Raqib Shaw, Self Portrait in the Study at Peckham (After Vincenzo Catena) Kashmir Version (2015-2016), via White Cube

Raqib Shaw’s work is flush with context, canvases as densely layered with paint as they are with intersections of religious, historical and personal signifiers, drawing on the sprawling figurative techniques of Renaissance reliefs, decorative arts, and portraiture in quick succession.  His are paintings investigating the techniques and histories of these early Western works, while drawing on his own personal experiences to drive and embellish their original iconographies.  Shaw brings a new body of these works in sculpture and painting to White Cube’s Bermondsey location this month, continuing his investigation of 15th, 16th, and 17th Century art through the lens of his own life. Read More »

Ai Weiwei, Standing Figure (2016), via Art Observed

Turning his sense for political inequality and global human rights issues towards the Mediterranean’s current refugee crisis, Ai Weiwei has brought a body of both new works and recent pieces from the past ten years to Athens’s Museum of Cycladic Art, exploring a fruitful intersection of historical and current political contexts in conversation with the artist’s own personal history.  The exhibition, which marks both Ai’s first exhibition with an archeological museum context as well as his first in the nation of Greece, is a well-selected show, which takes direct aim at the Syrian refugee crisis while addressing the history of Greece in subtly powerful ways. Read More »

Mark Grotjahn, Pink Cosco (Installation View), All artworks © Mark Grotjahn. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery. Installation photography: Mike Bruce

Continuing his inquiries into the modes of perspective, constraint and repetition at play in the modes of contemporary art practice, Los Angeles-based painter Mark Grotjahn brings a new series of works to Gagosian Gallery in London, under the title Pink Cosco.  Reprising several of his previous forms, particularly his painted “mask” sculptures, executed in bronze and covered in varied layers and styles of paint, Grotjahn again insists upon the beauty and precision to be discovered in variations on a theme. Read More »

Keith Sonnier, Ba-O- Ba VI (1970), Copyright: Haeusler Contemporary Munich/Zurich Photograph: Wolfgang Stahl

Keith Sonnier‘s work has stood as a landmark voice in the development of abstract languages and explorations in the sculptural form, suspending neon lights over and across varied materials, from strips of cloth to reflective panes of glass, each time utilizing his materials’ internal consistencies to drive at nuanced explorations of light and space.  It should be telling then, that Whitechapel Gallery’s impressive exhibition focused on the artist takes up only three years of his career, examining his creative output from 1968 to 1970 as a foundational point in both his work, and the generation of artists around him. Read More »

Ed Ruscha at Gagosian Gallery, via Art Observed

Few artists have left the sort of impact Ed Ruscha has left on the field of small-press and art book publishing over the course of their career.  Ruscha, whose almost constant output of small books of photography, prints and other printed matter, has consistently redefined both the material and conceptual practice of book manufacturing since the 1960’s.  His early pieces in this medium, executed during the 1960’s and 70’s, helped to redefine its practice, shifting the artist’s book from a limited-edition, rare item, to a mass-produced and widely distributed object that was seen as a step towards the democratization of art through its scalable production.

Ed Ruscha at Gagosian Gallery, via Art Observed

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Vito Acconci, WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976 (Installation View)

Continuing a consideration of its nearly half-century long history in New York City, MoMA PS1 is celebrating its fortieth anniversary with an exhibition dedicated to the early career of artist Vito Acconci, a pioneer of body and performance art in the United States during the 1960’s and 70’s that drove forward new concepts and perceptions of art practice while PS1 was similarly expanding the concept of the exhibition space.  WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976 focuses on Acconci’s works from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—the years that proceeded the opening of PS1 as an experimental, non-profit art center under the guidance of Alanna Heiss. Read More »

Liu Wentao, Untitled (2015), via White Cube

Taking over the full two-floor layout of White Cube’s Mason’s Yard exhibition space, the gallery’s summer exhibition the world is yours, as well as ours explores the richly diverse and energetic forms of Chinese painterly abstraction, considering its format beyond facile classifications as a corollary to Western technique.  Delving into the cultural histories and forms of Chinese painting over the past centuries, White Cube presents the abstraction of China’s current crop of artists as a deeper engagement wth a range of practices between modernism and more traditional approaches to the painterly surface.  The show places Taoist thought at its base, exploring how the appreciation of abstract form in Chinese culture more broadly has left the door open for diverse experiences and engagements with the canvas in the modern era. Read More »

A.R. Penck, Elektrischer Stuhl (1960), all photos via Osman Can Yerebakan

Climbing up the winding staircase of Michael Werner Gallery’s Upper East Side townhouse and entering the exhibition space, one is immediately faced with Elektrischer Stuhl (Electric Chair), a painting of a man being executed before a group of mourners.  The work, by Neo-Expressionist painter A.R. Penck, perhaps best embodies the artist’s combination of abrasive political gesture with his particular sense of aesthetic operation.  Early Works, on view at the gallery through September 3rd, outlines the body of Penck’s work in Dresden in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the influential artist suffered under the harsh social and political climate prevailing in East Germany.  It was during this period that the artist was the subject of an embargo by the government on his works, ultimately leading him to flee his hometown for Cologne, where he received a marked degree of critical and commercial acclaim.

A.R. Penck, Standart-Modell/CCCP-Studie (1972-73) Read More »

Danny Lyon, Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville, 1966 (1966), via Whitney Museum of American Art

Exhibited at a critical moment of heightened tensions regarding civil liberties in America, Danny Lyon’s retrospective exhibition transforms the Whitney’s fifth floor into a space for cultural reflection.  Set against a backdrop that confronts pertinent issues regarding violence, incarceration, and inequality, Lyon’s work chronicles a complex photographic history of the racial, social, and political issues that are currently challenging the United States anew in the 21st Century.  The serious tone of his work is met with the intimacy in which he engages with his subjects, offering a sense of hope while putting a deeply human face on subjects who are marginalized and oppressed. Read More »