Diane Arbus, Lady at a Masked Ball with Two Roses on Her Dress, NYC (1967). Images via Jeu de Paume unless otherwise noted.

Diane Arbus’ (1923-1971) first retrospective in Paris is on now at Jue de Paume. Between the Arbus Estate and 41 private collections, 200 photographs are shown, a handful of which have never been seen before. Describing her work, Arbus once said, “I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.” Her frank approach to portraiture confronts one with a sense of identity that is often hidden away; she exposed and celebrated the unique in all, her oeuvre showcasing an underlining sensitivity to the human condition.

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Walton Ford, It makes me think of that awful day (2011). All images via Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Walton Ford has been likened to 19th century naturalist John James Audubon for his realistic old-master style watercolors, but while the nine works on view now at Paul Kasmin may resemble Audubon in style, they go much further in content. I Don’t Like to Look at Him, Jack. It Makes Me Think of That Awful Day on the Island, includes two series of paintings: the first consists of three large-scale (9 x 12 feet) portraits of King Kong, while the second features various monkeys in the process of decapitating exotic birds. While each piece maintains a close attention to detail that is characteristic of Ford, the work also evokes the complex, wild, and occasionally emotional nature of nature itself.

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

In 2007, Urs Fischer used a jackhammer to tear up the floor of Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Chelsea, leaving the room an enormous pit of dirt. With his return to the gallery for a joint show with Cassandra MacLeod, Fischer has sought to “build” on the past show both literally and theoretically. The press release refers to the “inverted pyramid of excavated earth,” the natural next step of invention being a flat surface above the earth—the table, with which Fischer has filled the three gallery spaces. Paintings by MacLeod cover the walls of the gallery, making for an intriguing dialogue between the two artists’ work. Stacks of tables, some three or four high, perhaps even offer a better view to the paintings mounted high above.

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Mark Rothko, Light Red Over Black (1957). Artwork courtesy of the Tate.

Rothko in Britain commemorates the 50th anniversary of Rothko’s inaugural British exhibition. 41 years after his passing, the Whitechapel Gallery has meticulously compiled a retrospection of images, letters, and reviews, all paired with a single work—Light Red Over Black (1957), on loan from the Tate. Light Red Over Black towers over the viewer, a single, saturated painting. The large form and accompanying material, sparsely arranged, were placed in a manner in which to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko’s words, to encourage the feeling of being “enveloped within.” Walls were constructed specifically to show the work in such isolation, in hopes to evoke such intensity. The ‘less is more’ approach is discussed in Whitechapel’s video about the show, explaining the concept of an exhibition about a long closed exhibition.

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Antony Gormley, Still Standing (2011-12). Installation view. Via AntonyGormley.com.

British sculptor Antony Gormley has been given the opportunity to place seventeen new works in the Dionysius Hall of the classical Greek and Roman galleries of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.  The exhibition is titled Still Standing: A Contemporary Intervention in the Classical Collection; the unique juxtaposition of contemporary sculpture in a classical setting sheds new light on the Hermitage Museum.

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Aleksandra Mir, The Seduction of Galileo Galilei, video still (2011). All images courtesy the artist and Mercer Union, Toronto.

The second showing of The Seduction of Galileo Galilei, a video documenting Aleksandra Mir’s experiment with gravity and car tires stacked unnervingly high, is coupled with The Dream and The Promise, another previous series that combines religious iconography with elemental, scientific scenes. In her interview with AO, she explains how her inspiration largely lies between the crossover of the two—science and faith—so much so that each loses opposition, and within time are indistinguishable from one another.

Aleksandra Mir, The Dream and the Promise (2009)

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Installation view, Eva Hesse “Spectres 1960” at Brooklyn Museum. All images on site for Art Observed by Jen Lindblad unless otherwise noted.

Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum are nineteen small scale paintings by Eva Hesse. Completed at the age of twenty-four, the early figurative works are rendered in haunting golds and pale, muddled greens. The artist is best known for her fiberglass and polyester resin sculptures, but the paintings assembled for this exhibition shed new light on her work. Deeply personal, they offer a glimpse at the psychology of the tormented artist as she struggled to gain recognition in the New York City art scene of the 1960s before her untimely death at the age of thirty-four.

Eva Hesse, No Title, 1960, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in. Image via Brooklyn Museum.

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Cory Arcangel, Research in Motion (Kinetic Sculpture 6) (2011).
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Following up on his solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum, media artist Cory Arcangel is currently showing at the Lisson Gallery in London. Titled Speakers Going Hammer, the show features a number of pieces previously unseen in the UK, as well as several new works. The New York-based artist first rose to prominence in 2002, with his piece Super Mario Clouds, featuring a hacked Super Nintendo System that had removed all of the graphics from a Super Mario Cartridge save for the blocky, pixilated clouds. Continuing along these lines, Speakers Going Hammer features a hacked basketball game program, titled Self Playing N64 NBA Courtside 2, in which an outdated, video game version of Shaquille O’Neal continually takes and misses free-throws.

Installation view.

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Curtis Kulig, Love Me (Steel) (2011). All photos on site for Art Observed by Daniel Creahan.

Over and over again, the two words, “Love Me,” are repeatedly scrawled on the canvasses of Curtis Kulig, the street artist best known for emblazoning this simple cursive ‘throw-up’ all over New York City. Viewed next to the faux-LED crosses and blatant consumerist imagery of his long-time friend and supporter Skullphone, they begin to take on a hint of desperation, a plaintive plea in a world inundated with brand-names and electronic simulacra. While the two artists have supported each other for over 7 years, Scripture, now showing at the Mallick Williams and Co. Gallery in Chelsea, is the first documented collaboration between the two artists. Regardless of the precedent, however, the installation sees Kulig and Skullphone pursuing techniques that the artists have explored in past work.
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Frank Stella, Double Mitered Maze (1967). All images on site for Art Observed by Ana Marjanovic.

Paul Kasmin gallery hosts Geometric Variations, an exhibition assembling Frank Stella’s square-shaped canvases from the 1960s and ’70s, including Concentric Square, Mitered Mazes and the Benjamin Moore series. According to the press release, the exhibition explores the “historical importance” of Stella’s canvases. Contextualizing them within Western art history discourse, H.H. Arnason pointed out that Stella’s art represents a median between the “modernism advocated by Greenberg, and Minimalism.”

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Damien Hirst Legend (2011) and Myth (2010), via The Guardian

Damien Hirst has moved on to dissecting mythical creatures in his most recent public showing at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, UK, part of a Sotheby’s selling exhibition of monumental sculpture. From Legend, the winged horse with exposed bones and muscles, to Myth, a partially skinned unicorn, Hirst continues his exploration of anatomy, as well as “the relationship between science and religion,” (The Guardian). “It’s kind of like exploding a myth to make it real,” Hirst explains.

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Sliding down with canvas mat in Carsten Höller’s Untitled (Slide), 2011. All photos on site for Art Observed by Nicholas Wirth.

Carsten Höller‘s 40-foot-high, 102-foot-long transparent metal slide—a “pneumatic mailing system”—awaits the daring visitor at the top floor of the New Museum. Surveying eighteen years of the artist’s work, The Experience exhibition is organized “experientially,” as opposed to chronologically, moving from a low-speed mirrored carousel down the slide to realistic albeit neon animal sculptures, disorienting architectural interventions, a sensory deprivation pool, and the artist’s simple yet highly effective upside-down goggles. The series of interactive environments function like science experiments, designed “to explore the limits of human sensorial perception and logic through carefully controlled participatory experiences,” as the exhibition’s press release explains.

Installation view, fourth floor.

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Installation view of George Segal’s Woman on a Park Bench (1998) and Roger Hiorns’ Untitled (2008) in September 11, MoMA PS1, 2011. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

For an exhibition dedicated to the memory of September 11, 2001, September 11 at MoMA PS1 is conspicuously void of images from the tragedy 10 years ago. There are no day-after headlines, no lists of missing persons, no photos of crumbling towers filled with smoke and terror. Instead, curator Peter Eleey approaches 9/11 with more than 70 works by 41 different artists, the works created for reasons wholly separate from, and many before, 9/11/01—only 1 piece was made as a direct response to the tragedy. “Horrific, yet familiar, images of the attacks and their aftermath are embedded in our memories,” says the press release. “This exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.”

Installation view of Jeremy Deller’s Unrealized Project for the Exterior of the Carnegie Museum (2004-2011) and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (The End) (1990) in September 11, MoMA PS1, 2011. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

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Michelangelo Pistoletto, Lavatore – impalcatura (2008-2011). All images via Simon Lee Gallery.

His second exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, Michelangelo Pistoletto uses a process-as-product aesthetic to address themes of production, labor, and inevitably, deconstruction. The exhibition, titled Lavoro (Italian for to work or to operate), displays objects of construction as a means of revealing the art inherent to the tools that produce it, revisiting the artist’s fascination with ideas of assembly and process, and the socio-political implications thereof.

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Thomas Houseago, Lying Figure (Mother Father) 2011. Via Art & Architecture Journal Press.

On Vassivière Island, What Went Down is Thomas Houseago‘s first exclusively sculpture exhibition in France, at The Centre International d’art et due Paysage de L’ile de Vassivière. Both the building and its surroundings are filled with large, monumental sculptures inspired by the Vassivière landscape. Curated by Chiara Parisi, the artist creates with plaster, bronze, and wood, applying traditional ‘high-art’ materials to sprawling, awkward, masculine forms. Houseago has described his work as unskilled, saying “I could talk for hours about Michel Foucault, but I couldn’t draw. So I feel like I’m in a punk band. I’m completely unskilled. I feel like I just have to do it.”

Thomas Houseago, Large Lamp I (Snake Island) (2011). Via AAJP

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The Mound (2011), left. Triptych (2011), right.

Lisa Yuskavage is currently showing her third solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery. In a mix of early French Impressionism (a la Manet) and Dali-esque Surrealism, Yuskavage captures the languid, voluptuous figures of the female body through a feminist lens. The artist also takes on themes of landscape, time, and plot, in a way that extends her visual resonance.

Art Observed on site for the opening

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FIAC 2011 at the Grand Palais in Paris. All photos on site for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

FIAC 2011 (The Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain) opens this weekend in Paris for its 38th year. The international art fair, which boasts an impressive array of 168 galleries from 21 countries, will show the work of some 2,800+ artists. Running October 20–23rd, the exposition comes at the tail end of Frieze Art Fair, drawing artists, collectors, gallerists, and enthusiasts eastward from London. While the focus of Frieze leans toward contemporary, FIAC includes both contemporary and modern, including works from Picasso, Calder, and Matisse. The fair has been building momentum since 2006; Jennifer Flay, appointed general director in 2010, credits this boost to the fair’s move to the Grand Palais, one of the city’s most cherished architectural gems. The fair also expands this year to the Jardin des Tuileries, the Jardin des Plantes, the Museum of Natural History, and other venues around the city. Another innovation, a mobile application (in French) is available through Windows Phone which enables visitors to book tickets directly from their phone, as well as receive realtime news updates from the fair, find exhibitors and artists, and access videos and photos of the show.

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Jay Jopling of White Cube, which is exhibiting Damien Hirst’s Where Will It End.

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All images for Art Observed on site by Guillaume Vandame.

The Andrea Rosen Gallery currently presents its first exhibition of Sterling Ruby and Lucio Fontana, an adventurous juxtaposition of the hip contemporary Californian with the radical and aggressive 20th Century artist. Ms. Andrea Rosen, who kindly answered questions on the show, described how the inspiration for the exhibition came as a conversation with Ruby when Rosen was doing a group show of De Kooning, Fontana, and Eva Hesse in the fall of 2008. “We were talking about contextualizing Sterling’s work and Sterling had very much liked that show, in particular my relationship to those particular ceramics which hadn’t been shown very much,” Rosen said. “So we started with a discussion and it sort of evolved in a year long conversation about what we wanted to accomplish juxtaposing Sterling and Fontana.”

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Jenny Saville, Red Stare Head 1 (2011). Oil on canvas.  10 5/16 x 86 5/8 inches. © Jenny Saville. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Mike Bruce.

Her first exhibition in New York City since 2003, Jenny Saville‘s Continuum is on now at the Madison Avenue Gagosian Gallery. Writes Saville, “[Flesh] is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive.” In the multicolored paintings of the Stare series, the body and face are disturbingly laid open. The artist depicts flesh in all forms and colors, often grotesque, as seen in several mother and child paintings, which are also heavily influenced by Biblical imagery.

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Andy Warhol, Blue Liz as Cleopatra (1962)

An assembly of prints from 1962 and 1963, Andy Warhol‘s series of recently deceased movie star and social activist Elizabeth Taylor—the exhibition appropriately titled Liz—is currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. An iconic figure of Pop Art, Warhol reintroduced figurative imagery into the 1960s art scene, otherwise dominated by an aesthetic ideal of abstract expressionism. As seen in the Liz series and the rest of his early portraiture, Warhol re-appropriated images from the media, mechanically multiplying them via silkscreen.

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Photos via Opening Ceremony

“The possibilities, aesthetic and philosophical alike, are endless,” reads the last sentence of the press release for Love Roses, a show by Dan Colen and Nate Lowman currently on at The National Exemplar Gallery in Manhattan. The sculpture, a beaded curtain fashioned out of small glass tubes containing cloth flowers—that also have been known to double as pipes for smoking crack cocaine—challenges notions of the physicality and temporality of an interactive viewing process, while also calling to mind ideas of reappropriation and originality. After passing through the curtain, visitors encounter a rack of free postcards, featuring photographs of past work by both Colen and Lowman.

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John Baldessari, Double Feature: Sudden Fear (2011). Via Sprueth Magers.

Eighty-year old John Baldessari opens Berlin’s Sprueth Magers fall season with new works in a show titled Double Feature. Baldessari continues his image appropriation, for which he is well-known, with this series of works giving the audience a complex set of collages to view. Baldessari is a pioneer in hybrid art forms, mixing photographic collages, paint, billboards, and performance, remaining outside the confines of a neat categorization.

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Doug Aitken, Now (2011) at 303 Gallery NY. All photos for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

AO is on site in London for this week’s Frieze Art Fair. With 173 galleries selling an estimated $350 million worth of art, a level of anxiety pervades as the week’s results will be indicative of the overall international contemporary art market. Works like Christian Jankowski’s droll The Finest Art on Water and Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine directly comment on the world economic state, while the overall demeanor remains upbeat, with art world moguls and A-list celebrities enjoying the festivities.

Michael Landy’s Credit Card Destroying Machine (2011), Thomas Dane Gallery

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Still from PST video with John Baldessari and Jason Schwartzman. Via CalArts.

Began by the Getty Foundation nearly ten years ago, the Pacific Standard Time (PST) initiative has done well, to say the least, with the most recent issue of Artforum almost completely devoted to art in L.A. While PST-related programming began in early September, the weekend of October 1st was the highly anticipated official “opening weekend,” with sixteen exhibitions opening across the city.

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