Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum is Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks, the first major exhibition of the writings and sketches from Jean-Michel-Basquiat’s’ rarely seen personal archives. Without a doubt one of the most influential artists of 1980’s Neo-Expressionism, Basquiat worked with music, poetry, and  graffiti before finally arriving at painting. Tagging the walls of downtown New York, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz presented socially conscious graffiti under the tag name SAMO.  Straying from the visual attributes of popular graffiti, these tags were often full of sayings, quotes and poems in plain script that replaced graffiti’s showmanship with intellectual thought.  Navigating viewers into the personal thoughts of Basquiat with two video documentations and many rarely seen paintings,The Unknown Notebooks is a satisfying mixture of both seeing and reading.

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Basquiat’s cultural plurality and vivid paintings begin with the socially investigative phrases, symbols and thoughts on these carefully curated pages.  Each of the 160 pages in the exhibition hold a single composition, with blank pages framing the words to a strong effect.  Intent on speaking with political and socio-economic strength, corporate symbols, quotations, crowns, skeletons and teepees hang above words, and at the end of sentences, altering these everyday phrases, while visual techniques, suggesting dichotomies in familiar linguistic comprehension, open more room for unique interpretation.

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Accompanying the notebooks are a series of paintings that possess a freedom and fearlessness directly related to the artist’s graffiti background.  Words fill the canvas from top to bottom, transforming text into texture and letters back into gestural marks.  Acting as much as a carrier of language as a layer of paint, Basquiat’s words successfully  imported graffiti’s aesthetic energy and social awareness into the white cubes of the art world. The anonymous foundations of his early craft embrace this energetic freedom, vandalism, and self-expression that have come to define youth culture. A contributing figure in the impact of the practice in contemporary art proper, Basquiat’s dedicated approach to symbols and lettering transform this anonymous art form into a new format inside his burgeoning artistic repertoire. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

The Unknown Notebooks reveals  the underlying elements that made expression a larger concern for Basquiat than fitting into the previously determined aesthetic standards of high art. The primitive and socially aware foundations that have defined his work, and kept its impact almost thirty years later are here at Brooklyn Museum in an almost elemental form, on display through August 23rd.

— R.Williams

Read more:
“Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” at Brooklyn Museum [Exhibition Site]
“Review: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Unknown Notebooks’ at the Brooklyn Museum” [New York Times]
“‘Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks’ Gives a Window Into Basquiat’s Mind At Its Most Relaxed” [Forbes]

Tiger Tiger at Salon 94 (Installation View)

Tiger Tiger is the current summer group exhibition at Salon 94 Bowery, on view through August 21, 2015.  The fittingly titled show brings together fifteen artists, whose works explore the ease of tropical landscapes, and the seemingly perfect equilibrium of wild life. Works boasting ample color spectrums speak to simple yet ecstatic rhythms of island life, while elsewhere a distinctive composition of flush tropical wilderness wins out.  Distinctively foreign to New Yorkers, elements from these tropical destinations blossom into depictions of dazzling animals, plants or landscapes, contrasting the city’s heavily industrialized and overpopulated dynamic just outside the gallery space. (more…)

Forcefield, Meerk Puffy Autumn Shroud (2002), via Art Observed

Over the past half century, American art has distinguished itself as much for its formal heroes (Pollock, de Kooning, Judd, etc.) as its outliers, artists working along distinct threads of the abject, pop culture and mass production who challenged the more refined and neatly conceptualized exercises of the 20th Century avant-garde.  This separate thread of American art, running from 1960’s comic-book art through the punk and funk movements of the 1970’s and onwards through the chaotic energies of turn of the century performance and video are the subject of What Nerve!, a documentation of the American underground at Matthew Marks. (more…)

Jack Greer with One of His Works, all photos via Art Observed

Artist Jack Greer takes to Howard St Gallery this summer to present his solo exhibition, Landmark, continuing his affiliation with The Still House Group at the collective’s downtown space. Producing individual work amongst an ensemble of young artists–who chiefly provide for one another what is essentially a creative support group– has undoubtedly influenced Greer’s work; Landmark explores the relationship of the individual vis-à-vis the conglomerate, exposing the inherent desire of humans for enduring fellowship.  (more…)

Will Boone, RID (2015), via Art Observed

David Kordansky Gallery is currently presenting Flat World a group show organized by Karma New York, an exhibition of familiar objects rendered in conceptually minimal fashions, cohesively utilizing form as content while transforming formal aesthetic style into subject and material.  Flat World includes works by Richard Artschwager, Tauba Auerbach, Will Boone, Jeff Elrod, Robert Grosvenor, Peter Halley, Lee Lozano, John Mason, and Charlotte Posenensko. Combining the work of artists both young and old, the exhibition spans the years of the 1960’s  through the 1980’s and on to the early 2010’s.  (more…)

Carsten Höller, Isometric Slides (2015), all images via Hayward Gallery

Outside London’s Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre, a massive pair of slides have sprouted out from the building’s walls, spiraling away and towards each other in a mirrored, descent towards the ground.  The playful, immense structure marks the presence of Carsten Höller, the Belgian artist who is currently presenting a career retrospective within the gallery walls. (more…)

Korakrit Arunanondchai, Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2015), all photos by D. Mookherjee for Art Observed

Painting with History in a room filled with people with Funny Names 3 is a monographic exhibition displayed at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, presented by Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, and concluding a series of works started in 2011. The exhibition gathers performances, installations and videos that question the apprenticeship of a painter through the prism of an exchange between the artist and his alter ego Chantri, and his incarnation as a recurring fictional character, the Thai Denim Painter.  This exhibition finalizes the artwork initiated with the two previous pieces by dealing with Arunanondchai’s core theme; his identity, a structured representation of his artistic life, the social realities of Thailand and the phenomena of globalization, all mingled together here to form what he refers to as a “Memory palace.” (more…)

Gabriel Orozco, Diagram 1 (2015) via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Gabriel Orozco unveils new series of works at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Soho, London. For the fourth exhibition housed in the freshly renovated Victorian warehouse, Orozco chose to present a majority of works realized in Tokyo, where he has been living since the beginning of the year.

The exhibition offers a multidimensional survey of the artist’s critical and aesthetical concerns. It features the brightly colored Roto Shaku, twenty eight Obi Scrolls and their custom wooden cases, as well as intricate variations of his fragmented geometrical paintings on canvas, and a witty series of photographs.

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De Wain Valentine, Curved Wall Clear (1969), via Art Observed

Set inside David Zwirner’s West 19th Street locations, a series of works from De Wain Valentine’s late 1960’s and 1970’s output is currently on view, culling a number of works by the Light and Space artist that illustrate his technical, material and spatial innovations during the early years of his career.

De Wain Valentine, Works from the 1960s and 1970s (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Duane Hanson, Queenie II (1988), All images by Luke Hayes for Serpentine Gallery.

Currently on view at London’s Serpentine Gallery is a retrospective of Duane Hanson, the late American sculpture whose hyperrealistic sculptures of individuals pulled from daily life still manage to create a potent sense of awe are on view.  The show, his first survey in the British capital since 1997, strikes a chord against the backdrop of today’s high-tech art production methods and complex conceptual depictions.  (more…)

Hanna Liden with Everthing (2015), via Art Observed

At both Ruth Wittenberg Plaza and Hudson River Park, clusters of massive bagels have touched down, part of artist Hanna Liden’s new commission for the Art Production Fund.  Amplifying her previous interests in the possibilities for discarded material and consumer objects as raw sculptural material, Liden turns the ringed breakfast staple into a sudden intrusion on the New York landscape. (more…)

David Opdyke Exhibit A (2012), all photos via Josie Berman for Art Observed

This summer, Marianne Boesky Gallery’s uptown location has put forth a new group exhibition, organized by Aniko Berman, entitled Weird Science, a playful show that dwells on common threads that explore art as a discipline that attempts to logically reveal the possibility of unperceived worlds outside or within our own metaphysical landscape. Through process or content, the artists chosen attempt to expose the fantastic lurking behind everyday occurrences. (more…)

Anicka Yi, 7,070,430K of Digital Spit (Installation View), via Kunsthalle Basel

Following up on her widely praised commission at The Kitchen earlier this year, Anicka Yi is presenting a new body of work on view at the Kunsthalle Basel, under the title 7,070,430K of Digital Spit.  Continuing the artist’s interest in time-sensitive and formally unstable media, the exhibition includes a number of works in various states of destruction and decay, applied here to explore notions of forgetting and memory loss. (more…)

Thomas Hirschhorn, In-Between (2015), Photo by Mark Blower Courtesy of South London Gallery

Thomas Hirschhorn has returned to London for his first solo show in the British capital is some time, bringing a new, site-specific work that continues the artist’s interest in crisis, temporality and mediation as necessary components in the understanding and mitigation of trauma.  Borrowing from the aesthetic languages of installation and sculpture, the artist maps a fictitious moment of violence across the South London Gallery, bringing with it a state of suspended aftermath. (more…)

Watermill Center Summer Benefit and Auction, via Art Observed

The 22^nd Edition of the Watermill Center’s Annual Summer Benefit took place this past weekend, honoring long-time Watermill supporter and philanthropist Inga Maren Otto. This year, the gala’s theme was “Circus of Stillness… power over wild beasts”. Hosted by Robert Wilson, it brought together works of art and performance from some 25 countries, with over one thousand attendees. The evening raised a total of over $1.9 million dollars towards Watermill Center’s Artist Residency Program, International Summer Program, and other educational events for its artists.

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Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos (1946). All Images courtesy Tate London

Now through October 25^th, the Tate Modern in London is hosting an exhibition of Barbara Hepworth’s sculptural work. The Yorkshire-born artist is known for her elegant abstract forms, and is considered among the most important British modernist sculptors of her time.  Hepworth has continued to produce consistently throughout her lifetime, creating a wide array of structures and employing a variety of materials evocative of natural landscapes and relationships, two of her main points of inquiry.

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Olaf Breuning, Life III (2015), via Michael Benevento

Compiling a body of work from the past several years of the artist’s practice, Michael Benevento  in Los Angeles is offering a broad look at the recent practice of Olaf Breuning, exploring the artist’s interest in vastly differing modes of production, and the thematic interests that unify his work.

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FAILE, FAILE Temple (detail) (2015) via Brooklyn Museum

FAILE, a Brooklyn-based collaboration between artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, is currently presenting their exhibition Savage/Sacred Young Minds at the Brooklyn Museum, continuing the artists’ practice in obscuring the boundaries between fine art and street art through techniques of both traditional and rebellious creative processes within predominantly institutional settings. (more…)

Lee Lonzano, Slide (1965), all photos via Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth is currently presenting Drawings and Paintings, a historical survey of artist Lee Lozano at the gallery’s Chelsea space on 18th Street, featuring a selection of critically significant works from 1964 and 1965.  Lozano’s pieces, expressive in their energy and form, showcase depth in exploring issues relating to both gender and the body in general, with drawings and paintings suggesting intersections and geometric interplays using color, line, gradient, and variations of perspective. (more…)

Niele Toroni at Swiss Institute (Installation View), via The Swiss Institute

The work of Niele Toroni is currently the subject of a pair of shows this month, with exhibitions at the Swiss Institute through September 6 and at Marian Goodman Gallery through July 30.  The Swiss-born Toroni is known for his reductive, repetitive paintings, emphasizing a conceptual approach which he executes with impressive regularity.  According to some, the artist repeats his painting techniques to free his work from the formulaic politics of representation, and divorce art from authorship.  Toroni creates site-specific and serial paintings, placing brushstrokes at regular intervals with a 50cm paintbrush, 30cm apart on a variety of surfaces including canvas, newspaper, and fabric.  Toroni began employing this method during a 1967 performance in Paris. (more…)

Ai Weiwei with his Passport, via The Guardian

Artist Ai Weiwei is free once again to travel outside of China, following the return of his passport, The Guardian reports. The return caps a four year ordeal for the artist following his arrest for alleged tax evasion in 2011.  (more…)

Françoise Grossen, Five Rivers, 1974

Currently on view at Blum & Poe is the first survey of Swiss-born, New York-based artist Françoise Grossen, focusing on works the artist created between 1967 and 1991 using fiber, a material that has recently had something of a renaissance in contemporary practice.  The material, which served as a popular material during the experimental ventures of the late 1960’s art scene, saw Grossen, as well as her peers Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks and Lenore Tawney utilizing the material in allegorical and often grandiose arrangements, culminating in 1969’s historically resonant MoMA exhibition Wall Hangings. (more…)

Michael Borremans, Black Mould / Pogo (2015), via Art Observed

Belgian painter Michael Borremans has long mined the aesthetic moorings of antiquity for his work, creating meticulously labored paintings that owe much to 17th and 18th century painterly technique.  Originally trained as a photographer, Borremans’s craft is tempered by a notable scholarly, contextual awareness, frequently using his mooring in the present day to offer the occasional critique or inversion of his historical inspirations.  Such is the case with the artist’s most recent body of work at David Zwirner’s 24 Grafton Street gallery in London, a series of dark, occasionally disturbing pieces that use the painter’s signature style to amplify their surrealist aspects.

Michael Borremans, Black Mould / The Badger’s Song (2015), via Art Observed

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Franz West, Lamp (2003), all photos by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Marlborough Broome Street, the downtown, contemporary-focused outpost of Chelsea’s Marlborough Gallery, opened its doors for a summer group show titled Marlborough Lights this month. Curated by Leo Fitzpatrick, a newly appointed director at the gallery, the exhibition traces a loose interpretation of the lightbulb as a source of energy and an allegory for critical thinking, while exploring the potentialities for the lamp as a creative container for motives beyond mere furniture or utilitarian lighting.

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