Awol Erizku, Hot Hand in a Dice Game (2023), via Sean Kelly

This fall, artist Awol Erizku makes his first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly with Delirium of Agony a show that examines the construction of cultural iconography through the lens of contemporary hip-hop, street culture, art history, sports, and entertainment. Occupying the entire gallery, the exhibition features paintings, neon installations, photographs, sculptures, and works on paper that draw intriguing lines between graphics, cultural symbolism, personal affinity and subtle cultural representations.

Awol Erizku, Smoke #12 (2023), via Sean Kelly

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Giorgio Griffa, Campo Rosa (2022), via Casey Kaplan

On view this month at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, artist Giorgio Griffa brings together a body of new works that continue the artist’s interpretation and mining of memory and reflection as part of an expanded exploration of time and space. OCÉANIE consists of a series of nineteen paintings created between the fall of 2022 and the spring of 2023, marking the most significant shift in Griffa’s practice in over a decade. This is the artist’s sixth solo presentation at the gallery.

Giorgio Griffa, Océanie (Installation View), via Casey Kaplan

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Barbara Sánchez-Kane, New Lexicons for Embodiment (Installation View), via kurimanzutto

On this month at kurimanzutto in New York, artist Barbara Sánchez-Kane has installed a new body of work that explores a range of expressive modalities between sculpture and clothing design. Sánchez-Kane, who alternatively uses she and he pronouns, is interested in the deconstruction of identities and the duality of the presented self: through her clothes and sculptures, there is a perpetual tearing and fracturing of the structure, voids that seemingly shouldn’t exist, and the recurring repurposing of traditional objects through the destruction of their functionality. (more…)

Wade Guyton, Untitled (2022), via Matthew Marks

Artist Wade Guyton has long explored the constructs and constraints of contemporary image and object production, utilizing a range of various technological and gestural approaches to create dense, nuanced works that emphasize both the act of making and images they contain. For his latest show, on view this month at Matthew Marks, the artist takes particular interest in his studio as not just the site of production, but the images his work depicts.

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Philippe Parreno, Hertzian Tales (Installation View), via Art Observed

Philippe Parreno takes over Gladstone Gallery this month with a body of work that continues to mine notions of non-human intelligence, technology and life. The show, Hertzian Tales, marks the most recent manifestation of his ongoing contemplation of art as both sentient and sensual.

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Sam Durant, Open Your Eyes (2022), via Praz-Delavallade

This fall, artist Sam Durant opens a show of new works at Praz-Delavallade in Paris, continuing a body of work that mines the artist’s long explored modes of practice, while turning his examinations of modern culture, history and context on its ear. Long recognized for work that questions, highlights, and reframs social and civic issues from the more complex sides of history: colonialism, the death penalty, surveillance and slavery among them, the artist here turns towards the playful and exploratory, marking new notes in an already expansive and expressive practice.

Sam Durant, Certainty (2020), via Praz-Delavallade

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Anri Sala (Installation View), via Galerie Chantal Crousel

Artist Anri Sala opens a show of new work at Galerie Chantal Crousel this month, exhibiting a body of new frescoes that underscore continued reseaarch into the construction and composition of narrative, particularly oriented around refashioning and repurposing spaces and epochs.  (more…)

William Kentridge, Oh To Believe in Another World (Installation View)

This fall, Marian Goodman opens its gall calendar in New York with a solo exhibition by William Kentridge featuring Oh To Believe in Another World, an immersive five-channel projection made in response to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No.10. The exhibition marks the North American premiere of the film, which will be shown alongside a multi-disciplinary body of work which includes new bronze sculptures, drawings, collaged lithographs, and mixed-media puppets. Marking the artist’s 19th solo show with the gallery, it also marks 25 years of collaboration between the dealer and artist.

William Kentridge, Oh To Believe in Another World (Installation View)

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Nicolas Party, Portrait with an Eagle (2023), via Hauser & Wirth

Marking his first solo show with Hauser & Wirth in New York, the Swiss artist Nicolas Party has orchestrated an expansive and captivating show of new works that continue to underscore the artist’s mining of traditional painterly languages in concert with freely interpretive and expressive modes of depiction. Spread across the gallery floors of blue-chip dealers’ flagship space in Chelsea, Party’s work is a striking opening note in the fall calendar.  (more…)

Stuart Lantry curated by Shona McAndrew, all images via Libby Langsner for Art Observed

The first notes of fall are in the air in New York, and, like clockwork, another art season is now underway, kicked off once again by the opening of the Armory Show and its satellite fairs in New York City. That means that, once again, the night before the fair is the domain of Spring/Break Art Show, the curator-first, project oriented fair that brings together a range of expressive and imaginative works under a broad curatorial banner. Leaving ample space for exploration and investigation, the fair is a perennial highlight, and, now in its 11th year, has reached cruising velocity, bringing with it a year that takes a moment for retrospective conceptions of the event.

Gvantsa Jishkariani at CH64

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Venus Over Manhattan, all images by Art Observed

Over the last several years, the Independent Art Fair has built a name for itself as a dynamic and focused exhibition project, culling together small selections of exhibitors that emphasize curation and focus over the sprawling aisles of mega fairs and blue-chip magnets. This year, the fair has returns its 20th Century offering for the run of The Armory Show further uptown. The show, focusing in on historically-resonant works, makes for a striking new offering during Armory Week, and a fitting continuation of the fair’s well-established focus.

Norman Zammit at Karma

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Jonathas de Andrade at Galeria Nara Roseler

Despite a heat wave that made early September feel like mid-July in New York, this week, the fall art season and the promise of cooler weather has descended on The Big Apple, and New Yorkers are flocking back from their summer travels to kick off one of the busiest art seasons of the year at the Armory Show. This year, the Javits Center is home to over 225 booths, featuring selections from gallery veterans, non-profits, museums, and emerging gallerists from over 35 countries. The fair was notably divided into several sections such as Galleries, Solo, dedicated to single artists, Not-for-Profit, Focus, a section curated by Candice Hopkins, featuring solo- and dual-artist presentations that under-represented artists who draw on cultural connections, and Presents, featuring galleries that are less than 10 years old.

Leonard Baby at Anat Ebgi

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Katherine Bernhardt at David Zwirner, all images via Minji Son for Art Observed

With the first notes of fall drifting into the air, and August fading into September, attention turns this week to the South Korean capital of Seoul, where Frieze has reopened the newest iteration of its art fair franchise. Now in its second year, the fair, led by Frieze Seoul Director Patrick Lee, features over 120 galleries, with a strong focus on Asia alongside a range of galleries from countries around the globe, as well as its signature program of screenings, talks and other projects.

Theaster Gates at White Cube

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Malediction and Prayer (Installation View), via Modern Art

Taking its name from a Diamanda Galas record of the same name, Malediction and Prayer marks this year’s summer group show entry at London’s Modern Art. Delving into a range of richly expressive painting and sculpture throughout the show, the program takes on modes of seeing and representation that balances intimacy with intensity, dense layers with moments of triumphal revelation.  (more…)

Martin Wong, Malicious Mischief (Installation View), all images via Camden Art Center

Artist Martin Wong is widely recognised for his extraordinary depictions of social, sexual and political scenographies from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Weaving together narratives of queer existence, marginal communities, and urban gentrification, Wong stands out as an important countercultural voice at odds with the art establishment’s reactionary discourse at the time. This summer, the artist’s work is at the center of an impressive show at the Camden Art Center in London, tracing the artist’s works as an extension of his life. (more…)

Marcin Dudek, NEOPLAN (2023), via Edel Assanti

Artist Marcin Dudek’s work finds particular and complex sites for intervention in the language of the everyday, charging familiar forms and structures with a loose, vibrant energy that underscores cultural tensions, frictive languages, and modes of engagement that underline conflict and collision. This mode of practice finds particular expression in NEOPLAN, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with Edel Assanti on at the gallery’s London exhibition space. and running concurrently with his solo show at Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, and the launch of his new monograph. (more…)

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Moscow must pay more than $100,000 in damages to the collective Pussy Riot over a violent attack during the 2014 Olympics. “The attack has been established ‘beyond reasonable doubt,’ and that the situation in which the applicants found themselves during the attack was not compatible with respect for their human dignity,” the court ruled. (more…)

Ugly Paintings (Installation View), via Nahmad Contemporary

This month, writer Dean Kissick and curator Eleanor Cayre have teamed up at Nahmad Contemporary to present a new exhibition titled Ugly Painting. Drawing on works that mine the deliberate use of grotesque, garish, or abject in brushwork, representation, composition, or coloring, the show presents a range of works that run through a range of confrontational and conceptual approaches to the human form, its representation, and its understanding.  (more…)

Hundreds of works from the collection of the Ace Gallery are to be auctioned off, Art News reports, and used to pay debts run up by its founder since closing. (more…)

A NYT article looks at the rise in popularity of Hilma af Klint and some surrounding controversies, including an IP battle and questions over the artist’s sole authorship of some works. “I have to shift my mind-set on how these are collaborative works and not Hilma works,” says Guggenheim curator Tracey Bashkoff. (more…)

A Chinese Media Outlet has demanded the British Museum return all artifacts held in its collection. “The huge loopholes in the management and security of cultural objects in the British Museum exposed by [a recent] scandal have led to the collapse of a long-standing and widely circulated claim that ‘foreign cultural objects are better protected in the British Museum’,” the piece reads.  (more…)

Gagosian has hired Jiyoung Lee to run operations in South Korea, as the gallery looks to expand its foothold there.  (more…)

UK Police are on the verge of a major breakthrough in the theft of Maurizio Cattelan’s Gold toilet from Blenheim Palace. (more…)

Christina Mackie, Token 31 (2020), via Herald Street

On this month at London’s Herald Street, artist Christina Mackie exhibits a range of ceramic works and watercolors that showcase the artist’s multidisciplinary engagement with color and material. Combining a body of ceramic sculptures called Tokens and paintings titled Seaports, the show uses pigments, earthenware, slips, glazes, and an array of fabrics, to investigates the physical and chemical properties of her mediums, and simultaneously expose their emotional subtexts.

Christina Mackie (Installation View), via Herald Street

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