Kati Heck, Macht, los (2021), via Sadie Coles HQ

In her second exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ, artist Kati Heck has brought forth a new group of paintings and drawings centered around the horse, using the animal as both historical interpolation and metaphor for human psychology.  Read More »

Paul Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (2017), via Nathalie Karg

Opening a new summer group show centered around self-portraiture, Nathalie Karg’s Mirror, Mirror executes a series of explorations on perceived identity as a slippery experience, an unreliable form or concept that is constantly challenged and reified within the photographic medium. Featuring new and recent works of self-portraiture by Whitney Hubbs, Tommy Kha, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Ilona Szwarc, the show explores self-presentation as self-creation, a hallmark of the social media age.  Read More »

Alice Neel, Andy Warhol (1970), via Art Observed

Over the course of her career, one might say that Alice Neel did her best to paint everyone, embracing a wide-ranging and exploratory approach to portraiture that invited countless figures up to her home in Upper Manhattan. Capturing neighbors, friends, art world luminaries and other figures, Neel’s work brought the full spectrum of New York’s residents into a single body of work. Now at The Met, the artist’s work, and the city that birthed it, gets their due attention. Read More »

Peter Fischli, RELIEFS (Monkey 21) (2021), via Spruth Magers

In his wide-ranging oeuvre, artist Peter Fischli carefully observes and draws from the everyday world to create sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that address similar concerns to those explored as part of his collaborative practice with his late collaborator David Weiss. The artist’s work, so often centered around often overlooked, quotidian aspects of everyday life, sees him posing that same in an experimental and humorous way. For his most recent show, Fischli takes that interest towards a pair of specific models.  Read More »

Satoshi Kojima, Catch Me if You Can (2020), via Bridget Donahue

Painter Satoshi Kojima has returned to Bridget Donahue this month for another exhibition of his strange, ephemeral compositions, a series of surreal, swirling landscapes and figures suspended in a bold, cartoonish world. Welcoming strange engagements with the fabric of the everyday, the artist opens the door on a new way of experiencing reality, twisting urban landscapes and historical constructions into each unique canvases.  Read More »

Gerhard Richter, Cage 4 (2006), via Gagosian

Currently on view at Gagosian’s New York exhibition space, Gerhard Richter reprises his series of Cage paintings, previously shown at the gallery’s Los Angeles exhibition space, and in his expansive Met Museum retrospective, Painting After All. Throughout his career, Richter has navigated between naturalism and abstraction, painting and photography, exploring the conceptual, historical, and material implications of various mediums without ideological restraint. For this body of works, first painted in 2006, the artist renders a series of immense works created using his pioneering squeegee techniques.  Read More »

Julie Curtiss, Lobby (2020), via White Cube

Joining White Cube for her first exhibition in London, painter Julie Curtiss has brought forth a selection of new compositions, sculptures and works on paper that emphasize the artist’s artful and attentive sense of composition, using framing and cropping to accentuate her cinematic, and often humorous sense of the absurd. Drawing on saturated colors, crisp detail, and scenarios which are at once banal and bizarre, her pieces exude a dreamlike quality, and make for a fitting introduction to the artist’s work. Read More »

Paloma Varga Weisz, Bumpman on Tree (2021), via National Gallery

As the summer months begin in earnest, the newest iteration of proposals for London’s Fourth Plinth Art Installation have gone on view, with a series of six maquettes going on view at the National Gallery as well as online, with organizers welcoming the public to share their views and opinions on the options put forth.

Teresa Margolles, Improntas (2021), via National Gallery

The works range in concept and materials, subject matter and politics, and explore a range of both specific situations and fantastical other worlds. There’s the sobering sculpture presented by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, a series of casts of the faces of trans women, representing the plight of sexual violence and murder that has threatened so many. Arranged on a rack structure resembling a Mesoamerican Tzompantli (which displayed human skulls), the work makes plain histories of violence that threaten marginalized voices around the world. Another work proposing specific historical scenarios, On Hunger and Farming in the Skies of the Past 1957-1966 by Ibrahim Mahama presents a model of former grain silos constructed by eastern European architects in Ghana during the early 1960s, hearkening back to an era of new promise for the country prior to the violent overthrow of its government.

Samson Kambalu, Antelope (2021), via National Gallery

Other works offer a more otherworldy point of entry. Polish artist Goshka Macuga, for instance, has created a giant rocket  sculpture,  encouraging viewers to look up towards outer space, and to remember a basic human drive towards inquiry and understanding. Somewhere in the middle is the work of Nicole Eisenman, a lumpen iteration of a jewelry tree, covered with mementoes that reference both the UK’s own politically fraught history, and a surreal environment of her own making, colliding on a surface that repositions Trafalgar Square’s plinth as a dresser-top for the world around it.

Ibrahim Mahama, On Hunger and Farming in the Skies of the Past 1957-1970 (2021), via National Gallery

Other works come from the Malawi-born Samson Kambalu, whose work restages a photograph of John Chilembwe, a Baptist pastor who led an uprising against colonizers in his home country,  while the German artist Paloma Varga Weisz also poses a monumental tribute, albeit to a body not yet envisioned, a figure called Bumpman that draws on the idea of human insecurity and frailty.

The selections will be announced later this year, with options picked for both 2022 and 2024.

– D. Creahan

Read more:
The Fourth Plinth [Exhibition Site]

Georg Baselitz, Springtime of the Black Mountain Lake (2020), via Gagosian

Throughout his career, Georg Baselitz has combined a direct and provocative approach to making art with an openness to art historical lineages, pulling together a range of art historical signifiers from the history of both modernism and postmodernism, and unifying a range of expressive techniques in the depiction of the body and the experience of paint on canvas. Continually revisiting his iconic inverted figure, the artist’s work has repeatedly explored reinvention and renewal, and takes on that same thematic in his new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery. Read More »

Damien Hirst, Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures (Installation View), via Gagosian

Kicking off the run of Damien Hirst projects at Gagosian’s London space on Britannia Street, the latest iteration, Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures presents Hirst as artist and curator, presenting this deeply personal series of work through his own eyes, and exploring a diverse range of subjects and concepts that have run through the series and subjects of the artist’s career. Balanced in the middle of a perpetual confrontation between the contrasting systems of belief that define human existence, from common trust in medicine to the seduction of consumerism, Hirst’s work feels particularly timely in the midst of the ongoing challenges and trauma of Covid-19.  Read More »