Hilma af Klint, Paintings for the Future (Installation View), via Art Observed

It’s been a long time coming for the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint.  Born in 1862 in Stockholm, her works during the years leading up to and after the turn of the 20th Century marked an increasingly surreal departure from the studied realism of her peers, and into a state of abstraction the made her a leading voice in the development of the language and practice of modernism. Yet af Klint’s work is also frequently held aside from her peers of the era, that is, until now, with an ambitious and thrilling Guggenheim exhibition aiming to put her work back into its proper historical and aesthetic context. Read More »

Michael Heizer (Installation View), via Gagosian

Spanning the breadth and depth of the artist’s work in both sculpture and land art, Gagosian’s Paris in Le Bourget is currently presenting a body of work by Michael Heizer that moves from 1968 to the present.  Over fifty years, Heizer has redefined the very idea of sculpture in his explorations of size, mass, and process. His earth-moving constructions, paintings, and drawings explore the dynamics of positive and negative space.  With this show, the magnitude and nuance of his work is allowed to breathe at scale, presenting a body of works that underscore his evolution and incorporation of increasingly complex methodologies into his practice. Read More »

Robert Rauschenberg, Palladian Xmas (Spread) (1980), via Ropac

Over the course of his career, Robert Rauschenberg occupied an almost innumerable series of critical and theoretical positions in the practice and production of art objects, often bounding from material to material and technique to technique in bounds that often moved beyond the scope of any single artists entire oeuvre.  His relentless interest in particular with the picture plane itself, and its capacity for interruption or disruption through the inclusion of ready-made objects, collaged pieces and even the scraps of other paintings, Rauschenberg produced what could best be considered as a career in a constant state of flux caused by its own movements.
Robert Rauschenberg, Rodeo Palace (Spread) (1976), via Rauschenberg Foundation

This winter, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London is presenting the artist’s iconic Spreads series, reflecting on the artist’s work pioneering new ways of painterly construction while remaining focused on his own painterly language.  The large-scale Spreads encapsulate many of Robert Rauschenberg’s best-known motifs and materials, and the twelve works from the series―the largest of which stretches to over six metres wide are presented alongside a series of paper collages from the same era.  In the Spreads the artist’s familiar motifs from his object-laden Combines is reprised, incorporating car tires, doors, bedding and other materials in conjunction with fabric materials and canvas, all conspiring to create a dense, multilayered series of materials that challenges and reframes the canvas as a collecting pool for both materials and ideas, reference systems and the objects that contain them, all negotiating within the canvas as one potential conclusion of the project of the 20th Century avant-garde.
Robert Rauschenberg, Rumor (Spread) (1980), via Ropac

Rauschenberg himself was well aware of these conversations of object and image, referring to the “Spreads” as both a negotiation of history and “something you put on toast.”  The language of his materials laid across the canvas negotiate with their mode of presentation, ultimately creating even more dense linguistic networks alongside the concepts explored within the works themselves.  Rather than a purely retrospective exercise, the development of his Spreads is also suggestive of a more complex relationship between past and present, integrating not only elements from his earlier work but also reflecting changes in his life, his practice and in contemporary art at the time. Rauschenberg’s use of fabric color blocks in his Spreads not only represented a shift in his color palette from the urban experience of New York to the bright oranges, pinks and yellows of life in Florida, but also engaged with recent artistic developments such as Color Field painting and Minimalism, incorporating references to a new generation of artists.

Robert Rauschenberg, Spreads 1975-1983 (Installation View), via Ropac

This series of works, a vast trove of historical touchstones and concepts united by Rauschenberg’s hand, makes for a striking investigation of the artists’s work, and his vantage point from the vanguard of 20th Century art.

The show closes Janaury 26th.

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Thaddaeus Ropac [Exhibition Site]

Bridget Riley, Quiver 3 (2014), via Spruth Magers

Comprising work made between 1960 and the present, Bridget Riley: Painting Now at Sprüth Magers LA surveys the development of the British artist’s career-long exploration of looking and seeing in relation to the capacities of painting and picture making. Her work, consisting of tightly-interlocked bands of color and explorations of the potential for relief and tension in the presentation of visual stimuli, is presented here in its development of optically-elusive, challenging pieces, ones that make the viewer acutely aware of the act of looking. Read More »

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

In 1998, artist Julia Scher installed her work Wonderland in New York. Immersing the galley in a theatrical pink and purple light, Scher’s Wonderland is a multimedia environment where visitors are welcomed by the sound of the artist’s authoritative yet soothing voice: ‘Attention. There are live cameras here in Wonderland, recording you… Warning. Your size may change, here in Wonderland. Thank you for coming!’ This hint at the concepts of surveillance, of the reproduction of reality, and of the deconstruction of space and time feel particularly resonant in a new century, and underscore the cutting-edge nature of Scher’s work.

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

Scher’s work comes on the heels of a recent revival in interest around her work, and a performance of one of her ongoing works, ‘Security by Julia’ at Frieze this year. The Security By Julia series, which began in 1988, uses public space to question the invasion of personal freedom within the public realm, using the tools of the electronic age to critically engage it, specifically a recurring use of security cameras. Here, her reprised work follows a similar logic, provoking questions on the state, its presence in everyday life, and ways of living beside, or outside of it.

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

At the center of the space are two semi-circular child-sized desks arrayed with complex technical equipment and cabling, vintage computer monitors with live surveillance footage, various ephemera—such as bags of White Rabbit Creamy Candy—and Scher’s signature pink guard caps. Alluding to prior works and dense multi-media narratives, the artist’s selections of objects form a central nervous system of sorts, a series of narrative elements conspiring in their reproduction and reframing of the reality of the gallery space. Referencing both psychedelics and classic literature, as well as her own work, Scher’s pieces here invite a meditation on youth and media. On the walls, complementing the central assemblage of technological apparatuses, large-scale prints depict children, among them American actress and director Lena Dunham aged 10, dressed in the same pink uniforms and caps that are neatly folded on the desks.

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

Julia Scher, Wonderland (Installation View), via Esther Schipper

Posed here, the artist’s work mirrors the subversions of role-play and power, yet the inclusion of these same images are notable in turn for their place in the gallery today. It’s worth considering that the millennial models used for this piece have now grown into a place of power in the world. Dunham in particular is now a vastly successful writer and filmmaker in her own right. Scher’s work, presented in its new state, is perhaps an even more potent reflection at this point, not only suggesting the distended sense of reality caused by the exercise of state power, but perhaps more notably, the surreal nature of a new generation taking up these weapons, and eventually growing into their own place of power in the world.

The show closes February 9th.

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Julia Scher: Wonderland [Exhibition Site]

David Ostrowski, The Thin Red Line (Installation view), courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photography: Voytek Ketz, London & postproduction by Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin

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Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

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Seth Price, Hell Has Everything (2018), via Petzel

In the past several months, artist Seth Price has taken to making and posting mixtapes on his personal SoundCloud page. Described in a recent Art News post as “soundtracks for painters,” his mixes (and the article itself), underscore Price as an inveterate consumer of media and information, embracing a constant stream of data that he often delves into or twists up into the language and production of his works.  This compilation of information sits at the core of Hell Has Everything, the artist’s first show of work at Petzel Gallery in New York in six years.
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Chiharu Shiota, Me Somewhere Else (2018), via Blain Southern

Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota brings her signature techniques in environmental installation to bear at Blain|Southern this fall for her first exhibition at the gallery’s London space. Compiling a selection of new works that include a new site-specific installation, along with sculpture and works on canvas, the artist’s show, Me Somewhere Else, underscores her practice in attempting to connect and reframe the operations of her own memory in exchange with the world around her. Read More »

Ellsworth Kelly, Color Panels for a Large Wall II (1978), via Matthew Marks

In 1978, Ellsworth Kelly was commissioned to create a painting for the lobby of a new building in Cincinnati. His piece, Color Panels for a Large Wall, was the resulting work, a 30-by-125-foot painting that clocked in as his largest ever made. Yet the artist’s work in this vein would live well beyond this specific installation, reprised in several iterations of shows and installs in Amsterdam, New York, and Munich. In 2003, Kelly reconfigured the painting’s eighteen panels — from two rows of nine to three rows of six — when it was installed in its permanent home at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Read More »