Eva Hesse, Image 5: Studiowork, 1969.

“Eva Hesse: Studiowork”

CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE
LONDON
Through March 7
Curated by Briony Fer and Barry Rosen

Eva Hesse’s test pieces occupy a peripheral place in writings on the artist. As small as curios and variously shaped in latex, Sculp-metal, wire mesh, and wax, among other materials, they are typically seen as mere studies for the “major” works. It would seem that no aspect of Hesse’s art and life has escaped scrutiny: The artist’s drawings, her German works, and her paintings have each inspired recent shows, and it was almost inevitable that, like the croquetons of Seurat, Hesse’s test pieces would receive their due. Fortunately, the driving force here is Briony Fer, whose previous writings have thoroughly revised our understanding of process in postwar art and in Hesse’s work in particular. Neither merely monographic nor thematic, the show is that rare event: an exhibition generated by an idea.

— James Meyer

Theo van Doesburg, Simultaneous Counter-Composition, 1929–1930, oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 19 5/8".

“Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde”

TATE MODERN
LONDON
Through May 16
Curated by Vicente Todolí, Gladys Fabre, and Doris Wintgens Hötte

A chief exponent of De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg was anything but doctrinaire. Like the elemental shapes that logically expanded from his canvases to the world itself, his activities reached out to involve such seemingly antithetical developments as the early Bauhaus and Dada. Organized in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, the Netherlands (where the show is on view through January 3), this exhibition comprises more than three hundred pieces by van Doesburg and some eighty of the artists he affected, from Mondrian to Schwitters. The curators have gathered works of painting, sculpture, typography, poetry, music, film, furniture, interior design, and architecture—including model reconstructions of the collaboratively designed Café Aubette in Strasbourg, France—making visible the range of van Doesburg’s influential practice.

— Sean Keller

Chris Ofili, The Raising of Lazarus, 2007, 
oil and charcoal on linen, 
109 3/4 x 78 7/8".

Chris Ofili

TATE BRITAIN
LONDON
Through May 16
Curated by Judith Nesbitt

It takes guts to shed your clothes in public, but this, in effect, is what Chris Ofili has done in his paintings over the past five years. Layer by layer, he has peeled away the resin, glitter, and signature fecal excrescences that once made his canvases such dense and enthralling objects, laying bare the sinewy contours and flat fields of color that long served as hidden armatures. This shift makes all the more timely Ofili’s Tate retrospective of forty-five paintings (some never previously exhibited) and a selection of works on paper. Spanning from the mid-’90s until today, the show should illuminate the continuities and ruptures between Ofili’s recent and earlier output, as well as between media like drawing and painting, the former of which has gained new clarity and prominence in the latter’s domain.

— Scott Rothkopf

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 95".

Jack Goldstein

MMK MUSEUM FÜR MODERNE KUNST
FRANKFURT
Through January 10 2012
Curated by Klaus Görner

For decades, the reception of Jack Goldstein’s work has followed a cyclical pattern, whereby the complexity and wide-ranging influence of the artist’s practice snap into focus every few years, only to fade back into relative obscurity soon thereafter—a fitting pattern, perhaps, for a man who staged his own disappearance in various ways throughout his life. Starting as a post-Minimal sculptor based in Los Angeles during the early 1970s, Goldstein quickly moved into performances and films. The latter were initially made within the confines of his studio but by 1973 incorporated Hollywood techniques, with the artist’s own hand giving way to a producer’s cool attitude, which extended as well to his work in installation, sound, painting, and text. Later, such withdrawals became more literal: Shortly after his first full-scale retrospective at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Canada, in 1991, Goldstein abandoned the art world; his work generally ceased to be exhibited until another survey was organized, at the very end of the decade, by Fareed Armaly at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Around that time, Goldstein initiated a tentative comeback culminating in his largest retrospective to date, in 2002 at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble (Le Magasin) in France. Within months, a second, smaller exhibition of his films opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, immediately raising his profile in the United States. (Helping to that end, he restaged a 1979 performance between two boxers under strobe lights in tandem with the show.) But this moment in the public eye would be Goldstein’s last: The artist took his own life the following year, and presentations of his work, in both institutional and commercial settings, have been erratic and partial ever since, usually focusing on a specific medium or a single body of work.

The diverse Goldstein retrospective that appears at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst this fall, by contrast, seems uniquely positioned to inscribe Goldstein’s multifarious work once and for all into the art world’s collective consciousness. The moment is ripe, for two reasons. First, as is often cruelly the case, the artist’s cult status has grown exponentially since his death. (Unfortunately, this posthumous recognition has been accompanied by a dubious mythologizing of his life and tragic end, which has dampened much of the radical yield of his artistic posture as both elusive artist and producer.) Second, we are now witnessing a definitive institutionalization of those artists associated with the “Pictures Generation”—to borrow the name of the exhibition recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—to which Goldstein inescapably belongs. Indeed, he not only participated in key exhibitions and events for what seems (to some) the last coherent neo-avant-garde movement of global significance to come out of New York—including the original “Pictures” show curated in 1977 by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space—but helped an entire generation of politically engaged critics to gauge the terms of American art and, more important, to make a general prognosis on the fate of modernity in the artistic field.

Regarding the latter, it bears noting that Goldstein occupied something of an embattled, if emblematic, position. For instance, Crimp, writing in 1977, would place the artist foremost among those concerned with “the structure of signification, with that distance that separates us from the world and that constitutes our desire,” suggesting that he “maintains an allegiance to that radical aspiration that we continue to recognize as modernist.” But merely five years later, Craig Owens, writing in the pages of Art in America about Goldstein’s forays into painting, would suggest that Goldstein and his colleagues were complicit when it came to the reactionary forces in media they purported to critically engage. And this damning judgment would be echoed a decade later by Hal Foster, who, taking up Goldstein’s late “abstract” paintings, would see in them not any “cognitive mapping”—as advocated by Fredric Jameson—of advanced capitalist systems, but rather an endgame scenario: a full capitulation and awe before the effects of a capitalist sublime.

Today, such debates are receding from immediate memory or, more accurately, are as much in the process of becoming historicized as are Goldstein and his paintings’ cold-war, McLuhanesque phantasmagoria of foreboding cataclysm. One should also bear in mind that new generations of artists—many based in New York—have lately been seeking to redefine models of signification in our image-based sociopolitical reality. Many of these individuals do not so much build on the theoretical underpinnings of the Pictures artists as they profoundly displace the earlier presuppositions. In this context—and given this retrospective’s broad offering of twenty-five films and twenty-one canvases, along with drawings and records—it will be interesting to see what new Jack Goldstein emerges.

— Fabrice Stroun

John Baldessari, God Nose, 1965, oil on canvas, 68 x 57".

John Baldessari

MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA
BARCELONA
Through April 25
Curated by Leslie Jones and Jessica Morgan

“Pure Beauty” seems a funny name for a retrospective of an artist who cremated all his paintings in 1970 and voided the photographed faces of dozens of Hollywood starlets with signature colored spots, but of course an unsettlingly ironic humor runs through Baldessari’s career. This expansive exhibition should connect the proverbial dots with more than 130 works from five decades of collage, video, installation, and—yes— painting. In Los Angeles the artist’s influence looms (conspicuously) large. Accompanied by a catalogue with essays from Bice Curiger, David Salle, and ten others, Baldessari’s first British retrospective should reveal how far his pioneering brand of California Conceptualism extends.

— Michael Ned Holte

Thomas Schütte, Melone 1:5, 1986, wood and paint, eleven parts. Installation view, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, 1987. Photo: Tomasz Samek. © 2009 Thomas Schütte/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Thomas Schütte

MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
MADRID
Curated by Patrizia Dander and Thomas Weski

Using irony and subtle humor to challenge monumentality, Thomas Schütte’s work counters the “straightness” of modernity with gestures of stumbling and failing—a strategy that should prove key in taking on the bombastic architecture and difficult National Socialist past of Munich’s Haus der Kunst. Centered around an eighteen-foot-high Styrofoam and plaster “anti-monument”—here referencing Schütte’s “Mann im Matsch” (Man in Mud) series—this substantial survey brings together more than one hundred works made since the early 1980s, including sculptures, architectural models, watercolors, and ceramics. Curators Dander and Weski highlight Schütte’s reflections on “ambivalence, tension, and conflict” throughout this wide range of media, but the accompanying catalogue is dedicated solely to the artist’s newest watercolors.

— Dominikus Müller