Ai Wei Wei at Galeria Continua

Ai Wei Wei at Galeria Continua Yanyan Huang

Roundish and shiny, black porcelain glops rest contentedly on the floor in a corner of Galeria Continua. Aptly titled "Oil Spils", these glops tie in the ancient Chinese porcelain craft with the realities of dependence on fossil fuels for globalization. Oil dependency seeps into every aspect of our life, from food and transportation to entertainment and culture. With its need to consume natural resources at almost all levels of production, art is no exception. Ai Wei Wei's exhibition was on view at Galeria Continua in San Gimignano and ended on February 16. Photograph by Galeria Continua, text by Yanyan Huang

MARK MULRONEY @ Mixed Greens

Mixed Greens presents Mark Mulroney’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, entitled We're Never Getting Rescued With That Attitude. The drawings, carved wood panels, murals, and objects shows began with the simple vision of a man stranded on a desert island with a palm tree, two coconuts, and maybe a girl. While many people spent time in 2012 contemplating the Mayan calendar and mankind’s eventual demise, Mulroney turned his focus to the idea of paradise. Ageless one-liner jokes involving a man stranded on an island began to remind him of his own situation in the studio. The simple idea of the studio-as-island quickly gave way to a more complicated vision where the island is both an escape and a prison.We're Never Getting Rescued With That Attitude will on view until March 16, 2013 at Mixed Greens, 531 W. 26th Street, First Floor, New York, New York. Photographs by Austin McManus 

Andrea Kvas CAMPO @ Museo Marino Marini

Thin, uniform slabs of painted wood lean against the corners of Museo Marino Marini's Sacello (underground Chapel). Splotches of vibrant and saturated colors betray the skill of a lackadaisical fence painter who couldn't be bothered to finish his work. Or maybe he decided to import his leftovers. Applications of paint have been built up in layers and each fragment stands on its own as a sliver of a painting, each hinting at their individual grand potential. At eye level, a section laid diagonally between two walls blocks passage and demands attention. The impressions of paint create an interchangeable visual rhythm. Though immobile, the slabs emanate stoicism in their collective involvement: "United we stand, divided we fall", they seem to say. In the adjacent altar room where thick polyurethane and wooden branches have been piled up on a windowsill, we're left no choice but to imagine a post-catastrophic world - one where vestiges of culture are kept on hand only for fuel and heating purposes. Unable to afford the luxury of optimism in our time of economic turmoil, where historic buildings have been sold off to banks and museums have shuttered their doors for the lack of resources, Kvas's sculptures map out a desolate landscape. At least we're given the choice to rid ourselves of the remnants or participate in regeneration. Andrea Kvas's Campo, curated by Barbara Casavecchia, will be on view until April 6, 2013 at Museo Marino Marini, Piazza di San Pancrazio, Florence, Italy. Text and photography by Yanyan Huang 

Adel Abdessemed Le Vase Abominable

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David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new works by Adel Abdessemed, on view at their recently opened London gallery. Le Vase Abominable is the artist’s third solo show with David Zwirner since joining the gallery in 2008. Across a wide range of media, Abdessemed transforms well-known materials and imagery into charged artistic declarations. The artist pulls freely from myriad sources—personal, historical, social, and political—to create a visual language that is simultaneously rich and economical, sensitive and controversial, radical and mundane. Le Vase Abominable will be on view from February 22, 2013 to March 30, 2013 atDavid Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street, London, UK

Solo exhibition by Jake & Dinos Chapman "Chicken"

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The PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine) presents the first solo exhibition of Jake & Dinos Chapman in Ukraine titled Chicken. At the center of the exhibition stands the major new installation entitled, The Sum of all Evil (2013) that forms a synthesized reflection upon the central themes such as the Holocaust, violence, and death. Alongside this, the exhibition will include a number of iconic works by the Chapman brothers whose sharp subversive humour and unbridled aggression provokes controversy and questions moral contemporary taboos. Chicken will be on view until April 21, 2013 at The PinchukArtCentre, Baseina St, 2, Kiev, Київська, Ukraine

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

Centering on 1993, the exhibition is conceived as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. The social and economic landscape of the early ’90s was a cultural turning point both nationally and globally. Conflict in Europe, attempts at peace in the Middle East, the AIDS crisis, national debates on health care, gun control, and gay rights, and caustic partisan politics were both the background and source material for a number of younger artists who first came to prominence in 1993. This exhibition brings together a range of iconic and lesser-known artworks that serve as both artifacts from a pivotal moment in the New York art world and as key markers in the cultural history of the city. On view now until May 26, 2013 at The New Museum, 235 Bowery New York, NY. 

Quadri da una Collezione @ Sensus

A selection of work curated by Claudio Cosma and Pier Luigi Iazzi. Artists include Tracy Emin, Fabrizio Corneli, Alighiero Boetti, James Lee Byars, Han Bing, and others. Available by appointment or on Saturday evenings from 6-8. On view until Feb 28 2013 at Sensus, Viale Gramsci, 42. Florence, Italy. Text and photography by Yanyan Huang 

Jean-Michel Basquiat @ Gagosian Gallery

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Featuring over fifty works from public and private collections, the exhibition spans Basquiat’s brief but meteoric career, which ended with his death at the age of twenty-seven. Thirty years after Larry Gagosian first presented his work in Los Angeles, twenty years after the first posthumous survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1992–93), and eight years after the Brooklyn Museum of Art retrospective (2005), viewers will have a fresh opportunity to consider Basquiat’s central role in his artistic generation as a lightning rod and a bridge between cultures. On view until April 6, 2013 at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street New York, NY

Alexandros Vasmoulakis Figures @ LeBasse Projects

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LeBasse Projects presents a solo exhibition by multi-disciplinary artist Alexandros Vasmoulakis. The exhibition will feature muralist and installation artist Vasmoulakis' new series, entitled Figures, comprised of compelling figural work partly inspired by the tradition of portraiture. Vasmoulakis’ paintings contain many layers—physically, in terms of their thick impasto and textural buildup of paint, and also metaphorically. At the outset, the figures are smiling, a nod to the traditional purpose of portraiture as a showcase of one’s ideal or idealized comportment. However, the grinning and laughing expressions are menacingly exaggerated and recall the distorted visages of tortured souls in Francis Bacon’s deeply psychological portraits and self-portraits. In the case of Vasmoulakis’ personas, the turmoil does not come from an inner psyche, but from the outside influences of contemporary society, consumer culture and the media machine as the figures vapidly laugh, pose and posture. Alexandros Vasmoulakis Figures will be on view until February 23, 2013 at Le Basse Projects, 6023 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA

Set Pieces @ Cardi Black Box in Milan, Italy

Deviating from the standard white box of exhibiting shows, curators Lauren Mackler and Andrew Berardini invited four Los Angeles-based artists to create sets for showcasing other artists’ works. At once puzzling and defusing, some sets interweave consciousness with their assigned works while others sweep pieces into a bizarre narrative. Barely lit up by gel-filtered stage lights, the show reads part Universal Studios, part journey into a TV-fueled collective subconscious. Sets by Sarah Cain, Liz Glynn, Samara Golden, and Mateo Tannatt and works by the likes of Raymond Pettibon. Set Pieces, curated by Andrew Berardini and Lauren Mackler will be on view until April 2015, at Cardi Black Box Corso di Porta Nuova, 38 Milano. Text and photographs by Yanyan Huang 

Cyprien Gaillard The Crystal World @ MOMA PS1

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Cyprien Gaillard's (b. 1980, Paris) work navigates geographical sites and psychological states, addressing the relationship between architecture and nature, and evolution and erosion. Using a variety of artistic mediums ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, film, and video, Gaillard juxtaposes pictorial beauty and the atmospherically lush with elements of sudden violence, destruction, and idiosyncrasy culled from popular culture, pointing to the precarious nature of public space, social ritual, and the very viability of the notion of civilization. Cyprien Gaillard The Crystal World is on view until March 18, 2013 at MOMA PS1, 4601 21st St  Long Island City, NY

Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years

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For decades, critics have observed that Andy Warhol exerted an enormous impact on contemporary art, but no exhibition has yet explored the full nature or extent of that influence. Through approximately forty-five works by Warhol alongside one hundred works by some sixty other artists, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years juxtaposes prime examples of Warhol's paintings, sculpture, and films with those by other artists who in key ways reinterpret, respond, or react to his groundbreaking work. What emerges is a fascinating dialogue between works of art and artists across generations. Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years will be on view until April 28, 2013 @ The Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky Street, Pittsburgh, PA

Doug Aitken 100 YRS @ 303 Gallery

Central to Doug Aitken's "100 YRS" exhibition is a new Sonic Fountain, in which water drips from 5 rods suspended from the ceiling, falling into a concrete crater dug out of the gallery floor. The flow of water itself is controlled so as to create specific rhythmic patterns that will morph, collapse and overlap in shifting combinations of speed and volume, lending the physical phenomenon the variable symphonic structure of song. The water itself appears milky white, as if imbued and chemically altered by its aural properties, a basic substance turned supernatural. The amplified sound of droplets conjures the arrhythmia of breathing, and along with the pool's primordial glow, the fountain creates its own sonic system of tracking time. Doug Aitken 100 YRS will be on view until March 23, 2013 at 303 Gallery, 547 W 21st Street, New York, NY. 

Dabs Myla All Good Things @ Metro Gallery

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Presented in association with LRG, art duo Dabs Myla ready their All Good Things... exhibition at Metro Gallery in Melbourne. Known for their colorful abstractions that are fully realized with help and cooperation from both artists, the show promises to feature numerous new paintings, drawings and an on-site installation that will surely encapsulate the whimsy often associated with their work. All Good Things... will be on view until February 9, 2013 at Metro Gallery, 1214 High Street, Armadale, Victoria, Melbourne, Australia