Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way, featuring Errollyn Wallen, Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha and Tanita Tikaram. Photo: Cristiano Corte © British Council

The awards for the 59th Edition of the Venice Biennale have been announced, with artist Sonia Boyce taking home the Golden Lion for the Best National Pavilion, while Simone Leigh took the Golden Lion for participation in the Main Exhibition. This is the first time in Biennale history that both of the top awards at the event were won by black women.  (more…)

Marguerite Humeau, all images via Art Observed

Spread between above the green lawns and trees of Venice’s Giardini, and the winding streets and canals of the Arsenale nearby, the Venice Biennale’s Central Pavilion has opened its doors for its Vernissage event, kicking off the 59th annual edition of the exhibition, and welcoming visitors to its first open viewings before it opens to the public this coming Saturday. Curated by Cecelia Alemani, Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the show draws on the book by surrealist Leonora Carrington, where “life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination.” Here, Alemani invites a series of artists to imagine new worlds, visualize and pose them throughout the exhibition sites.

Katharina Fritsch

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Venice, via Art Observed

For the first time since 2019, the Venice Biennale will open amidst the waterways and winding streets of the lagoon city, with the 59th edition of the event returning to its position of prominence. The crown jewel of the art world’s circuit of international art exhibitions and curated projects, with over 100 years of history behind it, the return of the exhibition sees the Most Serene Republic filled with countless shows and projects alongside the main exhibitions at the Arsenale and Giardini.

Cecilia Alemani, via the curator (more…)

Joe Bradley, Nothing Ever Happened (2022), via Petzel

On view this month at Petzel Gallery, artist Joe Bradley touches down for a show of new works that underscore the artist’s continued evolution and exploration of a certain type of wide-eyed abstraction, balancing color, stroke and structure through a range of vivid fields of paint. Marking his first solo show with the gallery since leaving Gagosian last year, Bhoga Marga, roughly translated from Sanskirt as “the enduring path of experience,” showcases the artist’ on a new plane of gesture and composition here.

Joe Bradley, Bhoga Marga (Installation View), via Petzel

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Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Hop Louie (2020), via Chateau Shatto

On view this month at Château Shatto in Los Angeles, the gallery presents Fiona Connor’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs. Presented as a quite literal archive of closed spaces, vacant sites of cultural memory, the show makes much of the landscape of Los Angeles, introducing and removing works from the show over the course of its staging.

Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Once Upon a Page (2020), via Chateau Shatto
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Alvaro Barrington, The Rose That Grew from Concrete: Frank Miller Batman LA (2022), via Blum and Poe

On view this month at Blum & Poe’s Los Angeles exhibition space, artist Alvaro Barrington presents a powerful, challenging show dedicated to the music and culture of Los Angeles and New York during the 1990’s. Bearing the title 91–98 jfk–lax border, the show presents itself as an expression of joy and hope, and a tribute to the thriving hip-hop culture of both cities during the decade.  (more…)

Ryan Foerster, Looking Negative (2015-2022), via Martos

Marking his first exhibition with Martos Gallery since 2012, artist Ryan Foerster presents Frictional Archaeology this month in New York, presenting a series of works examining the artist’s wide-ranging practice through the prism of his photography, and showcasing works from the last decade in which Foerster excavates technical slippages in the photographic medium and the apparatus of the camera, achieving plastic effects through manipulating and embracing faded emulsion, deteriorated film, defective lenses and chance occurrences in the darkroom. (more…)

Austin Lee, Like It Is (Installation View), via Jeffrey Deitch

For over a decade, Austin Lee has explored the emotional potential of software-influenced art. Combining traditional techniques with digital tools to create colorful, energetic compositions in painting, sculpture and animation, the artist’s use of software in conjunction with his physical materials render works that split the difference between digital and physical spaces. For his most recent show, on view now at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, the artist explores emotion and physicality once again through a series of hazy, brightly colored paintings that continue their navigation through notions of tactility and experience. (more…)

Walid Raad, We Have Never Been So Populated (Installation View), via Paula Cooper

Conceptual artist Walid Raad opens a new show of works this month at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, continuing his interest in investigative practice, stringing together works that explore a range of themes and histories in pursuit of hidden entanglements between art, politics, and the natural world. (more…)

Valentin Carron, 1 2 3 (after Max Weiss) (2015), via Eva Presenhuber

Currently on view at Eva Presenhuber in New York, the gallery is presenting And So America Opened Up, the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition by the Swiss artist Valentin Carron. Carron, whose work is defined by a fascination for modernity and its decay, here presents a series of works created over the past 13 years, unified by studies in modernist history, architectural detail, and the slow stream of history. (more…)

Kevin Dudley, Think Positive Thoughts (2021)

Post Sponsored in Collaboration with Silvershed, Walter’s Cube and Gallerie Kleindienst

Over the course of the last two years of pandemic-driven isolation, few trends have been made more readily apparent than the current capabilities and implications of widely accessible commercial technology in augmented and virtual reality, metaverse narratives, and the capacity for interconnectivity over the internet. Art fairs continued in online viewing rooms, artists continued to meet and collaborate over Zoom and other online video chat technologies, and new modes of socializing, connecting and collaborating developed quickly in the vacuum created by the demands for self-isolation. With these new modes, or, perhaps, more visible variants of existing developments in modern tech, so too come ideas of expressivity and emotionality, new modes of language and interaction. This concept sits at the core of On Waves, a show of work hosted by Leipzig’s Gallerie Kleindienst in collaboration with online viewing platform Walter’s Cube and curated by New York’s Silvershed, an artist-run project in downtown Manhattan that explores contemporary art values, ethics and aesthetics of the 21st century.

On Waves (Online Installation View)

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Shahryar Nashat, Hounds of Love (Installation View), via Gladstone

Gladstone Gallery presents an enigmatic and engaging body of new work by artist Shahryar Nashat this month at its Chelsea exhibition space this month, a selection of works that meditate on the body, space and perception in the realm of the digital. (more…)

Repeater (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ

On view this month in London, Sadie Coles HQ presents REPEATER, a show that makes the most of a reflection on repetition and difference, the act of continued movement, duplication, and continuation over a range of approaches and media. Encompassing a wide range of artists, the show examines ideas of sequence, seriality and replication – whether in the form of modular sculpture, painting in series, or digital reproduction – in order to highlight the potential that exists in the act of repeating. (more…)

Taboo!, View From My E. 5th St Studio 5th Floor Walkup (2021), via Karma

On view at Karma this month, the gallery presents Citysapes, a show organized in collaboration with Gordon Robichaux around the work of New York artist Taboo!. Spread across both galleries, the exhibition reflects on the artist’s ongoing landscape work, painting a range of cityscapes that document New York’s iconic skyline from a range of vantage points and perspectives. This joint exhibition presents the most comprehensive survey to date of Tabboo!’s cityscape paintings from the last three decades.

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Nate Lowman, Irma (2021), via David Zwirner

This month in New York, David Zwirner opens a show of new work by Nate Lowman, continuing the artist’s inquiries of the languages and images of modernity. Lowman has become known for deftly mining images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, and installations. That mode takes center stage here, with a series of works that draw from meteorological readouts, embellished Xeroxes, and other interpolations of technological and technical images.  (more…)

Raque Ford, In A Year of 13 Moons (2022), via Greene Naftali

Marking her first exhibition with Greene Naftali Gallery, artist Raque Ford presents a new body of work this month abstraction with narrative potential; dense, layered arrangements in both two and three dimensions that underscore the artist’s weaving of the personal and architectural through inflections of text and material. By turns slick and diaristic, intimate and bracing, Ford’s latest wall works and sculptures expand the formal possibilities of her signature material: fragments of language incised into sheets of colored acrylic.

Raque Ford, Nighttime Grudge or How I Wanted to Be a Rockstar (Installation View), via Greene Naftali

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Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting (1956), via Pace

This month at Pace Gallery, James Turrell marks his new work at the gallery’s New York flagship with an accompanying curatorial effort, assembling a show of works by the American painter Ad Reinhardt. Reinhardt, whose own work in the exploration of light and perception through color, serves as a foundational point of entry to Turrell’s work, and here is offered an extended point of reflection in relation to the light and space master’s own work. (more…)

“Lure” by Ruben Ortiz Torres at The Last Tenant (Photography by Aleph Molinari)

Known for taking over unique architectural spaces for their exhibitions, MASA is a nomadic art and design collective co-founded in Mexico City by Age Salajõe, Hector Esrawe, and Brian Thoreen in 2018. It has since evolved into a collaborative creative platform, each year presenting stellar exhibitions in different locations throughout  Mexico City, as well as Oaxaca and an upcoming show in New York City. Its itinerant nature allows MASA to play with space and architecture, form and function, and to cleverly present art in unique locations away from the confines of the traditional white-cube gallery space. MASA collaborates with artists, architects, and designers by challenging them to create functional works that blur the line between art and design.  What ties together the young and established artists at MASA’s exhibitions is a deeply-felt sense of Mexicanness: multi-faceted and complex, constantly changing but never unmoored from its vibrant history. Their exhibitions are related to the history of the site and are often meditations on time and memory, and how the spaces we inhabit serve as vessels for both. (more…)

David Byrne, How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic (Installation View), via Pace

Artist and musician David Byrne rarely stays in the same conceptual space for long, moving from recorded music to sculpture, painting and drawing to film. The longtime frontman of the Talking Heads, and a vital force in the history of downtown New York’s art scene from the 1970’s to today, it’s hard to find a mode of work he hasn’t tried at least once. This vision finds a fitting home at Pace Gallery this month for How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic a show of work from the artist’s dingbats series of drawings made during the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of his tree drawings from the early 2000s, and a selection of his drawings of chairs from 2004–07.

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Robert Nava, Mechanical Voyage (2021), via Night Gallery

Night Gallery has opened a new show of works on paper by artist Robert Nava, Bloodsport, a body of works that continue Nava’s visceral renderings of dream states and surreal, tension-filled compositions that walk a line between brusque compositions and a surreal sense of horror.  (more…)

Rodney Graham, Untitled (2022), via 303 Gallery

On view this month, 303 Gallery presents a new body of work by Rodney Graham, a body of paintings that expand on the artist’s already expansive and exploratory body of work. Working since the early 1980s across the disciplines of video, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, and music, Graham’s work stages layered narratives suffused with cultural and historical signifiers. Here, he turns that same notion towards the painted canvas, using his understanding and utilization of varied materials and modes to create densely layered compositions that blend together a studied sense of the art historical with the artist’s own techniques.  (more…)

Jonas Wood, Dinosaur Landscape (2019), via David Kordansky

This month at David Kordansky Gallery, a new body of work by Jonas Wood, Plants and Animals, unites a set of recent paintings and works on paper by the artist that spans the full gallery space. Exploring recurring images in his work, and focusing in here on the aforementioned subjects, Wood turns to a variety of formats and mediums to render images not only of flora and fauna, but also of detailed worlds of related forms, spaces, and moods. (more…)

Wilson Bentley, Snowflake 6 (1900), all images via Georgia Suter for Art Observed

Currently on view at The Drawing Room in East Hampton, NY is a group exhibition entitled Snow Day, organized in association with Eric Brown Art Group. The show brings together ten artists, contemporary and deceased, who have engaged with landscapes and the natural world: Wilson Bentley, Jennifer Bartlett, Charles Burchfield, Jack Bush, Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, Hector Leonardi, Aubrey Levinthal, Fairfield Porter and Kathryn Lynch. The exhibition juxtaposes photographs, paintings and works on paper. Captured by each artist in the selected body of works is the unique serenity induced by a landscape blanketed in snow. (more…)

Japanese multimillionaire Yusaku Maezawa will sell the Basquiat piece he purchased six years ago for the estimated price of $70 million this May at Phillips. “I believe that art collections are something that should always continue to grow and evolve as the owner does,” he said in a statement.

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