Newest Reviews
U.S. Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
Unica Zürn
THE DRAWING CENTER
NEW YORK
Through July 23
Curated by João Ribas
Best known as an author who moved in Surrealist circles, Unica Zürn had a fascinating (if morbid) past: Berlin-born, she published short stories in German newspapers in the 1950s before moving to Paris with Hans Bellmer; there, her acquaintance with André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp left an indelible mark; severe mental illness—which began, Zürn claimed, after a 1957 encounter with poet Henri Michaux—led to her suicide in 1970. The fifty-some ink and watercolor works on paper produced between 1953 and her death on display here—including fantastical, cartoonlike sketches, illustrated anagram poetry, and pieces inspired by automatism of the ’20s and ’30s—highlight the oft-ignored centrality of drawing to the artist’s oeuvre. A selection of photographs, Zürn’s personal correspondence, and editions of her published writings will be installed among the artworks, providing helpful context within this tightly focused survey.
— Suzanne Hudson
Unica Zürn, Untitled, 1962, ink on paper, 12 3/8 x 9 1/4".
Aernout Mik
MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through July 27
Curated by Laurence Kardish
“I am intrigued by the figure of the extra,” Dutch artist Aernout Mik has said apropos of the anonymous figures in his films—who, like extras, seem content simply to be on the screen, without being the center of attention, as they move through his ominous and dream-like scenarios that dramatize contemporary forms of power and control. This retrospective features eight of Mik’s pieces, ranging from his earliest film, Fluff, 1996, to Schoolyard, 2009, a two-screen video installation commissioned for the occasion. Mik’s enigmatic images of collective bodies in cinematic movement will be shown throughout the museum in both gallery and nongallery spaces, prompting visitors to negotiate the complex forms of continuity between the activity on-screen and that in the places where his work is shown.
— Ina Blom
Aernout Mik, Schoolyard, 2009, looped color, silent two-channel video installation.
"The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984"
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
NEW YORK
Through August 2
Curated by Douglas Eklund
The label “Pictures Generation” conjures a loosely affiliated group of New York–based artists—the likes of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman—who exploited the slippage between categories of art and mass media to usher in the age of appropriation. With this presentation of approximately 160 works, curator Douglas Eklund seeks to expand the movement’s historical parameters, tracing its origins to the 1970s proving grounds of Hallwalls, a nonprofit art space in Buffalo, and to the classrooms of the California Institute of the Arts. While reframing well-known artists (look for very early, Prince-like advertising collages from both David Salle and James Welling), the show will also shed new light on others (such as Paul McMahon and Michael Zwack) who never quite blasted into the art-world stratosphere.
— Michael Lobel
Richard Prince, Untitled (four single men with interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right [detail]), 1977, mixed media, 23 x 19".
“University of Trash”
SCULPTURE CENTER
NEW YORK
Through August 3
Curated by Mary Ceruti and Sarina Basta
This May, artists Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman will use recycled and scavenged materials to transform SculptureCenter into a network of pavilions hosting workshops, talks, and film screenings, and a platform for investigating urbanism, alternative design, and the possibilities for pedagogy and activism inherent therein. The project owes much to the countercultural movements of the 1960s (the search for low-cost, environmentally sound “appropriate technology” for developing nations, for example), but its roots go deeper: to the “adventure playgrounds” of the ’40s, where children were invited to create structures for play from discarded construction scraps. A module made in collaboration with students from the alternative high school City-as-School will provide a site-specific anchor, engaging urban design issues relevant to SculptureCenter’s Queens neighborhood—homework for the summer, indeed.
— Suzanne Hudson
Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman, exhibition poster for “University of Trash,” 2009.
“Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward”
SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through August 23
Curated by Philip Allsopp, Thomas Krens, David van der Leer, Oskar Muñoz, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, and Margo Stipe
Freshly scrubbed after a three-year restoration, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum celebrates its golden anniversary with an exhibition devoted to the architect’s pioneering conception of space. Wright understood the exterior forms of his buildings as direct expressions of their interiors, a once-revolutionary idea that lost currency as cutting-edge architects increasingly approached their buildings as decorated sheds, abstract compositions, or the sheer articulation of structural concepts and programmatic needs. This exhibition promises a timely counterpoint, presenting more than two hundred original drawings, photographs, video animations, and historical and newly commissioned models relating to sixty-four projects spanning Wright’s vast and protean production.
— Scott Rothkopf
Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesen West, 1937–39, Scottsdale, AZ, 2009. © 2009 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Claes Oldenburg/Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
NEW YORK
Through August 30
Curated by Carter Foster, Chrissie Iles, and Dana Miller
The hard gone soft, the raw cooked: This is the Claes Oldenburg we know and love, the Oldenburg of Soft Toilet, 1966, and Giant BLT (Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich), 1963—shiny and tasty American wares fallen victim to gravity and deflation. But beginning in 1976, the artist’s collaborations with the late Coosje van Bruggen seemed to reverse course, stiffening into polished monumentality. While the Guggenheim and the National Gallery’s shared 1995 Oldenburg retrospective struggled to tie together these bodies of work, this survey leaves things largely bifurcated. Its first half, which includes rarely seen films, focuses on Oldenburg’s protean investigations of production, from The Store to soft sculptures to mid-’60s Happenings. Its second features his and van Bruggen’s little-known group of Brobdingnagian musical instruments, quite another take on collaboration and performance.
— Michelle Kuo
Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet—Ghost Version, 1966, canvas filled with kapok painted with acrylic, on metal, 51 x 33 x 28".
