Curated by Laurence Sillars and Francesco Bonami

Working from Auerbach, Dalí, and Rembrandt reproductions, English artist Glenn Brown wildly distorts the scale and coloration of his source material, rendering the familiar strange. His appropriations, extensions of Sherrie Levine’s early challenges to authorship and aura, replace thick brushwork with a Photorealist finish; Brown flattens the paint’s surface, yet gives the illusion of texture with a trompe l’oeil palpability. The result—works with the glossy, glassy surfaces of mechanically reproduced images—sterilizes and negates the painterly touch. This midcareer survey—the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date—brings together some sixty paintings and seven sculptures from 1991 to the present. A catalogue, featuring essays by the curators and artist Michael Stubbs, accompanies the show.

— Natasha Degen

Curated by Giorgio Verzotti

Wunderkind of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff began his practice in the 1970s tuned to the objective and analytic tendencies of German photography—that is, with views congenial to Minimalism and Conceptualism. Always probing the technical boundaries of his medium, Ruff has since the 1990s applied digital correction to such hyperrationalist efforts, “inventing” documentary images at their most perfect standardization. Castello di Rivoli presents some eighty works—many from the artist’s later series, including the teasingly blurred pornographic “nudes” affiliated with Michel Houellebecq’s erotic writings and the early paintings of Gerhard Richter. However, older work will also be on view, hung in proximity to his recent, uncharacteristically glossy “Substrat” abstractions (2001–2005), and no doubt defend the traditional course Ruff once so remarkably maintained.

— Robert Pincus-Witten