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…)

A new Internet program called Touching the Art has premiered on the Ovation Youtube channel.  Hosted by Casey Jane Ellison, the show takes an irreverent tack on discussing and analyzing the mechanisms and trends of the contemporary art world, with a sense of humor much akin to Hennessy Youngman’s Art Thoughtz.  “Is art somehow better because the person who starred in Transformers made it?” Ellison asks in one segment. (more…)

Korakrit Arunanondchai has unveiled the trailer for his newest exhibition Letters to Chantri #1, opening this Friday at The Mistake Room.  Arunanondchai’s trailer continues his engagement with a cinematic approach to his work and his own artistic narrative, and features shots of him creating several of his body paint canvases, as his denim-clad assistants look on.  “Those paintings that you make,” the video text says, “they suffocate you.”  (more…)

Marina Abramovic has partnered with Adidas for a recreation of the artist’s Work Relation, ostensibly as a promotional tie-in with the world cup events the brand is currently undertaking.  The video features a group of performers in white lab coats and Adidas sneakers, recreating the piece as the artist looks on. (more…)

Filmmaker Matt Black explores the creative philosophy of Jeff Koons during a studio visit for a new video profile on Nowness, delving into the artist’s work and inspiration.  “Much of his work focuses around the idea of sensuality and being alive,” Black says. “It’s not a cold world he creates.” (more…)

Artist Shirin Neshat has ventured into the field of choreography, planning an an interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest alongside Polish choreographer Krzysztof Pastor for the Dutch National Ballet.  The dance will feature Pastor’s choreography alongside video footage captured by Neshat.  “We shot most of the film in Holland and now we’re watching the rehearsals and carefully going back between the dancers and the editing room,” she says. (more…)

Mika Rottenberg, Bowls Balls Souls Holes (Bingo) (Installation View), via Osman Can Yerebakan

Mika Rottenberg’s artistic practice has long focused on the production methods and social schemes of contemporary work, orchestrating structurally perfect and visually playful videos in which actresses specifically cast for their physical looks twist the notion of productivity. Using meticulously planned and often vague plots, Rottenberg contemplates on the “nature” of making things in her videos, usually installed along with the pieces used in the production of the video.

Mika Rottenberg, Tsss Tsss Tsss (2014), via Osman Can Yerebakan (more…)

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…)

Marina Abramovic is in The Guardian this week, discussing her techniques in the “Abramovic Method,” as a way of increasing awareness and consciousness while preparing for performances. “It’s very much to do with concentration, and to the borderline of how far we can concentrate on one thing at a time.” (more…)

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and daughter with makeup) from Kitchen Table Series(1990), all images courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim

Documenting the landmark work of video maker, photographer, spoken word poet and textile artist Carrie Mae Weems, The Guggenheim is currently presenting a body of work spanning over thirty years in the artist’s career, including a number of the artist’s most significant and iconic works.

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography (Installation View) (more…)

Bill Viola, Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (2005) all images courtesy Grand Palais

On view at the Grand Palais in Paris is a group of works by celebrated American video artist Bill Viola, ranging in date from 1977 to the present day, making it  the largest retrospective the artist has ever shown during his long and productive career.

(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…)

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…)

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…)

Laure Prouvost, From the Sky at Danspace Project, via Ian Douglas

Just last Friday, Danspace Project opened its doors at the historic St. Marks Church in the Bowery for a special performance by French-born artist Laure Prouvost.  Titled From the Sky, the performance saw Prouvost exploring an invented history and interaction of her fictitious, conceptual artist grandfather, all through her signature blend of hyper-charged performance, video and imagery.

Laure Prouvost, From the Sky at Danspace Project, via Ian Douglas (more…)

Korakrit Arunanondchai, 2555-2012 (2012), via Art Observed

At just 28 years old, Korakrit Arunanondchai (“Krit” for short) has already compiled an impressive aesthetic vocabulary for himself.  Mixing his own blend of aesthetic signifiers (denim, flowers, musical tropes, performative hip-hop) with a variety of media including painting, video, sculpture and performance, to create a fluid, intertextual universe.  It’s just this universe that dominates the artist’s first exhibition at MoMA PS1 this spring, a single room affair that culls from the artist’s already dense body of work to extract a series of focused themes and subjects in the artist’s young career.

Korakrit Arunanondchai, Untitled (Muen Kuey No. 17) (2013), via Art Observed (more…)

Artist Stan Douglas has unveiled an interactive multimedia application this week at the Tribeca Interactive Festival, titled Circa 1948, which allows users to move through and physically interact with the architectural spaces of post-war Vancouver.  “It’s not a game,” Douglas says. “It’s a narrative. There’s no task: you’re not told to find this, kill that. There’s no beginning, middle or end – you’re sort of always in the middle. But that’s always the best part of a novel, say: not the beginning or the end. In the middle you know what’s going on.” (more…)

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…)

Douglas Gordon is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as he prepares to exhibit his work at this year’s Sydney Biennial.  “The idea of art is to be as free as possible,” he says. “I am the least hippy person. I am an extremely hardcore dogmatic bastard, actually. But I retain the right to do whatever I want.” (more…)

The New Yorker reviews the career of Ryan Trecartin this month, taking a look back at the artist’s series of videos from the past ten years, and examining his depictions of youth culture, internet dialects and his “breaking news about the future.” (more…)

Bjarne Melgaarde, via Art Observed

Plurality suits the Whitney Biennial.  It’s long embraced the diffuse narratives and varied identities of a nation as broad and intricate as the United States, and this year is no different, with 103 participants (both artists and several collectives) from around the country.  But the 2014 event, and the last to take place in the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer-designed space on Madison and 75th, has taken this interest in the varied artistic practices and themes dominating the American contemporary, and opened it to even wider dialogues, welcoming three separate curators (Michelle Grabner, Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer) with varying backgrounds to each select one floor of the museum, and explore their own particular concerns.  The result is a set of three almost completely separate thematic projects, each of which leaves itself open to dialogue with the floors nearby.

Works by John Mason, via Art Observed (more…)

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue seeks an experience akin to the slow trawls of internet message boards, Wikipedia pages, and Google searches that mark the contemporary search for information, a compartmentalized seeking after discrete bits of data.  Running from image to image, many culled from the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Henrot’s project offers a condensed experience of information overload, cramming the story of the earth’s creation into 13 minutes.

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), via Sophie Kitching for 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…)

Alex Prager, Crowd # 9 (Sunset), Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin

With a double show at Lehmann Maupin’s New York galleries, entitled Face in the Crowd, and another exhibition in Corcoran’s DC gallery, photographer Alex Prager has emerged from Los Angeles to take up major art world real estate this winter. Prager’s work is instantly recognizable, a savvy blend of mid-century nostalgia repackaged for our current moment, and it seems the rest of the fashion and art world have finally caught up with her. (more…)