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As every undergraduate knows, it was New York that stole the idea of modern art from Paris. The East Coast Americans had been mooning after the City of Light for long enough, and when they got it they made good use of their booty. But just supposing Los Angeles had stolen from Paris first: that's the feeling one derives from Aaron Curry's work. The free-standing sculptures that make up the bulk of this show employ a series of pieces of steel or wood cut into flat, biomorphic forms which slot tog... read more...

When I met up with Peter Doig shortly before last year's Tate retrospective, he explained that one of the works in the show would be "a large painting of a very small sculpture made by an artist I know in Trinidad. It's a sculpture of a bat, which is an old carnival costume, though it looks more like a butterfly. I'm painting a picture of the shadow of it." That picture, 'Man Dressed as a Bat', has now been joined by its pair - a night scene of the same figure on the sea shore - for a two-galler... read more...

Morgan Falconer, one of Saatchi Online's regular New York correspondents, discovers a genuine environmental poetic in 'After Nature' at the New Museum, while for Rebecca Geldard, our London correspondent, Gail Pickering's film 'Hungary! And Other Economies' made six-degrees-of-separation poetry out of cliched theatrical and unscripted human gestures.

Sure-footed were the pictures that Ari Marcopoulos took when he first came to New York in the late 1970s. He was then in his early twenties and clearly much in love with the city. Now living in Northern California, Marcopoulos now with some fascination and fondness watches his own kids and his kids' friends do their own posing. The price of the artist's maturity, though, is a certain loss of energy, and perhaps the price of living and learning has been a loss of footing as well. But Marcopoulos ... read more...

It's probably fair to say that Luc Tuymans has had an unfortunate influence on younger painters. Not because he isn't great or important, but because to borrow a little of him is too often to borrow it all. But maybe Tuymans has had an unhappy impact on critics as well, for when I first walked into Julia Schmidt's new show, I saw "Tuymans" and walked right out, it was only when I returned and looked properly that I started to see a good painter. ... read more...

For one who is only thirty years old, Cory Arcangel can seem like a very old-fashioned kind of new media artist. We're long past the generation of Nam June Paik, who was intrigued by the promise of technology; we're beyond the generation of Bill Viola, who took it all for granted; we've had the likes of Matthew Barney, pushing on into big-budget spectaculars; and we're familiar with artists like Matthew Buckingham, who seem nostalgic for the crackle and blur of old film stock as it circles the r... read more...

Kelley Walker's new show contains a troubling and intriguing mixture of new and old. The smaller half contains the new(ish): 'Whitney Houston' (2008), a maze-like installation of tilted mirrors culminating in images of the faded '80s singer (below). The rest is made up of the old(ish): a series of canvases that have been diagonally papered with copies of glossy colour magazines or pages from the 'New York Times', and then silkscreened with colour reproductions of various kinds of brickwork.

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The new show by the upstate New York photographer Dana Hoey envisions life under different weather conditions. It sounds like a premise for doom prophecies of the planet's demise, but Hoey has in mind something spiritually elemental, something metaphorical and enchanted.

Last year's Guggenheim retrospective affirmed Richard Prince's importance over the past two decades, but it also felt much too large and padded with mediocre work. Over-production is one of Prince's weaknesses, and in his current show of 15 canvases perhaps only seven of them are really good pictures. For sure, there are great pictures: the title piece tracks primitivism all the way from colonial fantasy back up through pop culture - a Rasta stands in a wild field of cannabis with an electric gu... read more...

Elizabeth Neel arrives for this, only her second solo show, boosted and burdened by association with her grandmother, the great, stubbornly figurative portrait painter Alice Neel. Neel grew up in what she has described as hippyish circumstances on a farm in Vermont (her grandmother would often retreat there to paint), and much of that proximity to nature has filtered into her pictures.

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The fluidity of Sevmor Chen's paint hints at the skills of a traditional Chinese ink painter, yet Chen sometimes carries those skills into areas reminiscent of fashion design and sci-fi. At other times he reminds one of Egon Schiele or Elizabeth Peyton. To see more of Sevmor Chen's work on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

To this sceptic, the ascent of Tomma Abts has always seemed like the nadir for abstract painting. Of course, I'm in the minority: Abts scooped the Turner Prize in 2006, she had her first American public gallery show at the New Museum in New York earlier this summer, and many sensible critics profess to a hapless love of her. But it's impossible to imagine how she could ever significantly advance this work without dumping it entirely and starting anew. I hope she does: she has an eye, that's for... read more...

Berlinde De Bruyckere's work is part of a welcome change which is coming over the studios and the galleries at present, a shift away from gloss and spectacle and fast-won effects, and towards human, sorrowful depth. One's mind reels back through the associations they suggest - through Kounellis, Soutine, Rembrandt, and awful freaks like the Isenheim altarpiece - and ultimately they feel like expressions of human fundamentals that all artists have striven for. ... read more...

Johannes Kahrs painted one of the most arresting of the more recent works included in "The Painting of Modern Life", at the Hayward in 2007. It's a diptych, entitled La Révolution Permanente (2000), that shows two scenes of Mick Jagger in a recording studio: one has Jagger pouting and stamping his foot, the other has him wandering off, his work apparently done; and both scenes have the quality of unposed photographs, no doubt because, like much of Kahrs work, they are based on photographs. They... read more...

Politicos and econo-wonks may spend the entirety of the autumn gnashing their teeth over the crisis of capitalism, and we may all wind up poor, but at least Matthew Day Jackson will be provided with a pathetic fallacy for his fine new double-headed show - and a vindication for his miserable outlook. To watch Saatchi Online TV's visit to Matthew Day Jackson's Brooklyn studio click here.
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There is a strain of monumentalism in all art; a desire to memorialise, to elevate and expose - and it's understandable that artists have started to take more interest in the monumental. Matthew Monahan is one of the most thrillingly inventive. The main development in his current show is a novel sense of verticality: many of the works are framed on two sides by plates of glass, which are fixed to the content of the materials inside with meaty straps and ratchets. It lends a museum preciousness t... read more...

Rob Pruitt bought an iPhone last year. Hitherto, he tells us in the press blurb, he was a tech Neanderthal. Nate Lowman had tried to teach him how to text (not the guy in the shop. Not some friend in a bar. Oh no. But it-guy-artist NATE LOWMAN!!!!). But even Nate's wizardry couldn't change dunderhead Pruitt. Until the iPhone! Since that arrived in his palm, Rob has since been digitising every aspect of his life. One hopes for insightful juxtapositions, but such things are ponderous in iPruittWor... read more...

The Canadian art collective Royal Art Lodge - featuring Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier - come to the UK this autumn with a solo exhibition at the Liverpool Biennial and a solo show in London at Pippy Houldsworth.

Despite the joyous assertion of medium immortality shouted from the title of this painting survey that spreads, roomily, across both Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali Galleries, there is also something uncertain and inadequate about that last bit -'Part II'. It's unavoidable, as this is the second iteration of a contemporary painting survey that Marks and Pat Hearn organised ten years ago (Hearn having since died, and her gallery closed, the baton has passed to Greene Naftali), but unfortunately ... read more...

As I turned to leave the gallery, I came to a print hanging near the exit, with an image of several one cent pieces and this text: "He's telling me why he didn't like the show. It's nothing more than graphic design. The writing is trite and full of gimmicks. The work is embarrassingly self-conscious, boring, over-rated, and in the end, totally unnecessary. I look away, set down my espresso, and mutter - who asked you?" ... read more...

One is apt to encounter hubris and overreach in large-scale, double-headed extravaganzas such as the one that Tom Sachs has recently launched in New York. It's hard enough to fill the capacious quarters of Sperone Westwater, and Sachs has filled it to brimming, dividing the space up into ten rooms to show a multitude of very different sculptures and wall-based work. And then he's gone uptown, mounted a display of works in the lobby and garden of one of the city's most storied Modernist towers, L... read more...

A sad and aging male Neanderthal serves as greeter at the entrance to Katharina Fritsch's new show; he stands before a large panel containing a pale green, monochromatic silkscreened photograph of a mountain gorge. The picture comes from a stockpile of postcards of German regions that Fritsch collected as a child, and, as such, it looks like a landscape framed for picturesque pleasures rather than one that might have supplied a home to early man. But then the early man standing before us bears t... read more...

David Altmejd, who represented Canada at the last Venice Biennale, has been called a "modern gothic", and compared to artists like Banks Violette and Matthew Barney. What is bold and intriguing in Altmejd's new work is the sheer scale of the figures, and the notion that artists might have found a route back to making monumental figurative sculpture without any of the old sexism in tow. ... read more...

Neal Tait looked like a very unhappy painter when he mounted a show at White Cube in London back in 2003. He looked unhappy by virtue of his style: a mode whose palette, handling of paint and form, even whose iconography seemed lifted from Luc Tuymans' very melancholy pattern book. And he looked unhappy because it seemed like he might never escape out from under Tuymans' shadow. That Tait is worth looking at again is only down to his lucky escape, and looking at his work now, in this new show at... read more...

Josephine Meckseper's latest outing has a very grave and chiliastic air. Its centrepiece is 'Ten High', a stage set-cum-catwalk-cum-shop display comprising a large, glossy black base and an arrangement of symbolically loaded objects: three mannequins (one attired in an armed services' veterans shirt); a smashed mirror; a bottle of whiskey; cigarettes and ash-tray; a bible; a Zimmer frame and cane and various other oddments. Bible-belt morality is up for sale. ... read more...

Non-Western art has always had a tendency to arrive on the Western marketplace bearing a brand. Be it via the Chinoiserie and Japanism of previous centuries, or via the Chinese Political Pop and Japanese Superflat of more recent times, the art scenes of distant nations get flattened out, simplified and delivered up for purchase often with an appetising quotient of otherness attached. One quickly doubts the imported work is all that representative of the scene back home. So it's refreshing to be... read more...

Brian Jungen is a member of the Dane-Zaa Nation of Northern British Columbia and recently relocated from his home in Vancouver to live and work on an Indian reservation. He is understandably preoccupied by landscape and politics, and it is that interest which announces itself first, at the entrance to the gallery, where the wonderfully simple, moulded, utilitarian form of a red jerrycan sits on a plinth. The can is useless for containing petrol, however, as Jungen has pierced it all over with ho... read more...

I peeped in the window of Harris Lieberman shortly before Thomas Zipp's second solo show for the gallery opened recently; I was hoping for an early viewing, and the gallery certainly looked full and ready: row upon row of wooden missiles stood to attention, all crowned with metallic tips borrowed from decommissioned Patriot Missiles. A fat coil of bubble wrap sitting at the door told me things weren't quite ready however, and I came back two days later to find everything disarranged. ... read more...

When I was starting to feel uncertain about Susan Philipsz's new sound installation for Tanya Bonakdar, I could, at least, take consolation from the fact that it resurrects a track by the old Glaswegian pop-punk duo, Strawberry Switchblade. For heaven knows, how many drunken nights have I sat trawling through itunes and wondering if the powers that be will ever post up a version of "Since Yesterday"? Philipsz, being Glaswegian, has perhaps spent even more nights like this than I, and, understand... read more...

Although Katy Moran is no infant (she was born in 1975), she has vaulted up the gallery rungs and into this very prestigious solo outing at Andrea Rosen with unseemly haste. A gallery more used to blurbing its artists with mentions of major retrospectives and headline projects, can do more than mention Moran's inclusion in Tate Britain's sturdy current group show, Strange Solution, and mention her attendance at the Royal College of Art; otherwise, she is without history. ... read more...

While art dealers and auctioneers may celebrate the emergence of an Indian contemporary artist whose sculptures have been installed outside Francois Pinault's gallery in Venice, and whose paintings are said to change hands for £100,000, some of us may also fear for his future. For this is an artist whose primary value appears to lie in his ability to export India to the world, to translate locality into the lingua franca of contemporary art, and to make it available at art fairs the world over.... read more...

The most vividly accidental arrangement of artless objects that I've come across in recent times was in a half built house in Florida. The unfinished fixtures, the loose wiring, the litter of paint pots and the ditch cleared for a pool, all suggested a mood of labour and do-it-yourself potential that was very close to the interests of a lot of contemporary art. Joseph Giannasio's interventions in an older building summon a similar impression, but by heading in reverse - pulling up floorboards, r... read more...

James Kalm caught Mark Bradford's "Nobody Jones" before it closed last week. Also up on the magazine today is James Kalm's tour of Luc Tuymans' show at David Zwirner. To watch the video of Mark Bradford's show click here. To watch the video of Luc Tuymans's show click here.... read more...

At their worst, Catherine Sullivan's films remind one of that feeling you had at school when you found yourself in the company of other children talking a private language - first, maybe, it was hurtful; ultimately, it was simply irritating. Her characters don't speak so much as warble and mutter and howl; their faces contort expressively but nothing of sense emerges.

The sculptures in Cristina Lei Rodriguez's first New York solo show remind one of that famous old British television April Fool in which reporters went out to rural communities in Italy to report on the pasta harvest. For just as that put forward a persuasively picturesque fib - that all our pasta was cut from trees in long strings - one could look at the fantastically bejewelled vegetation in Rodriguez's show and imagine that cheap jewellery grows in the rainforests of the South American jungle... read more...

The best way of comprehending most of the objects and figures in these pictures by the young Antwerp-based, German painter, is to assume that nothing is quite what it seems, no matter how finely described it may be. Morgan Falconer reports.

Six years ago - or so goes the picaresque story of his ascent - Mark Bradford was stony broke and working at his mother's beauty parlour in South Central Los Angeles. Today, aged 45 (boosters will only be disappointed that they cannot proclaim his enviable youth), Bradford has been tagged as one of Thelma Golden's generation of "post-black" artists (after he was included in her important 1991 show, "Freestyle"), and he has just had a brief solo show at the Whitney. So what's his secret? Morgan F... read more...

Sigmund Freud believed that bed-wetting was a natural part of what he termed the 'phallic stage' of a child's 'libidinal development'. In that sense, its central place in Luis Gispert's new 26 minute film, Smother, which is part of this very rich two-part show, is entirely comprehensible. Morgan Falconer reports.

Artist Cornelia Parker (below) was most impressed by Georg Bazelitz at the Royal Academy in London, while Morgan Falconer reflects on the lack of impressive museum shows of contemporary art, selecting instead Mitchell Algus's show of neglected European artists from the 1960s and 1970s; and London photography gallerist Michael Hoppen picks at show at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris about social reportage and its beginnings. ... read more...

An insular American, walking the shining halls of New York's MOMA and taking in this eccentric display by twin brothers and collaborators born in Transylvania, might just imagine that God's Own Country had only luckily escaped an awful apocalypse that had bombed large areas of Eastern Europe back into the early twentieth century. What else can explain the part modern, part folk mish-mash of the sculptures and ceramics, paintings and "type-writer drawings" by Gert and Uwe Tobias? Morgan Falconer ... read more...

On Tuesday 18 December "And Who Are You? Work from Saatchi Online" opened at the at the Sara Tecchia Roma New York gallery. Saatchi Online's first exhibition in New York presents the work of 12 artists based in New York, all of whom are registered on the website, and whose work explores questions about how the established art world parcels out or responds to value, fame, favoritism, integrity and pretension. Read on for a link to the New York Sun's article about the show.
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This mini-survey, charting ten years since Newkirk received his MFA, has been organised around a collection of his wall-hanging curtain pieces inspired by the curtains of pony beads that hang down from doorways in some old-fashioned homes and which Newkirk remembers hanging in the homes of his relatives. Stand opposite the curtains and the images they carry seem frustratingly wispy, as if they were merely illusions; move left or right and they begin to cohere; move too far or get too close and t... read more...

In twenty years or so, when miracles have occurred and the Iraq war has finally ended, museum curators will look back and, I hope, assemble an exhibition of the anti-war art of our age. And, when they do, the first picture simply must be the opening work in Thomas Demand's 'Embassy' series, which is on view in this excellent show.

Rather like the ageless ethical dilemma of whether to give money to culture or to the poor, artists often feel aesthetics and politics to be two very different arenas pulling in different directions. Some might dismiss the opposition as more apparent than real, and yet it keeps nagging, and Kirstine Roepstorff seems to be particularly exercised by it in her current show at the Drawing Center. ... read more...

Biography is so often the idler's route into unlocking the reasoning behind an artist's work; it may point nowhere, and yet so often, as it does in the case of this first New York outing by Hany Armanious, it does at least provide poetic echoes. For Armanious was born in the ancient land of Egypt in 1962, he emigrated to the new world of Australia, with his family, in 1969, and he subsequently trained as an artist in Sydney, where he's now based; and his installation for Foxy Production has inde... read more...

'Whim, and an open elevator door, encouraged me to begin the Guggenheim's Richard Prince retrospective at its end. It could have proved disorientating - not to mention misrepresentative - and yet it felt like a reasonable place to start, since something about Prince's career goes backwards as well...' Morgan Falconer reviews a major retrospective for the American artist. ... read more...

Currently standing in the window of James Cohan's gallery is a sculptural recreation, in acidic ice-cream hues, of Picasso's famous 1905 group portrait of the sad itinerant circus performers, 'Family of Saltimbanques'. The sight of these old theatrical diehards in a contemporary Chelsea gallery is a powerful and unsettling sight, as if all the turbulence of the world had torn a gash in history, destroyed all natural chronological order, and let these figures live again as ghosts. ... read more...

Allegedly, the works in Jay Heikes first New York solo show have their origin in a video in which the artist, dressed in the guise of a stand-up comedian, recounts a joke about a pirate and a disobedient parrot. But, like an apocryphal tale told through a succession of Chinese whispers, the punchline has been long lost and all we are left with are the muddled retellings. Hence, many of the exhibits, in what is a very promising early outing by the New York- and Minneapolis-based artist, have the ... read more...

Chris Ofili's extensive new show is his first for David Zwirner, and the first to unite his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and graphite drawing. That in itself makes it a landmark for the artist. Yet what really distinguishes the exhibition is what it demonstrates about how far he has come in terms of maturity and ambition.

A museum that is empty on a wet Saturday afternoon in New York is, by definition, a strange and desperate place. But add a multitude of devotional sculpture, a decent Goya, some archaeological artefacts and yawning security guards listening for pins dropping, and you have an exquisite setting for Francis Alÿs' new project.