Virginia Overton, Untitled (Juniperus virginiana) (2013), via Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Mitchell-Innes & Nash is currently hosting an exhibition of new works by Virginia Overton, the Tennessee-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose sculptural installations play at conceptions of personal identity, spatial interaction and artistic process. (more…)
Sotheby’s and The Whitney have announced a major auction of works to benefit the construction of the museum’s new downtown location in Chelsea. Featuring works by Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder, the New York auction, held on May 14th and 15th, will attempt to augment the $562.4 already raised by the museum with an expected $8 million in proceeds. “The Whitney has been there for these artists, especially early on in their careers before people really knew them,” said Whitney Director Adam D. Weinberg. “I think for many of them, they feel that this is a way to give back.” (more…)
Beginning in June, artist Donald Judd’s Spring Street home and studio, which he purchased in 1968 and renovated himself, will reopen as a museum, offering visitors a look inside at the artist’s personal collection of works and living space. The building stands as the only intact, single-use cast-iron building left in the neighborhood, and was renovated under the supervision of The Judd Foundation. “This has all been toward the goal of having people experience this place as if none of these things we had to do were ever done. And from the beginning it’s been a battle between preserving the art and preserving the building.” Said Judd’s daughter, Rainer. (more…)
The Museum of Modern Art has announced a major survey of the contemporary practice of sound art, the first of its kind for the museum. Running from August 10th to November 3rd, Soundings: A Contemporary Score will examine intersections of space, sound, and theory. “Sound has come into the limelight. It’s getting recognized as a frontier. There are more tools that are easier and less expensive to use these days,” says associate curator Barbara London. “And because of these tools there is more artistic freedom.” (more…)
Artist David Hockney’s first multi-channel video work, The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (2012) will have its American debut next month at The Whitney Museum. Depicting a set of jugglers moving against a blue and white backdrop, the video employs 18 separate channels of video, using intense lighting to alter perceptions of depth and space. “In this new video installation David Hockney surprises us once again, exploring how multiple perspectives can transform our experience of the moving image. Hockney mines the histories of cinema and painting through the lens of technology, to create a new way of seeing.” said curator Chrissie Ilessaid. (more…)
Peter Fischli and David Weiss (Installation View), via Sprüth Magers
On view at Sprüth Magers Berlin is a solo exhibition of work by the collaboration between artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss (often shortened to “Fischli/Weiss”), which explores themes of transition, globalization and ephemerality through a selection of plastic sculptures and photographic installations. (more…)
The High Line in New York unveiled a new project for its ongoing public works series yesterday, welcoming photographer and filmmaker Ryan McGinley to exhibit his piece Blue Falling (2007) on the billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue. This will be the ninth installation of work at the site, and follows works by John Baldessari, David Shrigley, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, among others. The work will be on view until April 30th. (more…)
Miroslaw Balka, The Order of Things (2013), via Gladstone Gallery
Polish sculptor and conceptual artist Miroslaw Balka is currently exhibiting a new sculptural work, titled The Order of Things, at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. Consisting of a towering set of containers and a length of hose, the work creates a continuous flow of water, pumping pitch-black water from one container through the piping, up over the rafters above the tanks, and out into the other tank. (more…)
Charles Atlas, Glacier (2013), courtesy of Vilma Gold, London.
The American-born Charles Atlas has been a pioneer in the fields of dance, theater, and performance on video. In his career he has worked with world renowned artists such as Marina Abramovic, Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Merce Cunnigham, Diamanda Galas, Antony and the Johnsons, and Yvonne Rainer. In a current collaboration with South London Gallery and Bloomberg SPACE, Atlas presents Glacier, a 360-degree multi channel video installation consisting of original, found and manipulated images. (more…)
Rita Ackerman, Fire by Days XXI (2012), Courtesy the artists and Vito Schnabel
Assembled by the young curator Vito Schnabel (son of artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel), White Collar Crimes, at Acquavella Galleries, brings together a collection of new abstract and conceptual works from emerging and internationally recognized artists, exploring the themes of concealment of crime by wealth, high level education and social status. Connecting concepts such as identity, historical erosion, commercialization, and political satire, the show opens the door to complexly interconnected readings of the subjects and artists on view, while directly addressing the context and location of the event itself. According to Schnabel, the exhibition “proposes an interplay between obscure ciphers and spectacular discoveries.”
Artist and musician Nick Cave’s Heard•NY opened at Grand Central Terminal in New York yesterday, filling the terminal with actors dressed in surreally designed horse costumes. Bloomberg spoke with the artist about his practice, and his goals for the installation, which will remain open all this week. “I’m looking at the station as a platform to get people back to that place where we dream. We’re in a world where we’re trying to do what we can to exist and hold on to our jobs. So I’d like to transmit this dream-state feeling, to get us out of our day-to-day routine for a moment.” Cave says. (more…)
Nick van Woert, Microscope (2013), (Nick van Woert in Ted Kaczynski’s clothes), courtesy of the artist and OHWOW
Since his first solo exhibition at Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam in 2010, Brooklyn-based artist Nick van Woert has quickly risen through the ranks of the contemporary arts scene, creating a prolific and experimental body of work informed by his unique interests in history, architecture, environment, and philosophy. From ancient Rome to the Unabomber, van Woert casts an eye on the past as a means of understanding the present and inquiring into the future. His work blends an emphasis on sculptural craft and process with the use of found objects and readymades, resting between aesthetic value and conceptual statement. While preparing for the opening of No Man’s Land, his first exhibition at OHWOW in Los Angeles, (open through April 6, 2013), the artist sat down to answer some questions for Art Observed.
Nick van Woert, No Man’s Land (2013), Courtesy of the artist and OHWOW
Jim Shaw (Installation View), via Simon Lee
On view at London’s Simon Lee Gallery is a solo exhibition of eclectic new works by Los Angeles-based, American artist Jim Shaw. A California Institute of the Arts graduate and longtime L.A. resident, Shaw’s works highlight the anxieties and triumphs of late capitalist society, phantasmic religion and the shamanic, mythical world of his dream life. This idiosyncratic body of work utilizes comic book aesthetic in pencil drawings and groupings of sculptures juxtaposed against new painted and drawn portraits of unhinged and broken body parts, which engender a distinct unease in the viewer.
Jim Shaw, Oden’s Broken Staff and Emerald City Asgard (2013), via Simon Lee
James Angus, John Deere Model D (2013), via Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
Pulling together three disparate artists in its three galleries on Greenwich Street in New York’s West Village, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is currently presenting a group of works that illuminate and reinterpret the construction of physical and structural realities. Combining sculptural, installation projects, assemblage and conceptual painting practices, the works on-view by James Angus, Rikrit Tiravanija and Jonathan Horowitz highlight their drastically different conceptual practices in exploring similar thematic territory.
Rikrit Tiravanija, Untitled (2013), via Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei will create a new installation this summer along the Emscher River in Germany’s Ruhr Region for the Emscherkunst triennial arts festival. The artist plans to erect 1,000 small tents along the river, allowing festival-goers to stay in the tents for a small fee. “The idea is to let normal people participate” says festival curator Florian Matzner. (more…)
Anthony McCall, Face to Face (2013), via Sean Kelly Gallery
Anthony McCall’s body of work is punctuated by decades of silence. Withdrawing from the art world in the late 1970’s after a number of promising exhibitions and installations around the globe, the artist completely ceased his artistic production until 2003, when he began experimenting with digital film projectors. 10 years later, the artist is presenting Face to Face at Sean Kelly Gallery, showing two works from the opposite ends of the artist’s career.
The Guardian has posted a video interview with French artist Laure Prouvost, discussing her winning of the Max Mara Award for Women, and her immersive video work Swallow, exploring the raw emotion of sensation, now on view at Whitechapel Gallery. “It’s this idea of what’s real and what’s not, expressed in video and bricolage.” She says.
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The New York Times is reporting on 9Y40, an Armory Week sound installation by Brooklyn artist and taxi driver Daniel J. Wilson, which replayed recordings from the artist’s graveyard shift cab fares around New York. Ferrying art lovers and fair attendees from exhibition to exhibition, Wilson offered riders a glimpse at themselves from the front seat. “It’s this world where people act like you don’t exist, even though you’re three feet away,” says Wilson “You get this fragment of a person.” (more…)
Leo Villareal, The Bay Lights (2013) Courtesy of The Bay Lights; Photography Lucas Saugen
The work of Leo Villareal often operates on grand scales, using bright LED lights to accent and underline the inherent characteristics of human structures around the world. Frequently using coded algorithms to create complex, shifting patters of light on buildings, walls, and other constructions, his infinite variations of light offer new ways of seeing and viewing already present architectures.
Following up on a number of massively successful public projects (including his popular “Buckyball” installation at Madison Square Park in New York), Villarreal has unveiled his largest installation to date: a string of LED lights running the length of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. TitledThe Bay Lights, his work highlights the iconic dimensions of the bridge, and projecting its stature into the night sky of the San Francisco Bay.
Christo, Big Air Package (2013) via Reuters
Inside the hulking structure of the Oberhausen Gasometer in Oberhausen, Germany, a massive, billowing expanse of translucent fabric runs down the walls, held upright by the constant airflow of industrial fans. A gentle, diffused light glows inside, the product of the Gasometer’s skylights shining down from above it. This is Big Air Package, an enormous pressurized envelope of air created by the Bulgarian artist Christo specially for the Gasometer, turning its spacious, cylindrical main room into a towering column of light and space. (more…)
For the first time in its 84-year history as an independent state, the Vatican City will have its own contemporary art pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Biennale president Paolo Baratta announced yesterday. The news comes as the Catholic Church seeks to move forward from issues associated with the last pope stepping down. “They said they wanted to put into public view the fact that there were other things beyond mere country boundaries, political state boundaries, that united people.” Says Andrea Rose, the British Council Director of Visual Arts, who met with Vatican officials last year. (more…)
| Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd |
Dan Flavin (Installation View) via David Zwirner
The inaugural show at David Zwirner’s spacious new location on W. 20th Street in Manhattan is a pairing of two of minimalism’s major figures and long-time friends, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Given the size of the new location, with its towering ceilings and ample floor space, the show is sparese in both form and quantity, containing 8 illuminated frameworks by Flavin and 5 welded steel boxes by Judd.
Donald Judd, untitled (1991), via David Zwirner
The Opening for Doug Aitken, 100 YRS, Courtesy of 303 Gallery
Working across a broad body of media and techniques, including photography, sculpture, video, installation, sound art and architectural interventions, Los Angeles-based artist Doug Aitken’s work frequently explores concepts of rhythm, repetition and duration, exploring interrelations between time, memory and space and the subsequent fluctuations of meaning and understanding caused by their interactions. His work has been ehxibited in a variety of institutions and contexts, including his enormous Song1 installation on the outside of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, as well as his upcoming video art installation at the Seattle Art Museum.
Doug Aitken, MORE (Shattered Pour) (2013), Courtesy of 303 Gallery
Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors (Installation View) via Luhring Augustine, New York
Luhring Augustine is currently exhibiting “The Visitors,” a nine-channel video installation by artist Ragnar Kjartansson, a musician and artist living and working in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. As a member of the group Trabant, Kjartansson pushes the boundaries between electronic rock and performance while working in multiple media formats, focusing primarily on various aspects of performance. (more…)
