Florian Maier-Aichen. “Untitled,” 2013. Courtesy the artist and the Gagosian Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Florian Maier-Aichen employs the splatter, Barbara Kruger and Shahzia Sikander discuss their artwork, Matthew Barney presents works on paper, and more.

• Florian Maier-Aichen is presenting his recent photographic work at the Gagosian Gallery (London). In Florian Maier-Aichen the artist displays his photographic image-making, employing analog and incidental techniques such as the splatter, and op-art that is similarly transformed into a photographic still-life against a studio backdrop. The show closes May 25.

• Richard Serra has work on view at the Gagosian Gallery (Beverly Hills, CA). Double Rifts features the artist’s recent drawings, including the use of paintstick on handmade paper. The exhibition runs through June 1.

• Judy Pfaff has work on view at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. Come What May presents two-dimensional collages and three-dimensional assemblages that incorporate materials like plastics and cardboard, and lighting elements, into organic works. The exhibition closes May 4.

• Barbara Kruger discusses her art for the April 2013 issue of Interview magazine. The article also highlights the artist’s current show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.) and upcoming collaboration with choreographer Benjamin Millepied for a ballet at the Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris).

• Shahzia Sikander’s works are featured in the April 2013 issue of ARTNews. In Shahzia Sikander: Maximalist Miniatures the artist talks about being inspired by manuscript illuminations in her native Pakistan and elsewhere.

• Matthew Barney’s works on paper get their first dedicated museum exhibition with next month’s Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney at The Morgan Library and Museum (NYC). The exhibition will feature drawings throughout the artist’s career, from his earliest 1980s work to his current project River of Fundament. This work will be on view May 10 – September 2.

• Paul McCarthy will present an 80-foot inflatable balloon dog at Frieze New York. The sculpture will complement his two shows at Hauser & Wirth New York that open with the fair. Life Cast will run May 10 – July 26 and Sculptures runs May 10 – June 1. Frieze New York will run May 10 – May 13.

Hiroshi Sugimoto. "Mathematical Model 002 Dini's surface: a surface of constant negative curvature obtained by twisting a pseudosphere," 2005. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy The Pace Gallery. Photo courtesy the artist and The Pace Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Hiroshi Sugimoto explores a Buddhist stupa, Florian Maier-Aichen lectures in NYC, Pratt honors Laurie Anderson and William Wegman, Matthew Ritchie debuts in Los Angeles, and more.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto: Surface of the Third Order presents new sculptures by Hiroshi Sugimoto, at the Pace Gallery (NYC).  Made from optical-quality glass, each Five-Element Pagoda is based on the form of a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist stupa, a traditional reliquary used to hold the ashes of Buddha. Enshrined within the sphere of each pagoda is a unique photograph from Sugimoto’s Seascapes series (begun in 1980).  This show closes December 23.

• Laylah Ali, Martha Colburn, Ann Hamilton, Raymond Pettibon and 26 other artists interspersed with poetry works are part of The Air We Breathe, a thematic exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) that explores issues surrounding the cause to legalize same-sex marriage. The show’s title is drawn from a Langston Hughes poem: “Equality is in the air we breathe,” from Let America Be America Again. The poem was written in 1938 but still resonates today.  The exhibition is on view until February 20, 2012.

• Carrie Mae Weems is one of three artists in Narrative Interventions in Photography, at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles).   This show includes 34 pieces primarily drawn from the Getty’s collection which contains images that are intimate and shocking, puzzling and poignant. Each artist expresses a new narrative by altering literary objects in their works, either by mutilating books, inserting words, or shredding printed pages. The exhibition closes March 11, 2012.

• Florian Maier-Aichen will lecture as part of the Aperture and the Photography Program in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design (NYC) on Tuesday, November 15.  Maier-Aichen often pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the 19th century.  He marries digital technology with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.

• Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle employs footage shot on a high-speed film camera for Always After, a public art project that focuses on the broken glass accumulated after the windows of the Mies-designed Illinois Institute of Technology’s Crown Hall were smashed by the architect’s own grandson as part of a ceremony in advance of the building’s renovation.  The project operates electronic exhibition sites along the Connective Corridor in Syracuse, NY at Syracuse Stage and the Everson Museum of Art. This work will be projected on site until December 31.

• James Turrell will soon install a new Skyspace light project, Building in the LIGHT, in Northwest Philadelphia.  The Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting (CHFM) will be building a new meetinghouse within the next year and will feature Turrell’s work which is similar to the one at the Quaker Meetinghouse in Houston, Texas.  Incorporating a Skyspace in this new, environmentally-friendly building and surrounding gardens and woods will not only accommodate the vibrant local Quaker community, but also offer people of all faiths a place to gather for quiet reflection, fellowship, education, and social action.

• Last week Pratt Institute honored Laurie Anderson and William Wegman as “distinguished individuals whose accomplishments and values resonate with those of Pratt.”  The occasion was the school’s annual Legends scholarship benefit.

• Julie Mehretu headlines Seeing/Knowing, an exhibition at the new Gund Gallery (Gambier, Ohio) that explores the contemporary overlap between art and data — work that expresses knowledge in graphical terms.  Mehretu’s Auguries is the first piece on display. It channels architectural systems and layered vectors across 12 panels. In addition, Seeing/Knowing showcases up-and-coming artists.  This show closes March 4, 2012.

• Matthew Ritchie‘s Los Angeles debut, Monstrance, includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, a site-specific multimedia installation and a performance.  The title refers to a ritual vessel created in the medieval period for the public display of relics, and is derived from the Latin word meaning ‘to show.’ In the performance, presented at the exhibition’s opening, a masked singer, representing the many forms of the sun, presents the ‘office of the evening’ as the sun sets.  This exhibition is on view at L&M Arts (Los Angeles) until December 10.

• Mark your calendars now for the next stops of a traveling exhibition of work by Mark Bradford that will be view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from February 18 through June 17, 2012, and at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) from February 18 through May 27, 2012. These will be the only West Coast presentations of this show, a major museum survey of paintings, sculptures, and multimedia works by Bradford.

Gabriel Orozco. "Red Flower Shadow," 2011. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

In this week’s roundup Gabriel Orozco paints with vectors, Florian Maier Aichen explores new forms of photography, Cindy Sherman is honored, several artists contribute calls to action and explore environmental sustainability, and much more.

• Gabriel Orozco‘s first solo exhibition to follow his recently completed retrospective is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery (NYC).  Gabriel Orozco: Corplegados and Particles includes a series of large format drawings and paintings that use shapes inserted with axels to explore behaviors of form and construction. Orozco utilizes vector and raster computer graphics to deconstruct, divide, and open up the images as a data structure based on a grid, but divided in dots.  This work is on view until October 15.

• Florian Maier Aichen at Baronian_Francey (Brussels) is Florian Maier Aichen‘s third show at this venue.  The artist continues his practice of picking apart and expanding notions of photographic representation. Works utilizing practices of photography, painting and drawing in equal measure have allowed the artist to explore image-making in pursuit of a new form of ideal photographic document.  The exhibition closes October 29.

• John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Eleanor Antin and others were invited to submit personal calls to action expressing political or social concerns which will be worn on T-shirts for Trespass, a parade through the Broadway Theater District in Downtown Los Angeles, on October 2.  Trespass continues into Monday evening, October 3 with a celebration featuring interactive and musical performances by progressive artists to benefit nonprofit West of Rome.

• Ann Hamilton will discuss The State of the MFA as part of the Sculpture X symposium at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) in Ohio.  With “spatial awareness” as a recurring theme, more than 80 sculptors affiliated with colleges and universities in the region submitted pieces to the “Sculpture X” website and gallery.  Hamilton’s keynote will take place on October 15.

• Cindy Sherman will be honored by The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in October.  She will receive an Archives of American Art Medal at the organization’s annual benefit.  The Archives is the world’s preeminent resource dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of the visual arts in America.  The event will take place October 25.

• Robert Adams and several other artists examine issues related to water use, mining, nuclear testing and its effects as part of The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.   A large number of the photos are of the American West, taken post-1970s to the present, and drawn from the museum’s 1,000-piece photography collection.  The exhibition is on view until January 8, 2012.

• Julie Mehretu‘s work is featured in a traveling show, Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu, at Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center gallery.  Mehretu is best known for her large-scale paintings and drawings, which layer maps, urban planning grids and architectural renderings with abstract markings and bright shapes of color. This is the first-ever comprehensive exhibition of prints produced by the artist thus far in her career.  The exhibition closes December 11.

• Collier Schorr, Matthew Barney, Paul Pfeiffer and others are also at Wesleyan University, as part of the traveling exhibition Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery.  These works explore the male athlete, a subject that has been overlooked by scholars until fairly recently, after a critical mass of art addressing this subject grew large enough to allow for such an exploration.  This work is on view until October 23.

• Andrea Zittel‘s new and ongoing work is on view at Regen Projects II in Los Angeles.  Zittel’s show will be presented at the same time as the Getty Museum’s multi-institution initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A 1945-1980 about the Los Angeles art scene.  The artist’s unique and unusual practice embraces the social and personal spheres engaging sculpture, textile, design, and painting. Her Regen Projects II exhibition consists of four bodies of work and closes on October 29.

• Kiki Smith‘s I Myself Have Seen It: Photography and Kiki Smith at the Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY) is a traveling exhibit that features the first comprehensive look at the role of photography in the artist’s work. It includes over 5,000 snapshots, over 100 large-scale photographs, including source photos alongside the sculptures inspired by them as well as prints, artist’s books and videos.  This show is open until December 30.

• Maya Lin will soon lecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology on “design for a living world.”  The artist will discuss her contributions to The Nature Conservancy’s global effort to turn raw sustainable materials into works of art and has designed a piece that’s part of a show at The Field Museum.  The artist’s talk will take place on October 24, at 6 pm.

Allora & Calzadilla, "Track and Field," 2011. Photo courtesy of Todd Heisler/The New York Times.

In this week’s roundup, Allora & Calzadilla are firsts in Venice, Barbara Kruger wraps a room, Chris Rock praises Michael Ray Charles, and much more.

• Allora & Calzadilla are installing Track and Field, a 52-ton military tank turned upside down and topped with a treadmill and an Olympic runner.  This work, along with five other new projects will be incorporated into Gloria, an exhibition that will occupy the American pavilion at this summer’s Venice Biennale.  They are the first artists representing the U.S. at the Biennale who work in Puerto Rico, incorporating performance as an artist collaborative.  The exhibition will run from June 4 – November 27.

• Barbara Kruger has a solo exhibition at L&M Arts (Los Angeles).  The exhibition consists of a multi-channel video installation running 13 minutes, a room “wrap,” exterior wall projection, and room filled with smaller-sized text pieces on panel, the legendary conceptual artist provided a multitude of options to receive her messages and ideas.  The show closes July 9.

• Constantin Brancusi & Richard Serra is on view at The Fondation Beyeler (Switzerland).  The exhibition consists of 40 Brancusi sculptures juxtaposed with an ensemble of 10 sculptures and a range of works on paper by Richard Serra. These reflect the development of his idea of sculpture over the past forty years, in a form never before seen in Switzerland.  The show closes August 21.

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Florian Maier-Aichen, "Der Spaziergang (Red, White and Blue)," 2011. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe.

In this week’s roundup, Florian Maier-Aichen’s abstractions, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lighting Field, artists’ metal store shutter murals, and more.

• Florian Maier-Aichen‘s fourth solo presentation with Blum & Poe is also his first in the gallery’s new space at 2727 S. La Cienega (Los Angeles).  Maier-Aichen’s latest artistic explorations takes aim at the characters of abstraction while expanding landscape photography.  The images originate from sources as varied as documentary or textbook photos to escapist landscapes.  This exhibition is on view until May 14.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto and James Turrell are among several artists from The Pace Gallery who will present major projects during the 54th Venice Biennale opening in Italy this June.  Turrell will show a work at the Arsenale. Turrell will be included in TRA– The Edge of Becoming at the Museo Fortuny. The exhibition will include seven photographs from Sugimoto’s Lighting Field series—works created by applying electrical discharges to photographic dry plates to recreate major discoveries of scientific pioneers.

• Louise Bourgeois‘s work is in the National Gallery of Canada (NGC).  The Gallery pays tribute to the artist, who is best known in Ottawa for her tall bronze spider, Maman, on the museum’s plaza and whose work the NGC has been collecting for nearly two decades. Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010 presents more than twenty sculptures and drawings by the artist created between 1949 and 2008 and on view in the Contemporary Art galleries B109 and B105 until March 18, 2012.

• Mary Heilmann and Barry McGee are among a group of artists invited to paint murals on the metal shutters of longtime kitchen supply businesses along Bowery as part of After Hours: Murals on the Bowery.  The Bowery (New York City) will be the spine of the project expanding from Houston to Grand Street.  The event is free to the public and viewing will be after-hours when businesses are closed.  This exhibition ends on July 7.

Vija Celmins, "Galaxy #4 (Coma Berenices)," 1974. The UBS Art Collection, London © Vija Celmins. Foto: The UBS Art Collection.

In this week’s roundup, Vija Celmins explores the desert, sea and stars, Laurie Anderson and Carrie Mae Weems explore vinyl record culture, Mark Dion explores oceanography, and more.

• Vija Celmins explores moving ocean surfaces, sparse desert landscapes, and vast starry skies in Vija Celmins. Desert, Sea, and Stars at the Museum Ludwig in Köln, Germany.  The artist begins with black-and-white photographs on which the artist instills with new life as she reimagines them into a new medium.  The show closes July 17.

• Laurie Anderson and Carrie Mae Weems are part of The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art. Through sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, sound work, video, and performance, The Record combines contemporary art with outsider art, audio with visual, and fine art with popular culture. The exhibition is on view at the ICA Boston through September 5.

• Mark Dion‘s Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas is a continuation of his investigations as a naturalist, archaeologist, and traveler.  The artist explores the collections of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco to create the largest ever curiosity cabinet of the sea and exhibits. At the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM), Dion presents a major intervention and a selection of artists at Villa Paloma, one of the NMNM’s exhibition spaces. OCEANOMANIA will be on view concurrently at the Oceanographic Museum and at Villa Paloma through September 30.

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Waldemar Smirnov of the Fraunhofer Institut Angewandte Festkörperphysik, Germany, “Squaring the Circle,” 1st place winner of Materials Research Society “Science as Art” competition (2009). Image courtesy of MRS. Crystalline diamond grain anisotropically etched by spheres of molten nickel.

Popular opinion concerning the relationship between technology and the environment is of great interest to me; my own graduate research focused on its treatment in mid-century American children’s book illustration.

If you think about it, the junction between science and nature in fine art – that lovely gray area blending mechanical precision with mysticism and ambiguity – actually makes perfect sense in our current world. Contemporary art has always served as a solid podium for creative voices looking to hold a mirror to social conventions and lifestyles, to reflect the modern mind. Never have our lives been so dominated and guided by the progress of technological advancement; just note how most of us are fully armed with Steve Job’s arsenal of Apple products. We’re constantly plugged in, tuned in, streaming, uploading, and downloading, and tech offers ever-expanding platforms through which to express ideas and experiment with new ways of looking at our environment.

Perusing science and medical journals, one might think it surprising that the stunning high-definition images do not qualify as works of art. In fact, they do, at least to some, and the mounting interest in the art of such research has led to an array of contests founded to reward these aesthetic accomplishments – veritable art fairs for the scientific community. The Materials Research Society launched their Science as Art competition in 2005, offering prizes to winning entries on a biannual basis. The MRS website sums up the thinking behind such contests:

Occasionally, scientific images transcend their role as a medium for transmitting information, and contain the aesthetic qualities that transform them into objects of beauty and art.

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Episode #113: Florian Maier-Aichen talks about rejecting the dogmatic approach and lighting sensibility of the Dusseldorf School of photography, traveling to Los Angeles to make a fresh start.

Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.

Florian Maier-Aichen is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Fantasy of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Download-to-own the full episode from iTunes.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Joaquin Perez, Mark Sutton & Jake Yuzna.

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Episode #108: Florian Maier-Aichen likens his use of infrared film to an in-between state, discussing photography’s role in picturing the American West and its ability to confound past and present.

Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.

Florian Maier-Aichen is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Fantasy of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Download-to-own the full episode from iTunes.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: 303 Gallery, New York; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and Florian Maier-Aichen.

A still of Florian Maier-Aichen at work from Season 5's "Fantasy" episode

On October 9, over a hundred art fans arrived at the Apple Store Soho to gain insight into the work and life of German-American artist Florian Maier-Aichen. Organized by Art21, the early evening event featured a special advance screening of Season 5′s Fantasy episode, which features Maier-Aichen, and it provided an opportunity for the public to ask the artist about his artistic practice and inspirations.

Introduced by Art21 Manager of Education and Public Programs, Marc Mayer, the event began with the video segment and continued with a Q&A session moderated by Art21 Associate Curator, Wesley Miller.

Ansel Adams, "The Tetons and the Snake River" (1942) (via Wikipedia)

Known for his digitally altered images, Maier-Aichen arrived in Southern California in the mid-1990s as a student to study art at UCLA. During his studies in Los Angeles, he discovered the American photographic tradition of the late 19th- and early 20th-century that popularized the majesty of the American West. He wondered if America’s love of photography, which he said is more respected as an art form here than it is in Germany, is rooted in this historic period when Americans discovered their nation’s natural beauty through the power of the lens. Miller added, to support Maier-Aichen’s point, that the awe most people felt when viewing those same early photographs contributed to the establishment of America’s first national parks.

While Maier-Aichen felt affinities with those early landscape photographers, such as Ansel Adams and Eadweard Muybridge, he says his work shies away from simple landscape images. “I don’t like pure landscape—it is too boring for me. I like the tension between [the city and nature],” he said.

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