Karen Kilimnik, the adoration of the cats (2015), via 303 Gallery

In her eleventh exhibition with 303 Gallery, on view through March 26th, Karen Kilimnik returns to her historically-motivated sense of sarcasm and self-awareness, dissecting the convoluted theoretical foundations of contemporary art, in a trademark language that plays on, and resonates with, notions and concepts of kitsch.  Kilimnik’s uncompromising fascination with the imperviousness of pre-20th century European extravagance, and its depictions in the art of the era, as well as that of modernity, blossom through her own collage techniques here, combining flippant references with lush environs to create critically de-centered works.

Karen Kilimnik (Installation View), via 303 Gallery

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Tom Wesselmann, San Francisco Nude with Green Wall (1959) All images © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, photo c/o David Zwirner

For its current exhibition in London, David Zwirner‘s Grafton Street gallery compiled a collection of thirty collages. created between 1959 and 1964, by the late Pop artist Tom Wesselmann, works that mark a significant point in the artist’s career as a leading figure of the Pop art movement, just at the point where he was transitioning from brusque abstraction to an interest in the commodity formats and spatial confines of the canvas.  Wesselmann’s later career, which consists of bold, graphically vivid works is hinted at through these collages, exposing the growth of his iconic style, and his interest in capturing interiors, landscapes, and female nudes. (more…)

Albert Oehlen (Installation View) All images Courtesy the Gagosian Gallery

In his work, German artist Albert Oehlen concerns himself with illustrating and exploring the process of painting itself.  From the early 1980’s on, he has combined tenants of figurative and abstract practice in reaction to the Neo-Expressionist trends in painting during the time, eventually Oehlen turning his experiments with various mediums and modes of painting more fully towards abstract painting.  Oehlen frequently approaches painting through a set of restrictions he imposes upon himself: to work at a deliberately slow pace, with only one color, or with unfamiliar or non-typical tools (his fingers, brushes, collage, and in this instance, aluminum-panels instead of canvas).  With a new series of works at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill location in London, Oehlen reveals a series of works drawing on digital processes incorporated into the act of painting, continuing certain explorations he began with line painting during the 1990’s, and reflecting his ongoing concerns with constantly testing the boundaries of the medium and its relation to broader modes of production.

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Daniel Richter, Flowers of Romance (2015), all photos courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac

Now through March 12^th, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents a solo exhibition of Daniel Richter’s new work, Half-Naked Truth, a collection of two separate groups of paintings produced in parallel over the course of the last two years.  Richter’s first experimentation with oil crayons, the show sees an intriguing new movement for the artist, lending his figures an almost crude demarcation or delineation of space in relation to each other. Though the themes of closeness and movement remain consistent with Richter’s earlier works, there is a quality of abstraction in these series that pushes towards testing the boundaries of the act of painting, as well as the artist’s signature use of bright colors and stark contrast from form to form that further his project in each series. (more…)

Frank Stella at the joint Marianne Boesky and Dominique Lévy Booth, via Art Observed

Returning to its home at the Park Avenue Armory, the ADAA Art Show opened its doors this past weekend for another year of sales and specially-focused exhibitions, offering a more curatorial take on the Armory Week fair show.  Dealing almost exclusively in curated booths or solo artist exhibitions, the fair’s manageable layout and sharply delineated booths offered an adventurous walk for the interested fairgoer, dropping historical perspective or new aesthetic links between artists and movements. (more…)

Hernán Rivera, Ernesto Burgos, Alberto Borea, The Visible Hand (2016), installation view, via 67

Since opening in the fall of 2015 the artist-run basement space of 67 Ludlow has been host to a number of shows, screenings, poetry sessions and discussions. The current show, The Visible Hand, brings together work by three young artists currently based in New York. Each exhibits his own  transformation of common, everyday materials and situations in efforts to forge a rift in typical systems of image-making, use and production. (more…)

Jean-Marie Appriou at Clearing, via Art Observed

Over the past several years, the Independent NY art fair has grown by leaps and bounds into something of a legitimate contender for the prime attention and customers of Armory Week.  Its impressive curatorial focus, relaxed atmosphere and intuitive layout has earned it a reputation that fits well alongside its manageable scale, and relatively easy accessibility for interested visitors.  This year sees the fair doubling down on its best qualities as it moves downtown to Spring Studios on Varick in TriBeCa, a marked upgrade that brings the best of the fair’s previous iterations to bear on its increasingly competitive stature.

Nate Lowman at Maccarone, via Art Observed (more…)

Christian Jankowski, Retrospektive (Installation View), all photos courtesy CFA Berlin

The work of Christian Jankowski involves various social and artistic practices, a comingling of actions in which the visual product is often only a single aspect of the larger work.  Randomly encountered bystanders become co-conspirators in his spectacle, often interrogating modes of modern communication and interaction.   Timed to coincide with the Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale 2016, the first-time collaboration between the gallery and Berlin-based Jankowski, the exhibition is presented as a retrospective and features predominantly cinematic work produced by the artist. (more…)

Caroline Wells Chandler, via Art Observed

Situated above the 8^th Avenue Post Office just outside of Chelsea and across the street from Madison Square Garden, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show easily takes the distinction of Armory Week’s most peculiar locale. Yet the hallways and offices of Moynihan Station make for an optimal site considering the event’s curator-focused, freewheeling vision and often unpredictable projects, a combination that has established SPRING/BREAK as one of Armory Week’s main events.

David B.Smith, Extruded Daydream, via Art Observed

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Armory Show, via Art Observed

Opening its doors for its press and VIP preview today, the 22^nd annual Armory Show is officially underway, bringing the art world’s top galleries and exhibitors to Piers 92 and 94 for another year of sales and showings. (more…)

Monika Grzymala, Raumzeichnung (outside/inside) (2016), via Lisson Gallery

Working in close collaboration with The Drawing Room, Lisson Gallery’s has brought together a selection of pieces that explore the more conceptual reaches of the drawing process, not only exploring drawing as a condition of ideation or practice for smaller works, but as a method of experiencing, and segmenting, space itself.  Titled Line, the show is a strong investigation of space and memory, time and flow, extended “off the page,” as the press release reads. (more…)

Morten Skrøder Lund, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

LTD Gallery is presenting the first U.S. Exhibition of painter Morten Skrøder Lund’s paintings on Polyethylene Vinyl Acetate (PEVA), dwelling on notions of time, composition and the interaction of paint and ground. (more…)

Michael Riedel, Untitled (Description Field “Art Material”; rer), (2015), via David Zwirner

Set to open this week, the Armory Show is returning to New York City for its 22nd year, setting off the dense selection of exhibitions, fairs, parties and programs of Armory Week 2016.  With a number of shifts in location and scheduling for this year’s selection of events, the week should see a new face on familiar proceedings. (more…)

The Calder Prize 2005-2015 (Installation View)

The Calder Prize 2005-2015, now on view at Pace Gallery in London, explores the influence of artist Alexander Calder in relation to the work of six contemporary artists, each of whom were awarded a prize in the former’s name.  Now through March 5, the five winners of the Calder Prize to date are featured in conversation with Calder’s own work.  The artists awarded the Calder Prize are seen to be continuing Calder’s legacy by imagining new and innovative directions for sculpture, among them Tara Donovan (2005), Žilvinas Kempinas (2007), Tomás Saraceno (2009), Rachel Harrison (2011), Daren Bader (2013), and Haroon Mirza (2015). Working in impressively divergent media, the artists are united by their common vision to push the limits of material through variations on space and time in their work, a point that unifies them with Calder’s vision.   (more…)

Richard Aldrich, Untitled (2014-2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Richard Aldrich‘s wide-ranging stylistic and conceptual practice over the past twenty-plus years has spanned any number of formats, from sparse abstraction to minimalist exercises in process painting, often subverting these established schools through momentary inflections of wit and comic interpretation.  Yet at the core of Aldrich’s practice is an effort to push beyond mere stylistic variation and a good sense humor, often using his practice and its shifting material grounds to explore a wide range of both techniques in image-making, as well as processes in each work’s construction on an intuitive level.

Richard Aldrich, Time Stopped, Time Started (Installation View), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

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Doug Wheeler, Untitled (1969/2014), via David Zwirner © 2016 Doug Wheeler

The work of Doug Wheeler is an exercise in embodiment and space, perhaps more so than many of his Light and Space compatriots.  Rather than merely exploring the sensations of seeing and perceiving space, Wheeler pushes beyond this sense of expanded optics and its cognitive effects, often exploring how this sense of space is reflected onto broader sensations of the body.  Encasements, the third solo exhibition by Wheeler in collaboration with David Zwirner, continues this work, showing a body of smaller-scale works that work in a strikingly harmonious series of interactions throughout the gallery. (more…)

Lee Ufan, From Line No. 800117 (1980), all photos via Art Observed

Blum & Poe’s close ties to the history and proliferation of Asian art in the United States cannot be ignored, having advocated for and built a market around Japanese and Korean artists like Takashi Murakami and Lee Ufan during the 1990’s.  Since then, the gallery has become an inextricable link between the continents, a point explored in the gallery’s most recent exhibition, Dansaekhwa and Minimalism, currently on view at the gallery’s Culver City location.

Kwon Young-woo, Untitled (1982), via Art Observed (more…)

Eddie Martinez, Restartation (2015), via Art Observed

Brooklyn-based painter Eddie Martinez had charted a particularly unique course for himself in recent years, exploring both expressly abstracted compositions and their relationships to more rigid, serial processes in both painting and sculpture.  Trained as both a draftsman and painter, the artist’s dual experience in both meticulously planned composition and free-roving expressionism floats to the surface in his first exhibition with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, on view now at the gallery’s Chelsea location. (more…)

Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens (Installation view), via Sprüth Magers

For the most recent new exhibition in Berlin, Sprüth Magers has brought together work from thirteen artists under the title Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens.  Curated by Goodroom and Johannes Fricke Waldthausen, the exhibition features works by Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Andy Hope 1930, Oliver Laric, Jon Rafman, and Andro Wekua, among others.  Intended to navigate visitors through the intersecting narratives within the realm of surrealist animation, abstraction and the ideas of “New Materialism” as expressed through the greater logistics of the world wide web, the exhibition references the notion of the screen as a critical tool of the conscious and unconscious, as well as a surface for projections of communication and technological abstraction.   (more…)

Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled (2016), image courtesy of Tatiana Trouvé and König Galerie

“Time is the theme underlying all my work,” states Italian-born, Paris-based artist Tatiana Trouvé.  Frequently reflecting ideas of time and intervention through her prolific body of drawings, sculptures and installations, the artist is presenting a new exhibition at Berlin’s König Galerie, where she has enacted a space illustrating the origins and systems dictating the flow and movement of the universe.  Consisting of furniture covered with bronze blankets, on whose backs reveals drawings and text, traced and written,her objects combine multiple realities incorporating dreamlike states and alchemical properties, always based on nuanced, multifaceted layers of space and time.  Each installation reveals a fragmented culture, and a system pushed into instability through her varying representational techniques.   (more…)

Pablo Picasso, Le violon (Titre attribué : Nature morte) (1914) © Succession Picasso 2015 / photo Centre Pompidou, MNAM-Cci, dist. Rmn-Grand Palais / droits réservés

Having pioneered the vivid forms and perspectival innovations of Cubism during the course of his career, pushing that initial formal innovation into the vastly divergent forms, there can be little doubt of Pablo Picasso’s monumental impact on the path of modern art.  This influence sits at the core of Picasso.Mania, a playful yet impressively curated exhibition currently on view at the Grand Palais in Paris.  Pairing works from both before and after the artist’s massively influential impact on the world of 20th Century Art, the exhibition presents a contemporary perspective to the name, the myth, the reputation of the artist. (more…)

Aleksandra Domanovic, Turbo Sculpture, (2010-13), all photos courtesy The Mistake Room

The Mistake Room Los Angeles presents Histories of a Vanishing Present: A Prologue, the second chapter in a series of four exhibitions, featured as part of a long-term research initiative launched by the space. This multiyear project spotlights the experience of millennial generation artists from the Global South who, through a lens of postmemory, explore the media through which the past is transmitted across time and space. The exhibition investigates how traumatic histories play out in the practices of contemporary artists, often whose experience of these histories is indirect—inherited through the images, narratives and objects of preceding generations. Curated by Cesar Garcia and Kris Kuramitsu, A Prologue features video pieces from four artists situated in non-western cultures, chronicling both events, relations and practices not typically included in the art historical canon.    In animating the enduring consequences of colonization, nationalism, ethnic wars, globalization and the legacy of racism, these artists engage in a complex meditation on their cultural heritage and identity politics, and embrace history as a site of reflection and reinvention.

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Chris Burden, Buddha’s Fingers (2014-15), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Spanning two uptown locations of Gagosian Gallery is a series of recent works by the late artist Chris Burden, who passed away last year at age of sixty-nine soon after his large scale New Museum retrospective. Burden, who started his career with avant-garde performances that played a significant role in furthering body art on a global scale, alongside his other American peers Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, then shifted towards idea-based practice later in his career.  Challenging in terms of execution rather than physical fortitude, these projects Burden undertook emphasized a concretized, material practice. (more…)

Diana Thater, Knots and Surfaces (2001), via Art Observed

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has invited Diana Thater to open her first U.S. retrospective, currently on view in the museum campus’s Art of the Americas building, and pulling a focused, yet nuanced exploration of much of Thater’s early work, tracing the intersections of her various aesthetic and conceptual interests as they converge in her environmental installations here. (more…)