Gilbert & George
, THE BANNERS
 (Installation View), 9x9x9, White Cube Bermondsey
 © Gilbert & George. Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)

THE BANNERS is the title of Gilbert & George’s ongoing exhibition at White Cube’s Bermondsey location, following the eminent duo’s larger scale installment Scapegoating Pictures for London in 2014. Resuming their sturdily rebellious stand against anything corporate or organizational, this current exhibition, akin to their previous one, appropriates the vocal language of political outrage and public protests that have been normalized and spread widely by the media.  As its self-explanatory title dictates, the exhibition includes thirty banners bearing ten different slogans and each repeating on three different white papers. Read More »

Yoko Ono, THE RIVERBED (Installation View), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Spread across two gallery spaces, Yoko Ono’s THE RIVERBED demonstrates the possibility and presence of basic human connection through the manipulation of various materials.  Together, the assemblages of stone, string, and ceramic create a process of healing through, as the artist says,”love, and creativity.”  This concept of mending is both internal and external, as string criss-crosses the space of each gallery, continued through pencil and paper on the sketchbooks provided.

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Tetsumi Kudo, Untitled (1971), via Hauser and Wirth

A key figure in the development of Tokyo’s Post-War, “Anti-Art” Movement, the work of Tetsumi Kudo explodes with a distinct sense of withered vibrancy: human body parts, plants and hulking, distending forms contend for space on what appear to be plots of earth, colored in sickening tones and rarely, if ever, clustering together beyond a few lilting stems.  The artist’s work, the subject of an exhibition at Hauser and Wirth Zurich (in collaboration with Andrea Rosen, which represents his estate), is a darkly realized challenge to the aftermath of nuclear war in Japan, and the artist’s disillusionment with the modernist notions of progress and “blind humanism.” Read More »

Anish Kapoor, Internal Object in Three Parts (detail) (2013-2015) © Anish Kapoor; Courtesy the artist & Lisson Gallery

Anish Kapoor & 17th century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn are placed into a neighborly conversation at the Rijksmuseum this month, as dualisms of flesh and meat, figuration and abstraction underscore the more nuanced connections between the pair, and illustrate the ever-changing focal points, yet unified interests in the shapes and forms of the human body and its depiction. Read More »

Urs Fischer, Bruno and Yoyo (2015), via Vito Schnabel Gallery

Vito Schnabel has taken over the lease at the former St. Moritz home of Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, marking the curator’s first permanent gallery space with an exhibition of new work by Urs Fischer, as well as a public installation at the nearby Kulm Hotel by Sterling Ruby.  The pair of exhibitions are a strong next step for the curator, paying homage to the history of Bischofberger’s space while emphasizing Schnabel’s vision for a gallery engaged with the broader landscape of his new home. Read More »

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Two Times #3 (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Delving into fragmented, often confounding representations of history and identity, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have brought a new body of works to Pace Gallery in New York City, continuing the couple’s unique vision in representing and reinterpreting their past in Russia and their challenging figurative work which ties into dualities and pluralized senses of time and space. Read More »

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic (1970), via Art Observed

Few series of work are as immediately recognizable as Robert Motherwell’s Elegies, his bold collection of compositions, inflected with broad strokes of black meant as a public lament to the bitter civil war that upended the Spanish Republic in the years leading up to World War II, and which saw the installation of fascist leader Francisco Franco.  The works, which Motherwell would continue until his death in 1991, are a striking visual critique, great swaths of black obliterating his spare compositions in white, blue and other subdued grounds, as if the war itself has overshadowed the artist’s own painterly hand blotting out his compositions with the tense, recurring figures of bars and blots of paint. Read More »

Robert Smithson, The Machine Taking a Wife (1964), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Before he began his pioneering work in land art and environmental sculpture in the late 1960’s, and shortly before his untimely death in 1973, Robert Smithson was exploring the quirkier, more colorful ends of the pop art spectrum, pulling from a broad range of figurative and cultural images.  Pornography, textured plastic, machinery and photographs collided in the Pop works, drawing from the often lascivious but always captivating landscape of Times Square, with its sci-fi movie houses, porn shops and street walkers combining to create a fitting commentary on the excess of American consumer culture.

Robert Smithson, Untitled [Zig zag star center, motorcyclist with wings, and microscope with wings] (1964), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

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Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Officers) (1982), via Petzel Gallery

Taking over the uptown, 67th Street location of Petzel Gallery, Troy Brauntuch is presenting a selection of early compositions, created between 1976 and 1983, illustrating some of the artist’s early interests in techniques of photographic reproduction and representation, executed in a variety of materials and styles that hint at the artist’s later work.

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Head) (1978), via Petzel Gallery

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Bradley Kronz, Untitled (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Tucked away on the fourth floor of 134 Bowery, an understated yet impressive Federal-style building, LOMEX opened its doors late last month with minimal fanfare.  The space, operated by curator, writer and artist Alexander Shulan, takes its name from one of Robert Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway plans, a strictly utilitarian concept which would have razed much of the area around the gallery’s home, and once served as the studio of Eva Hesse. Read More »