The Armory Show-The International Fair of New Art officially closes later today in New York City, with hundreds of galleries exhibiting thousands of artists in the West Side’s Pier 94. The Armory Show was introduced in 1999 and took place at the 69th Regiment Armory, the site of the famed Armory Show of 1913 that introduced modern art to America. This year’s show introduced The Armory Show-Modern on Pier 92, a new section devoted to historically significant modern and contemporary art.

The Armory Show’s 2009 commissioned artist, Ewan Gibbs has created the identity of the show with his grisaille drawings, executed with strictly straight and diagonal pencil lines. The stunning precision of these lines is tempered by the hazy familiarity of Gibbs’ quintessentially New York subject matter, displaying scenes of quotidian street life as well as iconic architecture. Gibbs’ compelling contemporary work is rooted in traditional technique, making him a satisfying and suitable choice for representing the Armory Show and The Armory Show-Modern.

The Armory Show is open March 5th-8th from noon until 8pm.

Galeria OMR, a Mexico City gallery representing several prominent and emerging Mexican and international contemporary artists, is a participating exhibitor in this years Armory Show at Pier 94. The gallery, which represents Mexican and Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose work is represented above, is showing several interactive works including a piece by the artist composed of a video sensor and LED screen, similar to previous works such as Third Person, Close Up, and Blow Up. The artist works with sophisticated technological media, often incorporating performance art and relational architecture.

In 2008, the artist produced Pulse Park, an interactive installation experience which took place in New York City at Madison Square Park. By measuring the systolic and diastolic activity of participants and viewers, Pulse Park manifested as a series of light beams capable of a range of lighting intensity. This intensity was manipulated by the viewers’ vital signs as this public space was lit by a constant flux of biometric rhythms.

Galeria OMR is located in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City and is currently showing photographs by German artist Candida Hofer until the end of March.

Candice Breitz‘s cinematic new work, Him+Her, is currently showing at Yvon Lambert in New York. The exhibition includes two seven channel installations, Him (1968-2008) and Her (1978-2008). Breitz gleaned footage from the distinguished film careers of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, uniting 23 Jacks from forty years of acting into conversation with one another in one room of the gallery, and 28 Meryl Streeps from thirty years of films in another room. Each installation includes seven large plasma screens, each playing assorted film clips of multiple Meryls and Jacks as they seamlessly interact in a compelling and psychologically probing piece.

The loose conversations taking place between the myriad of characters engage ideas of gender and self-definition. Nicholson’s mulitiple manifestations, naturally, highlight themes of male sexuality and dominance, while various women from Streep’s illustrious career interact with one another exchanging quips on relationships and men. The artist’s ability to cleverly manipulate these performances into one incredible installation mirrors the captivating beauty and talent of the actors themselves. Him+Her will remain at Yvon Lambert until March 21st.

Milan’s Carla Sozzani hip gallery at 10 Corso Como is currently celebrating Guy Bourdin‘s provocative, masterful photography. The exhibition includes the section A Message for You, which presents a series of photographs dating back mainly to the 1970’s, and Unseen, showing works from the artist’s own archive. Seductive, glossy, sometimes disturbing and doubtlessly radical, Bourdin’s works are a perverse and superb aesthetization of recurrent themes such as death, desire, and sex. Suicide, murder, pleasure and pain, but also decadence, glamor and a quest for perfection, are the components that define most of the images. Inspired by Surrealism and its fascination for transgression, the irrational and the uncanny, Bourdin envisions fantastic plots that make his fashion photography look delightfully attractive and impenetrable. He definitely succeeds in combining ground-breaking commercial campaigns and fashion advertising with his dark, gloomy, and even perverse modality of vision. He also seems to be well aware of the fact that it’s not the fashion item per se but the image to attract us as viewers, and this probably explains why we cannot help but be intrigued, if not utterly captured, by the beauty of his greatly charged images. What is apparent is that each one of his photographs is not a simple medium subjected to presenting a product but becomes a place where Bourdin the artist asserts his idea of photography as art.

Born in Paris in 1928, Guy Bourdin is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of fashion and advertising of the 20th century. Influenced by the well-known Surrealist photographer Man Ray, and by the work of many other Surrealists like Magritte and Balthus, Bourdin worked for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and shot a variety of advertising campaigns for many fashion designers such as Chanel, Ungaro and Versace. He died of cancer in Paris in 1991. His first retrospective was held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2003.

San Francisco’s Baer Ridgway Exhibitions is currently presenting Tell Everyone That You’re Smiling, new works by Seattle-based artist Tyler Cufley. This marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with Baer Ridgway, following his exhibition last year titled Ready Set Go! Tell Everyone That You’re Smiling features a mix of the artist’s new works including sculpture, painting, photography. While the work seems to be firmly rooted in formalism, with a closer look the viewer is able to decipher political ideas as well. The press release states, “Cufley addresses the role of revolution and radicalism for both aesthetics and politics by creating works that perform color field painting or geometric abstraction and are juxtaposed with meaningful subjects from America’s political history. An important conflation between modernist aesthetics and radical politics is now a central trope for Cufley’s practice.”

The artist was born in San Francisco and received his M.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Since graduation, Cufley has exhibited with Howard House in Seattle, Three Walls Gallery in Chicago and Acuna Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles, among several others.

The Ingleby Gallery‘s current exhibition, Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, centers a selection of contemporary art around what the gallery asserts to be the theme of transformation. Francis Alys‘ Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) headlines the exhibition. The video documents Alys pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts and ultimately disappears. While superficially inane, the action poignantly demonstrates the often meaningless nature of humanity’s travails. In the end, Alys’ act can be seen to celebrate the nothingness it reveals.

Transformation is manifest squarely in the gallery with Peter Liversidge’s Cohen versus California. The large floral tribute reading “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric” changes over the period of the exhibition as the chrysanthemums decay and fall from the work, pointing to temporality as well as the multiplicity of meaning found within the quotation. In Liversidge’s A Pair of Kestrels we see the very literal transformation of the body from life to death through the juxtaposition of a taxidermied kestrel and its skeleton.

Cornelia Parker’s Thirty Pieces of Silver (Exhaled) (Water Jug) transforms silver from primarily utilitarian into the purely aesthetic. Iran do Espirito Santo (whose work was featured at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2000 as well as the Istanbul Biennal in 2000) also alters the everyday in his Can series. Espirito Santo aggrandizes the can by superimposing its enlarged form upon black granite, elevating it to the realm of sculpture.

The paintings of Callum Innes and Alexander and Susan Maris negate the additive nature of painting. Innes creates minimal images on blackened canvases through “unpainting” or removing pigment. Alexander and Susan Maris cover canvases in gray pigment containing the ashes of Jacques Derrida’s text The Truth in Painting.

Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing is on view at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh through 28 March 2009.

Dutch artist Ruud Van Empel is currently presenting Souvenir, Dawn, Moon, World, his third exhibition with the Chelsea-based Stux Gallery. Within this new series, the artist further pushes his unique photographic aesthetic. The photographs feature the artist’s iconic childlike characters depicted in an erie light. The show also introduces new bronze-cast sculptures, bringing the same characters to life in a new form. The artist continuously challenges the notion of truth and possibility with photography through the use of subtle digital manipulation, destroying the fine line between the real and the impossible.

Van Empel has internationally and has 4 additional solo exhibitions scheduled this year. The artist will exhibit DAWN at Gallery Terra Tokyo in Japan and Flatlands in Paris, SOUVENIR at TZR Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany and RUUD VAN EMPEL PHOTOWORKS at Leica Galerie in Prague, Chech Republic.