Louise Bourgeois UNTITLED (detail) (1998-2014), Suite of 8 Holograms © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY.

Throughout the course of her fifty-year career, artist Louise Bourgeois has experimented with a broad span of media, while remaining primarily focused around her foundational sculptural works and works on paper.  That broad range of work is offered a new wrinkle in Holograms, a recently concluded exhibition at Cheim & Read that brings together a body of work never been shown in its entirety in the Chelsea exhibition space’s intimate rear gallery.  Offering a profound elaboration on the artist’s less-known approaches to her work, the show documents Bourgeois’s dialogue with the New York-based fine arts holographic studio C-Projects, resulting in eight holographic photographs blanketed with an alluring red tone, which granted the artist the potential to orchestrate her contemplative, often surreal techniques in this unexpected, yet fertile, medium.

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Boris Lurie, Adieu Amerique (1959-1960), part of the show’s “Inventing Downtown,” section all images via Shannon Viola for Art Observed

Nestled within the heart of Greenwich Village, New York University’s Grey Gallery is showcasing works from a selection of artist-run galleries in the surrounding neighborhoods over the early post-war years of 1952 to 1965.  The exhibition, which encompasses two floors of gallery space, illuminates the period in the New York art scene in which Pop Art and Minimalism were gradually overtaking the influence and impact of Abstract Expressionism. Pieces from eclipsed artists, such as women and artists of color, come to the forefront in particular here, exploring both the experimental approaches and the outcomes of a cooperatively-run sphere of downtown art, and the often overshadowed artists that were a cornerstone of New York’s cultural ascendancy during the era. Read More »

Willem de Kooning, Door to the River (1960), via Art Observed

Embarking on their first exhibition under their shared gallery name, Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy’s new Gorvy Lévy Gallery has opened 2017 with a bang, bringing together a landmark body of paintings by two masters of the medium, Zao Wou-Ki and Willem de Kooning.  Drawing from each artist’s unique gestural abilities and continually inventive bodies of work over the course of their evolution, the show is a major achievement for the gallery, including several major museum loans that underscores Gorvy’s impact on the gallery’s already strong programming.

Zao Wou-Ki, Untitled (1949), via Art Observed

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Katharina Grosse, Untitled (2016), via Art Observed

Opening her first exhibition with Gagosian since announcing her representation by the gallery last year, Katharina Grosse has brought a swirling, nuanced body of new works to the gallery’s 24th Street location in Chelsea this month, documenting her enigmatic approach to the painted canvas through a variety of approaches and forms.  Allowing varied layers and lines to intersect, overlap and combine, the artist’s gestural techniques, in conversation with her use of various technologies in the rendering of the canvas, create densely packed spaces of visual information.

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Anselm Kiefer, Walhalla (1992 – 2016), via White Cube

Walhalla, Anselm Kiefer’s latest exhibition at White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey, is a dark, thrilling, and sinister rendering of war and destruction. The show’s title, drawn from Norse mythology, and referring to the final resting place of slain heroes as they were received by King Odin, is scribbled in charcoal above the entrance. “Walhalla” or “final place of rest” is also the title of a neoclassical hall commissioned by Bavaria’s King Ludwig I in 1842, built to honor men of great repute.  Kiefer, for his part, honors not just historical figures, but found objects in tandem, marrying unreality with the show’s surreal juxtapositions: a bed sinks under the weight of a winged boulder; a lightening bolt strikes a bullet-hold wheelchair; a spiral staircase, adorned with rusted dresses, leads to an ambiguous destination.  Notions of mythology and reality are interwoven to provide an intriguing, albeit challenging, spectacle to behold. Read More »

Richard Serra, NJ-2 (2016), via Art Observed

Richard Serra’s works are nothing if not an experience; curving, twisting forms that wind the viewer through space, while taking an active hand on shaping the space itself.   Throughout the artist’s career, he has continued to create works that challenge conventional understanding of form, and re-conceptualize notions of gravity in play with his objects.  Working within this familiar domain, Serra is currently presenting three unique, large-scale steel sculptures at Gagosian Britannia Street, London. On view through March 10th, 2017 his new works highlight his mastery of material, and his unique ability to continually pursue a sense of creative vitality.  In some sense, his works here: NJ-2 (previously on view in New York), Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, and Rotate, exist as portals of some sort, gateways into a repositioned experience of space, and the act of viewing work within a given series of physical constraints. Read More »

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa (1964-1965), via Cardi Gallery

The return of Mexico City’s increasingly vital art week this February signals the first wave of 2017’s major fair events, as much of the world’s contemporary art world converges on the sprawling Mexican capital.  Centered around the large-scale Zona Maco fair and its smaller, younger sister fair Material at the Expo Reforma, the week offers a wide range of events and openings accompanying the market-focused proceedings. Read More »

Mark Leckey, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things (2013), via Art Observed

British artist Mark Leckey has brought a dense, timely exhibition to bear on the second and third floors of MoMA PS1 this month, as the artist’s first comprehensive U.S. survey brings a range of perspectives on the pace and content of a digitized life.  Questioning and playfully subverting the varied symbolic systems and technological structures that facilitate the landscape of modern life, Leckey’s exhibition is a fitting opening note of 2017, challenging hierarchies of power and image-making in a time when the consistency and reliability of information has become an increasingly troubled subject.

Mark Leckey, GreenScreenRefrigerator (2008-2016), via Art Observed

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