Thomas Zipp, Schwarze Ballons (2005). All pictures on site for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse.

The Saatchi Gallery in London is currently showing the work of twenty-four artists who work in, or are from, Germany. The exhibition, titled Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art From Germany, gives the audience a chance to see artists who come from the currently lively German art scene. Charles Saatchi has been collecting for over thirty years, and has had had numerous influential shows, often focusing on younger artists. The current exhibition continues a focus on younger artists, although there are some older as well, including Isa Genzken (born 1948). All three floors of Saatchi’s London gallery have been put to use, providing the larger pieces with plenty of room, and offering a rather impressive overview of contemporary art being made in Germany today.

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Six-year running Art Dubai attracted a record-breaking amount of visitors this year, albeit with some degree of censorship of artwork depicting politically charged Egyptian and ‘Arabian’ gulf conflicts. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬The Art Newspaper releases figures on 2011 museum and exhibition attendance, The Louvre remains number one with 8,880,000 visitors [AO Newslink]

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Jenny Holzer, Top Secret 21 (2012)

Section 2340 is pain that is difficult for the individual to endure and is of an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury. See Section 2340A Memorandum at 6.

Manhattan’s Skarstedt Gallery currently plays host to American artist Jenny Holzer’s first series of paintings in over thirty years. Renouncing the medium in the 1970s in favor of electronic LED lighting, projections, bronze castings, silkscreen, and varied other media for her subversive textual declarations, Holzer returned to painting for this 2010–2012 series, titled Endgame. Made famous by language-based works that provoke arresting responses to serious social and political issues, here Holzer occupies the veneered Upper East Side with Color Field-like swathes of oil on linen that manage to maintain her political bent .

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David Altmejd, The University 1 (2004). Images courtesy The Brant Foundation Art Study Center / Farzad Owrang.

For sculptor and installation artist David Altmejd, structure continues to play an integral role to the exhibition layout as well as the conceptual art itself. Currently on view at The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut, the chronological and aesthetic diversity of the showcase lends itself to many labels, potentially defined as a small-scale retrospective or a massive installation. Altmejd explained on a tour of the exhibition that he intensively sought the corporeal as cognitive—the use of the human body as an artistic commentary.

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Jonathan Beer.

In his most recent show at Half Gallery, Investigations of a Dog, New York based artist Dustin Yellin collides Max Ernst and MC Escher to create a series of 3D photo collages laminated between multiple sheets of glass. These pieces highlight a new direction in Yellin’s work with his use of photography and prints to create illusionary spaces that seem to move in two different directions at once. Art Observed’s Jonathan Beer was able to catch up with the artist before the show’s well attended opening on March 20.

Art Observed: The name of the show, Investigations of a Dog, comes from the Kafka short story. Is that something you just recently read or a piece you’ve returned to as a source? Has Kafka inspired other works?

Dustin Yellin: It was something I’d read in my younger days, and Kafka is someone, amongst a lot of different people, that I’ve been moved by. And it made sense for this show, because, if perhaps I had the consciousness of a dog maybe these black and white hallucinations might be one of the ways I might see.
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‪‬Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled #96,’ valued at $2.8–3.8 million, could break $4.3 million record for any photograph at Christie’s auction in New York on May 8, the piece a consignment by the Akron Art Museum in Ohio [AO Newslink]

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‪‬The Netherlands’ 10 day Maastricht Art Fair successful so far, dealing mainly old masters and antiques to seemingly recession-proof wealth [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Skarstedt Gallery to open space in Mayfair district of London this June, joining several other New York galleries expanding to London, including David Zwirner and Marlborough [AO Newslink]

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The artist Bharti Kher in front of A View of The Forest (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.

Bharti Kher‘s The hot winds that blow from the West showcases five variant pieces and is on view now at the East 69th Street location of Hauser & Wirth. On site for the show’s opening, the artist was born and educated in Britain, but moved to New Delhi, India in the early 1990s. The exhibition’s titular work is a large sculpture of stacked radiators, imported to Kher’s Indian studio from the United States over a period of six years. Stripped of their initial purpose as heaters, the ribbed design is dually linear and unnerving; repetitive carcasses pack the political implication of now-cold American heaters and suggest a recalibrating globalization with decreasing need for Western influence. More literally, ‘the hot wind that blows from the west’ is a reference to a summer wind called The Loo in Punjab. The region of Punjab is home to the northern border of India and Pakistan, a region fraught with conflict following post-colonial divisions.

Bharti Kher, The hot winds that blow from the West (2011)

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‪‬Charles Saatchi’s new book ‘Be The Worst You Can Be’ to be released in April, addressing 300 questions from readers and journalists [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Former MoMA painting and sculpture chief curator John Elderfield to join Gagosian Gallery in April as “a consultant to organize selected special exhibitions and projects with artists.” [AO Newslink]

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Liam Gillick, Untitled (2012). All images © The artist and courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

Galerie Eva Presenhuber hosts a new group of work by Liam Gillick in the exhibition Scorpion or Felix. Taking its name from a text by Karl Marx—of which only fragments have survived—the show features three central figures, Scorpio, Felix, and Merten, with smaller works in ink, writing on the wall, and colorful sliding doors. Gillick has been creating text-based works and objects dealing with the built environment since the late 1980s, challenging the interpretation of constructed spaces, “establishing relationships based sometimes on attraction, sometimes on repulsion.”

Installation view

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Installation view. All images via Carlson Gallery.

Nate Lowman and Hanna Liden collaborate once again at Carlson Gallery in London. Lowman demonstrates his process-as-art aesthetic, exhibiting a number of paintings originally used as drop-cloths on his studio floor, alongside Liden’s peculiar umbrella sculptures, creating an otherworldly installation pockmarked by subtle intrusions of the everyday.

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‪‬Damien Hirst official website launched, includes live feed of studio assistants [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Olafur Eliasson exhibition to inaugurate the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation museum designed by Frank Gehry in Paris late 2013 [AO Newslink]

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Conrad Shawcross, The Nervous Systems (Inverted) (2011). Images courtesy of MUDAM and artist.

One hundred and sixty two strings slowly wind down from suspended hexagonal structures in the Grand Hall of MUDAM Luxembourg, braiding into a colorful, ever-growing heap on the floor in The Nervous Systems (Inverted) by Conrad Shawcross. The sculpture will be on display and churning out rope though May 6, the latest of Shawcross’s rope machines that he has been creating since 2003, addressing scientific, mathematical, and philosophical concepts with both admiration and an inquisitive eye.

Conrad Shawcross, The Nervous Systems (Inverted) (2011)

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‪‪‬Sean Kelly Gallery moves to new two-story 22,000 square foot space designed by Toshiko Mori at 36th and 10th—as Exit Art vacates the space—more than tripling the gallery’s current square footage as newly signed artists include Alec Soth, Kehinde Wiley, and most recently, Terrence Koh [AO Newslink]

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‪‬X-Ray techniques identify likely Van Gogh painting of wrestlers beneath ‘Still Life with Meadows and Roses,’ which was previously unauthenticated, now hanging at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands [AO Newslink]

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‪‬BMW Guggenheim Lab changes plans on six year tour to not include Berlin district of Kreuzberg due to anti-gentrification protests [AO Newslink]

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Rachel Willis.

Gagosian Gallery recently debuted a new body of work by German born artist Georg Baselitz. The show is comprised of ten pieces—nine oil paintings and one bronze sculpture—all standing at least nine feet in height and displaying images of abstracted human figures. Baselitz’s work has long been known for its aesthetic expression and the paintings in this show are no exception with their vibrant colors and painterly brushstrokes.

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Installation view. All images via Honor Fraser Gallery

In her second solo exhibition with Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Rosson Crow explores memory, history, and the visual cues of U.S. national identity in a series of large-scale works on canvas. Playing on terms that suggest a raucous commotion, as well as a classic American boosterism, Ballyhoo Hullabaloo Haboob depicts moments of tragedy and triumph in the long 20^th century.

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‪Chairwoman of Galeries Lafayette Ginette Heilbronn Moulin accuses the dynastic Parisian art dealing Wildenstein family of withholding information about Claude Monet’s Torrent de la Creuse (1889), missing since its confiscation by the Nazis during World War II. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York currently possesses an allegedly near-identical copy to the lost work. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sotheby’s to sell some 50 works owned by the late Theodore J. Forstmann in New York throughout May, valued at $75 million and including pieces by Picasso, Miró, Lichtenstein, and Soutine [AO Newslink]

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