August 30th, 2016
Jessica Diamond, No Money Down (1986/2016), via Art Observed
Taking the currently fraught political climate in the U.S. as a starting point for a deeper reflection on national and local history, James Fuentes’s summer group show offers a fitting cultural parallel in the early years of the 1980’s in New York City.  Charting the era’s conservative economic and foreign policies, the exhibition, curated by Andrew J. Greene & James Michael Shaeffer, brings together works by Nayland Blake, Jessica Diamond, Peter Halley and Robert Morris executed between 1982 and 1984.  Recording and critiquing a range of social and economic crises during the era, the show is a subtly resonant look at the deeper histories of cultural critique in the city, and the role artists have played in this process.
Peter Halley, Yellow Cell with Conduit (1982), via Art Observed
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August 29th, 2016
Adam Pendleton, Untitled (code poem) (2016), via Public Art Fund
The Public Art Fund’s The Language of Things, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, takes on a challenging prompt this summer, seeking to communicate with the public through works that utilize language and linguistic themes in one of the most congested and sonically dense spaces in the city, just outside of City Hall downtown.  Benjamin’s assertion that “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake in language†further deepens this show’s proposed dialogue, looking at complexities of language as a utilitarian, communicative tool, to emphasize Benjamin’s conclusion that “it is in the nature of each one to to communicate its mental contents.†Read More »
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August 28th, 2016
Cao Fei, Whose Utopia (2006), courtesy MoMA PS1
Currently on view at MoMA PS1, Cao Fei presents her first ever solo museum exhibition in the United States.  The artist’s practice, while rooted in video, performance and photography, takes on a sort of ever-shifting, fluid mode of inquiry into the modes of reality and fantasy in the 21st Century, underscoring human desire’s inextricable links with its economic and material bounds.  Presented here, the show’s slowly unfolding range of interests, from bizarre diorama work to her several year engagement with Second Life, to a series of intuitive and empathetic portraits of modern subcultures, traces the Chinese artist’s ability to navigate multiple modes of understanding and existence in the face of an increasingly mechanized modernity.
Cao Fei, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007-2011), Courtesy MoMA PS1
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August 27th, 2016
Quick Light (Installation View), all images courtesy Serpentine Gallery
Quick Light, an exhibition of recent paintings by American artist Alex Katz has taken over the Serpentine Galleries in London this summer, showcasing the artist’s expressive range and signature style through September 11th, 2016.  The exhibition centers in particular on Katz’s landscape paintings or “environmental landscapes,†which seek to envelope the viewer in a single encounter with the sublime.  Large-scale canvasses, often depicting human and natural forms, fill the gallery space, a particularly well-selected body of work that addresses both the artist’s long history and the unique grounds of the Serpentine itself Read More »
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August 26th, 2016
Keith Sonnier, Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent (1970), via Art Observed
Celebrating the forty year history of its residency at the school building in Long Island City, MoMA PS1 has launched an impressively expansive exhibition reflecting on the history and continued vitality of the alternative art spaces movement in both its impact on the history of 20th Century art, as well as its resonance in the field today.  Culling together a diversely focused but attentively arranged group of artists, FORTY presents a series of studies on the voices of the 1970’s New York art community, and its broader connections to the changing face of contemporary art during the era. Read More »
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August 25th, 2016
Marco Barrera, Gaze (Exchange Rate) (2016), via Art Observed
The current group show at Moran Bondaroff is a swirling, surreal exercise in sculptural gesture, compiling a trio of uniquely-motivated artists whose works play on the intersection of materials, contexts, and conceptions of the human body. The show, which brings together new works by artists Agathe Snow and Marco Barrera in conjunction with a series of historical works by the Irvine, CA-based artist George Herms, emphasizes connections in the capability for everyday objects to escape their quotidian bounds by way of addition and juxtaposition.
Eternal at Moran Bondaroff (Installation View), via Art Observed
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August 23rd, 2016
Agnes Martin, Falling Blue (1963), via Art Observed
Currently on view at LACMA, Agnes Martin’s ambitious and expansive retrospective has touched down on American soil, giving the late artist her first major museum exhibition in the U.S. since 1992.  Previously on view at the Tate Modern in London, the show studiously wends its way through Martin’s career, beginning with a series of New York School paintings from the late 1950’s that not only makes a strong case for her inclusion among the pantheon of the city’s great post-war painters, but equally hints at the artist’s later work.  Even as her early work traces similar interests in space and the expressive capacity of color and form, a distinct focus on line and space makes her pieces here particularly noteworthy, with delicate yet careful attention paid to the interactions between each mark, and the qualities of weight and gesture that her minimal selections imply.
Agnes Martin, With My Back to the World (1997), via Art Observed
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August 23rd, 2016
Ken Price, Tubby (2011), via Art Observed
Continuing a series of exhibitions devoted to the estate of Ken Price, Matthew Marks Gallery’s dual exhibition spaces in West Hollywood are currently showing a selection of works spanning the West Coast artist’s long and industrious career, ranging from black and white interiors to his signature sculptural inventions.  Echoing a similar curatorial focus from the last show of Price’s work in New York, the two-gallery exhibition pairs similar forms and images across media, ultimately tracing a line through the broad range of interests and series of reinventions that Price took over the course of his career.
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August 22nd, 2016
Bas Jan Ader, Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970), via Simon Lee
Shown in conjunction with the recently closed exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York, London’s Simon Lee Gallery is currently showing a selection of landmark video works and photographs by Dutch conceptual pioneer Bas Jan Ader, whose short career ended 40 years ago this year.  Memorializing the artist across this series of pieces, the show underscores Ader’s ability to function along multiple theoretical lines and historical modes at once. Read More »
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August 20th, 2016
Shahryar Nashat at Made in LA (Installation View), via Art Observed
Currently on view at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum, the third Made in L.A. Biennial is exploring the broad experiences and voices of the city’s thriving arts community, culling together a body of work running from digital subversions to more concretely conceptual work, each time underscoring ideas of interconnected and related experiences of the Southern Californian experience.  With a subtitle written by poet Aram Saroyan, the show is intent on exploring concepts of expanded work, where the contributions and performances of those on view spill over into the city, and state, more broadly. Read More »
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