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.
Theo van Doesburg, Simultaneous Counter-Composition, 1929–1930, oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 19 5/8".
“Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde”
TATE MODERN
LONDON
Through May 16
Curated by Vicente Todolí, Gladys Fabre, and Doris Wintgens Hötte
A chief exponent of De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg was anything but doctrinaire. Like the elemental shapes that logically expanded from his canvases to the world itself, his activities reached out to involve such seemingly antithetical developments as the early Bauhaus and Dada. Organized in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, the Netherlands (where the show is on view through January 3), this exhibition comprises more than three hundred pieces by van Doesburg and some eighty of the artists he affected, from Mondrian to Schwitters. The curators have gathered works of painting, sculpture, typography, poetry, music, film, furniture, interior design, and architecture—including model reconstructions of the collaboratively designed Café Aubette in Strasbourg, France—making visible the range of van Doesburg’s influential practice.
— Sean Keller
Chris Ofili, The Raising of Lazarus, 2007, oil and charcoal on linen, 109 3/4 x 78 7/8".
Chris Ofili
TATE BRITAIN
LONDON
Through May 16
Curated by Judith Nesbitt
It takes guts to shed your clothes in public, but this, in effect, is what Chris Ofili has done in his paintings over the past five years. Layer by layer, he has peeled away the resin, glitter, and signature fecal excrescences that once made his canvases such dense and enthralling objects, laying bare the sinewy contours and flat fields of color that long served as hidden armatures. This shift makes all the more timely Ofili’s Tate retrospective of forty-five paintings (some never previously exhibited) and a selection of works on paper. Spanning from the mid-’90s until today, the show should illuminate the continuities and ruptures between Ofili’s recent and earlier output, as well as between media like drawing and painting, the former of which has gained new clarity and prominence in the latter’s domain.
— Scott Rothkopf
Guillermo Kuitca, "Mozart—da Ponte" I, 1995, mixed media on canvas, 71 x 92". © Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.
Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008
ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY
BUFFALO, NY
Through May 30
Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon
Employing motifs such as maps, architectural plans, and genealogical charts, Guillermo Kuitca makes borders and links—as well as their political and personal mediation—central to his practice. Miami is thus a fitting location to launch this touring midcareer survey, which traces the contours of the Argentinean artist’s oeuvre with some seventy drawings and paintings. One standout is Untitled, 1992 (on view for the first time in the United States), an arrangement of twenty child-size beds with road maps of Europe painted directly onto their mattresses—elegantly cleaving public and private.
— Lisa Turvey
Cyprien Gaillard, Desniansky Raion, 2007, still from a color video, 29 minutes.
Cyprien Gaillard
WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS
COLUMBUS
Through April 11
Curated by Catharina Manchanda
The classic anthropologist’s eye encounters the YouTube ethos in Cyprien Gaillard’s photographs and videos, whose streams of stitched-together footage seem at once fragmentary studies of alien cultures and rough-hewn compilations of amateur travelogues—forcing audiences to ask themselves time and again, “Is all this real?” Curiously, such a building air of instability intersects with a sense of unsteadiness in Western cultures, as Gaillard, conquistador with a digital camera, tours lands of lost modernism worldwide, from Kiev to Cancún. This survey features the artist’s already-familiar studies of post-Soviet fight clubs and housing-project demolitions, along with newer works that will undoubtedly evidence an expanding cartography.
— Tim Griffin
Susan Hefuna, SEE, 2006, wood, ink, 55 1/8 x 78 3/4".
“Project Europa: Imagining the (Im)Possible”
SAMUEL P. HARN MUSEUM OF ART
GAINESVILLE
Through May 9
Curated by Kerry Oliver-Smith
Twenty and a half years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this ambitious exhibition of works by eighteen artists and artist groups wants to “explore the conflicts and contradictions of Europe’s democratic dream.” While Cologne-based Marcel Odenbach presents a 1989–90 video installation portraying a candlelight procession from before the wall’s dismantling, Bucharest, Romania–based Dan Perjovschi is making a new wall drawing. The rest of the seemingly random team, many relatively unknown in the US, contribute plenty of photography and more video and drawing. Thematic sections will revolve around migrant identity and the market, among other subjects, but the diplomatically tinted rhetoric indicates that the artists’ national origins are going to be crucial—as will be the involvement of critic Boris Groys and curator Catherine David, the former writing for the catalogue, the latter keynoting a symposium on art and democracy.
— Maria Lind
Tania Bruguera, The Burden of Guilt, 1997–99, decapitated lamb, rope, water, salt, Cuban soil, dimensions variable.
“Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary”
NEUBERGER MUSEUM OF ART
PURCHASE, NY
Through April 11
Curated by Helaine Posner
Tania Bruguera’s midcareer survey will feature eighteen works, almost all of them documentation of past actions. The exhibition will balance the Cuban artist’s early performances—such as Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 1985–96, a series of reenactments of the older artist’s body works, and Studio Study, 1996, an endurance piece in which she stood for hours on a high pedestal while holding raw meat—with pieces that followed her development of Arte de Conducta, or the “Art of Behavior,” around 2002. While the former prominently featured the artist’s body, the latter have largely excised it, leaving situations that explore site-specific modes of social and political control and that aim to transform the audience into “citizens.” For example, Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version), 2009, staged at the Havana Biennial, permitted participants a minute of free speech.