Peter Fischli, RELIEFS (Monkey 21) (2021), via Spruth Magers

In his wide-ranging oeuvre, artist Peter Fischli carefully observes and draws from the everyday world to create sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that address similar concerns to those explored as part of his collaborative practice with his late collaborator David Weiss. The artist’s work, so often centered around often overlooked, quotidian aspects of everyday life, sees him posing that same in an experimental and humorous way. For his most recent show, Fischli takes that interest towards a pair of specific models.  (more…)

Satoshi Kojima, Catch Me if You Can (2020), via Bridget Donahue

Painter Satoshi Kojima has returned to Bridget Donahue this month for another exhibition of his strange, ephemeral compositions, a series of surreal, swirling landscapes and figures suspended in a bold, cartoonish world. Welcoming strange engagements with the fabric of the everyday, the artist opens the door on a new way of experiencing reality, twisting urban landscapes and historical constructions into each unique canvases.  (more…)

Gerhard Richter, Cage 4 (2006), via Gagosian

Currently on view at Gagosian’s New York exhibition space, Gerhard Richter reprises his series of Cage paintings, previously shown at the gallery’s Los Angeles exhibition space, and in his expansive Met Museum retrospective, Painting After All. Throughout his career, Richter has navigated between naturalism and abstraction, painting and photography, exploring the conceptual, historical, and material implications of various mediums without ideological restraint. For this body of works, first painted in 2006, the artist renders a series of immense works created using his pioneering squeegee techniques.  (more…)

Julie Curtiss, Lobby (2020), via White Cube

Joining White Cube for her first exhibition in London, painter Julie Curtiss has brought forth a selection of new compositions, sculptures and works on paper that emphasize the artist’s artful and attentive sense of composition, using framing and cropping to accentuate her cinematic, and often humorous sense of the absurd. Drawing on saturated colors, crisp detail, and scenarios which are at once banal and bizarre, her pieces exude a dreamlike quality, and make for a fitting introduction to the artist’s work. (more…)

Paloma Varga Weisz, Bumpman on Tree (2021), via National Gallery

As the summer months begin in earnest, the newest iteration of proposals for London’s Fourth Plinth Art Installation have gone on view, with a series of six maquettes going on view at the National Gallery as well as online, with organizers welcoming the public to share their views and opinions on the options put forth.

Teresa Margolles, Improntas (2021), via National Gallery

The works range in concept and materials, subject matter and politics, and explore a range of both specific situations and fantastical other worlds. There’s the sobering sculpture presented by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, a series of casts of the faces of trans women, representing the plight of sexual violence and murder that has threatened so many. Arranged on a rack structure resembling a Mesoamerican Tzompantli (which displayed human skulls), the work makes plain histories of violence that threaten marginalized voices around the world. Another work proposing specific historical scenarios, On Hunger and Farming in the Skies of the Past 1957-1966 by Ibrahim Mahama presents a model of former grain silos constructed by eastern European architects in Ghana during the early 1960s, hearkening back to an era of new promise for the country prior to the violent overthrow of its government.

Samson Kambalu, Antelope (2021), via National Gallery

Other works offer a more otherworldy point of entry. Polish artist Goshka Macuga, for instance, has created a giant rocket  sculpture,  encouraging viewers to look up towards outer space, and to remember a basic human drive towards inquiry and understanding. Somewhere in the middle is the work of Nicole Eisenman, a lumpen iteration of a jewelry tree, covered with mementoes that reference both the UK’s own politically fraught history, and a surreal environment of her own making, colliding on a surface that repositions Trafalgar Square’s plinth as a dresser-top for the world around it.

Ibrahim Mahama, On Hunger and Farming in the Skies of the Past 1957-1970 (2021), via National Gallery

Other works come from the Malawi-born Samson Kambalu, whose work restages a photograph of John Chilembwe, a Baptist pastor who led an uprising against colonizers in his home country,  while the German artist Paloma Varga Weisz also poses a monumental tribute, albeit to a body not yet envisioned, a figure called Bumpman that draws on the idea of human insecurity and frailty.

The selections will be announced later this year, with options picked for both 2022 and 2024.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
The Fourth Plinth [Exhibition Site]

Georg Baselitz, Springtime of the Black Mountain Lake (2020), via Gagosian

Throughout his career, Georg Baselitz has combined a direct and provocative approach to making art with an openness to art historical lineages, pulling together a range of art historical signifiers from the history of both modernism and postmodernism, and unifying a range of expressive techniques in the depiction of the body and the experience of paint on canvas. Continually revisiting his iconic inverted figure, the artist’s work has repeatedly explored reinvention and renewal, and takes on that same thematic in his new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery. (more…)

Damien Hirst, Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures (Installation View), via Gagosian

Kicking off the run of Damien Hirst projects at Gagosian’s London space on Britannia Street, the latest iteration, Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures presents Hirst as artist and curator, presenting this deeply personal series of work through his own eyes, and exploring a diverse range of subjects and concepts that have run through the series and subjects of the artist’s career. Balanced in the middle of a perpetual confrontation between the contrasting systems of belief that define human existence, from common trust in medicine to the seduction of consumerism, Hirst’s work feels particularly timely in the midst of the ongoing challenges and trauma of Covid-19.  (more…)

Pedro Reyes, Tlali (Installation View), via Lisson

Pedro Reyes returns to Lisson Gallery in New York this month with Tlali, an impressively dense and exploratory exhibition that a new series of sculptures and works on paper drawn from the language and symbols of Pre-Columbian civilizations. Drawing on the history and social economies of the Aztec language Nahuatl, the show turns a local historical and linguistic thread into a broader reflection on the state of the world and the broader political and social landscape of modernity.  (more…)

Agnes Martin, The Distillation of Color (Installation View), via Art Observed

Marking the most recent in its exhibitions from the estate of Agnes Martin, Pace Gallery’s The Distillation of Color delves back into the artist’s tightly-honed minimalism to explore her nuanced investigations of color, allowing subtle bands and hints at varied shades to pervade her works. For Martin, painting was defined by an ongoing exploration of its capacity to express a vision of beauty born of intuitive inspiration. In this most recent show, the gallery takes this concept and pushes it into the very notion of color as sensation.  (more…)

Rachel Libeskind at Signs and symbols, via Art Observed

After a year off, the New Art Dealers Alliance has relaunched its ongoing New York exhibition project, the third edition of NADA House, returning to Governors Island with 66 galleries, non-profits, artist-run spaces, and curators, presenting over 100 artists. The collaborative, public exhibition, now open and running through to August, continues in an expanded format, with gallery presentations in over 50 rooms in three neighboring turn-of-the-century colonial revival buildings.

Ken Grimes at Ricco/Maresca Gallery via Art Observed

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Wangechi Mutu (Installation View), via Gladstone

Entering Gladstone Gallery in New York, artist Wangechi Mutu’s surreal, serpentine sculptures greet the viewer with a mixture of minimalist, elegant beauty and unnerving, otherworldly poise, somewhere between lyrical, classical sculpture and the surreal forms of H.R. Giger. Drawing upon her sculptural practice, a core aspect of her work, this installation brings to life otherworldly alternatives to the systemic modes of representation portrayed throughout global traditions in art. Through an incisive re-examination of relations between the body, the natural world, and social forces, the works in this exhibition represent a new kind of hybridized humanity and iconography through the artist’s intuitive and forward-thinking eye.

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Rashid Johnson at Hauser & Wirth, via Art Observed

Over a year since the last iteration of the Frieze art fair took place in Los Angeles, and coming down on the other side of the turbulence of the last year under the Covid-19 pandemic, Frieze New York has touched down at The Shed on Manhattan’s West Side, a re-entry into the annual run of blue-chip events that have been few and far between, or confined to an online edition for the last year. Here, with an abundance of caution and a range of measures put in place to limit the number of attendees in the space at a given time, the fair still made something of a return to its old form.  (more…)

Mathieu Malouf at House of Gaga, via Art Observed

It’s been a challenge to imagine the same art world in the wake of Covid-19. Even as spaces start to reopen and events prepare for their first outings in over a year, the needed precautions and considerations have made for both questions and reinventions of just what a massive show or fair might look like. Enter the 2021 edition of Zona Maco, a notably reduced affair by comparison with previous years, the exhibition has spread out across a series of galleries and temporary in Mexico City, allowing for a more engaged approach towards the city while cutting back on the large-crowds of the usual Banamex crush.  (more…)

Simon Denny, Mine (2021), via Petzel

Currently on at Petzel Gallery in New York, artist Simon Denny has launched a new body of work under the title Mine. The product of a multi-year project exploring themes of technology, labor, and humanity’s relationship with the earth, Mine touches down in New York in a fitting time for consideration, as Amazon workers contend with failed unionization efforts, cryptocurrency once again dominates the news cycle and we move further into the post-digital landscape. (more…)

Arghavan Khosravi, On Being a Woman (2021), via Rachel Uffner

Curently on at Rachel Uffner in New York, artist Arghavan Khosravi’s marks her first solo exhibition at the gallery with an impressive selection of new works building upon previous explorations of techniques taken from historical painting genres — such the use of stacked perspective in Persian miniature painting — while also incorporating new sculptural and three-dimensional elements that further emphasize qualities of illusion and artifice. Titled In Between Places, the show is a striking introduction to the artist’s work. (more…)

Peter Hujar, Ray Johnson (1975), via David Zwirner

Marking an ambitious exploration into the work of the enigmatic and expansive practice of Ray Johnson, David Zwirner has opened a show focused in particular on the artist’s collages and drawings from the the 1950s through the 1990s, focusing on Johnson as a seminal and influentially queer artist as well as on his recurring fandoms and obsessions. Showcasing the artist’s work within an array of archival materials from his friends and collaborators, the show presents Johnson’s work as part of a broader constellation of artists working during the post-war contemporary movement. (more…)

Giuseppe Penone, Leaves of Grass (2013), via Marian Goodman

Artist Giuseppe Penone returns to Marian Goodman this month, presenting a new body of works that draw on his long fascination with breath, meditative gesture and poetry, turning his attention here in earnest towards the work of Walt Whitman’ particularly the writer’s early editions and his physical connections to his work.  (more…)

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Ann Craven, Woodpecker (and the Moon), 2021, 2021, via Karma

Currently at Karma’s East Side space in New York, the gallery has brought forth a series of new works by painter Ann Craven, titled Animals Birds Flowers Moons. Working between paint and watercolor, the artist’s new series of pieces bring together the titular bodies in a series of varying arrangements, displaying bear cubs, peacocks, woodpeckers, and horses as an exploration of graphical nostalgia and its expressive capacity. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama, Cosmic Nature (Installation view), via Art Observed

After several delays caused by the Covid-19 virus, the long-awaited exhibition of Yayoi Kusama’s work at the New York Botanical Garden has finally opened. Planned for exclusive exhibition at NYBG, the show sees Kusama reveling in a lifelong fascination with the natural world, beginning with her childhood spent in the greenhouses and fields of her family’s seed nursery. Giving her voice and works ample space to evolve and envelop the lush grounds of the Botanical Garden’s diverse selection of plants, the show is a fascinating embellishment of both artist and nature, speaking, and working, in unison.   (more…)

James Lee Byars, The Milky Way (Installation View), via Michael Werner

Currently on view at Michael Werner Gallery in New York, artist James Lee Byars’s nuanced and minimalist sculptural project The Milky Way goes back on public view, showcasing one of the artist’s more intriguing and ambitious two-dimensional works. This will be the first time the work is on view to the public.  (more…)

Oscar Tuazon, Natural Man (2015/2021), via Luhring Augustine

Currently on view at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca exhibition space, artist Oscar Tuazon has compiled a presentation of all new sculptural works, united under the title PEOPLE. Continuing Tuazon’s investigation of hybridized forms and construction through fusions of natural material and human technological developments, the show pushes fusions of minimalist abstraction and natural elements, making up a series of constantly changing morphologies and addressing notions of the natural systems of growth and decay. (more…)

John McCracken, Untitled (Red Block) (1966), via David Zwirner

Currently on view at its uptown exhibition space, David Zwirner is presenting an exhibition of works by William Eggleston and John McCracken, the first time the artists have been featured together, through a selection of works that explore color and light in their respective artistic visions. Expressing a natural interest in the forms and lines of the American landscape through documentation and precise geometries, the show is a fascinating exploration of the pair’s respective aesthetic visions.

William Eggleston and John McCracken, True Stories (Installation View), via David Zwirner

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Cory Arcangel, /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2017-21), via Greene Naftali

Over the past two decades, few artists have taken such a continuously engaging pathway through the history and culture of digital media in all of its forms in the same manner as Cory Arcangel.  Hacking into the systems and software that define our networked lives, he introduces glitches and misfires that reveal the perils of technological dependence. For his debut solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, he continues this practice, amplifying and enhancing themes he has honed over two decades, using the structures and social mores of digital platforms as his primary artistic material.

Cory Arcangel, /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2017-21), via Greene Naftali

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