Portrait of the artist by Aleph Molinari for Art Observed.

Israeli-Colombian visual artist Orly Anan mixes elements of theater, dance, performance, and costume design into surrealist neo-kitsch compositions. She recently premiered her first short film Ein Sof during Mexico City’s art week Zona MACO, in partnership with MATERIA and Mubi. Anan describes the film as a ‘Kabbalistic circus’ that blends elements of carnival, kabuki, and sacred numerology into an explosion of colors and symbolism. Art Observed caught up with the artist to talk about her film, her practice, and the esoteric sources of her creative inspiration. (more…)

Michael Williams, Paired Puzzle 1 (Frog/Farm) (2020), via David Kordansky

On view this winter in LA, and open for extended hours during the run of Frieze Los Angeles this week, artists Huma Bhabha and Michael Williams are part of a dual artist show at David Kordansky, featuring new sculptures and works on paper by Bhabha, and new paintings and drawings by Williams. (more…)

Jose Davila at Galeria OMR, all images by Hannah Zhang for Art Observed

Zona Maco has once again opened for its doors for a week of sales and shows in the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City. The fair, which has built a reputation for both its international curation and ist reflection of the thriving artistic community in Mexico City, here returns to the expanses of the Centro Banamex for its 19th year. This year’s edition marked a continuation of a fair that has long prided itself on the scale and strength of its inclusions, with particular focus paid to the art and artists of Latin America in relation to the rest of the international art market. 

Yoan Capote at Galleria Continua

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Alicja Kwade, Silent Matter (Installation View), via OMR

Artist Alicja Kwade has opened a new show this week during the run of Zona Maco in Mexico City at Galeria OMR, continuing a body of work that uses philosophy and natural phenomena as a means to explore the human condition. Marking her first solo exhibition in Mexico, Silent Matter, Kwade employs the notion of thought experiments, a tool commonly used in science and philosophy as a means to explore concepts and phenomena that are difficult or almost impossible to explain. In the tradition of Schrödinger’s cat or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Kwade creates physical manifestations of thought experiments meant to stimulate discussion as well as question the limits of our ability to understand and ultimately control reality. (more…)

Nairy Baghramian, modèle vivant (Installation View), via kurimanzutto

On view this month, and opening in tandem with the run of exhibitions and projects during Zona Maco, Mexico City’s kurimanzutto presents new work by artist Nairy Baghramian, exploring a range of histories and modes of studio practice converging on the notion and form of the human body. Titled modèle vivant, the title refers to the practice of drawing, painting, or sculpting the human figure from a live model; that is, from a person who strikes, assumes, holds a given pose in service to an artist’s act of composition. (more…)

Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Now I’m home, lips that know my name (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ

Marking their first solo exhibition in the UK, artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase opens a new show Now I’m home, lips that know my name, at Sadie Coles HQ, making for an explorative, domestic installation that embraces the Black Queer experience of love, sexuality, subjectivity and identity; and the profound depth of the capacity for intimacy and pleasure in both public and private spaces, that remain central to their practice. (more…)

Marlon Mullen, Untitled (2021), via JTT

JTT presents its fourth solo show with artist Marlon Mullen this month, continuing an ongoing collaboration with a new selection of colorful abstracted works that underscore the artist’s engaging, expressive hand. Collectively, the works on view span just over 25 years and include some of his earliest, never before shown paintings from the late 1990s as well as his newest works from the past several years.  (more…)

Stefan Bondell, Dark Marks (Installation View), via Vito Schnabel

On this month in New York City, Vito Schnabel Gallery welcomes artist Stefan Bondell to show Dark Marks, a selection of new works from the artistthe New York poet and artist’s most recent series of paintings – a dramatic series of monumentally scaled works executed in an obsidian palette, with deep, compounded layers of classical and contemporary imagery used to explore the turbulent sociopolitical condition of the United States today. (more…)

Karen Kilimnik, friends in the woods (2010), via Sprüth Magers

Marking an intriguing engagement with the language and history of drawing, Sprüth Magers is currently presenting The Kingdom of the Renaissance, an exhibition of works by Karen Kilimnik and her old master predecessors, curated by Mireille Mosler. Inspired by a variety of sources, from old masters to present day, Kilimnik conjoins components while constructing her own universe. From depictions of royal menageries of the Renaissance through public figures’ pooches, the artist filters her inner imaginary world through source material procured from books and museum exhibitions. (more…)

Sandy Williams IV, Endurance VI (2022), via Martos

On view this month at Martos Gallery, the group show Passages explores artists’ relationship to time and memory, space and persona. Taking the notion of cultural recycling as a starting point for art making in these doom-stricken times, the show relies on material and its overabundance as a jumping off point for exploring the act of making, and the goals of the artist in the modern era. (more…)

Alex Prager, Run (2022), via Lehmann Maupin

This winter, Lehmann Maupin presents Part Two: Run, an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Prager, that marks the debut of Prager’s ambitious new film, Run and features a selection of new photographs and sculptures made in conjunction with and in response to the film. Directly responding to a period of cultural ambivalences and uncertainties, the exhibition urgently examines human perseverance and explores the opportunities for empathy, participation, and action present both within art and everyday life. (more…)

David Salle, Tree of Life, This Time with Feeling (Installation View), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Presenting a body of new works at the Thaddaeus Ropac exhibition space in Paris, artist David Salle returns for the culmination of his celebrated Tree of Life series, a body of works that used human dramas and a comical undertone to create a space fro the meditation and reflection on contemporary art and its relation to history.  (more…)

Jonathan Baldock, Mother Flower (2022), via Stephen Friedman

Centered on themes of nature and the cycle of life, artist Jonathan Baldock presents a deeply personal and resonant exhibition this month at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, a show that reflects on the artist’s relationship with his mother and her garden. Arranging a selection of new works in wall-mounted sculpture and ceramic, Baldock presents a peaceful and expressive meditation on human emotion, quietude, and the experience of life in nature. (more…)

Joseph Beuys, 40 Years of Drawing (Installation View), via Art Observed

This month in London, Thaddaeus Ropac has embarked on a particularly striking and powerful exhibition, bringing together almost 100 works on paper from the archives of the Joseph Beuys family for the first time in the United Kingdom. On view now, Joseph Beuys: 40 Years of Drawing is the first major exhibition dedicated solely to the artist’s drawings to take place in London for 20 years, and offers a cohesive and engaging look at the role drawing played in the artist’s work over the course of his career.

Joseph Beuys, 40 Years of Drawing (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Richard Long, Walking at the Speed of Spring (1998), via Lisson

For his latest exhibition at Lisson Gallery, artist Richard Long presents a series of text works and photographs spanning his entire practice, from the 1970s to the present day. These works chart Long’s innovative path through and alongside histories of conceptual art, centering the artist’s life-long concern with walking as an aesthetic and philosophical practice. As textual and visual documentations of walks embarked upon worldwide, through mountains and deserts, shorelines and grasslands, rivers and snowscapes, Long’s works give poetic form to the ineffability and ephemerality of human perceptual experience. (more…)

Nicole Wermers, Reclining Female #1 (2022), via Herald St

On view this month in London, Herald St presents P4aM2aRF!, an exhibition by Nicole Wermers taking place in the gallery’s East London location. Resembling a code or password, the acronymic title stands for ‘Proposal for a Monument to a Reclining Female!’ and alludes to the public realm and its interactions with the female body. The exhibition features two main groups of work: a new series of photographs of locked bicycles entitled Attachments, and three sculptures from the artist’s Reclining Females series. (more…)

Duane Linklater, croatoan 1 (2023), via Bortolami

This month at Bortolami’s 39 Walker location, the gallery presents its first exhibition of the year, Junkyard of Dreams, bringing together the work of five artists; Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Duane Linklater, Virginia Overton, Kathleen Ryan, and Christopher Williams. Drawing on the disparate modes of both knowledge and object construction in the discourse of post-industrial modernity, the works on view here walk delicate lines between critique and active engagement with modern capital. (more…)

Pat Steir at Hauser & Wirth, all images via Hannah Zhang for Art Observed

Opening this week in the famously cloudy expanse of the San Francisco Bay, Fog Art and Design Fair has once again opened its doors for another year. Celebrating today’s most significant creatives and leading contributors to the worlds of design and visual arts, the fair assembles 45 leading international galleries; prominent 20th-century and contemporary design dealers; and a weekend of exciting programs. (more…)

A rare pair of floral paintings by Queen Victoria will go to auction next week, expecting prices of £8,000 and £10,000, Art News reports.  (more…)

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz is proposing that the British Museum return one of its ancient Assyrian treasures to Iraq in exchange for the donation of his fourth plinth sculpture to the UK. “As I pondered my gift to the nation of Great Britain, I began to fantasise that it could be attached to a second gift: the return of one of the British Museum’s lamassu to the country of Iraq, to replace what was destroyed by Daesh [or Islamic State],” he writes in an open letter. (more…)

Art News has a piece this week discussing ongoing issues with repatriation at The Met, reviewing some disputed works still on view. “Once you know that someone is acquiring artifacts without looking too closely as a source, the first thing you should do is look deeper,” says Erin Thompson, an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. (more…)

UNESCO is holding programs in Warsaw to help identify looted cultural materials from the Ukraine. “Poland is really a country at the forefront of this work,” Krista Pikkat, UNESCO’s director of culture and emergencies, says. (more…)

The New York Times writes on the revival of artist Robert Whitman’s 1959 happening American Moon at Pace. “I used to try to explain things to myself — what I was doing,” he said. “Then I suddenly realized my ideas and thoughts and rationalizations were nonsense, and I just decided to go with my intuition.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles Whitney Museum curator Marcela Guerrero, the first Puerto Ricaan curator at the Museum. “She is at the right place at a time when Latinx art is emerging as a force to be reckoned with,” says Mari Carmen Ramírez, the first curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “We all expect her to contribute to this transformation in a significant way.” (more…)