Miroslaw Balka, We Still Need (2014), all images courtesy The Freud Museum

On view at The Freud Museum in London is a special exhibition from contemporary Polish sculptor and video artist Miroslaw Balka, featuring a series of installations referring to the period from 1938, when Sigmund Freud moved to London from Vienna to avoid Nazi persecution, until 1942, when four of his five sisters died in concentration camps. Densely layering Freud, Wagner and the Holocaust in equal measure, the measured and immersive installation will remain on view through May 25.

Miroslaw Balka, Above your head (2014), via White Cube

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Tunga, Na Lua (On the Moon) (2014) via Osman Can Yerebakan

Crystals, sponges, glass vessels and ceramics are among an array of materials on view at the current exhibition of new work by Tunga at Luhring Augustine’s Chelsea location. During a career spanning over four decades, Tunga has presented a body of multidisciplinary work, finding inspiration in poetry, physics and alchemy to create intricate, symbolic work that presents a visual challenge to the viewer.  Marking the artist’s fifth collaboration with the gallery, From ‘La Voie Humide’  underlines the artist’s strong interest in a multi-disciplinary approach to art, comprising a large selection of mediums and undertones running throughout the body of the exhibition.

Tunga, Untitled (2013) via Osman Can Yerebakan (more…)

Peter Doig, Burger King (1984), all images courtesy Michael Werner Gallery

On view at Michael Werner Gallery in London is a show from Scottish painter Peter Doig that explores his earliest works, even ones from his student days at St. Martin’s College in London, when he was still finding his voice as a painter.  Included alongside some of the artist’s most iconic and important artworks from his first years of widespread success, the show is an intriguing study into Doig’s continually shifting and specific stylistic tendencies.

Peter Doig: Early Works (Installation View)

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Sherrie Levine, Bird Mask (2014) via Osman Can Yerebakan

Paula Cooper Gallery is currently presenting new works by one of the most iconic artists of The Pictures Generation, Sherrie Levine. The artist has been reinterpreting the set notions of ownership and authenticity in creative work for more than 30 years, while simultaenously commenting on the canonization process of art history.  Inspired by the pioneer Constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko’s three panel monochrome from 1921, Levine’s new exhibition, Red Yellow Blue, refers to the reduction of a painting to its most minimalistic forms and fundamental colors.  One of the most notable artists of a generation engaged with appropriation and representation of consumeristic and media-centric production, Levine’s works in the exhibition investigate the essence of art-making, and its creative limitations with reference to certain precedents. Regarding art history as a circular form instead of a linear one, Levine goes back to the roots of art production to redefine set concepts on issues such as death and mysticism throughout the works on view. (more…)

The New York Times takes a look at the lunch habits of various artists in their studios, examining the communal eating time for artists and their assistants, particularly those of Urs Fischer, Cai Guo-Qiang and Marianne Vitale.  “What makes me sad,” Fischer says, “is when people have these lunches where they all go out individually, and then have plastic containers of salads, and sit in front of computers.” (more…)

The New York Times takes another look this week at new arrests in the Knoedler Gallery forgery case, and notes the number of participants, complicit or not, to perpetuate a major art fraud.  “If you asked me what the biggest factors were behind this thing succeeding so long,” says art historian Jack Flam, “first is that everybody was afraid to be sued. People give credibility to works unwittingly by keeping quiet.” (more…)

Nate Lowman is in the New York Times Magazine this week, taking part in a dialogue with musician Devon Welsh of the band Majical Cloudz, where the pair discuss the interaction of sound and visuals in their work.  “If you discover as a kid that being a musician, or being an artist is something that you like, everyone should hold onto that,” Lowman says. (more…)

Marc Quinn is interviewed in The Guardian this week, answering a quick round of questions on his fears, hopes and secret passions, including an interesting answer to the question of what era he would visit in time: “To the beginning of the 20th century with knowledge of all the artworks to come,” he says. “If I then made them all myself, would it have the same effect on culture?” (more…)

The Wall Street Journal profiled Camille Henrot this past week, in the lead-up to the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition at the New Museum, opening this upcoming Wednesday.  The show includes her work Grosse Fatigue, which earned her the Silver Lion at Venice last year for most promising young artist, and which features the image of the turtle heavily.  “She’s slow because she is carrying this massive round thing–it’s like a figure of Atlas,” Henrot says. (more…)

Leigh Ledare, An Invitation: Tuesday, July 26, 2011 (2012) Courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash

On view through April 26th at Mitchell-Innes & Nash is Leigh Ledare’s new exhibition, articulating socially issues commonly held as taboo or obscene through a wide spectrum of mediums including archival materials, text, film and photography. Famous for his photography series, Pretend You’re Actually Alive, in which he photographed his mother through an arguably sexualized gaze, Ledare aims to examine the set perception on the photographer as a subject and the model as an object. (more…)

Michael Majerus, your bad taste (2002), via Matthew Marks

Spread over Matthew Marks Gallery’s spaces on 502, 522 and West 22nd Street is an exhibition of works by late Berlin-based artist Michael Majerus.  Presenting over twenty-five paintings and multimedia installations, the show is the most comprehensive of Majerus’s work in the United States as well as the first staged in the country since his life was cut short at the age of 35 by a plane crash in 2002.

Michael Majerus, pornography needs you (2001), via Matthew Marks

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Jordan Wolfson, (Female Figure) (2014), via Art Observed

How does memory function in the 21st century?  How does nostalgia?  These are questions bound up in the work of Jordan Wolfson, on view now at David Zwirner.  Spread along a series of assemblages, video, and the artist’s notoriously eerie animatronic robot, the show is a striking step for the artist, showing his unique approach to art-making in an ever-stronger expressive capacity.

Jordan Wolfson, Raspberry Poseur (2012), via David Zwirner (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports on musician and artist Charlemagne Palestine’s special sound installation in the stairwell of the Whitney Museum for this year’s Biennial.  Featuring a set of speakers ascending the museum staircase, covered in stuffed animals and fabric, the work plays off the reverberant nature of Eli Breuer’s concrete architecture.  “I’ve been coming to the museum since it was built, and I’ve always loved the staircase,” says Palestine. “This particular kind of concrete has a fantastic resonance. It’s Taj Mahal-esque.” (more…)

Pawel Althamer, Mezalia (detail) (2010), via Art Observed

There’s something decidedly ephemeral about the work of Pawel Althamer.  The Polish artist who, over the past two decades, has created a body of sculpture, video and installation work that consistently toys with formulations of identity and society, collaborative practice and mythology.  Works can hinge on a simple conceit, or careful placement of a minimum of elements, often leaving major aspects of the piece unseen or unexpressed.  His Black Ebony (??) piece, for example, stands as a testament to an incomplete work, activated by a group of African sculptors he invited to utilize the workstation-like installation to create sculpture during a show.

Massimo Gioni takes Part in Draftsmen’s Congress (2012), via Art Observed (more…)

Laure Prouvost, For Forgetting (Installation View), via Art Observed

Laure Prouvost has a lot to say.  Creating multifaceted, occasionally dizzying multimedia installations using wood, paint, video and various props, the 2013 Turner Prize Winner’s work is hyper-loaded in its signifiers and subjects, moving rapidly from the divine to the profane and back, all expressed with a masterful storytelling bent.  It’s just this line, in fact, that the artist makes express use of in her first U.S. installation, occupying the lobby of the New Museum, telling a lightning-fast narrative of identity theft and financial scamming in the post-digital economy.

Laure Prouvost, For Forgetting, 2014 (still). Installation and video. Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist and MOTINTERNATIONAL, London and Brussels (more…)

Björn and Dieter Roth, Selbstturm (1994-2013), via HangarBiocca

HangarBicocca, Milan’s 12,000 square meter former industrial space turned gallery, is the perfect place for Björn and Dieter Roth’s Islands exhibition. The huge interactive installation, curated by HangarBicocca’s Artistic Advisor Vicente Todolí (the former Director of the Tate Modern in London), interacts with the space beautifully, creating a unique environment defined by the artists. Visitors are drawn into the artwork as they walk through the several “islands” created by groupings of work: walls of paintings and prints, sculptures, an installation of repurposed materials, musical instruments, furniture, screens and household items that visitors are encouraged to interact with, including the 131 screens of Dieter Roth’s well-known video diary, the floors from the artists’ studio, and their sculptures: Zuckerturm (Sugar Tower), 1994-2013 and Selbstturm (Self Tower), 1994-2013. (more…)

Rosemarie Trockel, Copy Me (2013), via Gladstone Gallery

On view at Gladstone Gallery in New York is an exhibition of new work by German artist Rosemarie Trockel, featuring a series of wool paintings and wall sculptures, as well as ceramics, drawings, videos and collages, alluding to the short but dense history of twentieth century abstraction and conceptualism.

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Still House Group, Bru(s) (Installation View), via Galerie Rodolphe Janssen

The Belgian Galerie Rodolphe Janssen is currently presenting a show focusing on the diverse output and extended vocabulary of The Still House Group collective of artists based in Red Hook, New York.   A small, yet varied show, the show allows common thematic elements to jut out from vastly different aesthetics and media, showcasing the group’s common practice and shared techniques of production.

Still House Group, Bru(s) (Installation View), via Galerie Rodolphe Janssen

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Edward Hopper, Study for Nighthawks, (1941 or 1942), via The Whitney

An Edward Hopper painting inevitably leads the viewer to contemplation of the meaning and purpose of the simple and mundane moments that make up the majority of our lives. His scenes depict the usual, the all-too-familiar, and even the occasional melancholy moments of existence.  Empty gas stations, coffee shops, movie theaters, and bedrooms communicate the paradoxical isolation of American society;  while many of the inhabitants are depicted in social settings, in crowds or social establishments, they convey overwhelming feelings of remorse, isolation and resignation. Through his brushstrokes and pencil marks, Hopper provides a commentary on the American life of mid-20^th century, a commentary that is in many cases still applicable to the America of today.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, (1942), via The Whitney (more…)

Mika Rottenberg, Still from Sneeze (2008), via Magasin 3

Sneeze to Squeeze is the first solo exhibition of work by New York-based video artist Mika Rottenberg in Sweden. Exploring the themes of labor, production and contemporary body-image, this major exhibition captures the spirit of the artist’s broad range of filmic work, while also offering a thorough, studied look at her work in installation and photography.

Mika Rottenberg, Still from Squeeze (2010), via Magasin 3 (more…)

Artist Gavin Turk spoke with The Guardian this week in advance of his upcoming show this summer at Ben Brown Fine Arts, covering his practice, failing his MA Thesis show, and his views on the tag “conceptual art.”  “People often don’t want to do any work with art – they just want to see something and enjoy it. I can’t see art in those terms. To me, art is always about ideas. Really, it’s all conceptual.”  He says. (more…)

Gutai: Splendid Playground (Installation View), Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The main hall of the Guggenheim Museum’s signature, spiraling exhibition space is currently dominated by an enormous hanging sculpture.  Long plastic envelopes swim over the atrium, filled with brightly-dyed water that casts faint, glimmering shadows on the floor below.  This is Work (Water), by Motonaga Sadamasa, a foundational member of the Gutai art collective. Hailing from the Japanese town of Osaka, the Gutai helped to define the vibrant Japanese contemporary and conceptual art scene of post-war Japan.  Blending an open exploration of the raw materials of creation with a playfully subversive worldview, the Gutai made enormous contributions to the contemporary art practice worldwide.

Shiraga Kazuo, Work II (1958),  Oil on paper, mounted on canvas  183 x 243 cm  Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe

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Artist Cyprien Gaillard is featured in the New York Times’ T Magazine, talking about his practice, inspiration, and development as an artist, as well as his viewpoints on the cultural processes that inform his work. “For me, decay is a starting point. I don’t just record it or picture it. What I’m interested in is creating a form of equilibrium within the decay.”  He says. (more…)