Curated by Klaus Biesenbach

In 1993 Scottish artist Douglas Gordon made 24 Hour Psycho, which, as its title suggests, presents Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed down to last the length of a day. The art world has yet to recover. Considering the fervent dialogue between art and cinema in the decade that followed, Gordon—whose cinematic experiments in the ’90s included references to major filmmakers like Andy Warhol and Martin Scorsese—should certainly be seen as a, if not the, key artist of the period. This show of thirteen major films, installations, and text pieces includes Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake), 1997, in which the films The Exorcist and Song of Bernadette are shown on one screen simultaneously, and Play Dead; Real Time, 2003, a three-channel video installation featuring an elephant. Travels to the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires–Colección Costantini, dates TBA.

— Daniel Birnbaum

Curated by Germano Celant and Mónica Ramírez-Montagut

In the late ’70s and ’80s, exhibitions were the real performance stage for Zaha Hadid. A visionary architect of unrealizable works—or so it was said at the time—Hadid could present experimental forms of architecture only through her paintings and installations. But all that changed in 1993, when the Vitra fire station—her first major built design—was completed in Weil am Rhein, Germany. This ambitious retrospective comprises some four hundred works, including documentation of her most recent realizations, like the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany, completed in 2005 (a year after she won the Pritzker Prize), as well as the models, drawings, paintings, and computer renderings with which Hadid had made a reputation even before becoming an acclaimed international star.

— Emiliano Gandolfi

Curated by Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda

British fashion smacks of social revolt: Doesn’t punk doyenne Vivienne
Westwood, who dressed the Sex Pistols in the ’70s, embody the national approach? Perhaps it was a desire for revision that brought curators Bolton and Koda to position more than sixty pieces by sixteen contemporary British designers—transgressors like Westwood and Alexander McQueen, as well as traditionalists like Burberry’s Christopher Bailey—in the museum’s eighteenth-century English period rooms according to atavistic themes like the dandy and the English garden. But let’s not forget that Burberry, which sponsors the exhibition, was revived by naughty Kate Moss and that the brand’s tartan pattern has become a gang symbol for rowdy footballers—proving once and for all that, despite this exhibition’s dainty setting, the chief tradition in British fashion is transgression.

— Christopher Bollen

Curated by Jane Adlin

Ancient as culture itself, the clay vessel is a simple but endlessly mutable form, which New York– and Italy-based painter and sculptor Betty Woodman has explored in ways that fuse its various historical incarnations—from the utilitarian to the art-historical—referencing Tang Dynasty objects, Sèvres porcelains, Greek sculpture, Japanese kimono patterns, and paintings by Matisse and Picasso. This exhibition, her first retrospective in the United States, spans Woodman’s fifty-year career by way of some seventy drawings, paintings, wall reliefs, and ceramics—like usable (albeit fantastical) teacups, “Pillow Pitchers” (two fused cylinders with pinched ends), and five large urns commissioned for the Metropolitan’s Great Hall. The show is accompanied by a monograph on the artist, with essays by critics Arthur Danto, Janet Koplos, and Barry Schwabsky.

— Frances Richard

Curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Fred Wasserman

Eva Hesse’s radical latex and fiberglass sculptures—first shown at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1968—will be the core of this exhibition. Focusing on a pivotal moment when the artist “unmade” the category of sculpture to continue her own work in it, this show comprises twenty-three sculptures (including five of the eight shown in 1968), a selection of drawings, and never-before-shown archival material. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by the curators and by art historians Yve-Alain Bois and Mark Godfrey, and runs parallel to a show of Hesse’s works on paper downtown at the Drawing Center (cocurated by Sussman and Catherine de Zegher). Conceived quite differently from Sussman’s full-scale 2002 Hesse retrospective, which never made it to New York, these complementary presentations will offer audiences the chance to engage with Hesse’s work in a more intimate fashion.

— Briony Fer

Curated by Cynthia Young

The exhibition title “Unknown Weegee” certainly sounds promising, since Weegee (aka Usher “Arthur” Fellig, 1899–1968) is about as unknown as Diane Arbus. Even twelve-year-old photography enthusiasts are familiar with his images of pullulating masses at Coney Island; rich, freaky old bags at the opera; and vicious crime scenes. But guest curator Cynthia Young has drawn upon the International Center of Photography’s unique archive of nearly twenty thousand prints by this echt–New York tabloid-news shutterbug to present some one hundred images that have never been shown. Archival photographs, as well as a catalogue with essays by Young and photography historian Luc Sante, supplement the artist’s pictures and flesh out the contours of a Weegee we haven’t as yet encountered.

— David Rimanelli

Curated by Klaus Biesenbach

There’s nothing metaphoric about the title of this exhibition: Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 curator Klaus Biesenbach has marshaled a group of more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, videos, multimedia works, and installations (some large-scale) from the past six decades on the theme of corporeal entering and exiting, from metabolism (nourishment and excretion) and reproduction (intercourse to birth) to violence (shooting and—ouch!—impaling). Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Mona Hatoum, Paul McCarthy, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among many others, probe the probing of the human body in ways both routine and experimental. Save lunch for after the show.

Travels to Kunst-Werke Berlin. Nov. 25–TBA.

— Lisa Pasquariello

Curated by Anthony Huberman and Paul Pfeiffer

“Grey Flags” rounds up a generation-spanning coterie of artists who, in a variety of mediums, flood the marketing circuits of the art world, engaging in direct interventions (à la Seth Price, whose work here is the commandeering of the exhibition’s title and promotional text from the institution) or simply dancing between the categorical raindrops (à la the protean John Armleder). All nineteen participants, including Lutz Bacher, Tacita Dean, Allen Ruppersberg, Shirana Shahbazi, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, resist pigeonholing and branding—something that can also be said of artist Paul Pfeiffer, here making his curatorial debut alongside SculptureCenter curator Anthony Huberman. In addition to forty-four works made since 1971, the show will feature performances, lectures, and a massive catalogue with contributions from each artist—but don’t expect any of them to sum things up neatly.

— Elizabeth Schambelan

Curated by Bill Katz and Bernd Klüser

The itinerant painter and sculptor James Brown—not to be confused with the godfather of soul—makes art not only in various media but in many locations. His works on paper, which for Brown can mean anything from an envelope to fine Japanese fiber paper, were created in sites as far flung as New York, Tokyo, Paris, Tangiers, Oaxaca, and Naples. The 120 objects on display here encompass a quarter century of production and expand on the survey exhibition organized by Bernd Klüsen that toured France and Germany from 1999 to 2001. For the current show, Katz, curator at the Fisher Landau Center, has added to the European-exhibition checklist a substantial selection of pieces made by Brown since 1999. The works range from abstract gouaches to biomorphic and figurative watercolors to collages that update the synthetic Cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque.

— Martha Schwendener

Curated by Shoji Sadao

Buckminster Fuller was a brilliant polymath who invented the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion car—a fanciful, fuel-saving, three-wheeled automobile of the future. His friend and sometime collaborator Isamu Noguchi made a one-tenth-scale prototype of the groundbreaking vehicle—its streamlined design part Machine Age, part Amazing Stories—which will be featured in this exhibition of some forty models, sculptures, and photographs selected by Sadao, former Noguchi Foundation director and a longtime collaborator with both men. Noguchi is considered a reconciler of the aesthetics of East and West, but here we will see how Fuller’s influence fueled lifelong interests in other dualisms—art and design, thought and utility—apparent in everything from Noguchi’s playground designs to his paper lamps. Don’t miss the Japanese artist’s chrome-plated(!) bust of Fuller, a tribute to their solid friendship.

— Josiah McElheny

Curated by Charlotta Kotik

When Sidney Janis’s venerable gallery on New York’s Fifty-seventh Street mounted “Post-Graffiti” in 1983, the event seemed monumental. For more than five decades of collecting and dealing, Janis had kept abreast of the times, successively championing modern, Abstract Expressionist, and Pop art, and now he had turned his attention to graffiti just as its practitioners were transitioning from train cars to canvas and gaining creative traction, making him the hippest octogenarian of his day. As art-world tastes and media hype moved on, however, Janis continued showing and collecting graffiti art. The Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of twenty large-scale works culled from his estate—by ten artists, including Crash, Daze, Tracy 168, Lady Pink, Toxic, and A-One—should establish that, rather than being a dealer late in his dotage, Janis was prescient as ever.

— Carlo McCormick