‪President Obama awarded the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal today, with painter Will Barnet and sculptor Martin Puryear among the recipients. [AO Newslink]

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Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012). All images via David Zwirner.

At age 72, Doug Wheeler opens his first solo show in New York City at David Zwirner. A single site-specific installation, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 challenges the finite perceptions of interior space, creating what some have called a visual “vacuum tube” in the gallery’s massive exhibition space.  Long regarded for his contributions to the “Light and Space” movement of the 1970s, the American artist works to remove the visual cues of a space, focusing instead on the materiality of light and the human perception thereof. Longing back to the days of his childhood, flying over the western desert with his father, Wheeler said in a recent interview with the New York Times, “When I was growing up, the sky was everything to me.”

Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012)

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Installation view. All images courtesy of Haunch of Venison, London.

Haunch of Venison’s newly renovated four-gallery space in London currently holds an exhibition showing ten of Britain’s more important painters of the post-war era: Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Patrick Caulfield, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow. Exploring both personal and artistic relationships amongst the artists, over 40 paintings and drawings are on display, unveiling some works that have not been seen in public for years.
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‪‬W Magazine profiles ‘The New Female Gallerists,’ Kathy Grayson, Amy Greenspon, Jane Hait and Janine Foeller, Emily Sundblad, and Lisa Cooley [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Swiss art dealer Iwan Wirth interviewed by the Financial Times on endowing a professorship at the Courtauld in London, and the importance of donating to contemporary art education. [AO Newslink]

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Installation view. Via OHWOW.

In his first solo exhibition on the west coast, Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Arsham presents three bodies of works in the fall, the ball, and the wall. Shifting between sculpture, painting, and installation art, the works included demonstrate the diversity of Arsham’s ideas, while each enacting the subtle theatricality which has come to characterize his practice. Arsham has been identified by many sources as a rising star in the art world following his high-profile collaborations with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company choreographer Jonas Bokaer, and fashion designer Hedi Slimane. His works shift our perceptions of space, time, and the basic scientific tenants which order our embodied experience. Soft folds of fabric emerge from hard, flat walls; drips seem to slow down time and defy their natural gravitational pull; paintings confuse and distort scale.

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Daniel Arsham, Hiding Figure (2011). Via DesignBoom.

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‪‬Rachel Whiteread, the first female Turner Prize winner, designs bronze and gold-leaf frieze for London’s Whitechapel Gallery facade in time for Olympic games this June, based on the building’s Tree of Life motif with donated funds exceeding £200,000 [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Miro’s ‘Peinture’ work, estimated between £7m and £10m, goes unsold at Sotheby’s after his ‘Painting-Poem’ set a record high price for the artist (£16.8m) at Christie’s on Tuesday, both auctions in London [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Gerhard Richter retrospective walk-through at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie canceled due paparazzi mob, one day after the artist’s 80th birthday [AO Newslink]

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Elene Damenia.

Uri Aran loves cookies. In his current show, by foot, by car, by bus at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the artist explores the eminent childhood snack from a variety of media, discussing them in video, capturing them in photograph, and incorporating them into his large-scale tabletop sculptures, creating a motif of seemingly childish innocence that spans Aran’s vocabulary as a sculptor, illustrator, video, and performance artist.

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‪‬Metropolitan Museum of Art to redesign more “attractive and welcoming” entrance plaza to include new fountains, trees, seating, kiosks, and lighting, designed by Philadelphia-based OLIN architectural firm and funded mainly by David H. Koch [AO Newslink]

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‪‬HWKN’s ‘Wendy’ announced as MoMA PS1 13th annual Young Architects Program winner, a large nylon star treated to neutralize airborne pollutants [AO Newslink]

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Ernesto Neto, installation view of Crazy Hyperculture in the Vertigo of the World (2012). All images courtesy of Faena Art Center.

Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto inaugurates Buenos Aires’ new art space, the Faena Art Center (which opened in September 2011), with a massive net-like installation he calls Crazy Hyperculture in the Vertigo of the World. In Neto’s installation, jewel-toned webs of crocheted ropes and fabric fill the entire Cathedral Room to create a woven bridge that welcomes visitors to explore. Neto’s vision stems from the Neo-Concreto art movement, which, according to the exhibition’s description, “places the spectator at the centre of the creative action, thereby converting physical interaction into a key aspect of his work.”

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‪‬Artist Ryan McGinley and Edun, a sustainable fashion company (founded by Ali Hewson and Bono in 2005) produce a short film: ‘Beautiful Rebels’ [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sale of Joan Miro 1925 ‘Painting-Poem’ breaks artist’s record with hammer price of £16,841,250, nearly doubling the high estimate of £9,000,000 at Christie’s ‘The Art of Surrealism’ Evening Sale last night in London [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Ukrainian businessman Victor Pinchuk’s Future Generation Art Prize second biennial open to applications through May 6, 2012, with a prize of $100,000 and mentorship by artists Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andreas Gursky, and Takashi Murakami [AO Newslink]

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Installation View

Galerie Perrotin is currently radiating with Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light sculptures. An Installation features eight sculptural works from the years 1963–89 and three schematic drawings. 1963 was a seminal year for Flavin, as he removed all other elements from his practice to work solely with commercially available fluorescent lights. With clarity and simplicity, his constructed arrangements explore the painterly possibilities of color and light while engaging with the architectural space.

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Herzog & de Meuron, Ai Weiwei outside their Beijing ‘Bird’s Nest.’ Via Bustler.

The Serpentine Gallery in London announced today that Chinese activist-artist Ai Weiwei and Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron will team up for the 12th annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion commission. The trio will translate their 2008 collaboration of the ‘Bird’s Nest’ arena at the Beijing Olympics into a twelve pillar pavilion in conjunction with the London 2012 Festival and the London Games. Unearthing the eleven foundations of previous pavilions, a new column will be placed on each, with the twelfth situated as a ‘wild card.’ 1.5 meters tall, the twelfth column will hold a floating platform roof, collecting water and creating a reflecting pool, while also offering the versatility of a ‘dance floor’ once drained.

See the previous eleven pavilions after the jump…

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‪‬Pascal Spengemann, formerly of Taxter & Spengemann, appointed new Director at Marlborough Chelsea, “I hope to help Marlborough to foster an atmosphere of experimentation melded with broad appeal.” [AO Newslink]

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Installation view. All images courtesy of Os Gemeos.

Os Gemeos (Portugese for ‘the twins’) are Brazilian identical twin brothers Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo. Fermata, their latest exhibition in Vila Velha, Brazil, is a graffiti-minded colorful world of both fantasy and reality. The show consists entirely of new works, most of which were developed on site at the Museu Vale, which is an old train station now converted into a museum. The show’s name ‘fermata’ has musical roots and is defined as the interlude between musical tempos in an opera, inspiring the new paintings, interactive works, sculpture, and video. “Fermata, in this case, symbolizes the intervals needed to create the right mood for every action that will follow,” said artist Gustavo Pandolfo.

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‪‬A breakdown of major art philanthropy, including: $200 million in foundation work by the Broad family, $70 million to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond from Arthur and Margaret Glasgow, $30 million to the Miami Art Museum and an arts complex at Columbia University in New York [AO Newslink]

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Deutsche Guggenheim via Artnet

After 14 years of collaborative exhibitions, Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation are set to re-envision the current Deutsche Guggenheim contemporary art space as a place for political and corporate conferences. The decision was announced via email, by stating that the joint contract expires at the end of this year. Comments by Deutsche Bank’s CEO Josef Ackermann and Guggenheim Museum and Foundation Director Richard Armstrong confirmed the conceptual departure.

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David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (2011), one of a 52-part work. All images via The Guardian 

Britain’s Royal Academy of Art is currently showing some two hundred works by ‘Royal Academician’ David Hockney. The exhibition, A Bigger Picture, is centered on fifty-two new works inspired by the Yorkshire landscape of Northern England, where Hockney has been residing on and off for the past few years. Much of the work is new, including fifty-one new works ‘painted’ with an iPad application and enlarged.

David Hockney, Winter Timber (2009)

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Shirin Neshat, Divine Rebellion (2012). All images courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.

Shirin Neshat’s newest photographic series and video installation is currently on view at Gladstone Gallery. The exhibition’s title, Book of Kings, comes from the ancient book Shahnameh (Book of Kings), a tragedy written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi in the tenth century that tells the story of the mythical and historical past of Greater Iran. A collection of portraits of Iranian and Arab youth with calligraphic texts and illustrations covering their skin, Neshat’s artistic practice examines the conditions of power within the social, cultural, and political structures in the Middle East while also addressing universal themes of the human condition.

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Installation view

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