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

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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

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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

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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…)

Erin Jane Nelson, Chronomicrobiome (2023), via Chapter NY

This month, Chapter NY presents Sublunary, the second show at the gallery dedicated to the work of artist Erin Jane Nelson second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new body of work centered around the Okefenokee swamp, including quilted silks, ceramic wall works, and ceramic sculpture. The artist, whose work delves into a range of conceptual frameworks from barrier islands to spirituality to science fiction, here initiates a new project around the border of Georgia and Florida, and the Okefenokee swamp that defines that geographic line. (more…)

Mark Bradford, Manifest Destiny (2023), via Hauser & Wirth

On this month in New York, Hauser & Wirth presents the expansive new show from artist Mark Bradford. You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice, a major exhibition that fills the entirety of the gallery’s 22nd Street building, marks the artist’s first show in New York since 2015, and sees him embarking upon a deeply personal exploration of the multifaceted nature of displacement and the predatory forces that feed on populations driven into motion by crisis.

Mark Bradford, Death Drop (2023), via Hauser & Wirth

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Seth Price, Ardomancer (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this month at Petzel Gallery’s 25th Street exhibition space, artist Seth Price brings forth a body of new works that merge together conceptual practices, AI-generated imagery, three-dimensional graphics and traditional painterly techniques to arrive at a range of works that subvert and confound easy readings. The show is only the second time in nearly a decade that Price has presented an exhibition of new work in New York, and offers a rare look at work by an artist who has long subverted and disrupted the reading of art as object and/or information.  (more…)

Tom Burr (Installation View), all images via Bortolami

On this month at Bortolami Gallery in New York, Tom Burr reprises his dual role as artist and exhibition maker, relocating the act of making from the traditional studio space into the gallery. With a range of works that mix sculpture, 2-dimensional work and installation, the show is a striking and nuanced investigation of space as a material in art, and art’s ability to generate spaces in turn.  (more…)

Gerhard Richter, 3 Scheiben (3 Panes of Glass) (2023), all images via David Zwirner

This month in New York, David Zwirner presents a body of new works by the German master Gerhard Richter, comprising a range of practices, techniques and materials that underscore the artist’s breadth and depth. On view from March 16–April 29, 2023, at 537 West 20th Street in New York,the exhibition presents a group of Richter’s last paintings, made in 2016–2017; a number of these abstract oil paintings will be shown here for the first time. Though Richter completed his last paintings in 2017, his dynamic practice continues his artistic inquiries into the possibilities of abstraction and perception through his ongoing experimentation with drawing, printing and sculpture.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) (2016)

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Cassi Namoda, “Dog meat, cat meat, God-knows-what-meat” (2020), via exhibition curators

Sotheby’s Institute of Art presents “The Dreamers”, a student curated collection of artworks that explores the elusive characteristics of dream states and the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy. In collaboration with the class “Curating Contemporary Art”, the Institute provided students with the opportunity to propose, organize, and curate their own projects surrounding themes that they felt were most relevant and pressing to the contemporary moment. “The Dreamers”, the first show of the series, presents works from a range of exclusively female-identifying and queer artists including Maess Anand, Felipe Baeza, Shuyi Cao, Jessica Diamond, Cassi Namoda, Jess Xiaoyi Han, Angela Heisch, Arina Izmestieva, Heather Jones, Janet Jones, Ann McCoy, Joiri Minaya, Kiki Smith, Devin Osorio, Ana Maria Velasco, and Yin Zhang. (more…)

Sherrie Levine, Repetition and Difference (2022), via David Zwirner

This month in Paris, David Zwirner invites artist Sherrie Levine to present a body of new works in the city, marking her first show in the French capital in over 30 years. Featuring major new suites of paintings and photographs, as well as a selection of sculptures, this exhibition showcases several bodies of work that are central to Levine’s practice, and that distinctly engage her ongoing inquiry into notions of authorship, originality, and authenticity.

Sherrie Levine (Installation View), via David Zwirner

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Katherine Bradford, Trapeze Artists (2023), via Campoli Presti

On this month at Campoli Presti’s Paris exhibition space, artist Katherine Bradford marks her fourth show with the gallery. Exploring the world of  acrobats, their colorful costumes and masks as a study of form and color, the artist uses this framework as a way to explore societies and mico-cultures through whichartists and spectators are projected. (more…)

Clare Rojas, Go Placidly (Exhibition View), via Andrew Kreps

In her work, artist Clare Rojas employs a deeply personal visual language as she moves freely between dense figurative scenes, and minimal, abstract compositions. Rojas approaches both with a consistent, lyrical sensitivity as she interjects totemic references to her own life, and the Northern Californian landscape that surrounds her studio, seeking to distill fleeting memories and experiences into concrete shapes. For her first exhibition with Andrew Kreps, Rojas continues these modes of practice. (more…)

Gina Pane, Préliminaire (Installation View), via kamel mennour

Returning to the work of Gina Pane for its fifth gallery show dedicated to the renowned artist, kamel mennour has turned attention to the artist’s time at the Beaux-Arts de Paris during the 1960’s, examining how the artist’s experience in Paris during that time shaped (and re-shaped) the course of her career.  (more…)

Paul Mogensen, no title (2022), via Karma

On this month at Karma New York is Paintings: 1965-2022, a survey exhibition of work by painter Paul Mogensen. Known for his mathematical, progressional works that defy categorization and treat the canvas as a site for both deconstruction and restructuring of painting as a format, the artist’s work here illustrates a career of innovation and exploration.  (more…)

Portrait of the artist in his studio in Metepec, Mexico via Hilario Galguera Gallery

Opening on April 20 at Hilario Galguera Gallery is Mexican artist Gabriel O’Shea’s solo exhibition Preludio. Through his experiments with classical and contemporary mediums, from monochromatic paintings and wax sculptures to AI software, O’Shea explores the complex, and often surreal, relationship between technology and religion in a postmodern digital age.

Art Observed sat down with O’Shea over Zoom to talk about his artistic background, his creative processes, and the major themes surrounding the exhibition. (more…)

Andreas Schulze, Untitled (Chelsea Flowers) (2023), via Sprüth Magers

Artist Andreas Schulze returns to Sprüth Magers this month for his fourth solo exhibition at the London Gallery. Bringing with him a body of works that present confusing, unexpected forms as a mode of examining visual configuration and possibility, the artist once again returns to explorations of context and form as a site for the negotiation of both sensation and nonsense. (more…)

Marguerite Humeau, meys (Installation View), via White Cube

Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey is structured as a journey, incorporating sound, moving image and sculpture and enlisting the collaboration of artificial intelligence as well as hives of skilled craftspeople in order to explore ideas of interdependence and collective intelligence. Leading the viewer from the present and local to a distant, speculative future, Humeau entwines plural narratives around these themes – from a human society in collapse, to a simulation of the secret life inside an insect community, and a projected future gathering of a newly-formed collective in the process of synchronising. (more…)

The NEA announced its latest string of grant recipients this week, with $35.6 million earmarked for a range of projects that “demonstrate the vitality of the humanities across our nation” according to Shelly C. Lowe, the endowment’s chairwoman, and “support humanities programs and opportunities for underserved students and communities.” (more…)

Bernice Rose, an art historian and MoMA curator who was a vocal champion of drawing, and helped its establish its current role in arts study, has died at the age of 87. “She recognized early that for a generation of artists who emerged in the 1960s, the art of drawing knew no boundaries,” says Christophe Cherix, the museum’s chief curator of drawings and prints. (more…)

Renzo Martens and Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) will represent the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale 2024.  (more…)

The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA) has appointed Denise Ryner as its Andie B. Laporte Curator. “With her experience working at the intersections of art and academia, Denise brings an exciting perspective and expertise that will enhance the reach, relevance, and impact of ICA’s exhibitions,” says Zoë Ryan, the ICA’s Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director, and Hallie Ringle, ICA’s Brett Sundheim Chief Curator. “On behalf of the ICA Board and staff, I am thrilled to be welcoming her to join our team as we advance our mission as an experimental hub for contemporary art from around the world.” 

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