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…)

Jean Dubuffet, Snack for Two, (1945) via Museum of Modern Art

Currently on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is a retrospective focused on the work of French artist and sculptor Jean Dubuffet. Bringing together the museum’s unmatched collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and illustrated books from Dubuffet’s prolific output, the exhibition focuses predominantly on the key years of his career: from the 1940’s to mid-1960’s.

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The Museum of Modern Art has announced plans for an exhibition focusing on the African-American migration north during the early 20th Century, including a reunited Migration Series, Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel drawing featuring scenes of the Great Migration.  “Lawrence was rectifying what it meant to be a young man in a segregated North with being part of a people that have just moved from slavery to freedom,” says radio host Terrance McKnight.  (more…)

MoMA has announced plans for an exhibition focusing on the work of Japanese conceptualist Yoko Ono.  Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 will include 125 of Ms. Ono’s early works, including sculpture, videos and other pieces.  It will open in May. (more…)

Christopher Williams, Cutaway model Nikon EM. Shutter:/Electronically governed Seiko metal blade shutter vertical travel with speeds from 1/1000 to 1 second with a manual speed of 1/90th./Meter: Center-weighted Silicon Photo Diode, ASA 25-1600/EV2-18 (with ASA film and 1.8 lens)/Aperture Priority automatic exposure/Lens Mount: Nikon F mount, AI coupling (and later) only/Flash: Synchronization at 1/90 via hot shoe/Flash automation with Nikon SB-E or SB-10 flash units/Focusing: K type focusing screen, not user interchangeable, with 3mm diagonal split image rangefinder/Batteries: Two PX-76 or equivalent/Dimensions: 5.3 × 3.38 × 2.13 in. (135 × 86 × 54 mm), 16.2 oz (460g)/Photography by the Douglas M. Parker Studio, Glendale, California/September 9, 2007– September 13, 2007. via The Museum of Modern Art, 2014.

Now at the Museum of Modern Art through November 2nd, 2014, Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness serves as a comprehensive overview of the 35-year-long career of the influential artist.  Part of the first wave of West Coast Conceptual artists, Christopher Williams graduated from the California Institute of the Arts and went on to become a preeminent conceptual artist and art professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.  His artistic legacy has fervently pursued notions of commercialism, production, capitalism, and process, and the execution of this retrospective very clearly outlines those themes.

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The New York Times reports that MoMA and the Andy Warhol Museum have partnered in order to digitize Andy Warhol‘s film works. During his career, Warhol used a 16-milliliter film camera to shoot over 600 films such as the famous “Screen Tests” series, the  feature length film “Chelsea Girls”, and “Empire”, an eight-hour long single shot of the Empire State Building. Despite Warhol’s prolificacy, only a small portion of the films have been available to the public through the MoMA and online. This new partnership hopes both to preserve the fragility of the film and to expose the public to a lesser-known facet of the artist’s well-publicized career.  (more…)

An article in the New York Times explores the career of street artist and activist Caledonia Curry, also known as Swoon. With her installation “Submerged Motherlands” at the Brooklyn Museum this summer, Swoon became the first living street artist to be featured in a solo exhibition at the museum. In addition to showing her work in galleries and museums such as MoMA and MoMA PS1, Swoon has also spearheaded the creation of art centers and homes in New Orleans, Pennsylvania, and Haiti. Her unique blend of activism and art has led her friend and fellow artist JR to compare her to Ai Weiwei; the article quotes him as saying ““She has always managed to have some social impact with her work and at the same time stay an artist, not an activist”. (more…)

Filmmaker Harun Farocki has died at 70. Born in German-annexed Czechoslovakia, Farocki attended the German Academy of Film and Television in Berlin before getting kicked out in 1968 and pursuing an artistic career creating  politically-charged experimental films. Called the “best-known unknown filmmaker in Germany”, Farocki operated outside the New German Cinema movement that featured contemporaries such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog.  Represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Farocki exhibited an installation of his work “Images of War (At a Distance)” at the MoMA in 2011.  (more…)

Princeton University has announced that Samuel Hunter, professor of art and archaeology, emeritus, at the university, has died at 91. Before Hunter came to Princeton in 1969, he had already spent over 20 years as a curator, museum director, and professor of modern and contemporary art. As associate curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, Hunter organized the first major exhibitions of work by Jackson Pollock and David Smith at the museum. The author of over 50 books on modern and contemporary art, Hunter has been called “one of the pioneers of the study of modern art as an academic field”. (more…)

A New York Times article argues against the Frick Museum‘s plan to construct a tower in its gated garden, citing recent, less-than-popular expansions at the Morgan Library and the MoMA as evidence why the Frick should hold off from this “self-inflicted wound”. The tower would be part of a larger renovation and expansion, which would result in 40,000 new square feet, of which only 3,600 sq. feet would be exhibition space.   (more…)

A recent Wall Street Journal interview with Agnes Gund reveals the former MoMA President’s views on the current state of the art world, and its movement towards greater accessibility and access.  “The market will start to correct as more collectors, in it for the game, will drive the prices of women artists up as will buyers recognizing the talent that has been there all along,” she says. (more…)

MoMA PS1 has announced the line-up for its annual Warm-Up Series of concerts at the Museum.  Held each Sunday, highlights include performances by Pantha du Prince, Total Freedom, Dam Funk and Detroit Techno legend Kevin Saunderson.   (more…)

Maria Lassnig, via Art Info

Austrian painter Maria Lassnig has passed away at the age of 94.

Born in 1919, Lassnig’s career spanned over 50 years, and her work traces a long and intricate relationship with the history of painting and abstraction, moving from her abstract experessionist works in the 1950’s to her pioneering style of vivid color and dramatic self-portraiture, often utilizing visceral body positions and frank, revealing depictions of herself.  “Her art meant everything to her and she sacrificed herself, family, relationships… she an extremely focused and extreme personality that way,” dealer Iwan Wirth told ArtInfo.  “She was very headstrong, very critical of photography, fighting photography her whole life and she had no mercy when it came other painters.”

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The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the demanding logistics of moving Mike Kelley’s recently-closed show at MoMAPS1.  The show, which will open again next month in Los Angeles, required a multi-day deconstruction process, moving more than 200 individual works, and disassembling some of the show’s enormous sculptures.   “It’s one of the most complex exhibitions we’ve ever undertaken,” said PS1’s Peter Eleey, “It’s a very fine-toothed coordination.” (more…)

The Museum of Modern Art has hired Fiona Romeo as the head of the museum’s Digital Content and Strategy, a new position that will place her at the head of the museum’s digital media department.  “Fiona’s appointment builds upon the Museum’s pioneering work in the digital realm, and is a reflection of the dynamic and vital role that digital content plays in the way people can participate in the life of the Museum,” said MoMA director Glenn Lowry in a release. (more…)

Isa Genzken, World Receiver (2012), via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed

Open since November, Isa Genzken’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is a colorful affair, combining the artist’s playful manipulation of consumer objects, every day materials and multiple media forms with a studied historical perspective that underlines her architectural and structural interests.

Isa Genzken. Rot-gelb-schwarzes Doppelellipsoid ‘Zwilling’ (Red-Yellow-Black Double Ellipsoid “Twin”), 1982. Lacquered wood, two parts. Overall: 9 7/16 x 8 1/16 x 473 1/4″ (24 x 33.5 x 1202.1 cm) Part one: 5 1/8 x 8 1/16 x 236 1/4″ (13 x 20.5 x 600 cm) Part two: 4 5/16 x 5 1/2 x 237″ (11 x 14 x 602 cm). Collection of the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin. © Isa Genzken (more…)

The New York Times publishes a feature on LES Gallery owner Lisa Cooley, as she discusses her work in the New York Art World, the current show on Ileana Sonnabend at MoMA, and her the long history of prominent female art dealers.  “There have always been women dealers,” Cooley says. “It is a profession that has always attracted women. Women have relatively easy access to the field.” (more…)

The finalized plans for the expanded Museum of Modern Art campus have been announced, following a lengthy evaluation process, and the final decision by the organization has been unable to reconcile the preservation of the former American Folk Art Museum building with its new plans.  The new space, which will include a retractable glass wall, new gallery space and the opening of its entire first floor free to the public (including the sculpture garden), requires the destruction of the much-loved space, and goes against protests from a number of premier architects.  “It’s not for lack of trying that we find ourselves at the same pass,” said Elizabeth Diller, a principal at the firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro, which evaluated the new plans. “We can’t find a way to save the building.” (more…)

René Magritte (Belgium, 1898-1967). La clairvoyance (Clairvoyance). 1936. Oil on canvas. 21 1/4 x 25 9/16″ (54 x 65 cm). Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Ross. © Charly Herscovici -– ADAGP – ARS, 2013

The work of René Magritte is nothing if not recognizable.  His subtle, often humorous subversions of painterly convention and semiotic understanding are foundational elements of the early 20th century avant-garde, from  to his classic piece of semantic self-destruction, The Treachery of Images to the dreamlike paintings of imagined worlds and pastiched approaches to conventional subjects.  It’s these iconic works that form the center of the artist’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, examining his early works as the foundations of both his own career, and the vital lifeline of Surrealism in the twentieth century.

René Magritte (Belgium, 1898-1967). La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed). 1938. Oil on canvas. 57 7/8 x 39″ (147 x 99 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Joseph Winterbotham Collection. © Charly Herscovici -– ADAGP – ARS, 2013 (more…)

Francesco Vezzoli’s planned installation of an Italian church in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 in New York has been cancelled after Italian authorities intervened to block the artist’s export of the ruins.  Vezzoli is now under criminal investigation for the deconstruction of the church, despite the prior blessing of the Mayor of Montegiordano, where the church was located.  Vezzoli is searching for a new way to show his work at MoMA, but has yet to fully commit to a new plan.  “It’s like love — if this church turns you down, you can’t fall in love again right away,” he said. “My Juliet is being kept captive.” (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports on MoMA’s efforts to move beyond a brick and mortar museum space, detailing its hiring of Paola Antonelli for the newly created position of Director of Research and Development, a post focused on revolutionizing the museum space through technological advances.  Antonelli’s work is seeing its first fruits with the launch of Design and Violence an online exhibition intended to spark discussion and discourse on various art objects and projects.  “This is truly the new aspect, the fact that it’s a two-way conversation,” Antonelli says. “It’s a departure point.” (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…)

Ellsworth Kelly,  Chatham I White Black (1971), Courtesy of MoMA

Coming off the wide success of his early experiments in shaped canvases, pure color fields and architectural investigations in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, artist Ellsworth Kelly withdrew from the New York City art world that had helped him attain such a high degree of success, settling in the upstate villa of Spencertown.  It was here, painting at a rented studio in nearby Chatham, that the artist would begin a new series of works that would help develop and refine his artistic practice to a fine point.

Ellsworth Kelly,  Chatham XII Yellow Black (1971), Courtesy of MoMA (more…)

The Museum of Modern Art has announced a new show, opening this December, focusing on the life and patronage of collector Ileana Sonnabend, a Romanian emigré who at one time was married to Leo Castelli, and presided over the New York art world, eventually developing a collection valued at well over $900 million, and championing artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Mario Merz.  “For us, the emphasis will clearly be on the history she made.” Says Chief Curator Ann Temkin. (more…)