Rachel Harrison, Magnum (2015), via Regen Projects

New York-based artist Rachel Harrison is presenting a multifaceted exhibition at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects this month, exploring notions of representation, perspective and time as they function in both the context of the gallery and in the artist’s own work.  Titled Three Young Framers, the exhibition’s tacit reference to the photography of August Sander points to this notion of the subject as a participant in the act of photography, echoed today in an era of widely proliferating photographic technology. (more…)

Andra Ursuta, Scarecrow (2015), all photos via Connie Huang via Art Observed

Andra Ursuta has never shied away from a challenging, multifaceted study of global culture, executing monumentally-scaled works that are often just as imposing in their materiality and contextual weight as they are in size alone.  For the artist’s most recent exhibition at Ramiken Crucible, she turns her attention once again to these juxtapositions of commercial and cultural might through the imposing forms of industrial, cultural, athletic and financial prowess. (more…)

Ida Applebroog, The Ethics of Desire (Installation View)

The Ethics of Desire is the title of the currently running Ida Applebroog exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. In her decades long career, the New York native has frequently used her work to dismantle and reform sexual politics and its echoes in society (i.e. the women’s liberation movement, body politics and gender classification, to name a few).  Her turbulent biography, from a childhood in a Jewish Orthodox family in the Bronx to her time in Chicago and California, gained further momentum when she relocated in New York in the mid 1970’s. (more…)

The Art Newspaper notes that over one third of collectors in the top 20 of the Art News Top 200 Collectors List have opened museums or foundations to manage their collections, counting Bernard Arnault, Peter Brant and Eli Broad among them. (more…)

Mona Hatoum is profiled in The New York Times this week, as the artist prepares for her solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou this month, and reviews the multi-faceted international upbringing that informs much of her work.  “The basis of it is a feeling of wanting to be free of all those restrictions, whether it’s social or political, that are always put on people,” she says, “so I can be whatever I want to be.” (more…)

The New York Times has a feature on Dylan Brant, the son of collector and publishing magnate Peter Brant in its Style section this week, noting 25 year-old’s passion for curating and dealing, including a recent show, Rawhide, at Venus Over Manhattan.  “As a young man, I’m really aware of the standards for being a man in America, and you see a lot of that represented in cowboys,” he says. “So they’re interesting figures in relation to the disintegration of the American landscape.” (more…)

The Park Avenue Armory has received a gift of $65 million from the The Thompson Family Foundation, bringing the total amount of money given by the foundation to the institution to a total of $129 million over the past years.  The Foundation, set up to honor the memory of businessman Wade Thompson, has long been a staunch supporter of the Armory.  “He passionately believed that the Armory should be rescued as one of the country’s most important landmarks,” says his widow, Angela Thompson. (more…)

The Snarkitecture Studio has unveiled a massive ball pit installed inside of Washington D.C.’s National Building Museum, part of a 10,000 square foot work titled The Beach.  The work will remain open to the public through September 7th. (more…)

London’s Whitechapel Gallery has announced plans for an ambitious exhibition of Arab art, pulling more than 100 works from the Barjeel Art Foundation, and noted as “the broadest single overview of Arab art to be shown in the UK to date,” the Art Newspaper reports.  “The Barjeel foundation’s guiding principle is to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent, publicly accessible art collection in the UAE,” the foundation said in a statement. (more…)

Shepard Fairey’s warrant in Detroit resulted in the artist’s arrest at the Los Angeles International Airport this past Monday, where he was held overnight on charges of vandalism.  The artist has since been released, and has not made a statement on the event. (more…)

The Hong Kong Museum of Arts closes its doors next month for a three-year, $120 million renovation that will expand exhibition space, as well as raise the museum ceilings in exhibition spaces, a much-needed change that had caused problems for the institution.  “There were some exhibits from overseas which could not be shown at the museum because of the height problem,” says Chan Shing-wai, assistant director of leisure and cultural services. (more…)

The Met is currently working on plans for a 2017 exhibition focused on the work of Lucio Fontana, and initial reporting by the Art Newspaper indicates that the exhibition could be held at the Breuer building, formerly the home of the Whitney Museum.  “An exhibition at the Met will necessarily be all-encompassing,” an anonymous source close to the museum says. (more…)

The Economist reviews the touring exhibition of the M+ Museum collection, before the Hong Kong museum opens its doors in 2019, and profiles some of the most important contributors to the emergence of Chinese contemporary art worldwide, including businessman and diplomat Uli Sigg, and Guy Ullens, founder of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art.  “The view was that art and culture were enshrined in the past—that Chinese art was ‘something ancient’,” says Edmund Capon, who served as head of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. (more…)

The Art Newspaper notes the increasingly complex internal workings of the guarantor system at Christie’s this week, including a growing number of behind the scenes deals and third-party guarantees or investors that help push works to ever higher prices.  “It is becoming more complex and confusing, and that’s not what you want to have in an art market where prices are at this level,” says economist Olav Velthuis. “With the market expanding and prices rising so high, you want more transparency—but this is resulting in the opposite.” (more…)

The LA Times looks at the immense efforts taken at the Broad Museum to ready the exhibition space, including the negotiations in installing and managing immense artworks like a recently purchased Takashi Murakami piece.  “Contemporary art is so varied in form, material and scale that you often need to devise new approaches for moving and installing certain pieces,” says the Broad’s director of collections management, Vicki Gambill.  “That’s what makes the work infinitely interesting and complex. Preparators love solving problems.” (more…)

White Cube Gallery will close its São Paulo exhibition space this August, when its three year lease ends, The Art Newspaper reports. The gallery told the paper that it will focus on “special projects” in Brazil,“as was the impetus when the gallery was first introduced to the region.”   (more…)

Joan Miró, Bird in the Night (1967), via Art Observed

Joan Miró’s impact on the landscape of twentieth century art can hardly be ignored, an artist whose fluid, lithe figurations and adventurous approach to both color and line helped to pave an alternative to the dense cubism of his fellow countryman and friend Pablo Picasso.  Taking a reflective look at the artist’s contributions and continued artistic growth during his late Nahmad Contemporary is currently presenting Oiseaux dans L’Espace, a minimal, yet stunning show that reflects an impressive curatorial vision towards the artist’s later works.   (more…)

Roni Horn, Hack Wit – chasing blue out (2014), via Hauser and Wirth

Hauser and Wirth is currently devoting both its Saville Row Galleries to a collection of several recent series by Roni Horn, documenting the American artist’s ongoing investigations of language, repetition and meaning that stem from both the viewer and artist’s encounter with the work. (more…)

Ai Weiwei has opened a series of new exhibitions in Beijing, signaling a relaxation of the capital’s ban on the showing the artist, while foreign travel is still off limits.  “The decision-making process is opaque. I can only speculate that the authorities realize that they have created a situation that, sooner or later, has to be resolved,” says John Tancock, a longtime collaborator of Ai’s and an adviser to Chambers Fine Art. (more…)

Jeff Koons is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as the artist prepares to open his traveling retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao this month, and his views on critiques of his work as trophies for multi-millionaires.  “It happens to everybody – the work is held by someone who doesn’t even particularly enjoy the work, and just has it stored in some warehouse and will sit there for 20 years,” he says.  “Or someone doesn’t understand it physically, and their motivations are just to show that they have the power to purchase. There’s not much you can do; that’s about educating people, and the way you can educate them is through your art. And I try to educate people about materialism through my work. I try to show them real visual luxury.” (more…)

The New York Times travels to the Havana Biennial this week, and notes the arrest of artist Tania Bruguera during the event, following the artist’s live reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, an event that cast something of a pall over the first Biennial legally accessible to American visitors. (more…)

Damien Hirst has installed his large-scale work, Charity, outside of the Gherkin tower in London this week, a nearly 25-foot high statue of a young girl in a leg brace, holding a vandalized collection tin.  “Charity is an iconic piece of art. It is also a symbol of changing attitudes to disability over the past 50 years, since collection boxes like the one depicted in this sculpture were seen on high streets across the country,” says Alan Gosschalk, fundraising director at Scope, the British disability charity that once used the collection tins depicted in Hirst’s work. (more…)

Marina Abramovic is in The Guardian this week, reviewing her plans for her own funeral, to take place in the three cities she lived longest: New York, Amsterdam and Belgrade.  “I want to have three Marinas,” she says. “Of course, one is real and two fake because you can’t have three bodies.” (more…)

Manchester’s Whitworth Museum has been awarded the UK’s annual “Museum of the Year” award, recognizing the institution’s impressive new expansion project, unveiled this past February. (more…)