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 »

Dan Flavin, Untitled (To Helen Winkler) (1972), via Art Observed

During the early years of Dan Flavin’s career, the artist was known to experiment in particular with fluorescent lights as much for aesthetic potential as for the economics of their procurement.  Easy to access in any hardware store (and often just as easy to return after a show), Flavin embraced the cheap materials of home improvement projects and industrial construction as an essential part of his practice.  Yet what Flavin achieved with his pieces is equally significant, creating stately, somber interrogations of space and perception with these simple materials, often using simple patterns and accumulations of material that tied him to other masters of the burgeoning school of minimalist practice developing around him in New York. Read More »

Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at The Guggenheim, artist Danh Vo’s major retrospective invites a swirling, multi-faceted experience of the world and its political/social hierarchies over the past 40 years. Investigating moments and memories from the artist’s own life in Europe after his family fled Vietnam in the wake of the war during the mid-1970’s, his pieces move between assembled objects (documents, photos and journals) from participants in various parts of the war era, other iterations and moments of conflict and co-existence between Asia and the West, and his own memories and experiences. Presented here, the exhibition offers a striking opportunity for the viewer to explore a wide body of the artist’s output, which only amplifies his creative and political vision.

Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away (Installation View), via Art Observed Read More »

Ryan Gander (Installation View), via Lisson Gallery

The passage of time is at the center of artist Ryan Gander’s current solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery’s 67 Lisson location in London.  Marking the artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery, Gander’s show has pulled a particularly simple, yet tellingly even-handed quote from his father as the inspiration for the show: “let the world take a turn.”  Taking his father’s words to heart, Gander encourages spectatorship, welcoming the viewer to allow time to take its course within the gallery, and to allow it to work its healing, transformational capabilities to work throughout the show.

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Isa Genzken, Untitled (2018), via Art Observed

With a career spanning over four decades, German artist Isa Genzken has constantly worked along the shifting fault-lines of art and design, architecture and media, technology and the individual.  With a body of work that constantly seems to absorb and incorporate the physical materials in her close proximity, assembling them through a range of techniques and practices that flirt with any medium that may cross her mind, from sculpture, painting and collage, to drawing, film, and photography.  Deeply attuned to both the legacies of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the materials and forms of twenty-first-century global society, Genzken’s work interrogates the impact of our increasingly commodified and interconnected culture on our everyday lives.

Isa Genzken, Sky Energy (Installation View), via Art Observed Read More »

Robert Gober, Untitled (2000-2001), via Matthew Marks

Recalling the title of Robert Gober’s 2014 MoMA show, The Heart is Not a Metaphor, the artist’s current show at Matthew Marks presents an embedded perspective, a uniquely engaged perspective, into Gober’s own internal world. His father built his childhood family house, and, in a similar sense, Gober was also a house-builder, starting his life of art making creating miniature dollhouses.   Read More »