Frieze New York has announced the details for the 2015 edition of the fair, with over 190 galleries from around the world set to return to Randall’s Island from from May 14 to 17, 2015. (more…)
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…)
Sigmar Polke, Untitled (circa 2000), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
Fergus McCaffrey is currently presenting Sigmar Polke: Photocopierarbeiten, the gallery’s third exhibition focusing on the late artist following 2006’s Sigmar Polke/Andy Warhol: Drawings and 2011’s Sigmar Polke. This year has been an exceptional one in terms of the presentation of Polke’s legacy in New York, considering his recent exhibition Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, a major retrospective at the MoMa that later traveled to the UK and Germany, as well as a coinciding exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery focusing on the German pioneer’s early works on paper. (more…)
Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled (2014), all images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed
In his first exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, Iraqi artist Ahmed Alsoudani is delivering an eminently profound set of paintings, managing to remain current and relevant while at the same time tying strong references to pioneers of 20th century painting, a body of work that suggests a limitless array of interpretations. (more…)
Bernadette Corporation, no kinda ho3 (2014), via Art Observed
Painter Rita Ackermann takes the curatorial helm at Hauser and Wirth’s uptown gallery this month, presenting an exhibition of works that offers a fascinating, and notably specific study of recent art history. The exhibition, titled Freezer Burn, focuses on a specific group of artists cresting in the early years of the 21st century, as well as affiliated artists from the past decade exploring the pervasive aesthetics of pop culture and political interference. (more…)
Kader Attia, Asesinos! Asesinos! (2014), All images are the courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photography by Elisabeth Bernstein
Currently on view at both Lehmann Maupin spaces in New York, on the Lower East Side and in Chelsea, Kader Attia’s Show Your Injuries presents a striking first show for the artist with the gallery. Born in the suburbs of Paris, and raised both in France and Algeria, Attia appoints his multicultural background as his source of inspiration, studying the consequences of his dual cultural identity, both as an advantage and as a challenge. (more…)
Fulton Ryder, the secretive bookstore owned by artist Richard Prince, has announced via email that it will close its doors on Christmas of this year. “Fulton Ryder was always meant to be an ephemeral space, an experimental venue for spontaneous creativity where things constantly changed and shifted,” says gallery head Fabiola Alondra. (more…)
Takashi Murakami, In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (Installation View), via Ellen Burke for Art Observed
The recent work of Takashi Murakami is firmly embedded in the critical state of Japan in the 21st Century, a sense of the ecological peril that the country has attempted to deal with since the disasters of Fukushima several months ago. Taking this cataclysmic event as the jumping-off point for much of his recent work, the artist has taken his signature style, replete with smirking characters, huge swaths of psychedelic color, and the delicate iconography of classical Japanese art, applying it to a new series of works on view through January at Gagosian Gallery’s Chelsea exhibition space. (more…)
Douglas Gordon gives an enigmatic interview in the Art Newspaper this week, as the artist opens his newest commissioned piece at the Park Ave Armory, an immense, flooded space around which pianist Hélène Grimaud performs. “The whole thing started by accident when I was making a lithographic edition based on the eclipse of the sun in the south of France back in 1999,” says Gordon, “and one of the people involved asked me why I was interested in lunacy. I said, “Well, I like wolves…”. And so we got into this hilarious conversation and she said that I should get Hélène Grimaud involved in my practice because, well, she’s clearly not a lunatic, but she has this condition—synaesthesia—which means that she sees colors when she plays music. And she also loves wolves.” (more…)
Neo Rauch, Heillichtung (2014), via Art Observed
The newest show of work by Neo Rauch, on view at David Zwirner, is a fitting continuation of the German artist’s take on painting, combining surreal imagery with a vaguely familiar technique recalling the intertwined political and cultural history of his German homeland. (more…)
A Manhattan court has decided the lawsuit between Larry Gagosian and Ronald Perelman in favor of Gagosian, ruling that Perelman’s lawsuit “does not establish that [Gagosian] exercised control and dominance over [Perelman], who by [his] own description, frequently purchased, sold and exchanged works of art as investments.” (more…)
Artist Bjarne Melgaard has unveiled a new fashion collection he designed himself, inspired by the 2013 Catherine Breillat film Abuse of Weakness. “I was thinking about creating clothes that are about the mental state you’re in and the faults you feel you have,” the artist says. “And rather than do that in sculpture, I wanted to try it with a commercial fashion line.” (more…)
Artist Paul Chan, the winner of this year’s Hugo Boss Prize, is interviewed in the Wall Street Journal this week, discussing the temporary retirement the artist took in 2008. “At a certain point I realized I had no more ideas I was interested in making something out of, so I realized maybe this is time to stop,” he says. “I cleaned my house and read and tried to live, but at a certain point I realized I needed something else to do besides just living, and that’s where publishing came in.” (more…)
Maurizo Cattelan, Him (2001), via Art Observed
Maurizio Cattelan is back in New York. It’s been some time since the artist’s retirement from the art world proper, capped by his well-attended Guggenheim retrospective in 2011/2012, a move that the artist has made quite good on. Despite the occasional appearance high-profile appearance, Cattelan’s work has remained relatively outside of the art world spotlight for the past several years. But the artist’s commitment to his own absence hasn’t deterred Adam Lindemann, who is currently mounting a pair of exhibitions of the artist’s work at both Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery, and at his own space, Venus Over Manhattan on Madison Ave. (more…)
Christopher Williams, For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 19) (Installation View), via Art Observed
Christopher Williams, the Los Angeles-based artist who just recently closed his major MoMA retrospective earlier this month, is back in New York with a new solo exhibition with David Zwirner.
The artist’s current exhibition of new work at the gallery’s 19th Street space makes up for its minimal catalog in conceptual clout, examining the construction of narrative and spatial interactions through a coyly designed exhibition plan that shifts in theme and semiotic interaction based on the viewer’s position.
Christopher Williams, For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 19) (Installation View), via David Zwirner
The exhibition is composed of a series of variations on Williams’s ongoing fascination with the value of the image, and its role as a circulator of information and ideology in contemporary capitalism. During the construction of the show, or rather, the deconstruction of the prior show, Marcel Dzama’s Une Danse de Bouffons, Williams elected to remove several dividing walls, and, rather than remount them seamlessly, left them standing solitary, bearing the scars of their removal. As a result, the exhibition is divided by a series of walls that seem to have slightly broken free in the exhibition space, a peculiar visual phenomenon that also serves as one of the core conceits for the artist’s work.
Christopher Williams, Untitled (Study in Gray) 1967 Citroen DS Serial number: DS851360a Color code: AC 226 Color name: gris satiné Color year: 1964 Studio Rhein Verlag, Düsseldorf November 3, 2013, 2014 Inkjet print on cotton rag paper 20 x 25 inches (50.8 x 63.5 cm ) WILCH0415 (2014) via Art Observed
Regarding the photography itself, the artist follows a set of previously explored techniques with new angles. In one series, he photographs camera lenses cut cleanly in half, underscoring the complexity of a mechanism often left unseen, but wholly complicit in delivering the image itself to the viewer. In another, Williams photographs damaged car headlights, but shot after replacing all damaged parts and re-painting the car carefully so that only a peculiar, subtle bent can be detected, an inflection that remains buried underneath the aura of newness.
Christopher Williams, For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 19) (Installation View), via David Zwirner
The third combines an image of a chicken, inspired by the fringe market for poultry appreciation magazines and the linguistic tropes these magazines have established for themselves, with a carefully manipulated magazine advertisement for dish soap with all evidence of food removed, leaving a clean, confusing pan in a pristine environment.
Christopher Williams, Cutaway model Leica Leitz Wetzlar Tele-Elmar 135/4.0 Focal length: 135 mm Aperture range: 4 – 22 Number of elements/groups: 4/4 Focusing range: 1.5 m – infinity Angle of range: 18 degrees Filter thread: 39 mm Weight: 405 g Dimensions: 53.4 × 122.69 mm Manufacturer part number: 11850 Lens design by Dr. Walter Mandler Manufactured by Ernst Leitz GmbH, Wetzlar, Germany Studio Rhein Verlag, Düsseldorf March 14, 2013, 2014 Inkjet print on cotton rag paper 7 1/4 x 21 7/8 inches (43.8 x 55.6 cm) WILCH0427 (2014), via Art Observed
Placing these three sets of pieces along calculated sight lines, Williams’s manipulated walls effectively break the space of the room into various thematics based on the viewer’s position. Depending on position, the viewer may contend with the camera alongside an image of the chicken, or perhaps the broken headlight in all of its cosmetic interference alongside a shining pan. In each intersection, the idea of publication and the editorial decision, the act of depiction and its formatting within certain standards, takes a prominent role.
Christopher Williams, Demountable wall panel with panel storage cart from the exhibition The Production Line of Happiness, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, January 24 – May 18, 2014 Wall panel materials: Oak, plywood, metal, cardboard, fabric, rubber, vinyl, and adhesive Wall panel dimensions: 102 x 72 x 4 1/2 inches Storage cart materials: Steel, carpet, rubber, plywood, and paint Storage cart dimensions: 78 x 86 x 18 inches Gallery display system designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), Chicago, 1982 Pedestal materials: MDF, plywood, Douglas fir blocking, screws, lag screws, neoprene rubber spacers and shims, and metal Pedestal dimensions: 134 1/2 x 66 1/2 x 4 3/4 inches Pedestal designed by Mack Cole-Edelsack, Department of Exhibition Design and Production, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in accordance with loan specifications from the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Photography Exhibited in The Production Line of Happiness, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 27 – November 2, 2014 July 20, 2014, 2014 Selenium toned gelatin silver print 22 x 18 1/4 inches (55.9 x 46.4 cm) WILCH0459 (2014) via David Zwirner
Williams is also exhibiting a series of inversions on the notion of the exhibition catalog, in which images and text are merely replaced with color-coded pages, as well as Printed in Germany, a remarkably comical book that is completely blank saved for the aforementioned words printed on the back cover (apparently a requirement for the books to be shipped out of the country). Bearing only a single mark of international exchange, the book renders all content visually obsolete, underscoring only its place of origin.
Christopher Williams, For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 19) (Installation View), via David Zwirner
Williams’s exhibition is small, but packs a hefty punch, allowing the construction of the image within a fixed context to underscore and emphasize the methods and modes of image production today. The show is on view through December 20th.
— D. Creahan
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Christopher Williams at David Zwirner [David Zwirner]
Julian Stanczak, From Life (Installation View)
On view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s Chelsea location is a career spanning exhibition of Julian Stanczak, the renowned Polish artist considered to be one of the pioneers of Op Art movement. Starting with his works from the 1960’s until the present, the exhibition celebrates the artist’s long career, starting at a Polish refugee camp in Uganda in the 40’s after the artist permanently lost the use of his right arm due to an infection of encephalitis. (more…)
Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Floating Chain (High-Res Toni) (Installation View)
In their newest exhibition at Marlborough Chelsea, artist duo Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe are inviting the viewers into another realm of phantasmagoria, in which rooms full of ambiguous tales are revealed in their most bizarre and contradictory forms. Floating Chain (High-Res Toni) is the duo’s third collaboration with Marlborough after 2012’s Stray Light Gray, which absorbed gallery visitors into adjacent chambers of gory experiments and untold incidents connected through curiously large holes on the walls. (more…)
John Baldessari, Movie Scripts/Art: With a Fly Crawling on It (2014), via Art Observed
One of the most prominent names that defines the past 40 years of West Coast conceptualism, John Baldessari is currently presenting a new body of work at Marian Goodman Gallery. Titled Movie Scripts / Art 2014, the series resumes the pioneer’s investigation on the visual language of artworks and the possibility of a dialogue between images, words and cultural formats like film and literature. Baldessari, who has always been curious about the range text can explore in artistic expression, has not been hesitant about placing images next to sentences and written situations, often directly posing questions to the work or offering sarcastic alternatives to its surface level relationships. (more…)
Artist Paul Chan has been awarded the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize, the biennial award given by the Guggenheim Museum which carries a $100,000 prize as well as an exhibition at the museum. “Paul’s protean ability to work across multiple platforms from his videos to his more elegiac light pieces and community-based performances is what particularly stood out,” Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s deputy director and chief curator told the New York Times. (more…)
A recent article in Financial Times by writer Bendor Grosvenor takes a discerning look at the specter of price speculation in the contemporary market, and notes some of the more manipulative practices in guarantor purchases. “To liven things up, they are allowed to bid the work up during the sale too. But if they happen to buy it, their presale negotiation (again, undisclosed) means they will not pay anything like the “price” reported by the auction house, and nor will the new ‘value’ of the work be representative,” says Grosvenor. “Almost half of the lots in Christie’s sale last week were guaranteed.” (more…)
Thomas Houseago, Moun Room (Installation View), via Ellen Burke for Art Observed
Thomas Houseago is known for his large-scale sculpture work, immense, roughshod works that use cheap materials and a relatively unstable construction process to create immediately impressive, visually stimulating objects that often play on the dissonance between subject and depiction. Pulling the viewer into the artist’s unique sculptural vision, the works unfold over the course of their creation, physical demands and limitations aiding in the work’s construction. (more…)
Mick Peter, all photos via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed
The newly re-opened SculptureCenter in Long Island City has earned a reputation for forward-thinking exhibitions and thematic concerns, opening new dialogues between the constructed, three-dimensional object and its related artistic formats. It’s perhaps highly fitting then, that the exhibition space’s newest show, and its first since its impressive renovation, would focus specifically on these links of space and form. (more…)
Frank Stella, Concentric Square (1966), via Phillips
The Phillips Contemporary Evening Sale concluded Thursday evening, capping off the fall auction season with a staid, relatively stable performance. While the sale lacked some of the flair and fireworks of the proceeding evening at Christie’s, a number of notable sales defined the evening, as the auction house achieved a final tally of $52 million, with 8 of the 47 lots on offer failing to sell. (more…)
