Michael Queenland, Untitled (Stationary) (2017), via Tanya Bonakdar

Marking a sustained engagement with language and text, the current group show at Tanya Bonakdar Los Angeles, Restless Index, explores a specific approach to cataloging and documenting, and the potentials that these explorations of archives and databases might offer for the future.  Inadequacies of language—whether legal, symbolic, written or visual—are cast into stark relief during moments of social upheaval, a point which feels particularly apt during this cultural moment, and which serves as a bedrock for the show, exploring associations once normalized by cultural hegemonies as renewed sites of contention and conflict.  The show explores the canon as a permeable and flexible, where monuments and institutional mandates are called into question, histories reassessed, and so too are visual codes that derive from those histories. Read More »

Kevin Beasley, The Road (2019), via Casey Kaplan

Artist Kevin Beasley returns to Casey Kaplan this month for an exhibition of new work surrounding questions and explorations of ancestry, ownership and land, dwelling on a range of questions over ownership and property that underscore the United States’s relationship to its own past, and the culture of violence and oppression that helped to build its economic foundations.   Read More »

Philippe Parreno, Manifestations (Installation View),  via Esther Schipper

Marking his eighth solo show with Berlin’s Esther Schipper, artist Philippe Parreno‘s Manifestations spans the full range of his artistic output, running through a selection of pieces that include a granular soundtrack, a CGI film, atmospheric sensors, robotic systems, computer code, ice and water.  In typical fashion for the artist, the show is billed as an effort to “connect ‘things’ that, a priori, had nothing to do with one another; ‘thing’ that allow themselves to be summoned by repetitions, synchronicities, signals, or singularities.” Read More »

Andreas Gursky, Rhein III (2018), via Sprüth Magers

Opening a show of new works in Berlin, artist Andreas Gursky arrives yet again at a prime moment of reflection and consideration for the inhabitants of modernity, offering up a selection of photographs that welcome a renewed perspective on the state of the world, and the forces that shape it.  Featuring the artist’s first new body of work in almost three years, Gursky’s exhibition in the Berlin outpost of Sprüth Magers addresses a range of themes that the artist has investigated for decades, and often  revisits settings such as the Rhine river and Hong Kong’s futuristic cityscapes to explore new contexts and sets of information layered over by the current state of the world.  Gursky looks anew at our built environment and humankind’s impact on the natural world.

Andreas Gursky, Bauhaus (2020), via Sprüth Magers

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Harold Ancart, Untitled (2020), via David Zwirner

Making an intriguing continuation of his investigation of natural processes and large-scale environmental phenomena, artist Harold Ancart has a new show on at David Zwirner this month.  Delving into leafy canopies and expansive, haunting desert expanses, the show gives the impression of an extended meditation on place and space, and makes for a strong follow up to the artist’s first show with the gallery in New York.   Read More »

Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin

With the weather turning increasingly chilly, and the fall months coming on in full stride, the art world would normally turn its attention this week to London, where the tents would be up and the halls would be ready for another edition of Frieze Art Fair in the British Capital.  Yet the fair’s annual run is just one more event moved online this fall, as Europe and the United States continue to contend with the heightened stress and security concerns of the COVID-19 pandemic.  This week, the British staple of the annual art calendar has popped up online, open for the next week with a broad set of works on view, and a range of galleries logging in from around the globe.

Gretchen Bender at Metro Pictures

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Pieter Schoolworth, Shifted Sims #9 (Eco Lifestyle) (2020), via Petzel

Currently on at Petzel in New York City, painter Pieter Schoolwerth brings a collection of new canvases to bear, exploring a series of psychoactive tableaus and surreal depictions of humanity, a body of work that feels particularly apt in the strange landscape of a post-lockdown COVID-19 world.  Drawing on a range of signifiers and image sets for his works, the artist swirls his illusory, dream-like landscapes through the halls of the gallery. Read More »

Bruce Nauman, Two Leaping Foxes (2019), via Sperone Westwater

Welcoming Bruce Nauman back to New York City as the artist prepares to open his retrospective survey a the Tate Modern this month, Sperone Westwater’s SoHo Gallery plays home to a series of imaginative, surreal sculptures.  Marking his thirteenth solo at the gallery, his first 45 years ago in 1976, the show presents a set of new sculptures, underscoring the artist’s continued practice across a wide range of diverse mediums, including his own body, language, sound, film, video, neon, holograms and 3D technology. Once again reflecting on the perceptions, preconceptions and contradictions which characterize our existence in the world, the series of works on view underscores Nauman’s capacity to expand and elaborate on the capacities of art in the 21st Century.

Bruce Nauman, Walking a Line (2019), via Sperone Westwater

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Lucia Nogueira, Mischief (1995), via Art Observed

Touching down in Tribeca this fall for the first show in its newly opened space, New York’s Luhring Augustine opens its new doors with an illuminating show of works by the late Lucia Nogueira, a London-based, Brazilian-born artist whose brief but remarkable career saw her explore a range of captivating formal iterations and exploratory projects.  Marking her first solo exhibition in the United States, the artist’s work is quite at home in the classic New York architecture of the new space, and invites an intriguing first entry both for her work in the US, and for the gallery’s new home.   Read More »

Pat Steir, Untitled (2008), via Levy Gorvy

Taking over Lévy Gorvy’s New York exhibition space this fall, artist Pat Steir has compiled a selection of works from her ongoing series of Waterfall Paintings, this time focusing in particular on her pieces executed on paper.  Walking a fine line between the grand scale and gesture of her paintings on canvas as well as the more intimate sizes of the works here, the show traces a unique aspect of Steir’s engagement with the form.   Working on paper has been a quintessential aspect of Steir’s practice since the 1970s, producing a body of work that often saw prints and drawings coming out of the same conceptual exercises as her large-scale canvases.  As the show press release notes, these pieces have rarely been seen outside of museum collections, with Steir’s own personal holdings unseen for many years.  For this show, the artist pulls back the veil to explore the ways in which her practice is informed by these pieces on paper.  Read More »