News
Diary
Picks
International 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.
Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda XIII, 1936, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 31 5/8" © Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World”
MONTRÉAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS | JEAN-NOËL DESMARAIS PAVILION
MONTREAL
Through May 13
Curated by Barbara Haskell
Born in New York in 1871, Lyonel Feininger set off in 1887 to study art in Germany, where he enjoyed a successful practice as a graphic artist and caricaturist. He was active in the Berlin Secession and went on to teach at the Bauhaus; it was Feininger’s woodcut Cathedral, 1919, that served as the cover illustration for Walter Gropius’s epochal Bauhaus manifesto. But Feininger’s work was subsequently denounced as degenerate by the National Socialists, and he returned to the United States in 1937. Encompassing the full range of his production, from graphic art to abstract and figurative painting to photography, the Whitney’s retrospective will be the first in the US since 1966. An exhibition catalogue will feature essays by curator Barbara Haskell, curatorial assistant Sasha Nicholas, Ulrich Luckhardt, Bryan Gilliam, and John Carlin.
— Brigid Doherty
General Idea, P is for Poodle, 1983, color photograph, 30 x 25".
General Idea
ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO
TORONTO
Curated by Frédéric Bonnet and Odile Burluraux
“Haute Culture: General Idea, a Retrospective, 1969–1994” will change the image of Conceptual art as “lab test” into something much more fabulous. Emerging out of the 1960s Canadian counterculture, which accepted and even encouraged polymorphous perversity, General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal) established itself as an outfit of anti-art art-pranksters, living their work as theater and working prolifically to exploit every medium. In this show, which spans the group’s activity from 1969 until Partz and Zontal died of aids in 1994, we’ll see how they chilled us, thrilled us, confounded us, or just pissed us off—always delivering an extraordinary display of control over both format and dissemination. The exhibition catalogue features a previously unpublished 1991 interview with the artists.
— Gregg Bordowitz
Michael Morris, Paris Letter, 1967, acrylic on canvas, mirror, Plexiglas, 6’ ½” x 10’ ¾”.
“Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry”
MORRIS AND HELEN BELKIN ART GALLERY
VANCOUVER
Through April 8
Curated by Scott Watson and Michael Turner
Flickering in and out of fashion since the 1950s, concrete poetry offers a model of interdisciplinary practice that is emphatically transnational and transportable, linking artists and writers in far-flung locales. Vancouver emerged as an international art center during the 1960s, due in part to the efforts of Michael Morris, whose collaborative endeavors—from the Image Bank (an idea-exchange system via the postal service) to the artist-run space the Western Front Society—prefigured current interests in cross-media and networked practices. Featuring more than 150 examples of concrete poetry’s many formal manifestations, “Letters” situates roughly sixty works by Morris—including all eight of his large “Letter” paintings—with prints, ephemera, and books by Henri Chopin, Augusto de Campos, Kriwet, Jirí Kolár, Gerhard Rühm, and others (much of which is drawn from the Belkin’s extensive collection), along with a catalogue containing multiple essays and an interview with Morris.
— Liz Kotz
David Hockney, Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November 2006, six parts, oil on canvas, 5' 11 5/8 x 12' 1/8".
“David Hockney Ra: A Bigger Picture”
ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
LONDON
Through April 9
Curated by Marco Livingstone and Edith Devaney
Barely out of the Royal College of Art some half a century ago, David Hockney quickly earned an uncontested place in the annals of Pop art with his angelic ingriste graphic gift. Derived from close attention to Picasso, this early body of work largely focused on eroticized portraiture. Over the years, however, Hockney has pursued other genres, in particular landscape—a direction about which there is far less unanimity—and in doing so, turned away from Picasso, favoring instead the palette of Matisse, not to say van Gogh. Now a survey of nearly two hundered works is poised to challenge the long-standing critical indifference to Hockney’s vistas. It should also make clear his transformation from inspired graphic classicist to national painter (now that he is once more home in England), maintaining solidarity with the formidable English landscape tradition that runs from, say, John Constable’s rural countryside to the angst-filled world channeled by Paul Nash.
— Robert Pincus-Witten
Yayoi Kusama, Untitled Accumulation, 1963, sewn stuffed animals, wooden chair, pin structure, 34 x 16 x 16".
Yayoi Kusama
TATE MODERN
LONDON
Through May 27
Curated by Frances Morris
Now at the age of eighty-two, the maverick Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama will be the subject of a 150-work retrospective. Organized as a series of ambient clusters, the show presents different aspects and periods of Kusama’s six-decade career. Wols-like works from the late 1940s, the magnificent “Infinity Net” paintings of the late ’50s, “accumulations” and “self-obliteration” projects of the ’60s, a new mirrored “infinity corridor,” and other images made just this spring, rounded out by carbuncled furniture, painted bodies, visionary writing, scrapbooks, photographs, and clothes, all testify to the remarkable vitality of an oeuvre that spans the optical formalism of Zero and Nul and the psychosexual performance of Kembra Pfahler.
— Judith Rodenbeck
Roman Ondák, Loop, 2009, mixed media, installation view. Czech and Slovak pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale.
Roman Ondák
KUNSTSAMMLUNG NORDRHEIN WESTFALEN | K21 STÄNDEHAUS
DÜSSELDORF
Through April 29
Curated by Michael Stanley
Slovakian neo-Conceptualist Roman Ondák creates powerful works of art through seemingly simple shifts. During the 2009 Venice Biennale, he famously turned his country’s pavilion inside out, allowing the surrounding garden to occupy the building’s interior. In another recent piece, he transformed viewers into subject matter, directing gallery attendants to mark visitors’ names and heights on the museum wall in an ever-expanding drawing. For this show, his first major solo in the UK, Ondák will present two new installations that refer specifically to recent world events, prompting a reconsideration of cultural and societal relations. During the run of the show, Ondák will also complete the final leg of a separate three-venue European tour, winding up at the Fondazione Galleria Civica in Trento, Italy.