Arshile Gorky, The Betrothal, 1947, oil on canvas, 50 5/8 x 39 1/4". © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

TATE MODERN
LONDON
Through May 3
Curated by Michael Taylor

When he took his own life in 1948 at age forty-four, Arshile Gorky was not only in the prime of his career but also in a sweet spot in the history of American art. No less a deft draftsman than a dazzling colorist, the artist had addressed advanced painting’s imperative at the time head-on: to work through the legacies of Picasso and Surrealism and arrive at a personal, abstract vernacular. The results, as they say, are history. Gorky’s large canvases, which remain emblematic of the New York School, will join sculptures, drawings, and prints in this 180-work retrospective, introducing to a new generation a seminal figure for whom painting’s stakes were a matter of life and death.

— Jordan Kantor

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

Ed Ruscha, Oof, 1962/1963, oil on canvas, 71 1/2 x 67".

Ed Ruscha

HAUS DER KUNST
MUNICH
Through May 2
Curated by Ralph Rugoff

For the cover of the catalogue of his first retrospective, at SF MoMA in 1982, Ed Ruscha chose to reproduce a 1979 pastel that bore the inscription I DON’T WANT / NO RETRO / SPECTIVE. Obviously, no museum director took him at his word. Ruscha’s latest career survey concentrates solely on painting, allowing viewers, easily mesmerized by the artist’s extraordinary inventiveness in a variety of media, to reflect on the particular flavor of his pictorial output. Ruscha’s work has evolved at great speed since his 2005 Venice triumph, and this show of nearly eighty canvases (accompanied by a substantial catalogue with essays by Hayward director Ralph Rugoff and others, and a new interview with Ruscha) invites us to consider his current work in the context of his half-century-long love affair with paint.

— Yve-Alain Bois

Charlotte Posenenske, Vierkantrohre Serie DW, 1968/1990, galvanized steel, 6 x 9'.

Charlotte Posenenske

PALAIS DE TOKYO
PARIS
Through May 15
Curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler

“The things I make are variable, as simple as possible, reproducible,” Posenenske remarked in the late ’60s. Emerging as a painter while American Minimalism was taking shape, the German artist (1930–1985) went on to develop an approach strongly influenced by architecture. Constructing objects from simple industrial materials like tin and corrugated cardboard, she tested the combinatorial possibilities of modular forms, delegating an active role to the viewer. In 1968, for political reasons, Posenenske stopped making art, and her work was largely forgotten. A substantial career survey, in 2005, in Innsbruck, Austria, and Siegen, Germany, sparked a resurgence of interest, making Posenenske something of a cult figure. This extraordinary artist is now the subject of a comprehensive retrospective of roughly fifteen major works made between 1956 and the end of her abruptly truncated career.

Translated from German by Oliver E. Dryfuss.

— Astrid Wege