Agnes Martin, Untitled (1999-2000), via Sotheby’s

With the opening days of the Frieze art fair in London also come the annual fall auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, launching another season of marquee sales at the auction houses.  Starting on October 14th, one day after the fair opens its doors for the VIP viewing, the sales will offer a second opportunity for collectors to vie for top works. Read More »

Sol LeWitt, Drawing Series I,II,III,IIII (Drawings for Xerox Book) 24 Drawings (1968), via Art Observed

In 1968, a group of artists interested in the material limits of art practice, and the interrelations between text, language and action launched The Xerox Book, a published art book culling contributions from Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Lawrence Weiner to be printed and copied as an easily distributed art work.  Presented at Paula Cooper’s 21st Street Location in New York, The Xerox Book is a return to this landmark publication, incorporating a series of works and objects drawn from or inspired by each artist’s contributions.

The Xerox Book (Installation View) © Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Photo: Steven Probert

Read More »

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Orange over Mountain Walk, Italian Mask M30.g) (2014), via Anton Kern

Twisting the formal language of both his chosen objects and the painterly signifiers he has built up over the course of his career, Mark Grotjahn returns to Anton Kern Gallery for his fourth solo exhibition with the New York Gallery.  Building on the sculptural objects presented last year at the artist’s exhibition at the Nasher in Dallas, the works on view take Grotjahn’s interest in cast-off materials and repurposed objects, the show turns the artist’s frequently reoccurring subject, the cardboard box, into a container for his own aesthetic interests. Read More »

Dana Schutz, Fight in an Elevator (2015), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Petzel Gallery is a series of new works by artist Dana Schutz, the New York-based painter whose fluid hand, surreal scenarios and meticulous commitment to polymorphous narratives have made her a leading voice among U.S. painters. Read More »

Wolfgang Tillmans, Iquitos Dos (2013), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

David Zwirner is currently presenting artist Wolfgang Tillmans’ PCR, his first exhibition with the gallery following his departure from longtime representatives Andrea Rosen Gallery. Doing the justice to the exhibition’s inaugural nature, the gallery has reserved its two locations on 19th street for the massive show of photographs, sculpture and video, which takes its name from an abbreviation of the scientific term “polymerase chain reaction.”  A technique applied in molecular biology to reach a deeper and more particular genetic identity for a person’s DNA, PCR serves as a metaphor for the works on view, which near a hundred in total.  Each piece here underscores the breadth and depth of the artist’s expansive oeuvre, and every piece, similar to a molecule, contributes to build a larger pattern, holding traces of the German-born artist’s decades long career. Read More »

David Douard, bat-breath battery (Installation View), all photos by Daphné Mookherjee for Art Observed

David Douard’s bat-breath battery, presented at the Gallery Chantal Crousel, is a hybridization of formal territories, exploring correlations between poetry and vernacular, human and machine – recurring interests for the artist.  Often delving into the mechanisms of transformation and development, Douard’s work centers on  infectious relations between different worlds and objects, explained through media terminologies that draw from tech, biology, history, and visual culture at large.

Read More »

Sarah Sze, Hammock (2015)

Following her acclaimed 55th Venice Biennale presentation for the U.S. Pavillon in 2013 and her current participation in this year’s Okwui Enwezor-curated 56th installment, Sarah Sze is the subject of a solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery for her new body of work, returning to common themes that have informed her particularly interdisciplinary practice over two floors of the gallery space.  As is frequently the case with Sze’s work, architecture is often used as a meditative force on the space surrounding her pieces, rather than a utilitarian system of constructing materials.  Here, these explorations fall into conversation with Sze’s use of visually calm and fluid materials, as she strips the physicality of such objects from their primary definitions and purposes. Read More »

Barnaby Furnas, The First Morning (Scarlet) (2015), via Art Observed

Presenting a new body of work that combines his prior interests in masses of color and space with geometric inversions and breaks with the autonomy of the canvas, Barnaby Furnas returns to Marianne Boesky this fall, his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery since 2002.  Continuing his ongoing interest in the formal potentials for landscape painting in the Twenty-First century, Furnas’s new work negotiates a line between modern practice and the historical innovations of his forbears over the past several centuries. Read More »

Adrián Vilar Rojas, Two Suns (2015), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

The work of Adrián Vilar Rojas often occupies itself with remainders, leftovers, and detritus from the visual and aesthetic languages of human culture.  Suspending forms and materials in a timeless ruins that translates human-kind’s greatest accomplishments into a faded wreckage, the artist still manages to incorporate a certain degree of grace and elegance to his work, allowing the natural elements and human impulses that underscore his project to gradually take the foreground. Read More »