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 »

Carmen Herrera, Estructuras (Installation View), via Art Observed

Entering Lisson Gallery’s 24th Street New York space, visitors are greeted with a vibrant, colorful arrangement of works, geometric forms mounted on walls, arranged along the floor, and in some cases, even propped up on tables, creating the impression of momentary voids in the perception of the gallery space, or even that of the viewer’s own visual field.  The show is the first ever large-scale presentation of Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera’s Estrcuturas works, and underscores the artist’s ongoing contributions to the languages of minimalism and conceptualism. Read More »

Fausto Melotti, The Deserted City (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s expansive 22nd Street location in New York, a body of work by the Italian master Fausto Melotti spreads across the upper floors, a snaking, intricate series of pathways that draw the viewer into an intimate, almost theatrical relationship to the works on view. Presenting a series of varied scenes and arrangements of the artist’s delicate, surreal formal arrangements, the show is an exemplary demonstration of Melotti’s capacities to create other worlds and new sensations within the gallery. Read More »

Pope.L, Rebuilding the Monument (chicago version/the vitrine problem/one of three) (2007), via Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Currently on at both of Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s New York locations, artist Pope.L presents an exploration of various projects both current at historical at its Chelsea exhibition space and uptown gallery.  Pope.L’s practice often focuses on the uncertain but productive space between differences in language, class, race, and gender to create works that simultaneously enlist, mock and re-write convention. For Pope.L this gap is where ignorance, the unknown, or the unintended collides with human meaning and, even hubris to create fresh tensions around authenticity, self and icon. Read More »

Pierre Huyghe, UUmwelt (Installation View), Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (3 October 2018 – 10 February 2019). Copyright Ola Rindal. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries

Artist Pierre Huyghe is known for his complex immersive ecosystems, creating impressive arrangements of space and material that incorporate living organisms, active agents and forces that gradually transform or reactivate the gallery in which its placed.  For his new exhibition at The Serpentine Gallery in the UK, which opened during Frieze London this past month, the artist has turned the museum into a porous and contingent environment, housing different forms of cognition, emerging intelligence, biological reproduction and instinctual behaviors. Read More »

Olafur Eliasson, Straight Back (2018), via Art Observed

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is currently presenting Olafur Eliasson: The speed of your attention, the first solo exhibition dedicated to Eliasson at the gallery’s recently inaugurated Los Angeles location. The phrase “the speed of your attention” was introduced to Eliasson by Joe Dumit, an anthropologist at UC Davis who conducted a movement experiment during a workshop at Eliasson’s Berlin studio this summer. Dumit learned the phrase from Nita Little—one of the pioneers of contact improvisation, a contemporary dance technique in which movements arise through contact between two or more dancers—in the form of the instruction to “move at the speed of your attention.” Read More »