All installation images courtesy Gladstone Gallery by David Regen, copyright the artists.

The Spirit Level is a large multimedia group show currently on display at both of the Gladstone Gallery locations in Chelsea. New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone curated the show with the intention of tapping into various levels of consciousness with both sexual and surreal imagery. With a rather dark and visceral edge, the work spans a variety of mediums: painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and installation. Between the two galleries, a total of 19 artists are represented including Martin Boyce, Ann Craven, and Sam Gilliam.

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‪‬MAXXI, Italy’s national contemporary art museum in Rome, to have board of directors replaced by government-appointed administration following an unresolved 2012 budget

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‪‬Artist Christian Marclay, creator of The Clock, and collector Alice Walton of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art among Top 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine

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‪‬Takashi Murakami speaks on several personal and Japanese cultural issues in an edited interview with the Wall Street Journal

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Marina Abramović, The Abramović Method: Chair for Man and His Spirit (2012). All photos © Marina Abramović by SIAE 2012, courtesy Marina Abramović and Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan unless otherwise noted.

Known as the “grandmother of performance art,” Serbian artist Marina Abramović has chosen Milan as the setting for the exhibition of her much anticipated new body of work, titled The Abramović Method. Presented at PAC Padiglione d’Art Contemporanea through June 10, 2012 and complemented by an exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Lia Rumma (through May 12, 2012), this is her first major performance since MoMA’s The Artist is Present in 2010, during which Abramović sat in a gallery for 700 hours, silently and motionlessly interacting with a unending parade of museumgoers exclusively through eye contact. Abramović initiated her performance art practice in the 1970s with physically and emotionally demanding trials, aiming to test the limits of her bodily and psychological endurance. More recently, Abramović’s artistic practice has become preoccupied with the concept of duration and an obligation to the public.

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‪‪‬Model May Andersen becomes assistant director at The Hole gallery following spring internship and is also separately in the press today regarding her dating Julian Schnabel

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‪‬Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas P. Campbell earned $1.04 million in pay and benefits in 2010, a number comparable among other museum heads as the Met expanded loan and exhibition programs and attendance reached a forty-year peak [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Six works by Gerhard Richter from 1968–93 to be auctioned at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Sale on May 8 in New York, “With an aggregate low estimate of almost $40 million, the six works are primed to be a landmark event in the Richter market.”

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Artist Agathe Snow in front of Target Practice (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Maccarone Gallery presents new work by Agathe Snow in the exhibition I like it here. Don’t you? An artist whose visual vocabulary is steeped in the rhetoric of apocalypse, this collection of papier-mâché and fiberglass sculptures represents Snow’s vision of purgatory—a perpetual present constructed from the material refuse of a damned society. Ten totemic mobiles hang from ceiling to floor, each cleverly titled to simultaneously evoke their pop mundanity and allegorical weight, or perhaps, more aptly, weightlessness. This assemblage, a collage of cultural detritus both found and fabricated, hovers silently in Snow’s mythological continuum of hope and despair, conjuring associations of childhood and war, nature and culture, life and death, and everything in between.

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‪‬Ai Weiwei pens an essay in the Guardian on Chinese censorship, “The internet is uncontrollable. And if the internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It’s as simple as that.”

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‪‬Ai Weiwei sues Chinese government over tax issues claiming violations in handling witnesses, evidence, and company accounts

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‪‬Eleven Rivington expands to second space at 195 Chrystie street, opening April 29; Maccarone Gallery also opens an additional space around the corner from current West Village locale, set to open in June

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Keith Haring, Matrix (1983). All images copyright Keith Haring Foundation.

On now at The Brooklyn Museum is ‘Keith Haring: 1978-1982.’ This dynamic multi-media exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of Haring’s early work. Best known for his “Crack is Wack” landmark mural, “The Radiant Baby,” and other stylistically similar cartoons made with thick lines of black Sumi ink, Haring also produced work in other mediums such as film and print. This show is comprised of 155 works on paper, multiple videos, and more than 150 personal objects of Haring’s, including notebooks, flyers, posters, subway drawings, and photographs; all of which, put together, capture and encapsulate the excitement and energy of New York City’s club and art scenes in the 1980s. The exhibition narrates viewers through the period in Haring’s career immediately following his arrival in New York City through the establishment of his studio space and the beginning of his interest in street art.

Kenny Scarf and Peter Schuyff, Untitled (1979)

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All images courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, Paris

Following a year in the public eye for Jaume Plensa, the artist’s current show at Galerie Lelong in Paris is comprised of steel and rock creations as well as accompanying drawings. These “modern hermits” follow in the wake attention Plensa garnered last year via large scale sculptural installations in Madison Square Park, M.I.T. and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The mid-sized works and drawings are approachable, “silent observers of the hustle and bustle,” according to the press release.

Jaume Plensa, The Hermit VI (2012)

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‪‬Jenny Holzer discusses her use of language and new paintings with Kiki Smith in Interview, “Until recently, I felt I had to sneak color, but now I just paint it.”

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‪‬Rob Pruitt to collaborate with Jimmy Choo on 2013 Cruise collection of shoes, handbags, and leather goods slated for a November release. “We sensed that Rob’s twist on Jimmy Choo glamour would yield something very collectible and uniquely beautiful,” said the brand’s creative directors

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‪‬Art historian recognizes possible El Greco work in private collection of Camilla Blaffer: a canvas bought at a Paris auction 20 years ago depicts St. Francis, a common subject of the artist, and was signed with the artist’s proper name (though the signature was lost in the restoration)

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‪‬Palais de Tokyo opened its doors on Thursday after a €20m, 10-month renovation, offering an intentionally dusty 237,000 sq feet spread over four floors, the center’s president de Loisy saying, “Nothing is perfectly clean, nothing is perfectly painted on purpose. It is so important in art not to control everything. It’s all in favor of creativity.”

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‪‬The Metropolitan Museum of Art publishes guidebook of nearly two million works on 449 pages with 600 color illustrations, distributed by Yale University Press

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Walter De Maria, 5-7-9 Series, installation view. All images courtesy of Gagosian Gallery Rome.

Influential American sculptor Walter De Maria is currently exhibiting part of his 5-7-9 Series at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome. De Maria has been involved with numerous historical art movements, including Minimalism, Land Art, and Conceptual Art, and the present exhibition represents a chance to view De Maria’s contribution to some of these. The 5-7-9 Series is one of three large-scale, multi-part installation sculptures. The current Rome exhibition is edition 2 of 2; the first being on permanent view at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. This series is preceded by The 4-6-8 Series (1966) and followed by Time/Timeless/No Time (2004).
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‪‬Stolen Paul Cézanne painting recovered by Serbian police from a Swiss gallery heist four years ago when three suspects stole four paintings at gunpoint. If authenticated, the Cézanne will be the third painting recovered and could be worth $108m [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’—one of four versions—is on view now in London at Sotheby’s today for one week before heading to New York for May 2 auction, expected to fetch $80m

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‪‬Thomas Kellein steps down from director position with Chinati Foundation, agreeing to stay on as consultant for next 6 month period, “I am gratefully wishing my colleagues and my board of directors the very best in the future.”

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Cai Guo-Qiang in front of Desire for Zero Gravity (2012) at MOCA’s Cai Gu0-Qiang: Sky Ladder. Images via MOCA unless otherwise noted.

In the first West Coast solo exhibition of world-renowned New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) presents four commissioned projects, including the most recent work in the artist’s Projects for Extraterrestrials series, which began in 1989. Trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Cai Guo-Qiang’s projects are spectacular and theatrical gestures, embodying the ethos of action painting and a long history of creation/destruction strategies in terms of today’s complex (pyro)technical mechanisms. Using gunpowder as his medium, Cai creates large-scale drawings in a matter of seconds with the dramatic transformative potentials of this volatile material.

Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Photo on site for Art Observed by Megan Hoetger.

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