Arshile Gorky, Painting (1947-1948), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

Hauser & Wirth’s first exhibition for Arshile Gorky, the seminal Armenian-American painter of Abstract Expressionism, focuses on a four-year period in his life, beginning with his stay at Crooked Run Farm in Virginia, and concluding around the time of a series of unfortunate events in 1947, a year prior to his passing. Already an established artist as a key figure in non-figurative painting during the mid 1940’s, Gorky retreated to his wife’s parents’ farm in search of creative stimuli that would augment his interest in fluid nonlinear forms and subliminal themes. His isolation from the New York art scene—a network the artist always chose to remain distant from while his peers Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning dominated the social circle—ultimately manifested itself in contemplative and personal narratives and natural colors. Read More »

Richard Prince, Untitled (#109) (2016-2017) all images Copyright Richard Prince Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Richard Prince returns to Gladstone Gallery after a prolonged absence with his new body of work, Ripple Paintings, a series of large scale inkjet prints that riffs on the painted medium with both its title and process. An avid collector of vintage Playboy imagery, Prince uses Whitney Darrow Jr. watercolor drawings published by the magazine between 1967 and 1970 to create his swirling collages. Pages from different issues he acquired on eBay provides Prince new surfaces to paint onto, while the caricatures’ sexist and vulgar language gets blanketed by watercolor paint in bright hues and fluid forms. Placing pages he torn out of various issues flat onto floor, Prince loosely pours watercolor paint and lets the liquid meander on each page. After an overnight drying process, each work gives a unique and uninterrupted silhouette of paint with traces of the cartoon behind. Read More »

Ellen Gallagher, Whale Falls (2017) © Ellen Gallagher, Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth

Accidental Records, now showing at Hauser & Wirth LA, is Ellen Gallagher’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The collection of paintings, drawings and collage on view includes both new and recent works, which tread familiar conceptual territory while expanding upon themes from her rich and evolving oeuvre. The show’s title reflects the breadth of referential material that substantiates Gallagher’s work—from the literary to the musical, the psycho-theoretical to the culinary. In this erudite exploration of the Middle Passage—the deadly intercontinental journeys of slave ships—Gallagher excavates the depths of black history as well as the oceanic context in which so many slaves died. Known for her minimalist, pop-inflected collages that meditate on the African American body in history and culture, Gallagher focuses her lens upon the Black Atlantic.

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Dean Levin, Arches (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky

Returning to Marianne Boesky for his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Dean Levin has brought together a more ambitious and, paradoxically, more understated body of work than in his prior Boesky show, A Long, Narrow Mark. Through the series of sculptural installations and series of paintings assembled here, Arches takes Levin’s architectural interests and focuses them on the curved construct of an arch. Read More »

Haim Steinbach, Untitled (fins, dolphin, seahorse) (2017). All images via White Cube Gallery.

Now through January 20th, 2018, White Cube is presenting jaws, a series of new works by Haim Steinbach at Mason’s Yard, featuring a new series of shelf works and the major installation Design #15–Design for a Yogurt Bar, first conceived in 1981 and reconfigured for the gallery space. Centered around ideas of leisure and health, Steinbach’s works in the show draw on cultural models from the 1970s and 1980s to reveal novel and unexpected meanings through juxtaposition.

Haim Steinbach, starbucksroast (2017)

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Ashley Bickerton, Catalog Terra Firma Nineteen Hundred Eight Nine #2 (1989), Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton’s first U.S. survey dedicated to his multimedia work serves as a compact retrospective of his four-decade long career, shaped by various geographical and ideological milestones that show a continued response to the artist’s ongoing quest for meaning and space for contemplation in modern age. The exhibition, on view now at The FLAG Art Foundation proceeds a larger survey, Ornamental Hysteria, which opened in the spring of 2017 at the Damien Hirst-owned Newport Street Gallery in South London, including a total of 51 familiar and new works by the artist. The artist offers a range of work from both his current time in Bali and his long residency in New York, where Bickerton emerged in the 1980’s alongside Jeff Koons and Peter Halley. The show offers selections from various periods of his career, mostly including sculpture and painting, two mediums that have always remained intertwined since his early days. Read More »

Jannis Kounellis at Luxembourg and Dayan, via Art Observed

A contingency is a future event or circumstance that is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty, one that may rely on distinct conditions or concessions made in the present. This conditional framework serves as the namesake of the most recent exhibition of work on view at Luxembourg and Dayan this month, one that poses its exploration of the Italian post-war as contingent on a viewer’s willingness to freely-associate between various modes of practice in contemporary art. Read More »