The Art Newspaper reflects on recent reviews of federally-protected land ordered by the Trump administration, and how reclassification of land in Nevada may harm artist Michael Heizer’s City installation in Basin and Range. “Monuments have been adjusted… 18 times before,” Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke said in an interview. “So I don’t think there’s too much question that a monument can be adjusted. Whether a monument can be rescinded or not, that is a question for the courts.”  (more…)

John Graham, Mascara (1950), via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Divided into two opposite galleries inside the Parrish Art Museum’s sleek architecture, John Graham: Maverick Modernist, a comprehensive survey of the 20th century Ukrainian-American painter, offers a breakdown of the artist’s ever-evolving four-decade long career from 1920s and onward.  Curated by Alicia G. Longwell, the show recaps Graham’s defiant approach to Modernism, considering his sharp divergence from his dedication to modern art for the sake of figurative portraiture of female sitters in the 1940’s. Even then, at the height of his career, referring to Graham as a maverick would not be misguided: his models’ cross-eyed expressions, excessive make-ups, and mathematical details on their faces clash with easy readings as representational, and offer an intriguing historical context for much later practice in contemporary painting. (more…)

Taryn Simon, Charles Irvin Fain, Scene of the crime, the Snake River, Melba, Idaho, Served 18 years of a Death sentence for Murder, Rape and Kidnapping; The Innocents (2002), courtesy Taryn Simon Studio and Guild Hall

Since Taryn Simon first delivered her seminal The Innocents series in 2002, the New York-based artist’s work has continued to revisit and re-examine the concepts of power, identity and their interrelated social effects, examining how varied political conditions render real human effects on the body, and on space.  This summer, East Hampton’s historic art and culture center, The Guild Hall re-contextualizes Simon’s compelling photography series about misconceptions of guilt and impossibility of rewinding time on its 15th anniversary, serving as a backdrop for ongoing discussions around prejudice, injustice, and empathy. Organized by Guild Hall Chief Curator Christina Mossaides Strassfield, the exhibition reiterates a selection of photographs and video from the overall series that had its debut at MoMA PS1 in 2003. (more…)

Gerry Bibby & Henrik Olesen, Fernseher (2016), via Queer Thoughts

Hosting the Munich-based Deborah Schamoni for its entry in the CONDO New York exhibition, downtown space Queer Thoughts presented a group show featuring artists from both gallery rosters. Comprising works by Gerry Bibby (including a collaboration with Henrik Olesen), Siera Hyte, David Rappeneau, and Davide Stucchi, the exhibition centered around the body, and its suspension in broader informational or social networks. (more…)

A group of South Korean officials have been sentenced to prison terms for their roles in maintaining a black list of artists opposing former president Park Geun-hye. “It’s against the Constitution to exclude artists from government support programs according to the taste of political power,” presiding judge, Hwang Byeong-heon, said in his ruling. (more…)

Critic Jerry Saltz takes a tour of MoMA this week with architect Liz Diller of Diller Scofido + Renfro, and examines the prospects for the museum’s new expansion project. “This next version of the museum is going to be the best version we’ll get for a while,” he writes.  “Which is okay. I can’t live without this museum. I love it. It’s where we all come from — and need to return in order to spawn new ideas of modernism.” (more…)

Philippe Vandenberg, No Title (ca. 2007), via Art Observed

When the Belgian artist Philippe Vandenberg committed suicide at his Ghent home in 2009, he left behind an expansive body of work, including a drawing book that brims with semi-abstract watercolor sketches detailing the artist’s inner conflicts. Dedicated to the work Vandenberg created between 2006 and his death, Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition at its uptown space in New York aims to bring the legacy of the pioneer painter back to the New York art world’s attention. While Vandenberg left a significant footprint in his hometown during the European Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980’s, he maintained a relatively low profile in the United States, with only a handful of solo exhibitions in the last three decades. This show, organized by Anthony Huberman, the director of San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, expands throughout the gallery, bringing together a group of milestones from his last years that underscores his unique vision. (more…)

The Menil Collection in Houston has postponed a major expansion project that included a new Drawing Institute building, after Director Rebecca Rabinow shuffled construction schedules this week. “We’re in it for the long haul and have very exacting standards,” she says. “Better to take time and get it perfect than open too early.” (more…)

Former Met Director Thomas Campbell has been awarded the Getty Rothschild Fellowship, which will see him embarking on eight months of research at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and at Windsor Manor in Buckinghamshire, England. Campbell’s research will investigate  “the related question of how we can use art and culture as a gateway to promote understanding in an ever-more connected but ever-more divided world,” according to a statement. (more…)

Former Met Museum director Philippe de Montebello will become the new director at Acquavella Galleries, Art News reports. “I think it’s one of the great art galleries,” de Montebello said. “We have been talking over the last few years since I left the Met about how I could use some of my academic and other experience with the gallery.” (more…)

Russian collective Pussy Riot is fundraising to create a play based on its experience of Russian political oppression, recreating the “epic ordeal when the members were arrested, forced through a flawed judicial system and finally transported to a Russian jail,” according to a press release. “The audience will actually get the chance to re-live each one of these experiences themselves in London, learning what it means to be a political opponent in Russia today,” front woman Nadya Tolokonnikova said of the work. “We’ll take you on a journey from the cathedral altar deep into the vaults of the Kremlin itself. Hopefully, this is a journey that you’ll only have to make once in your life.” (more…)

Meschac Gaba, Reflection Room Tent (2017), via Tanya Bonakdar

Working between Benin and the Netherlands during the course of the past 20 years, artist Meschac Gaba has forged a unique language for addressing and visualizing the varied effects and themes both driving and stemming from the rapid pace of globalization.  Utilizing a playful approach to environmental installation and sculpture, Gaba’s work frequently presents spaces and scenes drawing from the marketplace and the museum, the refugee camp or the modern office.  For his current solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, Gaba has installed his Reflection Room Tent piece, opening a space for dialogue and engagement between visitors inside the gallery space.

Meschac Gaba, Memoriale aux Refugies Noyees (Memorial for Drowned Refugees) (2016), via Tanya Bonakdar (more…)

The 2017 Istanbul Biennial, curated by artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset, has announced its artist list for the exhibition, which opens September 16 and runs through November 12.  The list of artists, each exploring what it means to be “a good neighbor,” includes Mark Dion, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. (more…)

The Condo art fair project, which is currently wrapping a first run in New York, will launch editions in Mexico City and Shanghai, Artforum reports. “It had the same communal atmosphere as the London edition, which was important to me,” says organizer Vanessa Carlos of Carlos/Ishikawa, “and it definitely achieved the aim I have for Condo of demonstrating an alternate way of exhibiting abroad, of focusing of collaboration and of proposing a good way for audience members to encounter international artists and galleries.” (more…)

Shannon Ebner, Will And Be Going To (2017), via Art Observed

Los Angeles-based artist Shannon Ebner has marked her first solo exhibition with Eva Presenhuber this month, taking over the gallery’s exhibition space at 39 Great Jones in New York with a series of photographs on aluminum that mark the artist’s continued engagement with temporality and space.  Spread across the gallery’s two floor layout, Ebner’s photographs confront the viewer with a series of reinterpreted engagements with the act of photographic production, pushing for meditations into the creative act and exhibition of her images.

Shannon Ebner, Signal Escapes (2017), via Art Observed

(more…)

Shimabuku, The Snow Monkeys of Texas – Do Snow Monkeys Remember Snow Monkeys? (detail) (2016), via Artforum

Freedman Fitzpatrick, while hosting a fairly international roster, is one of the most representative galleries of the current Los Angeles landscape. Located in a strip mall off Hollywood Boulevard, its neighboring businesses are a Domino’s Pizza and a 7-Eleven.  With that in mind, it may seem that in pairing with Off Vendome for CONDO, Freedman Fitzpatrick has foregone their penchant for non-traditional gallery locales. In a four-person exhibition comprising the first and second floor of Off Vendome’s more conventional space, only one artist is represented by Freedman Fitzpatrick. Shimabuku, an Okinawan video artist, exhibits his 2016 video, The Snow Monkeys of Texas: Do snow monkeys remember snow mountains? which is also currently on view at the Venice Biennale.

Shimabuku at Off Vendome, hosted by Freedman Fitzpatrick (Installation View), via Off Vendome

(more…)

Cerith Wyn Evans, S=U=T=R=A2 (2017), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Mixing together sonic and visual systems of perception, artist Cerith Wyn Evans has opened an exhibition of new works at Marian Goodman’s Paris exhibition space, marking an expansion of the artist’s long-running interest in the gray area between speech and written text, sound and image.  Spread out across multiple floors in the gallery, the artist’s pieces delve into the functions behind cognition and spatial awareness, using familiar imagery and the written word to shape and disrupt the acts of reading, seeing and hearing.  (more…)

Rock and Roll superstar Alice Cooper has reportedly discovered a lost Andy Warhol Electric Chair painting in his collection, a piece that could be worth several million dollars, The Guardian reports. “Truthfully, at the time no one thought it had any real value,” Cooper’s manager, Shep Gordon says. “Andy Warhol was not ‘Andy Warhol’ back then. And it was all a swirl of drugs and drinking. But you should have seen Alice’s face when Richard Polsky’s estimate came in.” (more…)

The Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland has taken control of the first works from the Cornelius Gurlitt art horde, spurring new research into the work’s provenance in the Swiss city. “It is impossible to separate the Gurlitt collection from […] the debate about Nazi-looted art,” says Nina Zimmer, the director of the Kunstmuseum Bern. “I am glad the museum’s board took on this responsibility.” (more…)

Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

“No one writes lyric on a battlefield. On a map stuck with arrows,” begins Quarto, a 2009 poem by the feminist author and essayist Adrienne Rich. Adopting its name from the metaphorical expression Rich uses in her poem’s first line, Gladstone Gallery’s summer group exhibition, Lyric on a Battlefield, seeks impressions of beauty inherent in the struggles and joys of everyday experience through the poetic and personal narrative of life. Organized by Miciah Hussey, the exhibition pairs established names such as Suzanne McClelland, Anne Collier, and Ellen Berkenblit with a younger generation of artists like Monique Mouton and Louisa Clement.

Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

The introspective and meditative nature of the lyric, in terms of offering a highly subjective interpretation of time and space, infuses each juxtaposition of collective human experiences, like loss, intimacy, and memory, with a sense of vivid and often urgent vitality.  Presented here, the show’s works turn this sense of humanity into a powerful rumination on modern society, and the varied experiences that undergird our negotiation with everyday existence.

The biggest discovery of the exhibition is f.marquespenteado, the gender-nonconforming pseudonym of the Brazilian artist Fernando Marques Penteado, who combines traditional embroidery methods with found objects and text to orchestrate installations brimming with complex narratives. Although the artist is an established name in his native country and in Europe, his presence in New York has remained somewhat limited, with the exception of his inclusion in the Jewish Museum’s 2015 group exhibition Orthodox, which had aptly focused on artists outside mainstream dynamics of the art world.

The artist’s ability to infuse emotion, sensuality and soul to everyday objects allows him to marry domesticity with sexuality, while his texts add a sense of vivacity and character to his often mundane materials. The embroidery he accentuates and defamiliarizes his arbitrary objects which stems from a dedication to a practice that has been traditionally associated with feminine labor. In one of the installations, two pairs of clogs are placed in front of a wooden rake and dried flowers, standing in for a pair of absent bodies of two male lovers whose relationship is recounted through an imaginary interview conducted with one of them.

Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Lyric On a Battlefield (Installation View), Photos by David Regen. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

By contrast, Suzanne McClelland’s large scale double-sided painting Reg Park and the Hard Gainers exemplifies the Brooklyn-based painter’s decades-long investigation of text, data, and image culture through the lens of American ideals such as success, fame, and class. What appear on the surface as tempestuous and fervent abstract paintings, emanating from loose hand gestures, encapsulate her research and analysis-heavy process regarding facts prevalent in our society, such as male privilege and unjust distribution of opportunity. Adorned with slightly abstracted letters and names, McClelland’s abstract paintings further the artist’s interpretation of information as a fluctuating entity through their double-sided natures that offer alternative paths to same ends.

This sense of text and movement, experience and action, running throughout the show makes for an intriguing engagement with intersections of text and the life it describes. Lyric on a Battlefield is on view at Gladstone Gallery through July 28, 2017.

— O.C. Yerebakan

Read more:
Gladstone Gallery [Exhibition Page]

A recent report on the year’s auction health sees auction sales slightly improving, while private sales are drastically down at Christie’s, the Financial Times reports. Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti has attributed this to the “counter-cyclical relationship” between auctions and private sales. (more…)

The most recent financial disclosure by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump has valued the couple’s art collection at over $25 million, CNN reports. This comes after months of reported foot-dragging by White House officials in the release of information on the family’s holdings. “We’re not getting the level of responsiveness from the White House counsel’s office that we’re used to, or that we need to do the job really effectively,” says Walter Shaub of the Office of Government Ethics. (more…)

Harumi Yamaguchi, Fight Mode (1976) via Art Observed

Tucked in the back room of Bridget Donahue‘s Bowery exhibition space lies Project Native Informant’s contribution to the itinerant exhibition project CONDO: Harumi Yamaguchi’s first US solo exhibition. Yamaguchi, a commercial artist active from the 1970’s onwards, is an expert air-brusher. Not unlike fellow artist and commercial illustrator Hajime Sorayama, her illustrations portray human figures in an idealized setting: perfect lighting, unblemished skin, and gleaming white teeth, a sense of almost unnerving beauty amplified by their provocative poses and minimalist backdrops.

Harumi Yamaguchi at Project Native Informant Hosted by Bridget Donahue, via Bridget Donahue

(more…)

Alex Israel, Pelican (2017), via Almine Rech

Marking a new stage in his engagement with the cultural landscape and natural phenomena of the California coastline, Alex Israel returns to Almine Rech’s Paris location this month, presenting his aptly titled solo exhibition, Summer 2.  Drawn from the artist’s work on his forthcoming feature-length film, SPF-18, Israel has created a series of aluminum and acrylic wetsuit sculptures, text-based pieces, and an extremely detailed pelican sculpture, each presenting its own twist on the familiar iconography of the beach environments he has so often used as source material. (more…)