Events

For some time now, tense conditions have shaped our everyday lives. Whether its curfews, violence or the search for one's own identity, we are constantly in the process of readjusting and getting our bearings. Artists respond to the vulnerability and confusion that lies in control, racial discrimination and exclusion. The uncertainty and instability that we experience every day is represented in their work. The new collection presentation will show contemporary artworks from Scharpff-Striebich's private art collection confronted with twentieth-century works from the Staatsgalerie's own collection. These works highlight the complex and contradictory nature of our society.

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.

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.

German artist Katharina Grosse has become internationally known for her large on-site paintings, which she sprays across objects, architectural structures and landscapes. In her first solo exhibition in Finland, Grosse will be taking over both of the arched halls on the upper floor of HAM. On display will be two new pieces for which the artists will transform the exhibition spaces into massive, all-encompassing spatial works of art. Grosse will be painting one of the two pieces on-site, using the bright and vibrant colours characteristic of her art. Defying the conventions of two-dimensionality, Grosse’s paintings can be considered a form of intervention, painting as she does over architecture and surfaces while paying no heed to boundaries, or as a membrane between different realities. Grosse paints on all conceivable media, both indoors and out. An industrial spray gun provides the artist with the reach necessary to create her massive pieces. Grosse’s rapid way of working allows her to seamlessly translate thought into action. She uses acrylic paints and ready-made industrial colours that are only mixed to form new tones upon reaching the surface being painted. The finished paintings reflect the artist’s train of thought and movement within the space.

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.

Over the course of their nearly twenty-year partnership, Anton Kimbel (1822–1895) and Joseph Cabus (1824–1898) developed one of New York City's leading furniture and decorating firms. Sons of German and French cabinetmaking families, they defined a new take on Modern Gothic design, a style that originated in Britain and was embraced by a growing middle class in the post–Civil War United States. Combining British and continental European design sources, Kimbel and Cabus's furniture forms featured bold, clean lines and rich surface decoration, and the firm used innovative production techniques to offer these striking artistic objects at a variety of prices.

The elephant is a much-admired animal, but it is also endangered. The ivory from its tusks has been in great demand across the centuries and throughout all cultures. What sort of material is it? How has it been used in the past and the present? And what can we do today to protect the world’s largest mammals from poachers?

The dialogue between Classical Modernism and contemporary art from the Sammlung Goetz continues to be extremely popular with the public. As a consequence, the exhibition has not only been extended until 16 January 2022 but enriched by the curators with new juxtapositions. Some of the thematically conceived rooms have been completely redesigned and and show works by Carla Accardi, Michael Buthe, Marcel Odenbach, Tom Sachs, Egon Schiele, Cindy Sherman, Tatiana Trouvé, Luc Tuymans, among others, which now complement the presentation and create further dialogues between Classical Modernism and contemporary art.

Dance is communication. From contemporary collaborations or the first happenings of the Japanese Butoh dancers and the pioneers of Modern dance, Global Groove explores the cultural history of contact between the West and the Far East – going back even to the early performances by Asian dancers in Europe around 1900. Photographs, paintings, sculptures, films and live actions reveal the role played by the language of dance in the political and cultural transformation of societies.

In 1969, Angela Davis, a twenty-six-year-old black activist, was fired from her teaching position at UCLA, accused of involvement in a shootout that resulted in the deaths of four men, put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and spent several months as a fugitive. In October, she was arrested in New York and returned to California to stand trial. Her image became the focus and the tool of an unprecedented international effort to free an incarcerated black woman. Her trial and acquittal, in 1972, made her a lightning rod for fears and hopes on the right and left about revolutionary change and she has remained an active agent of change in the years since.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Emil Nolde (1867–1956) are leading figures in the German Expressionist movement. Turning away from Western society and the established norms of bourgeois culture, the artists looked to people, lifestyles and objects from other parts of the world for inspiration, especially Africa and Oceania.

Textures synthesizes research in history, fashion, art, and visual culture to reassess the “hair story” of peoples of African descent. Long a fraught topic for African Americans and others in the diaspora, Black hair is here addressed by artists, barbers, and activists in both its historical perceptions and its ramifications for self and society today. Combs, products, and implements from the collection of hair pioneer Willie Morrow are paired here with masterworks from artists including James Van Der Zee, Sonya Clark, Lorna Simpson, Mary Sibande and Zanele Muholi. Exploring topics such as the preferential treatment of straight hair, the social hierarchies of skin, and the power and politics of display, Textures is a landmark exploration of Black hair and its important, complicated place in the history of African American life and culture. The exhibition is organized by the KSU Museum with co-curators, Joseph L. Underwood, assistant professor of art history at KSU and Tameka Ellington, associate professor at the Fashion School at KSU.

Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia is the first mid-career survey of Columbian artist Oscar Muñoz’s work in the United States. Although he has had large-scale retrospectives throughout Europe and Latin America, this exhibition will introduce US audiences to a broad scope of his evolving practice. Beginning with his early, stark charcoal drawings from the late 1970s and early 1980s, whose approach to light and shade continued to impact his aesthetic in later photographic and video works, the exhibition will include approximately 50 exemplary works from his most evocative series created during the late 1980s, 1990s and 2000s to the present day, including site-specific work. In addition, at each venue, Muñoz will recreate local iterations of his Lugar a dudas (Room for Doubt) workshops, which he founded in Cali in 2006 as a hub for young artists to participate in public dialogue and debate about art and politics. Opening at Phoenix Art Museum in the fall of 2020, Invisibilia will be accompanied by the first comprehensive bilingual catalogue of his production, with contributions by leading scholars in the field.

His entire life long, he was plagued by poverty, strokes of fate, drug excesses, and severe illness, with his earnings as an artist sufficing only to cover his rent and the barest necessities. But today, works by Amedeo Modigliani—a native of Livorno, Italy who died in his studio in 1920 at just 35 years of age—number among the most expensive, with individual paintings fetching nine-figure sums.

In 1921/22 Édouard Vuillard created a cycle of six paintings for the entrance hall of the Villa Bauer in Basel. Four large-format pictures show exhibition rooms in the Louvre from Antiquity to French Rococo painting. Two sopraporte provide an intimate insight into the artist’s art collection.