Jonas Wood, Rosy in my Room with His Cat (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over both rooms at Anton Kern’s Chelsea exhibition space, LA painter Jonas Wood has brought a well-rounded and entertaining series of new paintings, which chart the artist’s continually playful and inventive approach to figuration.  Mixing together abstract signifiers with a cool, even-handed approach to the world around him, Wood’s pieces here are an exceptional entry in the discourse of modern painting.

Jonas Wood, The Bat/Bar Mitzvah Weekend (2016), via Art Observed

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Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Audience (detail) (2016), via Art Observed

Taking over the full expanse of Hauser and Wirth’s 18th Street location, Rashid Johnson has brought a series of new paintings, sculpture and assemblage to New York for his first gallery show in the city in several years.  The show, which dwells on concepts of escape, anxiety and history, is a concise examination of Johnson’s practice through a range of theoretical approaches and material interests.     Read More »

James Turrell at Dorotheenstadt Chapel (Installation View), via Art Observed

The memorial chapel of the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin is temporarily home to James Turrell’s most recent light installation, a gradually shifting arrangement of colored lights that fills the space with a gentle glow.  Every Monday and Saturday through December, the chapel will fill with light in time with the setting sun and envelope attendees in the otherworldly, immersive experience, as a series of LED lights hidden in the architecture of the chapel turn on as the sun begins to set, and change over the course of the next hours to correspond to the light outside of the space. Read More »

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 10 (1910), via Fondation Beyeler

In terms of the various rejections of painterly convention that defined the early decades of the 20th Century, few schools of thought left the same lasting imprint on the act of painting as “Der Blaue Reiter” (The Blue Rider).  The internationally distributed group of artists, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc chief among them, were early entries in the varied schools of thought and practice that sought to change the aesthetic and political energies of their craft through a combination of dynamic invention in their craft, and iconoclastic, ideological fervor in their writing and organization.  Making the case for a practice divorced from rote representation, the pair of artists instead relied on color and line themselves, affording these essential elements a much broader range of expressive capacity and spiritual evocativeness that would ultimately pave the way for much of the century’s adventures into abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau—Obermarkt with Mountains (1908), via Fondation Beyeler

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Shio Kusaka’s prints at Karma, via Art Observed

For eleven years, Printed Matter’s annual Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 has ushered in the fall art season with its unique and enigmatic selection of small press publishers, gallery bookmakers, artist-run presses, and other producers of small-scale works, antiquities, multiples, and other ephemera.   Offering an intimate and often far more portable selection of works by a wide range of artists and authors, the show, which runs through Sunday, offers a broad snapshot of the further reaches of the city’s arts community, where graphic arts, design, writing and studio practice have one of their few opportunities to mingle and show work in the same context, making for a unique look at New York’s fertile and expanded creative communities.

The David Zwirner Booth, with art by Oscar Murillo and Yutaka Sone, via Art Observed

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Eddie Peake, Head (2016), via Art Observed

Jeffrey Deitch is back in New York.  Following several years of one-off projects, rumored re-openings and pop-up exhibitions, Deitch touched down at his former space at 18 Wooster for good, kicking off his renewed tenure in the building last week with a series of celebratory performances by British-born Eddie Peake.  The artist, whose neon and glitter encrusted works have long been a staple of Deitch’s exhibition program, brought a fittingly enthused atmosphere to the exhibition, as his work Head left a literal mark on the gallery itself. Read More »

Sophia Al-Maria, still from Black Friday (2016). Digital video projected vertically, color, sound; 16:36 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai.

Currently showing on the first floor of the Whitney Museum is Black Friday, the American-Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria’s solo debut in the United States.  Born in the U.S. and educated in London and Egypt, Al-Maria has been a central voice in the Gulf region’s burgeoning contemporary art scene.  At the helm of the art collective Gulf Cooperation Council as a founding member, Al-Maria’s work drives at a concept of “Gulf Futurism,” a term she coined to define the rapidly evolving economic and social landscape of the region.  As a writer, researcher and filmmaker, Al-Maria has been delivering a substantial body of work on oil-fueled wealth and its political/social consequences in the Middle East.

Sophia Al-Maria, still from The Litany (2016). Digital video projected vertically, color, sound; 16:36 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai. Read More »

Taryn Simon, An Occupation of Loss (Installation View), courtesy Park Avenue Armory Image © Naho Kubota

In the midst of the Park Avenue Armory, a series of immense silos tower up from the floor, part of artist Taryn Simon’s landmark performance An Occupation of Loss, which brings a series of funeral mourners from around the globe to the Drill Hall for an overwhelmingly powerful performance meditating on loss, political agency, and common human experience. Read More »

David Hockney, Barry Humphries, 26th, 27th, 28th March (2015), all images courtesy Royal Academy

Currently on view at London’s Royal Academy through the end of the month, artist David Hockney continues his remarkably prolific painterly output, bringing a new series of portraits created at his Los Angeles studio to the British Institution.  Exploring a wide range of sitters through the artist’s particular approach to the genre, the show is both a striking map of Hockney’s own life, and his vivid, tireless approach to his craft.

 David Hockney, Rita Pynoos, 1st, 2nd March (2014)

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