Dan Graham, via Art Observed

After a whirlwind few hours in London, the Frieze Art Fair is underway, and the doors are open for the public. Opening its doors this week for its 17th edition in Regent’s Park, Frieze London has once again turned the art world’s collective eye towards the British capital for the next week, as sales and installations across its spacious halls make for a fitting center to one of the city’s busiest art events. (more…)

Amy Sherald, Sometimes the King is a Woman (2019), via Hauser & Wirth

This fall in New York, artist Amy Sherald, the artist tapped for First Lady Michelle Obama’s commanding, cool portrait for the National Archives, opens a show of new works at Hauser & Wirth, her first with the gallery. Titled ‘the heart of the matter…,’ the show debuts two paintings that reach a new, monumental scale for the artist, with monochromatic backgrounds that evolve into fully realized scenes referencing quintessential Americana, as well as a series of portraits that continue her iconic exploration of the contemporary black experience.   (more…)

Judith Hopf, Tongue as a Wall Piece (2019), via Metro Pictures

Taking over the ground floor of Metro Pictures Gallery for her first exhibition with the space, the Berlin-based artist Judith Hopf has orchestrated a range of works drawing on surreal juxtapositions of space and material, narrative and image that marks a strong opening to the fall season. Comprised of three different sculptural series–Walls, Tongues, and Pears–the works on view further Hopf’s practice of employing everyday construction materials and common manufacturing processes to investigate the social dynamics of the contemporary built environment and its influence on human behavior. (more…)

Dis, January 9, 2008 (2019), via Project Native Informant

The New York collective Dis has long reveled in a mixture of the politically-incisive and the socially-mischievous, putting further a body of work that dwells on revolution and change, modes of sociality in the digital age, and the mass-media phenomena that populate the world around us. After a year in which the group moved back into online publishing, embracing a “pivot to video,” trumpeted by social media giant Facebook (which, ironically, was later revealed to be based on a false premise), the collective has opened a show in London at Project Native Informant, compiling a range of recent works that explore the idea of the 2008 economic crisis as a missed opportunity for economic revolution. (more…)

Berta Fischer (Installation View), via James Fuentes

Marking his second exhibition with the Berlin-based painter, James Fuentes’s current exhibition of works by Berta Fischer brings a summery energy to downtown, a selection of brightly-colored, technically impressive arrangements that underscore the artist’s abilities in the sculptural medium. (more…)

Elizabeth Murray, DuckWabbit (1992), via Pace Gallery

The work of American painter Elizabeth Murray gets its first UK exhibition this summer in London, with Camden Arts Centre showcasing an impressive selection of the artist’s work from across her multifaceted career. Documenting Murray’s continued engagement with the languages of abstraction and conceptualism, the artist’s work delves into various iterations of painterly expression, from studies in violent action to nuanced investigations of the canvas as a form and medium in and of itself. (more…)

Peter Saville, Blue Monday (1983), via Sprueth Magers

Culling together a selection of works that chart the landscape of British art as it moved through the landscape of industrial collapse through the neoliberal ascendancy of the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, Sprüth Magers is currently presenting New Order: Art, Product, Image 1976 – 1995 at its London exhibition space. The exhibition originates from a discussion about the cultural status and art historical positioning of one of Peter Saville’s best-known works for Factory Records made in the early 1980s, an object that helped in blurring the boundaries between art, design, pop and product. (more…)

Simone Fattal, Works and Days (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view through the end of August, MoMA PS1 is presenting the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Simone Fattal. The Lebanese-American artist whose commanding body of work weaves together disparate elements and sources to create new stories and concepts. The show brings together over 200 works created over the last 50 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and collages that draw from a range of sources including war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, mythology, and Sufi poetry to explore the impact of displacement as well as the politics of archeology and excavation.

Simone Fattal, Works and Days (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Tarkulnga (1988) Ronnie Tjampitjinpa , © Copyright Agency. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2019 Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian

Following up on the much-praised New York exhibition documenting the leading painters from the Central and Western Desert regions of Australia, Gagosian’s Los Angeles exhibition space has pulled together a second iteration of Desert Painters of Australia, a strikingly powerful show documenting the indigenous art traditions of the country.
In the late 1960s, the Australian government moved several communities from the Western Desert region—primarily Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Arrernte peoples—to the Papunya settlement, about 150 miles south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, a forced displacement that simultaneously centered the Indigenous Australian art community around a centralized hub where artists would gather to create murals works on canvas, and other forms drawing on ceremonial decorations and sand art. The result was a transposition of historically-resonant modes to the physical media of contemporary art and which has since presented a new outlet and opportunity for Papunya Tula artists to reexamine the imagery and present their culture to outsiders through transcendental visual codes. (more…)

Ed Moses and Qin Feng via Blain|Southern

Currently on view at Blain|Southern’s London exhibition space, the work of Ed Moses and Qin Feng are placed into a fluid, flowing conversation across cultures, conducted in a shared artistic language. Relying on the two artists’s various interests in composition as a combination of varied gestural actions and interventions in the space of the canvas, the show is a striking look at the styles and ideas between two divergent perspectives in contemporary art in both the U.S. and China. (more…)

Economies (Installation View), via LTD

Currently on view at LTD Los Angeles, the gallery’s summer exhibition, Economies, explores the notion of observation and exchange, suspending the images and objects of the world of art as transactional properties, bound up in a flow between the work’s circulation and its effects.  The show, delving into the possibilities of simple materials suspended in flow, or twisted up into strange assemblages.  (more…)

Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat (Installation View), via Art Observed

Over the course of her career, Simone Leigh has continuously and insistently centered the black female experience, creating a range of works that pose the body in arrangements twisting architectural elements, sound, and other items into shared space. For her show with Guggenheim for her 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, the artist explores fusions of sound, text and sculpture to create broader narratives of resilience and relation.  (more…)

My Head Is a Haunted House (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ

Currently on view at Sadie Coles HQ in London, My Head is a Haunted House explores the weird and eerie from a range of perspectives, mixing together works from a broad group of artists.  The show, curated by writer Charlie Fox, is an intriguing investigation of materiality and motive, swapping pathos for a suspended sense of presence, and a concrete subject for a creeping sense of a body, either present or withdrawn. (more…)

Donald Moffett, Lot 090307 (O) (2007), via Lehmann Maupin

On view for the summer months at Lehmann Maupin, a group show compiling the work of Angel Otero, Donald Moffett, Carrie Moyer and many more. The exhibition, co-organized by Curator Michael Goodson and Lehmann Maupin Curatorial Director Anna Stothart and spanning both of its Chelsea locations, combines a group of artists centered around more traditional formal, material, and spatial concerns, while also explicitly engaging with social, political, and psychological areas of influence to expand the established narrative traditionally used to answer the question, “Where does abstraction come from?” (more…)

Betty Woodman, Venus #7: Homey (2014), via David Kordansky

Currently on at David Kordansky’s Los Angeles exhibition space, Shadows and Silhouettes brings together a selection of sculptures and paintings by Betty Woodman, the artist’s first solo show in a gallery since her death. Meandering through the last years of the artist’s live, the show takes particular interest in the technical issues of constructing the work, and how these moments and movements in space can work in conjunction with the artist’s hand to complete the object. (more…)

Allan Sekula, Man sleeping under a eucalyptus tree, Embarcadero park, (SD) from Fish Story (1989-1995), via Marian Goodman

Having first shown the late Allan Sekula’s nuanced and incisive photographic and conceptual work at its London Gallery this spring, Marian Goodman has once again tapped the artist’s archive for a wide-ranging exhibition of his works at its New York space this summer, compiling works from a range of different projects the artist has embraced over the years, and moving between film, performance and photography. (more…)

Andrew Sim, A pink Christmas tree (2019), via Karma

“What is the weird?” queries Karma in the exhibition text for its summer group show, which brings together the work of Henni Alftan, Matt Hilvers, Ruth Ige and Andrew Sim. Quoting from Mark Fisher, the show’s press release seems to trace a subtle line around the show as a whole: “When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here.” (more…)

Harland Miller, Me (2019), via White Cube

Mining a unique fusion between graphic design, painting and other tenuously associated aesthetic fields, artist Harland Miller’s work, on view this summer at White Cube’s Hong Kong location, lends itself to a striking and detailed interrogation of the language of design, and the design of language. Miller draws on a wide range of cultural references, including ’60s and ’70s graphic design and the bold, upbeat covers of post-war psychology books, yet set these graphical icons in conversation with the language of American painting, explicitly drawing links between the energetic abstraction of the era and the graphic design that seemed to bubble up alongside it.

Harland Miller, Boss (2019), via White Cube (more…)

Kelley Walker, Untitled (2006), via Paula Cooper

Exploring the convergence of varied aesthetic concepts and interesting overlaps between their artists respective practices, Paula Cooper Gallery’s summer show has opened, presenting a selection of sculptures and installations by Sam Durant, Liz Glynn, Walid Raad, Kelley Walker, and Meg Webster. Titled Non-Vicious Circle, the show draws its title and conceit from the 2014 mobile by Sam Durant on view. (more…)

Painters Reply: Experimental Painting in the 1970s and now (Installation View), via Lisson

In September of 1975, Artforum published a special issue on painting. In addition to articles such as “Painting and the Struggle for the Whole Self” and “Painting and Anti-Painting: A Family Quarrel”—in which Max Kozloff said “brush wielders were afflicted by a creative halitosis”—were the responses to a questionnaire polling 21 painters on the state and prospects of the medium. Decried for a distinctly fatalist bias towards the medium, the issue seemed to present the painted canvas as an object moving towards artifact, an icon of the post-war era that was swiftly losing its potency. (more…)

Cindy Sherman at National Portrait Gallery (Installation View)

What more can be said of the work of Cindy Sherman? An artist who has consistently produced works that interrogate and rework the notions of image construction and understanding through the use of her own image, Sherman’s photographic output has moved through an exceedingly broad selection of focal points and interests. There’s her selection of film still works, placing her image onto prints in a manner that seems to reference some disembodied section of an unseen classic, while elsewhere, her collection of hyper-specific portraits mines the notions of identity construction and affiliation in the modern cultural landscape. (more…)

Nelly Zagury, The Giant Stalker & The Cannibal Flower (2019), via Art Observed

Taking over the impressively appointed former William Ulmer Brewery at 81 Beaver Street in Bushwick, local gallery The Chimney has initiated an impressive installation, taking over six large rooms in the building to present a series of large-scale installations and selections of works by nine American and international artists. (more…)

Yang Fudong, Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project, Day 30 (2018), via Marian Goodman

Considered one of China’s most important contemporary artists, the Shanghai-based Yang Fudong’s work has evolved through a diverse series of focal points and interests over the course of his career, moving through painting, video and other bodies of work that underscore his place as a central contributor to the landscape of Chinese contemporary art and a prominent voice in the national discourse. This month in London, the artist presents an exhibition of new work at Marian Goodman, the first with the gallery in London, and the international premiere of his epic project Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project. (more…)

Eric Fischl, The Exchange (2018), via Sprüth Magers

For over four decades, Eric Fischl has produced uncompromising images of American society, presenting a challenging and often surreal perspective on the forms and functions of middle and upper class malaise as reflected in the body itself. Figures routinely share space on his canvases, yet their gazes rarely meet, lounging or posed in a manner that reflects a certain deconstruction of the body as persona. Even when they do, through composition, pose and gesture, they are trapped in the midst of strained exchanges, moments of exchange and interaction that seems to place the viewer in the midst of a meditation on the body and on the societies it constructs.  Marking his first solo exhibition in LA in 25 years, the artist’s current exhibition, Complications From an Already Unfulfilled Life, marks both a continuation of this thread and a new path forward, marking his first show in the Californian metropolis with Sprüth Magers. (more…)