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 »

Pedro Reyes, Tlali (Installation View), via Lisson

Pedro Reyes returns to Lisson Gallery in New York this month with Tlali, an impressively dense and exploratory exhibition that a new series of sculptures and works on paper drawn from the language and symbols of Pre-Columbian civilizations. Drawing on the history and social economies of the Aztec language Nahuatl, the show turns a local historical and linguistic thread into a broader reflection on the state of the world and the broader political and social landscape of modernity.  Read More »

Agnes Martin, The Distillation of Color (Installation View), via Art Observed

Marking the most recent in its exhibitions from the estate of Agnes Martin, Pace Gallery’s The Distillation of Color delves back into the artist’s tightly-honed minimalism to explore her nuanced investigations of color, allowing subtle bands and hints at varied shades to pervade her works. For Martin, painting was defined by an ongoing exploration of its capacity to express a vision of beauty born of intuitive inspiration. In this most recent show, the gallery takes this concept and pushes it into the very notion of color as sensation.  Read More »

Rachel Libeskind at Signs and symbols, via Art Observed

After a year off, the New Art Dealers Alliance has relaunched its ongoing New York exhibition project, the third edition of NADA House, returning to Governors Island with 66 galleries, non-profits, artist-run spaces, and curators, presenting over 100 artists. The collaborative, public exhibition, now open and running through to August, continues in an expanded format, with gallery presentations in over 50 rooms in three neighboring turn-of-the-century colonial revival buildings.

Ken Grimes at Ricco/Maresca Gallery via Art Observed

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Wangechi Mutu (Installation View), via Gladstone

Entering Gladstone Gallery in New York, artist Wangechi Mutu’s surreal, serpentine sculptures greet the viewer with a mixture of minimalist, elegant beauty and unnerving, otherworldly poise, somewhere between lyrical, classical sculpture and the surreal forms of H.R. Giger. Drawing upon her sculptural practice, a core aspect of her work, this installation brings to life otherworldly alternatives to the systemic modes of representation portrayed throughout global traditions in art. Through an incisive re-examination of relations between the body, the natural world, and social forces, the works in this exhibition represent a new kind of hybridized humanity and iconography through the artist’s intuitive and forward-thinking eye.

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