Ed Ruscha, Cold Beer Beautiful Girls (2009), © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever
On view at Gagosian Gallery’s Paris exhibition space are two exhibitions entitled “Prints and Photographs” and “Books & Co.,” organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk to explore the innovation and legacy of Ed Ruscha across a range of printed media.
Kehinde Wiley, Arms of Hugo von Hohenlanderberg as Bishop of Constance with Angel Supporters (2014)
The Brooklyn Museum is hosting a mid-career retrospective of Kehinde Wiley, the L.A.-born and New York-based artist known for his juxtapositions of contemporary youth through the lens of a classical notion of aesthetic. Wiley’s mostly street-cast models, sporting untouched urban attires, replace the highly familiar figures of classic European paintings that generally exclude people of color. Wiley consequently redeems what is missing from the canon of Western art in his intricately detailed oils on canvas, yet pays homage to Old Masters such as Velásquez or Ingres. Maintaining some distinct elements such as outfits and posture, his models, mostly young males of African descent, do not simply recreate what was already done centuries ago, but also reclaim a collectively missing part of their history. (more…)
An article in the New York Times notes an increasing trend towards museums deaccessioning parts of their collection in order to cover budget gaps, even in the face of staunch opposition from critics and board members. “If you want to safeguard cultural identity, you cannot sell the best pieces of your collection,” says Marilena Vecco, an assistant professor of cultural economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. “This is the challenge for all museums.” (more…)
A crane crashed onto the roof of the Dallas Museum of Art this week, just missing a Mark Di Suvero sculpture atop the institution. The south end of the space are currently closed for repairs, while the rest of the building remains open. (more…)
NADA Miami Beach is moving locations this December, leaving its long-time home at the Deauville Beach Resort in North Miami Beach for The Fontainebleau Hotel further south. Founder Heather Hubbs notes that the new location will see a fair of “the same exact size or a little smaller, but it won’t be bigger and we’re not looking to expand.” (more…)
Ryder Ripps, Alone Together (Installation View), via Art Observed
The New York-based artist and designer Ryder Ripps capped his first solo gallery show with Postmasters earlier this year, and has spent the past two months in residency at the Red Bull Studios, where his current show, Alone Together, has turned the space into a self-reflexive digital laboratory, complete with test subjects, flickering hardware, and its own, occasionally fractured ideologies. (more…)
Artist Cao Fei is interviewed in the New York Times today, underlining her work in recent years, and her move to Beijing from Guangzhou in 2006. “In the beginning I felt like I couldn’t connect to the city,” she says. “A lot of artists from southern China have that feeling when they come here. Take, for example, my husband, who is a Singaporean artist. For him to come here, the whole history and context is different. It’s not that easy.” (more…)
Curator Piper Marshall is profiled in W Magazine this week, as she begins her run of exhibitions in conjunction with Mary Boone Gallery, and documents her ongoing focus on female artists. “I love female artists so much that someone recently called me an ‘international womanizer,’” Marshall jokes. (more…)
Karl Holmqvist, Here’s Good Looking @U Kid (Installation View), via Art Observed
The current exhibition at Gavin Brown’s West Village exhibition space is abrasive, to say the least. Focused around the life and work of Karl Holmqvist, the three room exhibition is adorned with the artist’s goading vitriol towards New York real estate, gay culture, social media, the art world “star machine,” and what seems to be anything else that crosses his mind, combined with immense, industrial sculptures composed from the letters in words like “Fuck,” “Punk” and “Like.” (more…)
The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas has announced a major new art prize, to be awarded to “a living artist in recognition of a significant body of work that has had an extraordinary impact on the understanding of the art form.” The winner receives a $100,000 prize, and will be selected by an impressive jury that includes Phyllida Barlow, Okwui Enwezor, and Nicholas Serota, among others. (more…)
The Art Newspaper reviews the Whitney’s soon to open, Renzo Piano-designed space in the Meatpacking District, reviewing its tripled floor space and focus on every aspect of the museum’s presentation. “We conceptualized [the building] as a total work of art,” says Donna de Salvo, the museum’s chief curator. (more…)
An article in The Economist this week revisits the frequently noted boom in the art market, taking an extended perspective on the practices of private sales, institutional investment and consulting over the past thirty years. “People buy art when they’re confident about their future wealth,” says economist Clare McAndrew. (more…)
Anish Kapoor has contributed to Artforum’s “500 Words” section this week, describing his recent work with the pigment Vantablack, and its capabilities for absorbing light to create a sense of infinite depth on a flat surface. “I’m absolutely sure that to make new art, you have to make new space,” he writes. “Malevich’s black square doesn’t just make a proposition about non-images or black as an image; it suggests that space works in a different way than previously conceived.” (more…)
An article this week in the Financial Times forecasts a “grim” outlook for UK Museums in the face of harsh budget cuts and austerity measures. Those in the field note that while museums seem to be at a stronger state than ever within the British Nation, operational budget cuts threaten to hamper continued development and harm future plans. “Museums are ironically better than ever before, better presented, better run and in better condition,” says Stephen Deuchar, chief executive of the Art Fund. “It’s just at the point where we ought to be reaping all the benefit from that investment that revenue funding is being cut back at a worrying pace.” (more…)
Giuseppe Penone, Earth on Earth – Face (2014), via Marian Goodman
The New York outpost of Marian Goodman Gallery is currently presenting an exhibition of new works by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, continuing the artist’s practice of casting living trees in order to reposition his subject’s relationship to the natural world. The exhibition, curated by Dieter Schwarz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, also culls a series of historically resonant works from the artist’s early career, extending a natural progression throughout the last 40 years of the artist’s practice. (more…)
Rudolf Stingel, (Installation View), all images courtesy Gagosian Hong Kong
On view at Gagosian Hong Kong is an exhibition of recent paintings by Rudolf Stingel, representing the Italian artist’s first major exhibition of work in Asia. Exploring the nature of memory and the relationship between artwork and artist, Stingel continues expanding the vocabulary of painting with this series of work.
Keith Haring, Untitled (May 29, 1984) (1984), via Art Observed
Culling a minimal selection of works from Keith Haring’s immense output over the course of his life, Skarstedt Gallery is currently presenting Heaven and Hell a series of colorfully surreal compositions from 1984 and 1985, several years before the artist passed away in 1990. (more…)
Yayoi Kusama has earned the hyperbolic title of the “world’s most popular artist” following the release of Art Newspaper’s annual survey. “Kusama is the only one of our artists who sells on every continent. “She’s very rare in that she has this kind of credibility within the art world establishment, but she also has a very broad popular appeal,” says Glenn Scott Wright, co-director of Victoria Miro. (more…)
The Dia Art Foundation has acquired composer LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela’s famous Dream House installation for its permanent collection, and will recreate the work at its 545 West 22nd Street Chelsea location this summer and fall from June 17 through Oct. 24. They’ve made this incredible contribution to music that I think is still very underappreciated nationally and even internationally,” says Dia head Jessica Morgan. “He should be understood as a John Cage of our era.” (more…)
Writer Louis Menand is in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, reviewing the recent restoration of Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals using a specially designed lighting system, and the small crowd that gathers each day to watch as the murals’ lights are turned off. “You can still see the bones of the murals, the formal architecture—Rothko’s floating blocks, made to resemble portals in these pieces—but the glow is gone,” he writes. “As one observer put it, when the lights go off, comedy turns into tragedy.” (more…)
London’s Hayward Gallery has commissioned a major commission from artist Carsten Höller for the artist’s upcoming retrospective, Decision, inviting the artist to design a pair of slides for installation on the outside of its facade. “Decision will ask visitors to make choices, but also, more importantly, to embrace a kind of double vision that takes in competing points of view, and embodies what Höller calls a state of ‘active uncertainty’ – a frame of mind conducive to entertaining new possibilities.” says Ralph Rugoff, the gallery director. (more…)
Pace Gallery has announced an ambitious architectural expansion for its 540 West 25th Street location in New York, turning the building into an 8 floor gallery and office complex with 60,000 square feet of space. “The last ten years have seen incredible changes in the art world as creative communities from different parts of the world have started to connect. Now it’s time for the art galleries to change too. This new building gives us the chance to reimagine what we are all about and that’s exactly what we plan to do,” says President Marc Glimcher. (more…)
Anicka Yi, You Can Call Me F (Installation View), via Art Observed
Five vinyl tents populate the darkened upstairs gallery at The Kitchen. There are two constants in this room, a steady hum of rotating motor helmets and an indiscernible smell. Through these minimal elements, Anicka Yi brings us encapsulated ecologies, and a single lively billboard with the words “You Can Call me F” to the Kitchen, an exhibition layered with materials, time-scales, and most of all, infusions of body matter.
Anicka Yi, You Can Call Me F (Installation View), via Art Observed
Henry Moore, Wunderkammer – Origin of Forms installation view, Photo: Mike Bruce, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery
Gagosian London presents a new look at Henry Moore’s body of work in its current exhibition, a cunningly arranged series of small-scale sculptures. Though best-known for his large abstractions of the human form, Moore’s inspiration often came from small objects he found in nature—pebbles, shells, animal bones—which have been preserved in his Hertfordshire studio in Perry Green, his former home and now a museum and headquarters of the Henry Moore Foundation. These pieces are currently on display in this unique show demonstrating Moore’s artistic process. (more…)