Artist Andres Serrano, whose notorious work Piss Christ was removed from the Associated Press image archives after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, speaks out in Creative Time Reports this week, defending unconditional free expression in the arts and in contemporary political discourse.  “Unfortunately, times like these show us the true limits of people’s taste for debate, even in an ostensibly free society,” he writes.  “We have only to look to our shared human history to find that the artists and thinkers who have most advanced civilization in the direction of freedom and equality were often unpopular in their day. They questioned, they analyzed, they regularly offended. Without them we would surely be lost.” (more…)

Polly Apfelbaum, HWP 10-20 (2014), via Art Observed

The White Columns Annual offers a particularly resonant opening note for New York’s art world each year.  Refusing an overly objective approach to the curation of a “year in review” style group show, the event encourages, and even emphasizes subjectivity, turning the keys over to one group or person each year.  This year, the all-female art collective Cleopatra’s has been handed the reigns for the Annual’s 9th Edition, with the end result being a colorful, expansive show that is at turns somber, wry and compelling. (more…)

The U.S. Army is searching for a new group of cultural affairs officers to supervise the securing and preservation of important cultural monuments, property and locations in conflicted areas.  The Army had long taken a more lax, reactive approach to cultural preservation, but is looking to strengthen its methods.  “The civil affairs units have always had ‘functional specialists’, but the individuals were often not qualified in any meaningful way,”said Brigadier General Hugh Van Roosen, the director of the Institute for Military Support to Governance (IMSG) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  “At the same time, if you have one person who was just the right fit, you probably didn’t have two of them. It was just a broken system.” (more…)

The BBC looks at the early career of Vincent Van Gogh, and the artist’s decision to enter divinity school in his mid-20’s.  It was during this time that the artist visited the depressed Borinage region, and where his work among the laypeople inspired him to draw and paint.  “The people were poor and illiterate, and their work was hard and dangerous,” says curator Sjraar Van Heugten. “Yet for Van Gogh, there was some kind of bigger truth in their simple way of life. After he became an artist, he chose to find his subject matter there. Like artists that he admired, such as Jean-François Millet, he wanted to portray the life of working-class people, and he remained interested in doing so certainly for the first half of his career.” (more…)

The Guardian looks at the current labor struggles at London’s National Gallery, as the museum transfers staff management over to a private company, leaving little in terms of real job protection.  “I came to work at the National Gallery, but I could be transferred to a supermarket car park,” says one assistant. (more…)

The Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York has announced a new residency program, opening in conjunction with the long-running Shandaken Project Residency, which is putting its own program on hold during the partnership.  The new program will “encourage artists to engage with Storm King Art Center in new ways.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles artist Daniel Arsham, and his legion of high-profile fans and collectors, among them Usher and Jay-Z.  “I couldn’t tell you how it happened,” Mr. Arsham says of his popularity. “I work with a lot of people who aren’t famous, too. And in some cases, it’s been the celebrities who gravitate towards me.” (more…)

The Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris is focusing on expanding its collection of photography, the Art Newspaper reports, earmarking over â‚¬100,000 a year to increase the size of its holdings in the upcoming years.   (more…)

Sara Raza has been appointed the new Guggenheim curator for the Middle East and North Africa, and will continue the museum’s UBS Map initiative, the museum announced this week.  “Her work will complement and extend the research that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi curatorial team is undertaking,” says Guggenheim Director Richard Armstrong. (more…)

The Tate Britain has announced plans for a major retrospective focused on the work of Barbara Hepworth, which will feature a set of photograms from the artist’s archives, made by silhouetting the artist’s head against photo-reactive paper.  “It is a very beautiful thing in the flesh,” says Sophie Bowness, the artist’s granddaughter. (more…)

Diana Thater, Science, Fiction (2014), via Art Observed

Diana Thater’s new exhibition on view at David Zwirner’s 19th Street Exhibition is an exercise in restraint.  Consisting of a pair of video compositions and a monumental structure in a light-saturated installation piece, the artist moves towards an experience of space, both in an immediate and more figurative sense, that engages the magnitude of human experience on both macro and micro scales. (more…)

Egon Schiele, Death and Maiden (1915), via Kunsthaus Zurich

The Kunsthaus Zürich is currently presenting a historical study in portraiture and figuration over the course of a century, comparing the output of Austrian painter Egon Schiele with YBA-affiliated painter Jenny Saville, and tying together the pair’s varying approaches to powerful and, at times, visceral depictions of the human body.  Culling works from across the expanse of both artist’s careers, the exhibition seems to function both as a pair of parallel historical studies in each artist’s inspirations and development, while allowing a certain degree of overlap and cross-referencing into the various techniques each artist employed. (more…)

Mary Weatherford, La Noche (2014), via Art Observed

The Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated exhibition of contemporary painting, curated by Laura Hoptman, presents a cursory survey of current trends in this ever-evolving medium. Taking the concept of nonlinear time as its conceptual crux, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World attempts to parse the impact that the daily experience of digital media has had on painting specifically, and on visual culture more broadly.  (more…)

Preparations are already underway for the second edition of Los Angeles’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition in 2017, which will focus specifically on Latin American art, and which is turning to South and Central American arts institutions for leadership in planning the event.  “By nature, the breadth of this topic requires bringing in more people. With PST: LA/LA, we thought we had the unique opportunity to strengthen the connections between research communities in Los Angeles and Latin America,” says Joan Weinstein, deputy director of the Getty Foundation. (more…)

Richard Tuttle, I Don’t Know, or The Weave of Textile Language, (Installation View), all images courtesy Tate Modern

The largest work ever created by American sculptor Richard Tuttle (1941) is currently on view at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which has been the host to some of the world’s most striking works of monumental contemporary art.  I Don’t Know, or The Weave of Textile Language was a commissioned work, composed of vast cuts of fabrics designed by Tuttle himself from both manmade and natural fibers. Three vibrant colors are hung in a bold, majestic display, making use of its coiling form to generate a sense of movement within the massive hall.

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Al Taylor, Full Gospel Neckless (Middelfart) (1997), via Art Observed

Al Taylor’s work sits at a unique intersection of material fascination and object politics.  Combining the familiar materials of modern construction and design, Taylor’s work often investigated the pairings and interrelations of objects formed not only by the human’s aesthetic agenda, but equally by the complementary formal designs of the materials themselves.  These intersections can be seen in quite stark execution currently at David Zwirner, where the gallery’s 20th Street location is currently presenting a body of work created 1989 and 1997. (more…)

The popular Egon Schiele exhibition at the Neue Galerie has been extended through April 20th, the museum announced today, continuing the record breaking exhibition for an additional four months. (more…)

Gagosian Gallery in London will reportedly recreate the studio of sculptor Henry Moore for an exhibition next month.  The exhibition will be curated by Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation. (more…)

Sotheby’s February 3rd auction of Impressionist works in London will include a Claude Monet deaccessioned from the collection of MoMA, the New York Times reports.  The work, Les Peupliers à Giverny is anticipated to bring $13.8 million to $18.4 million. (more…)

Frieze London has announced that curator Clara M. Kim will take the helm for Spotlight, the special section of London’s Frieze Masters this fall.  Adriano Pedrosa, who led Spotlight since 2012, will still organize the section at Frieze New York in May. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal profiles the ongoing collaboration between Rem Koolhaas and Dasha Zhukova to create the new home for Zhukova’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow’s Gorky Park.  “The building is basically a found object,” Koolhaas says. “We are embracing it as it is.” (more…)

Marlene Dumas is interviewed in The Guardian this week, in the run-up to her Tate Modern Retrospective, opening early next month.  “When I start work on a painting, it’s total kitsch!” Dumas jokes during the interview. “When I painted myself pregnant, I couldn’t do the legs, and the blond hair made it look like a bad Klimt!” (more…)

Vito Schnabel will reportedly take over the St. Moritz gallery space formerly occupied by Bruno Bischofberger when the dealer vacates at the end of this season.  Bischofberger is reportedly moving his main space in Zürich into a 250,000-square-foot complex, and will be operating without a physical location in the meantime. (more…)

David Hockney, The Dancers IV. 14 August – 5 September 2014 (2014), via Art Observed

David Hockney’s new exhibition of paintings at Pace Gallery, his first full-size canvases since 2009, are a fitting continuation of the artist’s current interests, combining vaguely abstract environments and poses with a subtly loaded series of juxtapositions. The exhibition, which closes this Saturday, sees Hockney returning from several years focused on landscape studies and experimentations in digital video and photography to portraiture and human subjects. (more…)