Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos, all images courtesy New Museum

The New Museum, in collaboration with the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, presents the illuminating and expansive world of Rosemarie Trockel. Lynn Cooke, former deputy director and chief curator at Reina Sofia, worked with Trockel to imagine a world that is very much Trockel’s without being Trockel-centric: her lumpy sculptures and smooth, linear woolworks are shown with a massive preserved lobster and other natural artifacts; her videos and installations abide just a level above the orangutan Tilda’s three paintings; 18th century naturalist Maria Sybilla Merian‘s precise watercolors hang near the self-taught Judith Scott‘s frenetically wrapped yarn sculptures. (more…)

“The Clock”, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour long video montage, has been acquired by the MoMA and will be on view this month including a special New Year’s eve showing. The film won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale and will be on view at MoMA during public hours. (more…)

Isa Genzken, Installation View (2012), courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth is currently showing Isa Genzken’s mixed media readymade assemblages, a variety of figural sculptures. Isa Genzken was born in 1948 and currently resides and works in Berlin. She was previously married to Gerhard Richter, with whom she has collaborated over the years. Genzken is a mixed media sculptor whose work draws on aspects of constructivism and minimalism, also taking inspiration from architecture. Her work is often compromised of media associated with building materials, used in conjunction with readymades.

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Glenn Ligon, “Untitled (If I Can’t Have Love, I’ll Take Sunshine),” 2006, Neon and paint, Courtesy of Luhring Augustine

Currently on display at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea is Glenn Ligon: Neon, his first solo exhibition at the gallery. Over the past seven years, Ligon has created these neons, which relate to his famous text paintings that he created back in the 1980s. The pieces address a variety of historical, social and political issues, all with the underpinning of the use and re-use of language.

Glenn Ligon, “Palindrome #1”, 2007, Neon, Courtesy of Luhring Augustine (more…)

Antony Gormley, Installation View (2012), Courtesy of the White Cube Gallery

With scatterings of futuristic beings juxtaposed against white walls walls and the faded grey floor of  White Cube’s Bermondsey space is Antony Gormley’s new exhibition, Model. Darkened figures lurk in the shadows, emerging from the concrete; domineering inhabitants shun away the seemingly unwelcome spectators. Occupying the South Gallery is the massive work, itself entitled Model, which allows visitors to walk into its complete darkness and allow anything to happen.

Antony Gormley, Model (2012), Courtesy of the White Cube Gallery

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Kehinde Wiley, The Three Graces, all images courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon

Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris is presenting Kehinde Wiley’s first solo show in France, entitled The World Stage: France, 1880-1960. Wiley’s portraits feature mostly black and brown men on elaborate, baroque backgrounds, their natural stances modified by Wiley to echo the Napoleonic, kingly gestures of traditional portraits like those of Anthony van Dyck.

Kehinde Wiley, Bonaparte in the Great Mosque of Cairo

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Pieter Schoolwerth, After Troy 6 (2012), courtesy Miguel Abreu

The paintings of Pieter Schoolwerth sit at a peculiar intersection of homage and irreverence, combining classic painting techniques with a uniquely surreal vision of contemporary society, exploring the act of representation in painting, and continually playing with the nature of the human body as depicted in the fine arts. (more…)

Richard Artschwager, Horizon 2011. All images courtesy David Nolan Gallery

Richard Artschwager’s desert landscapes are the subject of an exhibition at the David Nolan Gallery in New York. Throughout Artschwager’s career, he has been known for his use of non-traditional materials in both sculpture and painting, such as wood, formica and Celotex(a fiberboard used for ceiling panels). He is also recognized for his large grisaille paintings, based on grid structures. These desert landscapes are a clear departure, and emit an emotional sensibility that Artschwager rarely lets us get a glimpse of — only recently has he employed such a vivid exploration of color.

Richard Artschwager Landscape with Pond 2011

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Installation view, Cellblock I, Andrea Rosen Gallery. All photos on site by Erica Simone for Art Observed

The Andrea Rosen Gallery opened Cellblock I at its main space on December 1st, 2012, and simultaneously inaugurated its new, second location–just down the street at 544 West 24th Street–with Cellblock II. Both shows, held together under the theme (and anti-theme) of imprisonment, were curated by the prominent scholar and curator Robert Hobbs.

Robert Motherwell’s Dover Beach III at Cellblock II, Andrea Rosen Gallery

Hobbs is well-known for his work as an art historian and writer. He has been the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair at Virginia Commonwealth University since 1991, and a visiting professor at Yale University for eight years. He is known as the definitive Robert Smithson scholar, and has contributed seminal writings on many of the artists he selected to show, including Alice Aycock, Beverly Pepper, and Kelley Walker. (more…)

Tony Cragg,  Installation View (2012), courtesy Lisson Gallery

Tony Cragg is a prominent British visual artist known for his smooth, blobular, almost alien formations. Cragg commonly uses a range of materials to produce smooth, curved surfaces that explore his observations of the surrounding world by challenging form, volume, scale and function through the medium of sculpture. His latest exhibition at the Lisson Gallery features a variety of new works in a continuance of form, yet extending his practice beyond the previous limits with ever more intricate surfaces areas and new formations.

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Gabriel Orozco, Astroturf Constellation (2012), courtesy The Guggenheim Museum

Having just ended its opening run at the Guggenheim Deutsche in Berlin earlier this year, Gabriel Orozco‘s two-part set of taxonomic installations, collectively titled “Asterisms,” is now on view at The Guggenheim in New York City.  The eighteenth and final project in the Guggenheim’s commission series, the piece continues Orozco’s ongoing exploration into the nature of environments, and the interactions of humans with these spaces, as well as with each other. (more…)

Richard Prince, Anyone Can Find Me (1990), courtesy Skarstedt Gallery

Skarstedt Gallery’s uptown exhibition space in Manhattan recently exhibited a series of multi-media works by American painter and photographer Richard Prince.  Blending hand-drawn landscape and mass media imagery, his “White Paintings” create an complex interplay between image and language. (more…)

Xavier Veilhan, The Bear(2010), courtesy The Phillips Collection.

Celebrated French artist Xavier Veilhan generally works with site-specific installations, reflecting art historical styles and concepts that are executed by employing technological innovation with a distinctly stylized futuristic aesthetic. Veilhan’s first major U.S. museum exhibition is currently on view at The Philips Collection as a part of its “Intersections” series. (more…)

Jack Goldstein – Where Is Jack Goldstein? (Installation View), courtesy Venus Over Manhattan

A member of the first graduating class of CalArts in 1972, Jack Goldstein made enormous and immediate contributions to the fine arts landscape in the 1970s and 1980s before vanishing from the public eye and tragically ending his own life in 2003.  Now, almost ten years after Goldstein’s death, collector Adam Lindemann is hosting an ambitious retrospective of Goldstein’s early work at his Venus Over Manhattan Gallery, pulling from Goldstein’s practice in painting, photography, poetry and film, including a recreation of Goldstein’s influential performance piece, Two Fencers. (more…)

Antony Gormley, Shore II (2012). All images courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery.

To inaugurate Sean Kelly Gallery’s new location, designed by Toshiko Mori, is an exhibition of new works by Antony Gormley. Bodyspace continues Gormley’s decades-long exploration of the body, and specifically addresses the body in relation to the newly re-designed interior.

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Olafur Eliasson, The Volcano Series (2012). All images courtesy Tanya Bonakdar.

Currently on view through December 22 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is Volcanoes and Shelters, an exhibition of new photographs and installations by Olafur Eliasson, who is best known for work that merges art, science, and natural phenomena to create multisensory experiences. The exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar, however, focuses on Eliasson’s straightforward collection of photographs of the Icelandic landscape.

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Guillermo Kuitca in front of his work at The Drawing Center, photo by H. Hannig for ArtObserved

Argentinian painter Guillermo Kuitca has, for the past several decades, continued to explore the visual aesthetic of organization, the varied architectural and illustrative lines at the heart of the maps, floor plans and aerial views, abstracting these images into his own personal artistic language.  The record becomes a personal interpretation, and vice versa.

Guillermo Kuitca at The Drawing Center photo by Cathy Carver

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Exterior View, Wolfsonian FIU. All photos by A. M. Ekstrand for ArtObserved

On Friday, December 7th, 2012, the Wolfsonian Museum at FIU held a reception for its shows on view:  “Postcards of the Wiener Werkstätte: Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection”,  “Esther Shalev-Gerz: Describing Labor” and “Art and Design in the Modern Age: Selections from the Wolfsonian Collection”. The exterior of the Mediterranean-revival style building recently underwent conservation and its dramatically lit 1926 cast stone façade welcomed invited guests.

Maria Likarz Fashion 1911 (more…)

Tracey Emin, Self Portrait with my Eyes Closed (2012), Courtesy of White Cube Gallery

Tracey Emin’s work inaugurated the new White Cube space in São Paulo, Brazil on December 1st, 2012 with her show I Don’t Believe in Love but I Believe in You.

Her recent works seem to embody a coming of age, perhaps even paralleling the growth of the gallery itself. The new pieces appear to have a new found calm and tranquility beneath her common narratives of love and sex. The exhibition has a quiet resonance that suggests the fruition of a lifetime’s work, setting the tone of the new venture.

Tracey Emin,  The Beginning of Me (2012), Courtesy of White Cube Gallery

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Terry Richardson and Pharrell Williams at OHWOW It Ain’t Fair 2012 photo by Aviva for Art Observed

On December 7th, 2012, at 743 Washington Avenue (on the Miami Beach side and not across the bay in the design district) OHWOW inaugurated the fifth and last edition of It Ain’t Fair (IAF), a venue for avant-garde art across all media. It began in 2008 in Miami, concurrent with the main fair, as another way to view work by emerging artists such as Tauba Auerbach, Ashley Bickerton, Cyprien Gaillard, Clayton Patterson and others.

Atmosphere at OHWOW It Aint Fair Miami 2012, all photos by E. Schwartzberg for ArtObserved unless otherwise noted

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Yue Minjun, Great Joy (1993). All images courtesy of Cartier Foundation.

On view through March 17 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris is an exhibition of the emblematic work of Yue Minjun. Appropriately titled “L’ombre du fou rire (The shadow of crazy laughter),” the show features Minjun’s large-scale paintings easily identified by caricatured self-portraits frozen in laughter that have rapidly gained international popularity in recent years.

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Danh Vo – We The People (detail) – Gallery Chantal Crousel, all photos by G. Hansen for ArtObserved

Copper – tarnished, polished, battered, and even mailed FedEx packages (as with Walead Beshty’s piece at Regen Projects) seemed to make an appearance in many places at Art Basel Miami Beach this year. One amazing example was Danh Vo’s curving, paneled “We The People” at Galerie Chantal Crousel, also perhaps the largest copper piece at the show.

Daniel Buren – Bortolami Gallery

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New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Art Fair 2012, all photos by E. Simone for ArtObserved

The NADA fair is home to the some of the youngest, and most surprising artists and gallerists during Art Basel week, and is often described as a respite from the big-named, shiny, high-altitude atmosphere of the main fair. Dealers and collectors come to NADA searching out the new artists they think have the most potential, reveling in the discovery.

Keith Farquhar, Leslie Fritz Gallery (formerly Renwick Gallery) (more…)

Ai Weiwei, Forge, He Xie detail, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

Ai Weiwei‘s Forge is single show across both of Mary Boone Gallery’s Fifth Avenue and Chelsea locations, with installation, video and sculpture that provides a comprehensive look into recent work, and which runs concurrently with his exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum. Ai is an artist, human rights activist, and Chinese dissident who produces thoughtfully provocative, political work. Forge falls firmly in that tradition.

Ai was born in Beijing in 1957 and attended the Beijing Film academy before moving to New York in 1981. He graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1983 and returned to China in 1993, where he currently lives. Though his website and blog have been brutally censored, Ai remains active on Twitter, and video transmissions from him are frequently released, including a recent take on ‘Gangnam Style’ in which he dances, waving around handcuffs.

Exhibition view, Ai Weiwei, Forge, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery

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