Ai Weiwei with his Passport, via The Guardian
Artist Ai Weiwei is free once again to travel outside of China, following the return of his passport, The Guardian reports. The return caps a four year ordeal for the artist following his arrest for alleged tax evasion in 2011. Read More »
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Françoise Grossen, Five Rivers, 1974
Currently on view at Blum & Poe is the first survey of Swiss-born, New York-based artist Françoise Grossen, focusing on works the artist created between 1967 and 1991 using fiber, a material that has recently had something of a renaissance in contemporary practice. The material, which served as a popular material during the experimental ventures of the late 1960’s art scene, saw Grossen, as well as her peers Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks and Lenore Tawney utilizing the material in allegorical and often grandiose arrangements, culminating in 1969’s historically resonant MoMA exhibition Wall Hangings. Read More »
| Comments Off on New York РFran̤oise Grossen at Blum & Poe Through August 14th, 2015 | |
Michael Borremans, Black Mould / Pogo (2015), via Art Observed
Belgian painter Michael Borremans has long mined the aesthetic moorings of antiquity for his work, creating meticulously labored paintings that owe much to 17th and 18th century painterly technique. Originally trained as a photographer, Borremans’s craft is tempered by a notable scholarly, contextual awareness, frequently using his mooring in the present day to offer the occasional critique or inversion of his historical inspirations. Such is the case with the artist’s most recent body of work at David Zwirner’s 24 Grafton Street gallery in London, a series of dark, occasionally disturbing pieces that use the painter’s signature style to amplify their surrealist aspects.
Michael Borremans, Black Mould / The Badger’s Song (2015), via Art Observed
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Franz West, Lamp (2003), all photos by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
Marlborough Broome Street, the downtown, contemporary-focused outpost of Chelsea’s Marlborough Gallery, opened its doors for a summer group show titled Marlborough Lights this month. Curated by Leo Fitzpatrick, a newly appointed director at the gallery, the exhibition traces a loose interpretation of the lightbulb as a source of energy and an allegory for critical thinking, while exploring the potentialities for the lamp as a creative container for motives beyond mere furniture or utilitarian lighting.
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Albert Oehlen, Untitled (2005), via Art Observed
In terms of painterly invention, few can keep up with Albert Oehlen, the German artist whose relentless reinterpretation of the medium has made him one of the more intriguing, and often unpredictable, guardians of the form. Moving effortlessly from visceral abstraction to coy installation work and back, few elements of visual culture have avoided his scope over the past 30 years. This drive towards the investigation of the image, and its potentials in an increasingly mediated world, sits at the center of Oehlen’s New Museum retrospective this summer in New York, combining a carefully selected series of works that move from his early recognition during the 1980’s through to the present day. Read More »
| Comments Off on New York – Albert Oehlen: “Home and Garden” at The New Museum Through September 13th, 2015 | |
Lynda Benglis, Bounty, Amber Waves, and Fruited Plane (2014) via Storm King Art Center
As summer reaches its zenith in New York, countless outdoor exhibitions and special public projects have sprung up across the city and region, encouraging visitors to take a more intrepid stance towards the art world. Continuing its annual series of special exhibitions, the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, NY has invited New York artist Lynda Benglis to take full advantage of its sprawling Catskills property, bringing a number of her organically-inspired cast sculptures to investigate the picturesque environs upstate. With 12 outdoor sculptures and an additional 15 on view inside the museum galleries, Benglis’s exhibition is a striking look at the artist’s aesthetic interests over the past 15 years, as she increasingly incorporated notions of public, urban space and natural phenomena into her dizzyingly complex sculptural assemblages. Read More »
| Comments Off on New Windsor, NY – Lynda Benglis at Storm King Art Center Through November 8th, 2015 | |
Summer Group Show (Installation View), via Marian Goodman
The group exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery revives an excitement for the accomplishments of formal, conceptual and technical art practices during the mid to late 20th century, presenting a lively exhibition that groups together an overlapping group of six prolific artists: Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Fred Sandback, Anne Truitt, John McCracken and Lawrence Weiner, one is privy to the continuing reverberations of works that defined both minimalist and conceptual techniques in contemporary art practice, often passing from one school to the other while redefining notions of structure, method, dimensionality, and form. Stoic in its midtown location, the exhibition presents an impressive collection of conceptual and minimalist classics, offering continuing pivots and critically advanced methodological expectations of non-referential visual forms.
| Comments Off on New York – Summer Group Show at Marian Goodman Gallery Through July 31st, 2015 | |
Karl Holmqvist, Bebe Coca wall drawing (2015)
The influx of summer group shows have already begun in New York this year, as galleries presenting diverting and compelling themes take the slow summer months to explore connecting themes among their roster of artists and the broader art world. Gladstone Gallery’s Hello Walls is one of the most intriguing of these early group exhibitions, placing an emphasis on the wall as a means for contextual experiment and repositioned working structures. Read More »
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Rachel Harrison, Magnum (2015), via Regen Projects
New York-based artist Rachel Harrison is presenting a multifaceted exhibition at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects this month, exploring notions of representation, perspective and time as they function in both the context of the gallery and in the artist’s own work. Titled Three Young Framers, the exhibition’s tacit reference to the photography of August Sander points to this notion of the subject as a participant in the act of photography, echoed today in an era of widely proliferating photographic technology. Read More »
| Comments Off on Los Angeles – Rachel Harrison: “Three Young Framers” at Regen Projects Through July 18th, 2015 | |
Andra Ursuta, Scarecrow (2015), all photos via Connie Huang via Art Observed
Andra Ursuta has never shied away from a challenging, multifaceted study of global culture, executing monumentally-scaled works that are often just as imposing in their materiality and contextual weight as they are in size alone. For the artist’s most recent exhibition at Ramiken Crucible, she turns her attention once again to these juxtapositions of commercial and cultural might through the imposing forms of industrial, cultural, athletic and financial prowess. Read More »
| Comments Off on New York – Andra Ursuta: “Ο Îότος θα εγεÏθεί ξανα (The South Will Rise Again)” at Ramiken Crucible Through July 12th, 2015 | |
