fakir (2015), via Art Observed

Nagle’s work seems obsessed with this brief moments of encounter between his work and the materials he executes them in, and the pared-down scale of the pieces seems to focus these moments at single points.  Always focusing themselves around balance and restraint, the artist underscores his aesthetic interests in conjunction with his own economies of form.

Offering a studious counterpoint to the Funk works explored in the gallery’s previous exhibition, Nagle’s exhibition is a striking look at the possibilities for ceramics on a micro-scale, one where strength of message is rarely sacrificed for delicacy of execution.

Ron Nagle, Lotta Wattage (2015), via Art Observed

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Ron Nagle: “Five O’Clock Shadow” [Matthew Marks]

Dan Flavin, untitled (to Sonja) (1969), via Art Observed

An idea that began with a single light was the generative force for New York minimalist Dan Flavin‘s ongoing interests in light and space. Starting in 1963 with the creation of diagonal of May 25th, 1963, a fluorescent lamp installed diagonally on a wall, Flavin quickly adopted light as his central aesthetic focus, and his journey through the environmental capacities of  light can now be seen in Corners, Barriers and Corridors at David Zwirner.

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Gilbert & George, To Be With Art is All We Ask (1970), all photos via Art Observed

The artist duo Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, better-known by just Gilbert & George, the self-proclaimed “Two People but One Artist,” first met in 1967 studying sculpture in London.  As the story goes, the two were taking photographs of one another holding their sculptural works, when it struck them that their own corporeal presence in the images was far more interesting than the sculptures.  As a result the pair deemed themselves “living sculptures,” and following the line of this ideology, have since considered their partnership, their artistic work (in all mediums), and even the mundane operations undertaken in their everyday lives, to be “Sculpture.”  For this reason, Gilbert & George made their mantra “Art for All,” endeavoring to make sculpture and sculptural practice accessible and liberated from the discriminatory elitism of the art world at large, instead focusing on the idea that accessible art derives from life itself. (more…)

Sterling Ruby at the Gagosian booth, all photos via Art Observed

Returning to its annual haunt at MoMA PS1, the Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair has concluded, bringing countless rare, collectible and artist-authored books to Long Island City. (more…)