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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.
Armin Boehm, Se Taire, 2008, oil, metal, and thread on board, 21 1/4 x 18 7/8".
“Secret Societies”
CAPC MUSÉE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN
BORDEAUX
Through February 26
Curated by Cristina Ricupero and Alexis Vaillant
From Yale’s president-spawning Skull and Bones to that mythical “invisible world government” the Illuminati, secret societies exert a powerful grip on the imagination. The Schirn Kunsthalle’s show isn’t an exposé, though. Rather, it proposes contemporary art itself as a seedbed for clandestine coteries, exacting codes of behavior, and diverse methods of evasion and exclusion. Here, within an appositely labyrinthine display designed by Fabian Marti, more than one hundred works by nearly fifty artists—including Kenneth Anger, Joachim Koester, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Lisa Yuskavage—will offer entrée to their hermetic milieus or, perhaps, stonewall viewers unversed in the correct secret handshakes. (Expect, say the organizers, “a certain level of occultation.”) For conspiratorial crib notes, consult the catalogue essays by Ina Blom, Michael Bracewell, Gary Lachman, Marco Pasi, Jan Verwoert, and the curators.
— Martin Herbert
Roman Ondák, Freed Doorway, 1998, door with glass window, 76 3/4 x 30 3/4 x 2 3/4". Photo: Jens Ziehe.
“Rearview Mirror”
ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA
EDMONTON
Through April 29
Curated by Christopher Eamon
The title for this show of nearly two dozen artists from across the former Soviet bloc—though none from Russia proper—communicates a processing of past events that may be closer than they appear. Exhibitions on Eastern European art are nothing new, but this show’s updated, post-Conceptual roster is particularly strong. Despite a curatorial focus on “divergence” of cultural experience across the region, the works will reveal commonalities, such as the heritage of mass housing (exploited by Paweł Althamer, Ján Mančuška, and Roman Ondák and discussed brilliantly in the exhibition catalogue by Andrzej Szczerski) and a welcome inclination toward dialogue with local figures of international significance, among them sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and Nobel Prize–winning poet Wisława Szymborska (addressed in projects by Anna Ostoya and Anna Molska, respectively)_.
— Matthew S. Witkovsky
Hans Hollein, Chair, 1972, white flagging on kern, 37 3/5 × 24 2/5 × 24 2/5”.
Hans Hollein
NEUE GALERIE GRAZ
GRAZ, AUSTRIA
Through April 9
Curated by Peter Weibel
“Everything is architecture,” declared Viennese architect Hans Hollein in April 1968. Appearing in the journal Bau, the proclamation accompanied images of what this expanded architecture might encompass: astronauts, bubbles, a pill. Such objects of contemporary life also fuel his “Transformation” collages, 1963–68, in which a spark plug, blown up in scale, becomes a gleaming tower, and an aircraft carrier, rising out of a barren landscape, suggests a fortified city. For the first comprehensive retrospective of his work (and the first exhibition in the recently relocated museum’s new home), Hollein will realize a sculpture based on another image from that series—the looming, chamfered form of a train car perched atop a raised plaza. Framing the Pritzker-winning architect as an artist, the exhibition foregrounds his multidisciplinary work in sculpture, writing, and design. Though if we take Hollein at his word, it’s all architecture.
— Michael Wang
Thomas Struth, Crosby Street, New York/Soho, 1978, black-and-white photograph, 17 1/4 x 22".
Thomas Struth: Photographs 1979-2010
MUSEU DE ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA DE SERRALVES
PORTO
Through February 28
Curated by Tobia Bezzola, Anette Kruszynski, and James Lingwood
Asked to pinpoint the essence of photography, Thomas Struth said it was “a communicative and analytical medium,” and his work is a prime example of that rigorous, intellectual approach. One of the most successful graduates of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Düsseldorf School, Struth is also one of the strictest adherents to its influential version of Neue Sachlichkeit. This three-decade survey rounds up nearly one hundred works, from his earliest, modestly scaled and unpopulated black-and-white streetscapes to the massive color views of thronged museum and cathedral interiors that have come to define his oeuvre, concluding with a series of big new studies of industrial sites.
— Vince Aletti
Simon Fujiwara, The Personal Effects of Theo Grünberg, 2010, color photograph.
“Simon Fujiwara: Since 1982”
TATE ST. IVES
ST. IVES
Through May 7
Curated by Miguel Amado
“I am my work,” Simon Fujiwara tells us. But not in a Madame Bovary c’est moi kind of way. Rather, the Berlin-based, Japanese-born artist gives us fictions in the guise of autobiography or uses biographical material as bait for his convoluted fish stories. If Fujiwara were a pathological liar, this could be art as public catharsis. In any case, truth and fantasy seem quaint conceits in the context of his performance-minded installations, a few of which, such as The Mirror Stage, 2009, and Letters from Mexico, 2010–11, will be on view in the artist’s solo museum debut. It’s a strange, sweet fact that the show takes place in Fujiwara’s childhood home of St. Ives—unless, of course, he’s lying about that, too.