Curated previews the upcoming Richard Phillips exhibition at London’s White Cube. “No stranger to popular culture – his work has featured on Gossip Girl and in collaboration with Jimmy Chu – Richard Phillips unveils his latest on January 28, 2011 at London’s White Cube Gallery. The subjects are familiar (or at least they should be), Phillips has painted what he considers the 10 most recognizable celebrities. There’s Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake and Zac Effron. The choices may be lost on older generations, the main goal here is to connect people disenfranchised by the art world to painting. Begs the question, is it successful?”

Check out Phillips work here.

Kirk Bray, of BillyKirk, unveiled a new set of paintings last night at Jersey City’s Fifty8 Gallery. The work, entitled In the Moment, is described as “a new collection of paintings depicting life in all its absurdity and preciousness.” There are eleven paintings in all and the exhibition runs through September 28, 2010.

Hats off to Kirk for not just the exhibition, but for continually supporting his local Jersey City art scene as well.

A full preview of Bray’s new work is available at Curated.

Now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins.

Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins celebrates LACMA’s 2007 acquisition of Eakins’s great sporting painting, Wrestlers, 1899. The exhibition will examine the work in a broad thematic context, providing a rare opportunity to consider the history of sporting images in the oeuvre of this icon of American nineteenth-century art. While his rowing paintings and swimming images were each the focus of special exhibitions, no show has ever been devoted to the varied array of sporting images Eakins depicted. Moreover, while Eakins exhibitions have been increasingly frequent on the East Coast, they have been rare at West Coast venues. Manly Pursuits will trace Los Angeles’s long but little known association with Eakins’s art. The exhibition is curated by Ilene Susan Fort, The Gail & John Liebes Curator of American Art at LACMA.

Manly Pursuits is on view through October 17, 2010.

How does the Whitney follow the 2010 Biennial? With a comprehensive exhibition of painter Charles Burchfield, that’s how.

Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchefield was organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in collaboratation with Buffalo’s Burchfield Penney Art Center. The exhibition opens on June 26, 2010, and will run until October 17, 2010.

From the Whitney -

Although he lived next door to Niagara Falls, artist Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) chose to focus his nature-based art on the ground beneath his feet. Curated by artist Robert Gober, this exhibition features over one hundred major watercolors, drawings, oils on canvas, sketches, notebooks, journals, and doodles by this visionary American artist. Acclaimed by critics and known to a broad public audience during his lifetime, Burchfield is curiously under-appreciated today. Working almost exclusively in watercolor, Burchfield’s primary subject was landscape, often focusing on his immediate surroundings: his garden, the views from his windows, snow turning to slush, the sounds of insects and bells and vibrating telephone lines, deep ravines, sudden atmospheric changes, the experience of entering a forest at dusk, to name but a few. He often imbued these subjects with highly expressionistic light, creating at times a clear-eyed depiction of the world and, at other times, a unique mystical and visionary experience of nature.

In detail above – Charles Burchfield, An April Mood, 1946–55. Watercolor and charcoal on joined paper, 40 × 54 in. (101.6 × 137.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with partial funds from Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman  55.39.

Gagosian Gallery opens Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes this weekend, the first ever exhibition dedicated to this particular segment of the artists oeuvre. Lichtenstein’s experiments with still life began in 1972 and continued for almost a decade. Many of the 50 works on display taking direct influence from print advertisements, creating confluence between the painters work in still life and more noted pop art production.

Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes runs from May 8 to July 30, 2010 at 555 W. 24th Street, New York, NY.

Learn more at Gargosian.

An exhibition I can really get behind -

The Annual Detroit Public Schools Student Exhibition features more than 300 works of young artists, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, in a range of mediums including drawing, ceramics, collage, fibers, and jewelry, among others.

The 73rd Annual Student Exhibition was organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts and Detroit Public Schools and is made possible with the support of the Ruth T. Cattell Education Endowment Fund, the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the City of Detroit. Additional support provided by General Motors Corporation, JP Morgan Chase, and MASCO Corporation.

On view at the Detroit Institute of Art through May 30, 2010. The museum has set up a Flickr page including a great amount of the kid’s work and some installation views. Some of the work is truly fantastic. (via Curated).

Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art plays host to “Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art” through July 25, 2010.

About the exhibition -

The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River in China is the world’s largest generator of hydro-electric power. When it was built, it displaced more than one million people and submerged more than 1,200 towns. This spring, the Nasher Museum presents “Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art,” in which four leading contemporary Chinese artists—Chen Qiulin, Yun-Fei Ji, Liu Xiaodong and Zhuang Hui—respond to the dam project.

A selection of images from the exhibition after the jump.

Occupying a very special place in the art world, Sewell Sillwell is subject of the groundbreaking exhibition Pushing Boundaries, on view through April 18 at the Florence Griswold Museum and then moving south to the Ashville Museum of Art.

At the tail end of the 1940s, Stillwell headed to Black Mountain College. There, he would become protege to Josef Albers, the Bauhaus master. Absorbing Albers’ approach to color, drawing, and design, Stillwell embarked on a multifaceted career in the arts. He taught Yale and at RISD. He produced his own colorful abstractions in water color. And, as half of publishing firm Ives-Stillman created some of the most important artist portfolios and screen prints of his era – for the likes of Frank Stella, Joseph Lawrence and more.

The exhibition follows all of Stillwell’s endeavors in the art world, connecting them to their time and place and providing proper context for the activity. Complementing the exhibition is a very concise and beautifully articulated catalog. At 32 pages, the publication fits a remarkable amount of material in and stands as superb primer for Sillwell’s career.

A few images of Sewell Sillwell after the jump.

Vienna’s Albertina Palais Museum hosts Cars an exhibition of works from the Daimler Collection through May 16, 2010. Included are many works by Andy Warhol – for instance Karl Benz and his Sales Associate, shown above – along with car related art from Robert Longo, Sylvie Fury and Vincent Szarek. The assembled pieces cover iconic automobiles and a sexy set of legs.

Albertina Palais Museum, Augustinerstraße 1, Vienna. (via Gestalten).

A short selection of exhibited works (and sexy legs) after the jump.

Opening tomorrow night, “Impermanent Bliss” helps to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of Philadelphia store/gallery Art in the Age. The assembled trio of artists (Kirk Bray, Matt LaFleur, and Eric Amling) all explore memory and its effects on our sense of self and place in their art work. Each artist works in mixed-media with their own individual flare.

Full information about the show can be found at Art in the Age. “Impermanent Bliss” runs through the end of the November.

Art in the Age is located at 116 N. 3rd, Philadelphia, PA.

More images from the exhibition follow.