March 30th, 2018
Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2018), via The Guardian
With spring now in our midsts, the string of public art projects targeted towards tourist-heavy summer seasons are opening across the world’s major urban metropolises, each seeking to turn heads while also offering a unique comment on public space and perhaps public discourse. This year, the biennial sculpture project has opened its newest iteration, Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s striking re-creation of a lamassu, the winged creature of ancient Assyrian myth that guarded the gates of Nineveh.
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March 29th, 2018
Willem de Kooning at Lévy Gorvy, via Art Basel
Marking the second major international art fair of this month, the global arts community has headed east, touching down in the towering metropolis of Hong Kong for the sixth edition of the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair. Marking the continued shift of focus on the highest end of the global market towards China and its neighbors, the fair has slowly but surely developed into an economic powerhouse for the market, and one where some of the largest deals seem to happen in an open selling environment. As blue-chip dealers and gallerists increasingly focus on the city and surrounding regions for well-heeled buyers, the fair has taken up a place as a major meeting place for the international art cognoscenti and a group of collectors with an increasingly honed taste for Western art.
Anicka Yi at 47 Canal, via Art Basel
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March 27th, 2018
Zach Blas, Contra-Internet (Installation View), via Art Observed
Currently on view at Art in General, artist Zach Blas has installed a striking interrogation and deconstruction of the internet itself, framing his show Contra-Internet through a language that fuses both classic frameworks of punk antagonism with a new generation of digital counter-cultures. Centered around a contemporary remake of director Derek Jarman’s masterpiece of radical queer cinema, Jubilee, Blas presents his own version of cultural collapse and reconstruction, framed through a group of artists and intellectuals seeking to rebuild from the ashes of Silicon Valley. Read More »
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March 23rd, 2018
Chris Martin, Golden Age #2 (2018), via Anton Kern
Drawing inspiration from the impressive two-floor layout at Anton Kern’s uptown locale, painter Chris Martin has dug into his voluminous output for a show of paintings in New York City. Cultivating the artist’s love for the painted canvas, and for the boundless enthusiasm that surges forth from each of his compositions, the show offers a fittingly colorful, joyous survey of the artist’s work, both in recent months and more broadly over the course of his career. Read More »
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March 20th, 2018
Art News has a piece surveying the fallout over the firing of Helen Molesworth at MOCA, including a series of interviews with artists and collectors over the move. In one interview, a donor recounts a time that Molesworth failed to show up for a tour of their collection. “I don’t show my collection to many people—it’s in my home. But Helen begged me twice to see the collection and then when I set it up, she no-showed me—and then never contacted me again,” an unnamed donor says. “Are you just supposed to put up with this sort of thing over and over again?â€Â Read More »
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March 20th, 2018
Marina Pinsky, Trigger Trace 1 (2018), via 303
The Russian-born artist Marina Pinsky’s work is political in the most expansive sense of the word. Delving into intersections of spatial, material and ideological models of the world and its inhabitants, her pieces examine personal relationships, contractual agreements and concrete localities as part of an ongoing continuum, working at specific narratives and sites in a mode of process that seems as inspired by social research strategies as they are by the writings of Foucault. Delving into both sculptural and photographic practices, her works seem to both model and reconstruct environments and situations while also actively documenting them in real-time. In her most recent show at 303 in New York, the city’s origins become her focus. Read More »
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March 16th, 2018
Barnaby Furnas, The Wrangler (2018), via Art Observed
Barnaby Furnas returns to Marianne Boesky Gallery this month, opening his seventh exhibition with the gallery with an act of both reflective meditation and an unflinching eye on the present. Bearing the title Frontier Ballads, Furnas’s work is a sort of inverted nostalgia, recalling the golden age of the American West, and the political analogs of this era that seem to echo forth in the current wave of populist politics in the United States.    Read More »
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March 15th, 2018
Yinka Shonibare, Wind Sculpture (2018), via Art Observed
With the weather turning slowly towards the gentle breezes and sunshine of spring in New York, a new sculpture by Yinka Shonibare has sprung up on the corner of 5th Ave and 57th, the southeastern corner of Central Park and long-running home to the Public Art Fund’s ongoing commission project. The piece is a particularly resonant one for the current juncture, mixing bright colors and a fluid, windswept form that carries deeper political subtexts and histories of capitalist exploitation of the African continent. Read More »
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March 14th, 2018
Sue Williams, Black and White and Red All Over (1998), via Skarstedt Gallery
For artist Sue Williams, the body always takes primacy. The painter, who began her career during the 1990’s, has long tweaked and twisted the female form, pushing it and painting it into any number of surreal arrangements. Multiplying that practice over any number of permutations, her canvases eventually arrive at a breathless final product containing massive flurries of activities and bodies, simultaneously personal and sexual, and often underscoring distinct facets of the hyper-mediated experience of modern life. Taking a retrospective angle on Williams’s work this month, Skarstedt Gallery in New York is currently presenting a body of paintings from 1997 and 1998, formative years in Williams’s body of work, and striking introductions to a practice that has only continued to evolve and develop over the following 20 years. Read More »
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March 11th, 2018
Hannah Levy, Untitled (2018), via Art Observed
Hannah Levy has exhibited broadly since receiving her Bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 2013, showing at such distinguished venues as MoMA PS1, the Palais de Tokyo, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, James Fuentes, and Marlborough Contemporary. She also appeared on Cultured Mag’s 2018 list of Young Artists. Her work typically contrasts metal, modernist, work-a-day design with fleshy silicone forms, departing most prominently from late Surrealism’s similar juxtaposition of materialities. For the artist’s most recent show, one view now at C-L-E-A-R-I-N-G in Brooklyn, her practice gets a concise review.  Read More »
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