Ida Ekblad, Proper Stuff (Installation View), via Herald St

It would be understandable to overlook the works currently on view at Herald St. in London as paintings by Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad.  The young painter and sculptor, whose work so often mines the scrawling hands of graffiti writing or mixes in cast-off detritus from her daily daily wanderings, here has taken a decidedly more contemplative route.  Over a small series of paintings, she embraces a distinct sense of foreground and backdrop, mining new ground to create a particularly compelling body of works. Read More »

Eddie Martinez, Love Letter #15 (2017), via Art Observed

Artist Eddie Martinez has returned to Mitchell-Innes & Nash this month, bringing two different bodies of work to the gallery’s two exhibition spaces in Chelsea and Uptown.  These two shows mark the first time Martinez’s work has been exhibited in New York since major solo exhibitions at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College and at The Drawing Center, New York, and signal a continuation of themes explored in those shows. Martinez’s work, which draws on languages of modernist painting while abstracting its language through varied techniques and imaginative approaches to the canvas.

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Serge Alain Nitegeka, Colour & Form XL (2017), via Marianne Boesky

Since joining Marianne Boesky several years ago, the Johannesburg-based painter Serge Alain Nitegeka has explored a series of ever-changing, constantly evolving approaches to a familiar construct. Blocks of color and stark, geometric forms dominate his pieces, always interested and invested in the way their application is capable not only of dividing up the space of his panels, but equally in how the viewer’s comprehension of space is shifted in turn. For his most recent exhibition at the New York Gallery, Nitegeka brings a selection of striking new paintings that continue this array of interests, applied towards increasingly impressive ends.

Serge Alain Nitegeka, Colour & Form XLVIII (2017), via Marianne Boesky

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Katherine Bernhardt, Siesta (2017), via Canada Gallery

Katherine Bernhardt’s work is nothing if not repetitive, producing colorful, swirling landscapes of repeated graphic motifs, often using variations on a theme to produce a sort of constellation of the everyday.  For her most recent show at Canada Gallery, she returns to this mode of practice. Cigarettes and Nike logos are a frequent occurrence, as are pizza, tropical fruits and even the occasional insect.  The show, which draws its name and inspiration in part from the classic Charlton Heston futuristic nightmare film Soylent Green, is equally invested in a sense of societal decline, pushing the artist’s own approach to figuration to stranger heights, twisting bodies ever further and images into an even more bizarre state of juxtaposition.  The same ideas are present to be sure, but the artist’s use of this same repetitive motif, one she has used over the past several years since debuting the approach at Canada three years ago, has been pushed to intense new vistas. Read More »

David Lamelas, The Other Side (Installation View), via Maccarone

The current exhibition at Maccarone Gallery in Los Angeles is something of a subdued affair, a pair of works by David Lamelas erected on either side of the gallery’s main, bisecting wall. The show, Lamelas’s third with the New York/Los Angeles gallery, is executed in conjunction with the current iteration of Pacific Standard Time, which included a body of the artist’s works. Read More »

Elizabeth Murray, Painting in the 80s, via Art Observed

Walking into Pace Gallery’s expansive exhibition hall on 25th Street in Chelsea, one is greeted by heaving masses of material, great swollen lumps of paint and canvas, bent and twisted into explosively animated forms.  These are the works of painter Elizabeth Murray, a pioneering abstractionist whose intuitive work with cut and shaped canvases has underscored her place among the lead voices of post-war painting in the US.  At Pace this winter, the gallery has turned its attention to a small body of paintings from the artist’s work during the 1980’s as a continuation of her last show, the fittingly titled Painting in the ‘70s.

Elizabeth Murray, Painting in the 80s, via Art Observed Read More »

Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) (2016), via LACMA

What makes an artwork truly original? What does intellectual property ownership look like? For over four decades, celebrated American multimedia artist Richard Prince has been investigating these questions through his unflinching conceptual works, most notably through collections of photography highlighting the myth of the cowboy and the American West through repurposed, rephotographed, and cropped Marlboro ads from the 1980’s and 1990’s. Currently, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is exhibiting Richard Prince: Untitled (Cowboy) featuring not one, but two previously unseen photography projects of this nature from the 2010s. Read More »

Gina Malek, Truth in Timbre (2017), via E. Tay Gallery

Painter Gina Malek brings a body of new paintings to E. Tay Gallery this month, assembling a series of the artist’s intuitive interactions with the canvas through a range of different scenes and situations. Teasing out various modes of linguistic understanding and interpretation through her loosely rendered canvases, Malek’s work in the show plays with the act of speech, and the vagaries of expression that so often spring from the inexact moments of vocalization.  Read More »

Isa Genzken, Untitled (2017), via Art Observed

For sheer conceptual punch and visual intensity, few works from the career of Isa Genzken carry in the way that her Schauspieler pieces manage.  Arrangements of various mannequins, from young children to adult bodies are arranged in the artist’s works from this series, each dressed in various fineries and strange arrays of various clothing. Work tools, ponchos, colorful fabrics and sunglasses adorn her figures, creating various scenes and scenarios that always keep the body and its relationship to the world around it in full view.  For her most recent show in Berlin, on view at König Galerie through the end of the weekend, Genzken has presented a selection of works from this series, continuing her razor-sharp investigation of the phenomena of modern reality. Read More »

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Two Times NR 34 (2016), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Launched in conjunction with the artist’s current exhibition at the Tate Modern, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is currently presenting a range of recent works by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, exploring the artist couple’s continued exploration and investigation of the threads of memory, narration and understanding through myriad approaches to art making. The exhibition presents a collection of three separate series of recent works, each reflecting the artist’s complex relationship with the past, and the notions of personal and collective memory.  Read More »