Installation view. All images via Gagosian Gallery.

In Urs Fischer’s latest exhibition at Gagosian’s Davies street gallery in London, the artist has created a life-sized wax model of Russian collector Dasha Zhukova. This is the next installment in a series made by the artist in which art-world figures are converted into giant candles and then burned slowly, until they are reduced to wax drippings. Previously making works of artists Julian Schnabel and Rudolf Stingel, and dealer Bruno Bischofsberger. Though Zhukova requested she be the next art figure turned wax candle, Fischer hesitated because, up until this point, he has only portrayed men. Ultimately, however, on Monday, September 10^th, the wick at the top of the wax figure of Dasha Zhukova’s head was lit, and will continue to burn until the sculpture is reduced to a puddle of melted wax, coinciding with the show’s closing on November 3^rd. Read More »

Urs Fischer, PLAY with Choreography by Madeline Hollander (Installation View), via Art Observed

Over the past several years, few artists have moved so effortlessly across media and concepts like Urs Fischer.  From kaleidoscopic, cartoonish abstractions to surreal sculptural assemblages on to patient, gradual evolutions of form and space on canvas, his work perhaps best characterized by its willingness to never stay in one place for too long.  This relentless invention finds a new outlet in PLAY, a new sculptural work at Gagosian Gallery in New York, created in collaboration with Madeline Hollander. Read More »

NY Art Book Fair, via At Observed

As the fall equinox comes and goes, the New York Art Book Fair has once again come to New York City, opening its doors at MoMA PS1 for the thirteenth annual edition of what has become one of the city’s most unique and energetic exhibitions of young artists, publishers, writers and thinkers, each representing a small part of the national and international art publishing community.  Free and open to the public, the event draws more than 35,000 individuals including book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals each year.  Read More »

Ellen Berkenblit, Untitled (2018), via Anton Kern

The Clock Unlocked is the first exhibition to spanning over four decades in the life and work of New York painter Ellen Berkenblit, on now at Anton Kern.  Running through a range of expressive and often enigmatic arrangements, the exhibition presents a roving and exploratory walk through Berkenblit’s practice, tracing evolutions and ongoing interests through any number of touchstones and points of entry.  Arranged instinctually and without chronology, The Clock Unlocked is just that, a diary of paintings and drawings reveals the artist’s idiosyncratic ‘alphabet’— the core of her visual language presented in the same idiosyncratic attitude towards time and space. Read More »

Cy Twombly, Untitled (1967), via Levy Gorvy

If you follow Brett Gorvy on Instagram, it’s immediately apparent that the Lévy Gorvy partner is a master of narrative, spinning long, anecdotal tomes around the images and artworks that he posts in his feed.  Gorvy’s vision and passion for art, and for the stories that surround each of the works that passes through his lens, is almost unparalleled anywhere in the art world, and his move in the past few years towards a gallery position should come as no surprise.  Yet Gorvy has plenty more tricks up his sleeve, and his most recent venture, a curated exhibition at his gallery, showcases just how deep his care and skill towards his profession go. Read More »

Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Embedment) (2018), via Marianne Boesky

Marking the first show of the fall season at Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea exhibition space, artist Anthony Pearson returns to his long-running experimentations with hydrocal for a new selection of  works.  The artist’s work as a lingering, enigmatic engagement with this material functions as an explicit practice in deep intellectual and physical engagement with a few materials, exploring the behaviors, reactions, and open possibilities of his intentionally limited material vocabulary. 

Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Embedment) (2018), via Marianne Boesky

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Giacometti (Installation view), via Art Observed

White, for Alberto Giacometti, is presented as something of an etheric form, the color of death or absence playing on is interrelation with temporal action.  Space is generated only from the presence of space, and not from its reciprocal orientation. His practice is disposed towards the ideal void, where reality, untouched, is always waiting to be discovered. Giacometti’s opposition to easily read concepts of reality lies in his belief that merely representing figures alone, leaving behind the density and materiality of their  surroundings and ignoring the distance between himself and the object of his perception, offered an incomplete picture of the truth. Giacometti’s eye was profoundly sensitive to different kinds of empty, negative space. He wanted to give form to space, opening his figure from within to its presence or surroundings. Read More »

Charline von Heyl, New Work (Installation View), via Art Observed

Few artists possess the sort of free-ranging, exploratory style and vocabulary that seems to mark the output of artist Charline von Heyl.  The German-born painter’s work is relentlessly committed to the canvas as a space for both formal reinvention and ongoing investigation.  Moving through a new selection of works this fall at Petzel Gallery, von Heyl returns to this mode, presenting a series of new compositions that marks her continued interest in texture and space as formative modes of the painter’s internal language.   Read More »

Marguerite Humeau, Birth Canal (Installation View), via Adelaide Pacton for Art Observed

Marking a new chapter in a body of work that has long mined the strange juxtapositions of history, culture, form and space, artist Marguerite Humeau has touched down at the New Museum this month, opening a show of works that will remain on view throughout the fall season.  The show, titled Birth Canal, presents a new body of digitally rendered sculptures realized in cast bronze and carved stone, each proposing its own unique vision of how to think through the understanding of the body and it relation to modernity.   Read More »

Harold Ancart, Untitled (2018), via David Zwirner

Over the past few years, Belgian-born, New York-based painter Harold Ancart has remained one of the more unique voices in modern painting.  The artist’s deceptively simple, ragged style of painting and his intuitive interpretations of natural phenomena and iconographies have seen his work move through a broad range of styles and iterations, including massive depictions of flames, icebergs and lush forests, always offset by a sense of spatially-sound minimalism.  Captivating in their spare, exploratory style, the artist’s works are a fascinating look at the language of modern practice, and how historical touchstones can double back on themselves to create new structures and vocabularies.  Read More »