U.S. 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.
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
THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART LOS ANGELES
LOS ANGELES
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
Ceal Floyer, Overgrowth, 2004, medium-format slide, medium-format slide projector, dimensions variable.
Ceal Floyer
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI
MIAMI
Through May 6
Curated by Bonnie Clearwater
Ceal Floyer has a mathematician’s brain, a phenomenologist’s eye, and—belying the apparent reticence of her Minimalist-Conceptualist amalgams—a conjurer’s showmanship. Moving fleetly between formats (sculpture, video, drawing, photography, sound), the Pakistani-born, London-raised, Berlin-based artist specializes in elegant, witty, circular proposals that could almost be one-liners if they didn’t open onto questionings of perceptual habit and expectation. A bucket, seemingly catching a leak, conceals a speaker playing dripping sounds (Bucket, 1999); a performance is themed around stage fright (Nail Biting Performance, 2001); a bonsai is projected on the scale of a full-size tree (Overgrowth, 2006). This survey, collating some twenty works from 1992 through the present, accordingly promises plenty of practiced bait-and-switch, with cerebral pleasure giving way to rippling disquiet.
— Martin Herbert
Cory Arcangel, CA 09 photoshop CS 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Yellow, Violet, Red, Teal” mousedown y=16450 x=10750, mouse up y=18850 x=206002009, 2009, color photograph, 110 x 72".
“Cory Arcangel: The Sharper Image”
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI
MIAMI
Through May 6
Curated by Ruba Katrib
Keep your Ray-Bans on: This solo museum show presents nearly thirty of Cory Arcangel’s multimedia works, which always appear to radiate a liquid-crystal halation. Glowing cyan Nintendo projections, C-prints of Photoshop’s slick color gradient, and unsightly 1990s HTML palettes are sure to add to the shine. But the artist’s slow burn follows a precise logic. He purposefully feeds various display technologies through different levels of time and skill, producing retro “structural films” made via consumer-friendly video software or splicing YouTube clips of cats walking on pianos so that they “play” a serial Schönberg tune. Coinciding with the final weeks of an exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, this survey will include several new and rarely exhibited works. Arcangel’s puckish mix of futurity and obsolescence seems only to be getting brighter.
— Michelle Kuo
Luc Tuymans, Der Diagnostische Blick V (The Diagnostic View V), 1992, oil on canvas, 22 7/8 x 16 1/2".
Luc Tuymans
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
SAN FRANCISCO
Through May 2
Curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth
After almost twenty-five years of mature production, Luc Tuymans’s reputation precedes him, and the contours of his artistic accomplishment are finally coming into focus. With his muted palette and pared-down painterly vocabulary, the Belgian artist has developed a personal yet remarkably resonant practice that embraces the limits of perception and communication while arguing vehemently for his medium as a vital, critical art form. As large as Tuymans looms in contemporary painting conversations, however, this seventy-work retrospective, which unites long-separated series and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Bill Horrigan and Joseph Leo Koerner, among others, is his first substantial American showing, but it promises to make up for lost time with unprecedented depth.
— Jordan Kantor
Renée Green, Space Poem 2, 2008, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS
SAN FRANCISCO
Through June 20
Curated by Betti-Sue Hertz
The conceptual currents within Renée Green’s twenty-year practice gain force from the cyclical return to prior installations, as each reconfiguration condenses a multitude of ambient identities grounded in global histories, feminism, identity politics, and fiction. One of the two recent projects that make up this show, Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2009, commissioned for the National Maritime Museum in London, blends meditations on oceans and memories, uncertainties and desires, in film and sound works, banners, diagrams, and drawings. Also on view is United Space of Conditioned Becoming, 2007, an assemblage of many previous works. Here travel is a metaphor and an actuality, evidenced in videos documenting Green’s peripatetic activities, while banners serve up a matrix of quotations and aphorisms that frame the streaming dialogic and informational flow that’s been building throughout her career.
— Jan Avgikos
Susan Rothenberg, Cabin Fever, 1976,
acrylic and tempera on canvas, 67 x 84 1/8". © 2009 Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Susan Rothenberg
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM
SANTA FE
Through May 16
Curated by Michael Auping
The earliest of the twenty-five canvases in this exhibition (organized with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico) date from the mid-1970s, when a group of works on horse themes catapulted Susan Rothenberg to the forefront of the New Image painters. Long settled in Galisteo, Texas, Rothenberg has for some time employed a much smaller, stitch-like stroke, a mode resistant to the “frozen motion” (as the artist describes it) of the equine ideogram on which her considerable reputation rests. Absorbed by the small wonders of Texan domestic life as well as by the state’s vast landscape, she now makes paintings that appear eccentrically Impressionist, with a characteristic loss of edge as figures and grounds meld into one another owing to her agile and flickering touch.