Richard Aldrich, Wizard (2017), via Bortolami

Diving into the language and history of painting, artist Richard Aldrich’s new exhibition at Bortolami Gallery comes up to the surface with a diverse series of finds, spanning a range of practice that underscores his unique and energetic practice.  The show, which combines both sculptural interventions and a range of canvases mixing text, drawing and oil painting, offers an impressive look at the artist’s recent work, and leaves the viewer grasping for steady ground.  Yet, as the case with many great artists, Aldrich seems to fundamentally understand the joy in a little hard work, and the conceptual twists his pieces carry make their often confounding arrangements particularly rewarding for intrepid viewers ready to crack open a puzzle.

Richard Aldrich, Enter the Mirror (Installation View), via Bortolami

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Cosima von Bonin, WHAT IF IT BARKS 1 (WHITE BASS GUITAR VERSION) (2018), via Petzel

Expanding a body of work already recognized for its exceptionally whimsical, imaginative fusions of form, color and context, artist Cosima von Bonin is currently showing a series of new works on view this month at Petzel in New York.  The artist’s eighth show with the gallery, What if It Barks is also perhaps her most ambitious for the space, continuing her unique formal interventions on a grand scale with AUTHORITY PURÉE, her first full scale installation at Petzel’s 18th Street location.  Read More »

Tedd Stamm (Installation View), via Lisson Gallery

Walking from Ted Stamm’s current exhibition at Lisson Gallery to Dan Flavin: in daylight or cool white at David Zwirner, the sharp angles of the two artists’ works seem to echo each other, representing two bodies of minimalist experimentation with a similar interest in form, and riffing on the shape of their canvas, whether that canvas be paper, neon, or stretcher. Stamm’s show is perhaps the more grounded in the traditional language of art-making, yet equally pushes his works to the semantic breaking points of the art object. Read More »

Kim Tschang-Yeul, Waterdrops (1980)

In a decade-spanning exhibition at Upper East Side’s Almine Rech Gallery, Kim Tschang-Yeul exhibits a body of water drop paintings that have become something of a calling card for the Korean artist. Pursuing the singular idea of depicting water drops in ever-shifting narratives, the artist has built an elaborate series of works in this form over the past few decades, exhibiting his meticulously-illustrated oil on canvas compositions to a broad audience in Europe, Asia, and America. The exhibition emphasizes the artist’s unending quest to expand this signature style to implement political, personal or artistic narratives into simple, yet poetic presence of oozing water. Using the drop’s magnifying ability and translucent ethereality in diverse formats, Kim merges techniques of hyperrealist painting with cues from abstraction, particularly with his direct reference to monochromatic painting. Read More »

Artie Vierkant, Image Object Thursday 5 October 2017 2:17PM (2018), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Galerie Perrotin’s spacious Lower East Side headquarters is a body of new works by digital artist Artie Vierkant.  The show continues Vierkant’s interest in the shifting modes of perception and criticality as the art object moves from a concrete object in the gallery space to an image of documentation online.  Filling the gallery with a series of his Image Object works, Vierkant’s pieces open an extended engagement between the object and its digital referents, ultimately seeking to break down connections between the two. Read More »

Robert Irwin at Sprüth Magers (Installation View), via Art Observed

Few artists have left such a remarkable imprint on the art and art history of Southern California in the way that Robert Irwin has done over the past 50-plus years. Pioneering a mode of practice that slowly but deliberately broke ranks with the painterly abstraction and object-based practice of the era to develop a mode of art-making that embraced light, form and space as free-floating, conceptual tools.  As a native Californian, Irwin’s work drew heavily from his experience of its delicate nuances in light and tone, the massive expanses of the California desert, evolving into complex geometric arrangements of space using scrim and paint to create shiting densities of light. Read More »

Liu Shiyuan, Isolated Above, Connected Down (Installation View), via Tanya Bonakdar

The 33 year old Chinese-born artist Liu Shiyuan’s solo exhibition Isolated Above, Connected Down at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery introduces not only six mashups of curated photography compositions in the second floor main gallery, each called Almost Like Rebar, but also two large-scale creations: a substantial cinematic work shown in a sprawling but comfortable first floor “rec room,” more playpen for grown ups than video installation, and upstairs, another literally “soft” environment: a felt-carpeted room installed in the project space supplemented with found furniture and coffee smells. Read More »

Stan Douglas, Loot (2017), via Art Observed

Continuing his practice of blending the hyperreal and the inherent materialities of photographic production, artist Stan Douglas has returned to David Zwirner this month for a show of new works from two divergent modes of practice.  The show, titled DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout, mixes together Douglas’s ongoing practice of detailed, involved portraiture, staged scenes that incorporate both specific time frames/locations into a freewheeling riff on the construction of reality, and a body of work that uses computer algorithms to deconstruct the image.  Throughout, Douglas’s interest in the construction of the image, and the narratives (or lack thereof) that emerge from the surface is at center stage.

Stan Douglas, Stranded (2017), via Art Observed

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Suki Seokyeong Kang, Jeong 井 (Installation View)

For her first exhibition with Tina Kim Gallery, Seoul-based artist Suki Seokyeong Kang has orchestrated a three-stage installation of sculpture, film and painting, offering a glimpse of her complex artistic practice prior to her US museum debut at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in late April. Here, she utilizes the gallery’s spacious sequential architecture to engage with the audience in a succinct narrative on cultural identity, memory, and art-making. The exhibition title Jeong 井 refers to a Korean musical notation system, Jeongganobo, that differs from the Western system of coding music in structure and form. Comprised of squares situated in a grid-like format, this musical system values time and suggests the next note through a lettering system in vertical sequence. Similar to notes that inform the musician through a score, Kang’s installation guides its audience through a set of visually subtle, yet conceptually robust steel and wood sculptures. Read More »