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…)

Frances Stark (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York is an exhibition featuring new work from Jennifer Bornstein, Judith Bernstein and Frances Stark.  While the work presented by each of these three artists is diverse in their concerns, they all possess a monumentality fitting to the large-scale environs of GBE.

Judith Bernstein via Art Observed (more…)

Alice Workman, the newly appointed director of Hauser and Wirth’s Somerset Gallery location, is profiled in The Guardian this week, discussing her views on the unique countryside space it occupies, and how the space will operate once fully operational.  It’s really a combination of all the things the Wirths are passionate about,”  she says. “We want different audiences to engage in different ways – some might come for the garden, the restaurant or the exhibitions, but will hopefully discover other things while they’re here.” (more…)

Following a steady stream of artists moving upstate, David Hammons has purchased warehouse space in Yonkers with the intent to turn the space into a gallery for showing new work.  The news comes after architect and artist Maya Lin purchased space in the town late last year.  “Now others in the art world want to join the transformation taking place in Yonkers,” Mayor Mike Spano said. (more…)

Hauser and Wirth has opened its newest gallery this spring in an unexpected location, an 18th-century farmhouse in Somerset, England.  Just outside the town of Bruton, the gallery space underlines the gallerists continued commitment to museum-quality spaces, similar to its renovated space on 18^th Street in New York. (more…)

James Turrell, Sensing Thought (2005), via Pace

Following his massive, three-museum retrospective last summer, artist James Turrell returns to the gallery circuit this spring, with a selection of recent works on view at Pace Gallery’s London location in Burlington Gardens.  The show offers a continuation of Turrell’s interest in light as a mediator of space, using LED lights to create shifting, intriguing alterations of depth in a closed room.

James Turrell, Recent Works (Installation View), via Pace (more…)

Doug Wheeler at David Zwirner, via Art Observed

The new installation by Doug Wheeler, currently on view at David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery, cites itself as an exploration of the horizon, a delicately shifting light installation inside an enormous ellipsoidal room.  Painted a harsh white, the floor and ceiling reflect the subtly changing neons running just out of site underneath the floorboards of the work.  Comparable to the work of James Turrell, Wheeler’s pieces make much of the illusory capabilities of light acting on space.  His 2012 installation at Zwirner, a massively lit wall giving the impression of an infinite color scape in front of the viewer, bears resemblance to a number of Turrell’s infinite lightscapes, allowing the viewer to slowly gain an awareness of their own act of seeing, and the behavior of their eyes in space.    

Doug Wheeler, LC 71 NY DZ 13 DW (2013), Photo by Tim Nighswander, Imaging4Art © 2014 Doug Wheeler; courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London (more…)

Keith Sonnier, Ba-O-Ba (1970), Caterina Verde, Keith Sonnier/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pulling works from the beginning and current periods of the artist’s career, Pace Gallery is currently presenting two bodies of work by artist Keith Sonnier, showcasing an extended perspective on the artist’s work and its evolution.  Working alongside fellow post-conceptual artists interested in the capabilities for light and lighting in installations and mounted works, Sonnier first embraced the use of neon in his pieces in the late 1960’s, using panes of glass and wrapped neon lighting to emphasize the interplays and gradual shadings of color caused by reflection and spacing.  A number of seminal works from this period are exhibited here, including  Ba-o-Ba V, and Neon Wrapping Incandescent, influential pieces that marked Sonnier’s newfound interest in the capabilities for light in a sculptural work. (more…)

New York Times Magazine profiles the Retrospective Gallery, which just opened last Saturday in Hudson, N.Y.  The space, founded by dealers Zach Feuer and Joel Mesler, is looking to experiment in the upstate city, trying new events and strategies “outside the pressure cooker,” as Feuer says.   (more…)

Do Ho Suh, Specimen Series: 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, Corridor, Radiator (2013), Courtesy Lehmann Maupin

On view at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong is a solo exhibition by Korean artist Do Ho Suh, coinciding with his installation Home within Home at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul.

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Willem de Kooning, [no title] (1984), © 2013 The Willem de Kooning Foundation:Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Tim Nighswander: IMAGING4ART

The late works of Willem de Kooning represent a striking departure for the artist’s work.  Condensing his colorful, flowing style into a tightly controlled, minimalist series of patterns and movements, de Kooning’s paintings in the late years of his life, from the mid-1980’s onwards signal a new interest in negative space and light.  The collisions and grating proximity of forms of his definitive work during the 50’s and 60’s seems to dissolve into a mellow, effortless form, well-balanced and refined.

Willem de Kooning, Ten Paintings (Installation View), Courtesy Gagosian Gallery (more…)

Architect Maya Lin and her husband, art dealer and collector Daniel Wolf, have purchased a former jail house in Yonkers, NY, with the intention of converting it into an arts space.  The 10,000 square-foot space will include place for performances, lectures, and exhibitions of the couple’s large collection of works.  “The jail offers enormous potential but the breathtaking view of the Palisades from the doorstep of the Hudson inspires a vision as unique and beautiful as the building itself,” Lin says. (more…)

Richard Serra, Inside Out (detail) (2013), via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed

Rounding out a gallery year that included exhibitions by Jeff Koons, Basquiat and more, Gagosian Gallery has opened the doors to both its Chelsea locations for a major showing of new work by Richard Serra, including an enormous new torqued steel structure, Inside Out in its 21st Street location, and a series of smaller, albeit no less impressive works at the gallery’s 24th Street space.

Richard Serra, Grief and Reason (for Walter) (2013) © Richard Serra. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photograph by Robert McKeever (more…)

Korean artist Do Ho Suh has been named Wall Street Journal’s Art Innovator of 2013, recognized for his challenging explorations of space and material.  The artist is interviewed in the magazine this week, talking about his recent work with graphite rubbings.  “Rubbing is a different interpretation of space. It’s quite sensuous—very physical and quite sexual,” says Suh. “You have to very carefully caress the surface and try to understand what’s there.” (more…)

A pre-war bank building in Shanghai has become the home of Bank, an arts exhibition space owned by cultural promoters Mabsociety.  “In the past, we were curating for other institutions and doing some pop-up exhibitions,” founder Mathieu Borysevicz says. “We think of ourselves as ‘post-gallery’.” (more…)

Gilbert0 Zorio, (Installation view), Photo: Peter Malet, courtesy Blain|Southern

A collection of major works selected from the long-running career of Gilberto Zorio is currently on view at Blain|Southern gallery in London Hanover Square. The show includes recent works, new site-specific installations, and important sculptures from the 1960s. Zorio’s first UK exhibition in five years, this show offers a wide range of examples of his work, revealing his evolution as an artist, both marking his profound impression on the Arte Povera movement and showcasing his extension beyond the influential Italian movement.

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Marian Goodman Gallery has reportedly settled on a new space in London, located at 20 Golden Square, just off Piccadilly Circus.  The addition of Goodman to the neighborhood signals what may be the emergence of a new gallery district in central London, to the east of Regent Street.  The gallery has not stated an intended opening date, but it is not anticipated to be before the end of this year.  (more…)

James Turrell, Breathing Light, (2013) Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Copyright James Turrell. Photo copyright Florian Holzherr.

Part of his three-museum, nationwide retrospective, James Turell lights up LACMA with a retrospective that exhibits works from the artist’s nearly fifty-year career.  Extending across an entire wing of the Resnick Pavilion, and an entire floor in the Broad building, the exhibition is easily the heaviest concentration of works by Turrell in one place that one could hope to see in a lifetime.  Loosely chronological, the show begins with a projection work from the first years of Turrell’s light experiments, and ends with an immersive environment created this year.  These works, Afrum (White) (1966) and Breathing Light (2013), provoke pure wonderment, emphasizing the device central to Turrell’s artistic investigations: that the work itself doesn’t necessarily exist in the space, but within the viewer’s experience, moving through the work.

James Turrell, Afrum (White), (1966), Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Copyright James Turrell. Photo copyright Florian Holzherr. (more…)

James Turrell, Tycho White: Single Wall Projection, (1967), Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, © James Turrell

Part of his ongoing retrospective spanning three cities and upwards of 92,000 square feet of exhibition space, American artist James Turrell has brought several of his iconic light installations to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.  Serving as the way station between the Guggenheim’s “blockbuster” exhibition of Turrell’s Aten Reign, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s blowout review of Turrell’s nearly fifty years of work, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston offers a subdued, yet cohesive addition to the national celebration of one of America’s pioneering light and space artists. (more…)

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013) (Installation View) © James Turrell, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

The highly anticipated James Turrell exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which opened last month, and remains on view through the summer, has renewed the ongoing debate surrounding contemporary artworks of Disney-esque proportions, especially considering whether or not these spectacle-inducing affairs are worthy of the attention they often command. Like his ongoing work-in-progress, Rodin Crater (a massive naked-eye observatory built within an ancient crater near Flagstaff, Arizona), Turrell’s multi-venue comeback is not exactly a modest undertaking, with concurrent exhibitions on view at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. At the Guggenheim, Turrell joins Matthew Barney, Nam June Paik, Maurizio Cattelan, and others who have mediated Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda through Turrell’s site specific Aten Reign, which uses an ingenious system of stretched fabrics and LED lights to create the illusion of billowing clouds of color that unfold in concentric rings through the rising levels, with visitors invited to watch the dizzying light show from the rotunda floor. Four other historical projected light works, three of which date to the 1960s, are also on view in adjacent galleries along with a selection of thirteen aquatints that, with expert lighting and position, appear to emit a soft glow. However, it is Aten Reign that has generated the most buzz, both good and bad.

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013) (Installation View) © James Turrell, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York  (more…)

Robert Irwin, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue³ III, all images courtesy Pace London

Currently, Pace London‘s 6 Burlington Gardens location is presenting the gallery’s first exhibition of works by American artist Robert Irwin. The new work springs from the artist’s pioneering practice during the West Coast’s monumental Light and Space movement.  Born in 1928, Irwin has been exploring the concepts of perception and space for over sixty years. Beginning as a painter, he was a foundational member of the Light and Space movement in the 1960s, helping to develop a concept of art as a response to specific life experiences in equal measure with the work’s surrounding environmental conditions.

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James Turrell, Prado, Red (1968), Courtesy of Almine Rech

James Turrell is a pioneer in perceptual art using light as his medium, and Almine Rech Paris, capitalizing on the artist’s current nationwide exhibition in his native United States, is currently presenting  his seventh exhibition in its gallery. Shown across three rooms, this collection offers insight into Turrell’s celestial inspiration for his abstract pieces.

James Turrell (Installation View), Courtesy of Almine Rech (more…)

James Turrell, Roden Crater (Sunset) (2009), via Kayne Griffin Corcoran

With concurrent shows opening at LACMA, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, James Turrell is certainly in the spotlight this summer. The Kayne Corcoran Griffin gallery is also joining in on the artist’s ubiquity, filling its new space on south La Brea with an exhibition focused on the Roden Crater project. Aptly named Sooner Than Later, Roden Crater, the show examines Turrell’s unfinished transformation of the crater into a sight-specific masterwork that has been in development since 1974. (more…)

Robert Irwin, Black Rectangle – Scrim Veil – Natural Light (1977), via The Whitney

The immediate effect upon entering Robert Irwin’s full-room installation at The Whitney Museum is one of disorientation.  A single black runs along the outskirts of the room, interrupted by the enormous window at one end of the space.  Through the middle of the room runs an even larger black line, seemingly suspended in mid-air.  The eye swims around this phenomenon, unsure of the depth of the room, or the origin of the line until one notices the large veil bisecting the room, leaving about 6 feet of clearance for viewers to walk under.

Robert Irwin sets up his installation at the Whitney in 1977, via New York Times (more…)