La Couleur en Avant at MAMAC, Nice. Martial Raysse, Nissa Bella (1964)  All pictures by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed.

The Museum of  Modern and Contemporary Art—MAMAC—in Nice, France is showing Arret sur image (which translates to ‘stop on image’) through October 23rd, and La Couleur en Avant (‘the color before’) through November 27th. Both exhibitions represent modern and contemporary artists, with an emphasis on the colors and fluidity within the contemporary. In Le Couleur en Avant, sculptures by Yves Klein and paintings by Henri Matisse, among others, are juxtaposed to show their influence on the pop art of Martial Raysse. Arret sur image, held in Ponchettes Gallery, displays work by living artists such as Gilbert and George, Robert Longo, and Barbara Kruger, expanding on the thematic influence of color in a contemporary context. The work in Ponchettes Gallery remains in MAMAC’s permanent collection.

Arret sur image by MAMAC at Galerie des Ponchettes, Nice.

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Carlito Carvalhosa, Sum of Days (2010). Via MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) presents Carlito Carvalhosa: Sum of Days, a large-scale interactive installation that engages the visitor’s visual, tactile and auditory senses. Brazilian artist Carlito Carvalhosa (born 1961) has suspended a lengthy, white, semi-transparent fabric from the spiral-like support attached to the ceiling of MoMA’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, draping a nearly 20 meter tall stucture. The fabric loosely touches the ground forming an elliptical walkway, the audience invited to walk through the installation and touch the fabric walls. Ceiling-mounted microphones record each days’ background noises which are then played back the following day. This “accumulation” of sound through time is reflected through the title Sum of Days. The installation also includes the occasional live music performance.

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All photographs by Tom Vinetz, © Kienholz Collection of Kawamura Memorial Museum, Sakura, Japan, courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, CA and The Pace Gallery, New York unless otherwise noted.

Imagine entering an expansive, lowly-lit room, shoes crunching on a sandy dirt floor. You follow the footprints into the ever-expanding room. The scene feels as though you’ve stumbled into a movie set: five cars are parked in a circle, dramatic lighting emanates from headlights, framing the central scene. Tinny blues rift from one of the automobile radios, immersing you more fully in the tableau. Among trees and other vegetation, you are drawn inside until you encounter a horrific life-size scene: five white figures attacking an African American man.

What you have seen is not a dream, it is Edward Kienholz’s work Five Car Stud. Created between 1969 and 1972, its current showing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) marks the first time the work has been shown since its inclusion in documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany in 1972.

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Subodh Gupta, Ali Baba (2011)

The major exhibition Paris-Delhi-Bombay, currently on view at Centre Pompidou through September 19th, displays work by nearly 50 artists mainly based or born in India. Many emerging and high-profile Indian artists have been showing recently in Paris—both the work at Indian Summer, organized at Ecole des Beaux Arts, and Anish Kapoor‘s monumental intervention at the Grand Palais, have included work by Indian artists both already established in Europe as well as those still up-and-coming.

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Installation view. All images courtesy of Cheim and Read unless otherwise noted.

For the first time in its fifteen years, Cheim and Read is showcasing all of its female artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, and Diane Arbus, for a celebratory exhibition. Less of a critical show on feminism, the exhibition is more of a simple gathering of varied artists. “The Women in Our Life: A Fifteen Year Anniversary Exhibition” reminds us of the voice and vision of some of these major players in contemporary art.

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Omer Fast, 5000 Feet is the Best (2011). Digital film still, via The Model

On view at The Model in Sligo, Ireland through November 27th is “The Tunnel,” a large-scale installation and major solo exhibition of Israeli video artist Omer Fast. Three installations occupy The Model’s atrium and gallery space including a two part version of his newest film project, 5000 Feet is the Best, which was commissioned by The Model, Dublin Contemporary 2011, the Hermes Foundation, and the Kadist Foundation. 5000 Feet is the Best will be presented as a unique version specific to The Model, including both the original film and multi-media installation components. Fast is known for his films that weave together multiple narratives using documentary and dramatization methods to explore the complexity in presenting truth, leading the viewer to the realization that fact and fiction are undeniably intertwined.

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Josh Tonsfeldt, Untitled (2011), via Harris Lieberman

Bodies and their attendant messes, the connection between the artist and the viewer, and the complicated processes of making and looking at art are all covered in this wide-ranging exhibition which was organized by West Street Gallery but is hosted by Harris Lieberman in Chelsea. The press release tells us that the show was was inspired by William Wegman‘s videos from the 1970s, four of which play in a loop on a television in the installation. One of these, Milk/Floor (1970-78), shows the artist dribbling milk from his mouth and his iconic dog lapping it up, setting the tone for the show by poking fun at the often absurd relationship between the artist (dribbling the milk) and the public (lapping it up). The rest of the works further probe this moment of connection.

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Detail of Dog head from Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2011) All photos by Megan Hoetger for Art Observed.

The installation of the first major public sculpture work by well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on August 20th, its West Coast stop on a global tour. Encircling the elevator up from the parking structure in the North Piazza of LACMA’s sprawling campus, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads functions as a marker of a heavily trafficked threshold. Its position outside the parking is particularly suited to the car-dominated geography of Los Angeles, but it also allows multiple points of approach for those visitors ambling between the Ahmanson and Broad buildings, or just arriving through the Chris Burden street lamps.

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Neo Rauch, Unter Feuer, 2010. Via Museum Frieder Burda

The Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany is hosting a large-scale retrospective of Leipzig-based artist Neo Rauch (born 1960). Showing about forty paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, the exhibition covers the past twenty years of Rauch’s career. Currently an honorary professor at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Rauch is the representative of the New Leipzig School of painting distinguished by the figurative visual language, narrative content, and technical perfection.

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René Magritte, La Carte d’après Nature, numèro spècial (January 1954). All images via Matthew Marks

Matthew Marks is currently exhibiting “La Carte D’Aprés Nature” curated by gallery-represented artist Thomas Demand. It features three rarely-seen paintings by René Magritte supplemented by sculptures, photographs, and films by established and emerging artists that explore themes similar to the late Surrealist’s. Demand has pulled pieces from all over the world, from varying disciplines and times, that speak of Magritte’s “carte d’aprés nature,” or “map of nature.” Demand tells the Observer, “I wanted there to be the feeling of something strange.”

René Magritte, Le grand style (The Great Style) (1951)

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Installation view, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape (2011). All images via Tate Modern.

On view until September 11 at the Tate Modern in London, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape brings together work spanning six decades of the internationally renowned artist’s career. Organized with the help of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, this major retrospective is a rare opportunity to see over 150 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper culled from collections around the world, as well as five of his large triptychs in their first ever coincident display. In addition to an exceptional viewing experience, the Tate has set out to provide a political context for Miró’s work and thereby shed light on the esteemed Surrealist’s oft-overlooked engagement with and dedication to the world around him.

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Joan Miró, Painting (1927).

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Sol Lewitt Installation at City Hall Park, all images courtesy of Gautier Pellegrin for Art Observed.

27 career spanning works from the late conceptual artist Sol LeWitt are now on view at City Hall Park through December 2nd. Curated from museums and private collections around the the world, the landmark exhibition Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006 is the first outdoor career survey of the groundbreaking artist’s conceptual work.

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Dirk Skreber, Untitled (Crash 1) (2009)

The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture at Saatchi Gallery features 20 sculptors throughout the space, marking the first ever exclusive sculptural exhibition at the Chelsea, London showroom. The international range of artists, some well-known and some up-and-coming, produced mixed media compositions of all sizes. An overarching theme of experimentation pervaded, both with human form and bright-colored whimsy. Geometric and architectural forays are present in the work of Sterling Ruby, Roger Hiorns, and Peter Buggenhout, with more figurative developments by Thomas Houseago and David Thorpe.

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View of the Vardø, Norway memorial “Steilneset”, 2010. All images via Wallpaper*

Architect Peter Zumthor and artist Louise Bourgeois have collaborated to design a memorial to the victims of the Finmark witchhhunts of the early 17th century.  The Steilneset stands on the edge of the small town of Vardø in Norway, where 91 women were burned at the stake or tortured to death.

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Yayoi Kusama at Museo Reina Sofía, installation view, via Museo Reina Sofia

A major retrospective of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) is on view at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid until September 12th, 2011. The exhibition assembles Kusama’s multimedia projects and includes drawings, paintings, collages, installation, performance, literary, and design pieces. Organized by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Tate Modern, the exhibition explores the relationship between art and the socio-cultural reality in the past 50 years as reflected through Kusama’s work. Since the late 1950’s, Kusama has been associated with pop, first generation feminist art, minimalism, happenings, conceptual and installation art. Her work addresses and reveals the mental health issues the artist has experienced since the late 1970’s, visible through her “use of repetition, monochrome, and grids.”  However, as the curator Frances Morris reminds, “we need to balance the obvious framework of her mental health with the framework of art history and cultural milieu in which she operated over time.” Already shown in the Pompidou Centre, Paris at the beginning of 2011, this one-artist retrospective will travel to the Tate Modern, London in February 2012 and the Whitney Museum, New York in June 2012.  The exhibition traces Kusama’s artistic development through a number of periods.

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Announcement for Warhol’s Original Soup Cans Show at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles in 1962, via MOCA

On view now at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art is Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans from 1962. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans are arguably both his most recognizable work, and that of American Pop Art as a whole. The installation opened on the 49^th anniversary of both the first exhibition of the paintings at Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery, and Warhol’s first solo show.

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), via the Museum of Modern Art

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Jeff Wall, Boy Falling from Tree (2010) via BOZAR

On view at the Center for Fine Arts (BOZAR), Brussels and curated by Joël Benzakin, the Crooked Path exhibition examines the artistic roots of Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, while pointing out the status of photography in relation to other artistic disciplines such as painting and cinema.  The exhibition features twenty-five photographs by Wall displayed with over one hundred multimedia artifacts by key figures of Western mainstream art since the late nineteenth century onwards, including Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Frank Stella, and Carl Andre  – artists designated as those who made the strongest impact on Wall’s career. By showing these works, ‘The Crooked Path’ shows the influence of  Minimalism, post-Minimalism, Cinematography, Conceptual and post-Conceptual photography, nineteenth century and contemporary photography on Wall’s work.

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Ryan McGinley, Tom (Golden Tunnel) (2010), via OHWOW Gallery

On view now through August 27^th is “Post 9-11” at Los Angeles’s OHWOW Gallery. The group show features works by  New York-based artists who have in common both their rise to fame in the years since 9/11, and outspoken work that addresses sex, drugs, and the general decadence of the New York art scene at the time. Dan Colen, Terence Koh, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Ryan McGinley, Agathe Snow, Dash Snow, and Aaron Young  all have work represented in this show that aims to chronicle their relationships, collaborations, and responses to external circumstances of the past decade.

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Albert Oehlen, Blue Diamond Eyes (1994) all images via Honor Fraser

“It’s Great to be in New Jersey” is currently at Los Angeles gallery Honor Fraser, and will be on view through August 27^th. Curated by the Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson, known for multimedia works that celebrate freedom from authority, the exhibition presents works by a diversity of artists including Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Banks Violette, David Ratcliff, Linder, Raymond Pettibon, Wolfgang Tillmans, Oscar Tuazon, and Bea Schlingelhoff. “It’s Great to be in New Jersey” celebrates the influence of British Punk and the ways in which each of these artists interpreted and experienced the movement.

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Francesco Clemente, Name, 1983, all images via Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle’s “Francesco Clemente. Palimpsest,” an exhibition of work by Francesco Celemente, is the first show of the artist’s work in Germany in over twenty-five years. “Palimpsest” exhibits works spanning thirty years of Clemente’s career, filling three galleries with large paintings as well as jewel-toned watercolors. The show is open through September 4th, 2011.

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Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Palermo) (1976), all images via Leo Koenig, Inc.

“Sigmar Polke: Photoworks 1964-2000” is currently on view at Leo Koenig, Inc. in New York City through September 3^rd, 2011.  Developed in collaboration with Winckler Fine Arts, Berlin, the exhibition displays a carefully curated slice of the thousands of photographs Sigmar Polke made throughout his lifetime.  The images chosen demonstrate his enthusiasm for photographic experimentation and the subjects captured range in tone from humorous to serious.  The exhibition reveals Polke’s chameleon-like aptitude and capriciousness.

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David Hockney, composite from “Me Draw on iPad” (2010), all Hockney images are via the Louisiana Museum

On view at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum is “Me Draw on iPad” featuring several hundred of David Hockney’s most recent drawings. Created on his iPhone and iPad using the Brushes application, these drawings make clear both Hockney’s characteristic whimsy and  dedication to exploration of new creative methods and media. Curated by Charlie Scheips, “Me Draw on iPad” is on view through August 28^th 2011.

David Hockney, composite from “Me Draw on iPad” (2010)

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Eva Rothschild, Empire (2011). All images courtesy are via Public Art Fund.

Installed at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York, “Empire” is Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild’s first commissioned public art work in the United States. Appearing at once ominous and playful, “Empire” greets pedestrians at the southeast entrance to the park. The sculpture joins the ranks of past Public Art Fund art installations that have been displayed in the plaza.

Eva Rothschild, Empire (detail) (2011)

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