Julia Rommel, Comedy Club (2014), all images courtesy Lisson Gallery

Currently on view at Lisson Gallery in London is a group exhibition including paintings, prints, relief objects, and works on canvas from nine different artists, grouped together around a theme of seemingly minimal artistic intervention. Contrasting with the minimal nature of these works, the pieces often required a complex, long and contemplative processes that preceded the works’ final production.  Participating artists include: Allora & Calzadilla, Cory Arcangel, N. Dash, Robert Janitz, Paulo Monteiro, David Ostrowski, Michael Rey, Julia Rommel, and Dan Shaw-Town.

(more…)

Marlene Dumas is profiled in the New York Times this week as she prepares for a major career retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and reviews her ongoing investigations of history, painting and her take on her success as a female artist.  “It’s not that I don’t want to be known,” she says, but “I want the other women artists to do well, and then I’ll be pleased to do well.” (more…)

303 Gallery has announced plans for an exhibition of the work of former Sonic Youth frontwoman and longtime fine artist Kim Gordon, running into the summer of 2015.  Gordon was added to the gallery’s roster earlier this year, but installed work there in 2012 in collaboration with Karen Kilimnik. (more…)

Mickalene Thomas, Portrait of Qusuquzah (2008) all images courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia and The Monaco Project for the Arts

At the Pavillon Bosio at the École Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques in Monaco is a collection of paintings, a series of photographs, and a new video by American artist Mickalene Thomas. Entitled Femme au divan II, the exhibition will remain on view through August 31st, and includes a series of photographs and paintings incorporating Thomas’s fascination with various time periods and perspectives on female African-American identity.

(more…)

Lucio Fontana, Scultura astratta (1934), all images courtesy Museum d’Art Moderne

On view at Museum D’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is an retrospective exhibition of Italian painter Lucio Fontana, who was known as one of the the primary founders of Spatialism, and was long known for his association with the Arte Povera movement. The exhibition will continue through August 24th. (more…)

A painting by Baroque artist Guercino has been stolen from the Church of San Vincenzo in the northern town of Modena, Italy this week.  The work, depicting the Madonna with St. John the Evangelist, is valued at over $8 million, and was stolen in the middle of the night when the alarm system failed to function properly.  “This precious painting is part of the cultural heritage of Modena,” says Modena’s mayor Gian Carlo Muzzarelli. (more…)

Urs Fischer, TBD (2014), via Sadie Coles HQ, All images © the artist; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

A collection of new paintings by Swiss artist Urs Fischer are currently on view at Sadie Coles HQ in London. Marking a departure from the artist’s more flashy exhibitions of subversive installations and sculptures, this is the first time Fischer has devoted himself strictly to large-scale paintings. (more…)

Lygia Clark (Installation View), via Art Observed

The Abandonment of Art is an ambitious name for an exhibition at MoMA, even if the work happens to be the medium-pushing sculptures and objects of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, who over the course of her career constantly sought new modes of encounter, interpretation and perception in the space of art.  Clark’s long-anticipated MoMA retrospective, taking up half of the museum’s top floor, welcomes this expansion, moving through the artist’s career from her early canvases to her later innovations in sculpture and performance. (more…)

Vincent Van Gogh, Installation View, via Art Observed

While the Metropolitan Museum of Art is well-known for its constantly rotating series of special exhibitions, this summer sees a new focus on the museum’s permanent collection. For the first time in over a decade, the Met has united its collection of works by Vincent Van Gogh under one roof, where they will stay for the next six months. Typically scattered across the globe on loans to various museum, the Met’s seventeen paintings by the artist is the largest such collection in North and South America. (more…)

Giulio Paolini, Autoritratto (Self-Portrait) (1968), Courtesy of Dominique Lévy Gallery and Courtesy Archivio Giulio Paolini, Turin

Hypothesis for an Exhibition, a survey show paying homage to the work of conceptual artist Giulio Paolini is open at Dominique Lévy on Madison Avenue through August 16. In addition to Paolini himself, the exhibition features the work of Richard Aldrich, Harold Ancart, Sebastian Black, Kerstin Brätsch, Guyton/Walker, KAYA, Charles Mayton, Seth Price, Josh Smith, R.H. Quaytman, Antek Walczak and Viola YeÅŸiltaç. Additionally, Studio Manuel Raeder has designed an accompanying publication, which incidentally coincides with London’s Whitechapel Gallery retrospective Giulio Paolini:To Be or Not to Be. (more…)

Paige Powell, a former girlfriend of Jean-Michel Basquiat, has released a series of polaroids of the young artist near the apex of his creative output, and sat down with Wall Street Journal this week to discuss the artist’s life and work. “He was so young and he was almost at the height of—you know, before he died—acknowledgement in the art world of his talent, his genius,” she says. “He had people coming at him all the time.” (more…)

Joan Mitchell, Cypresses (1975), all images courtesy Cheim & Reid

On view at Cheim & Read in New York is an exhibition composed of seven large-scale canvases by Chicago-born painter Joan Mitchell, presented in collaboration with the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Spanning a long stretch of her career, the works on view were inspired by the form and structure of trees, painted in an expressionistic way, and will remain on view through August 29, 2014.

(more…)

A viewer looking at Max Beckmann’s Departure (1932-1933), All Images via Kelly Lee for Art Observed

As much as it was an act of overt political action, the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Munich marked a pivotal juncture in German art.  Intended as an outright attack on the careers of artists like Emil Nolde, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Georg Grosz and many more, the original exhibition crammed hundreds of works together for a mocking, derision-filled critique of the perversions and mistakes of the modernist practice.

George Grosz, Portrait of the Writer Max Herrmann-Neisse (1925)

(more…)

The court case over payment to three trustees of the Robert Rauschenberg Revocable Trust has been settled this week by a Florida judge, who approved a payment of $24.6 million for “extraordinary services” in preserving the artist’s legacy, much to the disappointment of Rauschenberg’s estate, which is considering its options in the face of the ruling.  “We are reviewing our legal options and will pursue the course of action that is in the best interest of the foundation,” says Christopher Rauschenberg, the artist’s son and president of the foundation. (more…)

Mickalene Thomas, Carla (2014), via Lehmann Maupin

Tête de Femme, a show of new work by artist Mickalene Thomas at Lehmann Maupin, places the exploitation and regulation of the female form at its center, exploring the female figure and visage through eight large-scale portraits. Making use of screen-printing, collage, and candy-colored swatches of fabric, Thomas creates and re-creates the elements of a face in order to deconstruct a coherence presumed and projected into measurements of personhood.  Through bold geometric and material choices, Thomas approaches the question of identity as an problem to be solved through a concentrated treatment of each element, much in the same nature of Picasso’s work of the same name.

Mickalene Thomas, Tête de Femme (Installation View), via Lehmann Maupin (more…)

In the midst of a recent “boom” in art funds, The Art Newspaper looks back at André Level’s La Peau de l’Ours, a fund founded in 1904 that purchased works like Picasso’s Les Bateleurs and successfully sold them at markedly higher prices.  The fund was inspired by the 1903 Salon D’Automne, which greatly inspired Level.  “I had seen there the canvases that seemed to me, without the slightest doubt, the authentic art of our time and the near future,” he wrote.  “I believed in it; I had faith.” (more…)

Kazimir Malevich, Self Portrait (1908-1910), State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich first exhibited his Black Square, a simple, powerful statement on the possibilities for painting in the face of contemporaries still bound up in the exploration of figurative painting and impressionist tropes.  The piece marked a bounding leap forward for modernist practice, or rather, a point of entry in its own right to the early concepts of abstraction.

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting (with Black Trapezium and Red Square) (1915), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (more…)

In response to the efforts of Lucian Freud‘s son, Paul McAdam Freud, challenging the secrecy of the painter’s will, a High Court judge has ruled that the will’s contents are to remain undisclosed to the public and most of his 14-odd children. When he died in 2011, Freud left behind his estate equally to his solicitor and one of his daughters, with the understanding that they were to hold the estate in trusts for undisclosed recipients. The secrecy of the will has been a point of contention among his many children and beneficiaries. (more…)

Ville Andersson, Reflection, All images courtesy RARE Gallery

Now through August 7, Rare Gallery is presenting Fin(n)ish: Fresh contemporary art from Finland. This group exhibition features work from six emerging Finnish artists—Ville Andersson, Hanna Kanto, Katri Mononen, Aleksi Tammi, Timo Vaittinen, and Ea Vasko. The work presented here is stylistically wide reaching and employs a variety of mediums and techniques, speaking to the vitality of the Finnish art world.

(more…)

Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope III, (1961), Photograph: © The Estate of Francis Bacon.

In Homage, on view at Skarstedt London through August 8^th, takes as its focus six paintings that embody the elements of inheritance and inspiration that sits at the heart of all creative practice. Francis Bacon, George Condo, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, and Andy Warhol are the featured artists. Each work was chosen for the strong ties it reveals to a predecessor, reflecting the styles or borrowing as subjects the master painters Velázquez, Picasso, Baselitz, Ernst, Goya, Munch, and de Chirico. Relationship is explored both as a stylistic approach and an inevitability of the creative process. (more…)

Sigmar Polke, Plastik-Wannen (1964) via Kelly Lee for Art Observed

Sigmar Polke’s output was diverse to say the least.  Raised in the lean years following World War II in West Germany, the artist moved quickly from painting to photography to installation, film and back over his almost five decades of work, shifting his techniques and approaches with each subsequent piece.  Sharply critical and always challenging the nature of capitalist negotiation with the art world, his pieces cover a broad spectrum from overtly comical and self-aware to dark and brooding.

(more…)

Jenny Savile, Untitled (2014), all images courtesy Gagosian London

On display at Gagosian Gallery in London is a series of monumental oil paintings by Jenny Saville, focusing on the materiality of the human body. The works are large in scale and extremely detailed, and some of the works have taken up to 7 years to complete. The exhibition will be on view through July 26th at Gagosian London.

(more…)

The Wall Street Journal Reports that the death of German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt in May of this year has brought to light works by major artists such as Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, and Henri Matisse, which had been part of  Gurlitt’s over 1,400 piece collection. Although Gurlitt willed this collection to the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, the possible origin of the collection in Nazi seizures on Jewish art dealers leaves its fate uncertain. (more…)

Huma Bhabha, Untitled (2013 ), all images courtesy VeneKlasen/Werner

On view at VeneKlasen/Werner Berlin is a group of new works by Pakistan-born artist Huma Bhabha, marking her first solo exhibition in Berlin. The sculptures and collage drawings, which were created in 2013 while Bhabha was working as a resident artist at The American Academy in Berlin, will remain on view through July 26th.

(more…)