Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hannibal (1982), via Sotheby’s

With the opening days of Frieze London also come the opening forays into the secondary market for the fall calendar for the British capital, with Phillips, Sotheby’s and Christie’s each trying their hand at a market that has seen distinctly turbulent, albeit occasionally impressive results for what many are calling a sales slump.  Coming off a sluggish summer with an above expectations at Phillips’ New, Now, Next sale of young artists in the past weeks, market spectators and the odd speculator are watching the Contemporary Evening Sales closely this week.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (2007), via Phillips

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Ai Weiwei, Iron Tree Trunk (2015), via Max Hetzler

Bringing a body of less frequently seen works from the past several years to Paris for his first solo exhibition in the city, Ai Weiwei continues his global tour de force after regaining his passport last year, opening a show at Max Hetzler this month.  Capturing the artist’s continued engagement with both the material and socio-political histories of China, the show features a carefully selected, yet broadly applicable series of pieces that offer a fitting counterpoint to the artist’s major museum exhibition currently on view in Athens.

Ai Weiwei (Installation View), via Max Hetzler

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Sara VanDerBeek, Labryinth (2016), via Art Observed

Sara VanDerBeek’s work has long operated at the intersections of process and practice, history and modernity, as the artist allows her investigation of chosen images and art forms to bleed into the image itself.  This mode of practice, pulling diverse material interests into a linear mode of production,  welcomes a nuanced and often multifaceted approach to the cultural and historical contexts of her subject matter, a focus that sits at the center of the artist’s current solo show at Metro Pictures.

Sara VanDerBeek, Pieced Quilts, Wrapped Forms (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Ryan Gander, I Be… (x) (2016), via Art Observed

Ryan Gander has opened his first exhibition at Lisson Gallery’s new New York City outpost, spreading his work through a small but tightly selected body of pieces underlining the artist’s enigmatic material interests in play with his uniquely British sense of humor.  In one corner, a piece called I’m never coming back to New York shows a £20 note slowly twisting and pushing its way out of a hole in the wall, playing on dual jokes about fleshing out new coats of plaster with crumpled paper and the commercial core of the gallery environment.

Ryan Gander, Mr. Modern Classical Conceptualist (Dramaturgical framework for structure and stability) (2016), via Art Observed

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Donald Moffett, Lot 040616 (cobalt and pecans) (2016)

Spanning Marianne Boesky Gallery’s two adjacent Chelsea locations, including the recently-opened space at 507 W. 24th Street, any fallow field, a show of recent work by seminal New York artist Donald Moffett’s investigates some of the reoccurring themes in his multi-media practice.  Moffett’s work emerged in the midst of a New York art scene that, during the ‘80s, was dealing with the debilitating impact of AIDS, a point that made tremendous impact on his complex practice. Moffet’s work sees gender and identity politics explored through oblique, yet elegant, gestures, while remaining heavily invested in representation of form, texture and paint. Read More »

Dolores (Installation View), via Art Observed

The current exhibition at Team Gallery, Dolores, captures a series of disjointed, often confounding narrative arcs, and places them into close conversation through each piece’s respective architectural and spatial implications.  Drawing on the various trappings and appointments of modern domesticity, the show, curated by Todd von Ammon, twists familiar forms and functions through a variety of technical and visual alterations.

Max Hooper Schneider, Dielectrix I: Division Electrophorus (2016), via Art Observed

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Andrea Zittel (Installation View), via Art Observed

Taking over Andrea Rosen’s main Chelsea exhibition space on 24th Street, artist Andrea Zittel is showing a body of new works exploring not only the intertwined concepts of abstracted sculpture and utilitarian object that informs her object-based practice, but equally delving into the experience of space in relation to each piece.  Showing a series of works on view in multiple places simultaneously, Zittel’s practice realizes a distinctly indeterminate space between landscapes and contexts of use. Read More »

Madeline Hollander, Drill (2016), via Art Observed

Signal Gallery kicks off its fall season this month with a pair of exhibitions by artist Madeline Hollander and Aidan Koch, an enigmatic combination of formal interests and performative translations of material split between two rooms in the gallery’s Bushwick exhibition space.  Drawing from varied takes on illustration, movement and conveyance of information, the show’s connecting threads are distinctly understated, welcoming the viewer to consider each show’s work in its relation to material, cultural moorings, and each show’s internal systems of objects and actors.

Aidan Koch, Iris (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Jessica Stockholder, The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room (Installation View), via Art Observed

In The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, Jessica Stockholder’s scattered arrangements of sculptural elements play with assumed boundaries to become a fluid meditation on space.  Through a variety of materials and forms, Stockholder avoids overtly breaking down traditional artistic lines, so much as she highlights that they have never truly existed at all.  Here, in her third show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Stockholder adds new dimension to her longstanding interest in intersection and continues to define the multifaceted significance of surface and structure.

Jessica Stockholder, Security Detail [JS 688] (2016), via Art Observed

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