Events

With its multitude of startling new artistic styles, Modernism has remained a source of inspiration for successive generations of later artists. It paved the way for the liberation of perspective, proportion, and colour from formal verisimilitude. This living legacy is vividly reflected in the new display of modern art from our own collection, now presented in relation to 80 contemporary works from the Goetz Collection. The joint display leads to a broadening of artistic media, away from the traditional collection core of paintings to include photography, sculpture, and textile art. Many of the more recent artists also take a critical look at this legacy of Western culture and question how art, then and now, deals with the body, gender, and identity. The show features the art of Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Louise Bourgeois, Fischli Weiss, Rodney Graham, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Oskar Schlemmer, Rosemarie Trockel, Woty Werner, Andrea Zittel, and many more.

Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) was among the generation of American artists in the first decades of the twentieth century who rejected realism in favor of portraying their inner emotional states. But unlike her peers, who based their abstractions on the exterior world, Pelton used her vocabulary of curvilinear, biomorphic forms and delicate, shimmering veils of light to depict the unseen forces she believed exist in nature. Pelton’s art was included in the 1913 Armory Show, but her decision to remove herself from the art world meant that even within her lifetime she was relatively unknown except for her participation in the short-lived Transcendental Painting Group (1938–1942). Its members, like Pelton, believed in numerology, astrology, and faith healing. Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, the first survey of her work in more than twenty-four years, brings together approximately forty paintings dating from 1917 to 1961 that will illuminate her artistic contribution to American modernism and place her art within the context of international spiritual and esoteric abstraction. Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, and curated by Gilbert Vicario, The Selig Family Chief Curator. The installation at the Whitney Museum is overseen by Barbara Haskell, curator, with Sarah Humphreville, senior curatorial assistant.

Starting from Helmar Lerski’s outstanding photo series Metamorphose – Verwandlungen durch Licht (Metamorphosis through Light) (1935/36), the exhibition Faces presents portraits from the period of the Weimar Republic. The 1920s and ’30s saw photographers radically renew the conventional understanding of the classic portrait: their aim was no longer to represent an individual’s personality; instead, they conceived of the face as material to be staged according to their own ideas. In this, the photographed face became a locus for dealing with avant-garde aesthetic ideas as well as interwar-period social developments. And it was thus that modernist experiments, the relationship between individual and general type, feminist roll-playing, and political ideologies collided in—and thereby expanded—the general understanding of portrait photography.

With this major retrospective of the work of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow (* 1944), Haus der Kunst 2021 opens a series of exhibitions in the museum’s East Wing dedicated to contemporary female voices. Phyllida Barlow‘s sculptural structures are unwieldy and difficult to take in: timber, cardboard, cement, clay, plastic pipes, and colorful textiles pile up, spread out, or block the visitors’ way. The view ranges over these landscapes made of everyday materials, unsure what to hold on to, and drifts up to grasp their enormous dimensions. Barlow‘s works pose a constant challenge; they conquer the space as if they led a life of their own. They invite viewers to reconsidering spaces, perceive volume, and hear the language of architecture.

In the first exhibition highlight of the year, three outstanding artists – Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Georg Kolbe, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – are being brought together for the first time at Haus Lange in Krefeld. Figurative sculpture, as repeatedly integrated into designs and buildings by the architect Mies van der Rohe, is thus placed in direct dialog with the building, the design, and the gardens of Haus Lange. The background for the interplay between architecture and sculpture is the natural-philosophical climate, which, in the early twentieth century, influenced a wide range of disciplines. On display will be roughly twenty-five sculptures by Lehmbruck and Kolbe as part of the organic body of Haus Lange.

Beautiful and expressive art? Or images of racial thinking and oppression? This spring’s major exhibition at SMK tells a lesser-known, darker story about the two famous artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Emil Nolde (1867–1956). Two giants of modern art Kirchner and Nolde are both prominent figures within modern visual art. As painters, they played an important role in the Expressionist movement which quickly shot to fame in the early twentieth century, becoming known for its bold colours and strong, energetic brushstrokes.

DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present Louis Alphonse Poitevin, an exhibition honoring an outstanding inventor, chemist, engineer, researcher, artist and photographer, and one of the most important characters in the development of photography as we know it today. For more than 35 years, Louis Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882) experimented with chemical and mechanical processes in search of a printable and longer-lasting photograph. He recognized early on that photography had the potential to revolutionize how mass-produced books were illustrated. His work brought that revolution about, creating the first practical process for printing photographs, as illustrations within books, on an industrial scale. This exhibition of Alphonse Poitevin’s work, featuring 47 rare photographs, offers the opportunity for an in-depth view into some of his most prescient inventions. Poitevin is remembered today most for establishing the fundamental principles of four non-silver process families: photolithography, collotype, dichromate relief systems, and the carbon pigment process.

A unique international exhibition project is the result of cooperation between two large national museums: the Tretyakov Gallery and the Dresden State Art Collections. More than 150 paintings by German and Russian Romantics in all their versatility will reveal this complex direction in art that has manifested itself in various ways in Russia and Germany. The exhibition will feature works by such famous artists of the 19th century as Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus, Johann Overbeck, Alexander Ivanov, Orest Kiprensky, and Karl Bryullov. The exhibition will be complemented by the most striking works of modern art reflecting the romantic impulse, so that Romanticism could be seen through the eyes of a 21st century person.

ICA Miami presents a comprehensive survey for Chakaia Booker, an artist whose iconic works have been under-recognized for their formal vitality and their contributions to American art. Since 1993 Booker has created a striking, beautiful, and political signature style, assembling cast-off tires into monumental landscapes. Spanning four decades of the artist’s work, this exhibition introduces Booker’s vital visual language while showcasing the variety of her explorations.

Tammam Azzam’s paper collages and acrylic paintings have been “pictures without names” for twenty years. He leaves it to the beholder to interpret them. Are the works abstract? Or are they figurative, and if so: what do they show? Do they show destruction in Syria, a country at war for ten years now, without the global community being able to find a solution? Or does he paint his new home city Berlin? A city that is always becoming, and never just is, and also a city where there are still traces of the wounds and gaps left by the Second World War and the city’s division from 1945 to 1989.

The exhibition at the ALBERTINA Museum presents one of the most important Austrian painters of our time. The main focus of the show is on Xenia Hausner’s practice of staging so characteristic of her work. For her paintings, Hausner first constructs and then photographs spatial settings in her studio. Automobile fragments or train compartments thus naturally become inhabited places, peculiar scenarios in which trivial objects are co-actors. It is in these environments that her protagonists interact. Her figures emancipate themselves within a predominantly female cosmos and assume roles in Hausner’s stories, which resist clear interpretation. In fragmentary montages, the artist confronts us with our innate contradictions in close-up views that we are loathe to permit. And it is indeed precisely the fiction of these works that makes it possible for Hausner, her gaze thus sharpened, to apprehend underlying truths and reveal them visually. This exhibition is conceived as a retrospective, beginning with Xenia Hausner’s initial works from the 1990s and advancing to include her recent moving series, the "Exiles".

The Palo Alto Art Center is pleased to present The Black Index, a group exhibition featuring the work of Dennis Delgado, Alicia Henry, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, Whitfield Lovell, and Lava Thomas. The artists featured in The Black Index build upon the tradition of Black self representation as an antidote to colonialist images. Using drawing, performance, printmaking, sculpture, and digital technology to transform the recorded image, these artists question our reliance on photography as a privileged source for documentary objectivity and understanding. Their works offer an alternative practice—a Black index—that still serves as a finding aid for information about Black subjects, but also challenges viewers’ desire for classification.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the only East Coast venue for a major traveling exhibition devoted to Senga Nengudi, a leading figure of the 1970s Black American avant-garde and a pioneering artist of our time. Marked by her innovative use of everyday materials that range from water and sand to pantyhose and air conditioning units, Nengudi’s work bridges the mediums of sculpture and performance, offering a cross-disciplinary investigation into the personal experiences of the Black female body and the collective impulses of community and ritual.

With Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Andreas Gursky, and Jeff Wall, the exhibition spotlights four master photographers whose visual constructions call into question the possibilities and limits of human perception and the photographic medium. Both in analogue and digital form, these artists create unconventional perspectives on reality. Their spectrum of subjects ranges from fleeting scenes of daily life to enigmatic incidents and historic events. The point of connection between the works lies in the artists’ shared intention to combine the traditional documentary aspect of photography with fictional elements. In so doing, they generate visual disruptions, encouraging viewers to question their own impressions of reality.

In the winter of 1954–55, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) realised a long-held desire. The 73-year-old painted a response to Eugène Delacroix’s famous work Women of Algiers, of which he produced two versions as a memento of his 1832 journey to North Africa. Over three months, Picasso created a series of 15 oil paintings, which were accompanied by some 100 sketches and lithographs. Picasso’s response to Delacroix is not a single picture but a series of images which only remained together as a discrete ensemble for a short time. Today, Museum Bergruen is the only public museum in Europe that has one of the paintings from this series on exhibit. Alongside paintings and works on paper from the Femmes d’Alger series, the exhibition will also feature works that inspired Picasso, as well as some that he himself inspired.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Salzburg Festival, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg is showing the first retrospective exhibition of the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE (1962 London, UK) in Austria. Shonibare is one of Great Britain’s most important and versatile artists. In his works he examines the legacy of colonialism and slavery and its traces in the present. He became known through installations with headless figures in historical costumes made of colorful batik fabrics, with which Shonibare staged in a theatrical way the pleasures and behaviors of the so-called Leisure Class. The exhibition brings together around 60 works from the last 30 years.

Leif Trenkler (*1960) is regarded as one of the most important protagonists of New Figuration in Germany. He has played an important role in this contemporary movement and has achieved international success. His fascinating painting is created by using new colour constructions, a nuanced technique and unusual compositions employing oil on wood.

Marking the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés' landfall in the Gulf of Mexico, this major exhibition offers a fascinating insight into Aztec culture. At the centre of the exhibition are two unique feather shields and a nephrite jade figurine from the Württemberg State Museum, objects that have never been presented in the context of Aztec culture. These exquisite treasures will be complemented by high-quality objects loaned from Mexican and European institutions. Another focal point of this exhibition will be the presentation of the latest research results; for example, previously undisclosed findings regarding the great temple, the Templo Mayor, first discovered in 1978, will be on display. Impressive stone sculptures, ceramics, mosaics and gold works will provide a glimpse into Aztec art and culture, with vivid illustrations from colourful illuminated manuscripts bringing the visitor deeper into the subject. The dramaturgy of the exhibition follows the journey of Cortés from the peripheral provinces all the way to the sacred ceremonial precinct of the capital, Tenochtitlán.

Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is internationally celebrated for bringing Indo-Persian miniature-painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary art practice. This exhibition tracks the first fifteen years of this artistic journey, from her groundbreaking deconstruction of miniature painting in Pakistan to the development of a new personal vocabulary at RISD, expanded explorations around identity as a Core fellow at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and her global outlook during her first years in New York. During this period, Sikander richly interrogated gender, sexuality, race, class, and history, creating open-ended narratives that have sustained her work as one of the most significant artists working today.