Folkert de Jong at Sofie van de Velde

Marking it’s return to its usual spot in early summer, the 2022 edition of Art Basel has opened its doors for its early hours, preparing for a public opening this weekend with an expansive offering of works from European galleries and those further afield. Open once again at the Messe Basel, the fair continues its reputation as a flagship for the international fair brand, with over 200 leading galleries and more than 4,000 artists from five continents. Emphasizing it’s place as a central force in the run of events and fairs worldwide, Basel’s return to form is a tentpole in a run of reopenings in the wake of the Covid-19 shutdowns.

David Hammons at Xavier Hufkens

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Anna-Sophie Berger, Lady Wealth (2022), via JTT

On view this month at New York’s JTT Gallery, artist Anna-Sophie Berger presents a selection of new works that draw on bodies, space and perception to create striking visual and psychological effects. Using a fusion of everyday materials posed in unique new permutations, her body of work is a striking and potent investigation of how these items construct a shared reality, or perhaps just the sense of one.  Read More »

Anne Imhof, Avatar (Installation View), all images by Aleph Molinari for Art Observed.

Continuing her experimentation with spatial arrangement and irreverent institutional takeovers, Anne Imhof has transformed the uptown gallery space of Galerie Buchholz for her new exhibition, Avatar. A simulacra of an institution of learning, the exhibition plunges the viewer into an alternate universe that embodies the industrialized cut-and-paste production of knowledge and identity. The exhibit  an avatar for these spaces of socialization, and a representation of the avatars people adopt while navigating  them. Presenting physical signifiers in opposition to surreal juxtapositions of other works, the show explores the role of space in the production of power, sites of cultural socialization, and its interrelations to social constructs.  Read More »

Marlene Dumas, The Martyr (2002-04). All images via Art Observed.

The Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi presents Open-End this summer, a major monographic exhibition of work by Marlene Dumas, the Cape Town-born artist renowned for her portraiture exploring the depth, breadth and intensity of human emotion. Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, the solo-exhibition features over 100 works from 1984 to 2021, including previously unseen paintings such as Persona (2020). Curated by Caroline Bourgeois and the artist herself, open-end spans 33 rooms across two floors of the 18th-century Pinault Collection space alongside the Grand Canal in Venice. Read More »

Francis Bacon, Seated Woman (1961), via Skarstedt

On view this summer, Skarstedt has assembled a striking selection of work by painter Francis Bacon, titled Faces and Figures. The exhibition unifies a group of masterworks spanning the 1950s to the 1970s. Featuring depictions of some of his most beloved friends, lovers, and muses—Peter Lacy, George Dyer, Muriel Belcher, and Henrietta Moraes—along with an intimate self-portrait and a portrait of Pope Pius XII, the exhibition traces poignant moments of loss and companionship that underscores the artist’s masterful blending of art and life.  Read More »

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Errata (Installation View), via Mor Charpentier

Marking his second solo show at mor charpentier, British-Lebanese artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan continues a body of research on sound as legal evidence, focusing on the unbreakable relationship between testimony and the technology used to record it. Interested in the blind spots of global justice systems, the artist examines sound as a means to reveal historic acts of erasure and rupture. Here, that concept centers around the Nuremberg Trials, and the structures of justice and witnessing this process created and perpetuated.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Errata (Installation View), via Mor Charpentier

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Lynda Benglis, Yellow Tail (2020), via Blum & Poe

On view this month Blum & Poe, the gallery presents Excavation, marking the second solo exhibition of works by Lynda Benglis, continuing the artist’s work in soaring, swooping strokes of bronze. Alluding to themes of referencing the artist’s past in relation to her current work, and referring to the interchanges of positive and negative space as if one was digging or displacing earth, similar to the cast-making process.  Read More »

Kevin Beasley, Wood shed (on improvisation) (2022), via Art Observed

This month at Regen Projects, artist Kevin Beasley brings forward a selection of dynamic new works that marks his first solo gallery show in LA. With a multidisciplinary practice that incorporates sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, music, and performance, Beasley probes the material and cultural conditions that shape our perception of history. His ability to alchemize ordinary material—specifically personal artifacts and articles of clothing—into sculptures that are simultaneously transcendent and familiar has placed him at the vanguard of artistic and cultural thought. That practice continues here. Read More »

Celeste Rapone, Muscle for Hire (2022), via Marianne Boesky

On view at Marianne Boesky this month in New York, artist Celeste Rapone brings to bear a number of unique new canvases that underscore her investigation of painted space, and its ability to place itself directly between the imagined and the real. Marking Rapone’s first solo show with the gallery the artist continues to examine the potential of painting through the human form. Drawing inspiration from her native New Jersey, Rapone seeks to communicate both personal and collective feelings of anxiety, longing, and nostalgia experienced in contemporary life.

Celeste Rapone, Nightshade (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Rapone’s works focus on the figure, often centering on women protagonists whose bodies impossibly contort and twist up to the confines that Rapone creates within the painting, or at other times capturing a tender exchange between a pair of figures. Rapone produces her works without preliminary drawings, gradually building the compositions of her paintings through a dynamic interplay between scale, color, pattern, and the shapes of the human form. In the settings of her paintings, the artist populates the space with an array of allusions, pulling from art history, pop culture, autobiographical sources, and drawing influence from the stylized figuration introduced by the Chicago Imagists.

Celeste Rapone, Nightshade (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Celeste Rapone, Living Room (2022), via Marianne Boesky

Ranging in scale, each work within the show is unique and multifaceted in its development. At times, Rapone has a narrative in mind from which a thematic environment evolves for her characters to navigate. In others, the onset of a work is driven by formalist concerns, in which the artist begins with a unique color configuration or an abstract composition of shapes that then influence the formation of a painting’s scene. The resulting forms of her figures, whose bodies defy the rules of proportions and scale, are both undeniably present and vulnerable within the canvases. These forms and figures swirl throughout the space, turning into a careful balance of constructed image and observations of life. Delving into a space that exists between the artist’s eye and constructed world, here she turns the body into a site for the negotiation of memory, site, longing and history.

The show closes June 11th.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
Celeste Rapone: Nightshade [Exhibition Site]