The artist Bharti Kher in front of A View of The Forest (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Aubrey Roemer.

Bharti Kher‘s The hot winds that blow from the West showcases five variant pieces and is on view now at the East 69th Street location of Hauser & Wirth. On site for the show’s opening, the artist was born and educated in Britain, but moved to New Delhi, India in the early 1990s. The exhibition’s titular work is a large sculpture of stacked radiators, imported to Kher’s Indian studio from the United States over a period of six years. Stripped of their initial purpose as heaters, the ribbed design is dually linear and unnerving; repetitive carcasses pack the political implication of now-cold American heaters and suggest a recalibrating globalization with decreasing need for Western influence. More literally, ‘the hot wind that blows from the west’ is a reference to a summer wind called The Loo in Punjab. The region of Punjab is home to the northern border of India and Pakistan, a region fraught with conflict following post-colonial divisions.

Bharti Kher, The hot winds that blow from the West (2011)

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‪‬Charles Saatchi’s new book ‘Be The Worst You Can Be’ to be released in April, addressing 300 questions from readers and journalists [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Former MoMA painting and sculpture chief curator John Elderfield to join Gagosian Gallery in April as “a consultant to organize selected special exhibitions and projects with artists.” [AO Newslink]

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Liam Gillick, Untitled (2012). All images © The artist and courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

Galerie Eva Presenhuber hosts a new group of work by Liam Gillick in the exhibition Scorpion or Felix. Taking its name from a text by Karl Marx—of which only fragments have survived—the show features three central figures, Scorpio, Felix, and Merten, with smaller works in ink, writing on the wall, and colorful sliding doors. Gillick has been creating text-based works and objects dealing with the built environment since the late 1980s, challenging the interpretation of constructed spaces, “establishing relationships based sometimes on attraction, sometimes on repulsion.”

Installation view

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Installation view. All images via Carlson Gallery.

Nate Lowman and Hanna Liden collaborate once again at Carlson Gallery in London. Lowman demonstrates his process-as-art aesthetic, exhibiting a number of paintings originally used as drop-cloths on his studio floor, alongside Liden’s peculiar umbrella sculptures, creating an otherworldly installation pockmarked by subtle intrusions of the everyday.

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‪‬Damien Hirst official website launched, includes live feed of studio assistants [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Olafur Eliasson exhibition to inaugurate the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation museum designed by Frank Gehry in Paris late 2013 [AO Newslink]

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Conrad Shawcross, The Nervous Systems (Inverted) (2011). Images courtesy of MUDAM and artist.

One hundred and sixty two strings slowly wind down from suspended hexagonal structures in the Grand Hall of MUDAM Luxembourg, braiding into a colorful, ever-growing heap on the floor in The Nervous Systems (Inverted) by Conrad Shawcross. The sculpture will be on display and churning out rope though May 6, the latest of Shawcross’s rope machines that he has been creating since 2003, addressing scientific, mathematical, and philosophical concepts with both admiration and an inquisitive eye.

Conrad Shawcross, The Nervous Systems (Inverted) (2011)

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‪‪‬Sean Kelly Gallery moves to new two-story 22,000 square foot space designed by Toshiko Mori at 36th and 10th—as Exit Art vacates the space—more than tripling the gallery’s current square footage as newly signed artists include Alec Soth, Kehinde Wiley, and most recently, Terrence Koh [AO Newslink]

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‪‬X-Ray techniques identify likely Van Gogh painting of wrestlers beneath ‘Still Life with Meadows and Roses,’ which was previously unauthenticated, now hanging at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands [AO Newslink]

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‪‬BMW Guggenheim Lab changes plans on six year tour to not include Berlin district of Kreuzberg due to anti-gentrification protests [AO Newslink]

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Rachel Willis.

Gagosian Gallery recently debuted a new body of work by German born artist Georg Baselitz. The show is comprised of ten pieces—nine oil paintings and one bronze sculpture—all standing at least nine feet in height and displaying images of abstracted human figures. Baselitz’s work has long been known for its aesthetic expression and the paintings in this show are no exception with their vibrant colors and painterly brushstrokes.

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Installation view. All images via Honor Fraser Gallery

In her second solo exhibition with Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Rosson Crow explores memory, history, and the visual cues of U.S. national identity in a series of large-scale works on canvas. Playing on terms that suggest a raucous commotion, as well as a classic American boosterism, Ballyhoo Hullabaloo Haboob depicts moments of tragedy and triumph in the long 20^th century.

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‪Chairwoman of Galeries Lafayette Ginette Heilbronn Moulin accuses the dynastic Parisian art dealing Wildenstein family of withholding information about Claude Monet’s Torrent de la Creuse (1889), missing since its confiscation by the Nazis during World War II. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York currently possesses an allegedly near-identical copy to the lost work. [AO Newslink]

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‪‬Sotheby’s to sell some 50 works owned by the late Theodore J. Forstmann in New York throughout May, valued at $75 million and including pieces by Picasso, Miró, Lichtenstein, and Soutine [AO Newslink]

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Martin Creed, Work No. 890, DON’T WORRY (2008).  Image courtesy of the Tate Liverpool.

Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed brings seven new works to the Tate Liverpool this spring as part of their ARTIST ROOMS collection, in conjunction with the National Galleries of Scotland. Creed’s works range in media from paintings to a neon installation; “Refreshing, unexpected and humorous, Creed’s work challenges our preconceptions and rearranges the rules of conceptual art,” reads the exhibition’s press release.

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‪‬James Murdoch chooses to leave the board at Sotheby’s in May, opting to “focus on his core responsibilities at News Corps” [AO Newslink]

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All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

Lisa Cooley‘s new Lower East Side space opened Friday night, March 16, 2012 at 107 Suffolk St after four years on Orchard Street. The inaugural show is titled Today—after the Frank O’Hara poem at the top of the press release—and promotes a participatory and communal feeling as Cooley’s full roster of artists is on display in the 4,800 sq ft, one story space. Guests were invited to sign a white canvas ‘guestbook,’ adding an additional dimension to the exchange between artist and participant. The exhibition features works from Michael Bauer, Alice Channer, Andy Coolquitt, Cynthia Daignault, Josh Faught, Frank Haines, Alex Olson, John Pestoni, Alan Reid, Erin Shirreff and J. Parker Valentine, and runs through March 25th.

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Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration (1967). Images via Tate Modern.

Currently on view at the Tate Modern is the first major retrospective of Yayoi Kusama’s work in the UK. Covering a practice that has spanned nearly six decades, the fourteen-room exhibition reveals the wide range of the artist’s explorations into media and mediation. Including early manipulated photographs, soft sculptures, and immersive installations, as well as more recent paintings and sculptural works, the Tate’s retrospective moves viewers through one of the most individual and idiosyncratic practices to emerge from the 1960s New York art scene.

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James Shaeffer at Reference Art from Richmond, Virginia.  All photos on site for Art Observed by Elene Damenia.

The second iteration of the Dependent Art Fair took place on the Saturday afternoon of Armory week, alongside several satellite fairs—including the Independent Art Fair. Dependent organizer Rose Marcus gathered 20 galleries in the Lower East Side Comfort Inn hotel, offering the two night stay for a fair fee of $400. The DIY, tongue-in-cheek fair is geared toward community and dialogue amongst its participating galleries and artists, seeking a sort of humorous—yet rigorous—elegance, leaving the intense marketing focus of other fairs to the back seat. Up and down the six occupied floors (floors 3–8, with a smoking deck on 6), visitors squeezed through the hallways and into the individual hotel rooms to see a variety of contemporary painting, sculpture, video, and installations, including a bed-ridden mini Kawasaki motorcycle at Reference Art, or made-to-order rum-fruit smoothies at Roberto Paradise.

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Street View of Miss You at Prism, West Hollywood. All images via Os Gemeos.

Miss You, an immersive environment by well-known Brazilian artists Os Gemeos is currently on view at Prism in West Hollywood. Growing up in the megalopolis of São Paulo, the twins Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo were influenced by the vibrant street culture of the city, including its expansive graffiti and mural projects. They continually bring this energy into the gallery, transporting the dynamism of the tropical urban center into the space through their use of saturated hues, bold magical-realist style, and the totality of their vision.

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‪‬In anticipation of Damien Hirst’s upcoming Tate retrospective next month, writer Hari Krunzu lobs invectives at the artist in an editorial in the Guardian: “This isn’t just art that exists in the market, or is ‘about’ the market. This is art that is the market – a series of gestures that are made wholly or primarily to capture and embody financial value,” “Don’t just make money, be money: weightless, ubiquitous, infinitely circulating, immortal.” [AO Newslink]

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‪‬The Whitney Museum and Centre Pompidou announce promised gift of over 800 American and international artists’ works from collectors Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, with 500 American works entering the collection of the Whitney, to be exhibited first in 2015, and 300 European and international works going to the Pompidou for a later exhibition [AO Newslink]

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Rita Ackermann, Parkoló Baleset 1. – Marfa/Crash (2009) All images courtesy of the Ludwig Museum

Ludwig Museum’s current solo exhibition Bakos. Rita Ackermann, concentrates on works created in the past three years, including a wide variety of drawings, paintings, prints, and videos. The show also features all of what Ackermann produced during her Marfa/Chinati artist-in-residency program in 2010, with the Fire Days (2010) series on public display for the first time. Curated by Kata Oltai, the Bakos is part of series that aims to introduce Hungarian artists (who may or may not actually work in the country) to Hungary.

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