The U.S. will rejoin UNESCO and pay back dues, the Associated Press reports. “It’s a historic moment for UNESCO,†says UNESCO director general, Audrey Azoulay. “It’s also an important day for multilateralism.″ (more…)
Alice Neel at Victoria Miro, all images via Art Observed
Once again opening in the early weeks of summer in the Swiss city of Basel, the Art Basel art fair kicked off its opening previews early this week, with crowds flocking to the Messe Basel for another week of works on view, films, talks, and other projects. Preparing for its public opening with an expansive offering of works from European galleries and those further afield, 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.
Danielle Orchard at Perrotin
The Albright-Knox Gallery has reopened in Buffalo after a long renovation and rehang of its collection. The opening show featured its permanent collection prominently to showcase the new space designed by OMA. (more…)
A Dutch Supreme Court has ordered museum artifacts borrowed from Crimea returned to Ukraine, maintaining the works are part of the nation’s cultural heritage. (more…)
Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso show at the Brooklyn Museum has already seen impressive attendance, up 51 percent over the weekend before, the New York Times reports. (more…)
Yayoi Kusama, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers (2023), via David Zwirner
On this month, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers,  brings together a body of new of works by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama at David Zwirner featuring new paintings and sculptures elaborating on her signature motifs of pumpkins and flowers, and a new Infinity Mirror Room. Presented across the gallery’s 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street locations in New York, this will mark ten years since Kusama’s first solo show with David Zwirner in 2013 and will be one of her largest gallery exhibitions to date. (more…)
Hernan Bas, Conceptual artist #23 (Popsicle stick sculptor; a purist, he consumes his materials in devotion to his craft, leading to his inevitable last work) (2023), via Lehmann Maupin
Lehmann Maupin presents the latest works by Hernan Bas this summer; The Conceptualists: Vol. II, an exhibition of new work that continues a project begun in 2021. Bas is best known for his narratively rich scenes that feature a wide-range of references spanning art and literature, popular culture, kitsch, the occult, religion, and mythology. Across his works, Bas seeks to defamiliarize everyday experience through humor, revealing the surreal and absurd lurking beneath the mundane. In the Conceptualists series, Bas marries his personal appreciation of conceptual artists with his ongoing exploration of eccentricity. (more…)
Luc Tuymans, Smiley (2022), via David Zwirner
Open this month at David Zwirner Gallery’s  537 West 20th Street location in New York, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans presents a selection of new works that marks his seventeenth show with the gallery. Mining a hazy, liminal technique that results in works that defy easy categorization, Tuymans continues the exploration of the act of seeing, and reflecting that image in his work. (more…)
Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Daniel Paiol López (2023), via Sean Kelly
Sean Kelly in New York presents a body of new works by painter Kehinde Wiley this month, inviting the artist to showcase a series of paintings that continue his interpretation of the western canon and its politics of representation and perspective. Informed by Wiley’s focus on the evolution of Black culture globally, the show draws on the artist’s recent visits to Cuba, and explores the phenomenon of the carnivalesque in Western culture. Referencing a diverse range of artists, the circus, and the power of street performance and dance, the HAVANA paintings focus on the circus as a site of disruption for the rational mind and circus performers who embrace a dynamic and vibrant way of living and being in the world.
Kehinde Wiley, Misahel Hernández Study (2023), via Sean Kelly
Emily Ludwig Shaffer, Mary (2023), via Galerie Pact
This month in Paris, artist Emily Ludwig Shaffer presents a body of new works at Galerie Pact that continue an expressive and iterative approach to the language and canon of art history, interpreting and recontextualizing classical signifiers as a colorful and densely layered series of canvases. Using the work as a space to reclaim the woman’s body from the male gaze, her pieces draw on human form and its relation to history to create new modes and representations. (more…)
Austin Lee, Good Weather (2023), via Pace Prints
This month in New York, artist Austin Lee presents a selection of prints in collaboration with the Pace Prints studio. Titled “Good Impressions,†the show marks a continuation of Lee’s expressive and multi-faceted modes of image generation. (more…)
Lena Henke, Memory of young sculpture VIIIÂ (2023), all images via The Ranch
This summer at The Ranch in Montauk, artist Lena Henke has installed a body of works that respond to the site’s equestrian and architectural histories. Titled Nature Wills It, the exhibition brings together a range of works that combine human and animal signifiers to create a range of formally and conceptually-challenging works in the gallery space. Rather than put forward a coherent and unified body, Henke’s work proposes alternate ways of figuring the horse. These sculptures evince an agonistic making: grappling for different means of picturing the animal’s visual features. Endeavoring toward the haptic and latent, the horse is segmented into components (head, body, hoof), each given its own handling and media. (more…)
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Little Song (Installation View), via Kurimanzutto
On view at Kurimanzutto’s New York exhibition space this month, artist Abraham Cruzvillegas brings forth his second solo project in the city with a new body of sculptural pieces created in his studio in Mexico City in the last year. The show, which takes over the gallery’s larger exhibition space in the city, integrations the artist’s signature approach and trademark color motifs, paying tribute to the work of Brazilian post-war art while engaging with the aritst’s own iterative exploration of historical and material interests. (more…)
Trevor Paglen, Because Physical Wounds Heal… (2022), via all images Pace
On view from May 12 to July 22 in New York, artist Trevor Paglen opens his first solo presentation with Pace in New York with a selection of new photography, sculpture, video, and other work, in a thematic presentation that examines the enduring effects of military and CIA influence operations on American culture. The show serves as the conceptual nucleus of a multifaceted project by the artist that also includes a Web3 project, set to be released by Art Blocks x Pace Verso on April 5, and related “speculative reality work†launching this spring. (more…)
Chris Burden, Cross Communication (Installation View), all images via Gagosian
Exploring artist Chris Burden’s early work as a pioneer of both multi-media engagements with technology, and their interlocking investigations of performance and the presence of the body within the media network, Gagosian is currently presenting Cross Communication, an exhibition of relics, films, and video works by the artist, plus other materials that document his early performances. (more…)
Dustin Yellin, Beneath the Wheel (2023), via Venus Over Manhattan
On this month in New York, artist Dustin Yellin presents a solo exhibition of new work at Venus Over Manhattan, exploring the imagery and structures of the natural world in relation to interconnected narratives around technological landscapes, human perception, and systemic modes of meaning-making and understanding. Comprising a series of new paintings, Cave Painting represents an important shift to painting for the artist whose practice in recent years has focused most notably on sculpture. (more…)
Guan Xiao, FEET, V7V bow (2023), all images via David Kordansky
This month in Los Angeles, artist Guan Xiao presents a body of works at the David Kordansky space that trace the lineages and connections between disparate imagery and iconography sourced from the digital realm. Emphasizing hybrid narratives, expressive approaches and an expanded sense of possibility for art-making in the contemporary era, the show is a striking look at the possibilities for making as we move deeper into the 21st Century. (more…)
Kambel Smith at Shrine, all images via Art Observed
This weekend marks a return of the New Art Dealers Alliance art fair to New York City, a longtime staple of the New York art fair calendar, and an event known for its range of exploratory and expressive new work from emerging artists, smaller galleries and new projects. For those looking for new insights and fresh perspectives on contemporary art practice, its hard to ignore the call of the fair, which reprises its role as a central tentpole of a weekend of fairs, even as the city’s string of fairs has split up between several weeks this May. (more…)
Damien Hirst at White Cube, all images via Art Observed
Returning this year to The Shed in New York City’s recently redeveloped Hudson Yards, the 2023 edition of Frieze New York is now open, with a range of shows and projects spread throughout the exhibition space that include ambitious solo projects, surveys of gallery rosters, and focused, historical presentations that underscore the fair’s place as both a site for discovery, and one of the premier selling events of the yearly art world calendar. With a range dealers on hand from New York and around the globe, the fair signals something of a scale-back from the sizable expanses of the versions held at Randalls Island, yet nevertheless presents a dynamic and immersive program.
Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner
Diego Vega Solorza, Dorje (2019), via Pablo Astorga
On April 18 in Mexico City, TONO, a new festival dedicated to time-based work, held its inaugural two-week program. Partnering with museums and galleries around the city, TONO presented a range of experimental performance art, video installations, and dance performances by local, regional, and international artists. With each performance filled completely at capacity with a diverse audience including collectors from Mexico City and New York, other curators and artists, and students, the festival laid its foundations as an invaluable space for stimulating dialogues surrounding the relationship between various time-based mediums in the contexts of one another. (more…)
Alina Perez at Deli, all images via Art Observed
Art-lovers descended upon Spring Studios in TriBeca this week for the much anticipated opening of Independent Art Fair, which opened its latest edition in New York the week before Frieze New York’s annual run. The fair has garnered a reputation as a reliable source of fresh talent, and its continued residence at Spring Studios emphasized its staying power and impact amongst a crowded few weeks of events.
Willie Stewart at Nicelle Beauchene
Eva Rothschild, Sweet Spot (2023), via 303 Gallery
This month in New York, 303 Gallery presents Arms Folded and Unfolded, its fourth exhibition of new work by artist Eva Rothschild. Continuing and expanding her engagement with three-dimensional forms, spatial investigations and the subtle lines between aesthetic and utilitarian values, the artist’s work here is a striking extension of an already expansive body of work.
Eva Rothschild, Soft Rain (2023), via 303 Gallery
Harold Ancart, Paintings (Installation View), via Art Observed
On view this month at Gagosian, artist Harold Ancart marks his debut with the gallery with a body of new works that continue his atmospheric and expressive exploration of the canvas, walking a delicate line between abstraction and figuration. Continuing his studied approach towards specific visual motifs that run through a series of iterations and expressive tendencies. (more…)
