Joyce Pensato, Mouse Mask (2015), all images courtesy Petzel Gallery

To advertise her fourth solo show at Petzel Gallery, Joyce Pensato released a short video, a brashly black and white, slapstick affair, set to classic ragtime piano tunes.  In it, superhero Batman is knocked upside the head and shipped off to the exhibition, while Pensato, playing the gun moll in round-framed dark sunglasses, imitates her dumbly-smiling cartoon portraits. The video perfectly encapsulates Castaway, a new series of black and white cartoon portraits, erasure-paintings and drawings, both large-scale and small-scale, in addition to digital c-prints of the artist’s studio space. Read More »

Thomas Demand, Backyard (2014), via Matthew Marks

The artifice that drives Thomas Demand’s practice is simple, but the results are impressively commanding.  Utilizing carefully cut and assembled cardboard pieces to create familiar images, scenes and spaces, the artist’s work carries an evocatively nostalgic aura, while emphasizing his own craft in the construction of the scene itself. Read More »

Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit (1970), via Art Observed

Beyond his most iconic performance works and sculptural environments, Joseph Beuys’s multiples constitute an entire aspect of the artist’s practice rarely seen as a complete series of works.  While some of his more iconic small-scale works, including Capri Battery or Sled, as well as his prints and drawings have become iconic entries in the artist’s elusive, and often enigmatic creative history, the works have rarely been presented as a complete series. Read More »

Blinky Palermo, Wooster Street (1975), all images via David Zwirner

In collaboration with the Palermo Archive, David Zwirner presents an exhibition of rarely displayed works by Blinky Palermo at its 537 West 20th Street gallery. The works on display in this exhibition were made by the artist from 1973 to 1976, and range from objects to paintings and large-scale drawings. Following two years after David Zwirner’s exhibition of Palermo’s works on paper from 1976–1977, this show further explores the artist’s short but influential career, which is largely associated with abstraction, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, but also extends beyond these realms.  These pieces are being presented together for the first time since their installation in Heiner Friedrich, New York in 1974.

Blinky Palermo, Objekt mit Wasserwage (Object with Spirit Level, 1969–1973) Read More »

Daniel Keller, Stack 1 (2014), via Max Hetzler

Presenting a selection of artists working at the bleeding edge of social and economic critique, Max Hetzler’s exhibition Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism easily clocks in as one of the season’s most unexpectedly energetic exhibitions.  Curated by Lisa Schiff, Leslie Fritz and Eugenio Re Rebaudengo, and spread between the gallery’s Paris and Berlin locations, the show places post-capitalist theory and economic transition as its central conceit, examining the material and social costs of contemporary life within systems of capital exchange.  Pulling from the works of writer Jeremy Rifkin, the exhibition explores a historical juncture at which the traditional modes of national economic and political systems are slowly giving way, and a new, digitally-accelerated model of consumption and distribution is swiftly establishing itself.

Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism (Installation View – Paris), via Max Hetzler Read More »

Tomi Ungerer, All in One (Installation View)

The Drawing Center is currently honoring pioneer illustrator Tomi Ungerer, with an ambitious look at his expansive career of diverse themes and motifs.  Born in Alsace shortly before World War II tore through Europe, Ungerer moved to New York in 1956, where he published his first series of works.  Although his divergent artistic interests led him to compile a comprehensive oeuvre from advertisement campaigns for publications including the New York Times to graphically striking illustrations criticizing the politics of his time, Ungerer came to prominence in the U.S. as a children’s books author. His objection to this type of categorization eventually led him to move to Nova Scotia with his wife, later followed by another relocation to Ireland, where he currently resides. Read More »

Paul Chan, Sock N Tease (2013), via Art Observed

For a semi-retired artist, Paul Chan has been busy in past years.  Following his step back from creating video and installation work in 2010, the artist dove headfirst into the world of publishing with Badlands Unlimited, an imprint responsible for a broad variety of works that have included Saddam Hussein’s On Democracy, and even a recent series of erotic works inspired by Olympia Press, the Paris-based smut peddlers that also published some of the Twentieth century’s most significant works of literature (Lolita and Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifiction Trilogy).

This diversity of practice was what earned him the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize, one of the U.S.’s top honors, and an exhibition at The Guggenheim.  Given his output over the past decade, the artist is presenting a new series of sculptures that combine his recent publishing ventures with his particular approach to ready-made, object-focused sculpture. Read More »

Gabriel Orozco, Cats and Watermelons (1992), all images courtesy MoCA Tokyo

Inner Cycles is an exhibition of new works and historically significant pieces by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, who has been an influential figure in the international contemporary art community since the early 90’s.  Composed of found objects, photographs, and sculptures, the exhibition is meant to show a “universe in flux” as objects are constantly appropriated and re-appropriated for new uses.

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Philip Taaffe, Choir (2014-2015), all photographs by Farzad Owrang, © Philip Taaffe; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

In his large-scale paintings on display at Luhring Augustine’s Bushwick Gallery, Philip Taaffe blends historical and cultural motifs in dizzying collages full of color and life. His exploration of shapes and designs spanning space and time draw on historical narratives to bring overlapping cultural archetypes into view.

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