Urs Fischer, KITTINGER/ZAWACKI/YUTZY (detail), 2012, one of three components, silk-screen print on mirrored glass, UV adhesive, aluminum, glass, polyacetal, screws, 25 1/4 x 15 3/4 x 6 1/8", overall dimensions variable.

Urs Fischer

THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES (MOCA)
LOS ANGELES
Through August 19
Curated by Jessica Morgan

The Swiss-born artist Urs Fischer’s gigantisms and tricksterish transformations will take over LA MoCA’s two most sizable spaces—Grand Avenue and the Geffen Contemporary—for his first true US retrospective. Among the forty-some works on view, his 2004–2005 house of bread, the melty wax replica of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women from the last Venice Biennale, and a new addition to Fischer’s series of squeezed bits of clay enlarged to Brobdingnagian proportions—this one to be forty-five feet tall—will flaunt the sculptural tumescence that has made the artist both a crowd and commerce favorite of the past fifteen years. If such ambition framed Fischer as emblematic of the messier, punkier heroic excess of the precollapse 2000s, Tate curator Jessica Morgan’s show offers a chance to reconsider it all with postlapsarian eyes. And while New York’s darlings are often LA’s bêtes noires, Fischer’s masterful rescalings and material magic appear to have been granted the commodious space that the artist’s oeuvre demands.

— Andrew Berardini

Hans Richter, Cohesion II, 1970, metal on painted wood, 32 3/4 x 20 3/4 x 2".

“Hans Richter: Encounters”

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (LACMA)
LOS ANGELES
Through September 2
Curated by Timothy O. Benson

Long before the touch screen, Hans Richter was making screens that touch. Rectangles lunge at the spectator in his abstract film Rhythmus 21 (1921), confounding figure and ground; collaborations with Viking Eggeling and Kazimir Malevich promised the convertibility of all signals and sensations, electronic and tactile, into a universal code. LACMA’s major retrospective will include these works along with nearly 150 others—from collages to wall reliefs—in which resolute materialism vied with totalizing sensation and perceptual change augured political revolution. In Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928), for instance, Richter cuts loose and lets fly a gaggle of bowler hats, in a Dadaist upending of vision, objecthood, and Weimar bureaucracy. But unlike contemporary invocations of “animism,” which often merely tame objects into subjects with a veiled anthropomorphism, Richter’s animation heightened the alterity of the world—its alien and unknowable roil.

Travels to the Centre Pompidou—Metz, France, Sept. 29, 2013–Feb. 24, 2014; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Mar. 27–June 30, 2014.

— Michelle Kuo

“Jennie C. Jones: Higher Resonance”

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN
WASHINGTON, DC
Through October 27
Curated by Evelyn Hankins

Upon entering Jennie C. Jones’s show at the Hirshhorn, visitors will hear Higher Resonance, 2013, a new sound piece to be piped into an immersive listening area circumscribed by a curved wall. Imbricating microsamples of recordings by black classical composers (Wendell Logan, Alvin Singleton) with those by composer-performers from creative music practice (Alice Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Art Ensemble of Chicago), this piece foregrounds African American culture’s ongoing engagement with histories of the avant-garde and modernist abstraction. In the same room, Jones’s series of prints made with scans of double-ball bass strings will invoke synesthesia, and her paintings and sculptures using acoustic panels and bass traps will subliminally orient viewers to the physicality of sound. Far from “celebrating” jazz in a nostalgic turn, Jones’s work makes common cause with the music’s traditional function as a site for critique as well as for remembrance.

— George E. Lewis

Shirin Neshat, Bahram, 2012, ink on gelatin silver print, 99 1/8 x 49 1/2". From the series “The Book of Kings,” 2012.

Shirin Neshat

THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS
DETROIT
Through July 7
Curated by Rebecca Hart

The inked-over countenances of women holding, hiding, or otherwise harnessing guns in Shirin Neshat’s “Women of Allah” series, 1993–97, have become emblematic of art from a place all too easily amalgamated as the “Islamic world.” While themes of oppression and revolution in these arresting portraits have been well plumbed, the images’ more profound valences (regarding love and other matters more philosophical) warrant further consideration. This midcareer retrospective—featuring two extensive photo projects (“Women of Allah” and the recent “Book of Kings,” 2012) as well as a dozen video works made over the past two decades, including a seven-screen video-installation version of her feature-length magic-realist elegy to revolution, Women Without Men, 2009—offers a chance to reframe the Iranian-American artist’s work. With essays by Hart, Sussan Babaie, and Nancy Princenthal, the catalogue will examine Neshat’s dogged investigation of the paired structures of power and fantasy that undergird society in relation to a longer history of Persian cultural production.

— Hannah Feldman

Forrest Bess, Untitled No. 12 A, 1957, oil on canvas, 12 × 18".

“Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible”

THE MENIL COLLECTION
HOUSTON
Through August 18
Curated by Clare Elliott

The work of Forrest Bess has recently reemerged in art-historical culture, contextualized with a narrative not dissimilar to that of Bess’s artistic idol, van Gogh: A painter (rich in homo sacer innuendo) rends open the aesthetic dialectic of corporeality and sensibility to clear room for an exceptional bioaesthetic art, resulting not only in radical acts of body modification and diagnoses of madness but also (for us) a ground plan for the reorganization of artistic possibility, both on canvas and off. Consolidating forty-eight of Bess’s paintings and an expanded version of Robert Gober’s celebrated curatorial project “The Man That Got Away,” from last year’s Whitney Biennial, this exhibition and catalogue are the next steps in spawning light from Bess’s refreshingly sacral body of work.

— Sam Pulitzer

Nicole Eisenman, Beer Garden with Ulrike and Celeste, 2009, oil on canvas, 65 x 82".

Nicole Eisenman

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE (BAM/PFA)
BERKELEY, CA
Through July 14
Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio

Nicole Eisenman’s early work pictured a triumphant matriarchy doing ecstatic things together. In recent years, her protagonists have swung down from their heroic heights, post-Valhalla, to pursue the homelier stuff of life, and we find them in a bleaker mood at kitchen tables and in beer halls, eating, texting, napping, gazing, snogging, waiting for a drink. To her bag of tricks Eisenman has added a new motif: the close-up. She cuts to the big heads of various perplexed individuals in her Rabelaisian crowds, their faces confronting us with comic moods of befuddlement, anxiety, boredom, and distraction. This survey features more than forty of the artist’s paintings and prints made between 2009 and 2012. Eisenman shines her knowing, if dystopian, light on the way time passes here on earth, amid a populace of souls who are radically breaking apart and coming together, not only narratively but in the terms of drawing itself.

— Amy Sillman