Gustav Klimt,  Bauerngarten (Blumengarten) (1907), via Sotheby’s

Moving away out of the depths of winter and towards the spring market rush, Sotheby’s and Christie’s will kick off their respective sales of Surrealist, Impressionist and Modern works this coming week, marking the first major auctions of 2017, and signaling the first real test of a market dealt the lion’s share of uncertainty in the past six months.  Taking place in London, the week’s sales will offer a first look at how recent shakeups at both auction houses, and attempts to broaden their respective scopes, will fare with works on the block.

Paul Gauguin, Te Fare (La maison) (1892), via Christie’s

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John Armleder, Jasmine West (2017). All images courtesy David Kodansky Gallery.

Now through February 25, the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles hosts new work by Swiss artist John Armleder. This is the artist’s first show in the city in over 15 years and presents an array of wall paintings, several types of painting on canvas, and “installation-based gestures made in response to the overall effect produced by the other objects”, according to the press release. The show coincides with another exhibition of Armleder’s work in New York City at the Almine Rech Gallery. Read More »

Francis Kéré’s design for the Serpentine, via The Guardian

The Serpentine Galleries will host architect Diébédo Francis Kéré (founder and head of Kéré Architecture) as this year’s Serpentine Pavilion designer, making the architect the first African designer invited to work with the British Institution’s annual project.  Kéré, who splits his time between Berlin and his home city of Gando in Burkino Faso, has created a massive elevated canopy, much like the stretching branches of a tree, under which the Serpentine will host its annual series of talks, performances and other events.   Read More »

Jean-Luc Moulène (Installation View), via Art Observed

To walk through Jean-Luc Moulène’s retrospective at The Centre Pompidou is to traverse through a wasteland of fossils and discarded matter, a history of repurposed and spliced objects placed into an ever-evolving series of dialogues and interactions.  Giving off subtle senses of a dystopian, simulated future, the artist’s sculptures play on a suspended sense of reality, often challenging its role as constructed object or sourced material that plays on a rupture between past, present and future, disrupting easy legibility while staging a site where these divergent sensations are allowed to co-exist. Read More »

Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb, Drawn Together (Installation View)

Drawn Together, a decade-spanning look at the collaborative work of the cartoonist husband and wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb, offers a well-timed opportunity for lovers of the graphic arts at David Zwirner, coinciding with the opening of the New Museum’s Raymond Petitibon retrospective A Pen of All Work.  Although they were individually prominent artists in the graphic arts scene during the course of their careers, Aline and Robert delivered a unique visual and intellectual body of work that both drew on their marriage in the early ‘70s. Later gathered in a series titled Aline and Bob’s Dirty Laundry Comics, which debuted in 1974, the couple’s ongoing collaboration is a statement on marriage, partnership, and dependency, as well as on sexuality and gender roles of the society they lived and worked within. Read More »

Adrian Ghenie, Rest During the Flight into Egypt (2016), via Art Observed

Drawing on a wide range of works from the artist’s recent practice, Pace Gallery is presenting a series of new paintings by Adrian Ghenie, drawing on the artist’s unique approach to both the construction of his canvases, and the position his work takes in its relation to broader timeline of European painting and political history.

Adrian Ghenie, Degenerate Art (2016), via Art Observed

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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 »