Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2011, oil and paper on canvas, 8‘ x 10’ 2".

“Albert Oehlen: Malerei”

MUSEUM MODERNER KUNST STIFTUNG LUDWIG WIEN (MUMOK)
VIENNA
Through October 20
Curated by Achim Hochdörfer

Albert Oehlen’s paintings want to be hard to love. Or do they? Often framed by double-edged terms such as bad taste, irony, or contamination, Oehlen’s work slides deftly from the abject to the impressive. Its vulnerabilities and strengths are at one in its sheer permissiveness. By all measures, this German artist’s shadow is long, so some goodly anticipation surrounds what will be his first career survey in Austria. Organized by Achim Hochdörfer (who is no less able an interrogator of painting’s current potential) and couched largely in terms of confrontations among works, this exhibition will bring together approximately one hundred paintings, drawings, and collages, spanning the early 1980s through today. An unorthodox accompanying catalogue designed by Heimo Zobernig incorporates conversations between the curator and art historian Hal Foster, the critic Kerstin Stakemeier and the artist Rochelle Feinstein, as well as Daniel Richter in dialogue with the Maler himself.

— Matt Saunders

Sharon Lockhart, Michael Stufflebeam, Maintenance Pipefitter, 2008, C-print, 25 x 303⁄4". From “Arbeidstid” (Work Time).

“Arbeidstid”

HENIE ONSTAD ART CENTER
OSLO
Through September 1
Curated by Milena Høgsberg

There is surely some bitter irony to the fact that an exhibition about the changing conditions of labor is taking place in Norway, one of the few European countries not really affected by financial crisis and mass unemployment. Yet the purview of “Arbeidstid” (Work Time) is not just joblessness and the erosion of the social safety net but also the transformation of work into entertainment, lifestyle, and identity project that marks today’s information economies. Engaging the perspectives of some thirteen artists and collectives, including Olivia Plender and Sharon Lockhart, alongside a specially commissioned project by Danish artist Michala Paludan involving selections from Scandinavian labor-movement archives, this exhibition raises the question of how art can address and imagine the future of work, for both the employed and the unemployed.

— Ina Blom

Joseph Beuys, Aktion Eurasia Sibrischen Synphonie. 32 Staz, 1963. Performance view, Galerie René Block, Berlin, October 31, 1966. Photo: Jürgen Müller-Schneck.

“Joseph Beuys: Appeal for an Alternative”

MOSCOW MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
MOSCOW
Through November 14
Curated by Eugen Blume

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The first major Joseph Beuys exhibition in Moscow proposes the artist’s work as a site of inveterate turbulence, a hodgepodge of visceral didacticism, and calls for social transformation that serially engages the East within the West. In Beuys’s art-life cosmology, Russia is the hulking Eurasian landmass of energy and potential, the great unknown variable in the equation of Western civilization. Bringing together literally—literally!—hundreds of works and ephemera, “Appeal for an Alternative” includes such seminal installations as The End of the Twentieth Century, 1983–85, as well as graphic works, multiples, and video documentation of performances such as How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965, in which the artist will appear perfectly suited, as it were, for Moscow in 2012: Joseph Beuys, rational shaman, enthusiast of the East, inventor of political magic.

— Matthew Jesse Jackson

The 5th Auckland Triennial

AUCKLAND ART GALLERY TOI O TāMAKI
AUCKLAND
Through August 11
Curated by Hou Hanru

The fifth edition of Auckland’s festival of contemporary art baits its audience with the title “If you were to live here . . .” and invites more than thirty artists and collectives—including Anri Sala, Allora and Calzadilla, Peter Robinson, and Luke Willis Thompson—to complete curator Hou Hanru’s open-ended line. Such a conceit could easily feel flat these days, but Hou—for whom the exhibition is “an interaction between artists, people, and the city to envisage possible futures”—has plenty of experience in making such speculative, relational shows into something solid. Drawing extensively on Auckland’s academic and gallery networks, this 2013 triennial meditates on the kind of twenty-first-century place New Zealand’s metropolis could be. It’s a tough brief, but for a city with rapidly growing wealth, an expanding population, and a pointed desire to be seen through an internationalist lens, Hou’s leading question may provoke some challenging answers.

— Anthony Byrt

Lee Bul, After Bruno Taut (Beware the Sweetness of Things), 2007, crystal, glass and acrylic beads, stainless steel, aluminum, copper, PVC, 101 5/8 x 78 3/4 x 98 3/4". From the series “Mon Grand Récit” (My Great Tale), 2005–2008.

“Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only”

MORI ART MUSEUM
TOKYO

“Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only”
MORI ART MUSEUM
February 4– May 27
Curated by Mami Kataokan

As the discourse of contemporary art took a global turn in the mid-1990s, the Seoul-based artist Lee Bul rose to international prominence. Now, this front-runner of Asian contemporary art has her first midcareer survey. The exhibition will include some fifty works ranging from performances of the late 1980s and early ’90s, addressing questions of gender, to more recent installations (including several that will debut here) made using industrially manufactured glass and metal chains. Making clear the full scope of her practice to date, the show is poised to vividly demonstrate the extent to which Lee owes her artistic longevity to her visceral understanding of materials. And it will evince how her particular combinations of drastically different substances can command an emotional response no less compelling than the history and politics her works attempt to address.

—Joan Kee

— Joan Kee

Wols, Untitled, 1942–43, pen and ink on paper, 7 7/8 x 5".

“Wols: Die Retrospektive”

KUNSTHALLE BREMEN
BREMEN, GERMANY
Through August 11
Curated by Ewald Rathke and Toby Kamps

The discrepancy between Wols’s reputation in Europe and stateside is hard to overestimate. A household name there, the French-German Informel artist Wolfgang Schulze (1913–1951) long stood as proof that New York had not stolen the idea of modern art. In the United States, he at best remained obscure, at worst was belittled by the likes of Donald Judd, who issued this jab: “Most Americans, critics and painters alike, are not even sufficiently impressed by Wols’s threat to Pollock’s position to be interested in the argument.” With his first comprehensive exhibition to grace the US, after its debut in Bremen this spring, at Houston’s Menil Collection in the fall, Americans can finally see for themselves. The retrospective’s consideration of Wols’s relations not only to Informel but also to Surrealism—and of his production of not only paintings and watercolors but also photographs—promises a fresh reception, one both international and art historical in scope.

— Christine Mehring