Image: Rita Ackermann, Fire By Days: The Fool I, 2012, oil on canvas
All images courtesy Hauser & Wirth Gallery

On view at Hauser and Wirth’s London Picadilly space is the exhibition entitled Fire By Days, Rita Ackermann’s latest series by the same name.

It is comprised of three miniseries: Fire by Days, Fire by Days Blues and Fire by Days The Fool. The first two contain numerous diptychs that have been created by initially pressing the works together to form a ‘reflective pair’ but then working each piece separately yet simultaneously to distort the reflective essence of the duos.

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Image: Installation view, Gerhard Richter, PAINTING 2012, Marian Goodman Gallery. All photos by Maya Steward unless otherwise noted.

“The status of painting in [Richter’s] new works is figured as exceptionally fragile, yet it is powerfully formulated in its assimilation to its technological challenges, as though painting was once again on the wane under the impact of technological innovations,” writes Benjamin H.D. Buchloch of Gerhard Richter’s new works on view in the exhibition PAINTING 2012 at Marian Goodman Gallery. Working within the realm of digital imaging, Richter redefines the concept of painting once again, challenging the traditional application and boldly ascertaining both its methods and practice.

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Image: Installation view of Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes.
All images courtesy The Pace Gallery unless otherwise noted

The Pace Gallery opens its new London flagship gallery on Thursday, October 4th at No. 6 Burlington Gardens in the Royal Academy building. On view will be an exhibition of the work of Mark Rothko and Hiroshi Sugimoto entitled Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes. It will be the first private gallery exhibition of Rothko’s work in London in nearly fifty years.

Image: Installation view of Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes

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Image: Mickalene Thomas РDin, une tr̬s belle n̩gresse #2, 2012, Via Brooklyn Museum

Currently on view at The Brooklyn Museum is a selection of recent work by Mickalene Thomas.  Her first solo museum exhibition, Origin of the Universe, features a selection of the artist’s most recent works, examining imagery of the female form, African-American identity and her childhood in 1970’s New York City. (more…)

Image: Jasper Johns, Ballantine Ale Cans, 1960 via Artinfo

The Royal Academy of Arts is currently exhibiting over 150 sculptures around the theme of bronze. The selection of works spans the medium’s five-millennial lifespan, which spread from the Near East to Europe and China. Illustrating the complex and nuanced history of bronze as a medium, intertwining historical relevance with artistic production, the exhibition sheds light on the evolution of civilization in the context of these two undercurrents.

Image: Giovanfrancesco Rustici, The Pharisee, St. John the Baptist and The Levite from The Sermon of St. John the Baptist, 1511, Royal Academy of Arts

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Frieze Projects promises to showcase the more colorful side of the fair’s various components this year, with the chef of Moro cooking Canada Goose and hairy bittercress. DIS, billed as a “post-internet lifestyle magazine”, will host nighttime photo shoots including 20 breast-feeding women, African street sellers selling real Chanel bags and a faked scene in which a gallery owner has a heart attack. (more…)

Image: Richard Phillips, Black Water, 2012 via Gagosian

Currently on view at Gagosian’s 24th Street location is a solo show of the work of Richard Phillips.  The imagery mostly revolves around three internationally-renowned female celebrities: Lindsay Lohan, Sasha Grey and Adriana Lima, with the inclusion of one painting of the ocean at night. Through three videos and ten large-scale paintings, Phillips examines the superstar beauties and posits our fascination with them against one simple yet punctuating image.

Image: Richard Phillips, Installation View, via Gagosian

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Image: Jean-Michel Othoniel, My Bed, 2003, via Brooklyn Museum

In a collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, The Brooklyn Museum is currently showing a large-scale retrospective of the work of French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, whose colorful glassworks and sculptures stand between tangible reality and a reconstituted dream world.  Entitled “My Way,” the show provides an in-depth look at Othoniel’s 25 year career. (more…)

Image: Elad Lassry, Untitled (Presence), 2012

Elad Lassry‘s new show, Untitled (Presence), is on view at The Kitchen through October 20th. The solo exhibition includes 20 new photographs, a short run of performances featuring members of The American Ballet Theatre and The New York City Ballet, as well as a short 16 mm abstract film projected onto the wall. The exhibition was preceded by Lassry’s billboard, Women (065, 055), which appeared along the Highline Park as part of its ongoing series of work by various artists. The 25 x 75 foot-work at 18th street and 10th avenue was on view for a month until the show’s opening at the Kitchen on September 7th.
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Image: Matthew Higgs introducing performers Malcolm Mooney and Sun Foot. All images by Heather Hannig for ArtObserved.

The Seventh Annual NY Art Book Fair opened last night at Moma/P.S. 1., presented by Printed Matter, Inc., with a performance by Malcolm Mooney and Sun Foot. The fair presents artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines presented by 283 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-six countries. Lucy Lippard and Paul Chan are the keynote speakers for this year’s Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference. (more…)

Image: Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper and Silver Pillows, The New York Times

“Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” is a group show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that juxtaposes fifty Warhol works with one hundred of those by his peers and successors. The show attempts to capture the scope and breadth of Warhol’s impact on contemporary art history. Presented 25 years after his death at the age of 58 in 1987, the exhibition showcases the works of both artists who have risen to fame after Warhol’s death as well that of his contemporaries. Some of the artists included are Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Ed Ruscha, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter.

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Image: Installation View, Karen Kilimnik and Kim Gordon at 303 Gallery

Currently on display at 303 Gallery is a collaborative exhibition of work by Kim Gordon (of the band Sonic Youth) and Karen Kilimnik. It is Kilimnik’s eleventh time exhibiting at 303 and Gordon’s second. Upon entering the gallery, one is submerged into a dimly lit and twinkling underworld of subculture that is examined through film, painting, performance and installation.

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Cy Twombly – The Last Paintings (Exhibition View), Gagosian Gallery

In 2010, one year before his death, iconic American painter Cy Twombly completed a number of new works — primarily in green, red, orange and yellow — that would end up being the last pieces that he would complete in his lifetime.  These vivid works are now being exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in London, having made their way from Los Angeles to Hong Kong to their current location.

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Image: Now I am quietly waiting… (Exhibition View), Bortolami Gallery

The long, arresting title of Tom Burr’s first show as a curator for Bortolami Gallery takes its inspiration from the poem “Mayakovsky” by Frank O’Hara.  In the poem, the author delves into the nature of one’s own identity, and the relationship to other, separate, identities that surround us in our daily lives.  Taking this text as a jumping off point, Tom Burr has assembled a selection of works that are interconnected by his relationships to their creators, be they personal, professional, or merely tangential.

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Image: Sean Daly, Shaun Regen, Kathryn Bigelow, and John Loga via Vogue

Shaun Caley Regen opened her new location in Los Angeles last night at 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, in a newly developing section of Hollywood, just east of Highland Avenue. The new space was designed by architect Michael Maltzan, creating a museum-like exhibition venue.

Image: Regen Projects’ inaugural exhibition via Regen Projects

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Image: Daniel Buren, “Le Décor et son Double”. Photo Dirk Pauwels via S.M.A.K.

In 1986, French artist Daniel Buren created an installation for the home of collectors Annick and Anton Herbert called “Le Décor et son Double”. He installed a copy of the room in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent. This second copy was recently conserved and acquired by the museum (now renamed S.M.A.K.) and is being exhibited once again.

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Teresita Fernández - Night Writing (Installation View), Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Teresita Fernández has often explored the natural elements as a framework of perception in her installations, allowing natural phenomena to act as a method of transformation and translation.  For Night Writing, her fifth solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, the artist has continued in this vein, creating a number of works that examine our imposition of meaning on the night sky.

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Tim Noble and Sue Webster - Deadalive (2012), Saatchi Gallery

Over the past several years, the artists’ studio, RS&A, has commissioned 16 recognized artists to create their own chess sets and boards, allowing them to explore and reconfigure the image of the classic game.  Including sets by Maurizio Cattelan, Tracey Emin, Tom Friedman, Damien Hirst, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama and Paul McCarthy, the full collection is currently on view at Saatchi Gallery in London.

Yayaoi Kusama - Pumpkin Chess (2003), Saatchi Gallery

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Image: Expo Chicago via The Chicagoist

Expo Chicago opens with a VIP vernissage tomorrow evening to benefit the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Many blue-chip New York galleries are participating this inaugural year, including big names like Matthew Marks, The Pace Gallery, Luhring Augustine and David Zwirner, as well as other international galleries like Yvon Lambert. In the Exposure section, younger galleries like DODGE gallery and Kate Werble will be exhibiting.

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Crowd Shot at the opening of People Who Work Here at David Zwirner. All photos by Aubrey Roemer for Art Observed.

On a hot summer evening, David Zwirner’s 19th Street Chelsea location held an opening for its artist employees titled People Who Work Here. The show is curated by Rawson Projects co-directors James Morrill and Chris Rawson, who are also fellow David Zwirner employees.

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Jackson Pollock, “Ocean Greyness” (1953), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

This summer, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates a groundbreaking period in its history with “Art of Another Kind,” an installation featuring works collected primarily from 1949-1960. This era began with Solomon R. Guggenheim’s passing. The movement caught fire under new director James Johnson Sweeney’s affinity for the explorative and abstract work of artists he referred to as “tastebreakers,” and ended soon after the museum’s 1959 relocation to Frank Lloyd Wright‘s iconic white structure docked in the Upper East Side.

Judit Reigl, “Outburst” (1956), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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Installation View, Taken by Zoe Zabor for Art Observed

Mark Fletcher has opened his doors to The Still House Group, a mixed media Brooklyn collective exhibiting their first group show since 2010. The installation features paintings and sculptures by Isaac Brest, Nick Darmstaedter, Alex Da Corte, Louis Eisner, Jack Greer, Brendan Lynch, Dylan Lynch, Alex Perweiler, and Zachary Susskind and runs through July 27 at 24 Washington Square North.

Installation View, Courtesy of The Still House Group

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Piano in the Rain, a solo exhibition by painter Dana Schutz, opened at Friedrich Petzel Gallery on May 2^nd.  Schutz’s signature blend of cubist figures, brightly colored scenery, and chaotic compositions is a stylistic combination reminiscent of the artwork produced by the German Expressionist groups of the early 20^th Century.  Similar to the way that many of these groups found inspiration in the streets of Dresden and other large European cities, Schutz’s work also reflects troubles related to urban life; Heroin in the Wind shows a woman struggling with drug addiction while Small Apartment confronts the frustrating physical realities of city habitation. And as the title of the show suggests, each of these 13 paintings feature worlds fraught with troubles and instability and characters whose problems seem both common and insurmountable.

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Anish Kapoor, Untitled (2012) installation view, Gladstone Gallery, West 21st Street. All photos on site for Art Observed by Perrin Lathrop.

Anish Kapoor’s current solo exhibition at Gladstone Gallery confronts visitors with two opposing sides to the artist’s three decade long investigation into the nature of objectness. A veritable global art star, with a Venice Biennale Pavilion (1990), a Turner Prize (1991) and countless prestigious public art commissions under his belt, Kapoor is known for his perception bending works that verge on spectacle. In the Indian-born, London-based artist’s first show in New York in four years his new works expand across two gallery spaces on West 24th and 21st Streets. As an artist interested in the metaphysical polarities inherent in individual objects, Kapoor invests these two galleries with both organic and highly engineered approaches to the materiality of form.

Anish Kapoor, installation view, Gladstone Gallery, West 24th Street.

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