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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.
Edvard Munch, Puberty, 1894-95, oil on canvas, 59 3/5 x 43 3/10".
“Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye 1900–1944”
SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT
FRANKFURT
Through May 13
Curated by Clément Chéroux and Angela Lampe
As perhaps no other painter of his generation, Edvard Munch (1863–1944) gave radically innovative form to the traumas of the modern psyche. That he did so in perfect sync with the dawning media age in which he lived is the intriguing premise of one of the largest Munch exhibitions ever assembled in France. Including some 140 diverse works of painting, drawing, photography, film, and sculpture, this exhibition explores Munch’s later career, his twentieth-century output. An unexpected agility with the camera and a propensity for filmic and theatrical poses in his paintings underscore his enthrallment with the period’s new image technologies.
— André Dombrowski
Ai Weiwei, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1983.
“Ai Weiwei: Interlacing”
JEU DE PAUME
PARIS
Through March 1
Curated by Urs Stahel
Ai Weiwei’s disappearance into Chinese police custody on April 3 is a stark reminder of the events of September 2009, when, just prior to his exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Ai underwent emergency brain surgery to treat injuries stemming from an alleged police attack in China the previous month. The upcoming show at Fotomuseum Winterthur, which the artist will presumably be unable to attend, is the first to focus solely on his photographic and video practice. The large body of work presented here—some three hundred pieces ranging from Ai’s early days in New York to his many photographic projects and pictures originally posted on his blog and Twitter feed—exemplifies his blurring of the distinction between artistic expression and political engagement that has proved so compelling and so perilous.
— Colin Chinnery
Gino Severini, Le pan-pan au “Monico, 1959–60, oil on canvas, 9' 2 1/4" x 13' 1 1/2".
“Danser Sa Vie: Art and Dance in the 20th and 21st Centuries”
CENTRE POMPIDOU
PARIS
Through April 2
Curated by Christine Macel and Emma Lavigne
Taking inspiration from Isadora Duncan’s proclamation “From the first I have only danced my life,” this exhibition offers a historical look at the ways dance and visual art have informed each other since Muybridge first captured motion on film. Nearly one hundred artists will be represented here, from Kazuo Shiraga to Kelly Nipper, with their works—sketches, photo, film, and video—organized by the curators into three “acts”: self-expression and emancipation, bodily abstraction and kinetic form, and the body as event or social sculpture. There will be live performance, too, including a restaging of Felix Gonzales-Torres’s “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, and a new installation by Tino Sehgal, as well as pieces by Davide Balula, Trisha Brown, and Alex Cecchetti. A catalogue and edited reader with texts by Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben will accompany the show.
— Catherine Wood
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
Taryn Simon, The Central Intelligence Agency, Art, CIA Original Headquarters Building, Langley, Virginia, 2003/2007, color photograph. From series “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” 2007.
“Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts”
MOSCOW HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY / MULTIMEDIA ART MUSEUM
MOSCOW
Through February 19
Curated by Lisa Hostetler
With the tenacious sleuthing sensibility of an investigative reporter and a keen eye for the resonantly offbeat, Taryn Simon has spent the past decade turning her lens toward the forbidden and the forgotten, producing documentary photographs paired with concise factual texts. This midcareer survey will focus on four of the artist’s most ambitious projects, including her 2007 series “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” which led viewers behind the scenes at normally inaccessible sites—nuclear-waste-storage facilities, cryonic units, CIA headquarters—and “Contraband,” 2010, for which she spent five days shooting items confiscated or detained at New York’s JFK International Airport. With its aggregation of the exotic (dried deer penis) and the mundane (a plastic pitcher jammed full of salami), the latter series encapsulates Simon’s operative fascination: the curious stories that reside in the material facts of things.
— Jeffrey Kastner
Atsuko Tanaka, ’87H, 1987, acrylic lacquer on canvas, 76 1/4 x 101 3/8".
Atsuko Tanaka
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO (MOT)
TOKYO
Through May 6
Curated by Jonathan Watkins and Mizuho Kato
This career-spanning retrospective is Japanese avant-gardist Atsuko Tanaka’s first monographic exhibition in the UK and, gathering ninety pieces under one roof, the most comprehensive in Europe to date. Ikon’s thoughtful selection—which will include the artist’s famed 1956 Electric Dress and a re-creation of her 1955 Gutaï installation Work (Bell), as well as numerous later drawings and the eye-popping lacquer paintings made just before her death in 2005—cuts to the heart of her unfailing commitment to isolating the affective qualities of everyday objects, actions, and phenomena (such as the emission of light and heat from electric lamps) by distilling them in site-specific/performative objects, assemblages, and paintings, thereby rendering herself a bridge between the natural and technological worlds.