Cecily Brown gets the profile treatment in The Guardian this week as the artist opens her ambitious Met show. “Like a magpie at work, there’s no hierarchy of sources,” Brown said. “It’s just the feeling of someone who looks at everything, takes what they will when it’s needed, churning it around, and spewing it back out as something else.” (more…)

Richard Prince, Untitled (2019-2020), via Sadie Coles HQ

On this month in London, artist Richard Prince marks his seventh solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, bringing forth a new iteration and expansion of his iconic Joke Paintings. The artist, who has long mined the linguistic flows, political temperatures and structural modes of American pop culture, here finds new ground to explore in these modes for the show, titled Everyday.
(more…)

Robert Bechtle, 60 T-Bird (1964), via Gladstone

This month, Gladstone presents the first posthumous exhibition of works by Robert Bechtle, spanning nearly six decades of his practice. Highlighting important subjects he returned to throughout his lifetime, this expansive selection of paintings, watercolors, and drawings demonstrates the technical and conceptual ingenuity of his process that evolved over time and transformed approaches to realistic figurative painting in the United States. On the occasion of this exhibition. The show also marks the gallery’s first in the representation of the artist’s estate.  (more…)

Urs Fischer, Schmalifornia (2022), via Gagosian

This month at its Beverly Hills location, Gagosian presents Ice Cream Truck Democracy, an exhibition of paintings by Urs Fischer. In this new series of works, which occupies a range of sizes and formats, Fischer combines silkscreened, hand-painted, and hand-stenciled imagery, applying a collage-like aesthetic to his personal observations of Los Angeles.

Urs Fischer, Citizen’s Arrest. (2023), via Gagosian

(more…)

Zeng Fanzhi, Untitled (2022), via Hauser & Wirth

This month in Los Angeles, Hauser and Wirth makes history with the first solo exhibition in the city for Zeng Fanzhi, the renowned Chinese painter whose expansive and intricate body of work has made him a singular both in both his home country and internationally.   A pioneer of contemporary Chinese art, Zeng is celebrated globally for his constantly evolving style and subject matter, and the works on view herald his latest artistic breakthroughs that contemplate the intersection of Western art and style with traditional Chinese subject matter and philosophy.

(more…)

Franz West, Echolalia (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view this month at David Zwirner’s 533 West 19th Street space in New York, the gallery presents a commanding installation by artist Franz West. Created only a few years before the artist’s death, Echolalia consists of seven colorful, larger-than-life sculptures that seem to stand slightly off-balance, interspersed with three cushioned divans. Not exhibited publicly in more than ten years, the work represents the apotheosis of West’s commitment to sculpture as social space, integrating the viewer within an immersive, total environment. Conceptually, the installation manifests the intersection of many of West’s ongoing interests—most notably, the playfulness of sculpture, the participation of the viewer, and the importance of language.

Franz West, Echolalia (Installation View), via Art Observed

(more…)

Martin Puryear, Looking Askance (2023), via Matthew Marks

Marking the latest exhibition at both Los Angeles exhibition spaces, Matthew Marks has launched an expansive of works by Martin Puryear that also makes for the artist’s first solo show in the city in over 30 years. Compiling a range of works that revisit Puryear’s material adventurousness and tight examination of structural and historical progressions, including seven sculptures made over the past five years in a variety of media including wood, bronze, and stone.

Martin Puryear, Happy Jack (2020), via Matthew Marks

(more…)

Hermann Nitsch, Selected Paintings, Actions, Relics, and Musical Scores, 1962–2020 (Installation View), via Art Observed

Marking a major exploration and presentation of the artist’s work, Pace Gallery is currently showcasing a selection of paintings, scores and relics from artist Hermann Nitsch, an impressive collaboration with the artist’s Foundation that also celebrates the first English translation of his autobiography.  (more…)

Minerva Cuevas, In Gods We Trust (Installation View), via kurimanzutto

For more than three decades, artist Minerva Cuevas’s practice has been rooted in research-based projects concerned with economic and environmental issues and their socio-political impact. Focused often around Mexico and its particular political, social and cultural frameworks, the artist mines history and images to create new awarenesses and notions of contemporary life. On this month at kurimanzutto in New York, Cuevas continues that practice.  (more…)

Trevor Shimizu, Tulips (2023), via 47 Canal

Cycles, on view this month at 47 Canal, marks artist Trevor Shimizu’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, and a continuation of his enigmatic and studied engagement with disparate painterly languages. Presenting nine new paintings, varying in scale and unrelenting in spirit, the artist continues to push further through the genre model of landscape painting, and past his painterly personas. (more…)

All Photography by Aleph Molinari for Art Observed

Through her multi-media sculptures and large-scale installations, Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade explores natural and social systems and the underlying structures of reality. Her precise and technically complex works are physical representations of order, scale, and systems that extend from the subatomic to the celestial. Integrating physics and mathematics into her formal language, Kwade creates ethereal – and almost improbable – spatial compositions.

Art Observed sat down with Kwade to talk about her formative experience growing up in Germany at the cusp of political upheaval, the philosophical approach to her work, and her latest exhibition Silent Matter at OMR in Mexico City. In the minimal, brutalist space of the gallery, Kwade created a delicate universe entirely of her own. (more…)

Cy Gavin, Untitled (Grass Growing on a weir) (2022), via Gagosian

Gagosian presents an exhibition of new paintings by Cy Gavin this month in New York, marking the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Gavin’s landscape paintings transmute subjective responses to specific places into expansive works with striking palettes and fluid, gestural brushwork. Composed in dimensions that are in keeping with the scale of experience, these paintings interpret the sites and processes of the natural world. In this body of work, Gavin concentrates on subjects he finds in the vicinity of his studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. He proposes a conception of landscape in relation to his status as a citizen and steward of the land, developing ways to explore themes of growth, renewal, and belonging. (more…)

Anish Kapoor, Blood in the Sky III (2022), via Regen Projects

This month in Los Angeles, artist Anish Kapoor has brought forth a new body of large-scale paintings that continue the artist’s mining of visceral experience, phenomenological experiments and dense, colorful compositions as a site for the visualization of the perceptual experience. Over the last 40 years, Kapoor has engaged a diverse range of media and materials to probe the qualities and contradictions of form and perception. This is the artist’s seventh exhibition with the gallery since 1992 and the first devoted entirely to his painting practice. (more…)

Jess Xiaoyi Han, Implosion (2023), all image photography by Cooper Dodds via Ross+Kramer Gallery

Currently exhibiting at Ross+Kramer Gallery’s Chelsea location is Chinese artist Jess Xiaoyi Han’s debut solo show Implosion, a series of her most recent paintings which explore abstract articulations of internal fluctuation and transformation. This new body of work, painted with alkyd on canvas, reflects an evolution in the young artist’s meticulously controlled and expressionistic style —the compositions are increasingly crowded with frenetic arrangements while still maintaining a cohesive and meditative fluency. Han’s luminous canvases, saturated with a vibrant, candy-colored palette, burst with streams of fluid brushstrokes, emanating a sense of dynamic movement through illusionistic space.

(more…)

Emma McIntyre, We will invent new roses (2023), via Chateau Shatto

On this month in Los Angeles, local favorite Château Shatto presents a body of new paintings by Emma McIntyre, unified under the title Pearl Diver and marking the first show for the artist at the space. Embracing a gestural and expressive mode of mark-making, the works here see the artist running through a range of approaches and techniques, each time exploring notions of density, movement and space. (more…)

Kara Walker, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (Installation View), via Art Observed

For over two decades, artist Kara Walker (b. 1969) has been making work that weaves together imagery from the antebellum South, the brutality of slavery, and racist stereotypes. Her work has stirred controversy for its use of exaggerated caricatures that reflect long-standing racialized and gendered stereotypes and for its lurid depictions of history. This mode of work takes center stage in a body of new prints on view this spring at the New York Historical Society, which challenge and re-examine methods of depiction and representation of history through pointed interjection.  (more…)

Tony Oursler, SpEcTrUm (2023), via Lehmann Maupin

Compiling a body of new work this month, Lehmann Maupin presents mAcHiNe E.L.F. by Tony Oursler, the pioneering new media artist whose diverse combination of multimedia projects, immersive environments, expansive outdoor installations, and dynamic dolls, ghosts, and bots that liberate video from its traditional two-dimensional format and bring it into the realm of sculpture have long served as a powerful and expressive exploration of modern culture.  (more…)

Phyllida Barlow, Folly at the British Pavilion, via Art Observed

Artist Phyllida Barlow, a principle voice in British sculptor during the late 20th and early 21st Century, has passed away at the age of 78. The artist’s work, known for its massive scale and intricate incorporations of color, form and material, was a central figure in the country’s contemporary discourse, and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2017.  (more…)

LaToya Ruby Frazier, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022, (2021 – 2022) (Installation View), all images via Gladstone

Marking its first show with artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gladstone Gallery has installed a body of work by the artist that pays tribute to and commemorates the work of healthcare workers during the course of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Centered around More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland (2021-2022), which marks its first installation in New York, the show makes for a fitting reflection on several exceedingly challenging years for the United States and its healthcare workers.  (more…)

Mark Manders, Writing Skiapod (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar

Taking over the Los Angeles outpost of Tanya Bonakdar, artist Mark Manders marks his fifth solo show with the gallery, and his first in LA since 2010. Continuing his exploration of rooms as a container for expressive and surreal arrangements of material, the artist here takes on a range of explorations of language and expression. (more…)

Gedi Sibony, Her Seven Morning Sentiment (2015), via Greene Naftali

Artist Gedi Sibony presents a range of new works this month at Greene Naftali in New York, continuing the artist’s studied interrogation of spatial dynamics, color, and form, all explored through a range of sculpture and painting.  Titled I Was Like Wait, the exhibition stages a series of encounters, expansive and confounding.

Gedi Sibony, I Was Like Wait (Installation View), via Greene Naftali

(more…)

Charles Atlas, A Prune Twin (Installation View), via Luhring Augustine

On view this month, Luhring Augustine presents A Prune Twin, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with pioneering film and video artist Charles Atlas. The showmarks the debut of the titular piece, a multi-channel installation with sound and video originally commissioned by the Barbican Centre, part of the show Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer. Atlas and Clark were longtime collaborators, and this show marks something of both a tribute and compendium of their work together.

(more…)

Leidy Churchman, Niki de Saint Phalle! (1) (2021), via Matthew Marks

On view at Matthew Marks in New York this month, artist Leidy Churchman presents a body of twenty-four monotypes, showcasing an expressive and engaging aspect of the artist’s already dynamic and expressive practice. Turning their hand towards print-making in a series of varied and interesting works, the artist seeks to catalyze the feeling of images and thoughts in human consciousness. By giving attention to each image, the artist hopes to encourage what they have described as “an immersion and transformation of the world from an intimate perspective; a richer, rounder view of the moment from within the mind.”  (more…)

Joel Mesler, RABBI (2022), via Cheim & Read

Painter and longtime gallerist Joel Mesler presents a body of new works at Cheim & Read’s uptown exhibition space this month, bringing together works on paper and new paintings under the title The Rabbis. In a dramatic shift from the artist’s prior work, the pieces here depict a series of Jewish Rabbis, continuing a long history of the depiction of these religious figures. (more…)