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.
Luc Tuymans, Der Diagnostische Blick V (The Diagnostic View V), 1992, oil on canvas, 22 7/8 x 16 1/2".
Luc Tuymans
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
SAN FRANCISCO
Through May 2
Curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth
After almost twenty-five years of mature production, Luc Tuymans’s reputation precedes him, and the contours of his artistic accomplishment are finally coming into focus. With his muted palette and pared-down painterly vocabulary, the Belgian artist has developed a personal yet remarkably resonant practice that embraces the limits of perception and communication while arguing vehemently for his medium as a vital, critical art form. As large as Tuymans looms in contemporary painting conversations, however, this seventy-work retrospective, which unites long-separated series and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Bill Horrigan and Joseph Leo Koerner, among others, is his first substantial American showing, but it promises to make up for lost time with unprecedented depth.
— Jordan Kantor
Stephen Prina, The Way He Always Wanted It III, 2009, 35-mm film transferred to DVD, three Panasonic PT-LB800 projectors, two M-Audio Bx5a speakers, Kramer Audio splitter, Pioneer Pro DVD V7400 player, Monster audio cable, Baltic birch plywood, carpet. 3 minutes 9 seconds; 58 x 19 x 58".
Stephen Prina: Modern Movie Pop
CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS
ST. LOUIS
Through April 11
Curated by Laura Fried
Like Clark Kent and Superman, Stephen Prina, artist, and Stephen Prina, musician, have each customarily stepped aside to allow the other free rein. But that’s beginning to change as Stephen Prina, Renaissance man, experiments with the conjunction and recombination of his roles. Along with an orchestral composition in which elements of Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments are fused with Prina’s film sound tracks and a hodgepodge of pop tunes (by Prina and others), this diverse show features monochrome paintings on window blinds and a three-channel film installation the artist describes as a “movable stage spectacle.” Arranging these and other works so that their themes bleed together, Prina promises to reveal a thoroughgoing interest not only in the interaction of various media but also in the confluence of historical, modernist, and contemporary influences.