Joanne Carson, via Art Observed

As the month of September nears its conclusion, the 11th year of Bushwick Open Studios returned to Brooklyn this past weekend, with artists around the neighborhood opening the doors to their project studios, galleries, rehearsal spaces and even their homes to intrepid viewers. Presenting a broad look at the city’s young and practicing artists in their native environment, this year offered a series of surprises and strong works that once again underscored the fair’s reputation as a first-hand look at the Bushwick art scene in close focus. Read More »

NYABF, via Art Observed

Opening its doors once again this Thursday evening at MoMA PS1, the 2017 NY Art Book Fair got underway with a bang, marking its 12th edition with a new selection of exhibitors, shows, projects and installations that have made the fair a compelling part of the fall art calendar. Inviting well over over 350 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions, and independent publishers from twenty-eight countries to the event, this year’s edition of NYABF continued its engaging work connecting both small press publishers, artists and zine-makers with a broader network of special interest publishers from across the spectrum of both art and writing.

NYABF, via Art Observed

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Tom Sachs at Sperone Westwater, via Art Observed

Currently at Sperone Westwater’s Bowery exhibition space, artist Tom Sachs is presents Objects of Devotion, a body of new pieces that mark both a return and elaboration of the artist’s nuanced sculptural process, and his relentlessly interrogative focus on the act of making art. The show, on view through October 28th, spans two floors of the gallery, including a series of sculptures re-creating the artist’s various workspaces and materials, offering them both a pseudo-scientific dedication to reproduction, and a pseudo-spiritual fascination with their prominence in his life. Read More »

Robert Rauschenberg, Rhyme (1956), via Art Observed

Closing out its run at MoMA this month, Robert Rauschenberg’s impressive retrospective show, Among Friends, is a monument to the spirit of the post-War U.S. and its most exploratory artists, focused through the lens of a single painter. Drawing together some of Rauschenberg’s most iconic and challenging pieces alongside a range of works by his collaborators, friends and lovers, the artist’s pieces trace a life dedicated to the act of creating, and of challenging the work itself to push beyond the thin line between art and life itself.   Read More »

Mary Heilmann, Ray (2017), via Art Observed

In the early years of her career, artist Mary Heilmann embraced a utilitarian approach to the art object, drawing domestic materials, scrap pieces and other objects into a swirling orbit of bright colors and bold, thick strokes of paint.  Drawing on the energy and vitality of the minimalist language, and its conceptual charge to the body of modern painting, Heilmann’s work embraced both a subdued look at the real landscape of the modern American, and the manifold images that float through it each day. Read More »

The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is partnering with the Museum of Modern Art for a new exhibition, the Art Newspaper reports, presenting key works from the museum’s full holdings, including examples by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Cindy Sherman. “MoMA is a beacon for Modern art in the West, and for decades its narrative of art historical Modernism was uncontested,” says the Fondation’s artistic director, Suzanne Pagé. “It has also established itself [with] its discernment regarding the art of today, an institution possessed of a clear-eyed vision of its future. Today, the doxa [common belief and opinion] are being reassessed.” Read More »

Monika Sosnowska, Façade (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over one of the multiple large-scale exhibition spaces at Hauser & Wirth’s cavernous complex in downtown Los Angeles, artist Monika Sosnowska offers an interestingly nuanced exploration of modernist architectural convention for her first solo show in the Californian metropolis. Spreading her twisted steel sculptures and varied spatial interventions throughout the gallery, Sosnowska’s body of work marks a negotiation between the historical landscapes and political structures of her home country of Poland, writ large against the gallery’s ample halls. Read More »

Hannah Levy, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

Currently on view at MoMA PS1 for the museum’s spring and summer season, Past Skin draws on a nuanced understanding of modern man, dwelling on both changing conceptions of the body and body politics in conjunction with the modes of information dissemination, networked culture and physical architecture that have created a more nuanced assemblage of forms and functions in modernity.  Drawing heavily on the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the show, organized by Jocelyn Miller, pulls the human form into the swarms of data modern life is embedded within, and explores how this position has subtly changed the human relationship to the world around us. Read More »

DIVINE DIALOGUES: Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity, exhibition view. All images courtesy of the Museum of Cycladic Art.

On the occasion of Documenta 14 in Athens, the Museum of Cycladic Art presents “Divine Dialogues: Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity,” an exhibition that juxtaposes twenty-seven works by the American artist Cy Twombly with twelve ancient Greek artworks and objects from the Archaic and Classical periods. As the press release concedes, the impact of Greece’s geography and mythos on Twombly’s artistic production is widely known; “Divine Dialogues” seeks not just to reaffirm the scope and depth of this influence, but to make a firm case for Greek antiquity’s continuing relevance to modern and contemporary art at large. Read More »