Serpentine Pavilion, via Serpentine Galleries

The Serpentine Pavilion, the annual summer architecture project hosted by Serpentine Galleries, has opened in London, a swirling series of multicolored chambers and hallways by Spanish architecture firm SelgasCano (the first commission from a Spanish firm) resting on the lawn outside of the museum galleries. Read More »

Huma Bhabha at Salon 94 (Installation View)

Huma Bhabha’s new body of work is currently on view at both Lower East Side locations of Salon 94, showing the Pakistani-born and New York-based artist resuming her sculpture focused multi-media practice, pulling from vast inspirational sources, with her third exhibition at the gallery.  Spanning over centuries, religions, cultures and disciplines; Bhabha’s influences generate works of art that are hybrids of various methodologies. Not dictated by historical or cultural hierarchy, threads Bhabha weaves into her practice articulate on set modes of history writing, problematizing its embedded dynamics. Dystopian or utopian depending on viewers’ perception, Bhabha’s assemblies – most notably her robust sculptures – revoke remnants of a somber future that draws nourishment from its past. Read More »

Rob Pruitt, Esprit de Corps (Hokuskai’s Great Wave) (2015), via Art Observed

Rob Pruitt turned 50 this year, and marked the occasion with the opening of this summer’s bi-annual artist retrospective at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, the sprawling complex owned by magazine mogul Peter Brant, just across the street from his family home.  The show, taking its suburban locales and high art context as a point of departure, is a remarkable distillation of Pruitt’s practice over the last decades, and welcomes a renewed perspective on the artist’s own personal history in relation to his work. Read More »

Bruce Nauman, Pencil lift / Mr. Rogers (2013), all photos by Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Bruce Nauman presented a major solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, his first in France in the last 15 years. Imagined for the bright and airy building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the show features a selection of large-scale works, exploring the complex relationship between time, body, voice and surroundings.

The highly influential American-born artist established his studio in New Mexico in the late 1970s. The experience of his workspace has been a subject matter for a number of his works ranging from installation, performance, video, sound and sculpture. The broad array of media in Nauman’s Å“uvre is masterfully presented in this exhibition which brings in resonance iconic works from the 70s, 80s and 90s along with very recent productions, in an ongoing dialogue between reality and its representation, performance and its documentation, repetition and memory.

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Georg Baselitz, Glastrinker Beckmann (1981), All images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

The prolific German artist Georg Baselitz is the subject of Skarstedt’s current show with two series of paintings from the 1980’s.  Entitled Drinkers and Orange Eaters, the exhibition is composed of two series that the adept Neo-Expressionist created as a study on representation and pictorial narrative.  Accentuating the gallery’s minimal but elegant townhouse space, these vibrant paintings, emanating from Baselitz’s gestural brushstrokes fervidly reclaim the legacy of oil on canvas. Read More »

David Salle, Yellow Fellow (2015), via Art Observed

Painter David Salle is currently presenting a new body of work at Skarstedt’s Chelsea outpost, returning to his previous Product Paintings series in a set of vividly rendered prints and paintings that seem to address not only the artwork as object and commodity, but also that relation to the Post-War canon. Read More »

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 18th Construction (1915), via Sotheby’s

Following the big ticket sales in Art Basel this past week, the art market’s focus will shift to London this week, where a pair of major Impressionist and Modern Evening sales will launch the last two weeks of market activity before the summer months and their lull of activity.  Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s will face off again following last month’s monumental sales results in New York, with a number of extremely impressive works offered, often with equally impressive price tags. Read More »

Richard Prince, Original (Installation View)

Richard Prince’s Original series is currently the subject of a new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, nestled at the gallery’s Upper East Side bookstore showroom, and using Prince’s ‘arrangements’ of soft-core adult novels with artworks created for their covers, showing the next step in the artist’s fascination with collecting, ownership and presentation.  An ardent, perhaps even obsessive collector himself, Prince often mines and unfolds worn and sometimes clandestine images, not only from vintage pulps, which serve for the selection here, but also from copies of influential literary pieces, a pattern the artist has studied throughout his career of media appropriations.  A devoted member of a group of artists who started experimenting with appropriation in the ‘70’s, Prince usually employs minimal alteration to his subject matter; rearranging, editing and sometimes even rephotographing what already exists. Read More »