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

Impressionist Still Life

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
February 17–June 9, 2002

The Phillips Collection
1600 21st Street NW
September 22, 2001–January 13, 2002

Curators have lately been slicing the blockbusting Impressionists from every thematic angle: horse races, portraits, cityscapes, Mediterranean views. Now we find out what happens when a vision predicated on a thousand points of changing light collides with inert objects on a tabletop. The range of answers gathered together by Eliza E. Rathbone and George T.M. Shackelford is as varied as the roster of artists, which includes Courbet and Morisot, Bazille and Cassatt, Renoir and van Gogh, and is sure to make us look as hard at the objects chosen as the ways they are painted. Expect everything from empty bird’s nests and a langouste à la Parisienne to a pyramid of jawless skulls. Impressionism keeps getting harder to pin down.

— Robert Rosenblum

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