Nelly Zagury, The Giant Stalker & The Cannibal Flower (2019), via Art Observed
Taking over the impressively appointed former William Ulmer Brewery at 81 Beaver Street in Bushwick, local gallery The Chimney has initiated an impressive installation, taking over six large rooms in the building to present a series of large-scale installations and selections of works by nine American and international artists. Read More »
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Yang Fudong, Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project, Day 30 (2018), via Marian Goodman
Considered one of China’s most important contemporary artists, the Shanghai-based Yang Fudong’s work has evolved through a diverse series of focal points and interests over the course of his career, moving through painting, video and other bodies of work that underscore his place as a central contributor to the landscape of Chinese contemporary art and a prominent voice in the national discourse. This month in London, the artist presents an exhibition of new work at Marian Goodman, the first with the gallery in London, and the international premiere of his epic project Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project. Read More »
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Eric Fischl, The Exchange (2018), via Sprüth Magers
For over four decades, Eric Fischl has produced uncompromising images of American society, presenting a challenging and often surreal perspective on the forms and functions of middle and upper class malaise as reflected in the body itself. Figures routinely share space on his canvases, yet their gazes rarely meet, lounging or posed in a manner that reflects a certain deconstruction of the body as persona. Even when they do, through composition, pose and gesture, they are trapped in the midst of strained exchanges, moments of exchange and interaction that seems to place the viewer in the midst of a meditation on the body and on the societies it constructs. Marking his first solo exhibition in LA in 25 years, the artist’s current exhibition, Complications From an Already Unfulfilled Life, marks both a continuation of this thread and a new path forward, marking his first show in the Californian metropolis with Sprüth Magers. Read More »
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Daniel Richter, Plications of Come (2019), via Regen Projects
Currently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, painter Daniel Richter has brought forth a selection of new works, continuing recent explorations in methodology the artist first began experimenting with in 2015. One of the most influential painters of his generation, Richter’s work continues the lineage of post-war German painting that includes artists such as Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen. Mixing together disparate threads of figurative painting and abstraction, his pieces twist pop culture, media images and other bits of communicative detritus through a shared space, resulting in swirling compositions that implies an ever-open eye on the world around him. Read More »
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Marisa Merz, via Gladstone
Marisa Merz, the Italian sculptor whose enigmatic and intricate sculptural arrangements was a foundational part of the impact of the Arte Povera movement in the country and around the globe, has passed away at the age of 93. Merz, the only woman associated with the vanguard movement, blazed her own path through the landscape of post-war Italy, and founded a sculptural language that is enduringly important today.
The wife of Mario Merz, Marisa was born in Turin, Italy, in 1926, but little information on her early years persists.  Yet her time at home during the 1960’s marked her first experiments with simple materials, working with sheets of metal and thread to create nuanced clusters of material and subtle engagements with her family life. Merz’s work maintained a sense of intimacy and love, tenderness and the human body, that marked her work as distinct from her contemporaries, and which has made her work enduringly resonant.
Marisa Merz, via Gladstone
She is survived by her daughter Beatrice, who heads the Fondazione Merz, and who told the NYT Style section in 2017: “I recently asked her how some of her works came about, what was the thought, inspiration, or approach behind them. She answered that she always and only did what she liked, and that every work originated from the pleasure of making it, from a spontaneous gesture or finding of a particular object or material.â€
Read more:
Marisa Merz, Key Arte Povera Figure and Relentlessly Inventive Sculptor, Is Dead at 93 [Art News]
MARISA MERZ (1926–2019) [Artforum]
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Jamian Juliano-Villani, Let’s Kill Nicole (Installation View), via Massimo de Carlo
Currently on view at Massimo de Carlo in London, Jamian Juliano-Villani’s new exhibition, Let’s Kill Nicole, seems to emphasize the same sort of alternating morbidity and innocence of an adolescent suggestion of violence. In the same way that a child might suggest death as a way of solving a minor dispute, Juliano-Villani’s works seem to balance a timeless, vivid energy with simplistic, even banal scenes and subject matter. Read More »
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Wolfgang Tillmans, Greifbar 77 (2018), via Maureen Paley
Culling together a selection of new works and recent projects by Wolfgang Tillmans, Maureen Paley in London has opened an expansive and exploratory show that documents the artist’s multifaceted approach to image-making, featuring new and previously unseen works from the mid 1980s to the present day. Read More »
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Gina Beavers, Cake (2015), via MoMA PS1
In her visceral, vexing, often grotesque paintings, New York–based artist Gina Beavers welcomes an experience of pop culture, and of the history of its depiction in modern art, as a swirling vortex of techniques and transformations. Using sourced digital images appropriated from social media and the Internet, Beavers’s work sees her repurposing the digital graphics into thickly layered compositions that border on sculpture. Hot dogs and hamburgers, human lips and sporting implements all burst forth from the surface of the canvas, a sort of exercise in both dimensionality and texture that underscore their strange abstraction, both from the original scene captured, and from the image’s prior home online. For her exhibition at MoMA PS1 this summer, the artist continues her explorations of these cultural formats. Read More »
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Chris Ofili, Dangerous Liasions (Installation View), via David Zwirner
Currently on at David Zwirner’s 34 East 69th Street townhouse in uptown New York City, artist Chris Ofili is presenting a series of new works unified under the title Dangerous Liaisons. Referencing René Magritte’s eponymous painting of 1935, which Ofili explores in drawings that employ the compositional organization of the Surrealist’s work as a structure for his own rich and layered exploration of color and line, the exhibition underscores Ofili’s abilities as an expressive and emotive painter whose craft with the brush is complemented by his rich conceptual practice. Read More »
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David Hammons, Untitled (2017), via Hauser & Wirth
Marking his first major exhibition on the West Coast in decades, artist David Hammons has touched down at Hauser & Wirth for a major summer blockbuster, an exhibition that underscores the artists’s expansive and challenging practice, and its ongoing discourse with the languages of race, wealth, politics and modern art that have been his hallmark over the course of his life. Remaining razor sharp in its ability to comment on and critique the various socio-cultural spheres his work moves through, Hammons’s show is a masterclass in subtle condemnation. Read More »
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