Cy Twombly, The Ceiling, 2010

Cy Twombly is the first contemporary American artist to create a permanent work for the Louvre: a 3,750-square-foot painting on the ceiling of the Salle des Bronzes. A council of international experts selected Twombly to paint the mural for one the oldest and largest wings of the museum, in keeping with the Louvre’s commitment to incorporating modern art within its galleries. Along with Anselm Kiefer of Germany and Francois Morellet of France, Twombly is the third artist to paint a decorative work for the Louvre since 2007.

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Installation view: The Globe Shrinks (2010) four-screen digital video installation, via Mary Boone Gallery

Currently on view at Mary Boone Gallery, through May 1st, is “The Globe Shrinks,” a playful and seductive new video installation by Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger.  The artist is best known for her confrontational slogans paired with images, but her recent video work finds a new home in the gallery, where a 12-minute, 44-second looped video plays on four channels surrounding the room.

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Installation view: The Globe Shrinks [for those who own it], via Mary Boone Gallery

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Rachel Whiteread, Stairs, 1995

Leading contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread is best known for her sculpture, which almost exclusively springs from the premise of capturing the negative space in and around architectural structures. Now for the first time a museum has ventured to shed some light on her relatively neglected drawings, in a retrospective display at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Perhaps previously overlooked as preliminaries to a final sculptural piece, or just obscured by the monumentality of her public works, it is an interesting choice, and a critical one, in order to assert the importance of this ignored portion of an artist’s oeuvre. Whiteread herself affirms the personal import of these works when she described them thus: “My drawings are a diary of my work.” [Press Release] In the press release this metaphor is aptly extended as they describe how “like the passages in a diary her drawings range from fleeting ideas to labored reflections.”

Rachel Whiteread, Vitrine Objects

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Jules de Balincourt, Out of the Darkness and Into the Light, 2009-2010

Premonitions, Jules de Balincourt’s current solo show at Deitch Projects, is an implausible explosion of color, imagery, and imagination.  Aptly named, the show teeters between storyboarded recollections of drug induced hysteria and the dreamscapes of an apocalyptic premonition, for lack of a better word. The viewer is expected to jump head first into a world where imagination and chance reign supreme.

Jules de Balincourt, “Premonitions”, installation view

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Copyright: Andreas Gursky Ocean I, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010, via Gagosian Gallery

Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills recently inaugurated its new double-size gallery with an exhibition of work by German artist Andreas Gursky. Known for his luscious color, elaborate and intricate photographs which reproduce modern life often in epic proportions,  here Gursky presents a new series of large-scale works as well as a variety of subjects from the last twenty years of his career. The works on display capture his fascination with the structure of labor, luxury and leisure.

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Eva Hesse, No Title, 1969

Currently on show at Hauser & Wirth, through April 24, is a series of small sculptures by Eva Hesse that are essentially fragments rescued from her studio. They are fragile and diaphanous in substance, almost anti-sculptures. A year before her death, in 1969, Hesse wrote of her desire “to get to non-art, non-connotive, non-anthropomorphic, non-geometric, non-nothing; everything…It’s not the new, it is what is yet not known, thought, seen, touched; but really what is not and that is.” Though not quite there, or not quite anything, the works, nonetheless, feel significant and demanding. As Leslie Camhi wrote for the New York Times blog, though the work in the exhibition seem closer to prototypes to autonomous works of art, they are compelling in revealing those familiarly Hesse-ian themes: “plasticity, an engagement with ephemeral materials, the elusive and incomplete nature of memory, and a redolent corporeality.”

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Hedge (2008) by Tony Cragg. All images via Lisson Gallery

Currently on view at the Lisson Gallery in London is a major exhibition of works by the British sculptor Tony Cragg. The artist’s first solo show with the gallery took place in 1979, here he presents five new larger works, a selection of smaller works and drawings. The works displayed reflect upon the consistency Cragg has used throughout his career even as he moved from his early assemblages to casting sculptures during the mid-1980s. The resulting works project the forever materialist who easily transforms a simple image into a monumental and powerful form.

Elbow (2010)

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Idexa, Catherine Opie (2008)

Currently on view at Gladstone Gallery’s 24th st location is “Girlfriends,” by Catherine Opie. The works exhibited are a play on Richard Prince’s biker girlfriends and seek to explore the nature of “butch-dyke” identity. “An ode” to her former life, before domesticity and motherhood, Opie’s new works refer back to the subject matter that propelled her into the limelight in the early 1990s: her friends and partners in the gay, lesbian, and trans leather community. This return to the artist’s roots is highlighted by the inclusion of a series of small black-and-white portraits of androgynous young women that Opie made as a freshman in the early ’90s and has since kept to herself.

Angela (head), Catherine Opie (1992)

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At PMA, “Head of a Woman” (1937-38). Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

AO visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which are both showing survey exhibitions of the avant-garde in Paris in the early twentieth century. “Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris,” at PMA, is an exhaustive display of thirty years of Picasso, from 1905 to 1945, following him through the development of Cubism and artist communities in Paris. The Guggenheim’s show is smaller and less concentrated on Picasso; it includes thirty works by Picasso, Léger, Chagall, Braque, and more, where the PMA’s 200-strong exhibition includes works by Picasso collaborators and contemporaries as they interact with his own.

At the Guggenheim, Pablo Picasso, “Mandolin and Guitar (Mandoline et guitare)” (1924). Oil with sand on canvas Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York  Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Drawing from Stereoscope (1998-1999) by William Kentridge, via The Museum of Modern Art

I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing-the contingent way that images arrive in the work-lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world.

-William Kentridge

Currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is “Five Themes” by William Kentridge (b.1955).  The exhibition features a comprehensive survey of the artist’s career highlighting more than 120 works made in a variety of mediums such as visual art, film, and  theater. Known for exploring social conflict in his work particularly that of his South African homeland, he often  questions themes of personal and cultural memory, oppression and reconciliation.  This exhibition underlines the inter-relatedness of Kentridge’s various mediums while exploring five themes  present in his work since the 1980s.

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Ryan McGinley, Luz, 2010

It would be easy to quickly walk through Team Gallery right now and feel like you have seen some pretty satisfying photos. However, Ryan McGinley’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” is more complex than its enjoyable simplicity may first imply.

Sean, 2010

ArtObserved On Site at the Ryan McGinley, “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” at Team Gallery

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Quiver of Arrows, 2010 by Mike Nelson    All images via 303 Gallery unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at 303 Gallery at 547 W 21 Street, New York is the exhibition of new works by a contemporary British installation artist Mike Nelson. Quiver of Arrows, an installation constructed of  four travel trailers from 1939- 1969 that form Nelson’s   extended labyrinths,  is the artist’s first solo show in the United States.

Video of the Installation via Art Observed

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Five Points/Triangles by Alexander Calder, 1957
All images via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, New York is an exhibition of the large-format sculptures of Alexander Calder, produced between 1957 and 1970. The exhibition pays tribute to the late oeuvre of this renowned American sculptor, illuminating the period when Calder almost exclusively dedicated himself to sculpture of monumental proportions – the genre that brought him the international acclaim.

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Joseph with Jacob and His Brothers, ca. 1546–48 all images via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Running through April 18 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a show dedicated to the Italian Renaissance painter, Agnolo Bronzino.  Although best known for his paintings, Drawings of Bronzino, pulls together all 61 known or attributed drawings by this artist. In addition to the unprecedented gathering of the artist’s drawings in one location, this show represents the first solo exhibition of Bronzino’s works. The exhibition features loans, rarely put on public view, from institutions such as Galleria degli Uffizi, Musée du Louvre, British Museum, Royal Library of Windsor Castle, Ashmolean Museum, Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden, and Staatliche Museen Berlin, as well as private collections. Drawings of Bronzino was organized by the Metropolitan in conjunction with Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi and the Polo Museale Fiorentino, Florence.

Philippe de Montebello interviews Carmen Bambach, curator of Italian Drawings in the Department of Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about “The Drawings of Bronzino.” Via THIRTEEN

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Installation View All pictures via Gladstone Gallery unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21th street, is a new installation by Banks Violette, a renowned New York Minimalist and conceptual artist. Appropriately untitled, the installation encompasses Violette’s signature use of replaceable materials, monochromatic palette and the openness to myriads of interpretations.  The centerpiece of the installation is a large chandelier made of multiple fluorescent tubes . Wires fall in a cascade alongside the chandelier while the apparatus of steel tubes and sandbags supporting the wall remain in plain sight. By exposing these technical banalities, the artist probably seeks to reveal the theatrical and artificial essence of his oeuvre, in which he heavily draws on the legacy of Conceptual sculptors Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. The installation is organized in collaboration with Team Gallery and is on view until April, 17.
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Installation View  All photographs are via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia street, London is the exhibition titled “Crash, Homage to J.G. Ballard” , a group show dedicated, as the name suggests, to the oeuvre of J.D. Ballard, a prominent British novelist and short-story writer, a representative of the New Wave movement in science fiction.  The exhibition was put together to pay tribute to the enormous cultural influence of J.D. Ballard’s fiction on many visual artists. The impressive selection of works by  such prominent artists as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, AndyWarhol and Helmut Newton illustrates profound engagement of the writer with the works of visual artists of his generation and their mutual influence.

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Rosson Crow, The Dakis Joannou Collection at the New Museum, 2010 All images via Deitch Projects

Currently in its last days at Deitch Projects 18 Wooster Street location is an exhibition of new paintings by Rosson Crow exploring the rebellious and lawless side of New York history. Entitled ‘Bowery Boys,’ the super-scale works comment on a long line of underground “bad boys” who have existed in New York City from the 1800s to the present day. Deitch Projects’ reputation for exhibiting and supporting the current generation of rebellious youth from this lineage makes this a fitting location for Crow’s sassy attempt to mimic the spirit of gangs, graffiti, drugs and illicit sex so inherent to the city she has called home for the past six months.

Rosson Crow, Bowery Boys, installation view

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Gagosian Gallery, 17-19 Davies Street, London. All images via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted.

Starting February 10, Gagosian Gallery at 17-19 Davies Street, London holds the exhibition entitled “Arshile Gorky: Virginia Summer 1946″, featuring works on paper by the renowned Armenian-American artist. The exhibition at Gagosian Gallery coincides with the major retrospective at Tate Modern, London that includes 178 works by the artist and covers his entire career. The show at Gagosian focuses on the works produced by Gorky during the summer of 1946, when the artist was recovering from a cancer operation in a remote farmhouse in Virginia. Still too weak to paint, Gorky produced three hundred works on paper during that summer, fourteen of which are on display at Gagosian Gallery.

Untitled (Last Painting), Arshile Gorky, 1948

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Luc Tuymans The Secretary of State , 2005 on display at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. All images via SFMOMA unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a very significant retrospective of the work of Luc Tuymans,  a renowned artist from Antwerp, Belgium.  This comprehensive retrospective is the first American show of such scale for the artist. The traveling exhibition opened in September 2009 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, then on January 3, 2010 it traveled to SF MoMA. The show will then travel to Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibition features seventy five paintings produced since 1975 to the present. The retrospective is co-curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (and former SFMOMA Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture), and Helen Molesworth, Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museum (and former chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts).

CCTV, 2009

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Left: Self-Portrait Smoking Pot (In the style of Joe Bradley), Chris Martin (2009-2010) Right: Portrait of Joe Bradley, Chris Martin (2009)

Currently on show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash is a two person show featuring Joe Bradley and Chris Martin. The austere, often bare canvases by Bradley offer a dramatic contrast to the characteristically large, boisterous works exhibited by Chris Martin and so presented side-by-side, like a lecture in Art History, contrasting these sensibilities offers the viewer an opportunity explore the wide spectrum of today’s approach to the painting practice and, in turn, raises the question of movements in Contemporary art. The exhibition marks a continuation of an ongoing dialogue between the two artists from an interview published in ‘The Journal’ in Fall 2009 in which the two discuss an artists freedom to create without really knowing what it is they’re doing.

Untitled, Joe Bradley (2010)

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Another Nauman piece at PMA, which is exhibiting his audio shows “Days and Giorni” through April 4. Image via Art21.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, home to one of Bruce Nauman‘s earliest pieces, “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” (1967), is showing two new audio series by this much beloved contemporary artist. With this new exhibition, he tampers with time: in both “Days” and “Giorni,” multiple voices recorded separately recite the days of the week. “Days” is in English; “Giorni” is in Italian, and was recorded in a single day. Both fill the echoing gallery spaces of PMA until the show’s close on April 4.

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Liam Gillick, Discussion Bench Platform, 2010. Exhibition View

Currently on show at Casey Kaplan Gallery is an exhibition of new works by Liam Gillick. This is an exhibition of three parts; however, each eloquently converse and all display Gillick’s familiar brand of socially motivated neo-Minimalism and neo-Conceptualism. The Discussion Bench Platforms in particular demonstrates Gillick’s concern for public/audience participation and integration into the work. Furthermore, it is another manifestation of Gillick’s attempts to level the balance of functionality and aesthetic quality. Powder-coated aluminum benches are set up in the gallery space to compliment new discussion platforms converting the gallery into a designated space for thought.

Liam Gillick, Discussion Bench Platform, 2010. Exhibition View

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Time Stops but the Clock Disappears, 2008. (Spinning)

Don’t miss James Rosenquist’s exhibition of new works at Acquavella Gallery, New York. The exhibition is an extension of Rosenquist’s perennial fascination with the Universe and the Unknown, as well as Time and Space. The artist said of his obsession: “There’s so much we know nothing about.  Here we are in our natural environment and the mysteries of the universe are all around us. I want to paint these mysteries.” [Gallery Press Release]

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Candice Breitz, Factum Kang, From the series ‘Factum,’ 2009

Don’t miss Candice Breitz’s third exhibition at the White Cube in Hoxton Square, London. The exhibition, entitled “Factum” after Robert Rauschenberg’s almost identical canvases, Factum I and II, is an investigation into four twins and one triplet. Breitz has created beautifully intimate video portraits of each twin, which when coupled together in a kind of diptych, reveal the subtleties and nuances that make one individual. It is an extension of her perpetual fascination with repetition, identity and portraiture. By examining a phenomenon we wrongly presume as naturally and biologically identical we are encouraged to accept how very different twins really are.

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