Henning Strassburger, The Big Air Conditioner (2018), via Blumenthal

For the past five years, collector Robert Blumenthal has been wading deeper and deeper into the world of exhibition-making, mounting shows with a flair for the adventurous and the scholarly in his gallery that has moved from the Upper East Side and the Hamptons to Chinatown. Having embraced a collecting style that pairs conceptually ambitious work with more classical approaches towards lyrical and figurative painting, Blumenthal’s shows have been a distinct analog to his own collection, which features work by Darren Bader, Isa Genzken, Chris Burden, and Mary Weatherford, among others.
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Pablo Picasso, Fillette a la corbeille fleurie (1905), price realized: $115,000,000, via Christie’s

With the final bids placed and the hammer falling on the last lot of the evening, Christie’s has closed the book on an outstanding outing, concluding the star evening sale of its spring season, the sale of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection.  A jewel of modern art collection, the works from the family’s holdings were wide and deep enough to fill several evening sales in Christie’s calendar this week, with this 19th and 20th Century Sale serving as the main event. It did not disappoint.

Joan Miro, Mural I, Mural II, Mural III (1933), price realized: $20,000,000, via Christie’s

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Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché (Sur le CoÌ‚té Gauche) (1917), via Sotheby’s

With the weather gradually warming, and thoughts turning to the summer months in New York, the art world will once again look to the Big Apple for a last major auction of the spring season.  With a packed week boasting a string of sales spread over 10 days, the week’s offerings will make for a pointed cap to the preceding week at Roosevelt Island, where Frieze New York will has drawn to a close.  With a number of impressive highlights, chief among them the collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller at Christie’s, the spring sales in New York should offer a few impressive exclamation points to add to an already packed month of market offerings. (more…)

Ralph Ziman with The Casspir Project, via 1-54

Walking up to the open doors of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair a Pioneer Works in Brooklyn this weekend, visitors were promptly greeted by a massive military vehicle called a Casspir.  An icon of political repression in South Africa during the apartheid era, the truck’s presence as a colorfully-adorned place-marker, painted over with striking new patterns by artist Ralph Ziman, made for a fitting first note of the works on view inside, images from a thriving circuit of galleries and artists looking both to Africa’s past and future for inspiration. (more…)

Mingus in Mexico (1990). © David Salle, VAGA, NY courtesy of Skarstedt, NY.

Now through June 23, 2018, Skarstedt Gallery presents David Salle: Paintings 1985-1995, a selection of some of the artist’s most significant bodies of work highlighting a particularly prolific and experimental period of Salle’s career. The celebrated master of postmodern composition is known especially for his use of photography and collage in his paintings to deconstruct existing imagery, integrating everything from advertisements to post-war American art into his work, earning his classification among other artists of the ‘70s and ‘80s “Pictures Generation”, whose concerns largely centered on the changing status of the image in the era of mass media. (more…)

TEFAF NY, via Art Observed

Taking over the cavernous halls of the Park Avenue Armory, The European Fine Art Fair, better known as TEFAF, has returned to the Big Apple for another year, bringing a sense of balance and focus to the broad selection of fairs spread across the city.  The fair, which is now in its second year in the city of New York, has become one of the more noteworthy additions to an already crowded week of sales and fairs, with its focus towards high-end blue chip artworks in conjunction with classic design, artifacts and other fields, a focus that makes it both a concentration of the focus of many fair proceedings around town, and an elaboration, seeking buyers new to the field of collecting fine art, furniture, or otherwise, through a more organic mode. (more…)

Frieze, via Art Observed

As the sun beat down on the ferries making their way up the East River this morning, Frieze New York opened its doors on the early hours of its first preview day, offering an opportunity for collectors and dealers to take a first stroll through the fair without the bustling crowds of the later fair days.  Celebrating its seventh year on Randall’s Island, the fair’s early previews saw a first look at a fair that has come into its own as an anchor of New York’s already packed art scene, and which has become a much-anticipated first hint of the summer months in the city, a first opportunity to get outside and into the greenery of the slender island just north of Manhattan. (more…)

David Simpson, Blue to Yellow Air (1967), via Haines Gallery

The hustle and bustle of the spring art season has fallen over New York, and the anticipation is building for this year’s edition of Frieze New York, set to open its doors in just a few days at its annual haunt at Randall’s Island.  This year, as the fair reaches its seventh edition, some adjustments and tweaks to the schedule will look to expand the fair’s offerings and appeal in an increasingly crowded circuit. (more…)

Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Your Place or Mine… (Installation View), via Jewish Museum

Given Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s works are in many ways “sites” unto themselves, it can be easy to forget that the pieces themselves are also site-specific. In turn, New York’s Jewish Museum seems like the perfect space for Chaimowicz’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, given its prior history as a family home, yet that equally omits some credit due still to Chaimowicz. The crown moldings and wood floors and banisters that make the space familiar have become part of his narrative here, yet each gallery is made distinct, and the intimate effect of his works would result even working within a white-cube gallery space.  This exchange between site and space, artistic inclination and the fluid acts of design are at the center of this show. (more…)

Maria Lassnig, New York Films: 1970 – 1980 (Installation View), via Art Observed

Following the passing of renowned Austrian artist Maria Lassnig, a body of new films was unearthed from the artist’s estate, pieces that marked a continuation and elaboration of her unique and exploratory approach to the human form and its movements. This body of films has traveled to New York this month, following a close collaboration between the Maria Lassnig Foundation and the Austrian Film Musuem to execute an attentive and exacting restoration, resulting in their presentation as Maria Lassnig: New York Films 1970–1980 at MoMA PS1. (more…)

Lorna Simpson, Five Properties (2018), via Hauser & Wirth

Marking her first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth London with a body of new works, artist Lorna Simpson’s Unanswerable features new and recent paintings, photographic collages and sculpture.  Continuing the artist’s pioneering approach to conceptual photography, which features powerful juxtapositions of text and staged images, often bringing into question the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history, the show is a fitting reintroduction to Simpson’s work for a broader audience, and one that marks the continued impact and importance of her practice today.  (more…)

Doug Aitken, New Era (Installation View), via Art Observed

Walking into the shadowy depths of 303 Gallery this month, viewers are confronted with an almost completely destabilizing series of visuals.  Huge explosions of color and line expand out from the center of television screens placed in the pitch-black space, swirling movements and patterns created by arrangements of various technologic peripherals and paraphernalia.  Accentuated by the hall of mirrors the artist has constructed inside the gallery space, the video creates a alienating effect, the feeling of being awash in technologic constructs we are inventing faster than we can fully comprehend their effects on communication, knowledge or expression. (more…)

Mark (Installation View), via Team Gallery

The word “mark” takes the center stage in Team Gallery’s ongoing group exhibition, featuring works by Erica Baum, Louise Fishman, Suzanne McClelland, Shannon Ebner, and Al Loving. Aptly and simply titled mark, the exhibition gathers a group of two dimensional works in print and painting that loosely investigate the impact of visual culture on personal and collective memory. Initiated through varied linguistic and social traits of the word finding to its current use and connotations in modern English, the various approaches here explore differing meanings of the “mark,” each of which serve as tactics to examine societal codings of information, ethics, and culture. (more…)

Sean Raspet, Receptor-Binding Variations (Installation View), via Bridget Donahue

Taking over the large main room of Bridget Donahue this month, artist Sean Raspet has assembled a strangely minimalist arrangement of objects along the walls of the space.  Small white machines jut out into space, each humming quietly and dispensing a subtle scent.  These timed micro-diffusers are each emitting a scent designed by the artist, an experiment in scent reception that plays on his interests in synthetic compounds and their phenomenological capabilities. (more…)

Jeff Koons and Gagosian Gallery are facing a lawsuit over three allegedly undelivered sculptures by the artist, filed by collector and MoMA trustee Steven Tananbaum. “Behind the ostensible façade of Jeff Koons’ art world triumphs and record-breaking auction prices,” a filing by litigator Aaron Richard Golub charges, “lurks a well-oiled machine, more specifically an established, archaic System as old as the hills applied to the art world to exploit art collectors’ desire to own Jeff Koons sculptures.”  (more…)

Sarah Crowner, Folded Greens (2018), via Casey Kaplan

Notching her second exhibition with Casey Kaplan Gallery, artist Sarah Crowner has returned to the dealer’s Flower District space for a show of new paintings and a site-specific installation that underscores her continued interest in the language and lineage of the natural world in modern painting. Drawing on any number of figurative and abstract histories of painting the world around us, Crowner’s work is a refreshingly nuanced interpretation, one that draws similar graceful curvatures and natural forms from cut and sewn canvases.  (more…)

Richard Aldrich, Wizard (2017), via Bortolami

Diving into the language and history of painting, artist Richard Aldrich’s new exhibition at Bortolami Gallery comes up to the surface with a diverse series of finds, spanning a range of practice that underscores his unique and energetic practice.  The show, which combines both sculptural interventions and a range of canvases mixing text, drawing and oil painting, offers an impressive look at the artist’s recent work, and leaves the viewer grasping for steady ground.  Yet, as the case with many great artists, Aldrich seems to fundamentally understand the joy in a little hard work, and the conceptual twists his pieces carry make their often confounding arrangements particularly rewarding for intrepid viewers ready to crack open a puzzle.

Richard Aldrich, Enter the Mirror (Installation View), via Bortolami

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Cosima von Bonin, WHAT IF IT BARKS 1 (WHITE BASS GUITAR VERSION) (2018), via Petzel

Expanding a body of work already recognized for its exceptionally whimsical, imaginative fusions of form, color and context, artist Cosima von Bonin is currently showing a series of new works on view this month at Petzel in New York.  The artist’s eighth show with the gallery, What if It Barks is also perhaps her most ambitious for the space, continuing her unique formal interventions on a grand scale with AUTHORITY PURÉE, her first full scale installation at Petzel’s 18th Street location.  (more…)

Tedd Stamm (Installation View), via Lisson Gallery

Walking from Ted Stamm’s current exhibition at Lisson Gallery to Dan Flavin: in daylight or cool white at David Zwirner, the sharp angles of the two artists’ works seem to echo each other, representing two bodies of minimalist experimentation with a similar interest in form, and riffing on the shape of their canvas, whether that canvas be paper, neon, or stretcher. Stamm’s show is perhaps the more grounded in the traditional language of art-making, yet equally pushes his works to the semantic breaking points of the art object. (more…)

Anri Sala, The Last Resort (2017), all images via Marian Goodman Gallery

For his first show in New York since his solo exhibition at the New Museum in 2016, Anri Sala presents two new major installations at Marian Goodman Gallery that continue his interest in utilizing sound and music to question experience.

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Kim Tschang-Yeul, Waterdrops (1980)

In a decade-spanning exhibition at Upper East Side’s Almine Rech Gallery, Kim Tschang-Yeul exhibits a body of water drop paintings that have become something of a calling card for the Korean artist. Pursuing the singular idea of depicting water drops in ever-shifting narratives, the artist has built an elaborate series of works in this form over the past few decades, exhibiting his meticulously-illustrated oil on canvas compositions to a broad audience in Europe, Asia, and America. The exhibition emphasizes the artist’s unending quest to expand this signature style to implement political, personal or artistic narratives into simple, yet poetic presence of oozing water. Using the drop’s magnifying ability and translucent ethereality in diverse formats, Kim merges techniques of hyperrealist painting with cues from abstraction, particularly with his direct reference to monochromatic painting. (more…)

Artie Vierkant, Image Object Thursday 5 October 2017 2:17PM (2018), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Galerie Perrotin’s spacious Lower East Side headquarters is a body of new works by digital artist Artie Vierkant.  The show continues Vierkant’s interest in the shifting modes of perception and criticality as the art object moves from a concrete object in the gallery space to an image of documentation online.  Filling the gallery with a series of his Image Object works, Vierkant’s pieces open an extended engagement between the object and its digital referents, ultimately seeking to break down connections between the two. (more…)

Robert Irwin at Sprüth Magers (Installation View), via Art Observed

Few artists have left such a remarkable imprint on the art and art history of Southern California in the way that Robert Irwin has done over the past 50-plus years. Pioneering a mode of practice that slowly but deliberately broke ranks with the painterly abstraction and object-based practice of the era to develop a mode of art-making that embraced light, form and space as free-floating, conceptual tools.  As a native Californian, Irwin’s work drew heavily from his experience of its delicate nuances in light and tone, the massive expanses of the California desert, evolving into complex geometric arrangements of space using scrim and paint to create shiting densities of light. (more…)

Liu Shiyuan, Isolated Above, Connected Down (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar

The 33 year old Chinese-born artist Liu Shiyuan’s solo exhibition Isolated Above, Connected Down at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery introduces not only six mashups of curated photography compositions in the second floor main gallery, each called Almost Like Rebar, but also two large-scale creations: a substantial cinematic work shown in a sprawling but comfortable first floor “rec room,” more playpen for grown ups than video installation, and upstairs, another literally “soft” environment: a felt-carpeted room installed in the project space supplemented with found furniture and coffee smells. (more…)