Sophie Calle Installs Safes For Storing Lovers' Secrets At Fraenkel Gallery In San Francisco

"Find a couple. Have each of them tell me a secret. Install two safes in their home. Lock each secret up in its own safe. Keep the codes to myself. The lovers will have to live with the other’s secret close at hand but out of reach." Fraenkel Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Sophie Calle. Calle uses photography, text, and video to pursue her sociological and autobiographical investigations. Her exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery focuses on four bodies of work in which the artist delves into the nature of love, violence, secrets, and death. Among the works on view will be Secrets—a pair of working safes for storing a couple’s secrets, accompanied by a plaque engraved with the above text and the artist’s contract stipulating how these mysteries will remain secured. Writing is often integral to Calle’s work, as in her 2014 triptych Suicide (also on view), in which photographs of dark ripples on the surface of black water are accompanied by text sandblasted on glass: “They say the police can distinguish between people who drown themselves for love and those who drown themselves for money…” Featured in this exhibition will be two series incorporating portraits from ‘ready-made’ sources and addressing themes of privacy and violence. Calle’s Cash Machine photographs are made from ATM video surveillance footage, and each work is exhibited as a sequence of two to eleven images. Collateral Damage, Targets is a series comprised of images of petty criminals’ mugshots, which were used for police target practice. The exhibition will be on view until December 24, 2015 at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. photographs by Bradley Golden

Here Are 11 Things You Need To Know About the Artist H.C. Westermann Before Seeing His Retrospective in New York →

"See America First," a comprehensive exhibition of sculptures and drawings by the late, great H.C. Westermann, is on view now at Venus Over Manhattan. The installation features a wide range of Westermann's work, spanning from 1953 to 1980. Clock here to read eleven things  about the artist before seeing the exhibition. 

Ryan McGinley "Winter" Opening At Team Gallery In New York

On view in New York are McGinley’s groundbreaking Winter photographs, which portray his nude figures in frozen landscapes. There is virtually no photographic or cinematic precedent for these works: to capture naked bodies in such extreme conditions took profound measures of precaution, audacity and sacrifice on the part of all involved. The artist and his team invented and improvised manifold contrivances, employing the likes of ice-fishing tents, propane tanks and rock-climbing gear, in order to enable the production of these images. These pictures, unlike the Fall photos, feature hyper-limited palettes of whites, greens, blues and greys, finding intrigue and variance instead in the texture and organic architecture of ice formations. Impossibly, the unclothed bodies appear native to their wintry settings. Ryan McGinley "Winter" will be on view until December 20th, 2015 at Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, New York. Julianna Vezzetti

The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy Group Show @ Blum & Poe In Los Angeles

Blum & Poe presents The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy, the second installment of a two-part exhibition which began in New York and now opens in Los Angeles, offering a broad and critical reassessment of Cobra—an essential postwar European movement named for the home cities Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The exhibition follows the solo exhibition of Karel Appel, one of the movement’s key protagonists, presented at Blum & Poe, New York in September 2014. Named after a seminal work by Cobra founder Asger Jorn, The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up pays tribute to Jorn’s catalyzing role and to the movement’s enduring aesthetic and conceptual influence on artists working today. Works by artists Enrico Baj, Joe Bradley, Bjarne Melgaard, Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel and many more are included in this exhibition. The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy Group Show officially starts today and will be on view until December 23, at Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles. 

Daniel Johnston In Los Angeles For "Hi, How Are You" Art Opening @ MAMA Gallery

MAMA gallery presents "Hi, How Are You?," an immersive exhibition exploring the art, music and mind of prolific cult singer-songwriter-artist, Daniel Johnston. The November 7, 2015 opening reception will feature the world premiere of the short film, Hi, How Are You Daniel Johnston, directed by Gabriel Sunday and starring Daniel Johnston. Hi, How Are You is an exhibition about Daniel’s past and present. "Through creative visions of madness and hope, we witness an aging musician coming to terms with the dreams of yesteryear." This unique exhibition of Daniel Johnston works explores his past and present art, exposing his heartrending tales of unrequited love, cosmic mishaps, and existential torment. Daniel Johnson: Hi, How Are You? will be on view from November 7 to November 11, 2015 at MAMA Gallery, In Los Angeles

Artist Keith Mayerson's Meta-Narrative of Appropriated Americana Explored In "My American Dream" At Marlborough Chelsea in New York

My American Dream is a large installation and body of work by artist Keith Mayerson created over the last decade. Various incarnations of this project, or “chapters”, first appeared in exhibitions in New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Houston, and Brussels, most recently culminating in his 42-painting installation, curated by Stuart Comer into the 2014 Whitney Biennial. My American Dream is a meta-narrative, consisting of more recent personal images from photographs—of his husband and himself, his family, and world—and also from a long career of painting from appropriated imagery and abstraction. This particular body of work began in 2005, building on the hope that one day the cosmology would be exhibited in a site-specific composition. Marlborough Chelsea presents the large cosmology of the work (accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog) to inspire and promote a progressive, positive view of America’s past in the hope to help make a better future. My American Dream will be on view until December 23, 2015 at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

A Long Strange Trip: Read Our Intimate Convo With Actor, Artist And Now Curator Leo Fitzpatrick On Navigating The Tricky Waters of The New York Art World →

It’s been a long strange trip for Fitzpatrick since he was discovered skateboarding in Washington Square Park at age 14 by Larry Clark to star in the director’s seminal ‘90s troublemaker film Kids. Though he has remained involved in acting on and off ever since (he’s most likely appeared in at least one of your favorite shows: The Wire, Carnivale, Banshee, and a hilarious turn in this past season of Broad City as a misdemeanor prone trust fund man child), art has more or less been his primary passion since he bought his first Chris Johanson piece at age 17. He gained some notoriety for his austere and slightly brutal painting style as well as for his documented friendships with some of the early ‘00s’ most famous wild child artists like the aforementioned Snow and Colen, Nate Lowman, and Ryan McGinley. Click here to read our intimate convo with Adam Lehrer. 

Gagosian Beverly Hills 20-Year Anniversary Invitational Exhibition in Los Angeles

To mark the twentieth anniversary of Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills on North Camden Drive, founder Larry Gagosian has selected a special exhibition of works by more than thirty artists spanning three generations. Born in Los Angeles, Gagosian opened his first galleries on Almont Drive and Robertson Boulevard in the early 1980s. Chris Burden and Jean-Michel Basquiat were among the first artists to be exhibited. Drawing on the city's abundance of talented artists, Gagosian was at the forefront of developing a bicoastal model for contemporary art galleries—the beginning of a global expansion that now numbers fifteen galleries in three continents—when he moved to New York in 1985 and opened his first gallery there, in collaboration with Leo Castelli. Los Angeles provided both artists and galleries with an ideal infrastructure for creating and exhibiting diverse bodies of artwork, sometimes on a very large scale, and in 1995 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, designed by acclaimed American architect Richard Meier, opened with new sculptures by Frank Stella. The Beverly Hills 20-Year Anniversary Invitational Exhibition will be on view until December 19, at Gagosian Beverly Hills, 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills, CA

Read Our Exclusive Conversation With Artist Annina Roescheisen Who Is Currently Featured At the Venice Biennale And Whose Solo Show Opens Tonight In New York →

Artist Annina Roescheisen is making her name known in the art world. Right now, you can see her formative series What Are You Fishing For? at the Venice Biennale, in the context of the European Pavilion. Starting today, the German-born artist who received her degree in art, philosophy and folklore from the elite Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in 2008, will see her first solo gallery show in New York. Her series What Are You Fishing For? is emblematic of her work: rife with symbolism and metaphor, and dripping, literally, in pictorial beauty. Later this month, Roescheisen’s other series, La Pietà, which features the artist as a sort of erotic Virgin Mary, will be shown as part of a group show exploring divinity. In the following interview, Annina talks about the use of metaphor in her work, her experience getting to know New York and the meaning behind her self-designed tattoos. Click here to read the interview. 

Corinne Wasmuht's "Alnitak" Explores Digital-Image Aesthetics @ Petzel Gallery In New York

Petzel Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Berlin based artist Corinne Wasmuht. This will be her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. One cannot address Wasmuht’s work without considering the seemingly full palette of digital-image aesthetics in her paintings: simulations of space, distortions, and displacements—even right down to the effect of a backlit computer screen. Generating the ideas for her pictures in the form of digital collages and computer sketches, Wasmuht’s initial source material derives from an array of abstracted and overlapping photographic imagery that she sources from a combination of the Internet and her own personal photographic archive. This material is then worked up into extremely complex, often very large-scale, panorama-like pictures depicting futuristic science-fictional landscapes of airport terminals, shopping centers, people in pedestrian zones, or, as Wasmuht refers to them more broadly, “structures,” which belong to our collective, global, everyday life. Corinne Wasmuht "Alnitak" will be on view until December 19th, 2015 at Petzel Gallery, 456 W 18th Street, New York. Photographs by Adam Lehrer. 

Adam McEwen "Traditional Contemporary" @ Petzel Gallery In New York

Petzel Gallery presents Traditional Contemporary, a grouping of new works by New York-based artist Adam McEwen. Comprised of large-scale drawings on paper and wall-mounted sculptures, Traditional Contemporary echoes themes previously explored by McEwen to create a disquieting opposition of the familiar momentarily made unfamiliar. Adam McEwen "Traditional Contemporary"  will be on view December 19, 2015 at Petzel Gallery, 456 W 18th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

William Crawford "More Worried Than A Worm In A Bird's Nest" @ Farago Gallery In Los Angeles

More Worried Than a Worm in a Bird’s Nest presents the drawings of William Crawford. William Crawford’s drawings were found in an abandoned house in Oakland, CA. Several of them were made on the backs of prison roster sheets dated 1997. Nothing is known about the artist except for his occasional and varying signature as Bill, William or WM Crawford. In graphite on paper, the drawings depict drug use and orgies often including a recurring male figure which suggests the artist’s self-portrait. Their drawings recall the comic tumescence in the work of Tom of Finland and the weightlessness of William Blake. Crawford’s collected drawings, of which there are hundreds, appear to have comprised several narratives consisting of images in sequences of 30 or more. These sequences, presumably broken up since their original compilation, are now fragmentary. The exhibition is the first presentation of William Crawford’s work in Los Angeles. "More Worried Than A Worm In A Bird's Nest" will be on view until December 5th, 2015 at Farago Gallery, 224, West 8th Street, Los Angeles, CA. 

Opening Night of Lucien Smith's "Macabre Suite" @ A Warehouse In The South Bronx

Last Thursday night, Keith Rubenstein and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn hosted artist Lucien Smith’s "Macabre Suite," a one-night only art installation and epic party in the South Bronx to celebrate the purchase and the revitalization of the historic South Bronx Piano District by Rubenstein’s Somerset Partners. Guests included the likes of Gigi Hadid, Naomi Campbell, Adrien Brody, Baz Luhrmann, and more. There was also a strong line up of musical performances from Frankie Bones, Kool Herc, Mess Kid, Lucas Vercetti, Tigga Calore, DJ Chase B with a finale by Travis Scott. Widely considered one of the most gifted artists of his generation, Lucien Smith conceived Macabre Suite as an “art happening” inspired by the medieval genre danse macabre. A three-part exhibition evoking the season’s morbid undertones, Macabre Suite consisted of a special dance performance by Kobe Kanty borrowing from a wide range of traditional movements such as Sioux Ghost Dance and Japanese Butoh, a central sculpture which was part of Smith’s “Scrap Metal” series and a selection of oil paintings and video. photographs by Angela Pham and Matteo Prandoni/BFA. 

Mukunda Angulo From the Wolfpack Takes Us On A Tour Of His Exhibition At Deitch Projects in New York

Halloween time is like Christmas time for the Angulo family. Last week, Mukunda Angulo, one of the seven children from "The Wolfpack" – as explored in Crystal Moselle's illuminating and riveting documentary that won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize and is a must see – took Autre on a tour of his and his brothers' exhibition that ended over the weekend at Deitch Projects in New York. The exhibition showed ephemera from the brothers' homemade movies and premiered their first short film, entitled Window Feel. Polaroid photographs by Julianna Vezzetti. 

Check Out Five Favorites From Artsy And Sotheby's Input/Output Auction That Are "Must Haves" For Collectors →

Richard Prince, Mark Flood, Parker Ito, you know, the biggies – Artsy's Stas Chyzhykova has create a list of five of her favorite works from the Input/Output auction presented by Artsy and Sotheby's, that are "must haves" for collectors. Tonight is your last chance to bid on these works. Click here to see the list. All works will be on view at Fused Space in San Francisco from October 22 to October 30, 2015.

Here Are Six Fascinating Things We Learned About Artist Justin Adian →

Artist Justin Adian titled his recently closed show at Skarstedt Gallery ‘Fort Worth’ after his hometown. The show features Adian’s bold organic paintings created by stretching oil enamel-painted canvases around foam cushions then mounted on wood. Some people would argue that Adian’s work is abstract, and they’d be right most of the time. But Adian also engages in pop culture iconography; one painting references Raymond Pettibon’s infamous Black Flag logo. Adian doesn’t so much mash-up high and low as he does reject high-low as a concept. Good art is good art. Click here to read six things we learned about Adian during his talk at Skarstedt Gallery. 

No Hate, No Fear: An Interview With Artist On the Rise Marilyn Rondon On Diverting Dick Pics, Her Obsession With Asses and Loving Freely →

"The first time I met Miami-based artist Marilyn Rondon was at this year’s New York Art Book Fair. She was working at a booth under the tent section of the fair and it’s very hard to not be immediately drawn towards her: a fiercely petite Venezuelan woman in her mid-‘20s with painfully beautiful bone structure, deep brown eyes, jet black hair, Olympian fitness level, and a vast collection of tattoos including script on her forehead and an amazing battle royale back piece done by Brad Stevens of New York Adorned. Trying to evade a pervasive sense of shyness, I briefly chatted with her while perusing through her impressive display of self-published zines and other work." Click here to read Adam Lehrer's convo with artist on the rise Marilyn Rondon.