Neo Rauch, Der Störfall (2016), via David Zwirner

Marking his first solo exhibition in the UK, painter Neo Rauch has brought a series of new compositions to David Zwirner, marking a new entry in the artist’s unique explorations of figuration, Central European art history, and the shifting surrealist language that mixes epochs and styles over the range of his practice.  Rendered in his signature  palette of subdued oils on canvas, the works continue Rauch’s exploration of the past as an open framework for interpretation and juxtaposition.

Neo Rauch, Rondo (Installation View), via David Zwirner

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James Rosenquist, Reflector (1982), via Thaddaeus Ropac

Over the last 40 years, painter James Rosenquist has continued to mine and manipulate the languages of consumer capitalism, mass-market branding, and the formal techniques of sign-painting, creating works that push these same linguistic elements to points of near-disintegration.  His pieces, huge swirling arrangements of color and line, smash commodities and natural forms together, combining food, buildings, and other objects into confounding, hybridized arrangements.  This ongoing experimentation with the canvas as a space of critical examination and surrealist detuning takes up the full expanse of Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery’s Pantin exhibition space, joined by a series of collages at its space in The Marais.

James Rosenquist, Coup d’Oeil – Speed of Light (2001), via Thaddaeus Ropac

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Chiharu Shiota’s Uncertain Journey (Installation View)

Chiharu Shiota’s Uncertain Journey, on view at Blain|Southern Berlin through the 12th of November, is an awe-inspiring meditation on memory, fate, and belonging.  Evocative and beautiful, this installation fills the gallery’s main atrium with a swarming mass of red yarn that creeps up the walls and envelops the viewer in a network of red.  Entering into the space, one is swept up in a ghostly web that spreads between the forms of skeletal boats.  Shiota is known for her immersive installations, such as The Key in the Hand (2015), in which she creates new visual planes as if she were painting in mid-air.  The artist has created this site-specific installation in Berlin eight years after she last exhibited in her home city, reprising a body of work that earned her impressive attention at last year’s Venice Biennale. Read More »

Anthea Hamilton, Project for a Door (After Gaetano Pesce) (2016), vi Art Observed

With the early weeks of the fall art season comes the opening of the annual Turner Prize exhibition, bringing together works from each of the artists’ nominated for Britain’s highest honor for contemporary art.  This year’s exhibition, one of the more cohesively selected, and consistently inventive in recent years, has already earned impressive accolades, with a striking quartet of artist’s each exploring constructions of space and identity through diverse historical, technical, and material connections. Read More »

Mike Nelson, Tools that See (Installation view), All images via the artist and neugerriemschneider.

Mike Nelson’s Tools That See (Possessions of a Thief) 1986-2005, on view at neugerriemschneider is a material chronicle of the tools the artist has used over the past 30 years. Immediately recognizable as an homage to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, Nelson’s pieces carry the same force of reality-bending humor as earlier iterations of found object art and the readymade.  The familiar items, ones a viewer may see strewn around a site of construction, are rendered as images withdrawn from their tactile elements, contained in glass frames and elevated on dense wooden pedestals. Read More »

Pedro Reyes, Doomocracy (Installation View), via Art Observed

Doomocracy, the long-anticipated collaboration between Pedro Reyes and Creative Time, has opened at the Brooklyn Army Teminal in Sunset Park, bringing a timely “house of horrors” to a city preparing for both the thrills and chills of the Halloween season, and an election cycle that has been often been fraught with a similar sense of doom and gloom.

The Voting Booth installation, courtesy Will Star Shooting Stars for Creative Time

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Jeff Koons (Installation View), via Art Observed

Opening its new exhibition space in London during Frieze Week, Almine Rech has tapped Jeff Koons for a series of new pieces to christen the space.  The show, which draws heavily on Koons’s recent work in his Gazing Ball series, shown alongside a small selection of polished steel Ballerina sculptures, marks an interesting continuation of the series. Read More »

Dana Schutz, Red (2016), All images via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed

Now through the 29^th of October, the CFA in Berlin hosts an exhibition of new work by Dana Schutz, Waiting for the Barbarians, retaining the artist’s prior interest and investment in absurdist and dark humor and pushing it onto new ground.  Where earlier work depicted often surreal or unlikely scenarios, Schutz’s new series is far more concerned with depicting the absurdity of current political and social realities. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the CFA. Read More »

Julie Mehretu, Conjured Parts (head), Aleppo (2016), via Melis Sonmezler for Art Observed

Pushing her particular brand of gestural and highly-nuanced awareness of the picture plane, artist Julie Mehretu’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman in New York is a powerful entry in the artist’s ongoing exploration of abstraction.  Realizing intricate networks of marks, twisting and turning around each other to create swarms and clusters of sinewy, undulating forms, Mehretu’s practice is an ever-evolving study of process in its own right.  Yet her new pieces, showing through the end of the month, present a new sense of both technical urgency and depth of the visual field, combining to create a series of striking new works. Read More »

Simon Denny, Blockchain Future States (Installation  View), all images via Petzel Gallery

Simon Denny’s latest exhibition at Petzel Gallery is an ambitious investigation into the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology, delving into the utopian ideals and potential opportunities that blockchain poses, taking on this treatment through an examination of three forerunners of the technology and their visions for the future.

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