Trevor Shimizu, Girlfriend Wants a Baby, (2010), all images Courtesy 47 Canal

Again, a solo show of the work of Trevor Shimizu, is currently on view at 47 Canal now through April 6.  From the work itself to the press release of this show, the dry wit and intense self-awareness of Shimizu’s voice reverberates throughout each work.

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Chuck Close, Untitled Torso Diptych (2001), all images courtesy Pace Gallery

Taking an inside look at the meticulous creative process of artist Chuck Close, Pace Gallery in New York presents an exhibition featuring Polaroids, daguerreotypes and an acrylic painting exploring the artist’s continually shifting approach to the human figure.  The exhibition focuses on “the body,” a subject long-investigated by the artist.  Born in 1940 in Monroe, Washington, Chuck Close is best known for his many renditions of the human face. Mostly large in scale and based on photographs, his works are in the permanent collections of major museums and galleries around the globe, and have been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions in more than 20 countries.

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Brad Kahlhamer, The Four Hairs (2012), All images courtesy Andréhn-Schiptjenko.

New York-based artist Brad Kahlhamer is currently on view at Stockholm’s Andréhn-Schiptjenko. The artist, who works across mediums ranging from painting and sculpture to video and music the gallery has chosen to invite viewers to access his unique understanding of his surroundings or perhaps, alternative reality, through his painting, assemblage and sculpture.

Brad Kahlhamer, Kill Chiefs, (2010)  (more…)

Georg Baselitz, Untitled (2013), all images courtesy Gagosian Gallery

On view at Gagosian London is an exhibition of recent works by German painter Georg Baselitz, focusing the artist’s distinct style through a series of paintings focused on the self-portrait, while paying direct homage to the gestural figures of Willem de Kooning. The exhibition will remain on view through March 29, 2014.

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One of two paintings exchanged by artist Jackson Pollock for the convertible he ultimately crashed and died in will be on sale at Christie’s later this year, the Wall Street Journal reports.  Pollock reportedly exchanged his work Number 5 (Elegant Lady) for art dealer Martha Jackson’s Green Oldsmobile, which he crashed two years later.  The work is valued between $15 million and $20 million.   (more…)

Marianne Boesky and Dominique Lévy have announced their official co-representation of artist Frank Stella.  The two galleries will take over for the artist’s somewhat scattered representation of the past few years, representing him jointly worldwide. (more…)

A German student has discovered the composition of Joseph Beuys’s iconic brown-hued paint Braunkreuz (brown cross), the Art Newspaper reports.  Beuys used a special rust-proofing agent in his paints, giving them their signature sheen, reports Ole Valler of the Hochschule Rhein-Waal.  “This shows his belief in the strong connection between art and everyday life. Materials have a special meaning in Beuys’s work,” says Barbara Strieder, of the Museum Schloss Moyland.  (more…)

George Condo, Constellation Portrait (2013), via Simon Lee

In the middle of 2013, George Condo fell ill with legionnaire’s disease and triple pneumonia, a combination of illnesses that left the prolific artist at death’s door.  Traveling between Berlin, London and New York, the artist’s demanding schedule finally got the best of him, placing him in the hospital for several weeks recovering.  It was during this time that Condo painted the works currently on view at Simon Lee gallery, a suite of paintings that see the artist branching ever further into his particular approach to portraiture and abstraction.

George Condo, Headspace (Installation View), via Simon Lee (more…)

New research has shown that a set of watercolors by J.M.W. Turner, previously thought to depict the burning of Parliament, are in fact paintings of a fire at the Tower of London.  The note was discovered by Matthew Imms, a cataloguer at the Tate.  “We could tell that the works were fairly late in Turner’s career so I cast around for other events at that time, and came across various images, popular prints and so on of the Tower of London fire in 1841,” Imms says. “It immediately clicked, because the various uncertain features of the architecture and so on matched quite well.” (more…)

The ongoing dispute between two members of the Cy Twombly Foundation appears to have reached a settlement, the New York Times reports.  Twombly Foundation President Nicola Del Roscio and Vice President Julie Sylvester had filed suit accusing fellow director Thomas Saliba and lawyer Ralph Lerner of valuing several Twombly works (held in their own trust) at a highly inflated $1 billion.  The settlement terms, while not all stated, involved Salbia and Lerner resigning their positions in the Foundation. (more…)

The investigation into a stolen Gustav Klimt painting nearly 17 years ago has been reopened, with authorities using sophisticated DNA testing technology to try and find a match with evidence found on the work’s frame.  Portrait of a Woman was stolen in 1997 from the Ricci-Oddi Gallery in Piacenza, with police unable to find any prior evidence able to track down a suspect.   (more…)

The New York Times delves into the work and life of Oscar Murillo, charting the artist’s meteoric rise over the past two years, and his current popularity on the market.  “I came to this by simply working,” Murillo says. “It’s the market, and that has nothing to do with me. I’m just trying to keep things normal. I’ve had to live below my means for so long that I’m keeping it that way.” (more…)

Glenn Ligon is interviewed in The Independent this week, as the artist prepares to open a new show at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, and recounts an experience meeting President Barack Obama, in which the president told the artist he owned several of Ligon’s works.  “I thought to myself, ‘the President of the United States knows what’s in his house,'” he says. “It’s not just decoration. He looks at it and knows when it’s not there. It was touching to realize that visual art is an integral part of his and his family’s life. It’s not just window dressing, not something you have to talk about because people expect you to. It was a really great way to meet him.” (more…)

Ten years of research into the identity of a purported Lucio Fontana painting has resulted in the work’s authentication, ArtNews reports.  Le Jour, painted in 1962, had sat in a European collection for many years, with the identity of the artist in question, until the piece was shown to Michele Casamonti of Tornabuoni Art Paris.  “It’s very interesting because it shows the physical position of Fontana in front of the canvas,” Casamonti notes. “It also shows how Fontana studies his gestures before realizing them. Preparation is almost more important than the execution, which is instinctive, total, and immediate.” (more…)

Giacomo Balla, Mercury Passing Before the Sun (1914), via Art Observed

From the opening lines of the The Futurist Manifesto, on view near the ground floor of the Guggenheim’s current historical survey of the early 20th century Italian avant-garde, one can detect a certain mechanistic determinism, a powerful, single-minded focus on the power of industry, science and machines.  F.T. Marinetti’s famous lines summon the roar of the engine, and the hum of electricity in equal measure, damning an Italy obsessed with its own past, and embracing a new future as a world power.

Umberto Boccioni, Elasticity (Elasticità), (1912), Courtesy Guggenheim Museum (more…)

Margaret Lee at Jack Hanley (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view, Closer to right than wrong/ Closer to wrong than right is Margaret Lee’s second solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery. For the exhibition, Lee—co-founder of the Lower East Side gallery 47 Canal, an arbiter of art-world cool—has assembled a showroom of sorts, featuring an array of furniture-like pieces festooned with a uniform black and white Dalmatian print. While Lee’s previous work frequently dealt in a brash take on domestic objects, such as eggplant or cucumber-shaped telephones, the tone of the current exhibition is comparatively subdued. A tongue-in-cheek minimalism prevails, with polka dots turning the installation’s assorted objects—a chair, a lamp, a side table, and even a painting on the wall—into the sort of kitsch that undermines what could otherwise be mistaken as a serious design sensibility.

Margaret Lee at Jack Hanley (Installation View), via Art Observed (more…)

Peter Doig sits down with the Financial Times this week for the newspaper’s Lunch with the FT segment, and discusses his life as a painter, as well as his childhood split between Trinidad, Canada and the UK.  “My thinking is always between places. Something I would like to achieve in my paintings is a place in between places.” (more…)

Jonathan Meese, Selbstportrait mit eisernem Kreuz (2001), all images courtesy MdM

On view at the Museum der Moderne Münchsberg is a unique exhibition of paintings by contemporary German artist Jonathan Meese, whose works are mainly focused on controversial issues within contemporary German history.

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Eric Fischl, Corrida in Ronda #4, (2008), via Elene Damenia for Art Observed

The New York Academy of Art is currently presenting The Big Picture, a brief series of large-scale paintings by five artists who embrace the challenge of large-scale canvases and epic scenery.  Curated by Peter Drake, the show has selected works from Neo Rauch, Mark Tansey, Vincent Desiderio, Jenny Saville and Eric Fischl for the show, inviting a comparative look at the varying techniques and approaches to painting on a grand scale.

Vincent Desiderio, Quixote (2008), via Elene Damenia for Art Observed (more…)

A group of nine collectors have filed a lawsuit against the Keith Haring Foundation, claiming that the organization’s judgement of works in their collections has “wrongfully destroyed” their value.  The lawsuit, which seeks $40 million in damages, has been flatly rejected by the foundation.  Its lawyer, Michael Ward Stout, claims, “We believe that the allegations are not supportable, and we will address them going forward.”  (more…)

Artist Mickalene Thomas premiered a film eulogizing her late mother on HBO last night, titled Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman.  Capitalizing on the film’s release, Thomas has also published an essay and a number of new paintings and photographs of her mother on Creative Time Reports. “As an artist I have always been astonished not only by my mother’s strength and tenacity but also by her sustained elegance and charisma in spite of harsh obstacles,” she writes. (more…)

Richard Artschwager, Running Man (triple), (2013), Photo by Rober McKeever, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Gagosian’s Upper East Side Gallery is currently featuring the final works of the late Richard Artschwager. This exhibition coincides with the final destination of Artschwager’s traveling Retrospective, Richard Artschwager!, which just ended at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in January. Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Yale University Art Gallery, the comprehensive display of Artschwager’s life’s work was his second retrospective, the Whitney having exhibited an earlier iteration in 1988. Collectively titled No More Running Man, the works on view at Gagosian swerve in and out of generic categorization, at once painting and sculpture, to systematically present the enigmatic leitmotif of the Running Man. While one will find echoes of the past in these works, they represent the evolution of a highly protean and prolific master, whose style and subject resisted singularity for over sixty years.

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The Whitney Museum has loaned a pair of Cape Cod landscapes by Edward Hopper to the White House, where they have been installed in the Oval Office.  “We are pleased and honored to lend two paintings by Edward Hopper—the artist with whom the Whitney Museum of American Art is most closely identified—to The White House for display in the Oval Office,” said Director Adam D. Weinberg. “We hope these beautiful Cape Cod landscapes will give great pleasure to President Obama and to all who see them.”  (more…)

Alex Katz / Dara Friedman (Installation View), all images courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise

On view at Gavin Brown’s enterprise from January 11th through February 22nd is an exhibition of cutout works from American Pop artist Alex Katz, paired with a new Super 8 and High Definition film by Dara Friedman entitled PLAY, (Part 1&2).

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