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 »

Agathe Snow at The Journal, via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Agathe Snow’s current exhibition at The Journal in Williamsburg is a flurry of touchstones, compiling fragments of art history, domestic objects, knitted material, paint, and any number of accompanying materials to explore what the artist deems the full-length of human existence, an attempt at a totemic retelling of man’s relationship to the world around him.  Objects cluster and clump together, or are cast into heaps and piles spread across the spacious confines of the gallery.  The show, which continues the artist’s enigmatic approach towards sculpture, identity and its related historical contexts, is at times comic, and at others sobering, interrelating the artist’s personal life, themes of death and rebirth, and the always present backdrop of human culture.

Agathe Snow at The Journal, via Rae Wang for Art Observed Read More »

Alberto Burri, Grande sacco (Large Sack) (1952). Photo: Antonio Idini, Soprintendenza alla Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, courtesy Ministero dei Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo

The chasm between experience and representation seeps through the full expanse of The Trauma of Painting, a major Alberto Burri retrospective at the Guggenheim, an ambitious exhibition that’s as much an exploration in process as it is an embodiment of wartime and its brutal demands on humanity. Born in 1915 in the Italian town of Città di Castello, Umbria, a region steeped in the grandeur of Renaissance art, Burri’s early years were overshadowed by both World Wars.  While beginning his career as a doctor, his capture by the British and his internment in Texas during WWII propelled him into painting.  Without a formal artistic education, Burri developed a practice stemming from his training as a physician, evoking elements of abjection and corporeal tactility. Read More »

The New York Times reviews the new, $160 million expansion and renovation of the Milwaukee Museum of Art, which adds new exhibition space as well as repairs and fixes to the institution’s older wings.  “People shouldn’t come to a museum just for the architecture, and this brings back the balance to the art,” says Director Dan Keegan.   Read More »

Peter Doig, Horse and Rider (2014)

Following his solo exhibition at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa that coincided with the 56th Venice Biennale, Peter Doig is the subject of an exhibition at Michael Werner‘s Upper East Side townhouse with his new body of work.  Featuring works from the artist’s Italian debut, the selection of pieces at the gallery includes works Doig created in 2015, reflecting the Trinidad-based artist’s most recent artistic endeavors, and an expansion of his increasingly fluid and expressive hand. Read More »

Ellsworth Kelly, Curves on White (Four Panels) (2012), via Art Observed

Ellsworth Kelly, a pioneer of 20th Century abstraction and an early voice in the development of color field painting and cut-canvas work, has passed away at the age of 92.

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