Jenny Saville, Red Stare Head (2007-2011)

Striking and visceral, the paintings of Jenny Saville capture a fierce movement within their canvas boundaries, blending detailed rendering with sharp auxiliary strokes of paint to suggest a violent, decaying nature.  Now, the Young British Artist who rose to prominence in the early 2000’s alongside contemporaries Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, is having her first solo exhibition on British soil, at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford.

Jenny Saville, Trace (1993)

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Trevor Paglen‘s ‘The Last Pictures’ to launch into outer space attached to a television satellite in September 2012 as part of a Creative Time project. Paglen, in collaboration with MIT and various scientific specialists, designed an ultra-archival disc of images, capable of surviving billions of years in space.

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New York financier Leon Black is the record breaking buyer of Edvard Munch‘s $120 million ‘The Scream’ at Sotheby’s last Spring.

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Ai Weiwei, involved in a confrontation between conflicting online bloggers in Beijing’s Chaoyang Park, denies physically harming Wu Danhong, an alleged government-paid blogger. “It makes no sense to lie. I did not beat him. The crowd called my name when I approached and Wu panicked a little bit when he saw me.”

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Chris Martin, Untitled (2012), via The Journal Gallery, New York

The Journal Gallery has organized a summer group show whose impact exceeds the expectations of such a reference. Home Again, Again features nine distinctive contemporary works which, crowded together in the tiny Williamsburg space, form another, unique whole. In a lovingly critical homage to art after 1950 – from the Greenbergian picture plane to the strigency of minimalism – the works on view here are flat, angular, and imposing. Yet, their initial starkness is deliberately thwarted by their use of material and content, offering a lively contemporary perspective on the legacy of postwar American art. (more…)

Jenny Holzer, Sophisticated Devices (Gallery View)

On view currently at Sprüeth Magers’s London gallery is a collection of solo works from multimedia artist Jenny Holzer, exhibiting Holzer’s unique interplay of semiotics and text used to create the art object.

Jenny Holzer, WITH BLEEDING INSIDE THE HEAD … TEXT: LIVING SERIES (1980-1982), 1981

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The Guardian explores Rachel Whiteread‘s perspectives on the changes in East London, the attention and criticism her art receives, and her newly commissioned, frieze at the Whitechapel art gallery, which is one of the key pieces of the London 2012 festival.

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The New York Magazine examines Yayoi Kusama‘s position in the art world after a 40 year stint in a mental hospital. The Japanese artist voices her opinions on her mental illness, her youth, and her old contemporaries, including Andy Warhol, stating that “he lived near me and appropriated my ideas, only he was too late because I have already realized them. We don’t hear his name now so much in Japan.”

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The MET to open a major exhibition surveying Andy Warhol‘s influence on contemporary art, featuring work by Robert Gober, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and others, in September 2012.

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Protesters, outraged by BP’s sponsorship of the Tate Modern, carried a one and a half tonne wind turbine blade across London’s Millennium bridge to the gallery last Saturday morning. A speaker of the activist group, Sharon Palmer, stated that “in a time of climate crisis [visitors to the gallery] should not be made to feel that they’re legitimizing [oil firms].”

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‬Police in Spain arrested four people involved in the sale of a counterfeit copy of Picasso‘s “Buste de Jeune Garçon”, which would have potentially fetched up to $2 million.

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Souren Melikian explores the mind of an art collector by looking at Dutch dealer Bob Haboldt and his new volume. “With the store of knowledge, visual and art historical, that they accumulate in their chosen field of competence they [dealers] will always be ahead of auction house experts who must handle thousands of artists.”

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A Turner prize-nominated piece was rescued from a condemned council flat in London. Roger Hiorns‘s salvaged ‘Seizure’ will be on display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield next Spring.

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In his most recent show at Gagosian Gallery in Paris, Out of the Blue, Into the Black, New York based artist Dan Colen  is the second part of a show in memory of his close friend Dash Snow. Out of the Blue, Into the Black continues where Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are (2009) left off, and is comprised of  paintings, installation, and a sculpture. Art Observed’s Jonathan Beer was able to catch up with the artist bef0re the show’s  opening on June 10.

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Dan Colen, Out of the Blue, Into the Black (2012), Installation View. All photos courtesy of Gagosian, Paris.

For his inaugural solo show at the Paris Gallery, Gagosian presents the exhibit, “Out of the Blue, Into the Black” featuring new works by Dan Colen. The New York artist, known for his participation in the Downtown art scene of the early 2000s, here memorializes his late friend and fellow artist Dash Snow in a tripartite installation of paintings and sculpture. The exhibition title, as well as those of the objects within it, references the opening and closing songs from Neil Young’s seminal 1979 album, Rust Never Sleeps: “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” and “My My, Hey Hey (Into the Blue)”—confronting the fear of obsolescence and death in an elegiac tribute that is both celebratory and somber, hopeful and despondent.

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This July, the Sperone Westwater gallery presents Moving Spirits, an exhibition of the kinetic works of Francois Morellet (France) and Gerhard von Graevenitz (Germany). The longtime collaborators are featured here through works dated between 1960 and 1976, the period coinciding with the artists’ involvement with the Light-Kinetic Movement.

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In a potential harbinger of a doomsday convergence between massive fast food chains and artwork held in museums such as the Tate Modern, Damien Hirst has donated one of his spin paintings to be displayed in Leicester Square’s newly remodeled Burger King in London.  The work is titled: ‘Beautiful Psychedelic Gherkin Exploding Tomato Sauce All Over Your Face, Flame Grilled Painting 2003′

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In an Op-ed, Eli Broad, founding chairman and trustee of the MOCA board, provides insight on the past and current changes at MOCA, including the departure of top curator, Paul Schimmel, on the museum’s behalf, concluding that: “MOCA will thrive and will avoid the problems that are plaguing other institutions while increasing attendance and membership, continuing to offer world-class exhibitions, and exhibiting its collection.”

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The New York Times interviews Mark Flood on his influences, vision, and position in the art world. “I’ve known people who I call ‘sacred monsters,’ like famous art people and such, who are so uptight about always doing everything the same way. So I’m trying to do things differently,” says the Houston artist whose show, The Hateful Years, will open on July 18, 2012 at Luxembourg & Dayan.

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Marina Abramović to teach The Abramović Method at MoMA PS1 Summer School this year. The renowned performance artist’s technique is designed to train students to achieve “a clear state of mind in order to develop ideas for their own work.”

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Caro Niederer, Karen Blixen’s Garden (2006) All images courtesy Hauser & Wirth unless otherwise noted.

Until July 27, Hauser & Wirth Gallery hosts 18 paintings by the Swiss artist Caro Niederer. Consistent, engrossing movement synthesizes a wide variety of subject and scale. Niederer’s work since 1990 is presented in a ‘capsule survey’ in a skylit room towards the rear of the gallery. Sprinkled throughout this room are illustrations from the Kama Sutra in which a burgeoning fascination with narrative is apparent. These walls serve to acclimate the visitor to a stimulating use of color in Niederer’s larger-scale work.

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Kelly Crow of the Wall Street Journal describes the career of Zhang Xiaogang, China’s most expensive living artist, as a story that relates to the contemporary art market of China itself.

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A trove of 100 paintings and drawings possibly by Renaissance master Caravaggio is discovered in a castle in Milan. Worth a reported €700 million – the discovery is the subject of much contention as the authenticity of the collection remains uncertain.

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 A 2.5 ton bronze bull by sculptor Arturo Di Modica, similar to the Wall Street Bull by the same artist,  has been positioned near the front of NYSE Euronext (NYX)’s Amsterdam “as an antidote to Europe’s debt crisis.” “Europe is in an economic crisis. Think positive! Together we will go up!” read leaflets that were handed out by a spokesman for Di Modica.

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