Erika Vogt, Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll (2013), Courtesy New Museum, New York Photo: Benoit Pailley

The back room in the New Museum lobby is currently draped with hanging anchors, plaster molds,  and other myriad items, a bizarre assemblage of pieces and materials that forces visitors to duck their heads and tread cautiously as they move through the narrow room.  This installation, newly created for the museum by artist Erika Vogt, is Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll, a surreal video and sculptural piece that playfully toys with the raw materialism of the works on view.

Erika Vogt, Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll (2013), Courtesy New Museum, New York Photo: Benoit Pailley (more…)

Brian “KAWS” Donnelly’s mural, his second major art exhibit in Brooklyn is the latest addition to The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s public art offerings. The mural 3 story-high mural was completed this week, and stands behind a newly-installed, modular bike rack designed by David Byrne, which forms the phrase “Bold wink.” The mural is in bright neon colors and shows the artist’s trademark cartoon forms. (more…)

Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is preparing to bring his work Ventilator, which premiered at MoMA in 2008, back to the museum this year.  Consisting of a simplistic fan, a cable and the air of the space, the fan moves in haphazard, circular patterns above the room, illustrating the air currents and forces at play in seemingly empty space.  “I think that Ventilator is captivating to look at, but you also start to wonder what on Earth makes it fly,” Eliasson says. “When we walk into a space, we tend to look at the walls and the floor as solids, and everything between as somehow not there. We know very well that air is thick enough for a jumbo jet to take off and float on it. There is something there, conceptually, to solidify.” (more…)

Six artists have been named in the shortlist to produce the latest in the rolling series of sculptures featured on Trafalgar Square’s empty Fourth Plinth – including British artists David Shrigley, Mark Leckey and Marcus Coates. Competing for time slots in 2015 and 2016, two artists from the shortlist will be selected early next year.  Miniature versions of the proposed works will be on display in nearby church St. Martin-in-the-Fields starting September 25. (more…)

Robert Therrien, no title (folding table and chairs, beige) (2006), Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 2007. © 2006 Robert Therrien. Photograph by Tom Loonan.

Robert Therrien is represented by Gagosian Gallery.  He has shown in major exhibitions worldwide, and is in the collections of some of the most prestigious museums around the globe, among them the Centre Pompidou, LACMA, MoMA, and the Tate Modern. Yet his work is often noted for its absence from the mainstream body of post-war conceptual and pop art.

Robert Therrien, no title (table leg) (2010), Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery. ©2010 Robert Therrien. Image courtesy of Robert Therrien studio. (more…)

Carol Bove, Monel (2013), via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed

There’s a certain intangible spiritualism to the work of Carol Bove, located somewhere between the phenomenological minimalism of Donald Judd, and a more abstract, natural focus on the intersections of urban and rural ecologies.  Divine symbolism intersects with locational meditations, found objects with architectural forms, and rigid industrial materials with looping, whimsical forms.  Fitting then, that the artist would present a pair of shows, both including seven new works, one at the Museum of Modern Art, and one at The Highline Railyards, where construction is currently underway to convert the last untrammeled part of the elevated railway into park space.  Both created specially for their respective spaces of exhibition, the pair of exhibitions currently on view feel like two parts of a potent whole.

Carol Bove, Equinox (Installation View), via Museum of Modern Art (more…)

The New York Times reports on the arrival of Ona, a new sculpture by Polish artist Ursula von Rydingsvard at the Barclays Center.  Installed Thursday night, the 12,000 pound bronze work consists of over 100 parts which were welded together shortly before the work’s final placement.  “You don’t have to pay a fee or enter a museum, and no guard will tell you not to touch it,’ the artist said of the sculpture. “I would actually love people to touch it. The acid from fingers polishes it, like the Buddhas getting their bellies rubbed.” (more…)

Peter Coffin, Untitled (Dog), 2012. Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum.

Now through October 6, the work of Peter Coffin is on view throughout the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. Here and There presents this collection of work through an installation that demands the viewer engage in the play of a hunt, or the happenstance of casual encounter.  Photography, sculpture, video installation and lithography are a few of Coffin’s mediums  scattered through both the museum and its online site.  A checklist that serves as a guide to the exhibition can be found on the museum’s website.

Peter Coffin, Untitled (Design for Colby Poster Company) (2008),  Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum. (more…)

Haroon Mirza, Frame for a Painting (2013), Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

As is to be expected, MoMA’s first survey into the field of sound art starts with a certain degree of theatricality: 1,500 individually micro-tuned speakers sit on the wall on the way into the exhibition space, filling the space with a sharp white hiss.  Shifting slightly with each change of position, Tristan Perich’s Microtonal Wall welcomes a lingering meditation, as viewers pace back and forth, moving their heads up and down close to the speakers or far away, the variance in intensity opening the space around it to any number of perceptual opportunities.

Richard Garet, Before Me, (2012), Courtesy the artist and Julian Navarro Projects, New York (more…)

David Hockney, The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (detail), (2012), © David Hockney, Via Hockney Pictures and Pace Gallery

The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (2012), the U.S. premiere of artist David Hockney’s first video installation, presents a panorama of bright color and whirling objects, tinged with mordant humor. In a darkened room on the second floor of the Whitney, the viewer will find a bare theater with a single long bench and eighteen screens arranged in a grid. The screens switch on to reveal a composition of red and blue horizontal blocks almost as flat as Hockney’s early acrylics. Also bearing similarities to his Polaroid collages, Hockney has chosen to create a fractured composition using video to achieve the same effect by combining feeds from eighteen different cameras mounted in his Yorkshire studio on a sunny day. The light is even and saturates the space, permitting no highlights or shadows, and without figures, the red and blue studio looks relatively seamless on the screen. (more…)

Monika Grzymala, Volumen (2013), via Daniel Creahan for ArtObserved

Currently installed on the ground floor of The Morgan Library and Museum in midtown Manhattan, Monika Grzymala’s Volumen is an impressive flurry of paper and string, flowing up from a corner of the museum’s glass atrium, and spreading out as it flows upwards towards the ceiling.  Part of the museum’s annual “Summer Sculpture Series,” the piece forms an illusively rich tapestry of colors, mixing homemade paper with copied texts from the museum’s vast collections of manuscripts and books. (more…)

“Art Within One Mile,” a new project by artist Bundith Phunsombatlert, has made its debut on New York City Streets.  Aiming to increase New Yorker’s awareness of art around the city, the series of taxicab yellow signs directs pedestrian’s attention to nearby sculptures and murals.  “It’s a form of generosity, a gesture toward an environment, like New York, that’s rich in a way that sometimes we take for granted,” says Prerana Reddy of the Queens Museum. “It’s a way of recuperating our hidden heritage, our hidden richness.” (more…)

Paul Klee, New Harmony (Neue Harmonie) (1936), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 71.1960. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

On view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is a unique exhibition of abstract works taken from the museum’s 20th century collection, intended to show the trends present between the years of 1919 and 1939, during which time a variety of abstract artists flourished, pioneering new techniques and creative philosophies across the mediums of painting, sculpture and drawing.

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The final selection of 57 works for the United Kingdom’s ambitious Art Everywhere project have been announced, covering a broad spectrum of British art that includes works by Peter Blake, Edward Burra, Francis Bacon, Peter Doig and John Constable.  The Guardian has published a photo gallery of the works, allowing interested parties a sneak peak at the works before they appear on billboards across the country. (more…)

In conjunction with the late Richard Artschwager’s ongoing retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the museum has partnered with the Los Angeles Nomadic Division and the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas to install a series of the artist’s blps pieces across the cities of LA and Las Vegas.  The museum is also hosting a contest around the blps installation, entering any viewer who posts an image of one on Twitter or Instagram for a drawing to win an Artschwager prize pack.    (more…)

A recent article in the New York Times investigates the growing trend towards museum exhibitions and spaces that prioritize experience and interaction over the quiet reflection and observation of more traditional art environments.  Exploring various approaches, including interactive installations, games, parties, interactive displays and social networking, museums are seeking ways to reposition themselves in a broader creative economy. (more…)

Akio Suzuki, Ku (detail) (2012), via Lisa Cooley

The field of sound art, as trumpeted by the New York Times and the Museum of Modern Art, is currently emerging into the mainstream dialogues of the high art world, exposing what was once seen as a relatively underground practice to the milling crowds of major museums.  Even so, with that sort of focus placed on the medium, a new level of critique, or rather, a reassessment of the techniques, practices and processes inherent in the creation of sound art.

The String and The Mirror (Installation View), via Lisa Cooley (more…)

Several days after the birthday of Andy Warhol, a group of artists in Pittsburgh have begun the process of covering the Andy Warhol Bridge in layers of knitted blankets, part of a project titled Knit the Bridge.  The project, which raised over $100,000 in crowdsourced funding, launched yesterday, and will be on view until September, when the blankets used in the project will be donated to homeless shelters.  “Everybody is jubilant,” said Jenny Tabrum, the technical adviser for Knit the Bridge. “The excitement is palpable in the air because everybody is thrilled that it’s finally happening.” (more…)

The newly launched Amazon Art marketplace system has opened, and close behind are a series of bizarre and sarcastic comments from users eager to weigh in on the offering of high-priced works for sale online, including a $1.45 million Monet.  Says one commenter: “I think I’m going to touch this up a bit with some water colors I have laying around. Make the colors pop more.” (more…)

James Turrell, Breathing Light, (2013) Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Copyright James Turrell. Photo copyright Florian Holzherr.

Part of his three-museum, nationwide retrospective, James Turell lights up LACMA with a retrospective that exhibits works from the artist’s nearly fifty-year career.  Extending across an entire wing of the Resnick Pavilion, and an entire floor in the Broad building, the exhibition is easily the heaviest concentration of works by Turrell in one place that one could hope to see in a lifetime.  Loosely chronological, the show begins with a projection work from the first years of Turrell’s light experiments, and ends with an immersive environment created this year.  These works, Afrum (White) (1966) and Breathing Light (2013), provoke pure wonderment, emphasizing the device central to Turrell’s artistic investigations: that the work itself doesn’t necessarily exist in the space, but within the viewer’s experience, moving through the work.

James Turrell, Afrum (White), (1966), Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Copyright James Turrell. Photo copyright Florian Holzherr. (more…)

James Turrell, Tycho White: Single Wall Projection, (1967), Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, © James Turrell

Part of his ongoing retrospective spanning three cities and upwards of 92,000 square feet of exhibition space, American artist James Turrell has brought several of his iconic light installations to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.  Serving as the way station between the Guggenheim’s “blockbuster” exhibition of Turrell’s Aten Reign, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s blowout review of Turrell’s nearly fifty years of work, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston offers a subdued, yet cohesive addition to the national celebration of one of America’s pioneering light and space artists. (more…)

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013) (Installation View) © James Turrell, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

The highly anticipated James Turrell exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which opened last month, and remains on view through the summer, has renewed the ongoing debate surrounding contemporary artworks of Disney-esque proportions, especially considering whether or not these spectacle-inducing affairs are worthy of the attention they often command. Like his ongoing work-in-progress, Rodin Crater (a massive naked-eye observatory built within an ancient crater near Flagstaff, Arizona), Turrell’s multi-venue comeback is not exactly a modest undertaking, with concurrent exhibitions on view at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. At the Guggenheim, Turrell joins Matthew Barney, Nam June Paik, Maurizio Cattelan, and others who have mediated Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda through Turrell’s site specific Aten Reign, which uses an ingenious system of stretched fabrics and LED lights to create the illusion of billowing clouds of color that unfold in concentric rings through the rising levels, with visitors invited to watch the dizzying light show from the rotunda floor. Four other historical projected light works, three of which date to the 1960s, are also on view in adjacent galleries along with a selection of thirteen aquatints that, with expert lighting and position, appear to emit a soft glow. However, it is Aten Reign that has generated the most buzz, both good and bad.

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013) (Installation View) © James Turrell, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York  (more…)

Signaling a potential sea-change in the landscape of contemporary sound art, a number of major museums are dedicating space in their fall schedule to the medium, including a major survey of the field at the MoMA, opening this Saturday.   “For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” says curator Tom Eccles, who has commissioned a new work by sound artist Susan Philipsz in New York. “On a very basic, basic level, sound is one of our first experiences — in the uterus, in fact.”
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Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013, Designed by Sou Fujimoto, © Sou Fujimoto Architects, Image © 2013 Iwan Baan

Each year, the Serpentine Gallery commissions an outstanding architect who has yet to build on British soil to design a Pavilion in the yards of the gallery in Hyde Park. This year’s pavilion, an impressive cloud of white steel built upon a three-dimensional grid, was conceived by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. (more…)