Vanessa Albury, Arctic, Future Relics (Glacier Ice) (2016), via Art Observed

The 2016 Edition of Bushwick Open Studios took place this weekend, continuing the event’s series of studio tours, special exhibitions and openings in the longtime artistic hotbed of Bushwick, and showcasing the neighborhood’s impressive density of artists spread across its blocks.

Fred Holland, Untitled (2002), via Art Observed

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Andy Warhol, 20 Pink Maos (1979), via Phillips

Complementing the offering of new works across town at Regent’s Park, Phillips London has opened a week of auctions around Frieze Week, closing out its 30-lot sale this evening with a consistent sale, seeing 6 of the evening’s 30 lots go unsold to reach a final tally of £17,867,750. (more…)

Ugo Rondinone, the sun at 4pm (Installation View), via Art Observed

Ugo Rondinone returns to Gladstone Gallery this fall for an exhibition of recent works, culling together a body of works that mark the artist’s engagement with the natural world through four separate series of work.  Bearing the names of various natural forces, Rondinone’s mountain, sun, waterfall, and cloud pieces capture a particular vantage point in modern humanity’s engagement with the world around it.

Ugo Rondinone, the sun at 4pm (Installation View), via Art Observed

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

With the opening days of Frieze London also come the opening forays into the secondary market for the fall calendar for the British capital, with Phillips, Sotheby’s and Christie’s each trying their hand at a market that has seen distinctly turbulent, albeit occasionally impressive results for what many are calling a sales slump.  Coming off a sluggish summer with an above expectations at Phillips’ New, Now, Next sale of young artists in the past weeks, market spectators and the odd speculator are watching the Contemporary Evening Sales closely this week.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (2007), via Phillips

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Mona Hatoum, Electrified (variable II) (2014), via White Cube

Drawing gallerists, collectors and artists from the UK, Europe, and even further afield, Frieze London is set to open its doors this week for the fourteenth edition of the market calendar staple, and the first since the summer’s Brexit vote drew a line in the sand between the UK and the rest of Europe.  Considering early assurances by gallerists, many seem to think that the UK’s pending break may not bode as poorly for the country’s role as an international market capital as initially thought, but the proof will be in the pudding at Frieze, where the number eager buyers will serve as the real bellwether for a market that has already seen its share of struggles this year.

Martin Soto Clemente, Frenetic Gossamer (2016), via Frieze

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Ai Weiwei, Iron Tree Trunk (2015), via Max Hetzler

Bringing a body of less frequently seen works from the past several years to Paris for his first solo exhibition in the city, Ai Weiwei continues his global tour de force after regaining his passport last year, opening a show at Max Hetzler this month.  Capturing the artist’s continued engagement with both the material and socio-political histories of China, the show features a carefully selected, yet broadly applicable series of pieces that offer a fitting counterpoint to the artist’s major museum exhibition currently on view in Athens.

Ai Weiwei (Installation View), via Max Hetzler

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Sara VanDerBeek, Labryinth (2016), via Art Observed

Sara VanDerBeek’s work has long operated at the intersections of process and practice, history and modernity, as the artist allows her investigation of chosen images and art forms to bleed into the image itself.  This mode of practice, pulling diverse material interests into a linear mode of production,  welcomes a nuanced and often multifaceted approach to the cultural and historical contexts of her subject matter, a focus that sits at the center of the artist’s current solo show at Metro Pictures.

Sara VanDerBeek, Pieced Quilts, Wrapped Forms (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Ryan Gander, I Be… (x) (2016), via Art Observed

Ryan Gander has opened his first exhibition at Lisson Gallery’s new New York City outpost, spreading his work through a small but tightly selected body of pieces underlining the artist’s enigmatic material interests in play with his uniquely British sense of humor.  In one corner, a piece called I’m never coming back to New York shows a £20 note slowly twisting and pushing its way out of a hole in the wall, playing on dual jokes about fleshing out new coats of plaster with crumpled paper and the commercial core of the gallery environment.

Ryan Gander, Mr. Modern Classical Conceptualist (Dramaturgical framework for structure and stability) (2016), via Art Observed

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Donald Moffett, Lot 040616 (cobalt and pecans) (2016)

Spanning Marianne Boesky Gallery’s two adjacent Chelsea locations, including the recently-opened space at 507 W. 24th Street, any fallow field, a show of recent work by seminal New York artist Donald Moffett’s investigates some of the reoccurring themes in his multi-media practice.  Moffett’s work emerged in the midst of a New York art scene that, during the ‘80s, was dealing with the debilitating impact of AIDS, a point that made tremendous impact on his complex practice. Moffet’s work sees gender and identity politics explored through oblique, yet elegant, gestures, while remaining heavily invested in representation of form, texture and paint. (more…)

Dolores (Installation View), via Art Observed

The current exhibition at Team Gallery, Dolores, captures a series of disjointed, often confounding narrative arcs, and places them into close conversation through each piece’s respective architectural and spatial implications.  Drawing on the various trappings and appointments of modern domesticity, the show, curated by Todd von Ammon, twists familiar forms and functions through a variety of technical and visual alterations.

Max Hooper Schneider, Dielectrix I: Division Electrophorus (2016), via Art Observed

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Andrea Zittel (Installation View), via Art Observed

Taking over Andrea Rosen’s main Chelsea exhibition space on 24th Street, artist Andrea Zittel is showing a body of new works exploring not only the intertwined concepts of abstracted sculpture and utilitarian object that informs her object-based practice, but equally delving into the experience of space in relation to each piece.  Showing a series of works on view in multiple places simultaneously, Zittel’s practice realizes a distinctly indeterminate space between landscapes and contexts of use. (more…)

Madeline Hollander, Drill (2016), via Art Observed

Signal Gallery kicks off its fall season this month with a pair of exhibitions by artist Madeline Hollander and Aidan Koch, an enigmatic combination of formal interests and performative translations of material split between two rooms in the gallery’s Bushwick exhibition space.  Drawing from varied takes on illustration, movement and conveyance of information, the show’s connecting threads are distinctly understated, welcoming the viewer to consider each show’s work in its relation to material, cultural moorings, and each show’s internal systems of objects and actors.

Aidan Koch, Iris (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Jessica Stockholder, The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room (Installation View), via Art Observed

In The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, Jessica Stockholder’s scattered arrangements of sculptural elements play with assumed boundaries to become a fluid meditation on space.  Through a variety of materials and forms, Stockholder avoids overtly breaking down traditional artistic lines, so much as she highlights that they have never truly existed at all.  Here, in her third show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Stockholder adds new dimension to her longstanding interest in intersection and continues to define the multifaceted significance of surface and structure.

Jessica Stockholder, Security Detail [JS 688] (2016), via Art Observed

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Jonas Wood, Rosy in my Room with His Cat (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over both rooms at Anton Kern’s Chelsea exhibition space, LA painter Jonas Wood has brought a well-rounded and entertaining series of new paintings, which chart the artist’s continually playful and inventive approach to figuration.  Mixing together abstract signifiers with a cool, even-handed approach to the world around him, Wood’s pieces here are an exceptional entry in the discourse of modern painting.

Jonas Wood, The Bat/Bar Mitzvah Weekend (2016), via Art Observed

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Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Audience (detail) (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over the full expanse of Hauser and Wirth’s 18th Street location, Rashid Johnson has brought a series of new paintings, sculpture and assemblage to New York for his first gallery show in the city in several years.  The show, which dwells on concepts of escape, anxiety and history, is a concise examination of Johnson’s practice through a range of theoretical approaches and material interests.     (more…)

James Turrell at Dorotheenstadt Chapel (Installation View), via Art Observed

The memorial chapel of the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin is temporarily home to James Turrell’s most recent light installation, a gradually shifting arrangement of colored lights that fills the space with a gentle glow.  Every Monday and Saturday through December, the chapel will fill with light in time with the setting sun and envelope attendees in the otherworldly, immersive experience, as a series of LED lights hidden in the architecture of the chapel turn on as the sun begins to set, and change over the course of the next hours to correspond to the light outside of the space. (more…)

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 10 (1910), via Fondation Beyeler

In terms of the various rejections of painterly convention that defined the early decades of the 20th Century, few schools of thought left the same lasting imprint on the act of painting as “Der Blaue Reiter” (The Blue Rider).  The internationally distributed group of artists, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc chief among them, were early entries in the varied schools of thought and practice that sought to change the aesthetic and political energies of their craft through a combination of dynamic invention in their craft, and iconoclastic, ideological fervor in their writing and organization.  Making the case for a practice divorced from rote representation, the pair of artists instead relied on color and line themselves, affording these essential elements a much broader range of expressive capacity and spiritual evocativeness that would ultimately pave the way for much of the century’s adventures into abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau—Obermarkt with Mountains (1908), via Fondation Beyeler

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Shio Kusaka’s prints at Karma, via Art Observed

For eleven years, Printed Matter’s annual Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 has ushered in the fall art season with its unique and enigmatic selection of small press publishers, gallery bookmakers, artist-run presses, and other producers of small-scale works, antiquities, multiples, and other ephemera.   Offering an intimate and often far more portable selection of works by a wide range of artists and authors, the show, which runs through Sunday, offers a broad snapshot of the further reaches of the city’s arts community, where graphic arts, design, writing and studio practice have one of their few opportunities to mingle and show work in the same context, making for a unique look at New York’s fertile and expanded creative communities.

The David Zwirner Booth, with art by Oscar Murillo and Yutaka Sone, via Art Observed

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Eddie Peake, Head (2016), via Art Observed

Jeffrey Deitch is back in New York.  Following several years of one-off projects, rumored re-openings and pop-up exhibitions, Deitch touched down at his former space at 18 Wooster for good, kicking off his renewed tenure in the building last week with a series of celebratory performances by British-born Eddie Peake.  The artist, whose neon and glitter encrusted works have long been a staple of Deitch’s exhibition program, brought a fittingly enthused atmosphere to the exhibition, as his work Head left a literal mark on the gallery itself. (more…)

Sophia Al-Maria, still from Black Friday (2016). Digital video projected vertically, color, sound; 16:36 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai.

Currently showing on the first floor of the Whitney Museum is Black Friday, the American-Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria’s solo debut in the United States.  Born in the U.S. and educated in London and Egypt, Al-Maria has been a central voice in the Gulf region’s burgeoning contemporary art scene.  At the helm of the art collective Gulf Cooperation Council as a founding member, Al-Maria’s work drives at a concept of “Gulf Futurism,” a term she coined to define the rapidly evolving economic and social landscape of the region.  As a writer, researcher and filmmaker, Al-Maria has been delivering a substantial body of work on oil-fueled wealth and its political/social consequences in the Middle East.

Sophia Al-Maria, still from The Litany (2016). Digital video projected vertically, color, sound; 16:36 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai. (more…)

Taryn Simon, An Occupation of Loss (Installation View), courtesy Park Avenue Armory Image © Naho Kubota

In the midst of the Park Avenue Armory, a series of immense silos tower up from the floor, part of artist Taryn Simon’s landmark performance An Occupation of Loss, which brings a series of funeral mourners from around the globe to the Drill Hall for an overwhelmingly powerful performance meditating on loss, political agency, and common human experience. (more…)

David Hockney, Barry Humphries, 26th, 27th, 28th March (2015), all images courtesy Royal Academy

Currently on view at London’s Royal Academy through the end of the month, artist David Hockney continues his remarkably prolific painterly output, bringing a new series of portraits created at his Los Angeles studio to the British Institution.  Exploring a wide range of sitters through the artist’s particular approach to the genre, the show is both a striking map of Hockney’s own life, and his vivid, tireless approach to his craft.

 David Hockney, Rita Pynoos, 1st, 2nd March (2014)

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Raqib Shaw, Self Portrait in the Study at Peckham (After Vincenzo Catena) Kashmir Version (2015-2016), via White Cube

Raqib Shaw’s work is flush with context, canvases as densely layered with paint as they are with intersections of religious, historical and personal signifiers, drawing on the sprawling figurative techniques of Renaissance reliefs, decorative arts, and portraiture in quick succession.  His are paintings investigating the techniques and histories of these early Western works, while drawing on his own personal experiences to drive and embellish their original iconographies.  Shaw brings a new body of these works in sculpture and painting to White Cube’s Bermondsey location this month, continuing his investigation of 15th, 16th, and 17th Century art through the lens of his own life. (more…)

Ai Weiwei, Standing Figure (2016), via Art Observed

Turning his sense for political inequality and global human rights issues towards the Mediterranean’s current refugee crisis, Ai Weiwei has brought a body of both new works and recent pieces from the past ten years to Athens’s Museum of Cycladic Art, exploring a fruitful intersection of historical and current political contexts in conversation with the artist’s own personal history.  The exhibition, which marks both Ai’s first exhibition with an archeological museum context as well as his first in the nation of Greece, is a well-selected show, which takes direct aim at the Syrian refugee crisis while addressing the history of Greece in subtly powerful ways. (more…)