In the early ’60s, when performance-trickster Piero Manzoni issued certificates designating authentic aesthetic achievement, Marcel Broodthaers received top honors—though the Belgian reported that his fellow countryman and sometime inspiration René Magritte reproached him for being “more sociologist than artist.” Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Broodthaers’s death, this exhibition will present an array of texts, objects, paintings, photographs, installations, and films by the slyly poetic Conceptualist. Acknowledging the appeal of honoring a native son, curator Corinne Diserens also promises to explore the contradictions inherent in an institutional celebration of Broodthaers’s career—marked as it was by an ongoing critique of the museological.

— Frances Richard