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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Susumu Kamijo, Bear Mountain (2023), via Alexander Berggruen

On this summer at Alexander Berggruen, the exhibition Levity presents a range of paintings that reflect on the comic and the absurd through a range of styles and techniques. Irony, mirth, the absurd, the evolving image of cartoon, and even darker, but amusing reads of the human condition serve as entry points into the language of the contemporary. Using humor as a mode to elicit a direct reaction from the viewer, the works on view press the viewer to move beyond their comfort zone. (more…)

Carol Bruns (Installation View), via White Columns

Brooklyn-based artist Carol Bruns marks her latest solo exhibition and first in Manhattan in over two decades with a body of recent works on view this summer at White Columns, continuing the artist’s work in a range of materials and forms that negotiate languages and ways of creating and approaching art and its production. (more…)

Sarah Cunningham, The Crystal Forest (Installation View), all images via Lisson

Lisson Gallery presents its first solo exhibition by British painter Sarah Cunningham this month, exploring psychological spaces and multifaceted landscapes that the artist composes within her layered and generative canvases. This new body of paintings – including a major triptych and large-scale works, alongside smaller panels – focusses on Cunningham’s abstract forays into kaleidoscopic environments and imagined forest clearings, which she constructs over time through layer after layer of gesture and radiating bursts of light, line and color. (more…)

Jean-Luc Moulene, TransBébu (Le Buisson, 2021) (2021), all images via Miguel Abreu

This summer at Miguel Abreu in downtown New York, the gallery’s artist roster gathers together for a group show that delves into painting, sculpture, works on paper, and other hybridized modes as am exploration of diverse themes and concepts. The cosmos, the monochrome, the representation of nature and the body, as well as the geometric impulse are imaginatively engaged in the paintings, sculptures and drawings included in this dynamic arrangement of works, unified under the title Shake the Dust.

Alex Carver, Temporary Composition (Hand Attached to Broken Leg) (2019)

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Al Hassah Issah, Piercing the Air (2022), all images via Mitchell-Innes & Nash

This month in New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash present Worldmaking, a group exhibition of ten emerging artists living and working in Ghana, with many showing their work in New York for the first time. Exploring relationships of content and politics, perception and reflection across the works on view, the show, co-curated by Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah and curator and Gallery Director Ylinka Barotto, Worldmaking frames Ghana against a backdrop of Western consumption, architectural influences that derive from years-long domination, colonial impact on ecosystems and economies, and the use of traditions as conduits to preserving the past and understanding the present. (more…)

Supawich Weesapen, The Comet, the Soul, and its Reflection (2022), via Clearing

Marking its entry in summer group show season, Clearing Gallery has opened MADE IN THE DARK, a selection of works that unifies five artists along lines of the phenomenological, spiritual and material. Drawing on otherworldly images, surreal interpolations of the human body, and figures that push the familiar into strange new territories, the show makes for a fascinating outing, exploring the thresholds of worldly and otherworldly phenomena through modes of mysticism and skepticism, on through fragmented and material negotiations.

Made in the Dark (Installation View), via Clearing

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Three men have been convicted in London after the recovery of a £2m vase stolen from a Geneva museum. “The organized crime group involved in this offending believed they could commit significant offenses internationally and that there would be no comeback,” says Detective Chief Inspector Matt Webb. “They were mistaken – highlighting the strength of our relations with international law enforcement partners and our ability to work across international boundaries. (more…)

A data breach at Christie’s exposed the location data of thousands of artworks uploaded to the site, a cybersecurity firm has found. Thousands of clients uploading images of their works for sale had their data exposed through a vulnerability in the company software.  (more…)

A work stolen from the British Museum and valued at $63,800 was placed on eBay for £49, the Telegraph reports.  (more…)

A federal judge has ruled that AI-generated art is not copyrightable. “In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No,” says U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell. (more…)

Maureen Dougherty, BOXER (2023), via Cheim and Read

On view this summer in New York, Cheim & Read gallery invites artist Maureen Dougherty to present Borrowed Time, a selection of new works by the painter and filmmaker. Continuing the artist’s work in documentary modes that branch both creative practices, the works on view here are direct and unflinching portraiture, stark in color and form in a manner that explores the sitter’s persona in deep, rich nuances.

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Regina José Galindo, SIREN (installation view)

On Saturday, July 29, 2023, The Watermill Center hosted “the BODY: The Watermill Center Annual Summer Benefit,” celebrating creative experimentation in support of the organization’s year-round Artist Residency and Education programming. This year’s benefit centered on the body’s role in art making and featured exhibitions and performances by a dynamic roster of international artists before culminating with a showing of Artistic Director Robert Wilson’s “Ubu.” (more…)

Sanaa Gateja, Ripe (2022), via Karma

This summer in New York, Karma presents Rolled Secrets, the first New York solo show dedicated to the work of Sanaa Gateja’s following the artist’s inclusion in the 58th Carnegie International. The artist, who transforms natural materials and post-consumer paper waste into complex, mosaic-like works, here continues his practice with a range of materials that include hand-rolled paper beads, cloth, and soaked and pounded strips of bark. Motivated by an innate sensibility of form, Gateja’s often monumental works oscillate between figuration and abstraction.  (more…)

Song Dong, ROUND (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this summer at Pace Song Dong’s ROUND focuses on the artist’s practice over the past three years, placing ancient Chinese philosophy in a contemporary context and offering new understandings of ideas that figure prominently in his work. Song, who is one of the most important figures of the Conceptual art movement in China, blurs the boundaries between art and life in his interdisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and film. Here, the artist uses the circle as a mode of philosophical and graphical meditation, reflecting on culture, memory and time through a range of forms.  (more…)

Thomas Hirschhorn, Schema Art and Public Space (2016-2022), via Marlborough

This summer at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, the group show Schema: World as Diagram presents a dynamic and intricate series of investigations into lines of thought, diagrammatic modes of thinking, and the use of graphical and indexical modes of organization to present and obscure the process of thought and creation. Occupying two floors of the gallery, the exhibition brings together over 50 artists whose works engage in these themes.  (more…)

Klara Kristalova, The Cold Wind and the Warm (Installation View), via Lehmann Maupin

This summer in London, Lehmann Maupin presents The Cold Wind and the Warm, an exhibition of new work by Klara Kristalova, dwelling on the artist’s figurative ceramic sculptures that incorporate both aspects of the human body and elements of nature, and marking her first solo show in London.  (more…)

Distribuidx (Installation View), via Lisson

This summer, Lisson Gallery marks its entry into the string of group shows sprung up across the art world with a show that opens a dialogue between the work of artist Hélio Oiticica and a range of intergenerational artists with varying relationships to Latin America. The presentation is curated by César García-Alvarez, the Executive & Artistic Director of The Mistake Room in Los Angeles. (more…)