Caroll Dunham, Now and Around Here (1) (2011-2015), all photos via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

A new body of work by painter Carroll Dunham is currently on view at Gladstone Gallery, resuming the artist’s ongoing investigation of the bather motif, which he has pursued, modified and continued to explore since 2009.   The large scale paintings on view depict lavish nude figures positioned amidst phantasmagorical landscapes, loyal to Dunham’s exuberant signature painting style. The artist’s work here does little to depart from his familiar forms and techniques throughout the series, and instead focuses on delivering his particular set of arresting images with a degree of uncompromising consistency.  Even so, some fresh elements in these works, such as male nudes and animals join the spectrum. (more…)

Jennifer Bornstein, Left Hiking Boot (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Jennifer Bornstein’s work has consistently dealt with the notion of obsolescence. This month, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the artist continues this pseudo-forensic body of work, that records the legacy of her father, a scientist specializing in collagen research.  Through her most recent body of work, Bornstein turns her father into the subject of study, evoking his presence and his work through a mixed-media installation of works on paper, plaster sculptures and film projection.

Jennifer Bornstein, Extension Cord (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

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Jon Rafman (Installation View) at Zabludowicz Collection, London. Photo: Thierry Bal

For his first major exhibition in the UK, multimedia artist Jon Rafman is exploring the differing spheres of reality and existence at the Zabludowicz Collection in London.  The Montreal-based artist is typically known for his practice focusing on the relationship between technology and human consciousness.  Here he takes his practice to a new dimension and scale, manipulating the space to create an interactive environment where viewer’s are able to ponder the real and the virtual, exploring technology with contemporary consciousness. (more…)

Huma Bhabha, Untitled (2015), all photos courtesy Clearing Brussels

New York-based artist Huma Bhabha is holding an exhibition of new work at Clearing Brussels, continuing her focus on found materials and their negotiations with the experiences and memories  of the cultural and historical past.  This series, including works on paper, photo-collage, and sculpture, references modern human construction from urban landscapes to utopian architecture to figure-based monuments. The artist’s work explores the different environmental relationships that have occurred over time and continue to linger in contemporary society, occasionally indicating a certain fusion of divergent materials that have been produced in Bhabha’s studio as the artist studies a more intimate understanding of modern debris. (more…)

Martin Puryear, Face Down (2008)

The Morgan Library & Museum is hosting Multiple Dimensions, an exhibition featuring seventy drawings Martin Puryear has produced over the course of his decades spanning career, accompanied by a selection of medium size sculptural work.  Set to travel to the Art Institute of Chicago and later to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition sheds light on another thread in the artist’s grandiose practice as he prepares for his upcoming Madison Square Park Commission in 2016. (more…)

2015:1947 (Installation View), all photos via Equity Gallery

Founded in 1947 by a group of over 160 prominent American artists, among them Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Guston, Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson and Jacob Lawrence, Artists Equity was formed to advocate for artists’ rights and provide collective resources for economic, legal and health benefits. Following WWII and the end of the WPA Federal Art Projects, amid a political climate growing more conservative and reactionary, artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi began to discuss with other American artists, primarily in New York and Woodstock, the idea of a collective advocacy organization. (more…)

Oscar Murillo, Lucky Dip (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Continuing his process of intricate, labor-intensive installations and performances, Oscar Murillo has set up shop at the Alexander Hamilton Custom House on Bowling Green, bringing his new work, Lucky Dip.  The performance, which places a series of laborers at the service of his own aesthetic and political interests, sees the artist reprising his interests in national identity, globalized labor and their exchange with the world of contemporary art. (more…)

Brant Foundation

Dash Snow’s work came of age during the dark years following 9/11 in New York City, a time when paranoia, violence and empire had written themselves large against the American consciousness.  Turning this dark, visceral atmosphere back outwards in his body of sculptures, installations, photographs and other works, Snow’s pieces demanded attention as much as his behavior did, part of a downtown ensemble of artists including Dan Colen, Ryan McGinley, Nate Lowman, Hanna Liden, and others, each of whom brought their own take on urban grit and anarchic living to their work. (more…)

Juliana Huxtable, There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed (2015), all photos via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Last Friday, MoMA played home to artist Juliana Huxtable’s There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed, one of the marquee performance works commissioned this year for the Performa 15 biennial.  The sold-out set of performances, set in the museum theatre, featured a slew of the transgender writer, artist, DJ and promoter’s (whose recurring event ShockValue played home to the performance afterparty) compatriots and collaborators, winding its way through notions of parallel histories, white-washed narratives, and the ubiquity of digital technologies, all turned through the artist’s unique poetic and aesthetic inclinations. (more…)

Jesper Just and FOS, in the shadow/ of a spectacle/ is the view of the crowd (Installation View), all photos via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Part of this year’s Performa proceedings, attendees at Danish artist Jesper Just’s performance In the shadow/ of a spectacle/ is the view of the crowd, found themselves suddenly guided up to the 43rd floor of a towering Financial District skyscraper, the downtown home of Time, Inc. on Liberty Street.  There, in an empty office floor, abstracted from the usual goings-on in the city’s bustling hub of banking and investment, a series of works presented themselves, continuing the artist’s investigations of structure and function, related to the movements of the modern urban context.

Jesper Just and FOS, in the shadow/ of a spectacle/ is the view of the crowd (Installation View) (more…)

Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #4 (2015), via Sprüth Magers Berlin

Currently on view at Sprüth-Magers in Berlin, artist Ed Ruscha is exhibiting a body of new color drawings, under the title Metro Mattresses, an exhibition that takes the cast-off mattresses of his native Los Angeles as an inspirational ground for an exploration of intertwined physical and imagined narratives, objective and subjective experiences of the urban environment. (more…)

Gerhard Richter, 180 Farben (180 Colours) (1971) Photo: David Brandt, all photos © Gerhard Richter

The relentlessly inventive Gerhard Richter is the subject of a meticulously crafted exhibition at Dominique Lévy in London this month, shedding light on a less recognized body of work from the early years of his decades long career.  Dating back as far as 1966, Richter’s works in the Color Charts series promise a unique and disparate offering, juxtaposed with his eminent and contemporaneous Photo Paintings, which brought the German artist massive global recognition.   This selection, compiled from a number of different collections globally, reunites a handful of earlier examples from the Color Charts  series for first time since they debuted at Munich’s Galerie Friedrich & Dahlem in 1966. (more…)

Camille Henrot (Installation Pictures), via Art Observed

Camille Henrot’s first solo show with Metro Pictures is something of a story in three parts, bringing the artist’s loosely flowing, cartoonish drawings to bear against her interests in environmental installation, digital artifacts and an interest in the modes and experiences of banality to bear across a broad selection of pieces. The artist’s work, presented here, offers a considered, meandering pathway through the iconography and subtle psychologies of modern life. (more…)

Robert Gober, Untitled (1997), all photos via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

Taking the fraught emotional landscape of early childhood as its central focus, Skarstedt Gallery’s London location is currently presenting a subdued but emotionally poignant group show, exploring the use and manipulation of the objects, scenarios and symbolism of youth as a productive force for a group of the gallery’s artist.  Exhibiting work from Robert Gober, the late Mike Kelley and Vija Celmins, the stripped-down exhibition carries an impressive punch. (more…)

Rineke Dijkstra, The Gymschool, St. Petersburg (2014)

Rineke Dijkstra’s new three channel video, The Gymschool, St. Petersburg, is currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery. Originally commissioned for Manifesta in 2014, this 15-minute video was shot at an acclaimed gymnastic school in St. Petersburg, Russia, utilizing the minimal, pale atmosphere of the rehearsal studio.  (more…)

René Magritte’s Miroir Universel sells over estimate for$6,661,000, via Rae Wang for Art Observed

The November auctions are over, as Christie’s capped its final major evening sale of the year to strong results, with 13 lots going unsold out of the 62 offered, tallying a final of $145,545,000. (more…)

Willem de Kooning, Untitled XXVIII (1977), via Phillips

Sales resumed for New York’s fall auction weeks yesterday evening, as a Sunday sale at Phillips combined early 20th Century works and contemporary artists in a brisk sale that began strong but stumbled towards the later half of the sale, as 9 of 52 lots ultimately went unsold, achieving a final tally of $66.9 million (just within estimate). (more…)

Robert Rauschenberg, JayWalk (Anagram) (1996), via Art Observed

Marking the first exhibition of the work of Robert Rauschenberg since the late artist’s Foundation joined Pace Gallery earlier this year (and the artist’s 9th in total), Anagrams, Arcadian Retreats, Anagrams (A Pun) brings a body of Rauschenberg’s later works to the institution’s 25th Street location in Chelsea, documenting the artist’s artistic evolution and interest in increasingly complex methods of dye transfer, plaster and paper in his compositions.

Robert Rauschenberg, Anagrams, Arcadian Retreats, Anagrams (A Pun) (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

Frank Stella, Harran II (1967), via Art Observed

Upon entering Frank Stella’s career retrospective at the Whitney, one is immediately assailed by a flourish of color and form, with the artist’s massive mural work Das Erdbeben in Chili spanning almost the full length of the fifth floor wall.  The show, which marks one of the largest for the artist in the US since his 1987 MoMA Retrospective, is a fitting introduction to his work, spanning his nearly seventy year career. (more…)

Amedeo Modigliani, Paulette Jourdain (circa 1919). All photos by Rae Wang for Art Observed.

A marathon auction calendar is set to open in New York this week, bringing a massive trove of premier works to the city’s top auction houses.  With 7 major sales over the course of the next week and a half, spectators can expect an almost unprecedented number of high value works changing hands, with major records already forecasted to fall during the proceedings at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips. (more…)

Richard Bell, Embassy (2015), via Performa

Performa, New York’s iconic and ongoing performance art Biennial has returned to the city this month, kicking off this past Sunday with a full calendar of events running through the 22nd.  The 15th edition of the event, Performa is offering a particularly strong calendar of events over the coming weeks, mixing high art stage performances, conceptual exercises, live poetics and confrontational pieces across the city’s range of venues, institutions and galleries. (more…)

Liam Gillick, A Broadcast from 1887 on the Subject of our Time (1996)

On view at Maureen Paley through November 22nd is a solo exhibition by prominent British conceptualist Liam Gillick, continuing the artist’s vastly interdisciplinary practice mining fluid and interconnected social norms, and scrutinizing the overt or arcane methods that agents of society pursue in response to such dynamics. (more…)

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Josh Smith, Untitled (2014), all photos via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Luhring Augustine is currently hosting its sixth collaboration with New York based artist Josh Smith. Having emerged in the early 2000s alongside a group of critically challenging and occasionally irreverent artists including Kelley Walker, Sterling Ruby and Seth Price, Smith is one of the foremost representatives of a genre that delivers spontaneity and audaciousness in presence, yet asserts a depth that is subliminal and immaculate.  Here, the artist takes his signature penchant for deconstruction to one of many natural conclusions, executing minimal compositions that tie his interest in gesture and hand to an almost free-associative exchange with the art historical. (more…)