“Magic Numbers,” which takes up three floors at the George Economou Collection in Athens (through August 28), makes for a rhythmic, tuneful show. In the center of a large mirror piece, Rashid Johnson’s Good King, 2013—one of a number of works commissioned for this show—two identical covers of the singer-songwriter George Benson’s 1975 album Good King Bad stand propped on a shelf. One is upside down, the other right side up, so that the inverse images of the singer’s head and raised bare arm seem to form an infinity symbol, or perhaps a yin-yang sign. Such doublings, mirrorings, and repetitions recur throughout Johnson’s work, explicitly recalling a concept the artist has consistently explored, what W.E.B. Du Bois termed double-consciousness. The African-American writer and thinker defined double-consciousness as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

In Good King, which is composed of rectangular and square mirror tiles of many different sizes in a manner that recalls Mondrian’s geometric abstractions, the viewer’s reflection, itself a doubling, is also fractured. And as with the album covers, the found objects that are frequently incorporated into Johnson’s work stand as both literal things and transfigured, or metaphorical, components of the artwork. Here, four blocks of shea butter—two quite small, two larger—rest on shelves, as do two potted plants. Interfering with these symmetries are poured splotches of black soap dispersed over the surface of the mirror, like reminders of death in counterpoint to the live plants. Although Johnson utilizes relatively few materials, he constructs of them a dense lattice of associations, a synthesis of oppositions: good and bad, life and death, abstraction and representation, literal and metaphorical.

A table constructed out of mahogany in a midcentury modern style serves as a frame for, as the title has it, a Shea Butter Landscape, 2014. Upon the gorgeous expanse of soft yellow moisturizer spread across the top, the artist has inscribed various marks, establishing a tensile interplay between gestural expression and hard-edged design. Johnson considers shea butter one of his “meaning materials,” evoking Africa and the African diaspora, its plasticity suggesting mutability and changes of state.  

Gestures as well as what is arguably the most meaningful of materials, the human body, animate The New Black Yoga, 2011, a short film playing in a room with five Oriental rugs on the floor. These echo rugs in the film that are set on a beach, near the waterline, where at sunset five black men enact a series of movements derived from dance, yoga, and martial arts. Johnson made the film after attempting a yoga class in German, a language he doesn’t speak, while visiting Berlin. The men wield what look like kung fu fighting staffs, and their fluid, stylized routines emphasize masculinity while mimicking aggression. The wonderful score by Eric Dolphy, a song called Improvisations and Tukras, which uses the voice—chanting phrases like ta, dig da tay to tablas and tambouras—as an instrument, reinforces the sense that the piece is about translation or interpretation of movement. Yoga, as those in the West know it, is very much a translation, some would say garbled, of ancient Indian practices.

The rugs on the floor of the New Black Yoga installation have been branded (Johnson is known for branding a number of materials, an ingenious recuperation of the horrific slave-era marking device) with palm trees and crosshairs. And while there is little doubt that Johnson’s symbols, like his materials, are carriers of meaning, one can easily overdetermine what they actually signify. Johnson is adept at twanging the line between decoration and denotation. The crosshairs image, for example, which reappears here fashioned from black powder-coated steel, in Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, 2012, inevitably suggests targeting and the focusing of sight—whether by the viewer or by the artist remains unclear. Yet it is also a basic abstract motif, meant not just to be beautiful but to beautify.

Consider, too, Hollywood Shuffle, 2013, a painting on burned red oak flooring. In it, five pours of black soap create humanoid shapes, calling to mind the five men of the yoga film. Is five the magic number of the show’s title? Perhaps. There are five primary pours in another painting from 2013, 1, 2, 4, two on the outermost of its three cast-bronze panels and one in the center. But what of the numbers in the title? The answer might lie in what the pieces in the show share, what Johnson refers to as molested surfaces, something he likens to graffiti. 

The sorts of swooping, scribbling, slashing marks that cover the figures in Hollywood Shuffle are inscribed across the entire surface of a painting in black soap: Cosmic Slop “Hotter Than July,” 2013. It’s a worthy addition to the tradition of monochrome black abstraction. But surely we’re not meant to decipher its signs. At once violent and elegant, the molestation of the surface in the piece does indeed call to mind a carved tree trunk or heavily tagged wall. Still, the thing about graffiti is that, like Johnson’s work, it vibrates between two ranges, of significance and ornamentation. Even when it is indecipherable, even at its most decorative, graffiti means intensely, specifically: I was here. In light of that statement, one might deem all artists taggers.

Of one thing we can be certain—Johnson has a keen ear for double meanings. The black soap he consistently employs looks like tar, looks like dirt, and yet is used for cleaning. And so while others ponder which of the many numbers found in this show are “magic numbers,” I’ll take Johnson the music aficionado at his dyadic word. All his pieces are like tunes: abstract and signifying at the same time, rhythmic, transforming of their audience and magically transforming common elements. Each is its own enchanting number.   

A version of this article appears in the October 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.

For its 2014 edition, La Biennale de Montréal (BNLMTL) is undergoing what its leadership is terming a “radical shift.” Bringing on Sylvie Fortin as the executive and artistic director, absorbing the Quebec Triennial, and joining into partnerships with the Musée d’art contemporain and other local institutions are all big changes for the Canadian exhibition, which opens this fall. This year’s theme, “L’avenir (looking forward),” is fitting when considering all the changes afoot — it will encompass works by Ursula Biemann, Thomas Hirschhorn, Shirin Neshat, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Andrea Bowers, and 45 other artists and collectives. ARTINFO recently sat down with Fortin to discuss the particularities of Montreal’s art scene, Wodiczko’s commissioned artwork, and the biennial’s major themes.

There’s a big push this year to make the biennial “a landmark event on the international cultural calendar,” to use language from a press release. How do you transform a regional exhibition into one that gets international exposure?

I think for me it’s not so much to make it an international event, but to really bear witness to the fact that the local and the global are so connected. Montreal is a very cosmopolitan city. It’s not unusual for people in Montreal to speak four or five languages. I think that’s really specific to Montreal. So we are trying to undo that dichotomy and to impress upon local audiences that their very lives are much more global than we might think. I think that’s where it started. It wasn’t about a desire to be global, but rather a desire to be super specific about the local global engagements that do happen. Working with the Musée d’art contemporain was one way and then the other way is that we have a number of other partners. The museum was kind of the lever to start this show. You need to have some kind of base to make major change. It was the first step towards something that’s now become much broader. We’re working with three of the four universities, and more than likely all four, and we are also partnering with the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Museum of Fine Art, and with a number of artist-run spaces. Montreal is a place where knowledge and the academic industry is very close to the art scene in a way that is super specific. So how do we present that? We present that by multiplying the base from which the biennial emerges.

The biennial will give a special focus to Montréal’s art communities and half of the participating artists are Canadian. What is the Montreal scene like?

Like most of Canada, because the system is basically relying on state funding, the work that comes out is very often research-based. It’s not market-driven because there is very little market. There is one, but it’s not the dominant force. The dominant force is state funding, which is allocated through arts councils and those are peer reviewed. So it’s artists allocating funding to artists. So that changes the whole reality. You have to make work that other artists find very interesting, find to be cutting edge. You have a lot more socially-integrated work, long-term research-based practice, performative time-based work. You also have two intellectual traditions: French and English. It’s more than just language. It’s worldviews, a whole set of theories. So these get negotiated in real time in Montreal and that’s the only place on the planet where that is like that. For example, if you’re in Paris you encounter American theory in translation. There’s a time lag. And vice versa. In Montreal, these two things happen absolutely simultaneously. It’s kind of this translation machine. With the lecture series we’re doing, we are playing with language. Some will be in French; some will be in English. Thomas Hirschhorn is so generous and is doing two — one in French and one in English.

Was partnering with the institutions you mentioned earlier part of helping the biennial to grow and bring in bigger names?

I think it’s probably the other way around. When I came, I proposed a vision, which was that the biennial had to play a more complex role in Montreal and that would be done in two ways. One is not denying the fact that we are inheriting this biennial that local artists felt entitled to major representation in every three years. That’s a reality and the objective of that was to give them visibility and open some markets for them. However, to ghettoize it within Quebec doesn’t really lead to those results. We have a responsibility and we want to engage the local arts communities so we are going to do that by also welcoming a broad range of international artists. This is the first year that we are doing that so we want to invite international artists who are perhaps better known because that pulls the attention. But on the other hand the whole biennial hopes to be surprising. There’s a lot of research that has been done by the curators. In our international representation, yes we have a few big names, but we also have people whose work is amazing but has never been shown in Canada or North America. There are so many biennials and it is so easy to curate by the yellow pages, but we didn’t want to do that. But, at the same time, it is important to bring in people whose work is better known but give them new opportunities. Many of these better known artists don’t need the biennial so it’s also their belief that this is an important project that they want to be a part of. The last thing Montreal wants is a cookie cutter biennial.

One of those better-known artists is Krzysztof Wodiczko, who has been commissioned to do a project. Did the site of Montreal draw him?

Both him and Lawrence Weiner have a long time relationship with Montreal. It’s a city that they know well, that they’ve come back to. Krzysztof has Canadian citizenship. The context in which he is working is very different from anything he has done before.

So what form will the piece take?

The museum is in the entertainment district, which was an urban planning decision that was made — that Montreal was going to be a festival city. So an area of the city had to be redesigned and reconfigured to be able to welcome large numbers of people. In the immediate periphery of that neighborhood there is a very large homeless population with a number of missions and friendship centers. That is what struck him. They are just pushed to the margin of this grand social project. We hired someone who builds relationships with the St. Michael’s Mission, a local friendship center, shelters for women. We told them all about Krzysztof’s work and identified individuals who could be part of the project. Last week we were able to do the shooting in a studio in Montreal. Ultimately what will happen is that this large projection will be on the whole façade of a large theater. You can see it from blocks away and as you get closer you’ll also start to hear the sound part of it, which is these homeless people speaking in French, English, Cree, and Innu about their experience and what it’s like to be homeless in Montreal.

What are some major themes in the exhibition?

The major themes are the economy, the environment, and agency. Agency is like, what can art actually do? We make so many claims for art all the time. ‘It’s socially engaged and it’s going to do all these things.’ But we never stop and say, ‘What can it actually do?’ The environment of course is completely linked with issues of ethics and economics and, being in Canada, it is a very important question for many reasons. One is, of course, questions of water. We have the most water on the planet and it is something that we are very conscious about. The other is resource extraction and fracking going on. The level of that practice in northern Canada is something that is very present. Also, if you’re Canadian, the Arctic is very important, the melting of the ice. The Northwest Passage you can pass now. It’s just water; it’s no longer ice. The environment as a theme is locally grounded but allows us to talk about much bigger global concerns.

— Artists Sue Terry Gilliam: Three street artists are suing filmmaker Terry Gilliam for allegedly using their work without permission in his new film, “The Zero Theorem.” Artists Franco Fasoli, Nicolas Escalada, and Derek Mehaffey want the film’s US release to be delayed and hope to gain statutory damages, profits, and costs. [The Guardian]

— National Gallery Hangs Bacall Portrait: The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC is honoring the late actress Lauren Bacall with a portrait on the museum’s second floor. Included in the museum’s “American Cool” exhibition, the Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph is on view through September 7. [Art Daily]

—American Art Museum Nominates 13 Artists: The Smithsonian American Art Museum has released the names of 13 nominees for its $25,00o James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize: Njideka Akunyili, Cory Arcangel, Trisha Baga, Paul Chan, Barnaby Furnas, Theaster Gates, KAWS, Josiah McElheny, Dave McKenzie, Julie Mehretu, Frances Stark, Swoon, and Mickalene Thomas. [Art Daily]

— Guercino Work Stolen: A £5 million Renaissance work by Guercino was stolen from a Modena church with a faulty alarm system. [Telegraph]

— Photos From Ferguson: “These are our own, homegrown documents of social unrest and they can’t, like images from more distant lands, be kept safely at bay.” — Philip Kennicott analyzes the upsetting images coming out of Ferguson, Missouri. [WP]

— Phaidon Buys Artspace: We reported here yesterday that publisher Phaidon was in talks to buy online art seller Artspace, and indeed the company did. [Bloomberg]

— Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions has named George Bailey as chairman. [Art Daily]

— The Rauschenberg Foundation is appealing the recent court decision to award $24.6 million to its trustees. [NYT]

— Caroline Older is the new executive director of the Chicago Artists Coalition. [Artforum]

ALSO ON ARTINFO
Review: Rashid Johnson's "Magic Numbers"
Q&A: Sylvie Fortin On La Biennale de Montréal
Instagrams of the Art World: Katy Perry Loves Surrealism, Schama Visits the Frick, and More
Gagosian Organizes First Show with Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

NEW YORK — After two decades, Galerie Perrotin is revisiting the iconic works by social interventionist duo, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler. The couple began their collaboration in the late 70s, which spanned more than 20 years until Ericson’s death from brain cancer in 1995. The artists, who went under the radar, make a comeback in New York with a series of major installations and never-before-seen sketches pivotal to their practice.

“This was about two people getting together and creating work,” said Ziegler about presenting their pieces again after Ericson’s departure. “I see it now as a piece of history and Kate is a part of that as much as anything else.”

Ericson and Ziegler were among the artistic pioneers of social practices. They developed interventionist strategies based on local iconography and communities across America. Their conceptual practice is most evident in “Camouflaged History (1991),” where they traveled to Charleston, South Carolina and challenged the community’s ideology behind the city’s more affluent historic neighborhood and its stringent building codes. They found a house outside the historic city's demarcation line and painted it in camouflage under the local Board of Architectural Review’s prescribed list of approved house colors.

“What was important for us is that we didn’t feel like we were imposing an ideology on communities,” said Ziegler. “It’s not political in a way that there’s a right and wrong. It’s questioning the ideologies.”

The exhibition at Galerie Perrotin New York, 909 Madison Avenue, is open through August 22.

— Scott Indrisek picked 18 must-see gallery shows opening this September.

— Craig Hubert looked back at the life of Robin Williams.

— Scott Indrisek talked to photographer Christopher Williams on his MoMA retrospective.

— Anna Kats analyzed Manifesta’s subtle manifesto.

— Beverly’s was the latest spot to be featured in our Art Bars series.

— Sarah Hanson profiled collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn.

— The Google Art Project announced it would preserve Kara Walker’s Domino installation ad infinitum.

— Sarah Elson discussed her new London Launch Pad residency.

—Rashaad Newsome released a sneak peak of his film for the Brooklyn Museum’s “Killer Heels.”

— Adam Helms created a playlist for the latest installment of our Studio Tracks series.

This Week's VIDEOS:

A year ago Joe Reihsen would turn cagey when asked how his paintings were made, and perhaps justifiably so. His perfect surfaces, crisp flat finishes, and trompe l’oeil depictions of impasto and brushstrokes certainly seemed like clever, even proprietary, tricks. Visitors to “Clean Title, No Accidents,” Reihsen’s spring 2013 show at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, could be seen squinting their eyes
and tilting their heads to the sides of
the works, trying to detect any gradient or texture or bump. Many thought the paintings were digital printouts. Reihsen would correct this misunderstanding with a cool and polite “No, they are painted,” but would offer nothing more.

Reihsen’s taciturn days are over. Now he will take a visitor around his studio, showing each stage of his process. For the first layer, he plops drops of paint randomly on the surface that his paint roller picks up and spreads them out into a pattern. Then come brush­strokes and more traditional applications of color, which are shaded and altered with spray paint while wet until the ground is totally even. To finish each work, Reihsen is now doing something new: He takes pre­made shapes of paint, dried on sheets of hanging plastic in his studio, and applies them like skin to the top. More spray painting seals the outer layer.

The completed works come across almost like bubble­gum Richard Diebenkorns: Pastel colors like the palette of hypercolor T­-shirts trace out and come to resemble the very topographies of beachfront and desert that inspired the man from ocean Park. Reihsen’s layers work like veils. They slide, float, and move around the rectangle, sometimes compressing into solids, other times evaporating into voids. The painter’s work is stronger on a smaller scale, but he is making ground on his larger sizes—repetition and sustained effort are paying off. The skin works make their debut at Brand New Gallery in Milan this month.

It is not nature but, rather, the computer that sparked the 34-­year-­old Reihsen’s interest in painting. Like many artists his age and younger, he made art with early versions of Photoshop before
he ever bought a tube of Winsor & Newton. “Integrating the digital tools with my paintings started in 1996, when I was still in high school,” Reihsen says. “My parents were generous enough to spend what was probably a month’s salary on a very early digital point­and­shoot camera. I would shoot my paintings with it and play
with them in Photoshop and repaint them.”

His first show in L.A., in 2010,
 featured photographs of people in front
of his paintings wearing elements and colors taken right from the surface of those same canvases, a seemingly mad, mad world along the lines of Ryan Trecartin, Brian Bress, and other artists whose physical universe is permeated by new digital realities. Even now, when Reihsen takes his paint skins and puts them on
the work’s surface, he imagines the action more like manipulating a specific shape
on a screen with a mouse than like collaging onto a canvas. Even when speaking, he will use computer terms to describe his method: He will “copy and paste, distort, warp, and rotate,” only to “scale up or scale down.”

The artist does not find himself at odds with the digital world. He even believes that it can increase our ability to interact with our flesh­and­blood environment. He identifies with Christopher Wool and Albert Oehlen—painters who mix the human gesture with the machine and whose obsessions are as much those of printing geeks as of traditional painters. But it is Eva Hesse and Clyfford Still, both geniuses of texture and surface seemingly at odds with flat screens and pixels, who really earn his admiration. There is a part of Reihsen that seems
to long for a lush buildup of paint, a connection between art and skin that acts almost as a corrective to art’s becoming more and more digital, as Hesse once added warmth and humanity to Minimalism.

If one takes a closer look at Reihsen’s process, it is the deep materiality of Still and Hesse that resonates. Outside his studio stand towers made of reclaimed Douglas fir, a well­used forklift, and assorted shop tools, all part of his furniture business, called Blake Avenue Studios. Nothing about the shop is precious. Neither is the neighborhood in which it is located, a sliver of land between the 5 Freeway and the concrete­clad Los Angeles River north of Silverlake that Angelenos call Frogtown. The terrain is all industry and hard edges, a land of rough hands and tough negotiators.

Reihsen, who sold cars to pay his way through art school, fits right in. He seems to work constantly and can tell you the price of plywood on any given day. He is a Minnesota native who naturalized quickly to California cool, complete with wispy surfer hair. While his laid­back, good­natured demeanor mirrors the appearance of his paintings, his stride has a kind of bent urgency that denotes
a workaholic. There is a blue­collar directness to Reihsen, who does not suffer fools and would seem too busy for delicate things like painting or societal polish.

Up a staircase from the woodshop, however, one finds a white studio, floor to ceiling a gleaming surface, a land apart. The room is empty save for finished paintings leaning against the wall,
a camera on a tripod, a small woodstove for heat, and a table with a large Apple monitor and computer. This split in Reihsen’s character—the twin elements of digital maven and manual laborer—is exactly what makes him interesting. The bright studio and computer without the furniture workshop would not make any sense, in the same way that his paintings’ pristine surfaces would not make any sense without those bits of extruding paint skins.

Much as the interaction of inorganic systems with the body was Hesse’s question in the 1960s, Reihsen is drawn to the “collision of the biomorphic with the digital” in the age of Facebook and Twitter. He
is a house divided, an old­school physical being in a digital world. The most
urgent question of his painting is whether these two worlds ultimately have to be at odds or whether he can find a vocabulary that dissolves the split entirely.

A version of this story appears in the June 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine. 

The largest city on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido entices collectors with the inaugural Sapporo International Art Festival, running through September 28. Despite competition from a spate of summer art festivals in Japan—including the Setouchi Triennale and Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale—fair direction by renowned composer Ryuichi Sakamoto drew Anselm Kiefer, Carsten Nicolai, Tomás Saraceno, and Subodh Gupta to participate, alongside Japanese new-media wizards Daito Manabe and Yuko Mohri. Fujiko Nakaya is contributing a fog work. In the spirit of a technologically advanced event set against the
 backdrop of Sapporo’s lush natural surroundings, Sakamoto will stage what he calls a “forest symphony.” The installation, planned with the Yamaguchi Center for Arts
and Media, will be on view in the city’s Moerenuma Park, designed by Isamu Noguchi.

A version of this article appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Art+Auction magazine.

LONDON — Artistic geography is an understudied subject, but an important one. When a style is transported to a new terrain, climatically and/or culturally, it is likely to undergo a change. Thus, as is demonstrated by “Radical Geometry,” an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (through September 28), much abstract South American art of the post-war era had its roots in pre-war Europe. But, having crossed the Atlantic and traveled south of the Equator, the sober geometry of the Bauhaus and De Stijl was transformed into something very different: more sensuously physical, more mobile, more bizarre.

One is tempted to resort to a stereotype: could this work be the cool and rhythmic visual equivalent of Samba, Tango, and Bossa Nova? Perhaps it has something to do with the dynamic mood of the new world. After all, that affected even the serious-minded Dutchman Piet Mondrian himself, after he moved to the US in the last years of his life. Looking at a painting such as “Composition,” 1953, by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, you realize that her starting point was not the harmonious yet static Mondrian of the 1920s and ’30s, but rather later work such as his “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” 1942-3, which seems to pulse with the energy of Manhattan traffic as well as that of blues piano.

The best of South American abstraction was like that. As you walk around the exhibition, you can see the squares and circles of the Old World styles begin to move and bounce. And as they do, novel idioms emerge: kinetic art and Op art. The work of the Brazilian Hermelindo Fiaminghi from the later ’50s is already more than half way to Op, for example. His “Alternated 2,” 1957, consisted of intersecting red and grey spindle-like shapes resembling the teeth of a comb. The resulting image shimmers and fizzes like a Bridget Riley from a few years later.  

South American art tends to embrace paradoxes. “Nylon Cube,” 1990, by the Venezuelan Jesús Soto, consists of a rectangular arrangement of dangling plastic fronds. It is both transparent and geometric, softly permeable and as rigidly square-edged as any Mondrian — a seductively beautiful and intriguingly unclassifiable object. Like quite a few pieces of South American art of the period, it seems to be edging from being a sculpture or painting towards being something more all-embracing: an environment.

You can see how the work of a contemporary South American artist such as the Brazilian Erneto Neto — which tends towards softly encompassing, dangling, and wearable art — comes out of some of the pieces on show. The short-lived but significant influence of Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), for example — a fellow Brazilian and reference-point for Neto — evolved from geometrical abstraction to such novelties as his “Parangolés,” soft art in the form of costumes to be worn by Samba dancers. That is, art that needed to be activated by human movement. Lygia Clark made a similar move in another way with her series of “Creatures,” hinged metal sculptures that can be reconfigured in many diverse ways.

The last two examples bring one up against the limits of exhibitions. Clark’s “Creatures” don’t mean much unless you can pick them up and move them around, Oiticica’s “Parangolés” need a person gyrating inside. There is another limitation: this show, though beguiling, is housed in the small-scale Sackler Galleries (and all derived from one source, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros). The most impressive of these South American works, however, are often imposingly large.

I remember an astonishing piece by the Brazilian Lygia Pape filling the first space in the Arsenale at the 2009 Venice Biennale — it consisted of filaments of golden wire gleaming in a darkened room like diagonal shafts of light, at once minimalist, baroque, and visionary. One aspect of this movement, particularly in Brazil and Venezuela, was that it linked with the architecture of the period by the great Oscar Niemeyer — creator of Brasília, among others.

As Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro points out in a catalogue essay, the 1940s and ’50s were a time of optimism and expansion in South America. European Modernism ran into the disasters of totalitarianism and the Second World War, but neither had much impact of the other side of the ocean.

You only get a sense of the larger-scale possibilities of South American art at a couple of points in the RA show: Soto’s “Nylon Cube” is one; another is the wall-sized “Physiochromie No 500,” 1970, by Carlos Cruz-Diez — a painting that positively demands the viewer to move. As you walk past it, a ripple of transformation runs along the surface, which is made up of strips differently colored on different sides.

“Radical Geometry” is an appetizer rather than a full survey of a big subject that is still not well-known in Europe, certainly in London. Despite that limitation, it’s a delightful little exhibition.

There's a new addition on New York's Hudson river — an oyster bar called Grand Banks is housed on the boat F/V Sherman Zwicker.

The F/V Sherman Zwicker was a mid-century cod fishing boat, which sailed in Nova Scotia or the Grand Banks area of New Foundland. It is now owned by the Maritime Foundation.

Below deck is an art exhibition that tells the history of the boat using archival photographs, artifacts from the ship, mixed with modern art. The exhibit was curated by the New Draft Collective.

The oyster bar and exhibit is opened from 4pm-11pm. The boat will be docked at pier 25 (N. Moore St. at West Street) until October.

— Liebermann Painting Determined to be Nazi Loot: Experts researching the works of the Gurlitt trove have determined that Max Liebermann’s 1901 painting “Two Riders on the Beach” was, in fact, stolen by the Nazis during World War II. Furthermore, they declared that rightful ownership of the artwork belonged to the family of German-Jewish art collector David Friedmann, who are currently suing the Bavarian government for the piece. The Liebermann painting is one of two artworks thus far that have been verified as looted by the panel of experts. [WSJ, NYT]

— Smithsonian Shows 300 Shoes: Before she represents Japan at next year’s Venice Biennale, Chiharu Shiota will install 300 shoes at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler gallery. Donated by members of the public who tied a note detailing a memory to each shoe, they will be on view near the entrance of the museum. Shiota says the installation is inspired by living as a student in Germany. “I felt this gap in my imagination that reminded me of trying on old shoes,” she said. “They fit, but they don’t fit me anymore.” [WSJ]

— Study Shows Flipping is Cyclical: The New York Times hired “two companies that specialize in evaluating art market data” to do statistical analyses on art flipping at auction and the results seem to reveal that the trend of “soaring prices and quick resales” is cyclical. Current market trends closely mirror sales in the late ’90s, according to study. “Reselling art at auction is not a new phenomenon,” wrote Fabian Bocart, a founder of Tutela Capital S.A., “or at least, not very different from what has existed since 1995.” [NYT]

— Palestinian Artist’s Travel Ban Lifted: Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar has finally been able to leave Palestine for Helsinki, after the Israeli Security Agency prevented him from traveling to New York for the opening of the New Museum’s “Here and Elsewhere” exhibition. [TAN]

— Conservancy Board Member Calls For Museum Boycott: Turtle Conservancy board member Andy Sabin, acting independently from the organization, has called for a boycott of the Aspen Art Museum until the institution dismantles its controversial showing of Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Moving Ghost Town.” [9 News]

— What is Main Street’s Role in Ferguson? “Does a largely white police force see protestors in the middle of a strip like that, only recently abandoned by white residents, and feel as though its own turf — or its own culture — is threatened?” — L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne on the protests and landscape surrounding Ferguson, Missouri. [LAT]

— Ben Tufnell and Matt Watkins, who were formerly directors at Haunch of Venison, are launching new London space Parafin this September. [Art Daily]

— Here’s a profile of Shinique Smith ahead of her show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. [Boston Globe]

— DC gallerist Randall Scott is moving to Baltimore. [WP]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

Worlds Collide: Analog Meets Digital in Joe Reihsen’s Paintings

Datebook: Sapporo International Art Festival

“Radical Geometry” Digs Up Roots of South America’s Abstract Art

Tom of Finland Foundation Taps 10 Art Stars to Judge Its 10th Annual Art Competition

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— Judge Approves Corcoran Merger: After an activist group’s last-ditch attempt to preserve the Corcoran’s autonomy, a DC judge has ruled that the museum can merge with National Gallery of Art and George Washington University. “I realize it’s come out of a long, complicated, and difficult time in history,” said Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director of the National Gallery. “I think the solution saves the collection for Washington. It saves the school and moves it into a great university.” [WP]

— Amy Poehler Pokes Fun at the Art World: In a new commercial for Old Navy, comedian Amy Poehler pokes fun at art world clichés while playing a haughty blonde dealer who says exactly what many art worlders wish they could. “This is a challenging piece, and would be good for your collection. It’s so stupid it’s hard to understand, and that can be interesting,” she says, presumably about the art, but actually about the Old Navy jeans — which she guesses are by a “short, bald,” German artist who “has a lot of animals.” She closes the bit venting about her financial woes. [HuffPo]

— Francesca Grillo Gets Into Art Business: Francesca Grillo, Nigella Lawson’s former personal assistant who was accused of £685,000 in fraud, is getting into the art business with Sharrine Scholtz, another former employee of the Charles Saatchi household. The pair describes their new project, which will involve dealing and pop-up exhibitions, as “like an abstract Factory – a bit like what Warhol did.” [The Guardian]

— Smithsonian Adds LGBT Objects to Its Collection: The Smithsonian will gain hundreds of historic LGBT objects, photos, and documents, including some from the TV show “Will and Grace,” for its collection today. [Washington Times]

— NYC Commissioner Objects to Graffiti Exhibition: “I find it outrageous that one of the city’s museums is currently celebrating graffiti and what a great impact it had on the city,” said New York City police commissioner William Bratton, referring to the Museum of the City of New York’s current exhibition, “City as Canvas.” [WSJ]

— Phillips to Sell Photos From Art Institute of Chicago: Phillips will auction off 117 deaccessioned photographs from the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection, including Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1933 print of Córdoba, Spain, which is estimated at $80,000 to $120,000. [Art Daily]

— Christie’s is being sued for allegedly selling a fake artwork by Australian artist Albert Tucker. [TAN]

— Ron Perelman has subpoenaed Larry Gagosian in his suit against the dealer. [NY Post]

— The Whitney is going to be open on Mondays for the rest of the run of its Jeff Koons retrospective. [NYT]
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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.