Yutaka Sone, Hong Kong (2015), via David Zwirner

Art Basel is preparing to launch the first of its 2016 fair editions this week, as its international clientele touches down in the Chinese port of Hong Kong for the 4th year of the fair under the global fair franchise’s supervision.  Following last year’s impressive success and broad attendance, the fair will look to repeat its strong showing.  The challenges will be notable this year, however, in the face of slowing economic growth, and a diminished buyer pool following last year’s economic ups and downs.  Yet wealthy buyers seem to proliferate in China despite decreased confidence, seeking efficient ways to move investment out of the country’s currency during this unstable market period. Read More »

John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers, via Thisbe Gensler for Art Observed

Sprüth Magers, the German gallery with outposts in Cologne, Berlin and London, has opened its inaugural Los Angeles exhibition with a show of new works by John Baldessari.  Located across the street from LACMA on Wilshire’s Miracle Mile, the new gallery boasts two floors of paintings, its street-facing windows covered in Baldessari’s iconic scrawl, “I will not make any more boring art.”  The sixteen works in the show do not disappoint, showcasing the artist’s trademark conceptual wit in a series of works emblematizing his interest in visual and textual modes of communication, artistic authorship and the notion of absence.  Having worked across a vast range of media and styles he states descends from Duchamp, Baldessari continues to explore the agency of the viewer in finding and defining meaning in his pieces.

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Eduardo Navarro, Five minutes ago (2015), All photos via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Since unveiling its new expansion and renovated architecture in 2014, SculptureCenter has been embarking on a series of compelling, and conceptually unorthodox exhibitions, repurposing the building’s structural challenges and unique layout into an equally unique curatorial advantage.  The Eccentrics, organized by the staff curator Ruba Katrib, is the most recent example of such efforts at matching the space’s rugged industrial façade with distinctive aesthetic trends and aesthetic sensibilities in contemporary art.  Introducing eight international artists working in a variety of media, the exhibition stems from German Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin’s observations on the circus as a platform for societal norms and a performance of fabricated others. Read More »

Karla Black, Ways Appear (2016), via David Zwirner

In her second exhibition at David Zwirner, Scottish artist Karla Black takes over the gallery’s 525 West 19th street location to orchestrate a body of work that smoothly maneuvers through rigid conceptions of medium or genres.  In her previous exhibition in 2014, Black executed a carpet-like installation of bath bombs, nail polish, Sellotape and powder paint, infusing an otherworldly, ephemeral aura into the gallery’s white cube architecture through its lyrical presence.  Here, she presents another floor install, employing familiar everyday objects alongside artistically pertinent materials. The work, Includes Use, utilizes toilet paper collected from different parts of the globe, each manufactured in different shades and hues. Akin to budding flowers, the folds of toilet paper in their assorted hues pierce through earthy, plaster powder and paint, channeling a sort of surreal, utopian topography. Read More »

Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgement (c. 1495-1505), via Quincy Childs for Art Observed

Half a millennium ago, Hieronymus Bosch walked across the market square of the small Dutch town of ‘s Hertogenbosch, taking the 100 yard walk to his studio, where he would paint the timeless, demonic, and captivating works that continue to fascinate people today. To commemorate the 500^th anniversary of his birth, the town’s Het Noordbrabants Museum has secured the majority of his works for what is arguably one of the most important exhibitions of our century, Hieronymus Bosch – Visions of Genius. Exploring the timeline of his oeuvre, viewers are able to revive his living genius, and therein the fantasies and chimeras he created with a timeless sense of wonder.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Wayfarer (c. 1500-1510), via Quincy Childs for Art Observed Read More »

Matias Faldbakken, Europe is Balding (2016), via Quincy Childs for Art Observed

Matias Faldbakken sits among a select group of artists working at a certain crux of politically-critical work and a unique sense of material-based composition.  Crossing signifiers from the domestic and lifestyle commodities with the rough elements of building construction (cement, tile, nylon rope), Faldbakken’s work investigates the application and representation of force, often with disturbing contextual undertones. This notion sits at the core of Europe is Balding, his new exhibition of work at Paul Cooper Gallery in Chelsea.

Matias Faldbakken, Tiled Dashboard #3 (2016), via Quincy Childs for Art Observed Read More »

Larry Bell, Lil’ Orphan Annie (1960), all photos via Art Observed

Hauser & Wirth is currently presenting work by American sculpture and installation artist, Larry Bell at its Upper East Side location in New York, compiling a series of historically resonant works in conjunction with some of the artist’s recent environmental installs.  The exhibition, titled From the ’60s, sees the acclaimed artist presenting a body of work representative of his career working among the neo-avant-garde that followed in the wake of New York abstraction, and which continued to push the limits of perceptual and conceptual definitions of art.    Read More »

Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculptures (Installation View), via Art Observed

Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures are a unique moment in the artist’s catalog, a comical application of the artist’s subversive wit.  Transferring his patently absurdist utilizations of domestic commodities and subjects onto the human form, the works take his nuanced eye for the more unique forms and signifiers mass production and late capitalism, and apply them towards an immediate interaction with the human body.  Through his works in the series, Wurm deconstructs use and value as essentially productive elements of consumption, and then turns the intersection of actor and object into an inherently useless situationism. Read More »