Jo Baer, Untitled, 1960, collage and gouache on paper, 6 x 6".

Jo Baer

MUSEUM LUDWIG
COLOGNE
Through August 25
Curated by Julia Friedrich

In the 1960s, Jo Baer brought painting to the edge. With perimeters of black paint around white squares, she framed painting’s repressed material support, and with stripes wrapping around stretcher bars, she lured viewers away from painting’s ceremonial frontality. The Museum Ludwig survey will feature roughly a dozen such works but also some 150 lesser-known pieces in which Baer developed and exceeded her earlier concerns: richly colored gouaches of provocative symmetries and patterns, small rectangular studies (with creased edges and notched corners that allowed her to figure out the workings of her wraparound compositions), watercolors that Baer used to imagine bold installations of paintings, and a nude from 1960 that anticipates the subtle figuration with which Baer left her signature austerity behind. Catalogue essays by Lucy Lippard, David Raskin, and Lauren O’Neill-Butler should insightfully gather Baer’s ouevre into a whole.

— Sarah K. Rich

“La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity”

PALAIS DE TOKYO
PARIS

“La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity”
PALAIS DE TOKYO
April 20–August 26
Curated by Okwui Enwezor with Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émelie Renard, and Claire Staebler

This third edition of Paris’s La Triennale—tellingly titled “Intense Proximity”—is set to advance artistic director Okwui Enwezor’s important contestation of nationality and nativism by highlighting relational geographies and migrant figures. The show will unfold from the newly expanded Palais de Tokyo to neighboring institutions along La Colline des Musées, with an approach to cultural transnationalism inspired by twentieth-century ethnographers Marcel Mauss, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Griaule. The exhibition’s list of 120 artists comprises a small number of French citizens (Daniel Buren, Luc Delahaye, Annette Messager), several foreign-born Paris denizens (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Thomas Hirschhorn, Cameron Jamie), and many more (Georges Adéagbo, Yto Barrada, Desire Machine Collective) hailing from regions formerly subject to European colonial rule.

—T. J. Demos

— T. J. Demos

Simon Hantaï, À Galla Placidia, 1958–59, oil on canvas, 10‘ 8 1/4“ x 13’ 1 1/2”. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC.

Simon HantaÏ

CENTRE POMPIDOU
PARIS
Through September 2
Curated by Dominique Fourcade, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, and Alfred Pacquement

At the time of his death, Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) left behind one of the most challenging, diverse, and—as he emphasized—willfully “impure” oeuvres in later twentieth-century art. This comprehensive exhibition, the first full-career survey of the artist’s work, brings together more than 130 paintings made between 1949 and the mid-1990s, from the voracious experimentation of Hantaï’s early years in Paris through the justly renowned abstract canvases he began producing in 1960 in the medium he called pliage, or “folding.” Highlights include the monumental canvases Peinture (Écriture rose) and À Galla Placidia; developed adjacently in the studio between 1958 and 1959, the works are major milestones but have never before been exhibited together. An accompanying catalogue includes essays by Georges Didi-Huberman, Daniel Buren, and the curators, among others.

— Molly Warnock

Francesco Vezzoli, Francesco by Francesco: Before & After, 2002, two gelatin silver prints, each 24 x 32 3/4". Photos: Francesco Scavullo.

“Galleria Vezzoli”

MAXXI - MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO
ROME
Through November 24
Curated by Anna Mattirolo

Chi è Francesco Vezzoli? No mere survey exhibition, “Galleria Vezzoli” intends to answer this riddle via an investigation of the artist’s identity. Staging a chronological display of some ninety works drawn from his eighteen-year, star-studded, jet-setting career, the show will place special emphasis on the self-portrait—which may prove useful for decrypting (in advance of this fall’s “Church of Vezzoli” at MoMA PS1 in New York and “Cinema Vezzoli” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) whether Vezzoli is an enthusiastic adept of the celebrity-industrial complex or a true cultural critic–cum–social gadfly in the tradition of Cocteau, Dalí, and Warhol. Fittingly, given the artist’s penchant for grand gestures, MAXXI will be publishing a sizable retrospective catalogue in two languages with contributions from Douglas Fogle, Chrissie Iles, and the curator, among others.

— Alison M. Gingeras

Salvatore Scarpitta

GAM - GALLERIA CIVICA D’ARTE MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA
TURIN

Salvatore Scarpitta
GALLERIA CIVICA D’ARTE MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA
March 9–June 3
Curated by Germano Celant and Danilo Eccher

Salvatore Scarpitta (1919–2007) may have been born in Brooklyn and raised in LA, but according to the patrons and fans who long supported him in Italy, he was also a card-carrying Italian. Now, after an absence of several years from Italian public institutions, Scarpitta returns with a major exhibition in Turin. More commonly known for his sculptural engagement with sleds and cars (which he also raced), he is poised—via a thoughtfully researched selection of approximately sixty pieces made between 1957 and 2000—to be understood anew as an innovative agent of painting. The catalogue includes essays by Scarpitta scholars Fabrizio D’Amico, Riccardo Passoni, and Luigi Sansone, as well as the curators.

—Giorgio Verzotti

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Giorgio Verzotti

Anthony Caro, Hopscotch, 1962, aluminum, 18‘ 1“ x 7’ x 8' 2 1/2”.

Anthony Caro

MUSEO CORRER
VENICE
Through October 27
Curated by Gary Tinterow

Only a few twentieth-century sculptors have been thought to achieve “breakthrough” work. If Anthony Caro can be counted among them, it is due to the fact that in the early 1960s, the British artist’s painted metal constructions managed to “invade space,” to borrow Clement Greenberg’s famous phrase. Marshalling lines of force and direction, yet deploying no preordained pattern, Caro’s pieces seem to be organized according to an axial symmetry that has surrendered to the structural laws of intersection and relationship—an internal energy that in 1963 Michael Fried memorably dubbed “syntax.” Fifty years later, Fried will doubtless revisit that term in his catalogue essay for this fascinatingly far-ranging survey of sculptures, drawings, and three-dimensional paper works from the artist’s nearly seven-decade-long career.

— Anne M. Wagner