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 »

Li Binyuan at MoMA PS1, via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Exploring shared conceptual space between two generations of Chinese performance artists, MoMA PS1’s Land: Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan is a highlight of its summer calendar.  The exhibition, which draws on each artist’s unique approach to the body, particularly bodies exposed to physical or mental extremes, as well as the forces applied to it, from urbanization to culture to the natural world, presents itself as a documentation of sorts, relying heavily on each artist’s history of performance and video.   Read More »

Senga Nengudi, RSVP Reverie D (2014), via Sprüth Magers

For over four decades, artist Senga Nengudi has been pushing at the boundaries between sculpture, photography, and performance. A member of the African American avant-garde in Los Angeles and New York during the 1970s and 1980s, Nengudi began her career with innovative sculptures and performances, staged within art spaces and beyond gallery walls, that expanded the definition of sculpture, while simultaneously drawing on performance art’s ephemeral capabilities to investigate and question.  For Nengudi, this mode worked well to examine and seek to define women’s delimited roles in contemporary culture. Marking her first solo exhibition in Germany, the artist”s current exhibition at Sprüth Magers is a concise and powerful summary of her work at a time of significant debates worldwide over power and identity. Read More »

David Wojnarowicz, Americans Can’t Deal with Death (1990), via Art Observed

Few artists have managed to fly so consistently under the microscope of the art world’s fascination with downtown New York in the way that David Wojnarowicz has for so many years. Beginning in the late 1970s, the artist created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes, yet his body of work has long been held off from the more hallmark names of the era in terms of impact and historical resonance.  This month, The Whitney seeks to remedy this situation, granting the artist his first major museum retrospective, and turning its focus on a body of work that has long shone brightly even away from the limelight. Read More »

James Turrell, Logos (97) Medium Glass Circle (2017), via Kayne Grifffin Corcoran

Kayne Griffin Corcoran Los Angeles is currently exhibiting a selection of new and historic works by James Turrell, including four unique glass works, together with his Autonomous Structures series, a as well as models and prototypes of architectural spaces made between 1989 and 1991. The works on view epitomize his ongoing conversation with light in a retrospective that looks back on the last fifty years through a focused group of pieces. Light and space become a mode of understanding space and time, echoing the circumstances of perception, and building an architecture in its own right. The viewer perceives his sites only through consciousness, with light functioning as an interior mirror reflecting the spatial and temporal depths of one’s seeing, and the presence within space. “I’ve always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream,” Turrell says. “Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people…we don’t normally see light like that. But we all know it.” Turrell does not aim at bringing the viewer to a dazed, exotic zone; he wants to recall this other dimension we know innately.  Read More »

Nicholas Hlobo, Phantsi Komngcunube (2017), via Lehmann Maupin

Artist Nicholas Hlobo’s work has long explored the potentials for using various material sources and referential systems, using a range of elements like metal piping and fabric stitching to create elegant, arcing forms and figures that operate as self-contaned metaphors of sorts.  Free-flowing and adventurous, the artist’s work allows him to work instinctively while drawing his forms directly onto canvas from his subconscious, a mode that invites both critical participation and quick impulse at the same time. His work is presented in some sense as a catharsis or exorcism, purging from himself the indoctrination of cultural dichotomies that set boundaries of either/or, where Hlobo wishes to portray the multitude. Read More »