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 »

Carlos Motta, Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2015) (detail) Courtesy of the artist

Praz-Delavallade, a main figure in the Paris gallery scene since the ‘90s, opened its first space in the United States in Los Angeles this past January. This summer, the gallery continues its program on the west coast with Over the Rainbow, a group exhibition dedicated socio-political trajectory of the LGTQ movement in the United States, and its ebbs and flows through painting, photography, sculpture, and video. As a French import on the city’s gallery-dense Wilshire Boulevard, the gallery brings together an intergenerational group of artists drawn from a global spectrum of interests and backgrounds, each looking at seminal moments in the gay liberation movement, such as the Stonewall upheaval, the outbreak and aftermath of HIV/AIDS epidemic, and marriage equality granted to same-sex couples through allusive or direct approaches that grasp at a timeless, global sensitivity. Read More »

Alexander Calder, Red Lily Pads (1956), via Art Observed

An embarrassment of riches is spread along the winding pathway of the Guggenheim Museum this spring, tracing the long and storied history of the New York institution through its interconnected relationships with the collectors and avant-garde pioneers that helped to grow the institution into the powerhouse that it has since become.  Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim offers visitors a firsthand look at the inception of one of the city’s enduring guardians of modern and contemporary art, all through the eyes and hands of the various parties involved in its early years. Read More »