Edward Hopper, Chop Suey (1929), via Christie’s

This next week, New York City will see a string of Modern and Contemporary Auctions take place at the major auction houses, following up a tense season of political uncertainty in the U.S. with a series of sales that may offer a referendum on the nation’s current economic climate.  With a number of special sales joining the traditional major evening sales, the week should offer an intriguing picture of just how healthy the market is, or perhaps how daring its collectors are feeling. Read More »

Tania Bruguera at Tate Modern (Installation View), via Art Observed

Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera has been tapped for the most recent commission project at Tate Modern, which opened this past October during Frieze Week. The piece, which unifies disparate social threads under the museum roof, is a striking moment for the artist under the shadow of the nation’s Brexit negotiations. Read More »

General Idea, Untitled (AIDS with Cockroaches) (1989), all images via Maureen Paley

Now through November 11th, 2018, Maureen Paley in London is presenting AA Bronson + General Idea, an exhibition marking fifty years since AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal met in 1968 and formed the collective General Idea. The Canadian collective is known for producing over 100 solo exhibitions, as well as countless group shows and temporary public art projects. For the years of 1969-1994 they lived and worked together, creating a “living artwork of their being together” and working through various surfaces or ‘host’ media for their ideas and engagement with punk, queer theory, ad AIDS activism. Read More »

Amy Sillman, Landline (Installation View), via Camden Arts Cenre

Perhaps one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American painting, artist Amy Sillman has relentlessly and repeatedly pushed her own style towards the furthest reaches of her capacity, always in an attempt to interrogate and re-evaluate the language and practice of painting against the backdrop of modern history and the attendant shifts from analog to digital technologies and labor processes.  Based in New York, the artist has opened her first major solo institutional show in the UK this fall, an ambitious and expansive walk through her work at the Camden Arts Centre in North London.   Read More »

Ajay Kurian, Nine Flags (Installation View), via Art Observed

Artist Ajay Kurian returns to 47 Canal Gallery for a show of new works this month, delving into the recent American political landscape, and the fraught politics of identity, interiority and authenticity that have dominated the political discourse in the past years.  Responding in particular to the near-constant presentation and proliferation of the American flag in the language and iconography of a resurgent American nationalism, Kurian has created his own series of flags, fragmented transformations of this same language to explore new possibilities for an American populace.  

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Georg Baselitz, The Orange Eater VI (1981), via Art Observed

Gallerie Thaddeus Ropac London is currently offering a museum-quality show of ground-breaking inverted paintings, drawings and sculptures by Georg Baselitz, tracing the artist’s shift to a freer, more expressionistic use of paint and of color, while still staging works of startling intensity and solemn power. The exhibition presents seminal works from each of the series Baseliz developed during the 1980s such as Orangenesser, Strandbilder and Trinker, as well as works on paper from the era evoking religious icons, drawings from the Strandbilder series, and untitled figure sketches. Standing alongside his paintings, the show’s deep array of archival works establish the evolution of his personal iconography across media. Read More »

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Morning) (2018), via Art Observed

It’s been a good few years for Kerry James Marshall.  The Chicago-based painter opened his landmark show at The Met Breuer, a critically-lauded exhibition that toured the U.S. and earned the artist an impressive response from both viewers and critics.  Now, the artist turns his attention towards a body of new paintings, the first new series produced since the Mastry exhibition, for a new show at David Zwirner’s exhibition location in London.  Read More »

Julie Mehretu, SEXTANT (Installation View), via White Cube

Moving through a range of historical and aesthetic modes of exploration for her most recent exhibition at White Cube in London, artist Julie Mehretu has offered a new fold in an already complex and multilayered body of work.  Her new exhibition, which opened just this past month, brings together a diverse and challenging arrangement of pieces that sees the artist mining contemporary image archives and newspaper headlines for her grounding material, a mode that moves beyond her prior practice and into new ground.  Read More »

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study (0X5A1237) (2017), via Matthew Marks

Matthew Marks Los Angeles has given over its West Hollywood exhibition space to a striking group show, exploring a younger generation of artists under the name Positioner.  The show takes its name from work by exhibiting artist Julia Phillips, and, much in the same way that the artist explores institutional power and discrimination in her own works, this exhibition focuses on the the manner in which artists today are currently focusing on depictions, representations, or consolidations of the individual within the modern field of art practice.   Read More »