James Rosenquist, Reflector (1982), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Over the last 40 years, painter James Rosenquist has continued to mine and manipulate the languages of consumer capitalism, mass-market branding, and the formal techniques of sign-painting, creating works that push these same linguistic elements to points of near-disintegration.  His pieces, huge swirling arrangements of color and line, smash commodities and natural forms together, combining food, buildings, and other objects into confounding, hybridized arrangements.  This ongoing experimentation with the canvas as a space of critical examination and surrealist detuning takes up the full expanse of Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery’s Pantin exhibition space, joined by a series of collages at its space in The Marais.

James Rosenquist, Coup d’Oeil – Speed of Light (2001), via Thaddaeus Ropac

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Chiharu Shiota’s Uncertain Journey (Installation View)

Chiharu Shiota’s Uncertain Journey, on view at Blain|Southern Berlin through the 12th of November, is an awe-inspiring meditation on memory, fate, and belonging.  Evocative and beautiful, this installation fills the gallery’s main atrium with a swarming mass of red yarn that creeps up the walls and envelops the viewer in a network of red.  Entering into the space, one is swept up in a ghostly web that spreads between the forms of skeletal boats.  Shiota is known for her immersive installations, such as The Key in the Hand (2015), in which she creates new visual planes as if she were painting in mid-air.  The artist has created this site-specific installation in Berlin eight years after she last exhibited in her home city, reprising a body of work that earned her impressive attention at last year’s Venice Biennale. (more…)

Anthea Hamilton, Project for a Door (After Gaetano Pesce) (2016), vi Art Observed

With the early weeks of the fall art season comes the opening of the annual Turner Prize exhibition, bringing together works from each of the artists’ nominated for Britain’s highest honor for contemporary art.  This year’s exhibition, one of the more cohesively selected, and consistently inventive in recent years, has already earned impressive accolades, with a striking quartet of artist’s each exploring constructions of space and identity through diverse historical, technical, and material connections. (more…)

Mike Nelson, Tools that See (Installation view), All images via the artist and neugerriemschneider.

Mike Nelson’s Tools That See (Possessions of a Thief) 1986-2005, on view at neugerriemschneider is a material chronicle of the tools the artist has used over the past 30 years. Immediately recognizable as an homage to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, Nelson’s pieces carry the same force of reality-bending humor as earlier iterations of found object art and the readymade.  The familiar items, ones a viewer may see strewn around a site of construction, are rendered as images withdrawn from their tactile elements, contained in glass frames and elevated on dense wooden pedestals. (more…)

Maria Lassnig, Woman Power (1979), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Already a celebrated artist during the late ‘60s in her native Austria, Maria Lassnig left Paris and moved to New York, an unfamiliar city she considered vastly different from Europe, where the power dynamics of the art world were sharply drawn and where patriarchal discourses prevailed.  In addition to ‘body awareness,’ the term she coined to define her painting style in which she exclusively depicted body parts she felt during her painting process, Lassnig had already earned recognition for her surreal and experimental method of employing color to convey corporeality.  Not preoccupied by aesthetic standards defining the human form, Lassnig’s exploration of subliminal complexities as regards the body ultimately offered her compositions a vivid figurative potency.

Maria Lassing, Selbstporträt als Indianergirl (1973),

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Pedro Reyes, Doomocracy (Installation View), via Art Observed

Doomocracy, the long-anticipated collaboration between Pedro Reyes and Creative Time, has opened at the Brooklyn Army Teminal in Sunset Park, bringing a timely “house of horrors” to a city preparing for both the thrills and chills of the Halloween season, and an election cycle that has been often been fraught with a similar sense of doom and gloom.

The Voting Booth installation, courtesy Will Star Shooting Stars for Creative Time

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Jeff Koons (Installation View), via Art Observed

Opening its new exhibition space in London during Frieze Week, Almine Rech has tapped Jeff Koons for a series of new pieces to christen the space.  The show, which draws heavily on Koons’s recent work in his Gazing Ball series, shown alongside a small selection of polished steel Ballerina sculptures, marks an interesting continuation of the series. (more…)

Dana Schutz, Red (2016), All images via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed

Now through the 29^th of October, the CFA in Berlin hosts an exhibition of new work by Dana Schutz, Waiting for the Barbarians, retaining the artist’s prior interest and investment in absurdist and dark humor and pushing it onto new ground.  Where earlier work depicted often surreal or unlikely scenarios, Schutz’s new series is far more concerned with depicting the absurdity of current political and social realities. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the CFA. (more…)

Julie Mehretu, Conjured Parts (head), Aleppo (2016), via Melis Sonmezler for Art Observed

Pushing her particular brand of gestural and highly-nuanced awareness of the picture plane, artist Julie Mehretu’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman in New York is a powerful entry in the artist’s ongoing exploration of abstraction.  Realizing intricate networks of marks, twisting and turning around each other to create swarms and clusters of sinewy, undulating forms, Mehretu’s practice is an ever-evolving study of process in its own right.  Yet her new pieces, showing through the end of the month, present a new sense of both technical urgency and depth of the visual field, combining to create a series of striking new works. (more…)

Simon Denny, Blockchain Future States (Installation  View), all images via Petzel Gallery

Simon Denny’s latest exhibition at Petzel Gallery is an ambitious investigation into the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology, delving into the utopian ideals and potential opportunities that blockchain poses, taking on this treatment through an examination of three forerunners of the technology and their visions for the future.

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Matthew Barney, Case BOLUS -A value (sweetloaf)/ O value (sweetloaf), – JIM BLIND (andro.) -rec. majora -rec. minora (1989-91), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

Reflecting back on his relentlessly shape-shifting, enigmatic career and ever-evolving material practice, Gladstone Gallery has re-staged Matthew Barney’s Facility of DECLNE, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, shown for the first time in 1991.  While the iconic Cremaster Cycle stands as Barney’s emblematic body of works, the show offers an intuitive reflection on the artist’s initial works, presenting the New York art world a with rare opportunity to trace his initial works leading up to the monumental series, and to explore the threads that would later weave and wind their way through the complex and multi-faceted narrative of the film series, particularly his interest in systems of visual, subliminal and rhetorical structure and their orchestration both as performative operations and constructed series of images. (more…)

Carroll Dunham, Pink Mound with Eruption (5/18/93, 5/19/93) (1993), via Art Observed

On view throughout Gladstone Gallery’s 64th Street exhibition space, Carroll Dunham’s Drawings track the early stages of the artist’s evolution and interests, introducing concepts that would continue to inform and reshape his practice over the coming years.  Displaying a body of works from 1982 to 1996, the works on view employ a variety of materials, including wood, papyrus, wax crayon and charcoal.  Though lesser known, Dunham’s early drawings speak to his originality and desire to explore a single medium to its full potential. (more…)

Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim, via Art Observed

The Guggenheim celebrated the 20th Anniversary of the Hugo Boss Prize this evening, hosting the bi-annual arts award gala last night in its iconic atrium space, and reflecting back on the string of nominees and winners over the past two decades, among them Matthew Barney, Paul Chan, and Lorna Simpson.  This year, Anicka Yi became the latest artist to receive the prestigious honor, receiving the $100,000 prize and an exhibition at the museum this coming spring.  Yi was nominated alongside Tania Bruguera, Mark Leckey, Ralph Lemon, Laura Owens, and Wael Shawky.

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FIAC at the Grand Palais, via Art Observed

The Foire International d’Art Contemporain (FIAC for short), has opened its doors in Paris, bringing another year of sales and shows to the grounds of the Grand Palais, and continuing to expand its scope and scale.  Marking its 43rd year in operation, the fair’s reputation and mark on the market calendar has grown in leaps and bounds in the last several years, all under the guidance of director Jennifer Flay, and the 2016 edition looks to sustain this sense of forward momentum.

Leandro Ehrlich, Changing Rooms at Luciana Brito, via Art Observed

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Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #368: The wall is divided vertically into five equal parts. The center part is divided horizontally and vertically into four equal parts. Within each part are three-inch (7.5 cm) wide parallel bands of lines in four directions in four colors. In each of the other parts, three-inch (7.5 cm) bands of lines in one of the four directions. The bands are drawn in color and India ink washes. Red, yellow, blue, ink, India ink 3” (1982), via Art Observed

Spread across all three of Paula Cooper’s Chelsea spaces, the gallery has embarked on a major celebration of the work of Sol LeWitt, posing a series of exhibitions that explores the range of the artist’s conceptual oeuvre, both as a solo artist, and in his historical impact on the development and evolution of art in both the 2oth and 21st Century.  Combining this diverse range of perspectives and interpretations of the artist’s work, the show is a fittingly nuanced exploration of an artist whose work continues to influence the progression of the field today, almost fifty years after his first exhibitions of work.

Sol LeWitt, (rip) R724, The area of Florence between the Piazza della Unita Italiana la chiesa S. Frediano and il Porticato dell ‘Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova (1976), via Paula Cooper

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Karin Schneider, Situational Diagram (Installation view), via Dominique Lévy

Brazilian-born, New York-based artist Karin Schneider is currently the subject of a solo exhibition, titled Situational Diagram, at Dominique Lévy this month, delving into artistic and philosophical potentials for  “grasping” an artwork, both materialistically and ideologically.  Schneider, who co-managed the experimental Lower East Side artist-run initiative Orchard Gallery between 2005 and 2008, embarks on a series of black canvases, which offer the artist a degree of freedom to leave narratives open-ended, and to allow relationships and commerce to leave their mark on the painting’s surface.  Each work is subject to a specific agreement with its potential collector, where Schneider’s monochrome-heavy works utilize art history—particularly Minimalism—as a vessel to scrutinize social and consumerist dynamics in art through color and form. (more…)

Giuseppe Penone, Trattenere 6, 8, 12 anni di crescita (Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto) (2004-2016), via Art Observed

Few artists in the contemporary discourse have continued to produce work with such unrelenting consistency and vitality as Giuseppe Penone, a member of the younger generation of Arte Povera artists who seems to almost ceaselessly produce new variations and explorations on the relationships between humanity and nature, body and space, presence and absence.  Often posing unique material interactions with the human body, the bodies of plants or trees, and the material formats that he places between them, Penone’s work mines a rich multitude of lyrical interactions and relations of form and process.

Giuseppe Penone, Indistinti confini (2012), via Art Observed

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Walter Robinson, The Eager Ones (1979), via Art Observed

Filling the open spaces of Jeffrey Deitch’s reopened space at 18 Wooster, Walter Robinson’s Paintings and Other Indulgences demonstrates the wide scope of the artist’s interest in consumerist desire.  A traveling retrospective first launched at the University Galleries of Illinois State University, Paintings and Other Indulgences features a range of Robinson’s work spanning from 1979 to 2014, each of which address a wide span of pop culture imagery, imagined in the artist’s distinctive hand, ranging from greeting card kittens to Vicks VapoRub.

Walter Robinson, Lotion (1984) via Art Observed

Robinson’s work elevates the kitsch by giving it a frame, yet also highlights the hedonism of contemporary culture.  His process, immortalizing the vulgar and unspoken fragments of American society, evident in particular with his passionate re-creations of pulp novels, renders alluring works as occupied with their power of attraction as they are with their subject matter.  Vibrant and aggressively romantic, the images of these works are saturated with color and posturing desire, a layered approach that speaks in part to his work as both an artist and critic.  After co-founding the magazine Art-Rite in the 70s, Robinson went on to be an editor of Art in America, and a founder of ArtNet.  A well-established writer as regards the New York art scene, Robinson’s editorial eye is evident in the self-awareness of his works.

Robinson’s use of images from popular culture explores the central themes of postmodern art. His reproductions of symbols such as the hamburger reflect only the emptiness of consumerist America, revealing a signifier that is, in many ways, constructed.  The subconscious desires that his work involves lack true substance, and instead reflect the base human wants that sit at the core of advertising iconography.  Robinson’s take on pop art allows the viewer to locate himself within the art, but through a detached, somewhat dehumanized subject, never spilling over into overt brand-centrism or easily read consumer imagery.

While drawing on some of the darker themes of postmodern art, Robinson’s work displays a playful attitude toward lowbrow aesthetics.  The retrospective features several of his spin paintings, which predate those of Damien Hirst by roughly 10 years.  Similar to the rest of the pieces in their bright color and kitschy quality, Robinson’s spin art offers another angle into the purpose of his work.  These examples of abstract painting reveal the artist’s lighthearted approach, which he describes, overall, as “an accident.” Paintings and Other Indulgences displays this same line of humor and context that Robinson rides throughout, invoking pulp, while equally satirizing and elevating the oddities of our consumer society.

Walter Robinson, Ugly Trap (1986) via Art Observed

— M. Donovan

Read More:
Walter Robinson: A Retrospective [Exhibition Site]
An Interview with Walter Robinson in Advance of his Retrospective at Deitch [OhioEdit]
A Man-About Downtown Gets His Due [New Yorker]

Alex Prager, Orchestra Center (Stage) (2016), via Lehman Maupin

Photographer Alex Prager has returned to Lehmann Maupin’s New York exhibition space at 201 Chrystie Street this month for an exhibition of new photographic works, executed in conjunction with the production for Prager’s new film piece, La Grande Sortie.  Continuing the artist’s investigations between the lines of performer and viewer, production and reception, her new works dwell on the act of public performance, and the intersecting emotions of anxiety, desire and frustration as they play out in her tightly choreographed and constructed scenes.

Alex Prager, La Grande Sortie (Installation View), via Lehman Maupin

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Marianne Vitale, Equipment (Installation View), via Art Observed

Marianne Vitale has joined Invisible-Exports this fall for her first exhibition with the downtown gallery, bringing a single installation of handmade torpedoes that plays on concepts of military machismo, violence, weaponization, and the underlying threads of handicraft and technology that unite these elements in the utilization and application of deadly force.  Looming over the viewer in the center of the gallery space, Equipment’s inverse pyramid translates the artist’s long fascination with technology and materiality into a strikingly immediate, and highly animated format.   (more…)

Lorna Simpson, Detroit (Ode to G.) (2016), via Art Observed

Lorna Simpson’s Salon 94 exhibition speaks volumes with only a few shades and a handful of images on view.  Echoing throughout the gallery space’s small confines, her skeletal, eerie patterns contribute to a cohesive vision throughout the exhibition.  Despite consisting of paintings of a variety of sizes and of a combination of media even across the surface of one piece, the artist displays a unity in terms of her finely tuned, yet free-roving style.  The pieces themselves display an amalgamation of printed photographs, playing against spatters and blots of ink against a gradually altered background, providing a formal and thematic unity despite its disparate visual cues. (more…)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hannibal (1982), via Sotheby’s

The Sotheby’s Contemporary and Post-War Evening Sale closed out a weekend of unexpectedly strong and enthusiastic sales in London this week, continuing both a solid week of sales at Frieze London as well as a series of impressive sales at both Christie’s and Phillips in the past days.  Adding its own mark to the week’s proceedings, the auction house saw strong results for its first major offering of the fall season, tallying a final result £47,953,000 with 3 of the 34 lots going unsold. (more…)

Frieze London, via Art Observed

The doors are open and the 2016 edition of Frieze London is now underway, bringing a wide range of works and artists to bear on the fairgrounds at Regent’s Park in the northern part of the city.  With its VIP Preview concluding today, the fair made its first big push of sales alongside the kick-off for a number of its projects and performance works, which conclude this Sunday.

Samara Golden at Canada Gallery, via Art Observed

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David Shrigley, Really Good at Trafalgar Square, via Art Observed

Towering over London’s Trafalgar Square, David Shrigley’s Really Good has made its appearance atop one of the most coveted spaces for public art in the city of London, bringing with it the artist’s signature brand of irreverent and multivalent humor that leaves any number of interpretive avenues open for the everyday viewer.  Several years in the making, the work, an immense thumbs-up with a comically long thumb jutting up from the base of the sculpture, comes at a time when London’s position of global prominence seems in need of some healthy optimism, a note that Shrigley’s sculpture offers in ample (albeit strangely amplified) doses. (more…)