Serpentine Pavilion, via Serpentine Galleries

The Serpentine Pavilion, the annual summer architecture project hosted by Serpentine Galleries, has opened in London, a swirling series of multicolored chambers and hallways by Spanish architecture firm SelgasCano (the first commission from a Spanish firm) resting on the lawn outside of the museum galleries. (more…)

Huma Bhabha at Salon 94 (Installation View)

Huma Bhabha’s new body of work is currently on view at both Lower East Side locations of Salon 94, showing the Pakistani-born and New York-based artist resuming her sculpture focused multi-media practice, pulling from vast inspirational sources, with her third exhibition at the gallery.  Spanning over centuries, religions, cultures and disciplines; Bhabha’s influences generate works of art that are hybrids of various methodologies. Not dictated by historical or cultural hierarchy, threads Bhabha weaves into her practice articulate on set modes of history writing, problematizing its embedded dynamics. Dystopian or utopian depending on viewers’ perception, Bhabha’s assemblies – most notably her robust sculptures – revoke remnants of a somber future that draws nourishment from its past. (more…)

The Serpentine has announced a Build Your Own Pavilion contest for young and aspiring architects, aged 8 to 14, inviting them to try their hand at executing their own unique architectural design.  “The platform and workshops give an insight to the basic principles of architectural design and workshop students will be given the Pavilion brief and a toolkit that begins with sketching by hand, working with simple modeling materials and progressing to 3D design and print technologies,” the Serpentine says. (more…)

François Pinault is reportedly looking to Paris for the potential site of a museum housing his collection of art, WWD reports.  “He has met with [Paris mayor] Anne Hidalgo, who expressed her interest,” says a source close to Pinault. “They are looking together.” (more…)

Collector Bert Kreuk has won his lawsuit with Danh Vo, forcing the artist the create a room-sized installation work, after the artist delivered a much smaller-sized work.  Kreuk will pay the artist $350,000 for the piece, but Vo must deliver the piece by a set date.  If not, will be fined $10,000 for each day after he fails to produce the work.     (more…)

Rob Pruitt, Esprit de Corps (Hokuskai’s Great Wave) (2015), via Art Observed

Rob Pruitt turned 50 this year, and marked the occasion with the opening of this summer’s bi-annual artist retrospective at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, the sprawling complex owned by magazine mogul Peter Brant, just across the street from his family home.  The show, taking its suburban locales and high art context as a point of departure, is a remarkable distillation of Pruitt’s practice over the last decades, and welcomes a renewed perspective on the artist’s own personal history in relation to his work. (more…)

The Guardian looks back at the final degree shows for a number of prominent British artists, including David Shrigley, Gillian Wearing and Tracey Emin, including humorous anecdotes and reflections from the artists on their future careers.  “I remember saying, if I have one exhibition when I leave I will be happy,” Wearing says.  “That’s all I expected.” (more…)

A public sculpture by Erwin Wurm, depicting a full-size Mercedes transporter MB100D truck bending slightly up a wall, has been hit with a parking ticket for its placement outside of the German city of Karlsruhe’s Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in a parking restricted zone.  Karlsruhe mayor Frank Mentrup has stated that he will try and fix the ticket, so that the work may remain parked in the space, albeit illegally. (more…)

The New Museum has appointed Lauren Cornell, who recently co-curated the 2015 Triennial alongside artist Ryan Trecartin, as Curator and Associate Director, Technology Initiatives.  “Through her work at the New Museum and at Rhizome first, Lauren Cornell has been tracking the influence of technology on art and culture at large,” says Massimiliano Gioni, the Museum’s Artistic Director.  “In her new position, she will help the Museum take an even more active role in engaging with the present and the future.”  (more…)

Katharina Grosse, The Smoking Kid (Installation View), all photos via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed.

Now through June 21, Johan König in Berlin presents The Smoking Kid, a collection of new paintings by Katharina Grosse.  Grosse is known for her work employing bold colors and ambitious movement in order to transcend, open, and test the limits and boundaries defining space.  Color and gesture are central concerns of this artist, whose works are at once challenging and whimsical, and her current exhibition departs from Grosse’s typical method of large-scale sculptural installation, turning her abstract style instead towards work in which movement and color is tidily contained to the canvas instead of imposed onto walls and other three dimensional forms.

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Michael Heizer, Altars, via Art Observed

In Gagosian Gallery’s 24th Street Outpost, lithe, twisting steel platforms sprawl across the floor, smooth lines that undulate across the faded, industrial steppes that they lay across. In another room, an immense boulder hangs suspended from the ceiling, displayed in a case cut between two walls of the gallery so that viewers can see the rock’s sides from two separate rooms. The show could only be the work of Michael Heizer, one of the founding voices of American land art, whose new work continues his pioneering investigations into the construction of space and time along abstract, self-realized formats. (more…)

As the Broad Foundation prepares to open its Los Angeles Museum, its founders are on a major buying spree, buying about one work per week to bulk up its collection.  The museum already holds the world’s largest collection of works by Cindy Sherman, and is noted as having more Roy Lichtenstein works than anyone else outside the artist’s own foundation.   (more…)

Artist Marlene Dumas has been commissioned to paint an altarpiece for St Anne’s Church in Freiberger Platz, Dresden, replacing the current work, which was damaged in WWII.  “They are giving me a lot of freedom. I can choose the form. The theme is also open,” Dumas says.  “The only ‘restriction’ is that [my painting] should not be too depressing. It should offer some hope.” (more…)

Jake and Dinos Chapman are profiled in The Guardian this week, discussing their sprawling Hell installation, and the countless horrors occurring across its expanse of miniature figures, and the first draft of the work’s destruction in a massive warehouse fire.  “We heard the Momart warehouse was on fire and drove up to have a giggle because we thought it was full of other YBA art. Then we got a call saying Hell was in there,” Jake Chapman says.  “We just laughed: two years to make, two minutes to burn. A smart-assed journo phoned up and said: ‘Is it true that Hell is on fire?’ It was fantastic – like a work of art still in the process of being made, even as it burnt.” (more…)

This week, The Guardian looks at the fates of past years’ Serpentine Pavilion commissions, and their destinations after the work is taken down.  With most pavilions sold before they are installed, the article offers a look at the shifts in use and context as works appear in the gardens of Indian steel magnates, or used as a beachside restaurant in the Côte d’Azur in France. (more…)

Lee Ufan, (Installation View), via Bria Cole for Art Observed

If tranquility could serve as a physical construct, rather than a state of mind, then a state of calm could perhaps be considered as a reconditioning of vision, a way to perceive extended relations of time, material and space.  This sense of the perceptual retooling, and its effects, is one reading offered by Lee Ufan’s continuous series Relatum and Dialogue, the most recent version of which is currently on view at Pace Gallery.   The artist tends towards a relationship between philosophy and the objects he creates with artistic significance, in order to provoke subtle perceptual reconsiderations, as proposed in his writings and contributions to the Mono-ha school of artistic practice.

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Bloomberg looks at the popularity of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms among collectors, and its prominence in a number of major museum collections, including the recently opened Garage Center in Moscow.  “Russians loved Kusama,” says collector Inga Rubenstein. “The work is easy to understand because it’s so beautiful.” (more…)

Cecily Brown, The English Garden (Installation View), Rachel Williams for Art Observed

Currently at Maccarone Gallery are a set of intimately-sized canvases by painter Cecily Brown.  Aggressively captivating beyond their small boarders, the artist’s works here ignite a series of personal experiences as viewers stand inches away from canvases no more than 18 inches in height or width. Organized by novelist and art writer Jim Lewis, The English Garden contains garden scenes rather than traditional landscapes.  Sharp lines inside Brown’s expressionist marks create additional horizons that depict mysterious and often open-ended garden scenes. (more…)

Outside Art Basel, via Art Basel

The doors are set to open at Messeplatz in Basel, Switzerland this week, for the 46th edition of the Art Basel art fair, the massive fair exhibition that has come to define the early summer months in Europe.  Bringing the massively international scope of the world’s elite galleries, this year’s Art Basel promises another strong outing.  (more…)

The Guardian notes the recent completion of two new European contemporary art spaces (The Garage Center in Moscow and the Fondazione Prada in Milan) designed by Rem Koolhaas, heralding what some consider a new era in the shape and strategy for cultural centers.  “If you want to change the world you also have to decide what you want to keep,” Koolhaas states.

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Yayoi Kusama, Obliteration Room (2002 – present), via Art Observed

Yayoi Kusama returns to New York City this summer at David Zwirner, bringing a new body of paintings, sculptures, and one of her popular, full-room installation pieces, all of which offers a nuanced look at the 86 year-old artist’s prolific output.

Yayoi Kusama, My Life (2014), via Art Observed

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A long-running investigation into the contested work Saul and David has resulting in the painting’s reattribution as the work of Rembrandt, an attribution that was previously denied in 1969.  “For eight years, a large team of international experts has contributed to the research. A wide range of trusted and innovative research techniques have been employed,” says Mauritshuis Museum Director Emilie Gordenker The result is significant: the Mauritshuis has one of its most famous Rembrandts back.”  (more…)

Dean Levin, Surface Support (Road Goes on Forever) (2015)

Marianne Boesky Gallery recently presented A Long, Narrow Mark, the gallery’s first collaboration with artist Dean Levin, at its Clinton street location.  Levin has enjoyed a growing recognition in recent years, proven by an impressive range of group exhibitions he has been included in the U.S. and Europe, as well as his debut solo at Upper East Side space of Robert Blumenthal last year. (more…)

A former employee of sculptor Dale Chihuly has been accused of stealing over $3 million in works from the artist’s Tacoma, Washington warehouse.  The accused assistant, Christopher Kaul, had been dealing with drug addiction, and began stealing works after leaving rehab.  “We’ve seen this story before — an employee is hooked on drugs and steals from his boss,” said Prosecutor Mark Lindquist. “The twist here is the boss is a world famous artist.” (more…)