Sarah Charlesworth, Stills (1980) (Installation View)

One of the preeminent figures of Pictures Generation, Sarah Charlesworth is the subject of an expansive retrospective at the New Museum, on view through September 20th.  Curated by Massimilano Gioni and Margot Norton, the show spans the broad career of the late artist, tracing her visceral practice, each gallery on the second floor reserved for a different series by the artist. Considered a key member in a group of mostly female artists that dismantled set methods of looking at images while complicating the imposed grammar of photography, Charlesworth delivered an impressive body of work that eventually cemented her as a Conceptualist more than a photographer as she herself underlined occasionally.   Read More »

Chason Matthams, Heidi (2010), via Art Observed

In our daily lives, we are constantly bombarded with imagery, navigating through the chaos of web pages, textbooks, etc. These images are being infinitely reproduced and distributed, passing through our perceptual filters to either be kept indefinitely or to be ignored entirely. This summer, Miami-born artist Chason Matthams works with Thierry Goldberg to put on his first New York solo show, Advances, None Miraculous, delving further into the chaos to create non-linear narratives from this image detritus, making comparisons that might otherwise be ignored. Read More »

Petra Cortright ‘Niki Lucy Lola Viola’ (Installation View), all images courtesy of Jeff McLane

Currently at The Depart Foundation is NIKI, LUCY, LOLA, VIOLA, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Petra Cortright, curated by Paul Young. Brightly illuminating the pitch black walls of The Depart Foundation, Cortright presents a series of works that delve into the imaginative depths of the internet-literate modern mind.  Video and animation are approached with careful attention to composition, transforming them into fully immersive presentations that function in both time and space.  As Cortright pushes the limitations of her compositions, she also familiarizes viewers with videos, digital paintings, and flash animations that utilize the aesthetic and landscape of the digital. Read More »

James Lee Byars, The Figure of Death (1987), via Art Observed

This summer, Michael Werner Gallery’s New York location exhibits a pair of sculptures from James Lee Byars; The Figure of Death (1987) and The Moon Column (1990) are shown concurrently with two other exhibitions of Byars’ work, The Diamond Floor and The Poetic Conceit and Other Works, on view at the gallery’s London and Berlin locales, respectively. Read More »

Marc Quinn, The Toxic Sublime – The Toxic Sublime – 7&3Y6″>;X[:0#’y (2015), via White Cube

Artist Marc Quinn returns to his beloved shoreline for a new exhibition of works at White Cube this month, a continuation of the artist’s ongoing interest with the motion and resulting detritus that defines patterns of water, flow, and humanity’s relationships with these fluid forces. Read More »

Mark Manders, Room with Reduced Chair and Camouflaged Factory (2003) , via Art Observed

Compiled from over 100 works in the Guggenheim Museum’s personal collection, the current exhibition at the uptown institution, Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, feels like something of a victory lap for the museum, following up on its excellent On Kawara exhibition with an extended show of contemporary works that spans the last thirty years, and which uncovers a broad curatorial focus at the core of its collection.  Emphasizing a nuanced interest in the narrative as a core unifying element for disparately realized works, objects and assemblages, Storylines pulls from diverse practices to portray the often challenging representative missions that contemporary artists set for themselves. Read More »

Tamuna Sirbiladze, Pomegranate (2015), via Art Observed

Artist Tamuna Sirbiladze’s first solo exhibition in the United States, at New York’s Half Gallery combines oil-stick on unstretched canvas, accented by an intuitive emphasis on interior design and decorative elements inside the gallery, emphasizing its position as a formerly domestic space.  Taking the artist’s signature style as a starting point, the works seem to move towards a more expansive, space-oriented technique.

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Jack Pierson, Two Places at Once (2015), via Cheim & Read

For his first exhibition with Cheim & Read in over 6 years, Jack Pierson has returned to the canvas, bringing a series of bright, pastel-colored compositions that trace the artist’s renewed interest in the painterly surface as an opportunity for encounter, while exploring his own meditative process in realizing, executing and completing his works.  Created during a self-imposed retreat on the island of North Captiva (just off Florida’s Gulf Coast), Pierson seems to have taken a moment away from his often brash, challenging wordplay and sculptural practice to examine the beaming sun and gentle waves of the island getaway. Read More »

Banksy, Dismaland (Installation View), via The Guardian

Banksy, the master of grandly executed public projects and sharp jabs at the banality of pop culture, has opened his newest project, Dismaland.  The exhibition, which the subtitle a “family theme park unsuitable for children,” is spread out across the Tropicana, an abandoned site in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, and features a number of contributions from more mainstream contemporary artists, including Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer.  Yet the park is still definitively Banksy, with his trademark irreverence and coy inversions of pop culture formats abounding across the derelict swimming club in the British resort town, and continues his barbs towards the Walt Disney Corporation.

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