Armand Doré, Nude, Smoking and Reclining (c. 1860-65)

The French Exit group show brought to life by the curatorial eye of Mattias Vendelmans invites a dialogue between artists and their muses, considering just what happens when one skips the farewell in search of something more enticing after dark. How does the basic notion of privacy and vulnerability continue to pique our curiosity? Spanning works from oil paintings and sculptures to pen and paper, from Baudelairean Paris to the suburbs of 1930s Stockholm, an ongoing exploration of organic tenderness and bestiality in human nature unfolds.

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“To approach this new chapter differently, instead of viewing it as a carte blanche, we embraced the challenge of considering the many existing peripheral elements while exploring the centre as a void,” begins Minsuk Cho: this year’s chosen designer of the annual Serpentine Pavilion. With a background in hospitality, commercial and visual art projects across South Korea, Mass Studio’s founder brings a layered understanding of human interaction with one’s environment to this year’s installation.

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Chronos, the latest solo exhibition of works by the painter Maria Kreyn opened during the inaugural week of the 60th Venice Biennale, showcasing a series of ten new large-scale paintings. Set against the backdrop of the historic St. George’s Anglican Church in Venice, the paintings depict brooding tempests – the proverbial meeting of sky and sea at once turbulent and serene. Influenced by mythology and the sublime, Kreyn’s works are meditations on the fantastic forces of the natural world, as well as humanity’s inextricable entwinement with it. The storied church setting heightens the sense of the mystical and transcendent, turning each painting into a kind of altarpiece that invites prolonged contemplation.

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Gabriel Orozco at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2024

The Vitruvian Man (c. 1487) is a study of the proportions of the human body inscribed within the absolute forms of a circle and a square, using metalpoint, pen and ink, with touches of watercolour on paper. One of Leonardo Da Vinci’s best-known works, the drawing is stored in the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia in Italy, and only rarely exhibited due to its fragility as a work on paper.

Influenced by the theories of Roman architect Vitruvius in his treaty “De Architectura” (1st century BC), Da Vinci drew a male figure with his hands and feet touching the perimeter of a circle, his navel at its precise center. Another position is superimposed with his feet standing on the base of a square while his arms extend outwards, the area directly below the navel as the center of the square, per Da Vinci’s own findings.

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Modern art is full of determined characters. The ones who find success are visionary, changing the face of the contemporary art scene. Marina Abramović‘s exhibition at the Royal Academy marks the first retrospective of a female artist in the institution’s 255 years. The exhibition is one of the largest, occupying the academy’s previously unused rooms. While it was initially planned for September 2020, due to Covid-19 it was postponed numerous times. During this period Abramović suffered an embolism which prevented her from performing in the show as initially planned. It’s an unfortunate reality for an artist who is usually so generous with herself as a performer. (more…)

Cover images courtesy of Ola Wilk via Maria Kreyn; and Ellen Frances.

For its first artist-on-artist interview, Art Observed sat down with New York-based painter Maria Kreyn and multidisciplinary artist and performer Ellen Frances to talk about their individual practices and their collaboration for the opening of Kreyn’s solo show Untune a String at The Hole in Tribeca earlier this month. In their conversation with Art Observed, the two artists discuss the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration, the enduring resonance of classical artistic and literary forms, and their visions for the future. (more…)

Henry Taylor, I Got Brothers All Ova The World But They Forget We’re Related (2023), via Hauser & Wirth

Marking its inaugural outing at its new Paris exhibition space, Hauser & Wirth looks west to the work of critically acclaimed Los Angeles artist Henry Taylor, whose major career survey arrives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York on 4 October 2023 and will remain on view through January 2024. Taylor’s exhibition in Paris, the artist’s first prominent show in France, comprises a wide range of over 30 paintings, sculptures and works on paper encompassing the remarkable breadth of his practice. (more…)

Alex Israel, Self-Portrait (Palette) (2023)

Alex Israel returns to Almine Rech in Paris this fall for his fifth solo show with the gallery, adding a new perspective and mode of interpretation to the understanding and recontextualization of Pablo Picasso on the 50^th  anniversary of the artist’s death. Treating the artist’s life and work as a fitting jumping-off point for continued explorations of the intersections of art and pop culture, of image and practice, or even of ego vs. landscape, Israel turns his attention to another aspect of Picasso’s legacy: La Californie.

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Wade Guyton, Galerie Matthiesen, Ausstellung, Edouard Manet, 1928, 6. Februar bis 18. März, Vol. II (2022), via Chantal Crousel

Opening in Paris during the run of Art Basel’s Paris+ art fair, Galerie Chantal Crousel has opened a solo show of works on paper by artist Wade Guyton, marking the artist’s first foray into lithography. Mining the intersections of digital graphics and analog printing, long a juxtaposition and source of both tension and inspiration in the artist’s work, the show features a range of sourced material from printed matter.  (more…)

Tony Matelli, Displacement Map 2 (2023), via Andréhn-Schiptjenko

Andréhn-Schiptjenko Paris presents Displacement Map this fall, a new solo exhibition with New York-based artist Tony Matelli. The exhibition, the 8th with the gallery and the second one in Paris, will feature recent works shown for the first time, among these, a life-sized self-portrait and a series of Arrangements, polychrome bronze bouquets of inverted flowers as well as a number of paintings, the first time the artist has shown in this medium.

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Michael Dean, Four Fuck Sakes (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps

Michael Dean’s idiosyncratic work draws on language in its wildest sense. Often based on his own writing, Dean broadens what we understand to be the written word into a manifestation of semiotics and typographical abstractions—such as emoticons and logos that morph into three dimensional glyphs. Regularly deploying accessible materials, Dean draws out new language with which the forms themselves are at once a personal vernacular, and a physical configuration. The transitional movement from word-to-image-to-being becomes an amalgamation of symmetrical and physical intimacy. (more…)

Ai Weiwei at Galleria Continua, all images via Art Observed

With the temperature cooling in the British capital, Frieze Art Fair has returned to Regent’s Park in London for its annual run, bringing with it a range international galleries, projects and talks that underscore its continued vitality in the world of contemporary art. The mood was high as collectors, gallerists and artists strode the fair’s aisle and booths in the early hours of the fair press preview, exploring the gallery booths and chatting below the bright lights of the fair tent, which lent a gleam to the impressive works on offer across the expanse of the fair.

Marguerite Humeau at Clearing

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Ryan Gander, School of languages (2023), via Lisson Gallery

Mining unique dialogues between studied sculptural modes and coy reinterpretations of readymade material, artist Ryan Gander has long created works and environments that work delicate interactions between the human and nonhuman materials of daily life. For his newest show at Lisson Gallery, the artist explores the relationship between our evolutionary past and the ways in which we live today in societies driven by capitalist growth, speed and progress. The exhibition raises pertinent questions; how would the world look if humans had not learnt to count? How do we place value on time in a 24/7 world that demands our constant attention? (more…)

Julie Mehretu, TRANSpaintings (recurrence) (2023), via White Cube

Julie Mehretu’s solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, They departed for their own country another way (a 9x9x9 hauntology), debuts three new series of paintings consisting of nine works each. Presented alongside these works, in the 9x9x9 gallery Mehretu has paired her title track painting with a sculpture by visual artist Nairy Baghramian, in response to an ongoing dialogue between the two artists.

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Zach Bruder, Attic (2023), via Magenta Plains

This fall in New York, artist Zac Bruder presnts a series of new works at Magenta Plains that continue his ephemeral explorations the canvas and its subjects. Presenting a string of colorful, yet subdued canvases throughout the gallery space, Bruder orchestrates a series of meditations on material landscapes, painterly modes, and conceptual exercises.

Zach Bruder, Clear Arrears (Installation View), via Magenta Plains

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Paula Rego, Creatures (1981), via Victoria Miro

The 1980’s was a decade of creative transformation for artist Paula Rego. Moving away from a process of making collages – drawing and painting material that she would then cut up and arrange into sophisticated figurative puzzles – she began instead to engage with her childhood passion for painting as play. Working rapidly and fluidly, Rego embraced freedom as methodology, inventing a cast of humans, animals and hybrid creatures that served as fictive structures for new narratives and systems of meaning. These works serve as the cornerstone for a new show focused on the artist’s painterly compositions at Victoria Miro.

Paula Rego, Aida II (1983), via Victoria Miro

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Wolfgang Tillmans, Lighter, white / pink and Lighter 116 (2020-2023 ), via David Zwirner

On view at David Zwirner’s New York exhibition space this fall, artist Wolfgang Tillmans marks his fourth solo show, demonstrating the artist’s expansive vision while meditating on the simultaneity of life and art. Titled Fold Me, the show will feature an entirely new body of work by the artist, and follows Tillmans’s major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the fall of 2022. Tillmans , who regularly invites an interplay of chance and control, of consideration and coincidence, of process and time here folds the world back onto paper.

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Andy Holden, Song of Songs (Installation View), via Seventeen

For his first exhibition in a commercial gallery in fifteen years, Andy Holden presents two installations at Seventeen in London this fall. Linked by personal loss, each work is an attempt to process distinct moments from the past, within the context of the artist’s continued inquiry into the nature of time.

Andy Holden, Song of Songs (Installation View), via Seventeen

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Awol Erizku, Hot Hand in a Dice Game (2023), via Sean Kelly

This fall, artist Awol Erizku makes his first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly with Delirium of Agony a show that examines the construction of cultural iconography through the lens of contemporary hip-hop, street culture, art history, sports, and entertainment. Occupying the entire gallery, the exhibition features paintings, neon installations, photographs, sculptures, and works on paper that draw intriguing lines between graphics, cultural symbolism, personal affinity and subtle cultural representations.

Awol Erizku, Smoke #12 (2023), via Sean Kelly

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Giorgio Griffa, Campo Rosa (2022), via Casey Kaplan

On view this month at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, artist Giorgio Griffa brings together a body of new works that continue the artist’s interpretation and mining of memory and reflection as part of an expanded exploration of time and space. OCÉANIE consists of a series of nineteen paintings created between the fall of 2022 and the spring of 2023, marking the most significant shift in Griffa’s practice in over a decade. This is the artist’s sixth solo presentation at the gallery.

Giorgio Griffa, Océanie (Installation View), via Casey Kaplan

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Barbara Sánchez-Kane, New Lexicons for Embodiment (Installation View), via kurimanzutto

On this month at kurimanzutto in New York, artist Barbara Sánchez-Kane has installed a new body of work that explores a range of expressive modalities between sculpture and clothing design. Sánchez-Kane, who alternatively uses she and he pronouns, is interested in the deconstruction of identities and the duality of the presented self: through her clothes and sculptures, there is a perpetual tearing and fracturing of the structure, voids that seemingly shouldn’t exist, and the recurring repurposing of traditional objects through the destruction of their functionality. (more…)

Wade Guyton, Untitled (2022), via Matthew Marks

Artist Wade Guyton has long explored the constructs and constraints of contemporary image and object production, utilizing a range of various technological and gestural approaches to create dense, nuanced works that emphasize both the act of making and images they contain. For his latest show, on view this month at Matthew Marks, the artist takes particular interest in his studio as not just the site of production, but the images his work depicts.

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Philippe Parreno, Hertzian Tales (Installation View), via Art Observed

Philippe Parreno takes over Gladstone Gallery this month with a body of work that continues to mine notions of non-human intelligence, technology and life. The show, Hertzian Tales, marks the most recent manifestation of his ongoing contemplation of art as both sentient and sensual.

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Sam Durant, Open Your Eyes (2022), via Praz-Delavallade

This fall, artist Sam Durant opens a show of new works at Praz-Delavallade in Paris, continuing a body of work that mines the artist’s long explored modes of practice, while turning his examinations of modern culture, history and context on its ear. Long recognized for work that questions, highlights, and reframs social and civic issues from the more complex sides of history: colonialism, the death penalty, surveillance and slavery among them, the artist here turns towards the playful and exploratory, marking new notes in an already expansive and expressive practice.

Sam Durant, Certainty (2020), via Praz-Delavallade

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