The British Museum is testing the waters on a “Parthenon partnership” that could send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece, Bloomberg reports. “What we are calling for is an active ‘Parthenon partnership’ with our friends and colleagues in Greece,” says deputy director Jonathan Williams, noting that the move seeks to “change the temperature of the debate” around the disputed works. (more…)
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your body is a battlefield) (1989/2020), via David Zwirner
Barbara Kruger makes her first outing with David Zwirner Gallery this summer, marking her inaugural show with the exhibitor three years after announcing she was joining the mega-gallery. Spanning the gallery’s three locations on West 19th Street in New York, the show is a monumental review of her work, and quite a timely one. Kruger powerfully and directly engages with viewers through a distinctive visual language, utilizing images, text, and technology as tools of communication to reveal and question established power structures and social constructs, challenging power structures through their direct address. (more…)
Andreas Gurksy, Bauhaus (2020), via Art Observed
On view this summer at Gagosian New York, photographer Andreas Gursky compiles a selection of both new and recent images, continuing his documentation and exploration of the landscape of modernity. Gursky’s large-scale photographs evoke the global flow of information, the chaos of contemporary life competing with the classical desire for order. He portrays the visual extremes of the present moment with an objective eye, capturing built and natural environments on a grand scale in richly detailed images of autobahns and cruise ships, mountains and waterfalls. While comparable in their scope to early nineteenth-century landscape paintings, Gursky’s works retain the precision of photography. Many have been digitally manipulated, and often reveal a sensitivity to the damaging effects of human systems on the natural world. (more…)
Catechism (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue
Throughout the layout of the current group exhibition at Bridget Donahue, one can’t help but trace the works as a series of pointing arrows. Bright colors and strange, lumpen arrangements seem to trade barbs with each other, while other works create a series of conversations on typography and text, design and craft. In each case, the show seems to tug at a series of half-ideas, as if allowing the show to breathe anew in each moment of encounter.
Evelyn Reyes, Four Carrots, Pink (2004-2009), via Bridget Donahue
Robb Pruitt, Avery (2022), via 303 Gallery
On view this month at 303 Gallery, a body of new work by Rob Pruitt marks a continuation of the artist’s mining of the tension between comic renditions, heightened emotional states, and deep, rich engagements with the history of pop art, all centered around his latest series of Face paintings. (more…)
Sarah Ortmeyer, DAVID (2022), via Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Combining together a series of works and a range of different approaches and series from her practice, artist Sarah Ortmeyer presents a selection of pieces at Galerie Eva Presenhuber this month, united under the title SPORTS CLUB NEW YORK.Â
Oli Epp, Surrogate (2022), via Perrotin
On view this month at Galerie Perrotin, artist Oli Epp collects a range of works that mine a strange and otherworldly relationship with the language of painterly figuration and abstraction. Presenting a series of tightly constructed images that twist and warp bodies into playful new iterations, his works on view moving from human figures to animals to objects, always returning to the same deconstructive approach.
Oli Epp, Dead Center (2022), via Perrotin
B. Wurtz, Untitled (2017), via Garth Greenan
On this month at Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, artist B. Wurtz presents Monuments, featuring a number of the artist’s playful sculptures and mixed media works deconstructing elements of scale and monumentality and marking the artist’s first show at the gallery. Known for his repurposing of everyday flotsam into joyous, humorous, and beautiful sculptural objects. The works in the presentation, spanning the past four decades of Wurtz’s career, take the language of the everyday, and transpose it, creating strange tensions and relationships between materials. (more…)
Claes Oldenburg
Artist Claes Oldenburg, a foundational voice in the development of American contemporary and pop art, has passed away at the age of 93. Known for his monumental constructions that turned every day objects into large-scale sculptures and installations, the artist’s work re-created a range of iconic American images. “My intention is to make an everyday object that eludes definition,†he said. “I’ve expressed myself consistently in objects with reference to human beings rather than through human beings.â€Â (more…)
Jeppe Hein, Changing Spaces (Installation View), via Art Observed
This summer, artist Jeppe Hein has installed Changing Spaces, an interactive public art installation on Rockefeller Center’s Center Plaza, a swirling torrent of “liquid architecture” that continues the artist’s use of space and phenomenon to encourage visitors and passerby to stop and interact with the work. (more…)
Nicola L., We Don’t Want War (1974-75), via Alison Jacques
Marking the first large-scale exhibition of artist Nicola L. in the UK, Alison Jacques brings together an expansive selection of works by the artist. The show, presented in partnership with the Nicola L. Collection and Archive, Los Angeles, anticipates a forthcoming monograph, published by Apartamento in Autumn 2022, and a major survey at Camden Art Centre in 2024. (more…)
Paul McCarthy, A&E, MOTHER, Santa Anita session (2021), via Hauser & Wirth
Confronting the complex mechanisms of power, politics, desire, and history, artist Paul McCarthy opens a show of new works on view at Hauser & Wirth in his home of Los Angeles this month capping a new series of “A&E” drawings, an offshoot of Paul McCarthy’s ongoing video series with German actor Lilith Stangenberg. An initialism for Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve, and Arts & Entertainment, ‘A&E’ is a multi-disciplinary project that evolved out of the artist’s film project NV Night Vater (2019 –). Originally drawing from Liliana Cavani’s sadomasochistic erotic drama The Night Porter (1974), the project continues McCarthy’s exploration of the origins of fascism, Hollywood, the contemporary art world, and the current political climate.
Paul McCarthy, A&E, Adolf Adam & Eva Eve, Santa Anita session (2021), via Hauser & Wirth
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Uomo che guarda attraverso la gabbia (2018), via Simon Lee
Marking a newe perspective on the storied output of artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, Simon Lee Gallery has opened a show of recent works by the Italian artist. For his fifth exhibition at the gallery, the artist presents a series of mirror paintings that reflect on themes of captivity, isolation and restriction at a fractured moment in contemporary history. (more…)
Harold Ancart has joined the roster at Gagosian after leaving David Zwirner, the gallery announced this week. (more…)
Michael Williams, Frogs 9 (2022), via Eva Presenhuber
Over the course of his work, painter Michael Williams has developed a suite of interconnected paintings out of a drawing, not uncommonly focused on a human figure or surrogate. In the case of Frogs 1 – 9, the source is Untitled (Frog) (2019–2020): a small sheet given over to a greying man-cum-jester, hollowed nostrils shaped like an electrical outlet and mouth agape, forming an unlikely heart as he pinches a small frog. Here, at Eva Presenhuber’s Vienna exhibition space, this image becomes the ground for a series of interventions and reinventions of the image, spanning both drawing and painting.
Ajay Kurian, Tiresias (2022), via 47 Canal
On view this month at 47 Canal, Brooklyn-based artist Ajay Kurian has produced a body of work that delves into the constructions of personality and place that underscore conceptions and understandings of home. Installing a body of works that concentrate on concepts of denial and assimilation, generational trauma and dislocation, the work on view this month takes a long route through the symbolisms and abstractions that underscore a conception of the body and self.
Ajay Kurian, Missing Home (Installation View), via 47 Canal (more…)
Fischli Weiss, Untitled (Paris/Air France) (1998), via Eva Presenhuber
On view this month at Galerie Eva Presenhuber presents Airports and Cars, the gallery’s fourth exhibition by Peter Fischli and the late David Weiss. Fischli Weiss began the Airports series in 1987 and continued it for 25 years, a project that saw them repeatedly photograph and document the various scenes and landscapes of international airports, focusing on tarmacs and loading zones—the abstract-opaque logistical space, which passengers predominantly glimpse through panes of glass and see themselves detached from. (more…)
Karin Sander, What You See is Not What You Get (22 Exhibitions) (Installation View), via Esther Schipper
On view at Esther Schipper in Berlin, artist Karin Sander presents an enigmatic and unique installation under the title “What You See is Not What You Get” (22 Exhibitions). Combining a body of work to explore intriguing questions of space and presence, the artist presents bodies of work curated and then withheld from the public.
Valentin Carron, Child and Dog (2022), via David Kordansky Gallery
This month at David Kordansky’s Los Angeles gallery space, artist Valentin Carron presentss Barking Panting Sighs Heavenly, an exhibition of new sculptural works that continues the artist’s exploration of sculpture as a mode of representation, not only of the body and figure, but equally of relations and understandings of social and cultural construction. (more…)
A group of armed men broke into TEFAF Maastricht this week in an attempted robbery, causing an evacuation of the fair. “TEFAF has robust procedures in the event of a security breach,†a spokesperson for the fair said. “These were precisely followed, and all visitors, exhibitors and staff were safely evacuated. The fair has now reopened.†(more…)
Sam Gilliam at Mnuchin, via Art Observed
Artist Sam Gilliam, known for his work in abstraction and for his ground-breaking experimentations in freeing the canvas from the confines of the stretcher, has passed away at the age of 88. Rising to prominence in the late 1960’s from his early work as a school teacher, the artist was known for his dynamic and expressive works, which combined lyrical strokes and painterly movements with three-dimensional arrangements of cloth, which the artist titled “Drapes.” (more…)
Alex Israel, Sunset Coast Drive (2022), via Greene Naftali
On view this month at Greene Naftali, the gallery plays host to Sunset Coast Drive, its second solo show presenting the works of Alex Israel. An outing that looks to deepen the artist’s ongoing ongoing engagement with the culture and aesthetics of his native Los Angeles, it mines the sparkling optimism exported by its entertainment industry, while presenting imagery subject to close scrutiny. (more…)
Veit Laurent Kurz at Weiss Falk, all images via Art Observed
Returning to its recently transplanted site in another hall of the Messe Basel, the Liste Art Fair makes its voice felt on the landscape and layout of Basel Art Week this season with another edition of its event showcasing works by a range of galleries presenting the latest and newest voices in contemporary art. Running in conjunction with the Art Basel fair just a few minutes away in another hall of the expansive exhibition center, Liste welcomes 82 galleries, each centering on younger artists, new concepts and exploratory work. For gallerists, participating at LISTE, the fair is an opportunity to network globally and present their program to professionals and art lovers that gather in Basel during this important week on the international art calendar.
Tomas Diaz Cedeño at Peana
Folkert de Jong at Sofie van de Velde
Marking it’s return to its usual spot in early summer, the 2022 edition of Art Basel has opened its doors for its early hours, preparing for a public opening this weekend with an expansive offering of works from European galleries and those further afield. Open once again at the Messe Basel, the fair continues its reputation as a flagship for the international fair brand, with over 200 leading galleries and more than 4,000 artists from five continents. Emphasizing it’s place as a central force in the run of events and fairs worldwide, Basel’s return to form is a tentpole in a run of reopenings in the wake of the Covid-19 shutdowns.
David Hammons at Xavier Hufkens
