Events

George Segal (1924–2000) has been the subject of four major retrospectives and has been included in many national and international exhibitions, including the groundbreaking New Realists show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (1962). While the artist has long been acknowledged as one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century, his work as a painter, in pastels, and in photography is less well known. George Segal: Themes and Variations examines the artist’s work in all media as a series of variations on themes that he mined throughout his long career—figural groups, the nude, still life, and portraits.

The Perimeter is proud to announce a solo exhibition of Shuvinai Ashoona. Shuvinai Ashoona makes drawings which engage with the complexities of life, land and community in the Canadian Arctic, through fantastical motifs and modes of storytelling. The work interweaves scenes from everyday Arctic life with imagery associated with Inuit animism and shamanism. This is the first time Ashoona’s works will be shown in Europe since receiving a Special Mention by the awards jury at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, for her installation of six drawings in The Milk of Dreams.

John Martin was born in 1963 in Marks, Mississippi, and now lives and works at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. Martin's art, which includes drawings, ceramics, and woodwork, blends memories of his family farm in Mississippi with his current urban life in Oakland. His work often features images of trucks, snakes, pocket knives, cell phones, and other items from his collection of found objects. These items have been a significant part of his work since he began at Creative Growth in 1987. Martin's art not only captures the function of these objects but also plays with their practicality, creating extraordinary animal combinations, oversized Leatherman tools, and enigmatic text. In his unique style, fish transform into knives, alligators turn into saws, and John himself is reimagined as a Nokia phone. A multi-tool unfolds to reveal a smiling shark. Martin's clever humor shines through his work, transforming everyday items into a dynamic and illustrative visual language.

Otto Piene (1928−2014) aimed high with his art: to shape a more harmonious, peaceful, and sustainable world. His expansive view explored new media and projected aesthetic forms and experiences into new spatial realms.

Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld unites over 30 sculptures and paintings by two renowned artists who have explored humanity’s strained relationship with the environment for over 30 years. Both Dion and Rockman have achieved international prominence for their own distinctive practices. They conduct intensive research, using allegory, dark humor, and popular culture to convey their message. Each subverts the authority and objectivity of museums of art and natural history. They ground their studio practice in science and close observation but present it as theater. The title, "Journey to Nature’s Underworld," holds various meanings, including mythic abodes, archaeology, Earth’s subsurface, and unconscious beliefs about nature. Dion and Rockman reflect on our culture's harmful course, balancing the wonder and woe of nature’s condition. Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld was curated by Suzanne Ramljak, Chief Curator of Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, and organized by the American Federation of Arts.

Samia Halaby (b. 1936) is a pioneer in twentieth-century abstraction and computer-generated art. Born in Jerusalem, Halaby trained as a painter, earning an MFA at Indiana University, where she joined the faculty before becoming the first woman associate professor at the Yale School of Art, a position she held for a decade. Halaby was also an early practitioner of digital art, generating "kinetic paintings" of colorful shapes, sounds, and textures on a late 1980s Amiga computer. Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy is her first American survey, featuring more than forty paintings, prints, drawings, and computer-generated works of art from across six decades. The exhibition presents a chronological development of her artistic approach to abstraction, examining formal and thematic relationships across bodies of work. Halaby’s recent explorations in large-scale painting will be exhibited alongside her early forays into abstraction, with examples of her drawing and printing practice incorporated throughout. Significantly, her kinetic painting will be reanimated with a new artwork in the museum’s Time-based Media gallery. The exhibition is supported in part by the Jane Fortune Endowment for Women Artists, David Phillips, and the IU Bloomington Public Arts and Humanities Project Grant.

Matisse and the Sea is the first exhibition to examine the significance of the sea across Modernist artist Henri Matisse’s career, which included artwork in coastal locations on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. Marine imagery was an important catalyst for Matisse’s artistic experimentation—most notably in the Saint Louis Art Museum’s own iconic painting Bathers with a Turtle.

In spring and summer 2024, Nationalmuseum will be hosting an exhibition on Harriet Backer who, besides Edvard Munch, was Norway’s most influential artist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Backer was one of the most prominent colourists and portrayers of light and atmosphere in interiors. The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the National Museum in Oslo, Kode in Bergen, Musée d’Orsay in Paris and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Harriet Backer (1845–1932) was a pioneer on many levels and the exhibition highlights the innovative qualities of her art, as well as her central position in the Norwegian art scene at the turn of the twentieth century. How did she become such a prominent figure in Norwegian art? Why did a whole generation of young painters, men and women alike, choose to become her pupils and successors?

The Kunsthalle München presents the first major retrospective on Dutch fashion artists Viktor&Rolf in Germany. For more than three decades, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren have been exploring with breathtaking virtuosity the boundaries between the worlds of haute couture and art. Celebrated for their unconventional approach to design, their creations have been embraced by artists such as Madonna, Tilda Swinton, Lady Gaga, Doja Cat, and Cardi B and were staged in numerous ballets, as well as in an opera directed by Robert Wilson. Reflecting the duo’s passions, obsessions and singular vision, the spectacular scenography will showcase 100 of their most daring creations—many exhibited for the first time—along with numerous videos, sketches, dolls dressed in the designers’ iconic creations, and works by renowned visual artists like Andreas Gursky and Cindy Sherman.

"Monuments and Myths" is the exhibition to examine the intersecting careers of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, the leading American sculptors of the Gilded Age. With rich new thinking and stunning photographs, this exhibition examines the role of America’s most iconic public sculptures in the complex negotiation of national identity.

Following World War II, hundreds of artists from the United States flocked to the City of Light, which for centuries had been heralded as an artistic mecca and international cultural capital. Americans in Paris explores a vibrant community of expatriates who lived in France for a year or more during the period from 1946 to 1962. Many were ex-soldiers who took advantage of a newly enacted GI Bill, which covered tuition and living expenses; others, including women, financed their own sojourns. Showcased here are some 130 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, textiles, and works on paper by nearly 70 artists, providing a fresh perspective on a creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendency of the New York art scene. The show focuses on a diverse core of twenty-five artists—some who are established, even canonical, figures, and others who have yet to receive the recognition their work deserves. A complementary section dubbed the “Salon” combines works by French and foreign artists that the Americans would have seen in Parisian galleries or annual salons, alongside examples by compatriots who likewise spent at least a year residing in France during this time.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna’s 2024 spring exhibition is devoted to three outstanding pioneers of the Renaissance north of the Alps: Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Burgkmair, and Albrecht Dürer. It offers a golden opportunity to experience fascinating works by these artists and to explore how Augsburg became the birthplace of the Northern Renaissance.

Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other is a mid-career survey of the artist’s work with a focus on her community-centered and participatory projects. Over her twenty-five-year career, Clark has been committed to issues of history, race, and reconciliation. Clark often undertakes this exploration through everyday fiber materials—hair, flags, found fabric—and craft practices. In Clark’s work, craft and community are intertwined, and the resulting projects facilitate new collective encounters across racial, gender, and socioeconomic divisions. The ethos of her participatory work is embedded in the title We Are Each Other. It is inspired by the poem about civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1971) by Gwendolyn Brooks, which ends with the phrase: “we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

In spring 2024, the Kunst Museum Winterthur celebrates the long-awaited reopening of the unique collection of Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser in Villa Flora with the exhibition Bienvenue! After ten years, the masterpieces now return to the comprehensively renovated home of the collectors in a new presentation. Featuring works from the Hahnloser Collection and a selection of loans, the presentation traces the advent of French modernism from Impressionism and Postimpressionism to the Nabis and Fauves. Alongside reputable artistic pioneers such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir are presented with bodies of works by the Hahnlosers’ artist friends from the circles of Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton, Odilon Redon, and Henri Matisse. Sculpture is also included, with a significant selection of works by Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol. This exhibition celebrating the reopening of Villa Flora allows visitors to experience turn-of-the-century avant-garde art in unusual concentration and quality. It will now be possible to experience the ground-breaking Winterthur spirit for French modernism, particularly the unusual commitment of Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser, in the place where this first-class collection was created.

In 1532, Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) embarked on a journey to Rome. From his five-year stay in the Eternal City, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin has preserved a unique collection of around 160 drawings. These include wide panoramas and city views as well as studies of ancient ruins and sculptures. This outstanding collection will be on view in its entirety for the first time next year, 450 years after the artist's death. In addition to the virtuoso drawings, which are also important pictorial sources on the history of Rome during the Renaissance, paintings, books, prints and plaster casts will also be on display. The Kupferstichkabinett Berlin owns two spectacular adhesive albums with around 160 drawings by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574), which were made in Rome between 1532 and 1536/37. During these years he strolled through the city, visited art collections and antique gardens, made pilgrimages to the holy sites, and filled his sketchbook with drawings. In this way he compiled an extensive fund of motifs from which he was to draw throughout his life. After his death, the drawings were passed on, first to artists, later to collectors. Individual sheets were sold on, the majority were probably pasted into two albums in the 18th century – together with other drawings by other artists. Thus the core stock of Van Heemskerck's Roman drawings remained together until today, a unique case in art history. In 1886 and 1892, the two albums entered the holdings of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett; since then, they have never been exhibited in their entirety.