A CNN article looks at the factors causing astronomical jumps in price in the art market recently, and the extended efforts of the auction houses to entice buyers.  “You bring as many people as you can into the headquarters through dinners and cocktail parties, and your global specialists center there and try to sell the work,” says Lisa Dennison, Chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America. Read More »

Brice Marden, Eastern Moss (2012-2015)

Brice Marden is the subject of a solo exhibition that spans three all three 22nd street locations for Matthew Marks Gallery, unveiling a new body of paintings and drawings that continue a number of the artist’s ongoing interests with the narrative potential for color.  The works on view here possess a demure yet captivating appeal, underlining the New York-based artist’s continued interest in the intersections of 20th Century abstraction, broader art histories, and the use of color-field composition in varying applications. Read More »

Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Fragonard Young Girl Playing with her Dog) (2014-2015)

Challenging the established notion of history as linear entity, art history often manifests itself as an intergenerational pattern, embedding variant heterogenous theories, movements and phenomena onto compound structures, while just as often disregarding its most sound chronological hierarchies. Jeff Koons, whose current exhibition at Gagosian Gallery continues his entries in his series of Gazing Ball works, takes this opportunity to scrutinize the constellation of art history, drawing his own threads and theories through a diverse and complexly interrelated series of works. Read More »

Mark Bradford, Deimos (2015)

Over the past several years, Mark Bradford has had something of a meteoric rise in the art world, garnering impressive recognition, critically and commercially for his exhilarating painterly style and vivid shifts in form and technique . Committed to creating uncompromisingly grandiose and ambitious works of art, Bradford has been the subject of rightfully increasing acclaim, most recently proven by his solo exhibition Scorched Earth at the Hammer Museum in his hometown Los Angeles, and his recent commission for a massive installation to accompany his upcoming retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Read More »

George Baselitz, Untitled (2015), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Intertwining his own personal artistic process with distinct threads of historical reference, wry humor and disparate aesthetic threads, Georg Baselitz is currently on view at Gagosian Gallery’s 980 Madison space for a small exhibition of new works, positioning the artist’s drawings and watercolors as a “visitation,” as the artist terms it, by Japanese ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai.

Georg Baselitz, Visit from Hokuskai (Installation View)

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Joseph Kosuth, Agnosia, an Illuminated Ontology (Installation View), all photos via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

A preeminent member of the pioneering group of conceptual practitioners that sought to dissolve art making from declarations of objective emotion or feeling, Joseph Kosuth remains a marker stone for the reach and potential for Conceptual Art, still using his work to scrutinize the limits and definitions of contextual meaning, often removed from primarily aesthetic concerns, at age 70.  Agnosia, an Illuminated Ontology strikes the viewer as a large-scale installation orchestrated by Kosuth at Sean Kelly Gallery, where the artist, who splits his time between New York and London, is showing his first exhibition since 2011. Read More »

Rudolf Stingel (Installation View), Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Italian artist Rudolf Stingel takes over both of Sadie Coles HQ’s locations in London this month, bringing with him a typically enigmatic body of work that combines the artist’s interests in the role, transformation and translation of the painted image, taken in conjunction with its relation to photographic context, time and the natural world. Read More »

Marina Abramovic and Igor Levit, Goldberg (2015), photo by Marco Anelli

Over the course of the past two years, Marina Abramovic’s work has shifted towards the meditative, and the participatory simultaneously, a seemingly dissonant set of parameters that have resulted in a range of peculiar performances experimenting with sensory deprivation, mediated experiences of space, and gentle brushes with the artist’s person, as she acts as a guide through her own created environments.  Her practice continues this month at the Park Avenue Armory, where the the artist has partnered with pianist Igor Levit for Goldberg, a meditative concert of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Read More »