Curated by Michael Taylor

While Renaissance artists frequently depict Ariadne bewailing her abandonment by Theseus on the island of Naxos, Giorgio de Chirico shows the princess fast asleep, just before Bacchus wings in on his chariot to rescue her. She is seen as a life-size antique marble sharply lit in Mediterranean midday sun—the personification of estrangement and melancholy. The eight haunting Ariadne paintings of 1912–13 are brought together for the first time in an exhibition selected by the PMA’s Michael Taylor; they join other versions of the Ariadne myth de Chirico made long after his celebrated Metaphysical period.

— Richard Shone

Curated by Dominic Molon

Gillian Wearing’s best-known image is probably still the photo from 1992–93 of a businessman holding a self-penned sign that says I’M DESPERATE. Her first American retrospective, though, examines what came after—beginning with Sixty Minute Silence, 1996, which shows a group of police officers trying to freeze in a portrait pose as an hour ticks by, and ending with Broad Street, 2001, which documents an evening in a Birmingham nightclub. Wearing’s interest in local human dramas sets her apart from many of her YBA peers; says curator Dominic Molon, “I’m interested in her read of British culture—her work is so focused on Britain—and there’s an alternation of tragic stories and these sweet aspects of human behavior.”

— David Frankel