Jean-Michel Othoniel, Double Collier Autoporté Or (2014), all images courtesy Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong

On view at Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong is a solo exhibition of sculptures by French contemporary artist Jean-Michel Othoniel. For the works, great hanging sculptures composed of glass that Othoniel made in collaboration with a Feng Shui Master. Seeking to create forms that originate in human life, the works seek to achieve a symbiosis with the space that they inhabit.

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Bill Viola is profiled in The Guardian this week, following the opening of his new long-term installation, Martyrs at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, featuring videos of people engulfed in frames or hung upside down.   “These people are left for dead and don’t expect to live,” Viola says. “That’s all I’ll say.” (more…)

The Wall Street Journal looks at the recent movement of galleries into the Upper East Side, both by major players like Gagosian and smaller gallerists like Robert Blumenthal. “The Upper East Side is so unhip, it’s hip,” Blumenthal notes in the article. “Chelsea is a generation before me.” (more…)

The Morgan Library and Museum has completed digitization on its expansive collection of Rembrandt etchings, which will be available online beginning May 22nd.  “Completion of our Rembrandt project is another important milestone in the Morgan’s ongoing commitment to make its collections available to an ever wider audience,” says Director William M. Griswold. “We are extraordinarily pleased to be able to share them with scholars, students, and anyone interested in his art.” (more…)

Nan Goldin, Veils (2011-14), all images courtesy Gagosian Gallery

On view at Gagosian Rome is a unique exhibition of works by American photographer Nan Goldin. Entitled Scopophilia, referring to the Greek word that means “love of looking,” or, more specifically, an erotic pleasure that comes from looking at images of the body, the works focus on themes of sex, violence, rapture, despair, and the blurring of gender.

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Fifty years after Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled the groundbreaking design for the Guggenheim Museum, museums around the world are embracing dramatic designs for housing their collections, such as the subtle flow of The Curve at the Barbican in London.  “When we first embarked on this, people thought of this space as very awkward and difficult,” said visual arts head Jane Alison. “You don’t see everything at once. Now artists are very keen to be in the Curve and recognize the potential of it.” (more…)

An intrepid thief made off with a piece of a Danh Vo sculpture Thursday, stealing the work from City Hall Park in New York while the work was being installed.  “We can confirm that a small part of the artwork disappeared from the park during installation, and a police investigation is underway,” a representative from the Public Art Fund noted. (more…)

Kara Walker is profiled in the Economist this week, exploring the artist’s current installation at the Domino sugar factory, and the difficulties in keeping the sugar coated works together in various conditions.   “No one works with sugar,” says curator Nato Thompson. “Now we know why.” (more…)

As it prepares to move downtown, the Whitney has announced that it will donate its freestanding studio space uptown to Queens’s Socrates Sculpture Park.  “The Whitney Museum has generously presented us with an opportunity to explore the possibility of our first indoor space, which may be used to expand the park’s longstanding free arts education program,” says Socrates Sculpture Park director John Hatfield. “Other possible adaptable uses may include a gallery, visitor area or administrative space.” (more…)

The New York Times takes a look inside the bi-annual Brant Foundation Art Study Center opening last week, held in honor of the space’s new Dan Colen show, and noting its place as a haven away from the bustle of Frieze week.  “Frieze week is a nightmare,” says Nate Lowman. “To have the same limp handshake 400 times? I don’t go to anything except this.” (more…)

Paris’s Picasso Museum has fired director Anne Baldassari, citing a “gravely deteriorating work environment” during the museum’s continually delayed renovation, as well as “profound suffering in the workplace and a toxic atmosphere.”  The museum’s  reopening has already been pushed back twice, and had seen numerous employees leaving the organization during Baldassari’s tenure.  “There was nothing in the report from the inspector general that surprised us,” said one ministry official. “This had been going on for several years. The truth is that we could not open a museum with all these employees leaving.” (more…)

Railway operator Amtrak has announced a public art commission with artist Katharina Grosse, designed to combat urban blight along the company’s rail lines.  The Psychylustro project has seen a group workers painting buildings in Northern Philadelphia with an enormous spray gun, shooting streams of house paint on a series of buildings.“It’s a very different understanding of where a painting sits,” Grosse says. “You just get a glimpse of something rather large, it’s just touching the warehouse there on that little edge. The painting itself is far bigger, it’s maybe in the sky but there is no surface where it can land.” (more…)

The Guardian profiles downtown art icon Dan Colen, in the run-up to the artist’s retrospective at The Brant Foundation, which opens this week, reappraising the artist’s career in terms of his material and technical concerns.  “I’m trying to equalise the world to say there is no high and low,” Colen says.  “People have often thought I was fucking with them when really I was just trying to share that sentiment.” (more…)

Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon, the iconic sculpture project that places life-size casts of the artist’s body atop various buildings in an area, has been cancelled in Hong Kong following the pullout of sponsor J.P. Morgan.  The bank pulled its sponsorship after one of its employees leapt from the top of its office building in the Chinese city. (more…)

Swoon, Submerged Motherlands (Installation View), via Art Observed

The Brooklyn Museum has just installed a site-specific piece by artist Swoon, entitled Submerged Motherlands. Comprised of a monumental tree and a constructed surrounding environment, the work addresses issues of destruction and renewal in the artist’s signature multimedia approach.

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Frieze New York has announced that it will restate artist Allen Ruppersberg’s work Al’s Grand Hotel, a 1971 installation that saw the artist turning a Los Angeles house into a gallery, performance space and functioning hotel.  “My hope is that the hotel at Frieze will function as a space where people can physically and mentally take a break from the bombardment of the other galleries at the fair and walk into a time capsule where you can almost jump back to 1971,” says curator Cecilia Alemani. (more…)

Martin Creed, Work No. 1092, Mothers (2011), Courtesy Hayward Gallery.

A sheet of A4 paper crumbled into a tight ball, an image of several pots of variously colored and shaped cactuses and a large rotating steel beam bearing the word “MOTHERS”  – these are just some of the eclectic works currently on show at London’s Hayward Gallery for What’s the point of it?, a survey of British artist Martin Creed’s equally playful and thought-provoking works.

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Serpentine Galleries has announced a collaboration with Comme des Garçons to create a special unisex fragrance, inspired by the gallery’s location in Hyde Park, with a bottle designed by Tracey Emin.  “The result is a fresh, light, yet deceivingly complex, unisex scent composed of grass, leaves, pollen (galbanum, iris leaf), oxygene (aldehyde, ozone), asphalt (black musks, nutmeg), labdanum and smoked cedar with a little bit of pollution (benzoin, juniper wood, gaïac wood),” the gallery notes on its site. (more…)

The shortlist for the 2014 Turner Prize will be announced on May 7th at the Tate Britain.  The award, given annually to an artist born or working in Britain with an exceptionally outstanding exhibition in the past year, includes a £25,000 prize.  All of the shortlist nominees will be invited to show their work at the Turner Prize exhibition later this year. (more…)

The sentencing for art dealer Helly Nahmad is scheduled for this Wednesday in Manhattan, with prosecutors pushing for a one year to 18 month prison sentence, while Nahmad’s defense attorney’s have proposed a program for bringing homeless youth in the Bronx to the Metropolitan Museum.  “I do not have a great education in other subjects,”  Nahmad said in a letter to Judge Jesse M. Furman. “But I really do know a lot about art, and I think I could really teach young people in a good way and hopefully introduce them to a world they might otherwise never visit.” (more…)

Kara Walker’s upcoming Creative Time commission in Williamsburg’s Domino Sugar Factory is the focus of a profile in the New York Times this week, taking a look at the nearly finished project and its series of monumental sculptures dedicated to the slave labor that established the American sugar manufacturing market. “In some ways, doing a project like this is a bit of a nose-thumbing at detractors, naysayers, haters,” Walker says. (more…)

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Le orecchie di Jasper Johns (The Ears of Jasper Johns), (1966) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

At the current Michelangelo Pistoletto exhibition The Minus Objects 1965-1966, on view at Luhring Augustine’s Bushwick location, what greets visitors is their own reflection, as a single piece from the artist’s signature Mirror Paintings series, sits at the entrance. But the exhibition looks deeper into Pistoletto’s work throughout his career, focusing on the artist’s sculptural objects created between 1965 and 1966.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sfera sotto il letto (Sphere Under the Bed), (1965-1966) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Bringing together a wide range of industrial materials such as wood, metal, newspaper and plexiglass along with glass mirror, the work carries an individualistic structure and an independent content: Pistoletto, by placing them in an uncommon harmony, orchestrates a coherent body of work composed of, in many ways, unrelated works.  Structures underlining a hybrid combination of contrasting materials create a bridge between different techniques. For example Scultura Lignea (Wood Sculpture) includes a classically styled wooden sculpture, erected inside an orange-colored plexiglass case. Letto (Bed) on the other hand, is an assembly of wide ranging materials including glass mirror, velvet, wood and iron that Pistoletto culls together to render the domestic symbol.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Scultura lignea (Wood Sculpture), (1965-1966) via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Imi Knoebel, Bild 13.11.2013 (2013) all images courtesy Kewenig

On display at Kewenig in Berlin, Germany from March 8th through April 26th is a new series of paintings by German artist Imi Knoebel, comprised of solid-colored aluminum plates in various forms made with acrylic paint. The works have been interpreted both as paintings and flat wall sculptures, hovering weightlessly in their large-scale formats. Non-representational and highly reductive, the series challenges even the artist’s own minimalistic practice in their adherence principally to form and color. (more…)

The London Underground has released a new brochure and map for the Tube, featuring design by artist Rachel Whiteread.  The new map design features a series of holes on the front cover, offering snapshots of the routes listed inside.  “As a sculptor I cast empty spaces,”  Whiteread explained. “It therefore seemed appropriate to make some holes in London which theoretically could be filled up.” (more…)