“Displace, Disclose, Discover: Acts of Painting, 1960/1999”

LILLE MÉTROPOLE MUSÉE D'ART MODERNE (LAM)
LILLE

“Displace, Disclose, Discover: Acts of Painting, 1960/1999”
LILLE MÉTROPOLE MUSEUM OF MODERN, CONTEMPORARY, AND OUTSIDER ART
March 3–May 27
Curated by Marc Donnadieu

A decade ago, “As Painting: Division and Displacement”—a revelatory show at the Wexner Center for the Arts—foregrounded the vitality of French painting following the New York scene’s storied theft of modern art. Now, another exhibition, this time in Lille, more closely examines the pictorial practices of five French artists—Simon Hantaï, Martin Barré, Marc Devade, Jean Degottex, and Michel Parmentier—working during (and in resistance to) the ascendancy of Greenbergian modernism and its Minimalist and post-Minimalist aftermaths. Narrower in focus than its North American predecessor yet more expansive in regard to each featured oeuvre, the LaM’s presentation brings together nearly 125 works by these very different figures, arguing for the continued importance to each of some material notion of the tableau. A catalogue with essays by Donnadieu and Philip Armstrong accompanies the show.

—Molly Warnock

— Molly Warnock

“Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing”

TURNER CONTEMPORARY
MARGATE, UK
Through September 15
Curated by Brian Dillon

“Curiosity” is a sobriquet that suggests the recondite and faintly déclassé: qualities, no doubt, that recommend it to the arcana-loving, culturally omnivorous New York–based magazine Cabinet and to its UK editor Brian Dillon, who’s curated this bursting Wunderkammer of an exhibition. Spanning contemporary art, anatomy, criminology, Cold War secrets, voyeurism, old-master drawings, and more, “Curiosity” is set to provide a bracingly broad definition of the value—and gratifications—of uncovered knowledge, its centuries-spanning time line hitching past ambitions of grasping a totalized picture of the world to the digital data gluts of today. Alongside contemporary works by Matt Mullican, Tacita Dean, Katie Paterson, and Gerard Byrne, among others, expect Rolodexes from Los Alamos, Dürer woodcuts, Roger Callois’s mineral collection, and—of course!—a stuffed walrus. Travels to Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, UK, Sept. 28, 2013–Jan. 5, 2014; de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, June–Aug. 2014.

— Martin Herbert

4th Marrakech Biennale

ARTS IN MARRAKECH BIENNALE
MARRAKECH

4th Marrakech Biennale
EL BADI PALACE
February 29–June 3
Curated by Carson Chan and Nadim Samman

This festival of arts explicitly buys into the city-branding directive of big, brash international showmanship. However, presided over by Vanessa Branson (sister of Richard) and featuring participants ranging from the writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus to the punk-rock/freak-folk duo CocoRosie and the artists Younes Baba-Ali, Tue Greenfort, and Karthik Pandian, the fourth Marrakech Biennale promises to be at once stranger than the last and as heterogeneous as ever. After the bombing in the city’s bustling Jemaa el-Fnaa last spring, the event is now doubly tasked with helping to clean up Marrakech’s image and demonstrating Morocco’s commitment to an open society and free expression. Anchoring this multiplatform program will be “Higher Atlas,” for which architecture critic Chan and independent curator Samman have asked artists, musicians, novelists, and architects to collaborate with local craftsmen to create new works in response to the exhibition venue (a sixteenth-century palace) and the Sufi notion of transcendence.

—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

“Le Pont”

MUSÉE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN
MARSEILLES
Through October 20
Curated by Thierry Ollat

En route to Paris in 1792, a revolutionary volunteer army from Marseilles marched to the beat of the catchy, bloodthirsty tune “La Marseillaise,” which soon became the French national anthem. This year, the traffic runs the other way, as France’s second-largest city takes its turn as one of Europe’s official Capitals of Culture. Anchoring this effort for visual art is the Musée d’Art Contemporain, which, partnering with some twenty local venues—including three sites within Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse—is staging “Le Pont.” The aim is to highlight, via the work of some 150 artists hailing from countries as far-flung as China (Chen Zhen) and Chile (Alfredo Jaar), the role of Marseilles and its environs as a point of transfer. With the recent political upheavals on one side of the Mediterranean and a series of failed austerity measures on the other, an exhibition foregrounding the roles of “culture” and “capital” in a global world couldn’t be more timely.

— Paul Galvez

“André Thomkins: Eternal Network”

KUNSTMUSEUM LIECHTENSTEIN
VADUZ, LIECHTENSTEIN
Through September 15
Curated by Dagmar Streckel and Friedemann Malsch

The Swiss painter, draftsman, and object maker André Thomkins (1930–1985) was one of the more protean artists of the postwar era. The characteristics of his art, he said, were “metamorphosis, erasing time, banality, wit, precision.” Close in spirit to his friends in the Fluxus movement, with their ironic, playful attitudes, he also possessed a genuinely Romantic feeling for nature and its infinite transformations. Yet those who smile at his witty palindromes in various languages—STRATEGY: GET ARTS, for instance—may miss the point of his elaborately surreal figurative drawings or his process-based abstract paintings, and vice versa. With luck, this grand-scale retrospective will synthesize the many aspects of Thomkins’s complex oeuvre. Travels to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Oct. 19, 2013–Jan. 2014; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria.

— Barry Schwabsky