The three new sculptures on display in the Project Room demonstrate once again the artful way in which the artist conceals scathing criticism behind apparently playful or outlandish imagery. Using the grotesque as a springboard in the purest medieval tradition, his buffoonish characters knock figures of authority off their perches with a healthy kick in the pants.
The city’s younger galleries—including Anat Ebgi, François Ghebaly, Make Room, Nino Mier Gallery, and Night Gallery—have multiple locations, while blue-chip gallerists such as Blum & Poe, Jeffrey Deitch, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Kordansky Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, Regen Projects, Sprüth Magers and Vielmetter Los Angeles have either big buildings, multiple spaces, or both.
With two years on Newtown Lane under its belt, Skarstedt continues to mount museum-level shows that would be just as at home in its Upper East Side location. The most recently opened exhibition, ‘Semigods of the Jockey Club’, is from Stefan Rinck, whose satirical surrealist-leaning sculptures of stone festoon symbols from sports, gambling, and popular culture into a cast of motley characters.
Imagine if characters seen across modern sports and gambling arenas morphed into Pre-Colombian artifacts. That’s essentially a good starting point to describe Stefan Rinck’s new solo exhibition at Skarstedt. Housed at the gallery’s East Hampton location in New York, Semigods of the Jockey Club presents a series of totemic sculptures made of various materials, such as diabase, sandstone and cairo grey marble.
Opening in August and remaining up through the close of summer 2022, Skarstedt’s East Hampton gallery will host a solo exhibition of work by German sculptor Stefan Rinck. This will be the first New York solo show for Rinck, who works primarily in stone and whose zoomorphic sculptures feel both humorous and archaeological, as if worthy of altar-like worship at times and
a good laugh at others.
Now in its third edition, the Marfa Invitational art fair brings together galleries, artists, and collectors to the remote desert town of Marfa, Texas. Part of the Big Bend, Marfa was established in 1880 as a water railway stop, then as a border trading outpost, and eventually becoming a military base. In 1971, Donald Judd relocated his artistic practice from New York to Marfa, setting up his home and studio in the former military base. Subsequently, Marfa became a hub for minimalist art. Marfa Invitational presents a wide range of art from outsider and folk art to sculpture, public installations, performances and contemporary art.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s only been just over a year since Beeple’s explosive sale at Sotheby’s changed the genetic makeup of the art market as knew it. Over the course of that year, a split has emerged between those in the art world that embrace web3 with aplomb, and those that have been forced to make peace with its presence. That tension was on full display at this year’s New Art Dealers Alliance fair in New York, its first in the city since 2018. Inside, digital art blended seamlessly with traditional art—which is quite a feat.