Ryder Ripps, Alone Together (Installation View), via Art Observed

The New York-based artist and designer Ryder Ripps capped his first solo gallery show with Postmasters earlier this year, and has spent the past two months in residency at the Red Bull Studios, where his current show, Alone Together, has turned the space into a self-reflexive digital laboratory, complete with test subjects, flickering hardware, and its own, occasionally fractured ideologies. (more…)

Curator Piper Marshall is profiled in W Magazine this week, as she begins her run of exhibitions in conjunction with Mary Boone Gallery, and documents her ongoing focus on female artists.  “I love female artists so much that someone recently called me an ‘international womanizer,’” Marshall jokes. (more…)

Giuseppe Penone, Earth on Earth – Face (2014), via Marian Goodman

The New York outpost of Marian Goodman Gallery is currently presenting an exhibition of new works by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, continuing the artist’s practice of casting living trees in order to reposition his subject’s relationship to the natural world.  The exhibition, curated by Dieter Schwarz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, also culls a series of historically resonant works from the artist’s early career, extending a natural progression throughout the last 40 years of the artist’s practice. (more…)

London’s Hayward Gallery has commissioned a major commission from artist Carsten Höller for the artist’s upcoming retrospective, Decision, inviting the artist to design a pair of slides for installation on the outside of its facade.  “Decision will ask visitors to make choices, but also, more importantly, to embrace a kind of double vision that takes in competing points of view, and embodies what Höller calls a state of ‘active uncertainty’ – a frame of mind conducive to entertaining new possibilities.” says Ralph Rugoff, the gallery director. (more…)

Henry Moore, Wunderkammer – Origin of Forms installation view, Photo: Mike Bruce, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Gagosian London presents a new look at Henry Moore’s body of work in its current exhibition, a cunningly arranged series of small-scale sculptures.  Though best-known for his large abstractions of the human form, Moore’s inspiration often came from small objects he found in nature—pebbles, shells, animal bones—which have been preserved in his Hertfordshire studio in Perry Green, his former home and now a museum and headquarters of the Henry Moore Foundation.  These pieces are currently on display in this unique show demonstrating Moore’s artistic process. (more…)

The thieves behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum have been identified, according to a report by Breitbart.  The career criminals George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio were named as the perpetrators by anonymous sources within the FBI, which had recently been reinvestigating the case.  Reissfelder had previously been represented by Senator John Kerry during his days of private defense practice for a murder conviction, which was overturned.  “I don’t know if those paintings ended up on eBay,” Kerry once joked, “but they’re not on my wall!” (more…)

Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis will leave her position at the museum after five years at the helm of the museum that have been marked by criticism and occasionally turbulent personnel changes.  She will move to be the first international director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.  “I want to keep all that is good about the museum, which I admire deeply, while developing ways in which it can make more of its context and position,” she says, “especially in relation to the neighboring Modern Art Centre, and more widely.” (more…)

Klaus Albrecht Schröder, the director of Vienna’s Albertina Museum, has publicly called for a time limit Nazi-loot restitution claims for work held in public collections  “The international community should decide on a sensible time frame of 20 or 30 years from now,” Schröder argues. “If we don’t set a time limit of around 100 years after the end of the Second World War, then we should ask ourselves why claims regarding crimes committed during the First World War should not still be valid; why we don’t argue anymore about the consequences of the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war, and why we don’t claim restitution of works of art that have been stolen during previous wars?” (more…)

Tracey Emin’s My Bed has gone back on view at the Tate Modern, following the work’s record-setting auction sale last year for £2.2 Million.  “I always admired the honesty of Tracey, but I bought My Bed because it is a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die,” says its new owner, Count Christian Duerckheim. (more…)

The Japanese city of Saitama, just north of Tokyo, has announced that will launch its own triennale next year, headed by director Takashi Serizawa, who formerly led nomadic exhibition space P3.  “Cities are not just accumulations of buildings and roads, but rather a composite of human endeavor, history, and culture that develops over time,” says Serizawa.  “I envision the Saitama Triennale as a kind of “soft urbanism” — a social experiment intended to breathe some creativity into the workings of this city, as a nucleus of culture and art.” (more…)

The Public Art Fund and Brooklyn Bridge Park will host an exhibition of public works by Danish artist Jeppe Hein this summer, the New York Times reports.  “One of the brilliant things about Jeppe’s work is he can engage you no matter what your background or experience or age in a very direct way,” says chief curator Nicholas Baume. (more…)

The Whitney has announced the details for its first exhibition at its newly completed Meatpacking District location. America Is Hard to See will open on May 1st, showing off the vast new exhibition spaces of the Renzo Piano-designed building, and traces the history of the museum alongside the development of American art in the 20th and early 21st century.  “The game changer is the space,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator. (more…)

John Baldessari is featured on Vogue this week, discussing the formal and thematic concerns he reads in Philip Guston’s Stationary Figure, part of The Met’s new series featuring contemporary artists discussing their favorite works from the museum collection.  “He’s almost a dumb artist, and I’m using dumb in a good way,” Baldessari says.  “It’s seemingly clumsy but very sophisticated brushwork.  I guess it comes out of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of old boots: you don’t need to paint a cathedral, you just need to be an interesting painter.” (more…)

A painting recently authenticated as the work of Peter Paul Rubens is set to go on view at the Rubenshuis Museum in Antwerp.  The work, Portrait of a Young Girl, was purchased $626,500 in 2013, and was confirmed as authentic shortly after.   (more…)

Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit (1970), via Art Observed

Beyond his most iconic performance works and sculptural environments, Joseph Beuys’s multiples constitute an entire aspect of the artist’s practice rarely seen as a complete series of works.  While some of his more iconic small-scale works, including Capri Battery or Sled, as well as his prints and drawings have become iconic entries in the artist’s elusive, and often enigmatic creative history, the works have rarely been presented as a complete series. (more…)

Daniel Keller, Stack 1 (2014), via Max Hetzler

Presenting a selection of artists working at the bleeding edge of social and economic critique, Max Hetzler’s exhibition Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism easily clocks in as one of the season’s most unexpectedly energetic exhibitions.  Curated by Lisa Schiff, Leslie Fritz and Eugenio Re Rebaudengo, and spread between the gallery’s Paris and Berlin locations, the show places post-capitalist theory and economic transition as its central conceit, examining the material and social costs of contemporary life within systems of capital exchange.  Pulling from the works of writer Jeremy Rifkin, the exhibition explores a historical juncture at which the traditional modes of national economic and political systems are slowly giving way, and a new, digitally-accelerated model of consumption and distribution is swiftly establishing itself.

Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism (Installation View – Paris), via Max Hetzler (more…)

Tomi Ungerer, All in One (Installation View)

The Drawing Center is currently honoring pioneer illustrator Tomi Ungerer, with an ambitious look at his expansive career of diverse themes and motifs.  Born in Alsace shortly before World War II tore through Europe, Ungerer moved to New York in 1956, where he published his first series of works.  Although his divergent artistic interests led him to compile a comprehensive oeuvre from advertisement campaigns for publications including the New York Times to graphically striking illustrations criticizing the politics of his time, Ungerer came to prominence in the U.S. as a children’s books author. His objection to this type of categorization eventually led him to move to Nova Scotia with his wife, later followed by another relocation to Ireland, where he currently resides. (more…)

LACMA has published an editorial on its blog this week, calling for renewed efforts in preserving the Nevada region of desert called Basin and Range, where artist Michael Heizer is working to complete his monumental City project.  “As the possibility for protecting Basin and Range comes close to a reality, LACMA and other museums around the country are hoping to bring attention to the positive cultural impact protecting this land would have,” the article states. (more…)

Gabriele Finaldi, the deputy director of the Prado museum in Madrid, will take over for Nicholas Penny as the head of the UK’s National Gallery this August.  “I feel deeply honored to take on the directorship of the National Gallery after Nicholas Penny,” Finaldi, who formerly worked as a curator at the museum from 1992 to 2002, says.  “This is a world-class collection in a world-class city and I eagerly look forward to working with trustees and the staff to strengthen the gallery’s bond with the public and its international standing.” (more…)

Gabriel Orozco, Cats and Watermelons (1992), all images courtesy MoCA Tokyo

Inner Cycles is an exhibition of new works and historically significant pieces by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, who has been an influential figure in the international contemporary art community since the early 90’s.  Composed of found objects, photographs, and sculptures, the exhibition is meant to show a “universe in flux” as objects are constantly appropriated and re-appropriated for new uses.

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Louise Bourgeois, Anatomy (1998), all images courtesy Galerie Lelong

On view at Galerie Lelong is an exhibition featuring graphic works, sketches and drawings made early the career of the late French-American artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), whose work often incorporated autobiographical elements.

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Bill Viola, Transformation (Installation View), all images courtesy Farschou Foundation

On view at Farschou Foundation Beijing is a solo show by American video artist Bill Viola. Known for his large-scale, high definition, ultra slow-motion moving images, the artist has served as an innovator in the technological execution and exhibition of video art. His show in Beijing, titled Transformation will continue through March 22nd.

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Aaron Curry, Vertical Wood Sculpture (2013), via Almine Rech

Just one week after The Armory Show closed its doors in New York, the sixth edition of Art Basel Hong Kong is preparing to open halfway around the world, with many familiar names vying to court collectors from Asia, Oceania and abroad.  The fair, which shuffled its calendar this year in response to the Venice Biennale opening in early May, is presenting something of a scaled-back experience this year, running just three days from Sunday to Tuesday, but should nevertheless prove successful as one of Asia’s largest art fairs. (more…)

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Business as usual) (1987), all images courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery

On view in London’s Skarstedt Gallery is an exhibition of early large-scale, black and white photographic works from artist Barbara Kruger, early entries in Kruger’s ongoing project to challenge the visual language and power structures of consumerist culture and print advertising, always under the understanding that her works will themselves enter the marketplace as commodities.

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