Art Bites

 Opera Gallery Hong Kong is thrilled to announce its Autumn exhibition showcasing celebrated Chinese abstract painter Liu Jiu Tong alongside a collection of figurative sculptures by American artist Richard MacDonald. Interplaying the abstract and the figurative, Liu Jiu Tong’s unrestrained landscapes are inspired by renowned Chinese poets of the Warring States and Tang Dynasty. Eluding to form, Liu expresses a lyricism swathed in tenacious layers of paint, vigorously applied and condensed onto canvas like a fleeting moment trapped between open fingers. Born in 1977 in Suide, a province of northern China, Liu graduated from the Art Institute of Xi’an and continued his studies in Beijing. Growing from the highlands of northwest of China with giant mountains and fields makes Liu’s oil painting full of heroic spirit. Inspired further from his later travels, old charming buildings of Shanghai and peaceful villages surrounded by water appear in his artworks - full of melodic passi...

 De Buck Gallery announced United States representation of the Estate of Bernard Aubertin, the French avant-garde artist who is best known for his monochromatic red nail paintings and for his association with the global ZERO movement. Following a visit to the studio of Yves Klein in 1957, Bernard Aubertin was inspired to follow in Klein’s footsteps and work within the field of monochromy, a style he adamantly adhered to throughout his career, choosing a vibrant red hue just as Klein famously worked in blue. Aubertin’s first monochrome works were created in 1958 and featured canvases covered in materials such as nails, bolts, and screws all painted in red. By 1961, he officially joined the ZERO group, seeking to create a detached, expressionless approach to art making. Later in his career, his practice evolved to incorporate performance, and he became known for setting fire to his own work and exhibiting the remains. Since the 1960s, Aubertin's work has been widely exhibited th...

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the first institutional survey exhibition to explore the evolution of the celebrated Japanese artist’s immersive infinity rooms, will embark on the most significant North American tour of her work in nearly two decades. Following its debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on Feb. 23, 2017, which is the organizing institution, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors will travel to four major museums in the United States and Canada, including the Seattle Art Museum (June 30–Sept. 10, 2017), The Broad in Los Angeles (October 2017–January 2018), the Art Gallery of Ontario (March—May 2018), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (July–October 2018). Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors provides visitors with the unique opportunity to experience six of Kusama’s most iconic kaleidoscopic environments at once, alongside large-scale, whimsical installations and key paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the early 1950s to the present. It also marks the North Amer...

Feast for the Eyes is an exploration of how food has always inspired artists. The exhibition opened at Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, New York on July 30, 2016, and remains on view through November 6, 2016. Feast for the Eyes, a sweeping two-floor exhibition focused on food and dining in art, features works by a wide range of artists, including Audrey Flack, Red Grooms, George Grosz, Henri Matisse, Claes Oldenberg, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol, among many others. According to guest curator Franklin Hill Perrell “Food has always been celebrated in art.” He pointed out that food has been a inspiration from man’s earliest times, from cavemen depicting the hunt, to Greek and Romans depictions of food and feasting.” Perrell said that Feast for the Eyes brings art related to food and dining into the present day with 20th century movements such as realism and photorealism. Perrell said that A Feast for the Eyes would include work reflecting these movements but “we’re going ...

SITE Santa Fe announced the opening of SITElines.2016 Biennial. This is the second installment in SITE Santa Fe’s reimagined biennial series with a focus on contemporary art from the Americas. The exhibition features over 35 artists from 11 countries and 6 new commissions organized around intersecting ideas brought together by a team of five curators−Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Kathleen Ash-Milby, Pip Day, Pablo León de la Barra, and Kiki Mazzucchelli.

A major new Artist Rooms exhibition devoted to the drawings of the German artist Joseph Beuys is a highlight of the summer programme at the National Galleries of Scotland this year. The exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art brings together, for the first time, the extraordinary group of over 110 drawings by Beuys held in the Artist Rooms collection. Put together with great care and knowledge over many years by Anthony d’Offay, the drawings cover the whole of the artist’s career from 1945 to the end of his life, reflecting his encyclopaedic interest in nature, science, philosophy, mythology, society, politics and religion. This is the largest and most important collection outside Germany by this key figure of post-war art. Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is perhaps best known for his ‘Actions’, installations and sculpture, but first and foremost he was an artist who was interested in ideas: ideas about how the world, both natural and social, functioned and how the latter...

Composed on raw linen with an economy of gesture and palette, the subjects of these nuanced paintings float in isolation. A grinning man wears a shirt emblazoned “Down and Out in Montauk,” a nod to Orwell seemingly at odds with the comfort radiating from the painting. Elsewhere, Mesler references nautical history, pairing a reduced seascape with a seafaring rhyme and the submerged outline of Melville’s white whale. Across this body of work, it becomes clear that the sea itself is not the subject, but rather, how we encounter it, whether in a state of temporary withdrawal from our everyday lives, or within a work of art. This sentiment is most clear in “Untitled (I’m Moonlighting),” which depicts a figure in a canoe at night, drawing as he drags a paintbrush through the water. The painting reads, “I’m moonlighting”, a reminder of the Mesler’s role as both a painter and an art dealer, a dichotomy that has historically existed in the careers of art world characters from Marcel Duchamp t...

 The Indiana State Museum, in partnership with Crazy Indiana Style Artists (CISA) of Lake County, Ind., is presenting Still Crazy: 30th Anniversary of CISA, an art exhibition featuring more than 30 two- and three-dimensional works of original art by CISA chronicling their 30-year history. The exhibit, on view July 2 through September 5, 2016, is a part of the museum’s bicentennial exhibition 200 Years of Indiana Art: A Cultural Legacy on view March 19 through October 2. “The artists in this show represent some of Indiana’s most intriguing modern and contemporary pieces, which help to illustrate the more edgy side of visual arts development in Indiana,” said Mark Ruschman, chief curator of fine art at the State Museum. “This group, under the direction of graffiti installation artist ISH Muhammad, showcases the immense talent and diversity associated with the state.” Items in the show range from large-scale imagery on canvas to jackets, videos, articles etc., chronicling the v...