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

Douglas Gordon

MOCA Geffen Contemporary
152 North Central Avenue
July 25, 2013–February 20, 2002

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street, SW
June 1–September 1, 2003

In 1993, Douglas Gordon projected a super-slo-mo video version of Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the art world has never been quite the same. The Glasgow artist personifies contemporary art’s fixation on cinema over the last decade. This first US survey includes new as well as familiar projects. Organized by Russell Ferguson and accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by the late David Sylvester (among others), this show proves that bringing film to LA is nothing like bringing coal to Newcastle.

— Daniel Birnbaum

Liz Larner

The Museum of Contemporary Art | MOCA Grand Avenue
250 South Grand Avenue
December 2, 2001–March 10, 2002

Over the past fifteen years, Liz Larner has charted a particular (and productive) course, with one foot firmly planted in the historical discipline of sculpture and the other sliding in the directions of architecture and installation, painting and drawing, even photography. What ties it all together is her concern with the perceptual frame. From the early, reputation-making Corner Basher (a wrecking-ball-and-chain contraption let loose on the corners of the gallery) to her recent wonky cube structures, the eye is constantly drawn to the edge, where the imagination may begin its work of deformation. One tends to forget just how odd Larner’s hybrid objects and spaces once seemed. Perhaps this first in-depth museum survey, curated by Russell Ferguson, will jog the memory.

— Jan Tumlir