Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator for Special Projects at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. “Maneuver,” an exhibition she curated that explores aspects of Anni Albers’s diverse legacy, is on view at the Artist’s Institute, New York, through mid-December.
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NANCY SPERO (MOMA PS1, NEW YORK; CURATED BY JULIE AULT)
Kudos to artist-curator Ault for organizing this long-overdue survey, Spero’s first in her hometown. Rigorously selected and brilliantly installed, the show gave full rein to Spero’s fierce and fearless voice.
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“DIEDRICK BRACKENS: DARLING DIVINED” (NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK; CURATED BY MARGOT NORTON AND FRANCESCA ALTAMURA)
Relations between people and animals were the primary subject of the wall hangings in Brackens’s haunting show. Silhouetted within delicately hued abstract grounds, their textures visceral and sensuous, his human protagonists were imbued with an allegorical gravitas, while the dogs, fish, slaughtered pig, and rearing horse became ciphers for loss and death, conflict and alienation. For many weavers, the countless hours required to produce large-scale tapestries on a handloom become occasions for meditative reflection. In Brackens’s work, these musings manifest in an uncommonly tender regard for an imperfect world.
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“CHRISTIAN DIOR: DESIGNER OF DREAMS” (VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON; CURATED BY OLIVIER GABET AND FLORENCE MÜLLER)
An antidote to wartime austerity and to the intelligentsia’s existential anxieties, Christian Dior’s maison, with its signature style, the New Look, became synonymous with the resurgence of fashion in the postwar era. Vast in scope and scale, this enthralling show paid homage to the legendary founder while also featuring work by his six successors. Presenting extensive archival material alongside more than two hundred luxurious garments, the exhibition, though far from social history, was more than a parade of finery. It became an invitation to study the brand’s DNA. At moments, hints of uneasy relations between the house, protective of an iconic allure and identity vested in its originary moment, and the values of its subsequent hallowed designers bubbled up. In his engagement with contemporary culture, Raf Simons, for one, espoused a different ethic, not just a different look.
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CHARLINE VON HEYL (HIRSHHORN MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, DC; CURATED BY EVELYN C. HANKINS AND DIRK LUCKOW WITH SANDY GUTTMAN)
A show of von Heyl’s paintings is certain to be a dazzler. Arrestingly evinced in her disjunctive wrangling of myriad painterly styles, idioms, and motifs into precarious resolution, a performative virtuosity lies at the core of her practice. How this plays out in one canvas is not to be repeated in subsequent ones. Large-scale exhibitions, like this mid-career survey, consequently involve a certain risk. A cacophony of singularities may drown out subtle governing connectivities forged over decades. This show more than put such fears to rest.
Co-organized with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.
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CAROLINE GOE (WHITE COLUMNS, NEW YORK; CURATED BY LYNNE TILLMAN)
An habitué of the East Village who sold her paintings on the street, Goe became a familiar figure to local art-world insiders, some of whom began to collect her work in the mid-1980s. Modestly scaled and delicately rendered, they are the product of a discerning eye and skillful (though not academically trained) hand. Often depicting religious subjects whose costumes and finery Goe relished, they hint at a visionary impulse. Drawn from Lynne Tillman’s personal collection, the works on view galvanized an effort to seek out more examples and thereby redeem the oeuvre of a distinctive maker about whom almost nothing is known. Bittersweet, the show underscored the precarity of any creative practice in our rapacious art world—not only those generated on its margins.
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DORIT MARGREITER (MUSEUM MODERNER KUNST STIFTUNG LUDWIG WIEN, VIENNA; CURATED BY MATTHIAS MICHALKA)
Margreiter explores her abiding preoccupations—the visual languages of media representation and of architecture—through diverse modes of presentation, many involving projected imagery. In this rigorously conceived mid-career show, meticulously laid out by the artist, everything on view was part of an encompassing meta-installation. The inclusion of numerous works whose subjects are the museum’s purported antipode—the mall, theme park, hall of mirrors, etc.—subversively exposed the institution as an uneasy discursive site.
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KARA WALKER, FONS AMERICANUS (TATE MODERN, LONDON)
Walker’s monumental fountain commands Tate Modern’s gargantuan Turbine Hall as assuredly as its primary referent, the Queen Victoria Monument, dominates the forecourt of Buckingham Palace—sardonic spleen as a counterpoint to bombastic grandeur. Proposed as a “Gift and Talisman” from a colonial subject, the forty-three-foot-tall sculpture at once acknowledges and contests the breadth and power of an empire on which, at its height, the sun never set. Chattel slavery, forced migration, brutal oppression, and resistance are foremost among the timeless themes pantomimed by Walker’s robust allegorical figures.
On view through April 5, 2020.
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“PATTERN AND DECORATION: ORNAMENT AS PROMISE” (MUSEUM MODERNER KUNST STIFTUNG LUDWIG WIEN, VIENNA; CURATED BY MANUELA AMMER)
The rehabilitation of Pattern and Decoration, often identified as the last movement in art history, gathered speed this year thanks to four shows that saluted, dissected, and contextualized it. Culled largely from the collection of Peter and Irene Ludwig, MUMOK’s standout show featured several mavericks, including the memorable Frank Faulkner, along with the core cast of Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, Robert Zakanitch, et al. Deftly tempering the prevailing scholarly view that these artists were united by a single cohesive ethos, the curator opted for a probing scrutiny of P&D’s divergent impulses. The myriad epithets—inclusive, irreverent, artisanal, countercultural, brash, subversive, camp, feminist—usually advanced to define and fix this corpus indicate why it resonates so richly at present and suggest where it’s most vulnerable to critique.
Co-organized with Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst Aachen. The exhibition is on view until January 5, 2020, at the Ludwig Museum Budapest.
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YVONNE RAINER, PARTS OF SOME SEXTETS (PERFORMA, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 15–17)
Last performed in 1965, the same year Rainer created it, Parts of Some Sextets has taken on mythic status as an aesthetic turning point, a linchpin of her oeuvre. In part a recuperation, in part an invention conceived in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Emily Coates, the new version once again propelled a good-size cast that includes trained and untrained participants, along with twelve mattresses, through a series of fast-paced interactions across a space that seemed to reconfigure itself in whole or in part every thirty seconds. It was already apparent, when viewed in rehearsal last summer, that this variant would more than meet expectations.
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“IN A CLOUD, IN A WALL, IN A CHAIR: SIX MODERNISTS IN MEXICO AT MIDCENTURY” (ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO; CURATED BY ZOË RYAN)
In the 1940s, Mexico City became a hotbed of modernist innovation on par with Manhattan. Along with sundry émigrés from elsewhere in Latin America, European artists who fled there to escape fascism mingled with the local cultural and political vanguard. What this fascinating exhibition’s beguiling title (drawn from the writing of Clara Porset) doesn’t reveal is that the six modernists in question—Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Sheila Hicks, Porset, and Cynthia Sargent—are all women, and that their preferred media include textiles, furniture, photography, and sculpture. Never a group as such, they knew, or knew of, one another to varying degrees. What they shared was an attitude, or a set of beliefs, captured in another phrase of Porset’s: “There is design in everything.”
On view through January 12, 2020.