March Avery, Sofa Companions (1967), via Blum & Poe

Currently on view at Blum & Poe through the end of this week, the New York based artist March Avery marks her first solo exhibition with the gallery, and uses the platform to develop a masterful exhibition around still moments and subtle gestures, a fitting first intro to the artist’s body of work, which now spans over five decades. (more…)

Nick van Woert, Untitled (detail) (2019), via Art Observed

Opening a show of new works at GRIMM New York under the title Body Parts, artist Nick van Woert returns to the city with a studied and at times strange investigation of embodiment, persona and material, arranging assemblages of human limbs, cast off materials and furniture to create a striking investigation of humanity and its functions in social space. (more…)

The Harrisons, On Making Earth (1970-ongoing), via Various Small Fires

Currently on view in Los Angeles, gallery Various Small Fires has compiled a selection of works from the careers of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, affectionately referred to as “The Harrisons.”  A visionary pair who embraced early warning signs of a global ecological catastrophe, The Harrisons have used their lives and careers as a spring board for investigations and experimentations in just how artists mights provide alternatives and opportunities for global preservation in the face of global climate change and political indifference.  (more…)

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Untitled (2011), via 303 Gallery

35 years ago, gallerist Lisa Spellman opened 303 Gallery, a space that would stand as a cornerstone of the New York art world over the coming decades, and which still stands as an icon of distinctive artistic practices, conceptual rigor, and a little bit of New York style. Now, with the gallery celebrating its three and a half-decade milestone, it has launched a publication and exhibition culling together works and perspectives from the length of its run as a gallery.

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Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (Installation View), via Gavin Brown

Artist Alex Katz is still painting daily at the age of 92, working at an impressively quick pace that sees the artist continuing to produce his elegant, smooth style of portraiture and landscape across a wide array of subjects and scenes. Acclaimed for his iconic portraits and impressionistic landscape depictions, the artist has inspired generations of painters. For his most recent exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, the Brooklyn-born artist has compiled an impressive number of pieces, exploring the expanding reaches of his world and his painterly abilities. (more…)

The opening of Dakar’s Museum of Black Civilizations has sparked renewed debate over the restitution of African artifacts and treasures to their native countries, as a new show features a range of works on loan from European Museums. “We cannot go to France and take them by force as they did in the days when they took them from our people,” says Abdu Latif Coulibaly said. “France, on the other hand, should help us identify artworks that originated in Senegal. We will then work together in bringing all of them back here.” (more…)

Chelsea Culprit (Installation View) all images via Queer Thoughts

For her second solo show at Queer Thoughts, Mexico-City based American artist Chelsea Culprit presents a body of new work which expands upon her exploration of female representation in the visual arts, one which aims to dismantle the typically male view point of our Western art history. (more…)

A Paris court has decreed that a Pissarro painting stolen from a French Jewish family during the German occupation must be returned to the family, The Guardian reports. The work, seized from a Jewish collector, Simon Bauer, in 1943 by the Vichy government, was currently in the collection of American collectors Bruce and Robbi Toll.  (more…)

Art News has a piece surveying the fallout over the firing of Helen Molesworth at MOCA, including a series of interviews with artists and collectors over the move.  In one interview, a donor recounts a time that Molesworth failed to show up for a tour of their collection. “I don’t show my collection to many people—it’s in my home. But Helen begged me twice to see the collection and then when I set it up, she no-showed me—and then never contacted me again,” an unnamed donor says. “Are you just supposed to put up with this sort of thing over and over again?”  (more…)

A group of artists and institutions in Qatar are protesting the ongoing blockade of the country with a body of public works and installations, Art Newspaper reports. “Selected artists will get the chance to produce a mural on a bridge, tunnel or wall within the country,” according to the Qatar Museums Authority. (more…)

Wikimedia Sweden has lost a court case over its rights to exhibit images of public sculpture against the Visual Copyright Society in Sweden, saying that digitally shown images of public art and sculpture should be protected by copyright law.  “Such a database can be assumed to have a commercial value that is not insignificant,” the court said in a statement.  “The court finds that the artists are entitled to that value.” (more…)

The Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and the Kunstmuseum Bern have announced joint plans to show a selection of works from the Cornelius Gurlitt trove, The Guardian reports.  The show will take on a “historically and scientifically contextualized framework.” (more…)

Artist and performance poet Bobby Miller has filed a lawsuit against the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and a group of galleries for a total of $65 million, alleging that photos he took of the artist have been used without his permission or compensation for decades. (more…)

Following a decision by the Austrian government not to offer operation cost funding to the private Essl Museum, the institution has announced its decision to close July 1st.  “Sadly, this won’t be possible any longer,“ says collector Karlheinz Essl. (more…)

An Edvard Munch work stolen from an Oslo Gallery in 2009 has been recovered by Norwegian police, the Guardian reports.  Two men were arrested on suspicion of “handling stolen goods,” but not in connection with the actual theft. (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…)

Pablo Picasso, Le violon (Titre attribué : Nature morte) (1914) © Succession Picasso 2015 / photo Centre Pompidou, MNAM-Cci, dist. Rmn-Grand Palais / droits réservés

Having pioneered the vivid forms and perspectival innovations of Cubism during the course of his career, pushing that initial formal innovation into the vastly divergent forms, there can be little doubt of Pablo Picasso’s monumental impact on the path of modern art.  This influence sits at the core of Picasso.Mania, a playful yet impressively curated exhibition currently on view at the Grand Palais in Paris.  Pairing works from both before and after the artist’s massively influential impact on the world of 20th Century Art, the exhibition presents a contemporary perspective to the name, the myth, the reputation of the artist. (more…)

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…)

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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Hank Willis Thomas, The Truth Is I See You (Installation View) at MetroTech Promenade

The Truth Is I See You, the Public Art Fund’s recent collaboration with Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas, is on view at MetroTech Promenade through June 3rd, 2016. Dispersed throughout the flush, green common areas of the park, and nestled amongst high rise commercial buildings in downtown Brooklyn, the project addresses issues of communication, individuality and globalism within the frame of Brooklyn, one of the most dynamic urban areas of the United States.  Focusing particularly on languages spoken throughout the city, Thomas installed all twenty-two lines of Ryan Alexiev’s Truth Poem in a similar fashion to street signs, each showing a line from this poem in English, while the other side gives its translation in languages including Chinese, Polish, German and Hebrew, accompanied by a pronunciation guide. (more…)

 Ai Weiwei, Bench (2004), via Faurschou Foundation Copenhagen

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is currently presenting an exhibition of collected works that span the artist’s long career, encountering and documenting the artist’s countless conflicts, arrests and vocal critiques of the Chinese regime.  As a social activist, the artist’s work reflects the history and challenges of China in the 21st Century, placed alongside his own reflection and perception of his home country.  His work is intended to act as a form of intervention, and to encourage social change within the contemporary art sphere, while reflecting on China as the product of its vastly deep historical reserves.  This practice, and its history against the backdrop of contemporary China is illustrated in detail at Farschou Foundation this year, as the institution presents Ai Weiwei: Ruptures. (more…)

Katharina Grosse, The Smoking Kid (Installation View), all photos via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed.

Now through June 21, Johan König in Berlin presents The Smoking Kid, a collection of new paintings by Katharina Grosse.  Grosse is known for her work employing bold colors and ambitious movement in order to transcend, open, and test the limits and boundaries defining space.  Color and gesture are central concerns of this artist, whose works are at once challenging and whimsical, and her current exhibition departs from Grosse’s typical method of large-scale sculptural installation, turning her abstract style instead towards work in which movement and color is tidily contained to the canvas instead of imposed onto walls and other three dimensional forms.

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