Juan Muñoz

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
September 14–December 8, 2002

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard
January 24–March 30, 2003

New Museum
235 Bowery
April 21–July 28, 2002

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street, SW
October 18–January 13, 2001

Juan Muñoz’s series of cast-resin and bronze tableaux occupied a full floor of the Dia Center in New York in 1996–97, but the Hirshhorn exhibition comprises the Spanish sculptor’s first career survey in the States. It also takes on added poignancy in the wake of the artist’s untimely recent death at the age of 48. A cluster of Borgesian tropes—the balcony, the trompe l’oeil floor, the dwarf—run through Muñoz’s strange theatrical settings, featuring figures enigmatically assembled as if for conversation. The catalogue to the exhibition, which includes work made since the mid-’80s, includes essays by Art Institute curator Neal Benezra, Hirshhorn curator Olga Viso, and critic Michael Brenson.

— Frances Richard

Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South

Van Gogh Museum

February 9–June 2, 2002

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
September 22, 2001–January 13, 2002

The subject may be hoary, but the relationship between Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin—competitive, explosive, fertile—remains a high point of modern art history. With some 130 paintings and drawings, this exhibition makes palpable much scholarly study and proves visually enthralling. Both artists were in transition and both fed off each other, Gauguin borrowing van Gogh’s subjects, van Gogh adopting Gauguin’s more compact, linear style. Works painted by each in Arles in late 1888 during Gauguin’s eight-week visit are seen in the larger context of the two careers as well as Vincent’s utopian plans for a community of artists, the failure of which contributed to his breakdown and incarceration.

— Richard Shone