Armand Doré, Nude, Smoking and Reclining (c. 1860-65)

The French Exit group show brought to life by the curatorial eye of Mattias Vendelmans invites a dialogue between artists and their muses, considering just what happens when one skips the farewell in search of something more enticing after dark. How does the basic notion of privacy and vulnerability continue to pique our curiosity? Spanning works from oil paintings and sculptures to pen and paper, from Baudelairean Paris to the suburbs of 1930s Stockholm, an ongoing exploration of organic tenderness and bestiality in human nature unfolds.

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Gabriel Orozco at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2024

The Vitruvian Man (c. 1487) is a study of the proportions of the human body inscribed within the absolute forms of a circle and a square, using metalpoint, pen and ink, with touches of watercolour on paper. One of Leonardo Da Vinci’s best-known works, the drawing is stored in the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia in Italy, and only rarely exhibited due to its fragility as a work on paper.

Influenced by the theories of Roman architect Vitruvius in his treaty “De Architectura” (1st century BC), Da Vinci drew a male figure with his hands and feet touching the perimeter of a circle, his navel at its precise center. Another position is superimposed with his feet standing on the base of a square while his arms extend outwards, the area directly below the navel as the center of the square, per Da Vinci’s own findings.

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Sophie Kitching, Nocturne, 3A Gallery, all photos by Migle Staniskyte

For her latest exhibition on view at 3A Gallery, Sophie Kitching presents new paintings from her Nocturne series, a shadowy and dreamy companion to her Invisible Green series, started in 2019. Both the Nocturnes and the Invisible Green paintings incorporate images of bright flowers and leaves as their main subject matter, but the former is painted onto a background made of black ink mixed with Payne’s gray whereas the latter is on a white canvas. The contrast of both and indeed the title itself—Nocturne—alludes to the opposites representing night and day versions of one another, but moreover they tell a subtle tale of light versus shadow and express entirely different temperaments and moods.

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Heidi Bucher, Untitled (c. 1954) Photographed by Enrico FIorese.

With the Venice Biennale recently closing, only a few exhibitions remain on view in the city. Fortunately, for those who choose to visit this month, there is an exhibition at ALMA ZEVI featuring works by Heidi Bucher. Entitled Sublime Geometry, the show offers moments for discovery just as Venice harbors a wintry magic: in the quiet, crepuscular afternoon hours you arrive to this tucked away gallery space to find walls glowing with mother of pearl pigment.

Born in the Swiss town of Winterthur, Bucher studied textile design under Max Bill at the School of Applied Art in Zurich where she made silk collages that are enchanting for their varying degrees of precision and inexactitude. One work hangs in a corner of the gallery and invites closer inspection; illuminated from certain angles, it gives off a subtle luster redolent of a Vija Celmins Night Sky.

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Anri Sala, The Last Resort (2017), all images via Marian Goodman Gallery

For his first show in New York since his solo exhibition at the New Museum in 2016, Anri Sala presents two new major installations at Marian Goodman Gallery that continue his interest in utilizing sound and music to question experience.

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Meg Webster, Solar Grow Room (2016), via Paula Cooper Gallery

Currently on view at Paula Cooper’s West 21st Street space, Meg Webster is currently presenting a selection of new works, continuing her focus on sculptural works that encourage viewer participation while engaging subtly with the space around it.  In Chelsea, Webster has injected the pristine gallery with natural elements, fostering a deeper sensory examination of the spatial and relational interactions among viewers and the space they pass through, in turn revealing the always-existing power and beauty of nature through the individual’s relationship with it, and within it. (more…)

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1271 Scribbles 12 (2007), all photos via Quincy Childs for Art Observed

The Drawing Center in New York is currently presenting selections from the collection of Sol LeWitt, offering a glimpse into the creative inspirations of one of the Post-War era’s central figures.  Showcasing an array of memorabilia and art including Japanese woodblock prints, hand-colored tourist photographs, and letters from his contemporaries, the show traces a lifetime of intellectual exchange and exploration by the pioneer of minimalist and conceptual practice. (more…)

Ellsworth Kelly, Barn, Long Island (1968), via Matthew Marks Gallery

The late Ellsworth Kelly’s photographic works are the subject of the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in New York this month, offering a unique and alternative perspective on an artist already seen as one of the most influential and prominent abstractionists of the 20th Century.  The show, on view at Matthew Marks in Chelsea, showcases over thirty gelatin silver prints, originally taken between 1950 and 1982, the first ever devoted to Kelly’s photographic endeavors.  Kelly finished preparing these prints and planning the exhibition shortly before his death on December 27th, at the age of ninety-two.  Here, these photographs offer a fitting perspective of the artist’s own aesthetic inclinations, and his unique perspective for the world around him. (more…)

Tom Wesselmann, San Francisco Nude with Green Wall (1959) All images © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, photo c/o David Zwirner

For its current exhibition in London, David Zwirner‘s Grafton Street gallery compiled a collection of thirty collages. created between 1959 and 1964, by the late Pop artist Tom Wesselmann, works that mark a significant point in the artist’s career as a leading figure of the Pop art movement, just at the point where he was transitioning from brusque abstraction to an interest in the commodity formats and spatial confines of the canvas.  Wesselmann’s later career, which consists of bold, graphically vivid works is hinted at through these collages, exposing the growth of his iconic style, and his interest in capturing interiors, landscapes, and female nudes. (more…)

Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens (Installation view), via Sprüth Magers

For the most recent new exhibition in Berlin, Sprüth Magers has brought together work from thirteen artists under the title Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens.  Curated by Goodroom and Johannes Fricke Waldthausen, the exhibition features works by Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Andy Hope 1930, Oliver Laric, Jon Rafman, and Andro Wekua, among others.  Intended to navigate visitors through the intersecting narratives within the realm of surrealist animation, abstraction and the ideas of “New Materialism” as expressed through the greater logistics of the world wide web, the exhibition references the notion of the screen as a critical tool of the conscious and unconscious, as well as a surface for projections of communication and technological abstraction.   (more…)

Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled (2016), image courtesy of Tatiana Trouvé and König Galerie

“Time is the theme underlying all my work,” states Italian-born, Paris-based artist Tatiana Trouvé.  Frequently reflecting ideas of time and intervention through her prolific body of drawings, sculptures and installations, the artist is presenting a new exhibition at Berlin’s König Galerie, where she has enacted a space illustrating the origins and systems dictating the flow and movement of the universe.  Consisting of furniture covered with bronze blankets, on whose backs reveals drawings and text, traced and written,her objects combine multiple realities incorporating dreamlike states and alchemical properties, always based on nuanced, multifaceted layers of space and time.  Each installation reveals a fragmented culture, and a system pushed into instability through her varying representational techniques.   (more…)

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Captain America Drawing in Ten Parts 41.17) (2008–09) (part three), Photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio © Mark Grotjahn

After exhibiting this body of work at Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo in 2010, Gagosian Gallery is presenting Mark Grotjahn’s ten part surrealist drawing exercise Untitled (Captain America).  The title of this show is a play on the original comic book series, where Captain America was intended to fight against the Axis Powers during World War II.  Seventy years later, the motif of Captain America is still significant and commonly used as a symbol of fighting for the American Dream.  (more…)

Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture (描法) No. 15-76 (1976) photo courtesy White Cube (George Darrell)

Considered one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, White Cube’s Mason’s Yard is currently presenting the work of Park Seo-Bo in his first solo show in the UK.  Best known for his Ecriture series of paintings, which he began in the late 1960s, the artist’s work in the series has allowed for his body, mind and creative process to merge together to form works that fully breathe out into space and time.  This exhibition traces the origins of these works, featuring 16 paintings made between 1967–81. (more…)

Jennifer Bornstein, Left Hiking Boot (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Jennifer Bornstein’s work has consistently dealt with the notion of obsolescence. This month, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the artist continues this pseudo-forensic body of work, that records the legacy of her father, a scientist specializing in collagen research.  Through her most recent body of work, Bornstein turns her father into the subject of study, evoking his presence and his work through a mixed-media installation of works on paper, plaster sculptures and film projection.

Jennifer Bornstein, Extension Cord (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

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Jon Rafman (Installation View) at Zabludowicz Collection, London. Photo: Thierry Bal

For his first major exhibition in the UK, multimedia artist Jon Rafman is exploring the differing spheres of reality and existence at the Zabludowicz Collection in London.  The Montreal-based artist is typically known for his practice focusing on the relationship between technology and human consciousness.  Here he takes his practice to a new dimension and scale, manipulating the space to create an interactive environment where viewer’s are able to ponder the real and the virtual, exploring technology with contemporary consciousness. (more…)

Katherine Bernhardt, Sharks, Plantains, and Cigarettes (2015) all photos courtesy Venus Over Manhattan

Painter Katherine Bernhardt has created an exhibition of work inspired by her recent residency in Puerto Rico, taking inspiration and encouragement from the landscape and artists of the city as her muse, and translating them into the artist’s signature hand.   (more…)

Piet Mondrian, Ovale Komposition mit Farbflächen (1914), photo courtesy Martin Gropius Bau © Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Nie-derlande

With his famous works focusing on geometric lines and primary colors, Piet Mondrian’s history as an artist is often obscured by his iconic later output.  Yet, the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin is exhibiting work by Piet Mondrian in an exhibition entitled The Line, taking the artist’s creative evolution and exposition as its starting point.  Initially starting his career painting in the Impressionist style, this exhibition of Mondrian’s work dedicates itself to showcasing the artist’s career and subsequent development of his unique stylistic innovations.  With over 50 drawings and paintings, the journey through Mondrian’s career is exposed through his many lenses and creative phases, and is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in Berlin since the opening of the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1968.

Piet Mondrian, Komposition mit rot, schwarz, gelb, blau und grau (1921), photo courtesy Martin Gropius Bau © Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Nie-derlande

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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…)

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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Oscar Murillo, Distribution Center (Installation View), via Art Observed

The newly opened Los Angeles Gallery The Mistake Room is inaugurating its downtown space with Oscar Murillo’s Distribution Center, a show of recent works by the artist.  Murillo, who is only 28, is perhaps best known for his large-scale paintings, if not for his young age and recent rise to the upper echelons of the art market. Here, his signature style is quickly noted, with canvases bordering on sculptural assemblage, debris and ephemera from his studio and travels are directly transplanted on to the canvas. Even in their installation, very few works happen to hang directly on the wall. Instead, they litter the floor and table surfaces like large, mis-matched carpet tiles, creating a kind of multi-layered horizontal work across the length of the room.

Oscar Murillo, Untitled (2014), via Art Observed (more…)

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Cuilapán Niche) (1973), via Galerie Lelong

The current exhibition at Galerie Lelong contains a wide range of Ana Mendieta’s work, spanning from photography (Mendieta was known for her documented performances), sculpture, and works on paper. Mendieta’s diverse approach often brings to question the artist’s practice and style: was she an earth artist, a conceptual artist, a performance artist, a filmmaker, a photographer, or a sculptor?  Featured prominently in this show, the artist’s earth sculptures in particular provide viewers a unique opportunity to examine the transformation of Mendieta’s work during the last years of her life. Presenting ephemeral works the artist executed in natural environs, as well as her three-dimensional pieces, made from natural elements such as earth, wood and sand, these pieces show the artist’s continued imagery of the female body.

Ana Mendieta, Alma Silueta en Fuego (Silueta de Cenizas), (1975), via Galerie Lelong (more…)

Richard Jackson, Bad Dog, 2013 via Orange County Museum of Art

The Orange County Museum of Art is currently presenting the first retrospective of Los Angeles-based artist Richard Jackson. Known for his radical expansion of painting’s practice and definition over the past 40 years, Jackson’s personal take on “action” painting invigorated its performative potential, and brought it into the sculptural dimension, while extending his practice into everyday life. Jackson’s pioneer approach to making paintings most likely has roots in his homestead upbringing. Sacramento born and raised, he spent most of his free time on a 2,000 acre ranch as a child before going on to study art and engineering at Sacramento State College.

Richard Jackson, Deer Beer, 2013 via Orange County Museum of Art

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Jim Shaw (Installation View), via Simon Lee

On view at London’s Simon Lee Gallery is a solo exhibition of eclectic new works by Los Angeles-based, American artist Jim Shaw. A California Institute of the Arts graduate and longtime L.A. resident, Shaw’s works highlight the anxieties and triumphs of  late capitalist society, phantasmic religion and the shamanic, mythical world of his dream life. This idiosyncratic body of work utilizes comic book aesthetic in pencil drawings and groupings of sculptures juxtaposed against new painted and drawn portraits of unhinged and broken body parts, which engender a distinct unease in the viewer.  

Jim Shaw, Oden’s Broken Staff and Emerald City Asgard (2013), via Simon Lee

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Jim Dine (Installation View), via Pace Gallery

In a refreshing break from his figurative painting and Pinocchio art, Pace Gallery presents a collection of new abstract paintings by Jim Dine.  The paintings are large, romantic, intense renderings of universal situations and emotions – sometimes literally, with titles like “A Fingerprint of Stars”, a painting that reaches fourteen feet wide and five feet tall.

 
Jim Dine, Late Friends (2012), via Pace Gallery

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