Ryan McNamara, Performance Plaque (2014)

Ryan McNamara star has rapidly been on the rise in the past years, as his infamous performance commissions, among which are his breakthrough Performa 09 piece A Fag Could Do That and his McLaren Award-winning performance MEEM, which the artist brought to Miami Beach last December. Following the immense success of his recentresidency, McNamara is making his comeback to New York at Mary Boone Gallery’s Midtown location with an exhibition that delves into the tangible aspects of performance art, the remains of a performance (body parts, clothing, and materials), which are left behind following a piece. (more…)

Harmony Korine, Fex Chex (2014), all images Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Currently on view at Gagosian Beverly Hills is a group of new paintings by American film director, producer, screenwriter, author, and artist Harmony Korine. Although he is primarily working within the mediums of film and writing, Korine has recently begun publicly displaying his works, immense, swirling compositions composed in a variety of techniques and palettes.

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Mamma Andersson, Behind the Curtain (Installation View)

Currently on view at David Zwirner is Behind the Curtain, a new body of work by one of the most recognized contemporary artists from Sweden, Mamma Andersson. The Stockholm-based artist has gained international acclaim in recent years with her solo shows in Aspen Museum of Art, Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin and a mid-career survey that travelled to Finland and UK after its Swedish premiere several years ago. (more…)

Yael Bartana, Inferno (2013)

Yael Bartana’s new body of work, containing two video pieces, two photographs and a neon installation, is currently on view at Petzel Gallery. The Tel Aviv and Amsterdam-based artist has become one of the strongest artistic voices from her home in Israel, a territory Bartana, in her own words, aims to ‘treat as a social laboratory’. Living abroad gives the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design graduate the opportunity to maintain a neutral outside perspective towards her country that has always remained embedded in political, religious and social turmoil. (more…)

Pierre Huyghe, Zoodram 5 (2011)

Following a year of strong solo exhibitions and special projects in the United States and abroad, Pierre Huyghe has opened a the first major retrospective devoted to his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, pulling together a combination of his most ambitious videos, sculptures and installation environments, allowing a broad few of the artist’s continued interests in fluctuations of time, space and matter as expressed within the gallery environment.  Huyghe’s retrospective, which first opened in Paris, early last year, finally makes it to U.S. soil, bringing with it a group of 50 projects culled from the artist’s 20 year career. (more…)

Sturtevant, Duchamp Relâche (1967)

The Museum of Modern Art is hosting the first US exhibition focusing on the work of the late Sturtevant, one of the foremost artists to initiate conversations on commodification and appropriation of artworks, after the late artist was the subject of various solo shows in Europe. Born Elaine Horan in Ohio, Sturtevant always chose to remain discrete about her biography, so much that her year of birth is still a matter of discussion. (more…)

Berlinde de Bruyckere, 028 (2007), all images courtesy S.M.A.K and © Mirjam Devriendt

Currently on view at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium is the first mid-career presentation of the ouevre of Berlinde De Bruyckere (1964, Ghent) and the first solo exhibition of her work in Belgium since 2002. Entitled Sculptures & Drawings. 2000-2014, the exhibition is an interwoven series of associations of form and content, presented through the mediums of painting, drawing, and installation art.

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Rineke Dijkstra, Selected Works (Installation View), all images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery Paris

On view at Marian Goodman’s Paris exhibition space is the third exhibition from Dutch photographer and filmmaker Rineke Dijkstra, composed of of two new videos filmed in Russia.  Dijkstra became internationally known for her beach portraits of teenagers on the beaches of South Carolina, Poland, and Ukraine during the 1990’s, but she has also been producing lesser-known video portraits since 1996. The videos on display here, focusing on young ballerinas, were commissioned by Manifesta (European Biennial of Contemporary Art) for its most recent edition in 2014.

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Paramount Ranch 2, via Art Observed

Tucked away in the mountain ranges outside of Santa Monica, the Paramount Ranch is a relic of the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system, a massive film set and town used to shoot Westerns.  It’s just this history that makes the landscape a fittingly Californian location to stage an art fair.  Now in its sophomore year, Paramount Ranch offers a unique take on the fair experience: galleries and artists are invited to participate, steering away from any formal application process, and the selection of works often leans towards the more imaginative and immediate.

Haciencda at Paramount Ranch 2, via Art Observed (more…)

John Waters, Beverly Hills John (2012)

Marianne Boesky Gallery is hosting its third collaboration with John Waters, a pioneer of American camp and “trash culture” since the 1970’s, particularly through his feature breakthrough Pink Flamingos in 1972.  Throughout his career, Waters has constantly redefined the elements that constitute American culture, at a time when the nation was premature to notions such as homosexuality or kitsch, and used these often marginalized cultures within a studied cinematic and artistic framework.

John Waters, Still from Kiddie Flamingos (2014) (more…)

Polly Apfelbaum, HWP 10-20 (2014), via Art Observed

The White Columns Annual offers a particularly resonant opening note for New York’s art world each year.  Refusing an overly objective approach to the curation of a “year in review” style group show, the event encourages, and even emphasizes subjectivity, turning the keys over to one group or person each year.  This year, the all-female art collective Cleopatra’s has been handed the reigns for the Annual’s 9th Edition, with the end result being a colorful, expansive show that is at turns somber, wry and compelling. (more…)

Danh Vo, Your mother sucks cocks in Hell (2015), all images courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo and his family fled Vietnam in a homemade wooden boat a few years after the Communists’ victory, when Vo was just four. In his current exhibition, “Homosapiens,” at Marian Goodman London, as in much of his body of work, the intersection of the historical and the personal is explored through artifacts, documents, and photographs—fragments, begging for the viewer to find their context, that bring into question the nature of identity and belonging. (more…)

Gillian Wearing, Me As an Artist in 1984 (2014), all Photos Courtesy of Regen Projects Los Angeles.

One of the most prominent members of the Young British Artists, Gillian Wearing, who in the past few decades has established a unique and enduring voice in the contemporary discourse, is presenting her new body of work at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects. The artist’s fourth collaboration with the gallery, everyone, features two new video pieces as well as various multimedia works that juxtapose Wearing’s investigations on personal memory, confrontation with past and unfolding of angst as a direct result. (more…)

Diana Thater, Science, Fiction (2014), via Art Observed

Diana Thater’s new exhibition on view at David Zwirner’s 19th Street Exhibition is an exercise in restraint.  Consisting of a pair of video compositions and a monumental structure in a light-saturated installation piece, the artist moves towards an experience of space, both in an immediate and more figurative sense, that engages the magnitude of human experience on both macro and micro scales. (more…)

Egon Schiele, Death and Maiden (1915), via Kunsthaus Zurich

The Kunsthaus Zürich is currently presenting a historical study in portraiture and figuration over the course of a century, comparing the output of Austrian painter Egon Schiele with YBA-affiliated painter Jenny Saville, and tying together the pair’s varying approaches to powerful and, at times, visceral depictions of the human body.  Culling works from across the expanse of both artist’s careers, the exhibition seems to function both as a pair of parallel historical studies in each artist’s inspirations and development, while allowing a certain degree of overlap and cross-referencing into the various techniques each artist employed. (more…)

Mary Weatherford, La Noche (2014), via Art Observed

The Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated exhibition of contemporary painting, curated by Laura Hoptman, presents a cursory survey of current trends in this ever-evolving medium. Taking the concept of nonlinear time as its conceptual crux, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World attempts to parse the impact that the daily experience of digital media has had on painting specifically, and on visual culture more broadly.  (more…)

Henri Matisse, The Snail (1953), via Art Observed

There’s a moment at the end of Henri Matisse’s landmark exhibition of his late “cut-out” works, currently on view at MoMA in New York, when the viewer emerges into the last room to view Matisse’s final canvases, immense explosions of color and form that immediately arrest the viewer with their dynamic, minimal surfaces. (more…)

Peter Doig, 100 Years Ago (Carrera) (2005-2007), courtesy of Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne and Centre de création industrielle, Paris

Currently on view at Fondation Beyeler in Basel is a survey of important oil paintings by Peter Doig (1959), as well as a number of seminal works on paper and a monumental mural.

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David Altmejd, Flux (Installation View), via Art Observed

Canadian-born, New York-based artist David Altmejd brings his uniquely executed sculptures and installations to the Musée D’Art Moderne in Paris this winter, the artist’s first career retrospective in France, and one which sees him realizing one of his most ambitious new sculptures to date, alongside a selection of his work from the past twenty years. (more…)

Richard Tuttle, I Don’t Know, or The Weave of Textile Language, (Installation View), all images courtesy Tate Modern

The largest work ever created by American sculptor Richard Tuttle (1941) is currently on view at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which has been the host to some of the world’s most striking works of monumental contemporary art.  I Don’t Know, or The Weave of Textile Language was a commissioned work, composed of vast cuts of fabrics designed by Tuttle himself from both manmade and natural fibers. Three vibrant colors are hung in a bold, majestic display, making use of its coiling form to generate a sense of movement within the massive hall.

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Al Taylor, Full Gospel Neckless (Middelfart) (1997), via Art Observed

Al Taylor’s work sits at a unique intersection of material fascination and object politics.  Combining the familiar materials of modern construction and design, Taylor’s work often investigated the pairings and interrelations of objects formed not only by the human’s aesthetic agenda, but equally by the complementary formal designs of the materials themselves.  These intersections can be seen in quite stark execution currently at David Zwirner, where the gallery’s 20th Street location is currently presenting a body of work created 1989 and 1997. (more…)

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus (1839), all images courtesy Tate Britain

On view at the Tate Britain is the first exhibition devoted entirely to the work of Joseph Mallord Wiliam Turner, created between the years of 1835 and his death in 1851. The show brings together major series of works including a group of square pictures highlighting Turner’s tendency towards innovation, even at the end of his life.

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Louise Lawler, Dots and Slices (Traced) (2006/2013), via Sprüth Magers

In 2013, Louise Lawler performed a series of “tracings” at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, taking previously executed photographs from Lawler’s broad body of work, and converting the image down to a simple vector graphic in partnership with artist and children’s book illustrator Jon Buller.  These tracings are currently the subject of the artist’s most recent solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers Berlin, as Levine returns to her particularly subtle brand of institutional critique. (more…)

Andy Warhol, Shadows (Installation View), Photo by Brian Forrest. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork.

In the late 1970’s, Andy Warhol embarked on a new printing project, replicating a single photographic image of the artist’s studio bathed in shadow, a single “cap” of light hovering just to the left of center.  Reproducing the image over one hundred times in a series of color pairings, shades and contrasts, the work created a haunting, surreal environment, currently on view at MOCA in LA for a landmark exhibition of the piece on the West Coast. (more…)