Jussi Pylkkanen and Brett Gorvy in front of the Record-setting Basquait, via Art Observed

Christie’s has wrapped its Post-War and Contemporary auction last night in New York, continuing a strong performance that contrasted sharply with the lackluster sales last night at Sotheby’s, including an impressive new record for Jean-Michel Basquiat.  All told, the sale saw 9 unsold lots out of a total 61 (counting a single withdrawn lot), and a final total of $318,388,000. (more…)

Paul Signac, Maisons du Port, Saint-Tropez (1892), via Sotheby’s

Having just announced a loss of over $25 million for the first quarter of 2016, Sotheby’s needed a strong performance this evening to alleviate concerns over its recent shakeups and acquisitions, but there were few reassurances in sight for the house’s New York Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale tonight, as it concluded a 62 lot outing with almost a third of the works going unsold, bringing a final sales tally of $144,434,000. (more…)

Mike kelley, The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #13: Art (1994), via Art Observed

This week, Skarstedt Gallery opened a show of Mike Kelley’s shaped paintings at its Chelsea exhibition space, the first time that the artist’s work in this series of egg-shaped, abstracted canvases has been compiled at one time.  Taking the artist’s interests in psychoanalytic techniques, trauma, and their intersections with the structures of mainstream American culture, the exhibition offers a close look at Kelley’s interests, juxtaposed through a series of pictorial relationships, or contrasted from work to work in a single room. (more…)

Omer Fast, 5,000 Feet is the Best (film still) (2011)

Offering a cinematic experience comprised of particularly constructed viewing rooms, Omer Fast’s inaugural exhibition at James Cohan saw the premier of the artist’s three most recent films for a New York audience. On view through this past weekend, the exhibition, which challenged the typical context of the theater, complicates notions of script and reality as well as of documentary and fiction.   (more…)

William Kentridge, Mantegna 2016, via Art Observed

1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair opened its second edition at Pioneer Works in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook this weekend, presenting over 60 artists from 27 countries to cement its reputation as the premier platform for the representation of the multiplicity and diversity of contemporary African art.  Referencing the  fifty-four countries that constitute the African continent, 1:54 is a vital addition to the selection of fairs across the city during Frieze Week, presenting myriad perspectives on the contemporary African art context through a ambitious, yet focused lens. (more…)

Brice Marden, Star (for Patti Smith) (1972-74), via Phillips Auction

Following in the footsteps of an early evening auction at Christie’s just an hour prior, Phillips has logged a staid but consistent auction into the books for its sole evening sale of the spring auction week.  The auction house’s 20th Century Sale achieved moderate success with a final tally of $46,576,000, with only 3 of the 38 lots going unsold.

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Maurizio Cattelan, Him (2001), via Christie’s

This week’s marathon series of art auctions is underway in New York City, as Christie’s launched a rare, specially-curated Sunday sale, ending its 39 lot Bound to Fail auction with a final tally of $78,123,250, with only a single lot going unsold.  The fair, which followed hot on the heels of the last hours of Frieze, saw modest bidding and consistently dependable sales, although several works sold for final prices below estimate. (more…)

   
Revolution in the Making (Installation View), all photographs courtesy Thisbe Gensler, via Art Observed

This past month has seen the much-anticipated opening of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s new gallery space in Los Angeles’ Arts District. The scale of the former flourmill—totaling over 100,000 square feet of exhibition spaces, book store, Printed Matter Lab, courtyard and garden, forthcoming restaurant, as well as offices—rivals the real estate of many museums, as do its curatorial aspirations.  Swiss couple Iwan and Manuela Wirth have partnered with former MOCA curator Paul Schimmel, a definitive fixture of Los Angeles art history and pioneering figure in its contemporary art scene. In his opening remarks during the press opening, Schimmel described his vision of the gallery as a community-driven, public-oriented space that would proffer a seamless urban experience for the creative downtown demographic, not only focused on changing the traditional relationship of the gallery to its public, but also between art and life.  In partnering with Hauser & Wirth, lauded for its museum-caliber exhibitions and dedication to scholarship and publications, Schimmel announced this new institution’s role in serving and revitalizing the arts of Los Angeles. (more…)

Sarah Peters and Marsha Cottrell, via Art Observed

NADA has returned to its now familiar haunt at the Basketball City sports complex at Pier 36, continuing its more relaxed counterpoint to the proceedings at Frieze just a short ferry ride up the East River. The fair, which is now in its fifth year, has continued to pioneer its own take on early May’s bustling selection of shows and exhibitions, and continued its strong performance this year with a roster of 105 Galleries and a diverse selection of works on display. (more…)

Fausto Melotti, Scultura n. 11 (Sculpture No. 11) (1934), all photos via Quincy Childs for Art Observed

A central figure in the history of twentieth-century art, Fausto Melotti’s body of work is revered throughout Europe, with critical successes, major exhibitions, and awards all conferred on his ambitious and stylistically diverse oeuvre.  Yet the artist’s catalog has long eluded American viewers, a point that Hauser and Wirth is seeking to change as it takes over representation of his work worldwide.  First presented at the gallery’s ADAA Art Show booth, Melotti’s work is on view at the gallery’s 69th Street exhibition space, exploring a practice that spanned sculpture, painting, ceramic, low reliefs, and works on paper, evoking the artist’s craftsmanship and inclinations towards “weightlessness,” and exploring his desire for geometric balances beyond mere figuration.

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Francis Bacon, Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970), via Sotheby’s

Just as Frieze closes its doors on a week of contemporary sales, the New York auction houses are opening theirs for a second week of major U.S. market activity.  Spreading the offerings across a marathon series of sales in the coming days, the New York spring/summer auctions will mark the last test of buyer interest before the summer recess. (more…)

Lisa Yuskavage, Stoned (2016), via David Zwirner

Celebrating its 5th Anniversary in New York City, Frieze New York will touch down once again on Randall’s Island this week, bringing a strong selection of 202 galleries to the event, alongside a full calendar of events, performances, and talks that has turned early May into a another centerpiece of New York’s already bustling calendar, joined by both satellite art fairs and a series of high-profile gallery openings. (more…)

Vigée Le Brun, Baron de Thellusson (1814), via Art Observed

There are few prominent female artists that are as highly revered as Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was in 18th Century France. Falling in love with painting through her father, Louis Vigée, Le Brun went on to work for the aristocracy in Paris during the French Revolution.  After painting more than thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette and her family, Le Brun was forced to flee the country over her association with the queen, ultimately working in Italy, Austria, and Russia. Once she settled in Italy, she was elected into the artist group Accademia di San Luca, and moved on to painting portraits of Catherine the Great’s family as well as Stanislaw August Poniatowski, Poland’s last king. (more…)

Patrick Meagher, Natural Artificial Neural Networks (Bethany Hamilton) (2016), Photo by Kayode Ojo

Suggested For You, Patrick Meagher’s solo exhibition at Equity Gallery, takes its name from the “suggestion engines” of social media and e-commerce sites, utilizing personal activity as a generator for financial value.  With a wildly colorful CMYK palette, Meagher presents a jumble of inkjet prints and sculpture that address the ways in which the internet mediates our perception of consciousness, and simultaneously reshapes them. (more…)

Alighiero Boetti, Oggi Ventiduesimo giorno dell’ottavo mese dell’anno millenovecentootantotto (1988), via Art Observed

There’s a tangible spirit of enthusiasm in the opening exhibition for Totah Gallery in the Lower East Side, a dual exhibition exploring the work of Alighiero Boetti and Mel Bochner in concert.  The pairing, at face value, seems obvious; a pair of artist’s whose roughshod textual inversions made established their roles in the language and semiotic turns in art during the 1970’s.  Yet proprietor and principle curator David Totah’s investment in the broader material aspects of both artist’s careers unfolds here into a nuanced exhibition that rewards deeper readings and lingering views on each composition.  It’s a point of focus that he will continue at the space, driving research-heavy installs that blend history with personal encounter, always emphasizing exchanges between the artists and his own relationships with them.

Mel Bocher and Alighiero Boetti, Verba Volant Scripta Manent (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

Mark Wallinger, Ego (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over Hauser and Wirth London for his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Mark Wallinger has brought a nuanced collection of both new and recent works, showcasing the artist’s unique interests in the associative and perceptual variations of one’s encounter with the surrounding world, mixing together explicit psychoanalytic technique with less concrete forms that trace the body’s relation to the urban environment, or the preservation of time through similar modes of engagement.   (more…)

Alexis Rockman, Cervid Cervacles (Jacob Riis Beach, Queens) (2015), via Salon 94

Alexis Rockman’s work is expressly involved in the correlations between image and ground, material and subject, often pulling from the biological intersections of human and animal, flora and fauna, or land and water, that define the landscapes of modernity.  Shifting this focus to a more microcosmic level, the artist has opened a show of drawings of New York City wildlife, a project that heightens his sense of delicate relations between nature and its inhabitants, on view at Salon 94. (more…)

Ellsworth Kelly, Barn, Long Island (1968), via Matthew Marks Gallery

The late Ellsworth Kelly’s photographic works are the subject of the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in New York this month, offering a unique and alternative perspective on an artist already seen as one of the most influential and prominent abstractionists of the 20th Century.  The show, on view at Matthew Marks in Chelsea, showcases over thirty gelatin silver prints, originally taken between 1950 and 1982, the first ever devoted to Kelly’s photographic endeavors.  Kelly finished preparing these prints and planning the exhibition shortly before his death on December 27th, at the age of ninety-two.  Here, these photographs offer a fitting perspective of the artist’s own aesthetic inclinations, and his unique perspective for the world around him. (more…)

Alex Israel & Brett Easton Ellis, Born and Not Made (2016), all images © Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis; courtesy iStock and Gagosian Gallery Photography: Jeff McLane

Marking one of the art world’s more unique collaborations in recent years, Alex Israel has partnered with writer Brett Easton Ellis to create a series of large-scale acrylic and ink canvases, reveling in the unique iconography and landscapes of Los Angeles.  The show, which opened earlier this Winter at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills location, combines Ellis’s distinctively modern texts with Israel’s particular blend of pop-influenced wit, here manifested in sprawling scenes from the varying spheres and vistas of Los Angeles’s shifting landscape.

Alex Israel & Brett Easton Ellis (Installation View)

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T. J. Wilcox, Word on a Wing (The Girl) (2016), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

“Staring at the starry field, I ardently hoped…” intones T. J. Wilcox in Word on a Wing (Altar Boy), one of four poems the artist penned for Equivalents, his first exhibition at Gladstone Gallery.  On view through April 23rd, the exhibition urges its audience to stare upwards, much in the same way as protagonist of Wilcox’s poems, to break with the conventional exhibition viewing experience.  Dispersed throughout the high ceilings of the otherwise empty gallery interior are hybrids of steel, Plexiglass and projected video, glaring in the dimly-lit space. (more…)

Fischli/Weiss, Rat and Bear (Sleeping) (2008), via Art Observed

The Guggenheim has opened its doors to Swiss collaborative Fischli/Weiss for the retrospective show How to Work Better, exploring the pair’s lighthearted, often satirical manipulations of reality and art history through their unique modes of creation. (more…)

Qiu Xiaofei, Vortex (2015), all photos via Rui Tang for Art Observed

Double Pendulum, the first solo exhibition of Qiu Xiaofei in North America, is currently on view at Pace Gallery on 510 West 25^th Street. Showcasing a group of new paintings, the exhibition presents the artist’s transition towards an abstract expression through a range of colors that complicate the relationships between foreground and background. (more…)

 

Hernan Bas, Champagne Corks Bobbed in the Pool That Morning, 2016

Bright Young Things is Lehmann Maupin’s ongoing exhibition for a new body of work by Detroit and Miami-based painter Hernan Bas.  Amongst the most particular and earnest contemporary figurative painters, Bas has established himself over the past years as a craftsman of distinctive visual narratives, in which the lavish and relentlessly indulgent daily life of western aristocracy meets the styles of mannerist painting, employing passionate color spectrums and surreal architectural forms. (more…)

Glenn Ligon, What We Said The Last Time (Installation View), all images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

Artist Glenn Ligon has embarked on an ambitious exhibition schedule this spring, showing at both New York locations for Luhring Augustine this month.  The show, which closes next week, runs through a range of Ligon’s body of work.   What We Said The Last Time is the Chelsea leg of a two part exhibition, and sees the influential multimedia artist commemorating the literary work of James Baldwin, whose writings had tremendous impact on many other authors and artists. (more…)