Alvaro Barrington, The Rose That Grew from Concrete: Frank Miller Batman LA (2022), via Blum and Poe

On view this month at Blum & Poe’s Los Angeles exhibition space, artist Alvaro Barrington presents a powerful, challenging show dedicated to the music and culture of Los Angeles and New York during the 1990’s. Bearing the title 91–98 jfk–lax border, the show presents itself as an expression of joy and hope, and a tribute to the thriving hip-hop culture of both cities during the decade.  (more…)

Ryan Foerster, Looking Negative (2015-2022), via Martos

Marking his first exhibition with Martos Gallery since 2012, artist Ryan Foerster presents Frictional Archaeology this month in New York, presenting a series of works examining the artist’s wide-ranging practice through the prism of his photography, and showcasing works from the last decade in which Foerster excavates technical slippages in the photographic medium and the apparatus of the camera, achieving plastic effects through manipulating and embracing faded emulsion, deteriorated film, defective lenses and chance occurrences in the darkroom. (more…)

Austin Lee, Like It Is (Installation View), via Jeffrey Deitch

For over a decade, Austin Lee has explored the emotional potential of software-influenced art. Combining traditional techniques with digital tools to create colorful, energetic compositions in painting, sculpture and animation, the artist’s use of software in conjunction with his physical materials render works that split the difference between digital and physical spaces. For his most recent show, on view now at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, the artist explores emotion and physicality once again through a series of hazy, brightly colored paintings that continue their navigation through notions of tactility and experience. (more…)

Walid Raad, We Have Never Been So Populated (Installation View), via Paula Cooper

Conceptual artist Walid Raad opens a new show of works this month at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, continuing his interest in investigative practice, stringing together works that explore a range of themes and histories in pursuit of hidden entanglements between art, politics, and the natural world. (more…)

Valentin Carron, 1 2 3 (after Max Weiss) (2015), via Eva Presenhuber

Currently on view at Eva Presenhuber in New York, the gallery is presenting And So America Opened Up, the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition by the Swiss artist Valentin Carron. Carron, whose work is defined by a fascination for modernity and its decay, here presents a series of works created over the past 13 years, unified by studies in modernist history, architectural detail, and the slow stream of history. (more…)

Kevin Dudley, Think Positive Thoughts (2021)

Post Sponsored in Collaboration with Silvershed, Walter’s Cube and Gallerie Kleindienst

Over the course of the last two years of pandemic-driven isolation, few trends have been made more readily apparent than the current capabilities and implications of widely accessible commercial technology in augmented and virtual reality, metaverse narratives, and the capacity for interconnectivity over the internet. Art fairs continued in online viewing rooms, artists continued to meet and collaborate over Zoom and other online video chat technologies, and new modes of socializing, connecting and collaborating developed quickly in the vacuum created by the demands for self-isolation. With these new modes, or, perhaps, more visible variants of existing developments in modern tech, so too come ideas of expressivity and emotionality, new modes of language and interaction. This concept sits at the core of On Waves, a show of work hosted by Leipzig’s Gallerie Kleindienst in collaboration with online viewing platform Walter’s Cube and curated by New York’s Silvershed, an artist-run project in downtown Manhattan that explores contemporary art values, ethics and aesthetics of the 21st century.

On Waves (Online Installation View)

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Shahryar Nashat, Hounds of Love (Installation View), via Gladstone

Gladstone Gallery presents an enigmatic and engaging body of new work by artist Shahryar Nashat this month at its Chelsea exhibition space this month, a selection of works that meditate on the body, space and perception in the realm of the digital. (more…)

Repeater (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ

On view this month in London, Sadie Coles HQ presents REPEATER, a show that makes the most of a reflection on repetition and difference, the act of continued movement, duplication, and continuation over a range of approaches and media. Encompassing a wide range of artists, the show examines ideas of sequence, seriality and replication – whether in the form of modular sculpture, painting in series, or digital reproduction – in order to highlight the potential that exists in the act of repeating. (more…)

Taboo!, View From My E. 5th St Studio 5th Floor Walkup (2021), via Karma

On view at Karma this month, the gallery presents Citysapes, a show organized in collaboration with Gordon Robichaux around the work of New York artist Taboo!. Spread across both galleries, the exhibition reflects on the artist’s ongoing landscape work, painting a range of cityscapes that document New York’s iconic skyline from a range of vantage points and perspectives. This joint exhibition presents the most comprehensive survey to date of Tabboo!’s cityscape paintings from the last three decades.

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Nate Lowman, Irma (2021), via David Zwirner

This month in New York, David Zwirner opens a show of new work by Nate Lowman, continuing the artist’s inquiries of the languages and images of modernity. Lowman has become known for deftly mining images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, and installations. That mode takes center stage here, with a series of works that draw from meteorological readouts, embellished Xeroxes, and other interpolations of technological and technical images.  (more…)

Raque Ford, In A Year of 13 Moons (2022), via Greene Naftali

Marking her first exhibition with Greene Naftali Gallery, artist Raque Ford presents a new body of work this month abstraction with narrative potential; dense, layered arrangements in both two and three dimensions that underscore the artist’s weaving of the personal and architectural through inflections of text and material. By turns slick and diaristic, intimate and bracing, Ford’s latest wall works and sculptures expand the formal possibilities of her signature material: fragments of language incised into sheets of colored acrylic.

Raque Ford, Nighttime Grudge or How I Wanted to Be a Rockstar (Installation View), via Greene Naftali

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Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting (1956), via Pace

This month at Pace Gallery, James Turrell marks his new work at the gallery’s New York flagship with an accompanying curatorial effort, assembling a show of works by the American painter Ad Reinhardt. Reinhardt, whose own work in the exploration of light and perception through color, serves as a foundational point of entry to Turrell’s work, and here is offered an extended point of reflection in relation to the light and space master’s own work. (more…)

“Lure” by Ruben Ortiz Torres at The Last Tenant (Photography by Aleph Molinari)

Known for taking over unique architectural spaces for their exhibitions, MASA is a nomadic art and design collective co-founded in Mexico City by Age Salajõe, Hector Esrawe, and Brian Thoreen in 2018. It has since evolved into a collaborative creative platform, each year presenting stellar exhibitions in different locations throughout  Mexico City, as well as Oaxaca and an upcoming show in New York City. Its itinerant nature allows MASA to play with space and architecture, form and function, and to cleverly present art in unique locations away from the confines of the traditional white-cube gallery space. MASA collaborates with artists, architects, and designers by challenging them to create functional works that blur the line between art and design.  What ties together the young and established artists at MASA’s exhibitions is a deeply-felt sense of Mexicanness: multi-faceted and complex, constantly changing but never unmoored from its vibrant history. Their exhibitions are related to the history of the site and are often meditations on time and memory, and how the spaces we inhabit serve as vessels for both. (more…)

David Byrne, How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic (Installation View), via Pace

Artist and musician David Byrne rarely stays in the same conceptual space for long, moving from recorded music to sculpture, painting and drawing to film. The longtime frontman of the Talking Heads, and a vital force in the history of downtown New York’s art scene from the 1970’s to today, it’s hard to find a mode of work he hasn’t tried at least once. This vision finds a fitting home at Pace Gallery this month for How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic a show of work from the artist’s dingbats series of drawings made during the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of his tree drawings from the early 2000s, and a selection of his drawings of chairs from 2004–07.

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Robert Nava, Mechanical Voyage (2021), via Night Gallery

Night Gallery has opened a new show of works on paper by artist Robert Nava, Bloodsport, a body of works that continue Nava’s visceral renderings of dream states and surreal, tension-filled compositions that walk a line between brusque compositions and a surreal sense of horror.  (more…)

Rodney Graham, Untitled (2022), via 303 Gallery

On view this month, 303 Gallery presents a new body of work by Rodney Graham, a body of paintings that expand on the artist’s already expansive and exploratory body of work. Working since the early 1980s across the disciplines of video, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, and music, Graham’s work stages layered narratives suffused with cultural and historical signifiers. Here, he turns that same notion towards the painted canvas, using his understanding and utilization of varied materials and modes to create densely layered compositions that blend together a studied sense of the art historical with the artist’s own techniques.  (more…)

Jonas Wood, Dinosaur Landscape (2019), via David Kordansky

This month at David Kordansky Gallery, a new body of work by Jonas Wood, Plants and Animals, unites a set of recent paintings and works on paper by the artist that spans the full gallery space. Exploring recurring images in his work, and focusing in here on the aforementioned subjects, Wood turns to a variety of formats and mediums to render images not only of flora and fauna, but also of detailed worlds of related forms, spaces, and moods. (more…)

Wilson Bentley, Snowflake 6 (1900), all images via Georgia Suter for Art Observed

Currently on view at The Drawing Room in East Hampton, NY is a group exhibition entitled Snow Day, organized in association with Eric Brown Art Group. The show brings together ten artists, contemporary and deceased, who have engaged with landscapes and the natural world: Wilson Bentley, Jennifer Bartlett, Charles Burchfield, Jack Bush, Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, Hector Leonardi, Aubrey Levinthal, Fairfield Porter and Kathryn Lynch. The exhibition juxtaposes photographs, paintings and works on paper. Captured by each artist in the selected body of works is the unique serenity induced by a landscape blanketed in snow. (more…)

Tomás Saraceno, Silent Autumn (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar

On view this month at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, artist Tomás Saraceno presents a body of new works that invite participants to attune to the intricacies of our entanglement with human, nonhuman and elemental forces. Across a spectrum of perceived realities and through works that connect differently with other beings and phenomena, Saraceno highlights how a considered co-existence encourages new ways of living together, while giving space to existing equitable collaborations with the atmosphere and wider environment. (more…)

Sayre Gomez, Halloween City (2022), via François Ghebaly

Currently on view at François Ghebaly’s Los Angeles exhibition space, artist Sayre Gomez continues his recent exploration of a unique approach to the cognitive mapping of late America, seen through the cultural and topographic specificity of Southern California’s urban sprawl. Continuing the exploration and depiction of ads, abandoned buildings, and other landscapes and scenes, Gomez’s work here, in Halloween City, takes on a particularly dark and dreary turn.  (more…)

H. R. Giger, HRGNYC (Installation View), via Lomex

Among the more hotly anticipated shows of the winter calendar in New York, Lomex is currently hosting a survey of works by  the renowned Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, opening in the gallery on January 29, 2022. The largest exhibition of Giger’s work in New York in nearly three decades, HRGNYC draws from the breadth of his entire career and displays his manifold talents in a vast array of media. (more…)

Eddie R. Aparicio, Holbein En Crenshaw (Washington Blvd. and Crenshaw Blvd., LA, CA) (2018), all images via Aidan Chisholm for Art Observed

Hauser & Wirth presents “The New Bend,” a group exhibition exploring the intergenerational legacy of quilting as a gendered, raced and classed mode of social practice. Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, the exhibition brings together twelve contemporary artists engaging with the Gee’s Bend Alabama quilting tradition: Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens, Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kincaid, Eric N. Mack, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Qualeasha Wood, and Zadie Xa.

Tomashi Jackson, Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer) (2021)

The New Bend renders apparent the enduring influence of the Gee’s Bend quilters, underscoring the weighty historical role of Black American women including Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988) and Mary Lee Bendolph (b.1935). Rooted in the hamlet of Gee’s Bend along the Alabama River in Wilcox County, this textile tradition extends from the 19th and 20th centuries to the present era, with contemporary artists mining the visual rhetoric and technical framework of quilting, while paying homage to the collective ethos of the communal practice. “The New Bend” highlights contemporary engagement with the Gee’s Bend legacy to posit the centrality of this tradition within Modernist art historical narratives of abstraction.

Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the pivotal exhibition “The Quilts at Gee’s Bend” at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002-2003), “The New Bend” attests to the continued relevance of this textile practice in the context of twenty-first-century digitization. Russell evokes the rhetoric of digitization and computation to understand the cooperative networks enacted through quilt-making today, in this era of the Web 2.0 marked by the proliferation of participatory platforms within the decentralized internet domain. “The New Bend” does not position textile art as a reversion to the handmade in our digital era, but rather harnesses the rhetoric of computation and coding to appreciate the layered dynamics of quilting as simultaneously personal and communal, conjuring collective memories while perhaps envisioning alternate futures. In Qualeasha Wood’s work, the artist reflects upon the dynamics of surveillance and control within non-neutral digital infrastructures to explore the polemics of hypervisibility of Black female subjectivities.Ctrl+Alt+Del (2021), views the dynamics of surveillance and control within non-neutral digital infrastructures to explore the polemics of hypervisibility of Black female subjectivities.

Qualeasha Wood, Ctrl+Alt+Del (2021)

The gallery statement underscores the legacy of Gee’s Bend extending beyond art historical discourse: “What the quilters of Gee’s Bend reveal via their transformative cooperative work is that they are both artists and technologists, contributing simultaneously to art history, as well as to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice. This duality exists in the work of each artist featured in this exhibition and many more beyond who continue to grow in this tradition.”

Anthony Akinbola, Jubilee (2021)

Basil Kincaid, Four Eyes One Vision (2021)

Entering the intimate, second-floor space of the Chelsea gallery, viewers encounter Dawn Williams Boyd’s The Right to (My) Life (2017), a mixed media tapestry capturing an anti-abortion rally. This vibrant figurative work situates textile art as a mode of political intervention, conjuring the legacy of quilting as a mode of political conscious-raising amidst the Civil Rights Movement, particularly following the emergence of The Freedom Quilting Bee in Rehoboth, Alabama in 1966. Anthony Akinbola builds upon the sampling tactics of Gee’s Bend quilters through his use of the Du Rag, a vernacular emblem of Black American culture, in his Jubilee (2021). From the architectural paneling of Eric N. Mack’s boy on the edge of the shoreline in DES HOMMES ET DES DIEUX (2018) to the incorporation of soil from a former potato field in Tomashi Jackson’s Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer) (2021), the vibrant works in “The New Bend” are enmeshed within a creative network encapsulating rich cultural heritage.

Dawn Williams Boyd, The Right to (My) Life (2017)

Diedrick Brackens, survival is a shrine, not the small space near the limit of life (2021)

– A. Chisholm

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Hauser & Wirth]
Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers [Souls Grown Deep Foundation]

Ashley Bickerton, 0°36’06.2″N, 131°09’41.8″E 1 (2022), via Lehmann Maupin

This month, Lehmann Maupin presents Seascapes at the End of History, artist Ashley Bickerton’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, continuing the artist’s bold and expressive use of sculpture and natural iconographies to create striking, illusory effects. Posed as a reappraisal of the seascape genre, the exhibition features work first conceived of while living in New York City prior to the artist’s relocation to the Indonesian island of Bali in 1993. An avid surfer, Bickerton’s work here draws on resin, fiberglass, corten steel and other materials to blend industrial material with natural iconographies.  (more…)

You Find Yourself Alone in the Middle of a Forest, curated by Nora Lucia Boyd and featuring Opal Mae Ong and Tyler Krasowski

Continuing its own intriguing and honed perspective on booth its surroundings in Los Angeles and on the model of the art fair, SPRING/BREAK has once again made arrived in the California city, launching a supplementary event that offers an ample supply of artists and galleries presenting in a concept that stands as a stark contrast to the traditional fair model. Launching this year in a new location in Culver City that continues the fair’s collaboration with the Skylight group of properties, the new space continues the scrappy, raw atmosphere of past years in a location that places the fair in closer proximity to the goings-on at Frieze Los Angeles (more…)