One Friday night this past September, Nicolas Party hosted a dinner party at The Modern Institute. Seated on stools painted like elephants, each of the twenty-four invited guests ate a seven-course meal designed by the artist, which included a single oyster; a fish; a sausage and a poached pear presented on a plate painted by Party. Indeed the table and even the table’s under-belly were painted in his signature, softly colored swirls. There is no doubt that painting is the departure point for Party’s practice, but one would be remiss to dismiss the social aspect of Party’s work, which is highlighted by his frequent collaborations with other artists to create performances and prints. Party’s practice is embedded in a delicious and tender sense of humor. As a painter, he creates still-lifes, landscapes and site-specific installations depicting decorative and geometric patterns, as well as ambiguously anthropomorphized teacups, fruits and trees. In his current solo exhibition at Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zurich, “Still Lives & Big Naked Women,” Party’s habitual motifs are rendered in black and white, except for an idiosyncratic collection of rocks painted like halved fruits – oranges, apples and limes – which have been marooned on the gallery office floor. (Alhena Katsof)

New York-based artist Charline von Heyl (1960, Germany) describes her style as “melodramatic abstraction,” a unique sensually charged take on the tradition of Abstract painting. Throughout her career, Von Heyl has built an impressive body of work that defies the limitations of existing mediums and styles. Her paintings are their “own weird universes,” she told Christopher Bedford in frieze magazine, “oartist Mary Simpson called “fucking with the terms of abstract painting.” Von Heyl’s paintings and collages will ften contradicting each other aesthetically.” What unites her work, however, is what be on view in Europe and the U.S. for the larger part of 2012. The exhibition at Tate Liverpool is being organized in collaboration with Kunsthalle Nürnberg, where it will travel to this summer. On show are no less than 42 of the artist’s large canvasses and a number of works on paper. Tate Liverpool and Kunsthalle Nürnberg will also co-publish a hefty catalogue of her work to accompany the exhibition. In March, von Heyl’s solo show opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, also featuring her paintings and collage-based works on paper.  (Maaike Lauwaert)

Until May 27th at  Tate Liverpool, July 15th at ICA Boston and from 11 July to 30 September 2012 at Kunsthalle Nürnberg.

A few blocks from their exhibition space on Greene Street, Artists Space has opened a new venue. Dedicated to the exchange of ideas through verbal and literary means, Artists Space: Books & Talks will host a variety of events. A comprehensive schedule of lectures, screenings, symposia and performances is sure to unfold, as well as research-based projects, one-off events such as book-launches, and collaborations with other organizations around particular themes, including Artists Space’s current partnership with W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy). Upcoming events include a symposium on “hidden biographies” and a survey of the work of Anja Kirschner and David Panos. Meanwhile, the storefront of the ground floor venue will be transformed into Artists Spaces’ bookstore. The store’s inventory of books has been compiled with the assistance of one hundred artists, writers, architects and theorists, each of whom was asked to select ten titles that are important to cultural production and critique. Committed to sourcing any publication that is listed, Artists Space always has two copies of each title in stock. 55 Walker Street is a welcome downtown home for this fruitful expansion, keeping the focus on what matters most: books and talks, of course. (Alhena Katsof)

In an obituary for Steve Jobs, a long-time Apple supporter, writer and actor Stephen Fry wrote that it would be naive to maintain the distinction between style and substance. Today style determines usability no less than substances does. Current debates in the art world would be incomplete without considering the role graphic design plays in shaping the identities of art institutions and practices. The increasingly interchangeable roles of artists and designers, along with the numerous collaborative initiatives between the two creative fields, open up the development of a more critical understanding of design’s potentiality in facing contemporary capitalist systems. Among the key figures exploring the critical potential of contemporary graphic design is Zak Kyes, who stands behind the production of numerous art publications and designs for art institutions—the work that earned him the INFORM Award in 2010. As a recipient of this annual accolade, Kyes was presented an opportunity to exhibit his works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig. Accompanying the exhibition is a Sternberg Press publication, Working With…, in which a multitude of contributors, from Andrew Blauvelt to Marcus Miessen, examine the designer’s critical engagement in shaping the dialogue between art and design. Locating this relationship under the umbrella of economics and politics, the book contributes to the current discourse regarding the questions of authorship, identity and collaboration. (Aliina Astrova)

“The Peripatetic School of Drawing” is a very appropriate title.
On the one hand, it identifies the transient and wandering methodology of a group of artists who strive to understand the latin american territory by using drawing as a thought device vis-à-vis the landscape.
On the other hand, the concept of “school” is rather fitting in the sense that the mounting of this exhibition makes evident the common decisions made by a group of artists acting so closely in some cases that they seem to gracefully homogenize the pieces. The work of Mateo López, Nicolás París, André Komatsu and Jorge Macchi’s utilize drawing as a means to represent the impossible, by elaborating a series of schemes of the absurd, where the same drawing sheet becomes a territory to be explored.
Some works raise interesting questions and others seem to responder to witty, but rather short-lived formulas. This is not the case in the work of Ishmael Randall Weeks or in Brigida Baltar’s work, which engages similar themes with a strong intention to denounce, achieving an enriching dialogue from their own particularities, Weeks by constructing architectural models with paper pulp and Baltar by imitating the vegetal pattern of a tile with red dust. A shrewd and accurate relation. (William Contreras Alfonso)

Until June 4th, 2012 at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia.

Guy de Cointet’s play Five Sisters, a meditation on glamor, beauty and feelings performed on April 27th at the LACMA, will be staged at the MoMA in New York on the 9th and 10th of May as part of their Words in the World program. The performance coincides with the screening of a documentary film about de Cointet made last year by Marie de Brugerolle, an art historian and dramatist. The film, Who’s That Guy? Tell Me More About Guy de Cointet should make known to a wider audience a French artist whose oeuvre is mostly referred to as “unmined” ; it played at the MoMA last Wednesday and was followed by a conversation with Marie de Brugerolle, Tim Griffin, Connie Butler and two of the performers from Five Sisters, Adva Zakai and Veridiana Zurita. Originally conceived with the artist Eric Orr, this re-staging of the play is in collaboration with the artist Elizabeth Orr, his daughter, who produces the sound and lighting. De Cointet’s paintings are better known than his performances now, so this will be an opportunity to see what correspondences there are between his word-as-thing coded letter paintings and the physical articulations of the angular women in his performances. Much has been made of his combination of the daily soap opera “low” culture of his adopted city and French haute literary theory, but it should be interesting to look more closely at what he draws from the fine arts world of ‘70s and ‘80s LA and the campy pop culture of his native France. (Eva Kenny)

Who would you most like to meet in the world? How about Anybody? You can meet Anybody online now, in fact, right now you can meet about 25,000 Anybodys on Chatroulette.com, a people-connecting website that teams you with different chat partners at random. And, conveniently, as soon as you – or they – are adequately bored, distracted or disturbed there is a “NEXT” button to comfortably eject them from your browser. The impact that the Internet and the Smart devices have on human encounters is one concern of British artist Lucy Woodhouse, as is the expiration of analog broadcast space since the UK’s recent digital switchover. She says, “space is being sold off to communication and mobile phone networks, and it’s turning into a more restricted space in many ways. It’s the end of a kind of wild communication space.” To mark the transition she has mounted the exhibition “Global Local Transition Transmission Connection Centre” at London’s Zabludowicz Collection. Here, Woodhouse uses both digital and analog broadcast technologies to create a live exchange between a number of local spaces where televisions are viewable, from the kebab shop to the local pub and the gallery itself, where some chosen collaborators were invited to perform live actions, revelling in the analog wilderness while they still can. (Isobel Harbison)

Morgan Fisher (b. 1942), renowned and respected as an experimental filmmaker, conceptual painter and art theorist, is one of the rare figures that seem to excel at a wide range of things. Bringing together works conceived between 1968 and 2011, an exhibition at the Generali Foundation is an overview of Fisher’s rich career and an attempt to shed light on the reasons behind his turn from filmmaking to painting. Part of the exhibition will be a screening of his experimental films from the 1970s and ‘80s, such as the critically acclaimed Standard Gauge (1984). It will also present a recent series of twelve monochrome canvases and the “Italian Paintings” series from the ‘90s. Fisher recently expressed his admiration for the German painter Blinky Palermo in Artforum, stating that the latter’s monochromes and textile paintings had opened up the terms and conditions of modernist painting. This “opening up” is central to Fisher’s own practice, which continues to defy pigeonholing and has carved a unique path through art history. (Maaike Lauwaert)

David Benjamin Sherry’s second publication, Quantum Light, has hit the streets. This beautifully clothbound volume, put out by D.A.P., is prefaced by a conversation between the artist and Collier Schorr. In the book , Sherry continues to work with the vivid colors that permeate his practice. He ramps up the saturation in his photos, infusing them with gilded light. Sherry has had many subjects—abstraction, portraiture, still life and collage—and many of his color-infused photographs to date have been of his friends. The release of Quantum Light coincides with Sherry’s first solo show in New York, “Astral Desert,” at Salon 94. It showcases his most recent body of work, created while he traveled through the National Parks of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and California with traditional medium and large-format film cameras. Focusing on the intricate details of rock faces, canyons and sandy dunes, Sherry departs from the figures in his earlier works. He abstracts his subjects—the desert rocks and cliffs—by removing the horizon line from the frame, and in doing so, releases the landscape. As ever, his images are bathed in electrified lavender, tangerine and deep blue, creating a supernatural light.

The bar, as a motif, suggests both industrial progress and the institution of debauchery—that is, resource and its Bacchic inversion. For Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel, “raising the bar” meant opening Times (with Lindsay Lawson) in Berlin’s Neukölln district, a bar that’s part working business, part running art gag, somewhat like Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant Food in 70’s SoHo. At their solo show at T293 Naples, Henkel and Pitegoff’s bar-themed paraphernalia, such as faux plastic cocktails and unfinished tile booths, were scattered about the gallery, recalling both candy-colored artistry and faulty economics. Texts about performances, Berlin, the debt crisis, and a recent e-flux journal were UV-printed on aluminum, like hardened memoirs of a night on the town or like crystallized press releases from gallery tours of yore. During the show’s opening, the hanging of framed photographs was billed as a “performance.” It was a tongue-in-cheek gesture toward art’s divisions of labor and, somehow, a flirt with the celeb politics of the Eurozone (“lower on the Right”). The photographs being hung showed the artists lounging in luxury hotels in Athens, using Facetime in Egyptian cotton towels while the country below rioted. The pieces all amount to an attitude that is both pristine and inflammatory, like a Canal Street knockoff handbag or a bikini bottom floating silently past you on the surface of a pool. Moscow mule, anyone? (Pablo Larios)

By the end of the 1980s, the thriving underground gay culture of Manhattan had been hit hard by the AIDS epidemic, raging with a particular relentlessness in the African-American and Latino communities. Around the same time, voguing, a gay niche culture that offered these communities a refuge and stage in the ballrooms of midtown and Harlem, had hit its zenith. The photobook “Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 1989-92” is a long-overdue tribute to the glory days of queer balls and voguing’s highly coded aesthetic. Offering a fascinating glimpse into the on and offstage world of the scene’s protagonists, photographer Chantal Regnault’s compelling images are rare documents of an interlocking of the cultural trope of African-American signifyin’ practice applied to performance and performativity. Ranging from stylized glamour portraits to shots transmitting the vibrant atmosphere of the balls, these photographs capture every detail, from the looks to the pitch-perfect poses of the bygone era. Acknowledging music’s role as a vital part of the scene’s history, Soul Jazz Records is releasing an accompanying compilation of house music that aptly conveys the ballroom atmosphere steeped with a  hunger for life and recognition. Both the book and the compilation testify to a moment in the complex history of the scene that taught pop culture a step or two. (Kathleen Reinhardt)

German artist Jana Euler’s (b. 1982) first solo show in an American gallery will open in one week at Real Fine Arts. Euler’s will be the further episode in a three-year-old program held in Brooklyn. She was trained at the Frankfurt’s Städelschule, and is now at the Wiels‘ residency in Brussels, where her Old Continent gallery, Dependance, is based. She exhibited at Mathew, Berlin; Portikus, Frankfurt; Air de Paris, Paris; Etablissement d’en face, Brussels; Pro Choice, Vienna, and so on. Her work addresses interpersonal relationships in codified environments and suggests that people’s daily lives get stuck in the vortex of networked society, not accomplishing any actual exchange. To paraphrase the title of a series of Euler’s paintings: in the postmodern world, emotions are transforming their own bodies. Notwithstanding the gloomy scenario, Euler’s art is hilarious, exhilarating, satirical. It boasts a sort of hippy cipher hidden in the ruins of the cyber-punk aesthetic: be happy with your body, be happy to be young, be happy to be human. (Michele D’Aurizio)

For Manifesta 8 held in Murcia, Metahaven designed alternative fruit labels placed on local produce destined for international distribution: Signal (Murcia,) (2010) seems to address some of the socio-political and economic issues at stake in Bétonsalon’s current group exhibition. “Tropicomania: the social life of plants“, part of “La Triennale” in Paris, traces back the economic routes of tropical plants, such as the pineapple or the rubber tree. The fruit of thorough research by curators Mélanie Bouteloup, Anna Colin and their scientific colleagues, references include The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986), an anthropology reader edited by Arjun Appadurai. Bringing together rich archival material from the historical library of the Cirad (Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development) set within the former ‘Garden of colonial experimentation’ in the Bois de Vincennes, the exhibition moves from ‘local’ to ‘global’ economies, with works by 15 participants, including Lois Weinberger, Maria Thereza Alves, Pablo Bronstein, and André Lassoudière, a specialist in the history of the banana tree. Commenting on his documentary ‘Ananas’, on view in the exhibition, Amos Gitaï brings it to the point: “One day, when I opened my refrigerator, I looked closely at a can of pineapple. It had been “made in the Philippines,” “packaged in Honolulu,” “distributed in San Francisco” and the label “printed in Japan”. This was a concrete illustration of the multinational economy.” (Anja Isabel Schneider)

Until 21 July 2012 at Bétonsalon, Paris

American artist Bruce Conner (1933–2008) is considered one of those art world figures that, while being very influential, was insufficiently understood. A new, richly illustrated book by Kevin Hatch aims to correct this by placing Conner’s work at the forefront of post-war avant-garde art. The book is centered around the idea of ”looking,” investigating what the action might have meant for Conner, who made artworks that both attract and repel the eye and drawings that disrupt normal viewing patterns. Hatch also argues that a deep anxiety pervades the wide-ranging works and changing personas of the artist, who had twice announced his own death and worked under several alter egos in an attempt to dodge any form of “belonging.” His art, too, was never classified or restricted to any one mode of expression. Influenced by San Francisco’s counter-cultural practices like beat poetry, punk music, and underground film with its hallucinatory, surreal images, Conner made found-footage films, ink-blot graphics, collages, tapestries, and sculptures from cast-off materials. He deliberately situated himself at the fringes of the art world, critiquing a system that was, in his view, increasingly obsessed with money, youth, the hip and the cool. In a letter addressed ”To a Young Artist,” published by The Brooklyn Rail magazine in 2005, he wrote: “I use the term artist as a functional excuse for my behavior,” suggesting a less pretentious definition of (his) art.  (Maaike Lauwaert)

With her deceptively straightforward practice of photographing existing objects that incorporate photographic imagery, Anne Collier produces complex and thoughtful works time and again. In this, her third solo presentation at Anton Kern Gallery in New York City, the photographs are comprised of images of open books, calendars, postcards and album covers frequently populated by eyes, cameras and advertisements for cameras in which women appear in various stages of undress. Stylized sexism from the 1970s and 1980s seeps from these images, and Collier seems to offer them as a form of nuanced critique. The large, framed photographs hold monumental space in the gallery, and the found objects that Collier has captured hover within them, photographed as they are leaning or pinned against the wall in her studio. The objects are bathed in cool, neutral light and, while these sparse images reference the tone of photo-conceptual practice, Collier introduces questions about perception and representation in a manner that is uniquely her own, both objective and free of artifice, yet infused with a compelling autobiographical tenderness that is hard to ignore. (Alhena Katsof)