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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Albert Oehlen, Untitled (2005), via Art Observed

In terms of painterly invention, few can keep up with Albert Oehlen, the German artist whose relentless reinterpretation of the medium has made him one of the more intriguing, and often unpredictable, guardians of the form.  Moving effortlessly from visceral abstraction to coy installation work and back, few elements of visual culture have avoided his scope over the past 30 years.  This drive towards the investigation of the image, and its potentials in an increasingly mediated world, sits at the center of Oehlen’s New Museum retrospective this summer in New York, combining a carefully selected series of works that move from his early recognition during the 1980’s through to the present day. (more…)

Lynda Benglis, Bounty, Amber Waves, and Fruited Plane (2014) via Storm King Art Center

As summer reaches its zenith in New York, countless outdoor exhibitions and special public projects have sprung up across the city and region, encouraging visitors to take a more intrepid stance towards the art world.  Continuing its annual series of special exhibitions, the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, NY has invited New York artist Lynda Benglis to take full advantage of its sprawling Catskills property, bringing a number of her organically-inspired cast sculptures to investigate the picturesque environs upstate.  With 12 outdoor sculptures and an additional 15 on view inside the museum galleries, Benglis’s exhibition is a striking look at the artist’s aesthetic interests over the past 15 years, as she increasingly incorporated notions of public, urban space and natural phenomena into her dizzyingly complex sculptural assemblages. (more…)

Summer Group Show (Installation View), via Marian Goodman

The group exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery revives an excitement for the accomplishments of formal, conceptual and technical art practices during the mid to late 20th century, presenting a lively exhibition that groups together an overlapping group of six prolific artists: Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Fred Sandback, Anne Truitt, John McCracken and Lawrence Weiner, one is privy to the continuing reverberations of works that defined both minimalist and conceptual techniques in contemporary art practice, often passing from one school to the other while redefining notions of structure, method, dimensionality, and form.  Stoic in its midtown location, the exhibition presents an impressive collection of conceptual and minimalist classics, offering continuing pivots and critically advanced methodological expectations of non-referential visual forms.

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Karl Holmqvist, Bebe Coca wall drawing (2015)

The influx of summer group shows have already begun in New York this year, as galleries presenting diverting and compelling themes take the slow summer months to explore connecting themes among their roster of artists and the broader art world.  Gladstone Gallery’s Hello Walls is one of the most intriguing of these early group exhibitions, placing an emphasis on the wall as a means for contextual experiment and repositioned working structures. (more…)

Rachel Harrison, Magnum (2015), via Regen Projects

New York-based artist Rachel Harrison is presenting a multifaceted exhibition at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects this month, exploring notions of representation, perspective and time as they function in both the context of the gallery and in the artist’s own work.  Titled Three Young Framers, the exhibition’s tacit reference to the photography of August Sander points to this notion of the subject as a participant in the act of photography, echoed today in an era of widely proliferating photographic technology. (more…)

Andra Ursuta, Scarecrow (2015), all photos via Connie Huang via Art Observed

Andra Ursuta has never shied away from a challenging, multifaceted study of global culture, executing monumentally-scaled works that are often just as imposing in their materiality and contextual weight as they are in size alone.  For the artist’s most recent exhibition at Ramiken Crucible, she turns her attention once again to these juxtapositions of commercial and cultural might through the imposing forms of industrial, cultural, athletic and financial prowess. (more…)

Joan Miró, Bird in the Night (1967), via Art Observed

Joan Miró’s impact on the landscape of twentieth century art can hardly be ignored, an artist whose fluid, lithe figurations and adventurous approach to both color and line helped to pave an alternative to the dense cubism of his fellow countryman and friend Pablo Picasso.  Taking a reflective look at the artist’s contributions and continued artistic growth during his late Nahmad Contemporary is currently presenting Oiseaux dans L’Espace, a minimal, yet stunning show that reflects an impressive curatorial vision towards the artist’s later works.   (more…)

Roni Horn, Hack Wit – chasing blue out (2014), via Hauser and Wirth

Hauser and Wirth is currently devoting both its Saville Row Galleries to a collection of several recent series by Roni Horn, documenting the American artist’s ongoing investigations of language, repetition and meaning that stem from both the viewer and artist’s encounter with the work. (more…)

Philippe Parreno, Danny La Rue,  H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS

The Park Avenue Armory has opened its doors this summer to Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno’s largest U.S. installation to date, H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, a symphony of events unfolding in scripted and random sequences that constantly blend and transform in shape and context, tuning the entire space as a series of interlocking events.  Sharing authorship, Parreno avidly collaborates with performance artist Tino Sehgal, artist Pierre Hughye and pianist Mikhail Ruby, giving Parreno the role of both artist and director.  (more…)

Theaster Gates, White Sky, overcast (2014), All Images Courtesy White Cube Gallery

Now through July 5, the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey presents an exhibition of new work by Theaster Gates, the installation artist and professor of visual art at the University of Chicago who draws from themes of individual and collective history, place and self, and empowerment in his work.  Freedom of Assembly continues and expands upon the artist’s approach to art as a vehicle for social-justice, communication, and critique.

Theaster Gates, Freedom of Assembly (Installation View)

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Andy Warhol, One Dollar Bill (1962), via Sotheby’s

The results are in for Sotheby’s Evening Sale tonight, drawing the first half of the 2015 market year to a close with a mixed sale that saw impressive strength in unexpected places and a number of major letdowns at the higher end of the sale, ultimately closing on a final tally of £130,376,500, well shy of the £203 million mark the auction house had trumpeted earlier this month, with 9 of the 58 lots going unsold. (more…)

Francis Bacon, Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer (1967), via Christie’s

Another auction come and gone for Christie’s tonight in London, and another set of strong results, as the auction house capped a 76 lot sale to the tune of £95,646,500, meeting expectations, and setting several records for non-blue chip artists along the way, with 10 lots going unsold, including a string of Gerhard Richter works that may signal a downturn in the artist’s market popularity. (more…)

Ai Weiwei, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010), via Phillips

Sales have concluded at tonight’s Contemporary and Post-War Evening Sale at Phillips Auction House in London, capping a strong outing by the company that saw 10 of the 53 lots going unsold.  With somewhat sluggish proceedings and a few surprises, the auction seems to be something of a stumble in Phillips’ attempts to challenge the larger auction houses this week.

Sigmar Polke, Carnival (1979), via Phillips (more…)